my shoes?” I ask the not-so-angel.
He looks down at me, his next words rocking me to my core. “The question you should ask yourself is if you wish to live. I suspect you know the answer, and you do not need me to give it to you.”
I nod and take a deep breath. Fuck it. An adventure in sucky Reaper-ville, it is then.
“You must hold my hand then,” Torfinn explains, reading my expression like he has known my decision a lot longer than he actually has. He offers me his outstretched hand. “I will guide you through the shadows, and I will not let you go.”
Talk about trusting a stranger.
I glance at Mossy, who nods once, though I can feel his nerves just like my own. “Fine,” I reply and take Torfinn’s hand. A strange warm feeling shoots through my hand, like an electric shock, but it’s gone so quickly I assume it’s just the nerves. Torfinn guides me into the darkness, and it smothers me the second I am inside of it.
Walking through the shadows is something I have always feared. To be lost in it is said to be a fate worse than death.
And here I am, trusting an angel and a reaper to guide me in the shadows.
Torfinn’s hand never leaves mine, gently coaxing me through the darkness until we tumble into a field of flowers, and my monkey passes out on my shoulder. Fae magic and reaper magic are a bad mix, and poor Mossy can’t deal with it. I pick him off my shoulder, holding him in my arms as I look up at the sky. The eternal night of the Reaper Realm. It is dark, like I heard it always is here, and I stare up at the stars above my head for a moment. The stars here are like nothing I have ever seen, even in the Otherworld or on Earth. The stars make patterns, looking like someone actually painted the sky with stars to make these images. They say the stars above in the Eternal Night are actually the homes of the gods.
Who knows if that is true, though.
“Welcome to Messorem, the city of reapers,” Torfinn states as I let go of his hand, tugging mine harshly to my side like it burns. Messorem, Latin for reapers, is a place of nightmares for me. The city of the reapers looks so beautiful in the distance, and I can see it all from the hill we are on. Tall buildings made of pure white stone smother the outskirts of the city, and magic shimmers between each building, making a barrier around the whole city. At the back of the city is a large cliff, and right at the top is a portal that is always open, a portal to the Otherworld. It’s said to be the only one in the reaper world, but I know that is a lie. I know exactly where there is a smaller portal. The portal here is the size of five houses at least and as tall as a tree. The yellow magic shimmers in the night, a stark reminder of the portal I dropped through when I left the Otherworld. At the front of the city are two massive white statues of cloaked beings holding scythes that meet in the middle to make an X shape. Above where the x is, is the only light other than the stars in this place. A giant sphere spins constantly, filled with enough magic to end all the living beings on Earth and turn everything to dust.
And it’s not reaper magic in that thing. I grit my teeth with anger and pull my eyes from the city.
“Why does the city make you angry, Daesyn?” Alun asks me, running his eyes over my face. “Are you not happy to be back in a place your parents were from?”
“I am angry because it was made with blood and stolen magic,” I bluntly answer. Alun’s eyebrows bunch together, and Torfinn stares down at me. “You could never understand as you are part of the lie. I’m freezing, where is your house?”
No one answers me for a long time, even as snow starts to fall from the sky, marking my bare skin and drenching my dress.
“This way,” Alun finally answers. Feeling Torfinn’s eyes on my back, I follow Alun over the hill of glowing white moonflowers and down a bridge to a house hidden by the hills around it. The house is small, almost