Under_The_Whispering_Door_by_TJ_Klune

He stood in front of a tea shop at dusk, looking at a sign in the window.
CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE EVENT
Hugo waited for him inside. He offered Cameron tea.
Cameron refused.
“I’m sorry,” Hugo told him. “For all that you’ve lost.”
The Reaper snorted. “He did it on his own.”
And it was like poison in Cameron’s ears.
There was a door, he knew, but he didn’t trust it. The Reaper had told him
that it could lead to just about anywhere. He didn’t know. Hugo didn’t know.
No one did. “It could be just endless darkness,” the Reaper mused late at
night while Hugo slept. “It could be just nothing at all.”
Cameron fled the tea shop.
His skin flaked away.
The cable snapped and disappeared.
The hook in his chest dissolved.
He made it to the town before he fell to his knees in the middle of the
road.
His last lucid thought was of Zach, and how he smiled like the sun, and
Wallace knew his desire to feel the same hadn’t only come from himself. It
was the last, forceful gasp of the man whose mind he now shared, the sun the
last thing he’d held onto before the end of his humanity.
And here, now, Wallace said, “It isn’t fair. None of it is.”
“Help me,” Cameron said.
Wallace looked down as his chest burned as if on fire.
A curve of metal stuck out from his sternum. The end was attached to the
thick, glowing cable that stretched toward Hugo. A connection, a tether, a
lifeline between the living and the dead, keeping them from floating away
into nothing.
Wallace reached for the hook, hesitating briefly. “I see it now. It’s not
always about the things you’ve done, or the mistakes you’ve made. It’s about
the people, and what we’re willing to do for one another. The sacrifices we
make. They taught me that. Here, in this place.”
“Please,” Cameron whispered. “I don’t want to be lost anymore.”
“Unexpect it,” Wallace said.
He gripped the hook, the metal hot against his palms and fingers, but it
didn’t burn. He pulled as hard as he could, the pain immense, causing him to