Chapter Forty-One
Walden
I’ve never understood those who fear death as if it is inevitable. Those who walk toward it with a grim sort of acceptance, or those who welcome it like a grief-draped lover. Those who claim to value the experience of the journey, who claim it will all be worth it in the end.
Death is not a destination. It is an enemy.
It stands across the ring with a grin on its face, and it knows in the end that it’s going to win.
I fell in love with a woman once when I was younger. Marguerite. She was the most beautiful creature in the world, as far as I was concerned, and just as fascinated with the concept of death as I was.
“I have decided that I shall never die,” she told me once, both of us lying in her university apartment, bare and sweat-slick.
“I just think it a terribly boring thing to do, don’t you?
Everyone dies, and I never want to be the kind of person that does something simply because everyone else is doing it. ”
I think I fell in love with her that very moment, and when I told her I would fight death for her if she asked me to, I could see in her eyes that she loved me back. She was a blessing, a miracle, another reason to avoid that ancient fear we all run from.
Death, however, is life’s greatest enemy, and it does not like those who challenge it.
We were in Paris when the great epidemic came to the city.
I tried to fight back, as I promised her I would, but no amount of money or doctors could stop the disease from eating away at her.
Marguerite’s light was snuffed out in a matter of hours, gone before I could so much as blink, and I became a well of grief, trapped in a city festering with sickness.
I threw myself into anything that might help me avoid the monster that waits at our end—medicines, folk tales, the occult.
I traveled to ancient sites and visited old shamans who all told me the same thing.
Death cannot be avoided.
Then I found the book. It was old, bound in human skin and being sold at an auction I had to pay entirely too much money to get into. And in that book was a promise for the one thing I had been searching for all those years: immortality.
My brother was the first to die after I found the book.
He was a weak thing, sick all the time and bedridden nearly half his life. When our parents died, his care was left to me, and it did not take long for my patience to wear thin under his constant needs.
The blade shook in my hands, but I did not hesitate to push it into his heaving chest as he struggled to breathe past his own weaknesses.
It’s worth it, I remember thinking. Worth the betrayal in his eyes, worth the hurt as he sputtered and begged for a reason.
He served as an offering to hide me from Death itself, the only worthy thing he’d ever done in his life. That was reason enough.
My aunt Eliza was next, then my uncle Jean-Paul. Years stolen from them and given to me instead, and with every life I took, I could feel the armor around me building and building. A rush of energy flooding into me, protecting me from my greatest enemy.
Unfortunately, I had little family left in the first place, and it was after my uncle that I realized I needed to think of a better plan. Something more sustainable.
The first one, a lowly girl with no significance to her name, was an experiment, nothing more. She’d looked a bit like Marguerite, but she was merely a test to see if a wife was considered family enough for the ritual to work.
And it had. It worked, over and over again. Each wife kept me young, and all it took was a handful of words and the downward swing of a knife.
And then I let my confidence, my pride, bring me to ruin. I let one girl, one single, insignificant girl, ruin everything.
Kolfina.
"I will not let you take me," she had said. "Let the waters consume me, for I am not yours to have, Walden de Klein. I never have been."
Perhaps it was my own fault for trusting she would sleep through the ritual with only a touch of laudanum in her system. My own fault for not considering how often she'd been taking it for her restless nights and her constant terrors.
There was a reason I chose simple girls from the beginning, as it was always easier to make them fall in love, easier to earn their trust. Kolfina was no different. Or rather, she was something different, but her mind was still such a simple, vapid thing.
I had not known the depth of her will. Hadn't expected her to pitch herself into Death's embrace just to keep me from getting what I wanted.
I was almost glad she was gone, simply for how much of a hassle she had been. If not for the fact that she ruined the ritual, if not for the fact that I had to scrape and claw the magic back into place to make it work the next time, I might have rejoiced at her saving me the trouble of killing her.
But Death, they say, has a way of catching up with you, and though I succeeded in wrangling my youth with another wife eventually, I fear it must be too late.
Because there is Kolfina, standing over me with that same look of furious betrayal on her face that she’d had right before the waves took her.
Her once beauty has become a gruesome thing, her skin rotting and covered in patches of salt and grime, her cheek torn open enough to see her bones and a great gaping hole left where one of her eyes should be.
The woman that once sat across the table from me and bore Kolfina’s name now lies splayed across the floor, too still and too quiet.
I cannot see her chest moving, and though my mind struggles to put the pieces together, I have caused enough death by now to know the shape of it in my hands, and I know that she is no longer with us.
Or rather, no longer with us in the body she once possessed.
“Y-you—but how?”
“Affascinante,” Lord Alilovi? mutters, a strange sort of awe in his eyes as he circles the table and reaches out for the woman, his hand gently cradling the curve of her cheek. “Solid, or nearly so. I have never seen such power in a spirit before.”
I see it then, the truth of it all. The truth of why I am here, about why the others still sit around the table watching, unbothered by the strange events happening before them.
The blonde woman does not so much as look at Lord Alilovi?, seeming unable to look away from me. God, I’d always hated those eyes. Lovely, empty, a touch too wide and entirely too unnerving.
“Kolfina.”
She twitches violently at the name, and I am sure the entire cliff trembles beneath us. I find myself scrambling backwards, twisting around the steward’s legs to press myself against the wall, using the wainscot molding to pull myself to my feet.
“But you’re—”
“Dead?”
The younger man, Theodore, says it with such vitriol and anger. He stands behind Kolfina and stares me down as a wolf might stare down a rat—unworthy of the effort it would take to make a meal of me.
“Some people believe a home to hold the memories of those who lived in it,” Azizi Alilovi? says as she joins him, standing at Kolfina’s other side.
I dare not move, all too aware of the room of predators I’ve found myself in.
“You began a ritual for immortality, did you not? And it required a sacrifice.”
Of course it did, but the ritual was never completed—
"I will not let you take me. Let the waters consume me, for I am not yours to have, Walden de Klein. I never have been."
The ritual called for a sacrifice, and Kolfina gave it with open arms.
"Walden?" I jerk my gaze back up to the trio, my eyes landing on the dark-skinned woman behind my dead wife as she smiles at me. Predator mocking its prey. "I would like to see you run."
I have never considered myself a cowardly man. I declared war on Death when I was a mere boy entering university. My hands are dripping with the blood of innocent lives I sacrificed all so I could keep my own.
So no, I have never thought myself a coward, and yet Kolfina wears a cloak of Death around her as if it was no heavier than a nightgown. She looks at me, and I know that my round is up. I know that the match is lost.
I do not look back as I scramble to the door and run.
There is no sound of footsteps following me, but I do not fool myself into thinking I am free when I burst out of the dining hall.
The matter only further proven when I yank on the front doors to find them locked.
I turn to where I know there is a back entrance without a second thought, only skidding to a halt when I find that damned steward already there waiting, a polite smile on his lips as he holds the door open for me.
“A bit of air, my lord? The garden is lovely this time of year.”
There is still no sound behind me, no hint of a pursuit.
I allow myself just a second to consider another exit, but somehow, I know I do not have time.
My heart thunders in my chest, my breath hitches in my lungs.
I do not realize I’ve moved until the door locks behind me and I am left in the face of my greatest shame.
The garden maze.
For a moment, I am tempted to go back inside.
It's a foolish temptation, as I know this maze inside and out, even decades later, but there is something about the way the full moon casts an eerie glow across the shrub tops.
Something about the sound of the ocean beating a violent melody just on the other side.
It feels like a dream within a memory. Or no, not a dream… a nightmare.
"Go on, little warlock," a sweet voice whispers in my ear, the petite Ana-Lucia grinning madly at me when I spin to look at her. "Run."
Again, I do not argue. I am in the maze before I can stop to tell my feet to turn around.