Page 14

Nothing could have prepared me for what awaits inside.

The Death God barely appears to notice that I’m here, to notice anything around him at all. He’s lying on the stone floor, even though a bed stands feet away from him, the thick fur blankets and sheets tangled together, half falling off the mattress. His head is angled to one side, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands tightened into fists, the skin on his knuckles bone white. I can see the tendons straining in his exposed neck, his forehead shining with sweat. His once-immaculate robes are as wrinkled as the bedding, slipping off one shoulder when he twists in place, panting.

Another low whimper escapes his clenched teeth.

The rest of the room lies in a state of total, breathtaking destruction. Parchment ripped to shreds, plates smashed into fragments, some of the pieces so fine they’ve been crushed into pale powder. Robes strewn around without care, from the deepest midnight black to the navy of an evening sky. Goblets of pure gold dented and contorted into shapeless forms.

I’m transfixed with horror, with the impossibility of this scene. Yes, I had known the Death God was in pain, eager to be freed from his curse, but I had greatly underestimated the extent of it.

I walk closer, picking my way around the shattered porcelain despite the voice in my head screaming at me to leave. Who knows how he will react once he has gained full control and consciousness? He is at his most unpredictable, the ghost had cautioned. He loses his mind. Yet it is as if there is a string tied between us, tugging me forward. I cannot break it. I cannot move away.

At last, he opens his eyes. They’re bleary and slightly wild, as though he’s staring at me through a blood-smeared haze.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasps. A shudder rolls through his body, yet he somehow musters the strength to lift his arm, to wave his sleeve at the door. “Leave. Leave—now.”

My fingers curl, then fall slack at my sides. For the second time today, I’m overcome by the desire to comfort Death, rather than run from him. A dangerous pattern.

“How often does this happen?” I ask, ignoring his command and lowering myself beside him. If I focus, I can feel the curse at work, the dark energy pulsing at his temple, wrapping its fingers around his throat, the aftershock of every fresh wave of pain. “Is it always this bad?”

He doesn’t seem willing—or perhaps able—to answer me. He’s breathing too hard, fighting against an invisible force. Then: “Sometimes.” His nails dig into the floor, and when I look down, I notice for the first time the claw marks he’s already made in the stone, the sharp, erratic lines running a few shades paler than the surrounding gray. Like the work of an animal desperate to scratch its way out of a trap. “If I try to—keep it at bay—it always comes back. Becomes worse.” His gaze focuses on me, dark with pain and accusation. “Why are you—still here? Are you enjoying it?” Even as his fists tremble, the venom in his voice is concentrated. The corner of his mouth curls. “Do you like seeing me this way? Undone—and at your feet?”

Heat threatens to race over my cheeks.

“If only you’d come—earlier,” he continues roughly, his lashes lowered at me, black eyes gleaming. I’m unsure if he is even aware of what he is saying, if he is flinging words at me for the sole purpose of distracting his mind from the pain, or to direct his suffering elsewhere. “You would have had the chance to hear me scream.”

It is a marvel that I am able to reply with such calm: “I am only trying to gain a better understanding of your curse . . .” I pause. There is a question that has been bothering me for a while now, the sense that I’m missing something, like a vital ingredient in a recipe. “Where did your curse come from to begin with?”

“That’s none of your business,” he snaps, but something flashes in his eyes. A bolt of fury. No, darker than that, more complicated, simmering just beneath the surface. Resentment. Loathing. Either he has been hiding it awfully well the entire time, or I had missed it before. But toward who? Another god? Some ancient creature? Difficult to imagine that anyone out there would be capable of cursing Death himself.

“Knowing the cause might allow me to cure you faster—”

“If you cannot cure me in time, do not make excuses for your own failings as a healer.”

I clench my teeth. Of all the patients I have ever dealt with, Death is by far the most difficult. “I am only trying to help.” To help myself stay alive is perhaps the more complete truth.

“Then do it,” he pants. “Make it stop—” Before he can even complete the sentence, he jerks back, trembling in silent agony. He twists and turns on the floor, grasping at nothing, the delicate skin between his brows pinched together. He sweeps an arm out. One of the already broken vases flies across the room and shatters against the wall with a bright tinkling sound, so loud I almost flinch.

“I’ll ruin him,” he whispers. His eyes are unfocused again, staring not at me but something in the distance, a memory or a mirage. “I’ll make him—regret it.”

“Who?” I ask, my pulse jumping. “What are you talking about?”

He doesn’t reply. He just groans and mutters something incomprehensible under his breath, rubbing his temples with his fingers. It feels obscene and almost disturbingly intimate to see him like this: damp strands of hair clinging to his face, his neck; his lips swollen, close to bleeding from where he’s bitten down too hard on them, as bright red as his skin is sickly pale.

Then, once the latest wave of pain seems to have crested: “If you’re not going to leave me alone, you might as well speak.”

“Speak? About what?”

“Something. Anything.” A harsh breath rattles out of his lungs. “Distract me, won’t you.”

I hesitate, unsure from where or what to begin, yet when I open my mouth, my tongue loosens on its own. How long has it been since someone asked me to talk about myself? About anything at all? And though I know he is in no condition to listen with full attention, it still feels like a relief, like I have been breathing underwater and finally I am on land again, forming words instead of empty bubbles. I offer up moments of my life, and in speaking about them, they become more real; he becomes a witness. I tell him about the first years after I had moved into my cottage, how the waves would wake me in the middle of the night, but I’d wrap a cloak around myself and simply sit there on the balcony, watching the moon move the tides, the stars pierce the night. About the dragons that had soared over my head when I was a child, how I dreamed of seeing them up close, riding them through the skies, another wish unfulfilled. About the tutor everyone hated who would make our scrolls disappear at random and ask us to recite all that we’d written, then force us to grind ink sticks without magic if we were wrong. About the first god I’d ever kissed, sneaking out to meet him on a balcony amid the floating clouds, how I had expected it to be everything, like the romantic tales I’d heard, only for it to be nothing, the most memorable part of it how utterly disappointing it was. Just fine, I had described it inside my head, which was a terrible word, a kind of malaise with no cure. About the other beautiful, bright-eyed gods I’d invited to my cottage after, hoping at least one of them would be the answer to my loneliness. But somehow they made the loneliness worse, even if they were lying right beside me, like peering through a fogged-up window at the fire blazing within while you shivered outside in the cold. When I was with them, it had felt like going through the motions, a choreographed routine, everything we did and everything we said. Even in the foolish days of my youth, when I had dared to want love, I had not wanted them.

Slowly, his trembling subsides, and when a heavy gust of wind blows through the castle, making the doors rattle, we both seem to startle out of a stupor.

The Death God sits up, his hair falling past his exposed shoulder like one long sweep of ink over parchment. When he speaks, he is so quiet I wonder if he is talking to himself at first. “You did not love any of them?”

“What?”

“Those gods you were with.”