“I will fight all the way here if I have to,” I said, clutching him tighter.

“I know you would. You’re the fiercest girl I’ve ever met.”

I moved my hand up his chest to cradle his face and I pulled him down to me. I took a breath just as I kissed him. He kissed me back gently as his lips moved with mine. Then he broke away with a wretched, sorrowful sound and he kissed my cheek, my temple, my forehead, and my lips one last time.

“I’ll be here,” he said. “For however long it takes. A year, ten thousand. I will not leave this world until you return to me.”

I brushed my hand over his cheek until I couldn’t hold it up anymore. “I promise I’ll come back to you. I won’t forget your face. I’ll come back.”

And then Will’s face faded away.

EPILOGUE

Will

THE ONLY REASON I WAS HELPING KATE MOVE INTO her dorm was because Marcus had made me. And because I liked Kate, though she still scared the hell out of me.

And because she told me I needed to be happy again.

I wasn’t especially fond of the university life in East Lansing. It was manic, alcohol-and-study-crazed, and there were too many people for me to enjoy it. But it felt safe from reapers here. Since the battle on Armageddon, the numbers of demonic reapers loyal to Hell had been devastated. Reapers no longer prowled the Grim, hunting humans. There were some reapers out there, but so few they were hardly a threat as we picked them off, one by one. We and the angels had just about wiped them out. I was, to be honest, bored and unfocused. Marcus, however, was clearly thriving.

“I think I may enroll,” he confessed.

Kate dropped a box of clothes onto the narrow twin bed on her side of the room. “You can’t just enroll, moron. You have to be accepted.”

He gave her a haughty grin. “Oh, they’ll accept me. As soon as they hear I’m in town, they’ll send their sexiest interns chasing me down the street, waving scholarship offers printed on fragranced paper smattered with lipstick smudges.”

Kate promptly socked him in the gut and knocked the breath out of him. “Find my hangers so I can put my clothes away. It’s after dark and I want to go party. All the fraternities heard I was moving in and I don’t want to keep those hot frat boys waiting. Boys…” She sighed. “Their attention spans are so limited, you know.”

Marcus grinned, grabbed her shirt and tugged her close, and he nipped her neck playfully. I sighed, shook my head, and set the television I’d just brought in for her on the desk. I’d tried so hard since we came up here not to look at the other side of the room, where Ellie was supposed to be moving in her own things today. I never realized how difficult it’d be for me to help Kate move in until I saw the empty bed and desk. My heart tried to break all over again. Everything was just too empty now.

It had been two and a half months. The university hadn’t assigned a replacement roommate for Kate. Things would be easier if there was someone there to fill the void Ellie had left, but there wasn’t. All I had left of her were her swords. I had wrapped them in cloth and put them away in my room. I couldn’t even look at them anymore.

Ellie had died in my arms. Even as an archangel, she had felt so small and fragile. I had held her dying so many times before then, but that final time was different. We had come so far since we were reunited. We’d loved so fiercely. She had been mine if only for such a cruelly short time. A few months in five hundred years was not enough time. I’d do it all over again, though. I’d lose her forever all over again. I would never give back those few months even for a less-broken heart.

One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she’d died. I’d fought alongside them in that battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unreal. The angels weren’t supposed to feel emotion, but they were weeping. All of them. Their tears stained their flawless faces like rain running in rivulets across stone. Azrael was the only one of them who came to me, knelt in front of me, and took her from my arms. He was the angel of death come to carry his sister home. I didn’t want to give her up, knowing it would be the last time I ever saw her face. I had died on that wretched hill with her.

I stayed with my mother for a few weeks afterward. I did as Ellie had told me, got to know my mother again, and during those weeks, I felt glimpses of what happiness used to be like. My brother hadn’t been around for almost a month, but Cadan had his own way of grieving, I supposed. once our pain faded and every day seemed less difficult to endure, I wanted to know him like family, to know what it was like to have a brother. To feel less empty.

I wanted to move on, but my soul wouldn’t let me. Every day I awoke with hope, but it was too early for Ellie to be reborn—if she would be reborn. There was no sign from the angels, no word on what had happened to her. I even took the Pentalpha and attempted to summon Azrael or Michael and beg them to tell me if they knew where she was, but the power had gone from the relic as she had from this world. There were no words for the hopelessness I felt after that.

But I prayed every day for her to come back to me, somehow, some way. I would never stop praying.

“Do you need anything else?” I asked Kate, trying to pretend she and Marcus weren’t practically tearing each other’s clothes off while I was still in the room.

“Mmm?” she asked, pulling herself from Marcus just enough to glance at me. “No. Thanks for everything, Will.”