Inbetween

So he was a cop. I nodded, thinking he’d be looking forever then. “Tell him…thank you.”

After she was gone, I read the memory over and over again. I didn’t remember it all, but I remembered how he touched me. Remembered that he loved me. I remembered that he lied to me. I closed my eyes.

“Are you awake?” Finn’s voice ran through me like syrup, coating everything with a sweet sensation that I couldn’t wash away if I tried. But there was something bitter inside me now, too. A painful regret, the kind that came with knowing the truth. He’d kept everything from me. Betrayal throbbed in my chest, painful and sharp. I opened my eyes, temporarily blinded by the buttery sunshine spilling through my window and the shimmering outline of Finn. When I lifted up my hand to shield my eyes, he jumped up to pull the drapes closed.

“You’re awake,” he said.

“I’m awake.”

“I never should have left you. God, I’m so sorry, Emma.” He looked like he was out of breath, though I knew that wasn’t possible. I gazed at him, mapping out his face line by line, comparing it to the perfect memory in my head.

“You lied to me,” I finally said, considering my words very carefully. Forcing myself to stay calm when all I wanted to do was scream. I swallowed past the burning lump in my throat and focused on the throbbing pain that radiated from the gash on my neck instead. Concrete pain like that was easier to deal with than the emotional kind.

“What are you talking about?”

“You lied to me about everything.” I twisted the blankets in my hands until my knuckles turned white. “Maeve. What we were to each other. God, Finn, what did you do? You…you took her life away from her and you forced me to be involved. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want this. It’s no wonder she wants me dead. She has a right to!”

“Emma…” He looked panicked, placing his hand on the mattress next to my arm. I jerked it away from him and he flinched. “Wait—”

“What are you, really?” I said. “You’re not just a soul.”

Finn looked away and rubbed his palms over his knees. “Why do you need me to say it if you already know?”

“Because I want you to tell me the truth. After all of this, I deserve it.”

“Fine. You want a technical term? I’m a reaper. You want the truth? I’m death.” A holster materialized on his hip. He grabbed the curved blade it held and flipped it open. “I rip souls from their flesh, and I don’t take them to a happy place.”

On the other side of the hospital room door, a nurse laughed. A cart rolled past. A sob welled in my chest, refusing to let me breathe.

“I took you,” he whispered, his eyes burning a hole in my floor. “I was supposed to take you again two years ago.”

“I know. A girl in a white dress showed me. She said to tell you that you owe her one.”

“That’s Anaya. She’s one of Heaven’s reapers.” Finn scooted closer to me, staring at the book.

“What else did she show you? Exactly how much do you remember?”

I swallowed, stretching my stitches. “You said you loved me,” I said. “Did you?”

Before he could answer, I turned away to hide the tears rolling down my face. Even through the anger I was feeling, the need to touch him was so intense that my chest ached until I couldn’t breathe.

As if he could read my thoughts, Finn moved. He touched my open palm, and his hand turned to iridescent particles that sifted between my fingers.

“Yes,” he whispered.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded. There was still too much hurt inside. Far too much for three little words to erase it all away.

“You were out of time,” he continued. “I don’t know if you remember what was happening to you, but I was losing you. And I couldn’t let you go like that. Not when it was my fault you were damned in the first place. I knew relationships between souls and reapers were forbidden, but I thought I’d be punished, not you. I wasn’t thinking. I should have known…” Finn stopped and his voice sounded strained. “Despite all of that, despite knowing I’d been unforgivably selfish, I couldn’t let you go. I still can’t.”

I absorbed the missing pieces to the puzzle, bits of what the girl in the white dress had given me coming back. The black veins. The Shadow Land. My mind wandered through the newly familiar memories that still didn’t quite feel at home in my mind, trying to remember feelings that belonged to another girl. My heart fluttered just thinking about the way Finn had looked at me. The way he’d touched me. “I don’t want you to let me go.”

I may have been angry and hurt and confused, but I at least knew that much. I wasn’t ready to let him go, either. Even after all of this.

Finn kissed my wrist, his lips dissolving into a fine mist as they moved slowly down to my palm.

My breath caught in my throat and my fingers curled around the shimmery particles. He pulled away, his skin weaving back together as he sat up. Once he was whole again, he grunted and grabbed the blade at his hip.

“Don’t go.” I sat up, reaching out for him, but he pulled away.

He stood up, regret and want swirling in the green depths of his eyes. “I don’t have a choice. Please don’t hate me.”

“Wait!” By the time the word had passed through my lips he was gone. My gaze drifted down to the places he’d touched that still felt warm and tingly. I could still feel him on my fingers. In my veins.

And none of it was enough.

Chapter 29

Finn I couldn’t tell where the hell I’d landed. Shadows slithered over my vision. Hundreds of them. They screamed, writhed, twisted until I dropped to my knees and slapped my hands over my ears. My knees sank into dirt and ash and God only knows what. This was not the time for me to get dragged away.

Not when I didn’t know where Emma and I stood. I had to make her understand. I couldn’t just leave things this way.

Easton slapped me on the back. “Smells like home.”

I looked around. Flashes of shimmering light punched holes into the dark. Reapers. At least twenty of them. “Why are they here?”

“Too many,” Easton said. “Body count’s going to be over a hundred.”

He pointed over my shoulder. Flames stretched so high into the darkness, they could have touched the stars. A massive hunk of metal burned, bordered by fir trees and flames. Jet fuel fumes ate away at the fresh air. A charred wing jutted up from the wreckage, branded by a blue and red airline logo. A plane. A plane full of burning people. My body heaved. God, I wished I still had the ability to throw up. I took a step back and stumbled right into the heat of a memory.

Heat licked at my neck. Something stung near my elbow. I punched at the controls of the airplane.

Just a little farther…

“Finn?”

Smoke choked me. Something hot scorched the back of my neck, my shoulder. “Son of a bitch!” I slapped at the flames crawling down my sleeve. The plane shuddered just before-“Hey.” Easton knelt beside me, his brows drawn together, as he snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Snap out of it.”

He stood and held a hand out to me. I looked at it like it was a snake ready to strike. Groaning, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me up.

“Look, I know this is hard,” he said. One of Heaven’s reapers, a boy with blinding white hair and alabaster skin, walked past us with his arm around the trembling soul of a woman in a flower print dress. “You can do this. You’ve had to do it before, and as long as these stupid humans keep trying to fly, you’re going to have to do it again. So I need you to take this.”