My Last Seven Days On Earth Started With A Broken Promise Chapter 07

My Last Seven Days On Earth Started With A Broken Promise Chapter 07

Three more days passed on Earth.

The images in the scrying mirror kept getting worse.

A cleaner had cleared the mess from the living room, but the house felt tighter than before.

Reid was on the sofa, phone in hand. The screen kept lighting up and going dark.

Four days. No purchases on my cards. Not a single text.

“She still has to eat. She still has to sleep. No matter how well she’s hiding.”

Graham was on his feet.

He grabbed his keys. “I’m going to her office.”

Half an hour later.

Graham stood at the front desk of the planning firm where I’d worked, white-knuckled.

“Marielle, you said?”

The receptionist scrolled through her screen, frowning. “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have anyone by that name on file. Are you sure you have the right company?”

“That’s impossible.”

Graham’s palm hit the counter. “I drove her here last month! She’s the associate director of your planning department!”

The noise brought HR out. They pulled every file they had..

Nothing. Not a single record of me, going all the way back.

“Sir, if you don’t leave, we’re calling the police.”

Security walked him out.

He stood in the sun, drenched in cold sweat.

His hands shook as he called Reid.

“Reid, something’s wrong. She’s gone. Not just gone, but erased. Her office doesn’t even have

atile.”

On the other end of the line, Reid was standing in the city records office.

His voice wouldn’t hold steady.

“Graham… I had someone pull public records.”

“Your family’s adoption files… there’s never been a Marielle in them.”

“Someone expunged her records?” Graham’s voice cracked.

“Nobody deleted anything.”

Reid sagged against the tile wall, fighting for air.

“There was never a record to begin with. It’s like she… never existed.”

The silence on the line was suffocating.

Meanwhile.

Nolan was in his studio, standing in front of The Lunar Spirit and the Stars.

The torn corner where I’d ripped away the canvas started to blur.

The colors bled out like watercolor in rain, then crumbled away.

Tessa’s painted face cracked first, the pigment peeling off in dry flakes.

Underneath it, my outline surfaced.

Only for a second.

Then that, too, turned to pale ash and dissolved into the air.

Ten minutes.

The painting was a blank canvas.

It wasn’t the only one.

Every piece in the studio I’d ever inspired went the same way. Canvas after canvas, wiped clean.

His palette slipped from his hand and cracked against the floor.

He tore home and ripped open the old photo albums.

In every group photo, the spot where I’d stood was a smear of light. No face: No outline. Nothing.

“The Moon Court…”

Nolan sank to his knees, clutching an album, jaw trembling. “She told us. She said she was going back to the Moon Court.”

They met back at the house.

None of them could look at the others.

The lunar spirit fairy tale they’d laughed at, mocked, and used to humiliate me had been true. Every word of it.

And I was gone.

“No. No, I don’t accept that.”

The sound Reid made wasn’t words. It was something animal.

He tore through the house, ripping open drawers and cabinets.

“She had to have left something! The stone! The glowing stone!”

He ran for Tessa’s room.

Tessa was at her vanity with a face mask on when the door flew inward.

“Reid, what the hell…”

“The bracelet. Where’s the bracelet with the stone?”

His eyes were bloodshot. He had her by the shoulders.

Tessa yelped. “You’re hurting me! I tossed that thing days ago. It looked like something you’d get at a flea market.”

“Where?”

The trash bins outside… two days ago…”

Reid let go of her and was out the door before she hit the cushion.

The city’s trash went to a central municipal waste facility.

Graham and Nolan were right behind him.

Three men who’d never been seen in anything less than tailored suits dropped to their knees in rotting garbage and started digging.

Flies swarmed them. Rotten liquid soaked through their shirts.

They didn’t notice.

I watched the whole thing in the mirror and yawned.

“Celeste, why do humans do this? They treat you like garbage when they have you, then dig through actual garbage when you’re gone.”

Celeste peeled a grape and placed it on my tongue, laughing softly.

“Because they’re fools.”

“And this is only the beginning.”