Page 54 of Veil of Death and Shadow

Mostly because it didn’t taste like much. A shitty facsimile of the real thing.

Everything here was a shitty facsimile.

That was the fecking point.

A shadow of the real thing kept us craving the things we couldn’t have.

It’d been a week since my little vacation in the mortal realm and I was still somehow hungover, still chasing that high.

At least today the headache had died down a bit and I was more or less able to string a thought together.

This was a dangerous world to spend so long lingering in that liminal space, recalibrating to the stench of death.

Odds were higher that one of the young, eager-fecking-beavers would see the moment of weakness as an opportunity. One wrong move and I’d be dead.

Again. But permanently this time.

Leaning back against the wall, I took a drag, relishing the memory of that night.

Fuck, I wanted to go back.

Of course, I also hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. That was sort of the point of these little vacations, wasn’t it?

Gave us something to look forward to when everything around us was otherwise so fucking bleak?

I still wasn’t sure if it was because I cashed out all my vacation on the anniversary of The Undoing, when the barrier between our worlds was thinnest and our power the strongest, or something else about that night that made it feel so different. So real.

Maybe it was just her. There was something different about her.

It felt like I’d flown too close to the sun at the end, like I’d tapped into something I wasn’t supposed to. For a moment, I almost felt like me—the me that existed before the me in the Between anyway.

So, yeah, the hangover was shite. But it was also fecking worth it.

I pulled the crumpled lace from my pocket and pressed it to my nose—a sweet little souvenir I’d swiped at the last second.

The material didn’t still hold the vibrancy of her scent, not like they did in her world. But like with the smoke, the shadow of it was there, and that shadow would be enough to sustain me for a little while at least.

Hell, it’d been a week, and I’d wanked every day since with her panties in my mouth. Evenwith the hangover, they’d been the best wanks of my death.

Bit of a genius move on my part, pocketing these.

Anything we brought with us during our brief trips into the mortal world usually made its way over to this one. There were exceptions, of course, but that was part of the lure of the job.We could bring things back with us. Little reminders of what we couldn’tactuallyhave.

Fecking masochists, the lot of us.

Groaning, I pressed my forehead against the stone wall, letting the chill soak in through my skin. In all my years, I’d never had a humanity hangover quite like this, had never been so drained from a fuck.

I hadn’t even lasted that long. Not quite a two-pump chump, but I’d been pretty damn close to earning the title.

Two hours. That was all I’d been granted in her world.

And like the dickhead that I was, I’d wasted the first one sucking down a pack of proper smokes and enough booze to burn the memory of the taste into my tongue for a few days—to sustain me until the next vacation.

Though if I’d had any fucking clue what lay in front of me for the second hour, I’d have started there. The taste of her tongue still lingered on mine—far sweeter than any booze had ever been.

I adjusted my pants, my dick hardening at the memory of it.

She’d remembered me, too, which I still didn’t get. We’d always been told that was impossible. On the rare occasions that mortals engaged with, they weren’t supposed to remember. We were kind of like the faces people conjured in dreams—snapshots of NPC’s, filler faces that weren’t grounded in the real. In the living.

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