Page 68 of Virgin Lust

Come on, Shepherd. Your sister only has eight human hours left.

I didn’t make it to the third hour. I couldn’t waste another second. Shepherd would waste them all telling himself he was doing his sister a favor. When the real reason was plain as day. He feared she’d hate him.

Picturing Shepherd in my mind, my Reaper senses gave me his whereabouts. Fading there, I paused at what I saw. There was no porch to the moldy trailer he lived in. Bricks, like steps, were stacked near the door.

“You’re finally here.” Dirk’s words made me glance up. The gremlin peeked through the cracked door.

“You guys live here?” I asked. It was dark through the windows.

“We lived nowhere before this,” Dirk stated.

I frowned. Did he mean the gremlins, or was Shepherd included in that?

“Where’s Shepherd?” I walked up the bricks.

Dirk opened the door wider to let me in. “Waiting on you to knock some sense into him.”

I stopped abruptly and looked around. My heart sank. There was nothing there. No table in the kitchen. No fridge. Feeling along the wall, I found the light switch.

When I kept toggling it up and down, Dirk said, “No electricity.”

“Why couldn’t you have just visited my dreams?” Shepherd called out.

Glancing into the living room, I saw him on the couch with his eyes closed, arms and legs splayed. He looked miserable. A knot formed in my throat. I caught bits and pieces of Shepherd’s sadness since meeting him, but as I walked through the trailer, tears filled my eyes.

He’d been existing, not living. It was as if Shepherd wanted to feel dead, like he really died all those years ago.

There was very little of anything in the trailer. I dared walk into the bedroom. The only thing inside was a mattress on the floor. The air in the small space was damp and moldy too. Shepherd’s home was falling apart.

Shepherd started to rise from the couch. “Let’s go.”

Hurrying, I pushed him back down, and he looked up at me warily. “Shepherd.”

I didn’t mask my pain. I wanted him to hear, to feel it like he said he could. Tears slid down my cheeks. My soulmate had mistreated himself for years.

“I didn’t want you to see this place, Princess. You’re too precious to step foot in here.”

“You are too,” I whispered. “Do you want to leave this world?”Do you wish to die?

Wrapping his arms around my waist, my soulmate placed his head against my stomach. “What?Fuck no! You can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m not going anywhere. You’re not either.”

“You treat yourself so poorly.” I tried to push him away, but he held me tighter.

“I’ll do better.” His breath heated my shirt, teasing my stomach. “I forgot that I was alive, Princess, and it took finding you to wake me up. You brought color back into my life. Now I see my mistakes.”

I ran my fingers through his hair.

“I regret it,” Shepherd croaked. “Not being a part of Tiffany’s life when I finally changed into my human form again, but I was too afraid by then. After all the lives I’d stolen… I let her believe she could depend on me, then I failed her.”

“You took care of her,” I said. “No, I didn’t see that from your memories. I just know that with certainty.”

“I’m an awful big brother.”

“The worst,” I agreed. “But there’s still time for one last hello and goodbye.”

______

In his reaping form, Shepherd rippled back and forth in the hallway as we waited. I slipped through the door and watched Tiffany sleep. Her husband passed away three years ago, so she was alone. Shepherd, however, refused to enter her room until after she died.

---