Nate doesn’t often receive wedding invitations.

This year, he gets seven.

• • • •

To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit.

But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades.

It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how good the hors d’oeuvres are at this wedding, but he’s not sure they’re quite there yet.

Nate doesn’t talk to many people, but he does dance. Oh, how he dances! The band has picked music from the bride and groom’s college years and the audience is gyrating, thrumming, and screaming out nostalgic lyrics, laughing with fond recognition.

He dances with the bride, who’s swapped out the silver-trimmed heels that buoyed her to the altar for a sensible pair of lacy flats. He dances with a storm-eyed beauty whose tie bears a cheeky pattern of cavorting nuns. He dances with the groom’s seven-year-old sister whose giggles tumble out of her mouth like marbles.

Finally, he dances with the groom’s grandmother, whose tears at the sight of the happy couple fall like hyacinth petals. He whirls her, twirls her, unfurls her. She hugs him, guffaws into him, kisses his cheek. When she finally sits down, her beaming smile illuminates the entire garden.

Her death sounds like roses blooming in the snow, but only Nate can hear it. He takes her hand and asks, “One more dance?”

• • • •

The Queen Behind the Skies is getting married for the three-hundred-and-thirteenth time. It’s an auspicious number, so she expands her guest list. Nate receives a personalized invitation etched into the tidal tails of a star being torn apart by a springy little black hole.

This time, it’s not for work, so Nate can dress as he pleases. Gabriel takes him to get his nails done at a tiny rooftop salon in Lagos. “They wear these cute aprons with daisy patterns and serve you champagne,” Gabriel coos. “Plus the owner pays his employees well and swallows dick like a vegan who’s just discovered bacon.”

When Gabriel’s not working, he resolutely ignores the angelic strictures regarding appropriate topics of conversation.

The aprons really are cute, and the champagne is served in goofy, hipsterish mugs. Nate’s mug bears the legend, “If you have to die, make sure you have a beautiful corpse”, which makes him snort and then think about the dancing grandmother.

His nail-artist replicates a pattern found in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It takes her three hours to finish, but Gabriel has more than enough gossip to fill the time.

“Girl, I want you to hear it from your Aunty Gabriel . . . but Thor’s seeing someone.”

It hurts, but Nate isn’t self-aware enough to know how much, so he asks, “Who?”

“Some mortal hussy from . . . I want to say Australia?” Gabriel flicks his fingers dismissively which earns him a reproachful look and dark Hausa mutterings from his manicure technician. “She looks like the ugly end of a wallaby crossed with a didgeridoo, if you ask me,” he says with so much loyalty in his voice that Nate doesn’t have the heart to say that he’s trying to be happy that Thor has found someone else.

Nate’s not a monster.

The receptionist takes a picture of the two of them as they depart and Nate’s fingers hover over Thor’s number on his phone. Finally, he types, “Gabe and I are going to look hot. See you at the wedding?” and sends over the picture. He wants to send, “Looking forward to meeting your girlfriend!” but he overthinks himself out of it. He doesn’t know if it’s true yet. Nate doesn’t lie.

Thor sends back a starry-eyed emoji at the picture. Then he writes, “Can’t make it, sorry. Emily’s birthday.”

His fingers don’t shake when he asks, “Who’s Emily?”

Thor takes a while to answer. Nate can see him typing and retyping. He wants Thor to deny it, to lie, so that Nate can have something to which he can latch the ugly feeling bubbling in him.

But Thor replies, “GF. Just started dating.” It’s quickly followed by, “Want you to meet her someday.”

In Lemuria, before the island was swallowed up, sorcerer-mourners would liquefy the innards of an important official’s corpse, cut a hole in the belly, and suck out the resulting slime using long, clay pipes. Nate feels as though someone is doing that to him right now.

Gabriel clucks in disapproval over his shoulder.

“I meet everyone someday,” Nate replies, adding a skull emoji, but the joke feels hollow.

Thor does not text back.

• • • •

Three unnamed spirits of air and darkness Nate once helped move into a new apartment invite Nate to a tiny commitment ceremony held inside a dream of scorching blue skies above a red desert. He’ll be the guest of honor, they say. They gratefully offer to make him a blood sacrifice of a dozen virgins, but he quickly declines. There are a lot of rumors about Nate’s work, and he’s constantly fending off strange offerings. Thor burned him a boat when they first met.

It’s a small, quiet ceremony. The servers shuffle through the sands in white linens held together by faience brooches. Nate suspects the staff was plucked from the dreams of a long-dead pharaoh, back when mortals preserved dreams in canopic jars. Not that they knew what they were really doing.

“Girl, you should’ve said yes to the sacrifice!” Gabriel says as he grabs a fistful of canapés from a proffered tray inlaid with turquoise. He stuffs them all into his mouth at once and makes a face because whoever dreamed them forgot to add flavor.

“Aren’t you supposed to be an embodiment of light and goodness?” Nate asks.

“I came with you to this weak-ass wedding, didn’t I?” Gabriel shoots back. “I would MUCH rather be canoodling with a hottie over at Alpha Centauri on my day off. Not that you’re not a hottie,” he says, his tone quickly shifting to what he probably considers “soothing”, “but you know you’re too much of a bottom for my tastes.”

Nate starts to roll his eyes but freezes mid-roll as he recognizes a figure wandering aimlessly among the other guests. Eyes like a storm at sea and another cheeky tie—this time with pictorial instructions on how to knot a bowtie embroidered onto it. The boy he danced with at the destination wedding in Kefalonia.

“There’s a mortal here!” he hisses at Gabe.

“Must be a stray dreamer,” Gabe says. “Don’t worry. He’ll be gone in a jiffy.”

Nate wants to go up and talk to the stranger before that happens, but a heavy paw lands on his shoulder. “Thanatos,” purrs an enormous Sphinx. “I didn’t expect to see you here! I thought you disliked weddings?”

“Only when it’s for work,” Nate says quickly, trying to keep an eye on the stranger—but it’s too late. He’s already dissolved, either back to the waking world or into some other dream.

• • • •

The next wedding is again for work, though this one makes Nate gag.

It starts off pleasant. On silver trays are served tiny kebabs that melt into fiery puddles in your mouth, small cups of saffron-infused sweet yogurt, and sugared paneer pressed into floral shapes. There’s a choreographed dance number that reminds Nate of a gently pink rainfall he once witnessed on a warm summer night in Atlantis. The groom’s horse is named after a particular flavor of grass—Nate learns upon asking her politely—and enjoys being rented out for weddings because of all the music.

But later, Nate has to watch helplessly as one of the bride’s former lovers pulls out a gun and murders a dozen other guests before swallowing a bullet himself. The groom flees in wild panic with the rest of the guests. The bride sobs by the marriage-fire, staring at her fingers where henna and blood mingle into a ghoulish mockery of wedding-mehndi.

The deaths sound like teeth shattering against a mirror, but only Nate can hear it.

The newly deceased are confused and scared as Nate does his painful work. When the last of them have Departed, Nate wants to scrub his eyeballs raw. He wonders how love could do that to someone, how love can contort and mutate until it’s wretched and ugly and monstrous.

He wants to speak to someone about this, but he doesn’t know who.

In the past, he would have talked to Thor.

Nate never brings his phone to work. He snags a passing raven. “I don’t want to bother you,” he tells the raven, “but would you like to hang out sometime? Maybe that soup-spot in Niflheim that you like?” Into the raven’s feathers he breathes Thor’s true name—the one he confessed to Nate after the first time they rutted on Thor’s childhood bed—and sends the bird off.

• • • •

Nate has only one mortal friend. Gabriel once joked that Nate could’ve picked a spooky Goth-chick, or a morbid coroner, or a taxidermist, or anyone more fitting, really, but Nate feels that Arthur, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from South London, is perfectly amiable.

Arthur’s blushing bride has bedecked the park where they’re celebrating with red paper lanterns. Their soft glow warms the heart.

Nate is enjoying the surprisingly excellent jazz band when a finger taps his shoulder and he’s looking straight into a pair of blue-gray eyes tinged with quiet lightning.

“Hi!” the beautiful man says, grinning. He’s wearing a tie patterned in cuneiform that spell out various insults involving the offspring of farm-animals. He’s holding a glass of red wine. “Were you at my friend Peter’s wedding in Greece? I thought I recognized you . . . I’m Tony. Well, Anthony, but Tony to people I like.”

Nate literally doesn’t know what to do. He burbles something incoherent in reply.

“I didn’t catch that?” Tony says, a touch of amusement purpling his voice.

“Err . . . yes.” Nate replies, flustered. “I was there. I’m a friend of . . . Peter’s grandmother.”

“Oh!” Tony says, his eyes widening. “I’m sorry for your loss. That was pretty terrible, what happened.”

“She died happy,” Nate says, the ease of familiar topics thawing his awkwardness, “seeing her grandson married.”

Tony nods slowly and takes a sip of wine. After a suitably grave pause, he perks up again. “Can I ask you what your name is?”

Nate colors. “Sorry. I’m Nate. Err . . . Thanatos, but Nate for those who don’t fear dying.” Even as the words come out, Nate cringes. He was aiming for cool and funny, not hopelessly dopey.

Tony laughs and it washes over Nate like a gulp of hot chocolate. “You’re named after the god of death? That’s awesome!”

“The one and only,” Nate replies.

“Well, Nate, how do you know my dad?”

“Your dad?” Nate is taken aback. It takes him a moment to realize that Tony is asking him how he knows the groom, his mortal friend Arthur.

Nate mainly talks to Arthur about ridiculously mundane stuff like traffic and weather, but he assumed his friend would have told him about children. Mortals went gaga over that kind of thing. “I didn’t know Arthur had a son . . .”

“It’s complicated,” Tony says breezily. “One of those stories you only hear about in movies. He knocked up my mom at a Grateful Dead concert in the States and didn’t know it, blah blah blah . . . it’s painfully cliché!”

Nate remembers the concert, twenty-odd years ago. Arthur had brought him back a band T-shirt, sort of as a joke. He hadn’t mentioned a girl.

Nate wants to ask more but a raven collides with his face with a great squawk.

A few nearby guests scream softly. Others start laughing. Tony swears. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m—fine,” Nate answers, deftly grabbing the bird by its legs. He can smell Thor on its feathers, thick like honey, potent like mead. “I—need to take this,” he mumbles, backing away.

Tony’s face puckers in confusion but Nate is gone before he can say another word.

• • • •

“Thanks for doing this, bro. Appreciate it!” Thor booms, because even Thor’s indoor voice is like that.

They’re on a moon where the skies sway pink and green and the woodland sighs musically.

Nate looks at him askance. “Since when did you start calling me ‘bro’?”

Thor shrugs. “I thought, since we’re not banging anymore . . .”

Nate resists an eye-roll. “You thought the best way to telegraph that we’re no longer together was to call me ‘bro’ and ask me to be your date to a wedding?”

Thor doesn’t like wearing shoes. He looks down and scuffs the sparkling dust under them with his massive feet. “You wanted to talk,” he mutters. “And the soup-place closed down.”

Nate winces. He’s being unkind. He had asked Thor, after all. “How’s Emily?” Nate asks casually.

Thor’s gaze jerks upward as though yanked by a marionette-string. “Nate, I wanted to tell you, but like . . . you okay? Ishtar says you—”

“Ishtar knows fuck all about me,” Nate snaps and regrets it instantly. Thanatos is not bleeding hearts and feels; Thanatos is inevitability, cold logic, and unvarnished truth. Nate takes a deep breath.

“My opinion has no import on your dating life,” he says.

“Bro, your opinion will always matter to me.”

“Can we please not keep up this ‘bro’ thing? I hate—”

A great roar interrupts them as That Which Devours consumes its new mate in a fit of amorous hunger. The ground beneath them undulates in response. The scream of ecstatic agony is punctuated by a smattering of polite applause. That Which Devours curls into a ball for a snooze, contentedly assimilating the new mate Nate knows will remain alive inside the beast. Nate won’t be needed. Not for years, at least.

“They’re so fragile, aren’t they, mortals?” he comments because in his heart, he really is a softie. “And yet we love them . . .”

“Are you making a dig at Emily? Coz, that’s not very nice—”

“I wasn’t!” Nate says hastily.

Thor eyes him warily.

“Honestly! It was just . . . pseudo-deep ramblings about mortals!” He wants to add, “I’m happy for you!” but the words catch in his throat.

Thor’s expression remains cautious but softens slightly. He gives one of those manly, dude-nods. “Ice-cream? Before the Queen Behind the Skies finishes it all?”

• • • •

A mansion in Rhode Island is a lovely spot for a wedding. The stately hallways are lined with mirrors, which multiply the exquisitely dressed crowd into a flock of birds of paradise. The memories of a thousand moments of joy perfume the air and Nate can’t help but take deep breaths.

A waiter dies quietly in a closet. The wine he snuck in didn’t interact well with the heart condition he’d developed a few months back.

His death sounds like dates squelching underfoot by the seaside, but only Nate even knows that the man has died. No one else will know for hours yet.

When Nate gets back to the party, Thor is fidgeting in place. He’s always hated wearing suits even though he looks amazing in them. He adamantly refused to wear the dress-shoes Nate recommended.

Emily is perched on Thor’s arm. It’s her cousin’s wedding. Nate has to admit that she’s actually very nice. She’s wearing a misshapen lump of rock that Thor got her as a pendant though she has no idea that it’s a petrified toe of an Elder Abomination.

Thor got Nate a present as well, for some obscure holiday lost to the mists, he said: a simple band of silver carved with runes spelling the words “To blood and friendship” in a language he claimed was invented by mistletoe. He thrust his chin out in a bro-y way as he presented it, and Nate had no idea how to respond.

Nate swallowed the ring. He never wants people to see how close to his heart he wants to keep it.

“Sorry, quick work call,” Nate says and Emily nods sympathetically.

You okay? Thor mouths because he knows Nate and will never stop knowing Nate and Nate smiles back and it’s genuine and it’s beautiful to know that Nate will always be able to smile back at Thor no matter what and Thor will always understand and—

“Nate? Thanatos? Bird-man?”

Nate turns and Tony’s wearing a grin that’s taking over his face. “I keep running into you at weddings,” he says, chuckling.

“You’re not wearing a tie,” Nate blurts out because his brain might be beginning to short-circuit right now.

Tony winces. “I actually spilled gazpacho all over it. The staff says they can get the stain out.”

“You look nice without it,” Nate says without thinking and ironically, he might actually want to die right this minute.

Tony’s grin, impossibly, widens even further. “I didn’t tell you earlier, but I dreamed about you! After we met in Kefalonia! It was a dream about another wedding, would you believe it?”

Nate blushes.

He only remembers that Thor and Emily are right beside him when Thor lays a warm hand on his shoulder. His eyes dart between Tony and Nate. The left corner of his mouth quirks upwards.

And though Thor’s words say, “Emily and I are going to grab drinks. See you at the table?”, Nate can see that Thor is actually saying, “I’m happy for you.”