Page 129 of Death is My BFF

Moving my mouth, I forced myself to speak. “I didn’t want this.

I didn’t want you to hurt him.”

“This is exactly what you wanted, darling,” Malphas said in his composed, raspy voice. “Remember, you called to me. You wanted freedom.” Malphas reached around Death’s body and grabbed his fallen scythe. His expression flinched, the corners of his eyes tightening with rage. The branches of the willow tree along the staff and the blade seemed to illuminate briefly against his touch.

In a dazed blur, my eyes drifted to Death and his lifeless body at the center of the sigil. I imagined this was all pretend. Any second now, he would get back up. He’d become my unlikely savior again and remain the unstoppable force I’d painted him as.

But he was so still, and I felt so cold.

It’s cruel when we listen to our hearts only after we lose someone forever. All the things I couldn’t say surfaced and ripped me apart from the inside out. Through the manipulation, the games, and trauma Death had caused me—whether it was right or wrong—I had fallen hopelessly in love with the monster beneath the hood. I was in love with the Grim Reaper.

Now he was gone. He was dead. And it was all my fault.

“The great darkness is coming.” Malphas stood over me with Death’s scythe clenched in his hands, rain trickling down his stony face. His eyes were dead black, vacant . . . possessed. “Ahrimad shall rise again.”

My vision tunneled as the world shuttered to black like the end of a film roll.

EPILOGUE

DEATH

I awoke in a confused state of panic, choking, clutching my throat as my lungs failed to pull in air. Lurching into an upward position, I remembered what I was. Undead. I didn’t need oxygen.

I shut off my lungs and heart. Breathing from time to time was a force of habit, an odd occasional comfort that shadowed me into immortality.

It took a moment to get my bearings straight. I’d been in the corn maze, and now I was sitting in the heart of Times Square, but the world was drained of color. The flashy HD advertisements and vibrant billboards stretching across the lengths of the buildings like light show collages were all blank. No blaring horns, no pedestrians rushing to get from place to place.

But there were souls. The corporeal ones moved sluggishly all around me, zombies, eyes sunken in, skin pale and translucent.

Some of them wore clothes from hundreds of years ago. None of them spoke a word, only an occasional grunt or sob. My head tilted heavenward. Dark-gray gusts of energy swirled around the sky, shrieking and moaning as they whirled through the realm.

I leapt to my feet and violently swore.

Limbo. I was inLimbo, a realm between Heaven and Hell, where memories and lost souls wandered.

I’d been so close.So closeto bringing Faith voluntarily back to Hell for Lucifer, and then Malphas interfered. He’d taken the perfect opportunity to draw magic into the ground and trap me in the corn maze. The next thing I knew, he’d used Latin to separate my soul from my body. I was completely debilitated inside of the sigil.

Although I’d known Malphas had been having me shadowed by his underlings, I hadn’t expected him to be so bold as to attack me all alone. This begged for a war from Hell, and he didn’t have the soldiers to fight Lucifer’s legion.

There was more to this plan of my father’s. It was written all over Faith Williams’s expression. As my soul ripped from my corpse, I’d seen the guilt in her eyes. She blamed herself for what’d happened to me, which meant she’d been in on it. Malphas must have found a way to communicate with Faith without my knowledge, perhaps through the slash on her forearm from the attack in the alleyway.

Maybe he seduced her.

The twisted thought set me off. I unleashed a thunderous roar, and a stabbing sensation cleaved the center of my chest. I clutched at my shirt; it was soaked, sticky with blood. I ripped the clothing over my head, uncovering an intricate pattern of deep puncture wounds around my heart in the exact design of the sigil Malphas had drawn. I recognized the pattern of symbols. A wandering spell, which trapped anyone or anything in Purgatory.

“I should have taken her the moment we met in that pool house,”

I raged out loud. “I should have thrown her ass over my shoulder, kidnapped her, and forced her into complacency. To hell with the rules, I’d kill anyone in my way. That would have been fun. Butno!

That would have been tooeasy!”

I hurled my torn shirt to the side, a complete meltdown in my wake. Fangs lengthened in my mouth. Pure rage rippled through me at the thought of my cloak being gone. My scythe was gone too.

Actual steam expelled from my bare skin as my temper flared against the cool, damp weather of this realm.

“I had to get curious and get to know her! I had to start worrying about her safety andfeelthings, like a weak, pathetic mortal!” I gripped both sides of my skull and squeezed. “And it turns out she doesn’t even like normal, or behaved! She likesme!”

Another snarl tore out of my throat. Energy pulsed through my veins, limitless and unpredictable.

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