Page 37

The pain from the fall doesn’t come.

A hand slides around my waist just before I crash, and instead of hard rock, broken bones, the air escaping my lungs, I find myself landing in slow motion, almost gently, beside the Death God. His robes are tangled with mine, and his arm draws me close to his chest, though not so much out of choice as a lack of space. We’re inside a constructed pit of some kind. Just wide enough to comfortably fit one person, and deep enough that the only thing visible is the rectangular patch of sky overhead.

Gingerly, I press my fingers to the earth walls boxing us in. The shaking has subsided, and the soil feels as solid as cement. Panic swells inside me. No. Not this.

“We’re in a grave,” I realize out loud.

“Is that so?” The Death God’s voice floats down from just above me. I try not to notice his chin resting against the top of my head, the firmness of his body, the place where his long fingers are splayed over my rib cage. I try not to notice how little room there is, how confined we are. “I should have suspected that Xinji would not go without playing one final trick.”

“Let me—let me stand up,” I say, pushing roughly against him and succeeding only in feeling the planes of his chest.

“To do what?”

“To get out of here.” I’d meant to sound incredulous, matter-of-fact, but my voice cracks with urgency. My throat is already closing up, my heart pounding so fast I can feel every terrified, insistent beat. I need to get out. I need to escape.

“You’re scared,” the Death God observes. He had sounded casual before, careless, as if it barely made a difference where we were, but now his muscles tense.

“No,” I say, half hoping I can convince myself as much as him. It’s all right, I’m not scared. But the walls seem to be shrinking, closing in around us, and the sky looks more distant than ever. I feel like I’m shrinking, too, until there’s nothing left of me except my thudding pulse and the sick feeling twisting through my stomach.

“I can hear your heart,” the Death God says quietly, then hesitates. “I know this will not make it any better, but there is a barrier in place.”

“What?” I want to believe it is a horrible joke, but when I look up again, look closely through the veil of my divinity, I see it too. The air around the grave ripples just slightly, like water on a moving plate. I should have sensed it earlier, but it’s difficult for me to think through the tingling in my fingers, the rising desperation in my chest. It’s difficult to breathe. “Can’t you break it?”

“Why me?”

I grind the back of my teeth together to stop them from chattering. “Are graves not your area of expertise?”

“I am usually not on this side of them,” he says, but he shifts position, freeing his other arm then lifting both toward the sky. Thick smoke pours out from his palms. The darkness solidifies into three gleaming black darts, shooting up at the barrier. But rather than piercing straight through it, they stop there, trembling in place as if caught by an invisible hand.

And then the darts come flying back down toward us.

My heart freezes.

The Death God curses and dissolves them with a snap of his fingers mere seconds before they can impale me. “It shouldn’t be like this,” he murmurs.

Even with the darts cleared, my panic has transformed from a roiling tide into an all-consuming wave, sweeping fast over my head. The air is too thin. No matter how much I inhale, it doesn’t seem to fill my lungs; it just ends up trapped in my throat. I can barely get out my next words. “Why— What do you mean?”

“Xinji’s traps are strong, but they shouldn’t be hard for someone like me to break,” he says. “Especially when she is already gone.”

“What if you’re just weaker than you believe yourself to be?”

He makes a disdainful sound. “I am weaker than I was before the curse, I do not deny it, but my powers are still vastly superior to most others. It is . . . something else. An imbalance in the universe, a force greater than I am.”

The words feel familiar. An imbalance. With a start, I remember the darkness spreading through the sea. Are the two incidents somehow connected? But as I do my best to think through the ringing in my ears, the Death God tightens his arm around me. “Could you not tremble so much?”

This is so unreasonable, so unsympathetic, I nearly forget my fear. “Do you believe I’m doing this on purpose?”

“It’s distracting me,” he says bitterly, his lips brushing against my hair as he speaks. “I want to focus, but all I can focus on is you.” He pauses. Moves his head so that his mouth hovers closer to the shell of my ear. I cannot tell if it is an improvement, or a far greater danger. “You smell like flowers.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Terrible,” he murmurs.

But I can detect the change in his breathing.

“Why are you so scared in the first place?” he asks. “You did not show such fear when you failed to kill me, and I can assure you that one ought to be much more afraid of me than this grave.”

“No reason.” I squeeze my eyes shut, but that only makes my heartbeat louder, heavier, more prominent. I can feel it thrumming in my neck, between my ribs.