Page 138 of Mortis

As if he’d been the one collecting the souls.

Arlo, meanwhile, had developed an uncanny ability to disappear whenever Mammon dropped in unexpectedly.

Which happened far more often than I’d expected.

If Arlo was at work, he suddenly found something that desperately needed doing out front. If we were at home, he vanished into his bedroom and shut the door.

Mammon noticed every single time.

His golden eyes would casually wander around the room. Towards the doorway. Down the hall. Once, I’d even caught him staring at Arlo’s closed bedroom door for several seconds before he realised I was watching. He’d looked almost . . . disappointed.

I’d made the mistake of asking him about it once. “Why do you care where Lo is?”

Mammon had slowly turned his head towards me and stared. Long enough that I started wondering if I was about to become the first immortal person to somehow get murdered anyway. Eventually, he’d demanded more souls and disappeared in a cloud of black smoke.

So, basically, our eternal future was going great.

For the most part.

Because while Kael had settled into his new life better than I could’ve hoped, there was one part of his old one he refused to acknowledge.

Barrowfell Woods.

I noticed the way he tensed whenever we walked past them. How he’d purposely turn his head the opposite way, pretending to be fascinated by whatever was on the other side of the street. How his breathing would quicken if we got too close to one of the footpaths leading between the trees.

For a while, I let it slide.

Kael had been through enough. He’d escaped more than a century of captivity, spent sixty years trapped by his own hunger, almost been dragged back into the hands of the people who’d tortured him, and then discovered his master could make people explode with a snap of his fingers. I figured he deserved some time to adjust. Time to enjoy being happy.

But after six months of watching him pretend the woods didn’t exist, I decided it was finally time to talk about it.

We were cosied up together on the couch one evening. It was getting late, but the sun was still lingering in the sky, spilling warm light through the open windows. A late May breeze drifted into the flat, carrying with it the promise of summer. Arlo was at his weekly book club meeting, so Kael and I had the place to ourselves. We were wrapped around each other with The Blair Witch Project playing on the TV.

In hindsight, maybe a film about people getting terrorised in the woods wasn’t the best choice. Kael didn’t seem particularly bothered, though. He was in his usual form, since we didn’t have to hide from Arlo anymore. His hooves hung over the opposite end of the sofa, while I sprawled across his chest, one leg wedged comfortably between his.

I peered up at him, resting my chin against his pec. “Why are you avoiding the woods?”

Kael’s eyes met mine, then quickly darted back towards the TV. His jaw tightened. “I’m not.”

My lips twitched. Six months together, and he was still terrible at lying. Whenever Kael said something he knew wasn’t true, he pursed his lips. Like even the act of lying offended him on some deeply personal level. They were doing it now, and annoyingly, it made me want to crawl up his body and kiss him.

Stop getting distracted, Teddy.

“You are. You won’t even look at them when we walk past.” His lips pursed harder. “And last weekend, when we were walking back from lunch at the café, you practically dragged me across the road so we didn’t have to go near the footpath.”

“There was a puddle.”

I stared at him, but Kael stared resolutely at the television. “A puddle,” I replied dryly.

“A large one.”

I poked him lightly in the chest. “Kael.”

His brows pulled together.

“I’m not having a go at you,” I said, softening my voice. “If you don’t want to go back there, you never have to. I just want to know why.”

That finally made him look at me. He didn’t reply right away, but his expression lost some of its stubbornness, replaced by something far more vulnerable. His claws moved absently through my hair as he seemed to search for the right words.