Death catches the scent of rot in a Birmingham hospital: someone is binding the newly dead to their bodies—and it isn't her. At the same time, fourteen-year-old Daisy starts drawing lost souls like a lighthouse, and Tobias Staghorn—lecturer, reluctant prophet, the man Music once chose—opens his door to the impossible: Music has a body again, and love is suddenly crowded.

Across a snow-slick winter turning to tense spring in the Midlands and London, A&E doctor Stuart Murray returns just as "impossible patients" stop dying on schedule; Death, elegant and furious, stalks the wards with a scythe she'd rather not use; and the rules show their edges: Death, Music, and Time are embodied and limited—guiding, kindling, braiding, but never choosing for a soul. Around them, Rosie, Lily and Troy at Tiger Lily, and Dottie hold the line, while Tobias and Stuart negotiate a hungry, tender power exchange that keeps breaking against work, wounds, and what they won't say aloud.

To free the jammed passage between life and afterlife, Death needs answers; Tobias wants a department built, a grief faced, and a love he won't ruin; Stuart wants to save bodies without losing himself; Daisy just wants the noise to stop. As shadow ghosts thicken and hospitals buckle, what do they owe the living, the dead—and each other—when Time himself is the sabotage? Lyrical, hospital-set, quietly witty, queer, and threaded with melancholic hope. Second in this cycle but reads cleanly as a stand-alone. Boundaries: multiple on-page intimate scenes (including kink with explicit consent), medical trauma detail, grief and harassment, one attempted sexual assault referenced on-page, and frequent strong language. Perfect for readers who enjoy personified cosmic forces in the modern world, hospital drama with heart, messy queer romance with D/s edges, found family under pressure, grief-into-grace arcs, urban fantasy that feels intimate and human.

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