This is where I should feel fear, but the closest I come to it is confusion. This … isn’t supposed to be how we part. But my essence is being called towards my family and it’s hard to ignore.
“I love you, Thanatos,” I say, taking him in. “Forever and always. Nothing will ever change that. And I’ll be waiting for you when even you, the Angel of Death, meet your own end.”
Chapter 75
The Beyond
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Death
Lazarus’s words are nearly my end. I have endured much over my existence, but this moment makes all past traumas pale in comparison.
How am I supposed to let her go?
Despite her words, she lingers in front of me. I stare down at her as, with a spectral finger, Lazarus draws a shape on my armor.
To her, it must simply be a mindless doodle, but the shape her finger idly makes, I know that symbol.
Opotu.
Love.
Realization slams into me, so potent that I can barely catch my breath around it.
I knew God had given me a word, just as She had my brothers, a word that was both a lesson and a choice wrapped into one. I even knew early on what my word was—life. I thought I had figured it out and pressed on.
But I hadn’t understood my task and my challenge, nor had I understood the word. Not until now.
I was wrong. I misunderstood it all. The word—the choice, the lesson—it was never life.
It was love.
Love.
And for whatever reason, that shifts the way in which I see everything.
Lazarus frowns, her eyes regretful as she glances up at me. “Until we meet again, Thanatos,” she says.
I can feel the sharp edge of her love as she moves away from me.
She looks over the gathered crowd once more, her eyes searching. I know who she’s looking for. It’s the one human she loves above all others, the one she tried to bargain her life for. Ben.
The moment Lazarus saved that baby and claimed him as her own was also the moment she truly stopped fighting me. She gave up humanity for that child because she loved him.
There’s that human selfishness—to pick one human over millions.
But is it selfishness?
That choice made Lazarus vulnerable to my brothers’ manipulation—and to my own. All for a little boy she just happened to save. Perhaps you could call that selfishness, but perhaps you could also say that what she had was a love so intense and selfless that it eclipsed everything else.
My lungs seize up at the thought.
That same love made Lazarus desperately bargain her life for her child’s. An extraordinary sacrifice—one I didn’t accept—but also one I’ve heard many, many times from humans.
My life for theirs …
I would do anything …
And perhaps it was that same love that made Lazarus turn her blade on herself rather than sinking it into my own flesh.
My brothers and I have assumed we were better than these humans we were tasked to destroy, but we have been the ones pitting their compassion against them.
I have followed orders this entire time. That’s what I’m good at. Even Lazarus was fated to me by God, so she too sat comfortably in my world … until, of course, she didn’t. She gave me raw, painful, messy humanity. With all its spontaneity and beauty. She awoke me, and no matter how today ends, I cannot go back to who and what I once was.
I see Lazarus hesitate and look back at me. I see plainly in her eyes that she doesn’t want to leave me, even though the afterlife and all her loved ones are calling her home. My heart aches so fiercely at the sight of her.
I quake at the thought of existing without her.
What will you do? It is your decision in the end.
Those words ring in my ears. They feel like a trick, even though that is not the way the universe works.
Cities have crumbled and legions have died and I have felt nothing. But the sound of Lazarus’s laughter has stirred my heart, and the slide of her body under mine has awoken my soul. How many lonely miles have I traveled with the memory of her voice keeping me company?
What would my future look like when Lazarus is nothing but a memory once more?
The thought is like a physical blow. That future is unfathomable.
You don’t even know what loss is, she said not so long ago. You’ve never loved anything enough to care if it goes.
Now I know.
I cannot lose her.
It’s not even a question. It’s a certainty. I simply can’t. It’s the same damnable choice Lazarus made when she discovered Ben. A single person can change your life. As a human, you can love deeply enough to doom humanity.
Or redeem it.
Chapter 76
The Beyond
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Death
“Wait,” I call out.
Lazarus’s family is already welcoming her; she is frightfully close to that blinding light of the beyond. Have I ever considered heaven frightful before this moment? Because right now, it is. And she’s a hair’s breadth from it.
“Wait,” I say again, softer this time.
Lazarus turns back to face me. The raw hope in her eyes cuts me deep. Too long that hope has been dashed.
It won’t be ever again. I don’t care if I have to apologize every day for the rest of our mortal lives, so long as we get those lives.
I move towards the spirits that surround her, brushing past them to get to Lazarus.
I clasp her spectral face in my hands. When I look into her eyes, I feel a deep sense of certainty not just that I can give up my task, but that I must. Not even God’s commands can drown out this drive I feel. I would tear away my immortality, my heavenliness, and I would unmake the world, all for the press of this woman’s lips against my skin and her voice in my ear.
“If I gave you everything you wanted—your son, an end to the apocalypse and the killing—would you return to Earth?” I ask.
Her brows draw together in confusion, and the sight of it wounds me. I have set her expectations so low, she cannot make sense of this.
“You—” my voice fails me, and I have to start again. “You can go with your loved ones and enter the afterlife. There will be no more pain.” I draw in a shuddering breath, the possibility terrifying to me. “Or, you could stay with Ben, on earth. I can’t promise that there will be no pain. To live is to feel pain.”
She doesn’t say anything, and I can’t read her face.
“What about you?” she eventually says.
I inhale sharply, and it’s as if I’ve drawn in my first breath. “I want you, Lazarus. With every part of me, I do. That will never change.” My love is just as vast and unending as the rest of me. “But I hurt you, and then I took you and then I disappointed you—”
One of her spectral hands presses against my lips, silencing me.
“I have done all the same to you,” she says. “It is forgiven.” She searches my features. “We have spent the entirety of our relationship fighting for our causes. What if we started fighting for one another?”
I go still at the implication.
Lazarus continues. “I want to return to Earth—and I want everything you promised. But I also want one more thing—” She smiles, “you.”
Chapter 77
Los Angeles, California
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Lazarus
I gasp in a breath, and my lungs expand. Rocks are digging into my back and everything feels … well, less than whimsical.
I blink my eyes open and stare up at Thanatos.
Except for that face. That face is pure whimsy.
The horseman smiles at me, and that smile manages to drive away all the shadows that linger on his face.
I grin back at him, my entire body feeling alive.
But then the smile slips from Death’s face. For a moment, he looks confused.
“Thanatos?”
Just as I begin to sit up, he chokes.
“Thanatos!” What’s going on?
I slip out of his arms so that I can kneel in front of him.
“Death?”