Page 86 of Veil of Death and Shadow

After letting Sora know that I was heading out and that we’d catch up after dinner, Kieran and I found ourselves at one of the many boat launch points in Wallingford.

It wasn’t my favorite part of the lake, but I did my best these days to avoid the dock I always used to frequent. Sometimes it was impossible to divorce a memory from a place.

I set my paddleboard in the water and climbed on, watching Kieran expectantly. “You okay?”

He squinted up at the sun. “Yeah, it’s just so . . . bright. I’m not usually out in the sun this long.”

“Still hungover then?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Weird to think that angels get hangovers.”

With a grunt masking as a response, he climbed onto the board.

It hardly even responded to his weight. I pretended to accidentally brush my knee against him, just to convince myself that he was, in fact, corporeal. At least sometimes. Sort of.

My brain latched onto the impossibility of it all, but I reigned it back in. “So, you can sit on solid objects, but you can also go through them?”

He nodded, then swiped his hand through the board and into the water to illustrate the point. “I can interact with the world, in a limited way, but I can’t touch any living thing except for my charge. Unless I want to waste whatever meager energy stores I’ve saved up trying to shove some random guy down the street or something.”

“Why?”

A couple with two kids passed by us in their kayak, all four of their faces bright with the exertion and excitement that came with the activity. It was a beautiful day, and the lake was more crowded than I’d anticipated.

For some reason, I’d unconsciously assumed the rest of the world would have abandoned their old hobbies after The Undoing. Like I had for the most part. That the world would be irrevocably split between Before and After, like it had been for me.

But that wasn’t the case. People were more resilient than I gave them credit for.

Maybe they were better for it. There was a strange kind of peace in existing as I did before. Out here, it was almost easy to pretend the chaos of the last six years had never happened. The world changed, sure, but it didn’t feel like it here. Everything was just the way that it was in the Before.

Then again, that could have been a family of vampires for all I knew, so maybe not. From what I’d gathered, they weren’t affected by sunlight like Hollywood had led me to believe. Didn’t sparkle either.

“Giving us limited range in this world gives us something to work towards,” he said, his hand lingering in the water. “Right now, I can’t really feel this. Not in the way that you can, that is. The sun, the water, the board, they all feel like the same thing. They’re just . . . there.”

“The sun is annoying you though.”

“In my world, the bad things come more easily than the good.”

“But when you get your vacations,” I stood up, adjusted the paddle, and started guiding us out along our path, “you can feel things more intensely then?”

It’d certainly seemed so anyway, unless he’d been faking his desire last week.

He nodded, studying me while he leaned back on the board, settling in.

It took a few minutes to get my stroke into the cadence, but once I found that groove, it was like no time had passed at all since the last time I’d been out here. Of course, I’d certainly be feeling it tomorrow, discovering aches and pains in muscles I’d long neglected.

We didn’t speak for a few minutes, and I slowly let the familiar ease that always settled over me out here seep into my bones. The world was quieter, made more sense than it did on land, during all the daily turmoil of survival.

And while I didn’t exactly enjoy the forceful delivery of the message, Kieran was right—it had been too long since I’d let myself indulge in the things I loved.

After a while, when we were away from some of the roots and debris closer to the shoreline, I set my paddle down and jumped into the water, letting the icy chill lick and bite along my skin.

Since The Undoing, there were hardly any commercial ships to worry about. None of the boats that came through this way these days had a motor, which meant there was more space to spread out and enjoy the water. No constant worry that some rich tool’s yacht was going to come speeding through, cut too close, upend the board, and chop me up into ceviche with its propeller.

When I broke the surface, my focus was drawn immediately to Kieran.

Even with his demanding personality, and the whole dead guy thing, I couldn’t deny that he was still just as stunning as he’d been at Incendiary. Hell, I’d been fixated on the memory of his features for years. In that sense only, did the whole angelic thing seem plausible. Why else would he so fucking beautiful? Or feature so frequently in my thoughts?

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