Page 6
Black walls, black halls, black marble floors, even a black vaulted ceiling, stretching high above my head and decorated with thin, overlapping veins of crimson. I feel as if I’ve fallen into the stomach of an enormous primordial creature. It is so cold that when I release a shaky, surprised breath, I can see it dissolve before me. The Night Realm. Where the Death God is rumored to capture fresh souls, where malicious ghosts are said to drift through the narrow corridors. This is the place of nightmares, of eternal night.
The sole source of light comes from the furiously swirling snow outside, visible only through the tiniest diamond-shaped cuts in the stone.
No—another source catches my eye: the gleam of a drawn blade.
The Death God raises his sword. It looks unused, perfectly polished. Dark shadows pulse through the silver, an echo of the Death God’s own power. One strike, and it could kill even a god.
Even me.
Fear rears its head, its hooves thundering inside my chest. A strange thing about fear: One would think that the older you grow, the less afraid you become. That was certainly what I’d believed when I was a child: that with the ineluctable passage of time, the accumulated grains of experience, the salt and wine that settled in my blood, my nerves would strengthen and my spine would someday turn to steel. But the opposite has proven true. In those placid days of my youth, I was like any newborn calf, bright-eyed and openhearted and too confident for my own abilities. I would not know to run from a tiger even if it were baring its teeth at me. Now, I am calmer, perhaps. Less likely to be fazed or enraged. Yet the more I have seen, the more I have lived, the more scared I’ve become. Everything is too heavy, difficult to pick up or put down. I am constantly afraid—of pain, of hope, of disappointment.
Of death.
It cannot happen. Not ever, but certainly not now, when all the pieces I’ve been laying out for centuries are finally starting to fit together. Not when they’re preparing to announce the promotion for Celestial Healer, when I’m closer than I’ve ever been to fulfilling my mother’s wish, to righting every wrong, to seizing all the power stripped from my bloodline.
“You must use a weapon?” I ask, speaking through the hard lump in my throat.
The Death God pauses. The sword is poised inches from my chest, where my heart is thudding with sickening speed, as if hoping to run away by beating fast enough.
“Do you always use one?” I continue quickly. “It’s just—I would have thought, for someone with your power, you would not even have to lift a finger to kill someone. The sword seems unnecessary.”
His lower lip curls. “Are you always so picky about how one chooses to kill you? In seconds you will be dead.” He tightens his fingers around the hilt. Lifts it a few degrees, as if assessing the exact spot to bury it.
My blood beats cold in my veins.
“Why—why here?” I ask. If I can just keep talking, maybe I can figure out a way to escape. Wait for my powers to be replenished. Convince him to change his mind. Anything. “Why not just kill me in my cottage?”
A ridiculous question. He had seemed blatantly out of place back at the cottage, a monster amid the flowers and herbs and the sea. Here, he blends in naturally with the inhospitable room of the palace. The chill does not appear to affect him at all.
“It would have caused too much drama and made a mess,” he says. “I do not have time for it.”
“It would make a mess if you killed me here too,” I tell him. Beneath the wild currents of my fear, I am almost impressed by my ability to continue talking, just as I am surprised by his continued responses. Despite the frost in his voice, he speaks slowly, carefully, as if unused to maintaining a conversation of this length. “I work with blood all the time. It leaves behind stains.”
“I will tolerate it,” he says. “And you should feel honored that I am here to kill you myself.”
I feel many things at present—disbelief, horror, panic, outrage, more horror twisting through my gut—but honored is definitely not one of them. “You’re certain I deserve this—this privilege? Wouldn’t it be better if you let me go?” I venture. “I could repay you. Whatever it is that you want. I can even leave fruit and light incense in your name. I’m willing to bet that has never happened before. And if you do not have any shrines, I can build you one—”
He lifts the blade higher, the cut of silver as hard as his gaze. “No.”
“But why me?” I demand, a genuine question this time, breaking through my chattering teeth. “Why—why now? What did I do?”
“It is not what you have done, but what the Heavens have decided,” he says without any sympathy, but without any glee. “Now, stop talking so I can get this over with.”
Then two things happen at once:
The sword streaks forward in a deadly line, aimed at my heart—
And I detect the faintest crack in his power. It is subtle, well masked, but there. Like a rotten spot on the underside of a firm, fragrant plum, a hair-thin fissure running down the middle of a cloisonné bowl. Like an opening.
“You’re cursed,” I say desperately, frantically, half braced for the pain to come anyway, for these to be the last moments I ever remember: the god of death and the snow falling like sleep in the distance.
But he stops, the sword suspended a split second away from delivering the killing blow. His expression is indecipherable, yet for the first time, I sense the slightest change in his pitch-black gaze.
Speak now, I urge myself, or never speak again.
“You’re in constant pain,” I blurt out. “Aren’t you? It torments you every day, and you cannot wield your full power.”
Now that I have noticed it, all the symptoms present themselves to me in brilliant clarity. The bruised shadows under his eyes, the tension running through his tall frame, the stark blue veins pulsing at his neck. The way he stiffens when he moves his head.
