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“You say you want me?” he whispers against my lips. “Prove it.”
I sink my nails into his clothes, relishing the sweetness of his mouth on mine, the sound he makes when I kiss him harder. In these moments, danger feels as distant as the hanging moon. It seems impossible that the fingers cupping my face so very gently could split my skin and spill my blood. He could be any god except Death. We could be anywhere, anyone. But there is still the shine of the sword, breaking the mirage.
“Do you believe me now?” I ask, sliding a hand down his shoulder, just as I slide my robes off mine, revealing a sliver of bare, candlelit skin. Inviting him closer.
He hesitates for a second before lowering his lips to the curve of my neck. An involuntary shiver courses through me. “I do not know what to believe,” he says hoarsely. “I cannot think like this—”
“Then stop thinking,” I say, my fingers moving over the hard planes of his chest, my pulse hammering in my ears with such ferocity I almost can’t hear my own words. When he doesn’t resist, I press my body tighter against his so there is nothing between us except silk and our pounding heartbeats. The wind roars outside, slamming the old wooden panels and gates. White petals swirl into the room through the window, falling at our feet. One petal catches in my hair. “Just tell me what you’re feeling. Do you want me too, or not?”
“I do,” he says, quiet. His grip tightens on my waist. His eyes, when he opens them, are lighter than I’ve ever seen them, so clear and bright I can make out the circle of amber around his irises, like the sun during an eclipse. So sorrowful that it aches to hold his gaze. “I want your soul, Rujia.”
Something in my chest twists. “That is the one thing I cannot give you.”
“Not to collect,” he says, an edge of self-mockery to his voice. He brushes a careful thumb over my cheekbone, light as bird wings, as if afraid to hurt me. As if this is the most natural thing in the world, though I’m no longer sure what is natural and what is not. Then he plucks the petal from my hair. We both watch as it withers between his fingertips, pure white fading to brown, the edges wrinkling and disintegrating. The corner of his mouth curls. “I do not deserve it, not remotely, and yet—I want your soul to know mine, as I would know yours from a thousand miles away. I want to consume your every waking thought, as you consume my dreams. And if I cannot have your whole soul, I would give up my own divinity to have half of it. If not a half, then a fragment, a scrap, whatever you are willing to offer me. I would gladly pretend it is enough.”
My hand quivers. It feels entirely surreal, hearing the words coming out of his mouth, but I cannot detect anything except truth in his face, the tightness of his jaw, the tenderness of his touch. How strange this moment is. The god of healing and the god of death standing together, with enough power between us to move the sun, but not enough power to speak our minds without falling apart.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Please tell me it means what I think. Please tell me I am not deluding myself.
“Aren’t you tired?” he returns, looking at me from under his long black lashes. “Because I am. So very tired.”
This time, he is the one who kisses me, soft and excruciatingly slow, and there is no urgency, no calculation, no ulterior motive. It is a deliberate choice. Yes, I want to say, and I wonder if he can hear it in the sigh that escapes me. Yes, I’m tired too. Let’s stop running and just stay here until the end of eternity. His fingers tangle in my hair with all the confidence of a god and all the tentativeness of a mortal, someone who has everything for the first time in their life and is terrified that soon it will be gone, and the sword slips from his grip, clattering to the floor. Neither of us reach for it.
“Let the Heavens punish me for this,” the Death God murmurs. As if the skies can hear us, the wind howls louder, shaking the blossoms from the trees. “Let the world burn, if it must.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I cannot stop smiling.
No matter how much practice I’ve had in controlling my expressions, the corners of my lips keep twitching up on their own. I feel utterly unlike myself: young, giddy, delirious, like I’ve eaten the stars for breakfast. The events of last night do not seem real. Not the way Keran’s fingers had knotted in my hair, not the way he had looked at me, not the words he’d spoken in such hushed, reverent tones he might have been praying, not how the violence I’d braced myself for had melted into tenderness, into something as rare and absurd as joy.
But then, this morning doesn’t feel quite real either.
The mountain air is blissfully sweet, the scenery stretched ahead of us more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen: a series of interconnecting grand temples, their upturned roofs gleaming emerald above the treetops, raised on flights of white stone steps. A soft mist has swept in, bathing the pillars and terraces and courtyards in a pale, ghostly glow, rendering everything surreal and indistinct. Even if I were a mortal who’d never left the city of Nanjing, never witnessed the dragons soaring over the four seas, the immortals summoning lightning from their fingertips, I would still easily believe in the gods in a place like this.
“. . . anyone that you want to pray to, Rujia-Jiejie?” Junyi asks.
I blink. “Sorry?”
Junyi holds up the incense sticks in his hand as we join the long line of worshippers outside the shrine. Two statues of the gods of fortune smile benevolently down at us from either side. The craftsmanship itself is impressive; their faces are serene and lifelike, the fluid, deep-carved lines of their robes creating the illusion of movement, as if the fabric really is billowing in the breeze. But they’re both distinctly uglier than any god of fortune I’ve met.
“I’ve brought plenty of offerings, in case you need it,” Junyi is saying. He turns to Keran. “You too, Si-Gege. I know you’re skeptical about these things, but I swear I didn’t drag you both up here without reason; I’ve heard that prayers are most effective on the Jiuyang Mountains because of how close we are to the Heavens. Apparently, someone prayed for a son last summer and discovered they were pregnant the very next day.”
Keran stares at the incense sticks, then back at me, his brows rising. I expect him to refuse, but he takes three from Junyi. “I suppose it can’t hurt. Thank you.”
Junyi’s mouth falls open.
“What?” Keran asks.
“You—you just thanked me,” Junyi splutters.
“And?”
“You’ve never— That’s never happened before.” Junyi gapes at him as we move forward in the line. “Are you feeling well? Are you feverish?”
“No,” Keran says frostily, but there’s no real bite to his words. He regards Junyi less like an enemy and more like an exasperated brother with their younger, overenthusiastic sibling. “If my politeness is causing you such distress, then I can make an effort to speak to you in only insults.”
