Page 60 of Where Light Cannot Follow

I do not tell him that I cannot feel it. That I never have and never will. That I've watched countless souls absorbed into that light—crying joyful tears, laughing, dissolving into a completeness they'd never known in life. But I've never felt the prickling warmth, the lifting of the heart, the pull I know the light possesses.

Dante’s shoulders rise and fall with great breaths. He stretches his arms out as though he might grasp lingering fragments of it. He spins once, slowly, almost playfully.

It isn't strange. I've seen so many react this way to that light, to the call of it. But somehow I expected things to be different with him.

It troubles me that it troubles me.

I can already imagine that joy on his face when his own time comes. How tears will fall uninhibited down that handsome face as he's absorbed into the light himself. His eyes will be lifted toward his completion, not cast down to where I remain behind. Where I always am. Where I always will be.

"We should carry on," I say, and my voice sounds distant even to my own ears. I need to deliver him before I grow any more attached. Already this will pain me like nothing I've experienced since my death. Adding anything further will only deepen the misery to come.

"As I mentioned, we have to skirt the Forest first, but we should make short work of it. I don't wish for us to traverse the obvious paths where others might search for us."

Dante's eyes have lost their otherworldly wonder. He studies me now, frowning. "You're worried about this forest?"

"We won't enter it," I say, but I offer nothing more. For I am worried. "Unless we must."

Dante watches me a moment longer, as though he might press. Then he simply nods and falls into step beside me.

He doesn't ask what I'm truly afraid of. Perhaps he already knows.

PART V

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

—James Joyce, The Dead

24

DANTE

The Forest Virgil had referenced is a malevolent thing, dark and towering. It reminds me of the Manhattan I'd walked in my first moments here. It contains that same oppressive emptiness, that same sense of something watching from the shadows. Surely the broken, splintered Christmas tree from my loop could have grown in soil like this.

Virgil has remained quiet since the child. Withdrawn.

I can't match his mood. Couldn't if I wished to.

That light. It was like it draped over me, seeped into me through my skin, my breath, places I didn't know I had anymore. Every ache of body and spirit lifted at once—every fear, every doubt, every old hatred I'd been carrying like stones in my pockets. All of it, gone. Just for a moment.

Now I understand why Virgil walks souls toward this light. Because if that is what awaits at the end, it's worth everything. Every miserable step through this wretched realm. Every torment I suffered in life. Every cold night I spent hungry, every betrayal I swallowed, every time I chose safety over vulnerability and told myself it was wisdom.

Worth it. All of it.

Virgil doesn't believe he can reach that light.

He's so deeply entrenched in his loop—this belief that he's damned beyond redemption—that he can't see past it. But I'll be damned twice over if I let him stay behind when I go. I didn't claw my way through every circle of my own personal hell to abandon the one person who made the journey bearable.

A wind crackles through the tree limbs, causing them to rattle together. My watch ticks softly at my wrist, and I'm startled when the noise of the Forest swallows its sound. That quiet rhythm has been our singular companion in this silent world. Its absence feels like losing a heartbeat.

"Blast." Virgil stops walking, his expression tightening. "I fear we must delve deeper into the Forest than I'd hoped."

I eye the malevolent trees’ twisted trunks, their gnarled branches reaching toward us before I step alongside him and into their shadow's embrace.

Something approaches. We need to evade it.

The knowledge settles into me like ice water. Satan hunts us both. Constance schemes in his service. Demons prowl these paths with hunger I've now felt firsthand. And I don't know how to protect Virgil. Not truly. Not until we reach the light and I convince him to shed whatever false beliefs anchor him here.

The last of the light's warmth drains from me at the thought.