Chapter VII
VII.
In His Desert
The ride on his stallion passed as if in a dream, and I remembered it as if looking through a frost-covered window.
At some point I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
When I next opened my eyes, I was tucked under a pile of blankets in a bare room, alone, still as I had been—dirty and scratched, shrouded in my grave shift, fingers and toes intact, dirt on my thighs unmarred.
I did not know where Death had taken me, but he had honored his promise to bring me there unharmed. Relief flooded me.
I should have been more on guard. I was a prostitute, after all, I knew all men masked their true nature. But, I reasoned to myself, Death was no man. I pulled myself up onto my elbows and tried to get my bearings in his world.
He had placed me on a makeshift bed in a small room such that you would find in any chateau kitchen cellar, with a wide hearth on the fireplace for cooking.
A thick layer of dust lay over the empty shelves and the hearth was cold.
I imagined Death did not often host fetes and wasn’t in need of large storehouses, but I wondered how long I’d been left alone to have the fire die.
I couldn’t gauge the light coming through the half-moon window high on the stone wall. It could have been morning or evening.
“You’re awake.” His sudden arrival filled the room with his presence, like a cloud across the sun.
Death.
His hood was removed, as was his veil. And instead of an icy abyss or a swirling shadow, he was in the shape of a man.
A dark-haired man with a strong brow, slight curl at the ends of his hair, and a Roman nose—younger and handsomer than I had imagined.
He was as tall as I remembered. Lean and clothed in a black tunic and hose and boots—clothing as spare as a monk’s, but as finely wrought as a king’s.
That faint smell of rich black spice and blowing snow still emanated from him.
He must have sensed my wariness for he did not even look at me, keeping a careful distance as he crossed to the cold fireplace.
Was Death a man? A god? A demon? He seemed all of them and none of them.
He clasped his long fingers, clad in black leather gloves, behind his back.
Without even a word, flames sprang alive among the coals, crackling as the charred logs lit.
As the firelight played along the edge of his profile, I felt as if I were witnessing the visage of some divine being. I swallowed quickly and looked away, overcome. His presence made me feel too aware of my every breath.
“Any lingering frost?” he asked, still with his back turned. “I believed I removed it all, but …”
“Oh! No, I am well.” I shivered against a prickly flush I couldn’t tell was hot or cold, and pulled the blankets up tighter. “How does Death heal?”
“I only undid the work of my servants,” he said. “You might call them Frost and Fright.”
“What do I owe you for your kindness?”
“Your life,” he said simply. Almost carelessly. “Do you have family?” he asked.
“No,” I answered plainly.
“How did you become a whore?”
“I ran away from a convent.”
“Where were you going out there, all alone?”
“I …” But my voice trailed off and I stared into the coals. It all came back to me then. The horror of blood. The whispers. Dacia. Had she seen? I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. “I crawled out of my grave,” I said.
He stiffened and bowed his head to stare at the floor, as if stopping himself from turning to me. I felt like I had surprised him, somehow. What did Death know of life? Of my life?
“Why did you leave the convent?” he asked quietly.
He knew. I could feel the word, shimmering between us. Witch.
“I was not suited for a nunnery,” I said, lifting my chin.
“I have never come across one such as you. Do you not know what you are?”
I felt a bit like he was playing games with me, so I played right back.
“I am the devil’s gateway. I am the unsealer of that forbidden tree.
I am the first deserter of the divine law.
I am she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.
I am the destroyer of God’s image, man.”
“Tertullian,” he said placidly, hands folded behind his back. “Yes, I’ve read his work. Strange to hear such learning from a prostitute.” He did not seem at all disturbed. “Have you killed someone yet?”
I could not answer.
“I think not. But you have come close. Oh, you have come close, I can smell it on you.”
I felt dizzy with fear. How could he know? “Is that why you came to take me?”
“No, Salomé, you misunderstand,” he said, back still turned.
“You are unlike any others. You probably know this, the way you are different, and it is no joy to you. But for me … it is so rare, as rare as a bloodred rose growing in the dark of winter, to find someone like you. To be able to save someone like you. I could only do it because of your power. If you had any less, you’d have been nothing but a lamb for sacrifice.
I would have had no choice but to gather you up and lead you to the darkness.
But you turned and stood. You drove me back.
You gave me a choice. And so, I could touch you.
I could help you. I could”—he quickly cleared his throat and his voice turned harder—“be, for a moment, redeemed.”
The brothel had taught me how to please men.
I’d learned that men projected outward the ideas they constructed about who they should be.
To be a good whore, as I’d told Death I was, meant learning to see past that, further, to please the silent man who lived inside.
Beneath Death’s cruel voice, his words were so earnest, so deeply felt, I felt as if he’d exposed my soul to its foundation and then revealed his own.
Without thinking, I responded to that with wide-eyed naivety.
How was it that I, a cursed child, a nameless woman, bore witness to the great soul of Death himself?
“I don’t know anything of my power. How can you? ”
“I know it has driven you out of your own grave and into my path,” he said simply.
His cruel tinged gentleness touched something raw and unknown in me.
Surprising me with how easily it brought down my guard.
I couldn’t stop myself from explaining, from sharing things I had never shared before.
“I do not know how to keep myself contained or how to use my power. It feels like something open and bottomless inside me that threatens to pull me under and drown me. I have no one. My mothers were killed, my sister was taken. They buried me, not caring if I was truly dead. There was no one to mourn me. No one to care. I ran into the forest where you found me.”
He lifted his head and turned—his eyes, no longer hidden or averted, locked to mine.
“But you are not dead. And you are not powerless.”
My breath caught in my chest in a strangled sob. No one had ever looked at me in this kind of way. I felt seen for the person I might have been without tragedy, without judgment and condemnation.
“You have power. More than enough ability. Anything you could want. You could give the world to someone and take it away. You could walk out of my home, untouchable. I could teach you. What else are you doing with your power? Trying to push it down so deep inside you it will cut down every person you let close?” For a moment I was afraid I might die from the atmosphere of his gaze alone.
He was carved by other gods, into the shape of a man like thunderclouds on a bare mountain peak.
His gaze bored into mine, and the obsidian color of his eyes reflected heat, but not light.
“You have thought a lot about death,” he said. “But how do you want to live?”
“I can’t live,” I explained, near tears. “This darkness is drawn to me. It’s … what drew you.”
“Your darkness cannot touch me. I am immortal, unless I lose the mandate of the gods.”
He saw me so clearly, so preternaturally, and I had already seen so much that I could not explain, that I felt as if he must be telling me the truth.
He stepped closer. Towering over me. “Salomé, you cannot hurt me with your magic. I can teach you to use it.” That slim gloved hand came to my throat just under my chin.
I went perfectly still.
“Don’t you want that?”
It thrilled me to think of it. It thrilled me to stand before him like this. Completely at his mercy as he whispered to me of turning that darkness into power. Power? Power that was mine to possess and nurture? A spark of ferocious hope lit in me. I wanted to say yes, but I was afraid to be a fool.
“I can feel it,” he said, his voice a whisper of frost in my veins, the cool leather of his fingers pressing into the sides of my neck. “With every pulse, I feel your power, your loneliness, your desire … like calls unto like. Tell me, Salomé, how do you want to live?”
My chest started to heave—out of fear, out of anticipation, out of things I couldn’t even name, and the heaving turned into sobs.
I did not know an answer, but I knew I did not want the life I had.
With his gloved hand on my neck, holding me upright, I remembered trailing through the forest after Valerie as a little girl, and being in the convent garden in the summer sunshine with Rochelle.
I wanted a life I could never have—the past, unmarred, unbroken, and my darkness undone.
I tried to give some kind of answer, but great sobs I could not contain, could not stop, could not even understand, tore from my chest in place of words.
He released his hold on me. “When you feel ready, come find me in my chambers. We shall discuss how to begin then.” And he left me behind, with the cackling fire and the dim light and the absolute tumult of my emotions.
I hugged my knees to my chest. Every time I thought of his voice, his words, the way he looked at me, my heart raced.
He promised to teach me to use my power.
To do whatever I wanted. But I did not know what I wanted.
My heart longed for things that no one could give.
I had no sight for the future; I was still living in the past.
I had been a fool for ever thinking I’d escape notice of the otherworld.
Now, I sat alive in Death’s home, unable to die when it seemed I should.
And for what? I had lost everyone I loved.
I was at odds with the entire world. I could not hide from my own curse.
I wiped my face, and my hands came away with streaks of mud that I scrubbed off on the translucent shift I’d been buried in.
I wanted a life, not just a past. I wanted to find my sister, even if it meant following Death into his realm.
Pushing the blankets back, I swung my legs down to the floor to follow Death’s directions and find him in the darkening chateau.
An unearthly squawk made me jump back.
At first, I thought it was a chicken. Or a massive rat.
But as the creature stalked out into the open, I yelped in surprise.
It might have been a regular orange tabby, except it moved with the smoked-out edges of the otherworld.
Neither here nor somewhere else—the creature had the shape of a garbage cat, but the form of a nightmare.
A pair of horns set right behind the ears, curving up into points.
The creature, gaunt and hungry looking from every angle, sent a small puff of smoke and ash up through the gray light with every step.
I almost thought it was a spirit, if not for the click-clack-click sound of its long claws on the stone.
I pulled my feet up off the floor, blinking, as if I might clear away the swirl of the supernatural.
The hellcat—I guessed, but that was the word that sprang to mind—stretched forward and lowered its rump to the ground, eyeing my frozen position against the wall.
This was not some cold spirit who scratched under the physical surface.
No, those claws were real. They’d tear my flesh and light me on fire.
The light fell and the coals burnt low, and I crouched above the floor, waiting for it to move on.
But it stayed where it was, amber eyes burning, watching me.
Rochelle always had a knack for lost and wild things.
She’d tame the field mice and catch birds in her two hands.
Deer would walk right out of the bramble, ears flickering, for whatever treat she’d offered.
She’d had the kind of inner stillness that made her a safe place for anything that was wild.
If she’d had seen this mangy beastie, she’d have found some way to tame it.
I, on the other hand …
The hellcat’s tail twitched.
Suddenly, it leapt up and darted out of the room like any normal tabby. Before I could reconsider, I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and followed.
The room I emerged from was just off the kitchen, but there seemed to be no staff, no food, no life.
The cook fires were cold. The shelves bare.
The wine cellar empty. I followed the fiery tabby as it darted through rooms of dusty stone and drifts of leaf litter.
There was no one to be seen. By the time I made it to the enormous front hall, it was clear: No one had lived here in centuries.