Page 88 of Veil of Death and Shadow

“Thank you,” he said.

I glanced up at him from the corner of my eyes. “For what?”

“For letting me hang out with you today. It’s not often that I get to really interact with my charges or their world. It was,” he paused, as if surprised by the word when he found it, “nice.”

“Yeah,” I smirked, “you’re not terrible company for a dead guy.”

“This is so weird.”Sora cupped her face in her hands, her elbows leaning against the kitchen table while she stared at where she imagined Kieran to be. She was about a foot off. “What does he look like?”

I’d explained the situation to her—leaving out the part about him being the guy I hooked up with last week—when we got back, just before the dinner rush. Which meant that I’d had to field her questions for a few hours, while we served our guests and Kieran looked on with amusement.

At first, he didn’t understand why I chose to return to work. Didn’t see how it could be, in a lot of ways, just as fulfilling as the afternoon off had been. But as I moved through my shift, greeting our usuals and feeding them the recipes I’d spent months perfecting, I realized that working here was more thrilling than I’d noticed before. Fulfilling in a way that was different from my time spent on the water. As burnt out as I sometimes got, I genuinely liked helping the people in this community. Liked making their day better, giving them a safe space to relax for an hour or so.

In some ways, it helped ease some of the guilt I carried about the curse—and let me interact with people without getting too close, without risking their lives.

After a few minutes of watching Sora and I juggle the dinner rush, Kieran’s confusion started to fade, until he seemed genuinely interested in everything—asking me questions about the food, the people, the taste of things.

It had been difficult, not cracking a smile when he started making observations about our customers, trying to guess their illicit pasts or construct entire stories of their lives from one cursory glance.

I turned back to Sora and shrugged. “He looks . . . I don’t know, like a regular guy.”

Kieran grunted. “Liar. Tell her I’m a smoke show.”

“Ask him what it’s like to die,” she demanded, her eyes wide with excitement.

“He won’t answer. Very illusive and uptight about the whole thing.”

He shot me a glare, but I just grinned.

“Do all people become guardian angels? Or ghosts?” Sora fiddled with the pendant around her neck. Since Menace had stolen it, she’d taken to wearing it daily to ward of his thievery. I was pretty sure she even slept and showered with it on now. “Is there, like, a network of dead people that he can reach?”

My stomach dipped. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Could we reach Rina or Amto Amani through Kieran?

When I turned to him, he shook his head. “Ghosts as you probably conceive of them don’t really exist. Only phantoms or echoes, like you saw with Claudine and Greta. But humans can’t become one of the dead or phantoms. Occasionally those who absorbed a lot of power during The Undoing can, but that’s very rare. And as for my kind—only those with supernatural blood can be reborn in the Between.”

The shot of adrenaline ebbed from my system as I translated for Sora.

She narrowed her eyes, considering. “What about bringing someone back though? I’ve heard rumors that the Sect of Azrael has found a way to commune with or even bring back the dead.”

I sat up in surprise. Sora had never mentioned this to me. We always did everything in our power to stay away from the compounds. They were all infiltrated with greed and manipulation.

After The Undoing, people went feral trying to find meaning and explanation amongst the chaos. Most of the old human governing bodies and religions fractured into cults. Only six of them seemed to survive beyond the initial surge of splits.

There were five main arms named for the followers of Azrael, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Lucifer.

Each of them crafted their own ethos around what was known about their archangels through the various Abrahamic religions, all of them determined to find a way to either manipulate, eradicate, or obtain the power pouring into our world. I couldn’t keep up with their belief systems or rules, or who hated who this month. It all seemed so . . . arbitrary.

But in the last few years, Lucifer’s followers split into The Seven Sons—each sect radicalized and named for one of the seven deadly sins, all in competition with each other for their prophet’s blessing and power.

The sixth arm was founded around a supposed new prophet: Rob. He was just some random guy before The Undoing—a college student studying philosophy or sociology or something. But his following has grown surprisingly large in the last few years.

All of them were bullshit, as far as I could tell. Which is why I was so thrown that Sora mentioned them with legitimate interest. We’d always done our best to steer clear of the religious zealots. They were just as dangerous as the local militia groups and the worst parts of the old governments.

Whatever expression was on my face softened her own. “My friend from the market, Rex? He mentioned it to me recently. He spent quite a bit of time with Azrael’s followers a while back, but I didn’t want to get your hopes up if it was just bullshit.”

I offered her a smile that felt too stiff as I waited for Kieran’s answer.

“Those ridiculous little cults?” He snorted. “Total Bullshit. I mean,” he ran his hand through his hair, considering, “like, Azrael was a real person—so I’m told anyway. Probably the others, too, though I’ve never met them or known anyone who has. I can promise you that if they're alive, they’re not wastingtheir time around power-hungry humans. And they aren’t all powerful. They live and die just as every demon does.”

---