Page 39 of Seduction of a Psychopomp
I reached out absently to run the backs of my fingers down Celeste’s wing feathers when she stepped closer to pick up her box of trinkets, noting the way she shivered and her eyes filled with hunger as I drew my hand back.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” she pouted before shaking her wings out. She paused, lingering by my side while holding her little box, and glanced at the closed door. “They’re truly not mad at me?” she whispered. It wouldn’t help, the whispering, but there wasn’t anything we would say that I wouldn’t have said in front of my family anyway.
I wrapped my arm around her and tugged her onto my lap. “No,” I assured her as I held her close. “More impressed than anything, I think.”
“Then why are we leaving?” she whispered, turning in my arms so that her wide, lavender eyes could search mine.
“Because I love my family dearly but I also love my space. And my privacy.”
The tension drained out of her shoulders, and I loosened my grip to release her, but she made no move to stand. “Oh,” she responded, relief clear in her voice. “Where will they go?” she asked. “Your family,” she clarified when I didn’t understand her question. “You mentioned before that no one lives here.”
I nodded and settled back against a pillow, reaching for a tendril of her hair that had escaped her braid and feeling the texture of it between my fingers. “They will rest here for a few days, and then go back to their tasks of collecting the dead,” I told her. Careful arrangements were made to guarantee that the areas we were assigned to had plenty of coverage from other reapers who could watch over them when one of us was otherwise occupied. It was a duty we all shared, and it was important to ensure none of us had too large a population to watch over at any one time. My family would return to their jurisdictions and relieve the temporary guardians of their extra duties.
“Oh,” she said again, but this time her voice seemed smaller. “Will you have to do that?”
“Eventually.” I hadn’t been told how long my respite would be, but it was common for our people to take a year off after a marriage or birth of a child. My grandmother had implied that it might be several years due to my need to protect Celeste while my magic finished taking hold, but it would probably depend on a multitude of factors.
“What happens if you just… didn’t?” Celeste asked. “What if you just let people live, instead?”
I blinked at her, trying to mentally untangle her questions. “I don’t cause mortals to die,” I explained. At least… not in the way she was imagining.Usually.
She held very still in my arms. “You don’t?”
I couldn’t help but frown at her question. “Mortals have a great deal of misunderstandings about death. It’s true that we are oftencalledDeath. We are a personification of it. But those we are called to guide are already dead. Their bodies are ruined… no longer fit to house a soul.Theyare in between and have nothing to return to.”
She was silent for a long moment as she turned that over in her mind. “But what about the people who don’t deserve to die?” she asked quietly, and I thought I might have detected a hitch in her voice.
That struck me as an odd thought, that death would somehow be deserved or not deserved. Like birth, it was simply a process thatwas. All things must have a beginning and an end. Mortals rise with the sun in the morning and fall into sleep as the sun descends into darkness to ready itself for a new day. Seeds sprout and bloom, then wither and fall, creating new seeds to sprout again. The young ewe is born in the spring, and the old ewe succumbs to the cold in the winter—and in doing so sustains the crow and coyote.
Whole galaxies are formed of ice and dust, their stars burning for eons while new life evolves within their warmth, before erupting into dust again and destroying everything they have created. This is the way of the universe that the Creator has formed.
“What about the ones who haven’t even had a chance to live yet?” she continued, blinking away tears that had begun to well up in her eyes. “How… how do you reap a child?”
Unbidden, my mind’s eye was flooded with the small forms I had collected over the years. The task of taking the flickering spirit from a still, silent body being held by their weeping mother was a devastating one. To leave them there—to fail to remove them—would not return their soul to their body. It would recklessly endanger them, leaving them vulnerable to the terrifying reality that is the spirit world without a guide. It would be a disaster. My duty,my purpose, was to bear them safely back to their Creator. And I did so, often gathering this precious cargo into my arms because it felt to me like the right thing to do. Always speaking a quiet blessing and comforting words to them as I carried them home to their ancestors. And I loved them, as deeply as one can love anything, in those moments.
I lowered my eyes to take in my wife’s pained expression, and told her honestly, “With great difficulty.”
She hugged me hard, and I held her in silence for a little while as she absorbed this information, before she finally nodded against my neck and sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry you have to do that,” she said quietly. I didn’t know what to make of that. I had no more choice in doing so than she had in drawing her next breath. But even if I could choose not to, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She turned to stare at me for a beat, studying my face, and then stretched up to kiss me on my cheekbone, before rising to stand. I pressed my fingers to the spot, confused by her response, and she smiled a small, crooked smile at me. “What should I bring?” she asked with a sigh, returning to her packing with her little box of trinkets. As she flipped open one of the trunks that my family had brought up for her, she pulled out a folded piece of paper and froze.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, concerned at the change in her posture, feeling myself tense up just as she had.
“It’s—” She didn’t finish her sentence, opening the paper and quickly scanning the contents with her eyes.
Her expression was one of anxiety, and every impulsive fiber of my being urged me to stand and pluck the note from her hands so I could read it for myself, but I was not an impatient man. I restrained myself, staying seated and reminding myself that she would explain when she was ready. My fingers might have twitched a time or two.
She read the note a second and then a third time before folding it back in half and letting her gaze drift to mine. Her expression was one of sadness and perhaps a mild annoyance, but then her lips pressed together. “Apollo left me a note,” she said, her voice unsteady again.
The urge to snatch it from her fingers rose in me again. I locked my muscles to prevent me from doing just that.
When she continued her voice was a little more even. “He said the same thing he told my mother, that he couldn’t bear to see me marry someone else. But he says he loves me and he always will.” She shook her head and tucked the note back into her belongings, and I watched her intently, trying to discern her response to this overture. Would he become a problem in our marriage? Or was this the closure that she needed from her former friend?
“What can I do?” I asked, setting my calling stones aside and standing to go to her.
She shook her head again, shutting the trunk and returning to her task of packing. “There’s nothing to be done. He just is who he is.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, and as much as I hoped his note would have made her feel better about his absence from our wedding, that didn’t seem to be the case. She seemed more resigned about it than anything. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and I meant it. Her hurt was my hurt, and I was sorry that this man continued to bring her tears.
