A Bargain with Death's Enemy

Prologue

Voices and sobs surrounded me, amplified by the high ceiling and shiny wooden furniture of the court room.

An onslaught of misery that matched my own.

I drew a thin breath trying to steady myself, but it did little to quell the churning of my stomach or the tightness in my chest. The voice of the judge, sonorous and deep, droned on and on, punctuated by the bang of his hammer with every sentence he passed. How much longer until it fell on mine?

Three groups of prisoners were ahead of me. I swallowed, fisting my hands to keep from fidgeting at the wait. It’s what I deserved, but I wasn’t sure I could hold it together without killing someone.

My gaze skittered over the people in the room—the prisoners at the front, and the audience at the back, crying for their loved ones.

I skipped over faces, avoiding landing on any one for long, wondering if the way my heart thundered in my chest was my own panic or one of them suffering an impending heart attack.

A mop of copper curls made my breath catch in my throat.

Colt. Despite the fact that he was a few years older than me, his face was still boyish.

Our eyes met, and I made myself hold his gaze despite the coldness there.

Angry pressure formed behind my eyes, but I had no tears left.

I thought he loved me. Maybe it was for the best that he didn’t.

I brought nothing but death to those that did.

The bang of the gavel sounded and the people ahead of me shuffled forward. Two groups ahead now.

I fidgeted with the manacle on my wrist, jangling the chain that connected me to the woman on my left, her shoulders hunched in her thin yellow dress. There was an air of resentment and defeat about her, but she appeared calm. Resigned. I almost envied her.

“Relax, love,” she said. “We’ll find out if we’re to die soon enough.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from telling her that her life wouldn’t end with the hangman’s noose.

“We all end up in the same place, regardless of how we get there,” she said.

“But not with the same debt.” My voice was low, but her head whipped towards me.

“What did you do?” she asked.

How could I explain that I didn’t know how it happened? I just knew it was my fault. I decided to keep it simple. “I killed my family.” The words scraped past my lips and a sharp wave of grief hit me in the chest. My family. Mother. Father. Brother. Gone.

Gone because of me.

A loud bang punctuated by a wail made us jump. In front of the judge, a young man collapsed. He sobbed as two bailiffs hauled him up and away, saying he didn’t want to die. Even from the back of him, I could see he wasn’t more than fourteen.

“Bastards,” Yellow Dress said. “That poor boy stole a loaf of bread to feed his siblings. The baker fell chasing him and died. So they called it murder.”

The injustice threatened to choke me. He didn’t deserve to hang for what he’d done. Certainly not without a real trial. But there was no such thing anymore, not for those without money or influence. Just a sentencing.

“May Death grant him an easier next life,” Yellow Dress murmured, like a prayer.

My eyes flew to the trio of statues set into alcoves in the wall above the judge’s seat—Death on the left with a scale in one hand and her pomegranate-like orb in the other, the Devil on the right with his rod and a whip made of shadows, and the Guardian of Fate, blindfolded with outstretched arms, above the other two.

A reminder that this life was not the end. There was always another.

When we died, our souls went to the realm of the dead, the In Between, to be weighed by Death and her Judges before they sentenced us to our next life and sent us back to this realm.

Death was the ultimate judge. If we were truly guilty, she’d punish us by sending us to the Devil, a path I would no doubt take when my life ended.

That’s the excuse that was given when things were streamlined to deal with a sharp rise in crime five years ago.

The number of hangings increased tenfold, and the prisons filled to bursting.

The Guardian of Fate determined the ultimate plan for our souls, how all our lives fit together, but that offered little comfort if this was the world we returned to. One without real justice. Only cruelty and pain.

The gavel fell.

“Next group, step forward.” A bailiff prodded us, and my heartbeat broke into a gallop as we shuffled forward to stand in front of the judge.

Hook-nosed, with cold-lidded eyes, he shuffled a stack of papers with a scowl, like they’d personally offended him.

I couldn’t help but look at him, the man who held my fate in his hands, even though I knew what would happen.

Cold tingles rushed up my arms, and a vision covered my sight.

I saw him choking on something, his face red and then purple as he struggled to breathe, before collapsing on a beautiful carpet, his eyes vacant and dead.

It was gone within a heartbeat and the courtroom blinked back into view.

I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth.

My mother had called it a gift. It wasn’t. It was a curse. The first time I looked at someone, I saw how they would die. It’s how I knew Yellow Dress wouldn’t hang. Colt was the only person I’d ever met whose death I couldn’t see. I thought it was love, that we were meant to be.

Turns out I was a fool.

I straightened as the judge addressed me.

“In the case of Maeve Merwood—” He stopped as a younger man whispered in his ear.

My heart beat in my throat and I clutched at the laces at the front of my bodice to keep them from coming undone as the men argued in hushed tones for what seemed like an eternity.

I still wore the dress I had been arrested in, the boning in the bodice squeezing my generous curves.

The laces had stretched, threatening to expose me, and the material was tattered and ripped, revealing my leg and shoulder.

A stab of pain in my side made me flinch and brace, but it subsided almost immediately. I prayed they wouldn’t make me wait much longer.

The old judge vacated the seat with a sour look on his face and stormed off as the younger man took his place.

The new judge met my gaze, and the vision of his death that slid over my sight made me gasp.

He struggled in the grasp of someone, their mouth at his neck.

Their face was obscured by a hooded cloak, but long, spindly fingers that ended in talons clutched him tight as they drank.

The judge’s skin grew pale, and his movements slowed until he lay limp in his captor’s arms. When they dropped him to the floor, blood dripped from what could only be described as fangs.

A Wraith. I’d never seen one before, but there was no mistaking it from the stories I’d heard. Vampiric creatures that dwelled in the shadows, with a taste for human blood.

I blinked as the vision dissipated.

The judge’s eyes flicked between me and the paper spread in front of him. There was something snakelike about him. I prayed he hadn’t noticed anything strange.

“Maeve Merwood,” he said.

Blood roared in my ears, so I had to strain to hear.

“You are to be sentenced for the murder of your parents and brother. They were found on your family estate. That morning, your father’s workers heard you arguing with Mr. Colt Hardpike about your father’s merchant ring outside his office.

Then you screamed. When they went to your aid, the bodies of your family were lying face up on the grass. Dead.”

I flushed hot with shame as the memory assaulted me.

“Cause of death was determined to be poison. A silver flask of it was found in your pocket.” I stiffened at the judge’s piercing look.

“Mr. Hardpike said you were angry at him for breaking off your relationship and had vowed revenge. That you tried to frame him by planting your father’s ring on him and saying he stole it. You didn’t deny it.

“Even though the bodies showed no outward signs of poison, you offered no alternative explanation. Do you have anything to say now?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, hard enough to make myself bleed. I hadn’t denied it, and even though it killed me, I couldn’t tell him the truth. Contradicting Colt’s story would have meant revealing what really happened, and my gift.

I didn’t just see how people would die. If someone near me was dying, I felt it as if it were my own.

The day my family died, the death I’d felt wasn’t theirs.

It was Colt’s. One moment we were arguing, the next he was having a heart attack.

I’ll never forget the choking pressure. Desperate to get rid of it, I pushed it away.

Into my family. I transferred Colt’s death to them.

I still didn’t know how, or how to stop it from happening again.

What I did know was that I didn’t want to find out what the authorities might do with that information.

What they might make me do. Besides, Colt may have used me to steal my father’s ring, but he didn’t kill them.

I did. If it hadn’t been for me, they would have still been alive. I deserved to be punished.

“No, your honor. I have nothing to say.”

“Very well.” He folded his hands in front of him, his eyes darting around the courtroom before fixing on me. “The court offers you a choice—prison or consignment to the convent of the Order of Death.”

My knees threatened to give out at his words.

I wasn’t to hang. Relief warred with disbelief and dread.

My curse and newfound ability to transfer and amplify a person’s death made me a threat to everyone.

I quailed at the thought of being executed, but it was the safest of the sentences they could give me.

“Choose the convent,” Yellow Dress said through her teeth when I didn’t answer right away.

“I don’t deserve it,” I said, my voice low.

Prison meant cold stone walls, damp straw for a bed, vermin, little food and hard labor, leading to a slow, wasting death.

I knew firsthand how dangerous it was, with so many dying around me.

I’d survived a week there so far. My energy had been sapped, and it had been hard to breathe, but I’d managed to endure it without killing anyone. It was a fitting punishment.

The novices at the convent were known to have an ascetic lifestyle, one that involved physical pain as an offering to Death on behalf of departed souls, but most of them lived long lives. It was a gentle existence in comparison.

Despite the danger I posed to those around me, prison was where I belonged. Yet I couldn’t form the words to seal my fate.

The judge cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Consider your options carefully. Think about what each would mean.” His voice was low enough that only I, and Yellow Dress, could hear him.

I frowned. The judge before him hadn’t taken this kind of care with the prisoners before me.

That, combined with the way his eyes constantly shifted around the room, made me distrust him.

For a panicked moment, I wondered if he knew about my curse, but if he did, I doubted I would have been standing there.

His eyes flicked upwards and stayed there for a moment before settling on me again in a meaningful look.

Following his gaze, I looked up to see the statues above his head. The Devil’s shadow whip almost seemed to gleam as I stared, making me shiver, and I quickly moved on to Death and the scales in her hand. My lips parted as I realized what he might have meant.

Death’s Judges came from her convents. People volunteered to go to the In Between to become one, even though the only way to get there was to surrender your life.

Something stirred in my chest at the thought, followed by a gentle pull.

It wasn’t a sure path. Souls were known to become lost on the journey.

It was more and more common, if the rumors were to be believed, but the risk didn’t bother me.

Assisting souls on their journey to their next life and balancing the need for justice with the need for mercy was a noble profession.

If I were to go to the In Between as a Judge, I could atone for my family’s death and whatever I’d done in a previous life that had warranted being cursed in this one.

The idea warmed me, and the pull intensified as the idea grew roots, planting itself in my mind.

I’d been at the mercy of my curse almost my entire life.

To have the chance to act was enticing. Seductive.

I didn’t deserve such a thing, but I couldn’t shake the desire to go.

“For some,” the judge said, “it’s a calling, not a choice.”

The words nestled in my chest, next to my heart.

I felt their truth even as I questioned my sanity.

I’d never been a strong devotee of the Order of Death.

Because of my visions, I barely left the house, only making monthly offerings on our family altar the way most people did in person at the Order’s church.

I’d never considered becoming a Judge before, but my hunger to atone by doing so was undeniable.

Maybe being constantly surrounded by so much death had given me an affinity for it.

Even the judge’s motive in offering me this choice, whatever it was, wasn’t enough to deter me. I knew in my soul, I had to do this.

“The Order of Death.” My voice was steady even as my pulse throbbed in my ears, and the judge’s lips curled in a satisfied smile.

The path to the In Between wouldn’t be easy—there was no guarantee I’d make it—but I’d endure whatever I needed to in order to atone for what I’d done.