Where the Light No Longer Follows (Blue Fairytales, #3)

by Wendy Heiss

After so long in her duty as a Reaper, Silene knew for certain that if love was all it took to save someone, they’d all be eternal.

“Do I steal your breath away, pretty Silene?” “Maybe you stink.”

Life was beautiful. He’d just not been beautiful to her.

“Are you glaring or staring?” he shouted over the deafening music when she remained rooted on the spot, watching him. “Neither,” she shouted back. “Admiring?” “Wishing.” “Wishing for what?” “For you to take a tumble down those stairs,” she muttered to herself, and then offered him the sweetest fake smile she could muster when he looked at her over his shoulder. To her chagrin, he offered her a real one back. “Heard that.”

“Maybe I will rip it out and give it to you.” “Why would I want your heart?” she asked, putting the end of her umbrella on his chest again. “To eat it out.” A serpentine smile rose on his face that Silene did not possess enough words to describe how seraphic it looked even under the shadowed light cast from the streetlamps overhead. “You’ve always looked at me like you wanted to take a bite out of it.”

“Why do you own a theatre?” “There was this girl I’ve always wanted to bring to a theatre,” he confessed to her.

There were times she’d spent sat just like that, in front of a flickering flame after the horrors that had been committed to her had ended, confessing every one of her secrets to the light in the pitch of night when everything but her nightmares had gone to sleep. That very same light had eventually started speaking back to her, bringing her comfort nothing had ever given her before.

I AM ON MY THE FLOOR SOBBING

“There hasn’t been a moment ever since the first time I found you that I’ve looked away.”

“Anything, you could make anything out of nothing. You gave more life to things than I ever could. Simply by touching them. You were magnificent. The rarest thing I’d laid my eyes upon,” he said, and the very foundations of her mind shuddered. “You and your brother, neither of you had any hope, the both of you were hurting, but somehow, you could give him courage and make him dream. Without them he would have never returned from those mines. It was what kept him alive in there, do you know that? Do you know how much power you had, Silene?”

“You selfish God,” she whispered. “My pretty Reaper,”

“Ask me if I have ever been in love.” Silene hesitated, staring up at him with a plea in her eyes for him to take back his words. Her voice was small as she asked, “Have you ever been in love?” Skies overhead rumbled with thick thunder as he admitted, “I am.” It felt like every clock had stopped moving at that very second, stuck onto those two words as Silene uttered two quiet words of her own, “You are?” “Yes,”

I love you.

Tales would follow for years, and they would tell their story with a different path each time, but always the same ending. That Gabriel had loved the ghost of a woman Silene had been after her bargain with Death for endless years, and that she had never loved him back for longer than a day.