twirling a piece of a truck engine in his hand. “And if I’m being honest there’s no way I’d try to hit you. Not when you’re carrying around that crazy-ass scythe. You’ve had more experience with yours than I’ve had with mine. It wouldn’t be a fair fight and you know it.”
“I didn’t come for a fight.” I glanced from the red F-150 parked on the other side of the room, then nodded to the piece of metal in his hand. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged and a familiar grin caught both sides of his mouth. “But the old man won’t be able to start his truck without it.”
“Why do you still torture him? He is your family, you know.” Remembering all of the stupid stunts Scout had played on his uncle over the years, it was a wonder the old guy hadn’t had a heart attack by now.
“I’ll stop messing with him when he stops messing with me. One trick all those years ago and he still messes with the Ouija boards and crap. Like I’m some ghost of Christmas past that’s going to come back and tell him how to fix his screwed-up excuse for a life. Do you know how much the man spent on phone psychics last year? Enough to buy a freaking new car, that’s how much. The man’s a moron. And until he stops being a moron I’ll continue to screw with him.”
He laughed and it suddenly felt like old times with Scout. When we’d sit in his garage and try to figure out a way to live like humans even though we were anything but. “Besides, it helps to pass the time in between my reaps. We don’t get as much action down here as you guys do up north.” When I didn’t respond, Scout set the engine part on the couch, and rested his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like it held all of life’s answers. “I thought you hated me now,” he said more to the floor than to me.
“I don’t hate you. You just…” I stopped searching for the right thing to say. “You just screwed up, okay? You screwed up, and with Emma, I can’t afford those kinds of screwups.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to say I get it. I’m not even going to say it’s okay, because it’s not. But I’ll get over it.”
“She got hurt, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, she got hurt.”
We both froze when his uncle stumbled into the garage and climbed into his truck, cursing as his foot slipped out from under him twice before he could make it in.
“He still drinking?” I asked.
Scout nodded. “Stupid old drunk. I’m doing the community a favor keeping him off the streets.”
The old man cranked the ignition and when all that resulted was a clicking sound, he erupted. A stream of obscenities bounced off his tongue so fast you could barely keep track. Scout looked tired as he watched his uncle dig under the hood and come out looking white.
“You’re in here, aren’t you?” the old man called, his eyes searching the garage, but only finding a floating brigade of dust particles illuminated by the sunshine spilling in through the one window that wasn’t covered with plastic.
“Oh, I’m here all right,” Scout grumbled and kicked an empty can across the room.
The old man jumped back two feet with a gasp. The can hit the toe of his shoe. “Damn it, Scout!
Stop with these games! I’m getting too old for this crap. I can’t believe your mama hasn’t come to drag your ass back to the afterlife yet.” He continued to mutter to himself as he let himself back into the house then slammed the door, knocking an old can of nails off his workbench and onto the floor.
Scout picked up the engine part and tossed it into a pile of junk in the corner of the room.
“Wouldn’t he just shit a brick if he knew I was the one to drag her ass to the afterlife?”
“You took your own mother?” I said. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”
“It’s not like I planned it. I was just covering for one of Heaven’s reapers that day and her hourglass ran out of sand.” He shrugged. “At least we got to say a proper good-bye that way. It wasn’t a big deal.”
I pressed my lips together into a hard line, trying not to torture myself with not knowing who had taken Mom and Pop. And Henry. It was too much to think about.
“Why did you stay?” I finally asked. It was the question I’d always wanted to ask him. The one I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to.
“What do you mean?”
“After Balthazar hired you on. You requested this territory. Why in God’s name would you want to be in this place? Watching the people you knew die again and again.”
He smiled and looked out at a memory that I couldn’t see. A stream of sunlight spilled across the dusty space illuminating the pain beneath his smile. Pain that looked way too familiar for my liking.
“A girl, of course. Why the hell else would I stay here?”
“A girl? You put yourself through this kind of hell for a girl?” I asked, a little disbelief seeping out with my voice. Scout had never seemed like the romantic type.
He raised a brow. “Like you’re one to talk.”
“So what happened? Where is she now?”
He crossed the room and fiddled with something on his uncle’s workbench. If I knew Scout, he was just trying to hide his emotions from me. I let him.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Last time I checked in she was married, had two kids.” He glanced back at me and shrugged. “It
“Did she ever see you?”
“No. I didn’t want her to.” His voice turned gruff. “I stuck around for a few months after the funeral. To be honest I didn’t really know where else to go when I wasn’t rubbing elbows with the dead.” He chuckled, but it sounded bitter. “After I watched her cry herself to sleep every night for three months, listened to her talk to me in the dark while everyone else in the world was sleeping…I couldn’t take any more, so I left her alone.”
“She talked to you?”
He turned to face me. His eyes grim, years of pain finally being set free. “Of course she did. She could feel me. Even if they can’t see you, Finn…they know. They always know. Just like on some level, Emma knew way before you ever made a physical appearance.”
Scout took a step closer and knelt down in front of me.
“They can’t move on while we’re still around. You know that, right? Emma won’t ever move on as long as you’re there. Just like Sophie wouldn’t have if I hadn’t left when I did.” He finally plopped down onto the dusty concrete beneath us, looking whitewashed, exhausted. “Just because we’re stuck like this doesn’t mean they should be. They deserve more than that.”
“How did you let her go? How were you okay with her having a life with someone else?” I asked.
Scout rolled his eyes as he wrote a message to his uncle in the dust with his fingertip.
He opened them again and sat back on his elbows, nodding to the message in the sand. “But I keep busy. And she loves him. Knowing that she was able to love somebody again, that she found some kind of happiness. Knowing I was strong enough to give that to her. It makes it easier.”
I stared at my empty hands. Hands that had held Emma a little more than forty-eight hours ago without feeling her. Hands that would never hold her again once this was finished. This had to work.
Because I was done torturing her. I was done torturing us both. Scout was right. She deserved more than me. More than I could give her.
The inside of my chest fractured, tore, and ached. Now that I’d come to terms with the decision, I felt hollow. For twenty-seven years, she had consumed every thought. My heart. My soul. She was my purpose. And now…who the hell was I supposed to be if I wasn’t this? Was there even anything left inside me if I wasn’t loving her? In that moment, it didn’t feel like it.
Scout cocked his head to the side, watching me. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“But you said—” He didn’t let me finish, making an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “Screw what I said. I am the most miserable creature in existence. Emma’s different and we both know it.”
She was. And staring into Scout’s empty eyes, I saw my future. He was strong, cut from steel…and facing an eternity of loneliness. Scout was giving me an out that I would’ve taken forty-eight hours ago, but I refused to do this to her anymore. I was going to take care of Maeve once and for all, and then I’d do what Easton and Anaya
