Auden gave him the strangest reception when she got in that night. He'd looked over from his post beside Grelle's bed, up from the copy of Wuthering Heights he'd been reading aloud to her, and when Auden met his eye, she looked about ready to burst into tears.

He was on his feet the next moment, going to her, saying, "Good heavens, Auden. What's happened? You're home late. Something at work?" but she shied away from him, backing almost completely out of the room. He stopped his approach.

"Auden?"

She just shook her head and disappeared down the hall. Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. The door to her room closed softly. Sebastian glanced back at Grelle and tried not to wish too hard that she was there to tell him what to do.

The moment her door shut, Auden gasped—one loud, painful breath and she used it to silence her tears. She couldn't cry about it. If she cried, Sebastian would ask her what was wrong and she couldn't lie, especially not to him. As much as she would have liked to tell him what had happened at work, she understood well by then what it meant to be a Shinigami. If she told him, her disobedience could jeopardize Grelle. She wouldn't give the Board, or On High, any reason to doubt that Grelle deserved to come back, that she'd trained Auden well, but when Auden had come home and seen Sebastian reading to Grelle, she just couldn't help the horrible pang in her heart.

It made her want to die all over again.

She went to the bathroom and took a long drink from the faucet, a little lightheaded by the end of it. She looked into the mirror, into the reflection of her own green eyes and stared hard, breathing hard, in and out in deep breaths until she was calm. She would be reliable. She would be Grelle's representative. She wouldn't give anyone any cause to declare Grelle officially and permanently dead.

There was a knock on her door.

"Come in," she called, trying for cheerful and getting strained instead. She cleared her throat, dipped her head under the faucet again for a second drink.

In the mirror, she saw Sebastian come in and glance around for a moment to locate her, eventually arriving at the threshold to the bathroom. She'd picked up a hairbrush in the meantime and started to pull her hair back into a ponytail. He looked at her eyes in the mirror.

"Is everything all right?" he asked.

Auden nodded. "Yeah, sorry. We had some tough soul collections today," she said, not exactly a lie. Some of them had been hard to watch. "A premature baby." Such a short record, barely more than a few days. She shivered thinking about it, stopped the tears from rising in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," Sebastian said.

"It's all right." Auden finished the ponytail and moved past him to go into her room. "How is Grelle?"

"Much the same," he replied.

She went into her closet and started pulling out a change of clothes like she always did. "Did any of the nurses say anything?"

Sebastian shook his head. "Only that they are reducing the staff."

Auden swallowed. "What?"

"They don't feel Grelle requires quite the round-the-clock care any longer," he said, and she could see behind his eyes that he was worried. "The number of nurses has been reduced to two."

Her heart beat fast. She couldn't tell him. She couldn't tell him why, that they were done researching, that Grelle could be all right, but that somebody else was in charge of making that decision now.

"Who's staying on?" she asked.

"Corey. The other shift will be a rotation."

Auden nodded.

Sebastian asked, "Did they have any news at Dispatch?"

This time her heart stopped.

"No," she said too quickly.

Before he could see through the lie, she went back into the bathroom and turned on the shower, knocking the knob all the way to the end of the red, and said something about wanting to wash up before dinner but she wasn't sure what the words were that came out of her mouth. At the very least, they got Sebastian to leave and she shut the door to her bathroom and took a very deep breath, one filled with steam from the scalding hot water pouring out of the showerhead.

She didn't know how long she could keep this up.

Sebastian went down and started dinner, and Auden appeared twenty minutes later wearing a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, her hair wet. Something was bothering her, but Grelle would have told him it had to do with being a teenage girl and to leave her alone. So he tried his best.

"I think we ought to get Corey a gift," he said, dishing Auden a bowl of ravioli.

"Like what?" she asked. Taking the bowl, she went to the stove and the saucepan that bubbled on top of it.

"I was hoping you would have ideas."

Auden just shook her head, her eyes blank, spooning scoop after scoop of sauce onto the noodles like she wasn't able to stop.

"Well, keep it in mind," he said and eyed her, his gaze flicking from her hands to her face. She started and dropped the serving spoon.

"Sorry," she said.

"That's all right."

Her strange mood continued through dinner which they ate upstairs with Grelle. Auden was silent, pale, her feet propped up on the edge of the bed, eating her ravioli though she looked about ready to be sick. Sebastian wondered what it was about dying young that turned humans inside out. He had killed so many people in his lifetime, dealt and been dealt so much suffering that it almost seemed to him to be a mercy to be released from your life early on. He suspected also that this was an unpopular opinion.

"Sebastian?"

He turned a smile toward Auden, who always seemed to feel the need to ask his attention even when he was the only person in the room. Only conscious person in the room, at least.

"Yes?"

"If Grelle doesn't wake up…like if we knew for certain she wasn't coming back…what would we do?"

Sebastian hadn't allowed himself to think that far ahead. Face an eternity without Grelle? It was unfathomable. He could pretend that Auden was enough, that she could fill the hole Grelle would leave if she passed, but pretending could only get him so far.

"I don't know," he replied.

Nodding, Auden looked at her lap. "Me either."

She might have asked him what Grelle had done to earn the wrath and hatred of the higher reapers, but she didn't dare. She'd come dangerously close to spilling the beans with her last question. She did wish he'd had an answer, though. Auden couldn't think of a gift for Corey and she couldn't think of what she would do if she actually had to grieve Grelle. Nobody close to her had ever died before.

Her bowl was empty now, but Auden stirred the sauce at the bottom around with her fork. The marinara was sort of the same color as Grelle's hair in the right light, and the thought made her smile, but it also made her sad. She looked up at Grelle's soul.

She was right there—right there. Both halves of her were complete, but the pieces were being kept apart. All it would take was a stamp of approval, just someone to say, "Okay," and Grelle would be up and at 'em like she always had been. How long would it take to make a decision On High? Why did there have to be any deliberation at all?

Getting up, she set the bowl down on her chair and walked, stretching, around the bed, coming to a stop at the base of the stand that held the bag filled with Grelle's soul. Auden wondered, looking at it, if it would be possible for her to see the Record. After all it was just there, flickering on the other side of the plastic, not going anywhere. If she touched the bag, would she be able to review it?

"What are you doing?"

Sebastian's voice was dark and it snapped Auden out of her thoughts to see her hand already extended toward Grelle's soul. She looked at him and paled at the glint of fangs in his mouth, lowering her hand.

"I don't know," she said. "I thought maybe…"

"Her aura flickered," Sebastian replied. "That frightened her."

She looked at Grelle, at her dead still face. She didn't look frightened. She didn't look like anything. Except for a corpse.

"I'm sorry," Auden whispered. She knew Sebastian could see and sense things she could not. Her heart screamed at her, shouting and shaking her brain back and forth. Just tell him, just tell him and deal with the aftermath. He deserved to know. Auden couldn't perceive how Grelle's soul reacted to the environment, and yet she was the one with the knowledge that things would be happening to that soul in the very near future.

She couldn't help asking another question.

"Do the reapers trust Grelle?"

Sebastian laughed. "In her own words, they would not trust her with a ball point pen if given the choice." The memory made him smile, but it had the opposite effect on Auden.

She just swallowed, faking a grin and nodding at him, but turning her face to her feet in the next moment and swallowing again at that lump of dread which had formed in her throat.