Page 97 of Veil of Death and Shadow

"Then why do you do it? Why not do something safer?”

"I'm not afraid of death, Mareena." His shoulders fell, like there was some invisible weight there that he'd suddenly been asked to carry. "There are things far more terrifying than that."

There were.

Like being the one death left behind.

The words were on the tip of my tongue, but I pulled them back, swallowing them down as I always did when they got too close to the surface.

That was the worst part about this curse—it made me selfish. It wasn't just that the people I loved always died. It was that they died and left me here—alone and missing them so much that I sometimes couldn't so much as breathe under the weight of it.

They died, and I had to go on living.

There was something so profoundly cruel about that.

"Please," he said, his voice soft, almost defeated. He scrubbed his hand over his forehead, then through his hair, looking like evenhewas confused by why this silly proposition mattered so much to him. "Mareena—I” he shrugged, “I could just really use a friend."

"Diet friend," I corrected, my throat thick and tight as I tried to swallow back the grief threatening to choke me.

"Right." His lips twitched, sensing victory in his grasp. "We take it at your tempo. I'll text you next time I'm in town. We don't even have to talk in between my visits to the city. In fact, we can make that a rule, too. I'm usually out of service range anyway. And if at any point, one of us wants to cut off the diet friendship, they can just fade into silence, no questions asked. So,” he sniffed, eyes hopeful, “we have a deal? Are these terms agreeable?"

He extended his hand towards me with the same rigid awkwardness that I'd employed just a few minutes ago.

“Our first deal went pretty swimmingly, didn’t it?” he added when I hesitated. “Who knows, maybe this one will be even better.”

For a moment that seemed to stretch into infinity, I stared at his hand, considering the offer. A voice inside my head screamed at me to just turn around and leave while I had the chance, while his absence didn’t sting or smart. To pretend I'd never met him. To lock our few hours spent together in a box in the back of my mind where I stored all my fleeting acquaintances. Future me would be better off for it.

A softer, smaller voice, one that hadn't quite gotten its legs yet, whispered a gentle suggestion that maybe instead, I extend my hand just a few inches forward and take his—a quiet, hopeful ‘what if.’

What if Sora was right?

What if the curse had broken that night a few years ago?

What if I could negotiate with death—could find a way to keep people at arm's length, but allow them to exist in my life? On the peripheries, yes, but closer than I’d let them get before in some sort of liminal way.

Before I could question it a second longer, I wrapped my fingers around his hand, ignoring the warmth of his skin and how my own responded greedily to the sensation. "Deal."

16

MAREENA

Present Day

Ichoked on the smoke, the back of my throat raw and burning as I tried to suck in a proper breath of air.

“I can’t believe you like this stuff.” My voice cracked on another cough. “This is seriously the thing you miss most about being alive?”

“One of them.” Kieran shrugged, his eyes alight with amusement. “You don’t exactly make it look as desirable as I recall it being. They should really consider trotting you around as a walking advertisement for kids.”

“Too bad there isn't any after school programming in the After. Sounds like I’d have the potential for stardom.” I took another puff, wondering if maybe it got better the more you partook, but it only heightened the burn.

He watched the tip flare, a small smile tugging at his lips as the smoke curled in front of his face.

It reminded me of Claudine and her mint tea—the way she would sit for half an hour, sniffing at the steam, like that was how she consumed it.

Honestly, it was a bit ridiculous that I hadn’t immediately realized she was dead.

Was I really that oblivious? That caught up in my own bullshit that I completely missed the fact that one of my customers wasn’t even amongst the living?

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