Death is My Frenemy Rewritten (Book 3 of the Rewritten Death Chronicles)

Chapter 32: No Shadow without Light

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***

Neriah. Neriah. Neriah.

He'd called me Neriah.

The old bookkeeper in that golden library. The one that made the Devil sleep.

"They said you took down Lucifer," Alexandru had told Neriah in the memory of that golden library. "That he was the most powerful arch angel, and when he challenged this realm, when all of Heaven was at his mercy, and he raged his flames upon the Elders to destroy them all, you were the one who stopped him. You are the one who brought the devil down to his knees."

Victorian Death had called me Neriah.

None of it made sense.

And yet, somehow...

Maybe this Neriah woman was the key to getting Ace and I closer to Death's physical body and away from Victorian Death. What had happened to Neriah in the realm of Heaven with Alexandru? How was she connected to all of this and possibly to me? Victorian Death had taunted me, continuing to play me like a fiddle, and now I was questioning just how far apart this villain's intentions were to my Death's.

What if their intentions were the same? That was the most frightening question of them all.

I'd held Death's body in my arms. The real Death. And I'd thought everything was going to be okay. I thought we'd be okay. But now I was back in this dreary cell in his cursed memory, and his corpse remained in that haunted library in the in-between. And I was so much more uncertain about the ending of this journey than ever before.

This adventure had pushed me past every threshold of strength I thought I had, propelling me into an even deeper void of confusion as to what was a lie and what was the truth.

If there was one thing I knew for certain, it was that I had been too naïve again. I'd let my heart take precedence over common sense. Death had two-thousand years' worth of secrets and bad intentions. Hell, he was double-cursed, for crying-out loud. The man was practically a paranormal convict with two permanent ankle monitors around his soul.

There was so much I didn't know about Death, and maybe those things could tear us apart. Maybe he'd known that all along.

Maybe that was why he'd told me to leave him. He'd told me to leave him to die. He told me to choose me over him. What I'd thought had been self-sacrifices in his words replayed in a crazed loop of deceit under the scrutiny of my mind's eye.

I need you to choose you over me, became suddenly became sentence broken apart without the closing. A half-truth, stunted in a moment of guilt, fear, or...worse.

I need you to choose you over me, he'd said, maybe with the unspoken: because if you give me the choice, I won't choose you.

"Faith?" Through the ringing in my ears, I heard Ace's voice. He stood in my peripheral through the bars of the adjacent cell. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face, and he had his shirt rolled up at the forearms. "Say something. You're freaking me out."

"I'm okay."

"Was the astral projection successful?"

My head slowly turned to look at the warlock through the bars. "He's alive."