46 Happy Tears

Lily

Bel pushed her sleep shirt—his shirt—up her body, kissing his way up her back, tracing lines of her spine tattoo with his tongue as she lay on her front, still mostly asleep. The satiny heat of his skin brushed over her body, his solid, reassuring weight an anchor for her mind and soul.

“Lily,” he rasped into her neck, nipping at her earlobe. He smelled like he usually did after a long day on the training fields, his warm, musky scent edged with the tang of salt and sweat.

She arched into him as he caged her in from above. “Mmm.” She twisted to steal a kiss from those wicked lips. “Morning.”

“A good morning,” he breathed, kissing her and grinding his solid erection against her ass.

She reached back to guide him into her and felt…nothing. His solid weight on the bed started to lift, as if he were floating away. Panic set in.

Lily twisted and reached for him, but paused when she saw his anguished, hollow-cheeked face, deep shadows of exhaustion smudged beneath eyes that glimmered with pain and regret. “Bel.”

His massive body began disappearing bit by bit into tendrils of smoke. He reached for her, his fingers wispy and insubstantial. Lily knelt on the bed and ran her fingers over the more solid parts of his fading body to trace along his brow bone and over his lips.

“Come home to me,” she told him. “Come home.”

* * *

Lily woke up on her stomach, arm reaching towards what had become Bel’s side of the bed, the sensation of his lips ghosting up her back and the empathy for his dream-self’s duress weighing heavy on her.

More than two months—almost two and a half—had gone by. While the weight of his absence and the danger that he and all the others were in was just as heavy, her ability to deal with it had increased, making the burden more manageable. It was a bit like grief that way, she supposed. Or just life.

She pushed herself out of bed, not hearing any noises from the kitchen yet. Sharkie had found a podcast created by marine biologists, who gleefully shared the absolute wealth of information about the ocean that they had access to in the Afterlife, and she listened to it every day, but especially in the mornings.

Lily tugged up her purple dinosaur shorts and some fuzzy socks, padding into the kitchen to stare into the pantry, waiting for inspiration to strike.

She was mindlessly staring at the flour, fiddling with her bracelets while Max smashed his face against her leg for attention, when Sharkie’s door opened and her footsteps came down the hallway.

“Morning,” Lily called.

“Morning, Mom. Can we have those scones with cinnamon sugar on top today?”

“Sure, that sounds…” Lily paused in the middle of reaching for the flour. Sharkie’s words, said entirely too casually, sank into her brain. A strange floaty sensation took over her body. Maybe it was a mistake. She turned, staring at Sharkie, confusion warring with hope and a little bit of fear.

Sharkie stood half hidden behind the door jamb, making her look too much like the child she’d been when she first arrived. She was clearly making a valiant effort to be casual, but her wide blue eyes were nervous. Apparently, Lily’s direct eye contact was too much for her.

“Can I call you Mom? I really want to call you Mom, because, like, you basically are, even though you didn’t grow me, but you’re helping make me into who I am and that’s a really mom thing to do, and also you’re there for me and you love me and I love you and stuff. And I wanna call Luci ‘Papa’ and Bel ‘Dad’ too but I wanted to ask you first because it was you and me first and that felt important,” Sharkie blurted, barely pausing for breath.

Silence filled the kitchen. Well, silent except for Max, his purr was unending.

Lily smiled, tears leaping to her eyes with surprising swiftness. “I would love that. I would be honored.” Her voice was more than a little choked, but she didn’t care.

Sharkie’s eyes lit up. “Really? These are happy tears, right?”

“Definitely happy tears. Come here.” Lily laughed, wiping her cheek on her shoulder and holding her arms out for her girl.

Sharkie hugged her fiercely, burying her face in Lily’s sternum, narrow shoulders trembling as she sniffed wetly. Lily held her tight, letting the tears flow freely down her face. Sharkie had changed so much—from the terrified little girl she’d first seen, to the confident, chaotic little badass she was growing into. Lily couldn’t wait to see who she would become.

“Love you, Mom.” Sharkie’s voice was muffled.

Lily squeezed her tighter, dropping a kiss into Sharkie’s shaggy blond hair. “Love you too, Sharkie. I’m so proud of you. And thank you.”

Bel

Almost eleven weeks, and there’d been no let up from the seemingly endless enemy army. Even with rotations, exhaustion was beginning to set in, and Bel’s body felt…brittle.

A broken arm, shredded wing, broken ribs, and a pike through his shoulder had all been fixed by the ever-busy healers, but anything less than a dire wound had been left to their own healing out of sheer necessity. Healers were already draining themselves dangerously low just to keep up with the critical patients.

Bel knew , could feel that the big one was coming, the attack that would either end the war or end them. He knew it as surely as he’d known that this last great campaign would begin.

He ducked his head into Asmodeus’s tent. His wings had been shattered and arm savaged by a gegony the day before. The healers had kept him out ever since. Bel listened to his cousin’s even breaths, trying to do the math in his head. Sariah was due to give birth soon. A week to go, maybe? A tired smile pulled at his lips as he stepped inside the tent and tugged Asmodeus’s blanket up, tucking it more securely around him. If Asmodeus were awake, he could tell him the due date without even having to think about it. He probably had the hour and minutes.

Bel stepped back out of the tent and headed to the mustering area. It was their turn on the front lines. His armor and weapons had always felt like an extension of him, but now he wondered if he actually had a body under there, or if he was just a war machine. The only things that kept him from believing that was all he was were memories of Lily.

Lily and Sharkie. His little family.

He grimaced, running his hand over his tangled hair. He’d kept Lily’s braids in his hair for as long as possible, partially unbraiding and rebraiding to prolong them, but he’d had to take them out a week before. Ever since, he’d had the foulest fucking luck—

A deep, earth-shaking rumble shuddered through the air a moment before the horns blared with an urgency he’d never heard before. A horrifying, soul-quaking chorus of distant gegony screams—more than he’d ever heard at once—sent ice down his spine as he raced into action.

It was time.