The Woman Who Wouldn't Die
1409 Words
The moment their hands touched, it felt like falling through a dream made of thunder.
Mira gasped, her eyes flaring wide as heat surged through her veins—heat that wasn't hers. Her heartbeat, once fragile and stuttering, thundered like a war drum. A pulse of light burst between her palm and Thorne's, silver and violet, rippling out in a ring that shimmered for a breath before vanishing into the hospital walls.
She expected pain.
She got clarity.
The humming of the lights above sharpened to a piercing frequency. The scent of disinfectant and lilies bloomed too sharply in her nose. Her own thoughts scattered like startled birds, and in their place came something else.
A name she didn’t recognize.
A memory that wasn’t hers.
Fire on a battlefield. A girl with blood in her hair. The sound of a bell tolling not for the dead, but for the dying.
Mira stumbled back. Thorne caught her wrist before she could collapse.
“Your soul is shifting,” he said, his voice grave. “You may feel pieces of my essence for a time. Visions. Memories.”
“I just saw… a war,” she whispered. “It wasn’t mine.”
“It was once mine,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“You were human?”
“A lifetime ago,” he said, his voice rough. “Before the vow.”
Mira looked at their still-touching hands.
The mark had appeared. A faint symbol glowed on her inner wrist: two silver circles overlapping like a pair of eclipsed moons. A matching mark faintly shimmered on Thorne’s palm.
“We’re connected now,” she whispered.
“Bound,” he said. “Until the vow is fulfilled or… broken.”
She looked up at him.
“What happens now?”
Thorne’s expression didn’t change. But something behind his eyes shifted—doubt, maybe. Or fear.
“Now,” he said, “you live. But nothing comes without a price.”
---
By morning, Mira was sitting up in bed.
Color had returned to her face. Her voice no longer sounded like paper tearing. The doctors used words like “miraculous,” “unstable remission,” and “unexplainable improvement.” They ran tests, muttered, shook their heads.
Mira just smiled faintly and stared at the mark on her wrist.
Thorne was gone by sunrise.
But he wasn’t far.
She could feel him now.
Every time her heart raced too fast, she sensed a flicker of cold somewhere nearby. When her thoughts strayed to him—those moon-silver eyes, that inhuman stillness—something in her chest tightened, as if her soul pulled toward his.
The bond wasn’t just metaphor.
It was magnetic.
---
Two days later, Mira discharged herself from the hospital.
She left behind the sterile white rooms and pitying nurses. The city had never looked brighter, or louder. She wandered in the sunlight like someone reborn—every sound sharper, every moment heavier with color.
And he was waiting.
On the rooftop of her apartment.
He wore mortal clothing now—black slacks, a dark gray coat, his silver eyes hidden behind aviator glasses like some reaper-on-vacation.
Mira smirked when she saw him.
“You look like a CIA reject.”
“Clothes help reduce mortal panic,” he said dryly.
“Sure. They also make you look like you’re two bad decisions from joining a jazz band.”
Thorne stared.
Mira laughed. It felt good. Alive.
She crossed the rooftop and sat beside him on the ledge.
“Any side effects I should know about? Visions? Nightmares? Random craving for souls?”
“Your life will stabilize temporarily,” he said. “But the soulbind has rules.”
“Let me guess—break them and the universe implodes.”
“No,” he said. “But the bond will decay. And you will die.”
She nodded slowly.
“How long do I have?”
“Six months. No more.”
She didn’t flinch.
“Then we’d better make it count.”
Thorne hesitated.
“There’s something else,” he said. “The moment I bound you… the veil stirred.”
“The veil?”
“The border between realms. Life and death. Dream and memory. Something… noticed.”
Mira felt cold for the first time in days.
“Define ‘something.’”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But the other reapers will feel the shift. They will know I interfered.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Very.”
She looked out at the horizon. The sky was burning orange as the sun fell behind the skyline.
“Well,” she said, “if they come for us… tell them to wait in line.”
---
That night, the dreams returned.
Mira stood in a forest made of glass. Every tree shimmered like crystal, bending light into fragile rainbows. Wind howled through the branches, singing in languages she didn’t know.
And there—across the clearing—stood Thorne.
Younger. Bloodied. Kneeling beside a child with eyes like silver fire.
Mira walked toward him.
“Is this yours?” she asked gently.
He didn’t look up.
“This was the first soul I took,” he whispered.
Mira knelt beside him. The child was already fading—becoming mist and wind.
“You grieved,” she said.
“I broke,” he answered.
Then the dream shattered.
And Mira woke with tears on her cheeks.
---
Over the following weeks, Mira and Thorne formed a strange rhythm.
He visited often, sometimes only in shadows, sometimes fully formed. He told her stories when she asked—of cities long buried under sand, of kings who ruled for decades and were forgotten in days.
In return, she told him stories of her own. Not history—just memories. Her first dog. Her mother’s cinnamon rolls. The time she shaved her eyebrows in ninth grade because a YouTuber told her it would “unlock divine femininity.”
Thorne blinked for a full five seconds before saying, “That is… deeply troubling.”
And Mira laughed.
God, it felt so good to laugh.
---
But the bond was changing.
Sometimes, when she touched things—glass, mirrors, metal—they vibrated slightly.
Sometimes, she saw faces in them.
Not human faces.
Whispers chased her when she walked past cemeteries. Cats stared too long. Children smiled at her like they knew secrets she didn’t.
And she began to feel him even more intensely. If Thorne was in pain, she knew it. If he grew cold, she shivered.
One afternoon, she sat upright in the middle of lunch, heart hammering.
“What is it?” her friend Nina asked, alarmed.
“Nothing,” Mira said. “Just—someone walked over my grave.”
But it wasn’t her grave.
It was Thorne’s.
---
Later that evening, he appeared in her apartment.
And he looked… drained.
“What happened?”
“Another reaper sensed the bond,” he said. “I deflected.”
“Deflected?”
“Temporarily.”
Mira’s mouth tightened.
“You’re fading.”
“It’s expected.”
“It’s not acceptable,” she snapped.
Thorne looked at her, surprised. For the first time, his mask slipped. He looked—worn. Like a knight with no war left to fight.
“I chose this,” he said quietly. “To give you six months of life.”
“Then we use those six months to fix this,” she said fiercely.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I don’t intend to spend them waiting to die.”
---
By the end of the month, Mira had found it.
An old legend. Buried in a book of reaper myths at a forgotten occult library in the Lower East Side. She read it aloud to Thorne in the middle of her living room, heart pounding.
“‘The Book of Endings,’” she said. “It was a ledger. A living archive. They say the name of every soul is written there—and it can be rewritten.”
Thorne looked shaken.
“That is not a book. It’s a force. It was sealed. Hidden.”
“Then we find it,” she said.
“If we are caught…”
“They’ll kill us anyway.”
Thorne didn’t argue.
The vow had changed her.
And now?
Now they had a reason to run.
- Writer
