Page 51 of Morena
I just know I am not a God, nor are you, so stop pretending.
I hung on chains, feeling the last thread of hope snap, when I heard footsteps. I begged it to be Morena coming to take me away, but ghosts do not wear heels. When the door swung open, Isabella stood in front of me.
“Matteo,1Dios mío, ¿qué pasó?” she pleaded, trying to pull me from the wall. She could not lift me. Instead, she collapsed against me, hands trembling as she reached for my face, trying to bring me back to myself.
“Don’t leave me, amor, please,” she begged, but no sound came from me.
The air went cold again, and she appeared in the mirror.
Morena.
She stepped forward and shoved Isabella toward the wall, forcing her to face the glass. As Isabella looked, Morena’s body began to twist, folding in on itself, bones cracking. She crawled toward Isabella, and she had to scream. Her jeans were wet. She had wet herself, begging and praying to God that this could not be real.
But it was real.
My skin went pale. My eyes weighted down slowly until they were nearly shut. Something shifted in the dark, a shadow moving where darkness had been. As my sight fell away, another scene opened.
A golden chair appeared. A black crow sat on it. A light burned nearby. As I drew closer, chains lifted from the ground like braided hair. The ground beneath me became living mud and began to swallow me whole. I was dragged down until I was completely under, swallowed by darkness. Earth filled my lungs. I could not breathe. I could not see. Then I heard my own voice.
“The ending is just death,” I said.
Images slapped me like wind. I saw myself in 1996, but not the same. I saw another version of me, the one who had jumped to save Gabriella. In that version, he saved her, and I was the one who died. Then another image: I was twelve, standing before Death itself. It spoke to me.
“I will give you a choice. Live now and die later, or die now and live later.”
I was only a boy. I chose life. I lived, but I lived poorly. Now I was dead, and I did not want to live anymore.
I asked Death, “What do you want from me?”
Death answered, “When the time comes, I want you to beme.”
The mud lifted me, and I stood. The world wavered and shifted around me—past, present, future folding into one.
I walked toward the chair. This time, a mask waited on it, and a scythe leaned against the back. I picked up the mask.
It was like a crow—black and leathered with two large mirrors for eyes, like the ones doctors wore during the plague. I pressed the mask to my face, took the scythe in my hands, and I was no longer Matteo. I was Death.
Feeling left me. A space sat where my heart had been.
In the mirror, Morena still tortured Isabella. I stepped out of the glass and pulled Morena back by her hair until her face metthe cold surface. Isabella was already running, not even looking at my chained, dead body on the wall.
“I said,onlyrotten souls,“ I told Morena, and pushed her to the floor.
“She is rotten too,” she spat, clawing her way back toward the mirror.
“Who told you you could go, Morena?” I asked, seizing her hair and dragging her close. The edge of my mask rested at her throat.
“Are you jealous?” I asked, and I tilted her head to face my dead body.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No.”
I made a low sound and shoved her away from the mirror.
We stood in the basement then, both of us facing my dead body that hung, blinded by chains.
“I saw what you did to him,” I said. Morena pressed herself closer to the wall.
She swallowed a hard lump. Her eyes were small, filled with fear.
