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  “Is he…dead?” Emma asked.

  Thanatos grunted and sat up.

  “Signs point to no.” I stepped to the center of the street, standing between Thanatos and everyone else. Other Reapers hovered close, forming a circle around us.

  “Stay back!” Thanatos snarled, standing. “He’s mine.” He rolled his head, popping his neck. Slowly, he lifted his fists in a challenge.

  If he wanted a fight, I’d bring it to him. I took another step forward.

  “Lazarus,” Emma called. “Don’t. You’re almost back. Don’t lose everything here.”

  Thanatos wasn’t going to stand aside and just let me go back to my body. I had to fight him. And then what? a voice nagged in the back of my head. You can’t kill him. He’s Death. Even if you beat his ass into the ground, there are hundreds of other Reapers standing by to pick up where he left off. This isn’t a fight you can win. Maybe it’s a fight that doesn’t need to happen at all.

  I forced my clenched fists to relax. “No.”

  “No?” Thanatos lowered his fists. “What do you mean, no? You can’t just say no. Hey! I’m talking to you! Don’t turn your back on me! I can still reap you!”

  I stopped walking and turned around. “With what? Your scythe is bent to hell. Maybe you can order them to do it. I can’t stop you from doing that, and I can’t beat you to the hospital where my body is waiting. I’ve proven again and again that I’m not dead, which means you can’t reap me, but you keep trying anyway. I can’t win if I play by your rules, so I choose not to play at all.”

  “This isn’t a game!” Thanatos screamed. “I will order them to reap you!”

  “You do that, and my kid will hit you with her magic again.” I nodded at Remy. “You’ll also be breaking your own rule.”

  Thanatos flinched as if I’d struck him.

  “That’s right. Remember that speech you gave me about the natural order? That was why you got so worked up and fixated on me. Because I broke the rules and made the dead live again. Well, if you reap me, you’re killing someone who’s not dead.” I gestured down the street. “I’m literally a block away from getting back to my body, and you still want to murder me.”

  “I’m not a murderer.” His eyes moved to Nate and back to me.

  “You will be if you order them to reap me. And I promise you, pal, if you break the rules, the Horsemen will be there to kick your ass whether you’ve got a soul or not. I proved that in my tenure, and I have no doubt that my replacement won’t hesitate to do the same.”

  “That’s right,” said Nate. “My charge is to keep the balance between gods, humans, and the supernatural world. If you murder him right in front of me, I’ll have no choice but to erase you from existence.”

  Emma chambered a round and pointed her gun at Thanatos. “And I’ll be there to back him up.”

  “As will I,” said Remy. “And all of Faerie.”

  I spread my arms wide. “Your move, asshole.”

  Thanatos scanned the line of people gathered in front of the Escalade. He held out his hand. The scythe suddenly dislodged from the roof of the car and flew back into his waiting palm like a boomerang. He planted the butt of it on the road and studied us a moment longer. I still thought we’d have a fight on our hands.

  Then Thanatos picked up the scythe and broke the wooden handle over his knee. “The reaping contract on Lazarus Kerrigan is hereby suspended until further notice,” he announced to the other Reapers. “Go about your business.”

  One by one, the Reapers vanished from the street and sky.

  Thanatos cast aside the broken scythe. “Reclaim your body…for now. I’m a patient Reaper, and you’ve only got another fifty years at best. I’ll be waiting for you then, Lazarus Kerrigan.”

  With a flash of blue light, he too disappeared.

  I counted the decades on my fingers. Apparently, Thanatos figured I was only going to live to be eighty. Joke was on him. I was going to live to be a hundred and one just so I could rub it in his face when he came to reap me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I returned to my body. It felt like forever since I’d stood at the end of my bed, looking at the weak and broken shell of who I’d become. Watching myself breathe with the assistance of a machine, I had the strangest realization that my body was only a small part of who I was. Eventually, it was going to fail me, and it would be time for me to go for good.

  All my life, I’d been afraid of death. Anytime I had to interact with it, it made me uncomfortable. Sure, I said I wasn’t afraid, but that was all a front. Dying scared me to death.

  But there was one thing that had always frightened me more: dying alone. It’s why I went to Hell for Emma, why I’d fought so hard to stay alive in the past. Now that I knew I wasn’t alone, that fear should’ve been gone. It wasn’t.

  What happens when I give the Horseman mantle to Nate permanently? My family will still be a target. We can never be safe. I closed my eyes. Maybe being safe wasn’t such a great thing after all. I’d played life safe before with Odette, and look where that got me. My life with Emma couldn’t be more of the same, not if we wanted to be happy.

  And I wanted with everything I was for us to have our happy ending.

  “What if this doesn’t work?” Nate asked beside me.

  “It’ll work,” I said. “It has to. There are no backup plans.”

  The curtain moved aside, and Finn shuffled in. Half his face was wrapped in gauze, with a big pad over his eye where Mask had cleaved his face. When the scars healed, he’d lose his boyish good looks, trading them to become someone older, harsher, and rougher around the edges. At least he’d look the part.

  “He looks like shit,” he croaked in a hoarse voice to Nate.

  “Glad to see he’s still alive,” I said. “We’ll need him when we go to the Nightlands.”

  Nate frowned. “To the Nightlands?”

  I nodded. “Mask isn’t dead. He’s still got spies and contacts here. The only way to stop him from coming back is to make sure he can’t, which means we need to close the third seal. It’s in the Nightlands, so we go to the Nightlands. Not yet, though. We’ll wait for everyone to be all healed up first. Hell, maybe we should just do it after the wedding.”

  “After,” Nate agreed. “He’s not going to try anything big for quite a while.”

  Emma came in behind Finn and slid to the end of the bed beside us. “We’re just waiting for the staff to disconnect life support, and then you’re good to go.”

  We’d decided that I should be disconnected from everything before I attempted to re-enter my body. It’d be rough going if I woke up with a tube shoved down my throat. Unfortunately, disconnecting me from life support was risky. My body would die, and they’d have to get me back using conventional methods. If Nate had known how to perform the Kiss of Life…

  No, screw that. I’d already been inside Haru. I wasn’t going to kiss my best friend, not even for a magic spell. Things were weird enough. They could shock me back to life, and that was that.

  Several nurses came in and started to disconnect all the equipment. I stood by nervously as alarms started going off, but no one else in the room panicked. The nurses disconnecting me moved aside to let another lady with a big cart step in. She started giving orders at practically the speed of light, mixing them with shouting out a bunch of statistics.

  Doctor Ben strode in, the very picture of cool confidence as he tugged on his gloves. “Have we lost the pulse?”

  “No pulse,” reported the nurse.

  Nate turned to me and nodded. “That’s your cue.”

  While the team started chest compressions and worked to get something into my IV, I hovered over my body and tried to shake my last-minute fears that it wouldn’t work. I’d done everything right and collected all the parts of my soul within the time window Samedi had given me. There was no reason for it not to work, and yet, it could still fail. My body might decide it was done and just give up without me. I had to make sure that d
idn’t happen.

  I closed my eyes and lowered back into my body just as they were attaching some sticky pads to my chest. Please, God. If you’re out there and this thing is on, please let something go right for me just this once.

  I woke up with what felt like an elephant sitting on my chest and one hell of a stiff neck. That was a good thing. Pain meant I was back in my body and it’d worked.

  Some equipment started beeping next to my head. The curtain moved aside, and Remy peeked in. She looked at me and then past me. “Finn! Stop it!”

  “Okay, okay. It’s just oxygen. Keep your shirt on.” The bed creaked as he stood up and leaned over me, sliding the plastic tubing away from his nose back to mine. Little bastard had stolen my oxygen.

  “Asshole,” I managed, my voice hoarse. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

  Finn shrugged and pointed to the eyepatch he wore. He still had some bandages on his face, but not as many as the last time I’d seen him. “It’s pretty much all I’ve got going for me now that I lost my good looks.”

  Remy reached across the bed and shoved him back into his chair before adjusting the oxygen tubing. “Sorry about him.”

  “Why does it feel like there’s a two-ton weight on my chest?”

  “They had to do chest compressions,” Remy said, adjusting my blanket.

  I grunted in response, suddenly sleepy again.

  The next time I opened my eyes, it was because someone was making some uncomfortable adjustments in my nether regions. A burly nurse with a buzz cut told me to hold still while they removed the catheter. You’d best believe I held still.

  After that, it was impossible to sleep with the parade of nurses and doctors that came to see me. Some of them just wanted to check my vitals while others were med students come to take notes on my miraculous recovery. My legs didn’t work right, and I was incredibly weak, which meant I had to page a nurse every time I needed to make the short trek across the room to the bathroom.

  But I was alive and in my own body. That alone made everything worth it.

  After a few hours of dealing with medical personnel, blood draws, and various tests, they finally let me order food. Of course, they limited what I could have to semi-solids like oatmeal and Jell-O, but even hospital Jell-O couldn’t get me down.

  Emma came to see me around dinner time. Like the angel she was, she brought me a nice, greasy, fast-food bacon cheeseburger.

  I took the first bite and leaned back, making sounds that should’ve been reserved for sex. “I’m telling you, there is nothing like the first cheeseburger after a near-death experience.”

  “I hope that’s the last near-death cheeseburger I ever have to bring you, Lazarus.”

  I lowered the burger to the adjustable table they’d moved over my bed. “I’m sorry I made you go through this, Emma.”

  She shook her head. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. Don’t say it is. I hurt you.”

  She offered a weak smile, but even it made my heart flutter faster. “But you saved the world, and everything came out okay in the end. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we can’t change where we’ve been or what we’ve done. The past is written in stone, but the future? It’s flexible. Now, if you go doing it again, we might have a problem.”

  “There’s just one more thing I need to do, then I’m out. I swear it.”

  She nodded. “I’m going to hold you to it. Now, eat your cheeseburger before someone comes in and finds out I smuggled that greaseball in here.”

  Over the next few hours, everyone else stopped by for a short visit. Even Leah came to check in. She stood off to one side while Nate and I talked about random stupid things. He was still the acting Pale Horseman, and I got the sense that Leah wasn’t happy about it, but I couldn’t read much else from her.

  When there was a pause in the conversation, she stepped forward. “Lazarus, I want to thank you.”

  “What for?” I thought I’d misheard her at first.

  She swallowed. “I’m still getting used to the idea that my husband is this Pale Horseman—”

  “Acting Pale Horseman,” Nate corrected, “Until he’s back on his feet.”

  “Acting Pale Horseman, then. But if you hadn’t given him the powers he has, I wouldn’t have my daughter back.” Leah placed a hand on Nate’s shoulder and smiled just a little. “And since he’s had his powers, he’s been a much happier man. I don’t know what happened when he went to Faerie, but Nate has a newfound confidence. It just seems, for the first time in a long time, that everything is going to be okay.”

  Nate put his arms around her and pulled her into a tight hug. “It is, Leah. We’re all going to be okay.”

  There was only one good thing about being stuck in the hospital for the better part of a month while my body healed. It gave me ample downtime to put together wedding plans. She wouldn’t let me have the Princess Bride theme, and I gave a hard no to doing anything Game of Thrones. That left only one viable option that we could mutually agree upon: Lord of the Rings. The upside? It made engraving the rings easy. Downside? She wasn’t letting me read my vows in Elvish.

  On the day before my discharge, the Tengu came to see me after hours. They somehow found a way to sneak in. Don’t ask me how the Tengu manage anything. Seeing Kaage-sama with Haru’s swords opened the wound. Haru had been an ally when I needed one, and a friend. Knowing he was gone hurt.

  “Haru left some things he wanted you to have.” Kaage gestured to the other Tengu with him. She came forward and placed a cloth bundle on my lap.

  I slowly opened it to find a bunch of comic books inside. I almost passed back out when I realized they weren’t just comic books, but several first editions in near-mint condition. Buried among them was a note.

  I heard congratulations were in order. I truly hope you and the future Mrs. Kerrigan get to enjoy the happiness the rest of us were denied. Being a Horseman is a lonely profession. It seems these old farts believe that’s part of the tradition. Who better than you to set that straight?

  If you’re reading this, it means I don’t get to give it to you in person, along with the good-natured jab in the ribs and a poorly-timed perverted joke. Just pretend I did those things.

  Anyway, I wracked my brain trying to think of what to get you as a wedding gift, and then I found these. Once upon a time, I was a normal kid who read comic books. You reminded me of that kid, so I thought you should have them. You’ll appreciate them for what they are.

  I included an address in the back of one. You should write to whoever lives there. I hope you’ll have stories to share about the man I always wished I could’ve been, and not what War made me.

  Your friend and associate,

  Haru Nakamata

  I glanced up at Kaage-sama, whose face remained blank, then turned the last page of the last comic book. There I found a yellow sticky note with an address in Alabama, of all places.

  “Haru’s sons,” said the Tengu softly.

  I lowered the comic book. “I thought he’d never seen them. That was what he told me before.”

  Kaage-sama sighed. “It was why he wouldn’t come back. He found out we knew where they were and went to them.”

  “He wants me to write to them.”

  The Tengu shrugged. “What you do with your time and whom you speak to is none of our concern. You’re free to do as you wish.”

  “How much can I tell them?”

  He tapped a feathered wing on the top of his head in thought. “I suppose that depends on you.”

  I nodded and tucked the note back into the comic book. “They deserve to know their father cared and would be there with them if he could. They need to be looked after, Kaage-sama. Taken care of. Haru wouldn’t want them to be in need. The man lived and died a hero. We couldn’t have won without him.”

  Kaage-sama bowed his head. “It will be seen to. Be well, Lazarus.” He stepped back and disappeared into a shadow in the same way I’d seen Fi
nn do it.

  “Goodness, I thought they’d never leave!” Jean floated through the wall and lounged in the chair.

  I blinked. “Jean? I thought the Reapers got you!”

  “Oh, they did.” He rolled his hand, dismissing the idea. “But they just sent me back to that blasted line. I cut to the front, much to Osiris’ irritation, and demanded to speak to Hades. He got things straightened out, and now I’m back. It was all very annoying.”

  Hades appeared in a puff of sulfurous-smelling green smoke. “Well, it would’ve been easier on us both if you hadn’t been caught in the first place.”

  I pulled my hospital gown up over my nose and waved away the smell. “Hades, you’ve got to quit doing that. The underworld smells like a high school locker room after the chili cookoff.”

  Hades sniffed the air, then shrugged. “Anyway, I hear you’ve set a date for the big day, finally. When is it? I need to know so we can plan our night of revelry and general debauchery!”

  “December thirty-first,” I said.

  Jean made a face. “New Year’s Eve?”

  “It’s an old family tradition,” I explained. “Good luck.”

  “Good!” Hades clapped his hands together. “That gives us more than a month to plan. Let’s see Dionysus try to tell me he’s busy this time.” He cackled like mad before grabbing Jean. “Come on, Jean. We have the greatest bachelor party ever to plan,” he said, and they disappeared together.

  I shook my head and collapsed back onto bed. Maybe letting Hades plan the bachelor party wasn’t the best idea, but considering everything else I’d been through over the last few weeks, that seemed a minor problem, and one I was content to ignore for the moment.

  Besides, what could possibly go wrong?

  The End

  Author Notes