Chapter 11
XI.
Surrender
It was the same refrain as before, nothing new. I had lost Rochelle. I had not used my power. Without him, I would have died. My groan was half from pain and half from despair.
Lord Death offered his gloved hand. I took it, wincing. Even the motion of lifting my arm sent pain stabbing through my ribs. He pulled me up, gently but without hesitation or caution, then left me standing alone beside the altar. After a moment, I swallowed my self-pity and hobbled after him.
It was a struggle to keep up, back through the labyrinth of hallways and stone.
With each step away from the empty chapel, the weight of my failure increased.
I had her in my hand. I heard her voice.
How had it happened all over again? I wanted to weep.
I wanted to die. But I clenched my fists and kept walking.
I wasn’t going to turn around and leave until he told me so.
I needed to know where Rochelle had gone. I needed to bring her back.
We came to his quarters, and I doggedly followed him through the doors. He hadn’t even turned, as if he’d known I was at his heels. Of course he knew. His fist ground into the writing desk.
“Tell me, Salomé, what is the point of being my apprentice if you aren’t going to listen to me?
You, who are so clearly brimming with unrestrained ability, but lack all the awareness and ability to make use of it, even to save your own life.
” He gripped the edge of the desk and the muscles in his cheek flickered as he ground his jaw.
“Saints, you are frustrating to watch,” he muttered.
What could I say to argue? Nothing. Everything he spoke was the truth. I swayed, fading and unsure.
He turned to me, those unforgiving, obsidian eyes truly looking at me, and I felt the sear of his gaze again—something no man I’d ever met could do. It tore back the feeling of my clothes and flesh, stripping me down to my very bones. “Do you value your own life so little?”
I swallowed, trying to find words in the swirl of pain and despair. “My sister,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Where did she go?”
Something unreadable flickered across his expression. “You did not see your sister. All you saw was an illusion of your desire.”
No—that could not be true. Maybe at first, walking through the doors and between the pews. But the older Rochelle, the one with the belt of stars—that had truly been her. I shook my head. “I saw her. I had her hand.”
“You saw your own desire,” he said sternly. “You held your grief.”
“Then how do you explain the creature—the thing that slid out of the place she went?”
“You called that creature. You and your exasperating ability to miss what is plainly in front of your face. That was a demon’s pet,” he said as he waved his hand. “They come to anyone who calls. It is no great feat.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. “A demon? Rochelle is with a demon?”
“Listen to me,” he said, cold and quiet, cutting through my increasing hysteria.
“Your sister was not there. What you saw was your own desires, your own expectations—again. You conjured her image. You called forth her memory. And with that magic, you also called other things out into this world, this realm. You think you know everything, but you know nothing.”
I didn’t want to believe him—she had felt so real. But why would he lie to me? What would he gain? I shook my head, my heart sinking. “She felt”—hot tears burned in my eyes. I clenched my fists tight to control them—“she felt so real.”
There was silence and the soft pattering of snow against the windows. I waited with my breath held, my desperation hanging in the air like a terrible, cloying dampness.
His mouth was tight, his eyes narrowed at the window. Surely, he was about to send me away. I had failed. I had disappointed him. Worse, I’d argued with him. And just when I felt I could bear the silence no longer, he spoke.
“I will teach you,” he said, with so much sudden care it nearly broke my heart. “But when your sister was taken, long ago, she was taken into places you cannot go.”
“I can go there now, with your help! Show me how.”
He shook his head. “Then. You could have stopped her from going back then, if you’d had the power, if you’d understood it. But now, you cannot bring her back. She is too much of that otherworld. It is the same as if she’d died.”
The words sliced like a knife, cutting cleanly through my chest. If you’d had the power.
It was too terrible to hear, somehow worse even than the agony of losing her. I shook my head, desperate to protest. But there were no words I could manage. How could I have saved her when I did not know how to do anything?
“Salomé,” Death said soothingly, closing the distance between us and reaching for my cheek as if to wipe away my tears.
But his hand fell, and I remained alone.
“I do not tell you this to be cruel,” he said.
“I do it so you may understand how powerful you are—and how much more you could become if only you learned to surrender it.” He stepped closer again, voice low and serious.
“How many more lives are within your control? Even now?”
My shame felt as if it filled the room. I didn’t know which was worse to live with—knowing I brought darkness and death to everyone I loved, or that I could have saved them from it. I jerked back, shaking my head, unable to look at him. “Why can’t I do it? What am I doing wrong?”
“You are fighting yourself and everything around you. In the same way you needed to die in order to find your way into this next part of your life, you also need to surrender your power to make it useful to yourself.”
I shook my head, aware that I stood before Death, trying to carve out life. “That makes no sense.”
“Neither does the universe itself, and yet all balance is defined in tension.”
The room swam in the blur of my tears, even the flames in the hearth seemed to flicker in and out. I swiped at my eyes with the edge of my dusty sleeve and steadied my voice. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do it.”
“I have already told you,” he said. “Use your power.”
I couldn’t tell whether I was more frustrated with him or myself. “I don’t know how to find it. I am blocked by a wall.”
“Then you need to find a way over it,” he said with maddening calm.
“I am trying.” Did he think I was not?
“And therein lies the problem,” he said, with a dismissive shake of his head.
“You promised to show me how. If I wanted to die in never-ending frustration, I could have stayed a whore,” I said, probably louder than I should have to Death’s retreating back.
“Then do that,” he snapped, and there was a spark of something in those obsidian eyes as his anger lashed out. “No one is holding you prisoner. You are free to return.”
I snapped my jaw shut, hating that my temper had backed me into a corner.
He sank into the chair, pulling up parchment and ink as if I were no longer there and no longer his concern. His quill scratched in the silence and the snow whirled softly upon the windows.
It felt like my body was being torn into pieces—pulled in so many directions I was unable to move or even really breath.
But even as despair weighed over me like a cloak of exhaustion, there was no question or hesitation in me.
No, I knew more clearly than ever—this was where I belonged.
Death was the only one who could help me.
I forced a deep, shuddering breath from my lungs and said, “I should have listened to you.”
His quill stilled.
I met his gaze, trying to see what might flicker beneath the cruelty there, but his eyes seemed to contain depths beyond my understanding. “Finally,” he said. “Now you are starting to understand.”
The scrap of praise, of feeling like I’d turned my face in the right direction, made some of the tension ease from my shoulders. “I’ll do it. I’m not fighting it.”
“You are fighting it.” His gaze turned searing again and the room seemed to brighten. “But you can learn to let go.”
I nodded eagerly. “I’m ready.”
“Are you really?”
I thought for a moment. “I want to be.”
“Now, that is truthful,” he said. He leaned back, long body unfurling like the stretch of winter evening. And then something strange happened. He smiled.
The smile was red and sharp-toothed. It did not change his eyes. It was the smile of a predator. But he was Death, and he was so beautiful, so compelling, the blade of his words felt like such a gift of hope—I could have saved her! It felt as if the sun were trying to shine behind thick clouds.
“Come here,” he ordered.
There was nothing about what he said or did that suddenly made me remember myself as a prostitute. But as I crossed the front of his desk to stand before him, with that predator’s gaze watching the flicker of my pulse in my throat, I remembered all the same.
This was different, I told myself. I stood before no man, but Death himself.
As a pupil, not a prostitute. Fully clothed—though I felt naked under his piercing gaze.
He stayed seated, long legs stretched elegantly at leisure.
His gloved hands rested on the chair with the kind of still tension that was deadly.
But who was I that Death would be interested in me? I remembered the mortification of curtseying. As he said, it was the expectation of my own pride. I resisted the urge to squirm.
I had never been like Dacia or some of the younger girls, hoping some patron might one day fall in love with me, that they could pay my debt and whisk me away.
But it turns out that I wasn’t as immune to those fantasies as I thought.
My heart raced a little, to stand and feel so naked.
It made me bold and unthinking. “Are you a god or a man?” I asked, ignoring the heartbeat at the softness of my throat.
He shook his head, raising his gloved hand in a motion to stop. “This is your surrender, not mine.”