Lucie

"So, chess, huh?" I asked Vinny, who was mostly silent in my passenger seat, with the exception of a "Make a right turn there" or "You need to keep straight at this light." When he wasn't navigating, he was staring idly out the window, legs folded in his seat. I had almost scolded him for not wearing a seatbelt, but had reconsidered shortly after, as it wouldn't exactly hold him anywhere. Vinny was tricky, defying the laws of both physics and basic logic, and despite knowing him for a month now, I still wasn't used to it.

"Chess?" asked Vinny. Then: "Left."

I jerked the car left. Someone honked at me. "Cian. He played chess. I saw it in the trophy case."

"Oh," Vinny replied. It took him a moment before he said: "Chess."

"Did you play chess?" I inquired, then hesitated, wondering if referring to Vinny in the past tense hurt him somehow. I considered blurting "do you play chess," but Vinny had already chuckled and moved on before I could.

"Me? Chess? Never. I'm...I was, I guess, I horrible at it. It was Cian's game. Chess is a game for people who like to strategize, who have logical and detailed approaches to everything," Vinny said, and his brow furrowed. He frowned at the glove compartment, drumming his fingers across it. Even just a small gesture like that, however, required major concentration on his end. "They're easy to pick out of crowds, chess players. They have a deadly smile and an observant mind."

I smirked. "Sounds like Cian."

Vinny stopped drumming. "He doesn't play anymore. He used to challenge Eden, but after..."

He didn't finish, and nor did he need to. The pain in his eyes, the downturn to his lips, was more than enough for me. He frowned, giving me another last minute instruction. Clearing my throat, I said, "So you...uh, were the athlete?"

Vinny nodded, once. "I was on the soccer team. Played baseball for a while, too, but in the end, soccer was what caught my eye," he said, then scoffed ruefully. "I actually thought I was going to the pros."

"Vinny..."

"Please don't sound like that," the smallest Horne said with an exhale, craning back in the seat and shutting his eyes. His neck, stretched elegantly towards the sky, was exposed to the sunlight filing through the window. There, in that position, casual but striking, he looked more like Cian than I'd ever thought. Even the tone of his voice sounded like his brother's: something discreet and subliminal beneath it all. "Like Cian said: I'm dead. I have to get over it. So don't be sad for me. Please."

My fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pity you."

"No, you didn't," he replied. "It's fine, Lucie—oh. This is it."

"This?" I questioned, taking a sharp turn onto a gravel parking lot, the tiny pebbles and stones popping up against the tires. Parking the car and removing my seatbelt, I craned forward, trying to see where Vinny had taken me. It was an expanse of gray-green grass waving in the wind, and among the meadow were dots of slate stones and decaying flowers, mausoleums and family crypts rising like mountains in the distance.

Crows called from the foliage.

My eyes darted to Vinny. "When people say take me somewhere, they don't mean to a cemetery, Vinny."

He was already hopping out of the car, and I recognized that I couldn't argue with him, so I followed him with a grunt, slamming the fading Subaru's door shut. The sun beat down on us, warming my bare legs and shoulders. I tied my hair up into a ponytail to get it off my neck, crossing my arms. The cemetery stood before us, silent and eerie.

"It's not just any cemetery," Vinny argued, sideways glancing at me. For someone in a cemetery, his expression was oddly playful. "This is where my body is."

I waited to feel some sort of comfort from that, but no such thing resulted. "That sentence creeps me out."

"Considering you have been hanging around with a ghost and an angel for over a month, Lucie Monteith, it shouldn't," replied Vinny simply, and approached the rusting barbed gate, faded letters carved of metal naming it: East San Francisco Cemetery. Vinny gave it an appraising look before slipping easily through the gate's bars, as if passing through a solid was something one did everyday—which, I suppose in his case, was true.

He waved at me from the other side as I unhooked the latch like a normal human person and opened the cemetery's gate like a normal human person. I did this because I did not pass through solids on a daily basis. "Are there other ghosts here?" I asked. "I feel like I'm being watched."

"That's because you are," Vinny told me, and at the horrified look on my face, laughed, which did not make me feel better. "Don't worry! There's probably not a lot of them. It's rare that a soul doesn't move on, anyway. Even rarer that one would ask to be left behind."

"Cian still blames himself for that."

Vinny paused. The grass kept moving at his feet. "I know. Can we not talk about Cian?"

I didn't want to talk about him either, as if keeping the name from my tongue would allay the idea that he was probably in terrible pain right now. That when I came back and saw him again, he would not be the same person. That when both Vinny and I saw him again, his wings, what he considered a part of his very identity, would be gone. The thought made me want to throw up, mostly because he had lost them saving me from my own inattentiveness. "Sure. Let's talk about you, Vinny. Where's your grave? What's on it?"

"My name."

I rolled my eyes. "Duh."

"Here," Vinny told me, and he reached out his hand to me, before he quickly recoiled. He shook his shoulders and started marching through the rows and rows of gravestones, as if this were a daily morning walk through his neighborhood. I fought the cold front that seemed to be washing around me, sending frequent shivers down my spine and causing my teeth to chatter. It was the ghosts, I knew. Though only Vinny was visible to me, it didn't mean others weren't observing.

That was more creepy than I could say.

Vinny, a blond figure in the distance, had stopped at a certain stone, and was now seating himself in front of it, stroking the ground almost affectionately. I was stricken; he had the look of someone longing for something lost a while ago, the look of someone who knew that this something was irreplaceable and yet yearned anyhow. My heart fissured inside of my chest.

I said nothing as I sat down beside him, grass tickling my ankles, crows cawing overhead. Gray clouds moved in above the trees, shrouding the sun. On the distant street, someone laughed.

Vincent Sylvester Horne, read the stone in front of us, August 17th, 2000 — May 12th, 2015. Beloved son, brother, and friend.

Forever remembered.

"'Forever remembered,'" read Vinny quietly, so quietly I at first thought it was to himself. "Wouldn't that be nice," he added, volume louder, "if it wasn't a lie?"

"Now, come on—"

"I asked you not to sound like that."

I frowned. "Sorry."

"It's true," he said, the gray clouds in his eyes making them seem misty. "When I died, everything of me went with me. That's how it works. People won't believe what they can't see, and that's all I am now, Lucie. A figment of everyone's imagination. I'd like to think that doesn't bother me, but..."

A crow cawed once more and perched itself on top of Vinny's grave. A dead rose, blackened and wilting, was pierced underneath the bird's claws. Vinny and I both blinked at it, at the flower and the bird, in silence.

"Cian asked me if the fact he remembers me is enough, but I don't know," Vinny went on. "One of these days, I'm going to be gone entirely, and one person won't be enough to hold on to that tether, especially if he's gone, too."

His fingers played with the grass again, nails streaking across the topsoil but leaving no marks behind. It was fascinating to watch, how Vinny could kiss the world and the world still not feel a thing. "I'm afraid I'm becoming what I don't want to be. I may be dead, but the last thing I want to become is dead and gone."

He stared at the rose. At the bird. At the rose.

I waved the bird away, and it left the dark flower sitting upon Vinny's gravestone, alone in the wind. Vinny watched me as I took the delicate thing in my hands, cradling it in gentle fingers. "You underestimate yourself, Vincent Sylvester Horne," I remarked. "You think you're some simple being that slips people's minds easily, but let me tell you something: there's nothing simple, nothing even close to forgettable, about you."

Because it was the truth. The boy beside me feared being thrust in the dark, and yet he didn't realize he himself was the light.

The rose flowered in my hands, stem filling with a vibrant green, petals bouncing from colorless death to bright crimson life, as if it was an object suddenly held back up to the sun. The pulse in my chest was a bit arrhythmic as I gazed down at the living embodiment of nature in my hands; I heard Vinny gasp beside me, and held the rose up for him to see.

"How'd you do that?" he demanded.

"I tried," I answered. "Guess I can lend energy to more than just ghosts, huh?"

I set the rose down over the grave, letting out a breath. "'Forever remembered,'" I read again, and added, "and always true."

The cemetery filled with a sweet song then, harp strings plucked to reveal honey-sweet notes and birds chirping pleasantly in the distance—

"Lucie. Your phone."

Crap. That was my ringtone, which I had set to the prerecorded tone "Nature's Beauty" in an attempt to relieve stress. Overall, all it won me was a strange look from Vinny as I answered it.

"Why does your ringtone sound like it belongs on a yoga video?"

"Shut. Your. Face."

Vinny cocked his head. "How?"

I chose to ignore this, and instead answered to the person on the phone. "Hello?"

"Hey. It's Caprice. The Order's done their job."

"Oh," I said, clambering to my feet and shooting Vinny a worried glance, which he promptly returned. We started on our way back to the Subaru. "Oh. Is he...uh, is he okay?"

The slowness of Caprice's response concerned me. "I...I don't know."