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thirty-six

Astoria

F eo’s shrill laugh rang throughout the small cottage. Gentry stood dumbfounded, his hand pressed firmly against his chest as he clung to a dining room chair for support. In true Gentry fashion, he stammered over his words, his head swinging back and forth between me and Feo.

“She was… this is…” he choked.

“The librarian?” Feo roared, her head tipping back as she continued to laugh at Gentry’s expense.

His barrage of questions pulled me back as I went about setting the table, readying for our weekly game night.

“Can she do that? Just upend people’s lives?”

“Fate can do whatever she pleases,” Feo answered, reciting exactly what she said to me months earlier.

Wrapping her arms around Gentry, she pulled him down to her level to press her cheek against his in a hug.

“Secretly, I’d always hoped you’d follow this thread.

” She patted his stomach, kissed his cheek, and pushed him away.

A swirl of color trailing behind her as she floated through the house into the kitchen.

It was in these small moments that I forgot the dull ache in my chest. Grim’s absence had become a void I carried everywhere; a weightless ache that never let up. It’s not the enemy’s blade that leaves the deepest scars, but the hand you once held.

It was worse than living cursed, and yet my resolve to stay away was stronger.

He hadn’t appeared once since our fight, and somehow, that made it easier. Not to forget, but to move on.

“What do you think she meant by that?” Gentry whispered in my ear, taking the stack of plates from my hands.

“I guess we will find out,” I answered, pulling a bottle of wine from the cupboard behind us.

Gentry had somehow convinced me to stay. In England, just outside Sussex. With Nemo’s help, and a lot of quiet strings pulled, I’d bought the cottage sight unseen. What I knew was that it stood alone in a wide field, older than memory, and had been vacant for some time.

Surprisingly, it was in decent shape. After a couple of months of hard work, it bloomed back to life.

The gardens burst into wild, joyful color, flowers growing taller than me and tumbling over the lawn in a riot.

Day gushed over the finer details—the slanting roof, the worn brick, the way the windows caught the last navy tinted light of evening.

At night, the wind sang lullabies through the rafters, and at dawn, the wildlife picked up the chorus as if they had never stopped.

It was peaceful. Everything I could have hoped for.

And still, I woke some nights with my heart pounding, certain that this fragile slice of peace couldn’t last. Certain I would have to leave it behind, just as everything else.

But for now, it was enough. Enough that the land was quiet. Enough that I could walk to the place where my father was buried.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you—” Gentry began, moving the same two forks back and forth on the placemat.

Day burst through the door, cutting him off, a large bottle of whiskey in hand and a cheeky grin on his handsome face. “Honey, I’m home!” he announced, striding forward without shutting the door to wrap me up in a hug and twirl me around.

He winked at Gentry, his mood mischievous as he sang my nickname, “Stoorryyboook. I missed you. It’s been what? A month?”

“A few hours,” I replied dryly, unraveling our limbs and taking the bottle from him. Day had all but moved in. When he wasn’t gone doing whatever Time does, he was here, living with me. “I only sent you to the store.”

“Wow really?” he looked at his watch, another expression of humor.

Gentry pushed napkins to Day’s chest, muttering under his breath before disappearing into the kitchen.

Day grinned, “Princess, you don’t mind that I invited someone, do you?”

Pulling an extra plate from the cupboard, I shrugged. “Of course not.”

Fortune was a disaster to play cards against. There was no winning, regardless of the game. Gentry was the last standing, his hand of cards tucked safely against his chest as if Fortune could somehow see them. They probably could.

Day beamed at Fortune as though they had hung the moon.

I smiled, catching the way they looked at him too, like they were trying to memorize the warmth of daylight.

They were handsome in this form, all tanned skin and dark hair, a little shorter than Day but solidly built. I could see the attraction.

But Fortune didn’t always look like this.

Day once told me they’d worn bright blue curls for a while—his favorite, he’d said with a fond smile.

Flesh didn’t seem to suit them for long; they shifted appearances and even gender the way some people changed moods, as if the world were a wardrobe and they were still deciding what to wear.

They leaned forward, eyes never quite leaving Day’s face, and placed another card down with the flicker of a grin, trumping Gentry’s with quiet triumph.

“I don’t know that this is entirely fair. Playing cards against literal fortune…”

“Hey, that doesn’t mean it's good fortune. It could be bad fortune,” Fortune replied, stretching back in their chair.

Feo snorted, a rainbow of colors in the twinkle of her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

Sometimes, I forgot. I forgot that Fate, Time, Fortune—even Death—weren’t human.

That I was dining with cosmic beings, entities older than language, forces carved from the marrow of the universe itself.

They called themselves Absolutes, as if it was both a title and a shrug.

And yet, here they were, playing cards and passing bread, draped in flesh as casually as a shawl.

It was easy to mistake them for people, until they looked at you just a second too long, and you remembered what you were sitting across from.

To onlookers, we’d look like a dinner party of friends.

Candles were lit, the wax slowly dripping onto the patterned tablecloth below.

The decadent chocolate cake I made was scattered about on mismatched floral porcelain plates; Gentry was on his second slice.

I glanced around the room, taking it all in.

This was the very dream I never dared to have. I was lucky enough to have friends who loved me and cherished me, regardless of the magic imprisoning me. And they continued to do their best to help me break it.

Gentry groaned as Fortune won the final hand, and Feo joined in, a rare frown marring her face.

Clearing my throat, I interrupted them all, tapping my fork against my wine glass gently. “I have something I’d like to say—”

“Shhh,” Fortune admonished Day, quieting him with a chaste kiss.

Giggling with nothing but affection and wine sweet on my tongue, I continued.

“It means a lot to have you all here. At almost one hundred and forty-eight, you’d expect me to have lived a far more exciting life, but for a long time, I’d been ashamed of my reality…

” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I allowed grief to overwhelm me.”

The room fell silent, the only sound my own labored breath, thick and uneven as I fought to speak the words caught in my throat. A shadow passed over the room, soft but sudden, followed by that familiar tug in my chest.

He wasn’t here. I knew that.

But somehow… it still felt like him.

“I haven’t been happy. In a long time. One can only bury their loved ones so many times before it eats away at you.

” Clearing my throat, I looked to Gentry, finding strength in the firm press of his lips and rapt attention.

“I spent many years in denial, believing that if I just did one good deed, I’d somehow redeem myself out of the curse.

Grim showed me the error in that. He also showed me that there is no fear in death, not when you were fortunate to live and to love. ”

Day began to softly cry, his eyes red and swollen as I glanced at each of them.

“I may never be granted the sanctity of death, but I can confidently say that if I were, I’d meet it with triumph and glee, knowing that I, above anyone else, had gotten to live and to love.

Because of all of you . Because of Grim, and because of my children.

My mother and grandmother, and even my father.

” My hand flew to my chest, pulling at the chain of my necklace, a motion I’d found soothing.

“I’d like to propose a toast to new beginnings,” I said, raising my glass.

“This cottage marks the start of finding my own way, no matter what tries to hold me back. It felt only right to name it Scythe Manor—in honor of the cleaving. Of cutting myself in two. Of leaving behind what is dead and gone, and beginning again, fresh and whole.”

I rubbed the star disc, holding it to my skin.

“In honor of Death… and the love that destroyed me—so something new could rise from the ashes.”

“To Scythe Manor, and to Astoria Devlin Tempest Reeves,” Gentry bellowed, standing to raise his glass to mine.

The others followed suit, and we knocked the glasses back, celebrating the life and the time I’d been given.

I woke early as the scent of coffee wafted up the stairs, sneaking through the crack under my door—inviting, familiar.

Day must’ve already been up, probably prepping for his morning run.

I slipped into a simple dress and boots, tugging Grim’s sweater over top.

One of the two meager tokens I had left of him.

Too many times, I’d considered stalking the hospital halls for a dying soul, just to bait him.

Would he come to collect? Would he stay away?

Did he think of me at all? Day liked to joke he’d be happy to take me to see him, but I couldn’t face him—not when every time I closed my eyes, the faces of those we’d killed flashed across my mind.

Not when he had paraded me through their last breaths to teach me a lesson.

In that respect, Death had never stopped pursuing me. I was still being stalked, hunted, and marked. I would be, forevermore. Unless I broke the curse.

I grabbed my notebook and pen from the bedside table, shoved them into my bag, and padded downstairs. The dining room wasn’t the mess I’d left it in the night before; everything was clean, filled with the sharp scent of lemon and coffee.

Surprised, I found it wasn’t Day in the kitchen—it was Gentry, making a colossal mess and absolutely burning the bacon.

“Hi… hey, I just thought—” he stammered, turning off the stove and yanking the pan off the burner. He froze, hands on his hips, shoulders tense, then smiled. “You look beautiful.”

My cheeks flushed with heat. “Thanks… What are you doing here?”

He glanced around, panicked, spotted a cup of coffee he must’ve brought from town, and handed it to me like it might fix everything. “I brought this. And I cleaned. And I sort of hoped you’d be up early.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, sipping the coffee. It was exactly how I liked it. He scratched the back of his neck.

“Right. So… I know you were planning to visit the cemetery today. But before that, I was hoping you’d come with me somewhere.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Where?”

He hesitated, then leaned against the counter, still holding the spatula like a shield.

“There’s a place I’ve been trying to get access to.

Lord Stanton’s old estate. Or what’s left of it.

Most of the property’s been sold off or turned to farmland, but one of the original residences still stands.

Private ownership. I pulled a few strings to get us in. ”

“You pulled strings? On a Saturday morning?”

“Yeah.” He avoided my gaze. “Let’s just say I had help.”

I studied him for a moment. “You think there’s something there.”

“I think there might be. Something about the curse. I don’t know exactly, but I have a feeling.”