Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
Elara
Fog clings to the lower graveyard like a shroud, blanketing the servants’ grounds, so thick it beads on my lashes and turns the world into smudged silhouettes: crooked stones, stunted yews, a slanted fence. And the two men lifting out a grave in the distance.
It’s the hour between worlds—the gray, damp seam in time right after dawn breaks—where the silence is so heavy it feels like pressure against the eardrums. Any stiller, and I might as well be dead…
Sitting on the frost-damp grass, I watch the spades cut into the earth with practiced rhythm, dark soil piling into a mound.
One man puffs white breath into the sky.
The other wipes his brow, casting a pitying glance back at me, at the queen in the dirty dress who’s been sitting here a long while.
How much stillness does that bastard need to finally show himself?
When the men shoulder their spades and leave, my gaze drifts to the pink-streaked horizon. I made sure I came here at a good time, with the moon faded and dawn bringing enough light for Death to hide his bones. Was he truly that gruesome to look at?
I squeeze my eyes shut, reaching for the grotesque memory.
What I find feels softened by time, the terror of it strangely blurred.
Skin pallid like a corpse’s, yes, but also smooth and flawless.
Ribs exposed for certain, a body stripped down to its simplest truth.
Is there a heart behind them? And if I somehow ever manage a glimpse, am I going to find it with its strings ripped to shreds?
I sigh.
Wed him. Bed him.
Does the morning in the tower count? When I pulled the curtain? Or was that just lust with no intent? I don’t know, but I can’t risk a technicality. Lying with him is probably a step in the right direction under the circumstances.
I stand, my knees popping in the cold. I cross the lower graveyard and walk up to the edge of the fresh hole. Dug for a kitchen maid, I overheard one of the men mention earlier. Poor thing didn’t even die of rot. No, she took a tumble down some stairs and snapped her neck. Pity.
The scent of loam and worms rises from the grave, its familiarity letting warmth settle under the cotton of my dress. I hitch up its skirts. My boot toes the edge, finding a foothold in the clay, and I slide down.
My soles hit the bottom with a soft thud. Walls of earth rise above my head, cutting off the view of the trees, the path, the everything, leaving nothing but a rectangle of gray sky above.
It’s colder down here.
Much colder.
I lie down, the back of my dress soaking up the dampness. Hands crossed over my chest, I am so still, forcing my breath into something dead-shallow as I stare at the sky. Come on now, you asshole…
Nothing.
No scent of carnations. No chill sliding under my skirts. No shadow thickening at my feet. No—
Crunch.
The sound is slow but deliberate. A boot on gravel. Then silence. Then another crunch. Closer.
I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.
Dirt rains down from the edge, a gritty sprinkle that lands on my cheek. A shadow blots out the gray sky. Vale leans over the lip of the grave, his black velvet coat absorbing the mist, his hair a dark halo against the morning light. He looks down at me, brow arched in supreme, unimpressed boredom.
“Feeling theatrical, Elara?” His voice is a low rumble that vibrates in the narrow space. “Or have you finally realized where your sense of fashion belongs?”
My molars grind back a scathing comment about the fashion of tendons dangling from bones. “I was waiting for you.”
“In a hole? Things that cannot be killed hardly belong in graves. It’s bad luck.”
“I was told you like stillness.”
“Oh?” He tilts his head, a predatory gleam entering his eyes. “I must say, I liked the way you rolled your hips against me much better.”
Without warning, he jumps.
I gasp, instinctively flinching as he lands beside me, his coat brushing against my arm, the scent of carnations and ice instantly overpowering the smell of the dirt.
And then he lies down.
The narrowness of the grave forces him to press against me, arm to arm, leg to leg. A gravedigger lying beside Death in a kitchen maid’s grave. Hysterical.
I turn my head. Vale’s profile is sharp, pale as marble against the dark earth wall. He isn’t looking at me; he’s staring up at the sky, his hands folded over his stomach, mirroring my pose.
“Make your wish,” he says softly. “I have places to be.”
I watch the slow, steady rise of his chest. “I’ll make you a deal.”
He snorts. “You don’t have the currency for a deal.”
“Show me your true form,” I say, ignoring his arrogant bemusement. “Let me see Death, and I’ll make my wish.”
The easy arrogance evaporates, replaced by a cold rigidity. He turns his head slowly, and this close, I can see the tiny flecks of gold in his irises.
“You demand your wish, and I grant it,” he says, his voice dropping. “That is the transaction. I do not perform parlor tricks for your amusement.”
“It’s not amusement. It’s…” Curiosity, probably, but that seems too morbid to confess. “It’s…knowing who I’m dealing with.”
“You’re dealing with the end of all things.”
He turns back to the sky, dismissing me. But he doesn’t leave. He stays there, the heat of his body—yes, heat—seeping through his clothes into mine. It’s strange. For all the coldness he can bring, near me, he sometimes seems to burn like a fever.
We lie in silence for a long moment. It’s surprisingly peaceful. The wind howls above us, but down here, shielded by the earth, it’s quiet.
“Why didn’t they see you?” I ask quietly, breaking the truce. “In the city. At the Gutter Lane house. My mother, Daron… They all looked right through you. But the kitchen girl…she saw you.”
Vale sighs, a sound of weary patience. “I am a concept, Elara. Even in this form, most minds refuse to perceive me.”
“But I saw you. I saw Vale.”
“Because I chose to let you see Vale,” he murmurs. “And once the curtain is lifted, it cannot be lowered. Not in this form.”
I nod in understanding. The kitchen girl saw him that night because he’d appeared to her before. No wonder she was scared. She didn’t see a steward or even a prince; she saw Death.
“The carriage driver who brought me here.” My mind wanders back to how he asked if I was alright. How Miss Hampshire mentioned the next day that talking to myself was not permitted. “He never saw you, did he? Probably thought I was mad.”
“What else would you call a woman who cozies up in a grave beside Death?” Vale shifts onto his side, turning to face me just in time for me to see a twitch leaving his jaw.
“Enough of this nonsense.” The annoyance in his voice is sharp enough to scrape.
Vale’s eyes narrow, not in anger—not yet—but in that bored, predatory way that says he’s about to stop indulging me.
“I didn’t climb into a grave to trade memories of carriage drivers.
Ask what you’re clearly prepared to ask, Elara, before I decide you’re wasting my morning. ”
The scathe in his voice pricks at me. The distance between Vale’s patience and his rage is unpredictable at best, but maybe I can still risk more questions? Learn about the power he wields and the rules that bind it?
I roll onto my side, leaving nothing but an inch between our faces, warm breaths mingling in the air. “The farm girl. Kael’s distant scrap of blood.”
“What of her?”
“Did you kill her?”
“This again?” Again that shift in his jaw, barely there, but I catch it. “I cannot take a life like that.”
“You told me as much, but who knows?” I shift in the grave, the movement sending a small cascade of dirt down from the grave’s edge, but it mostly sprinkles on him. “You’re Death. It’s in the title.”
“Do you really think I busy myself with mixing poisons or pushing old men down stairs?”
I look at the dirt on the velvet of his collar, Corvin’s voice murmuring through my skull. He desires you. Use it. My pulse rises into my throat, but I simply let it pound there. Death is a man, he said so himself, and I now understand what it takes to seduce one.
After all, he taught me.
I reach out, fingertips slowly brushing the dirt off his collar. “If it suits your plans.”
Vale hesitates, eyes narrowing, flecks of gold catching in the gray light. “I am not a plague. I am not a blade. I am not the hand that pushes a child into a river.” His voice turns colder. “I am merely the one who collects the soul.”
Daron’s soul, and that thought drives a shiver along my arms. “You’re making yourself sound pretty innocent, considering you created a curse that’s killing thousands over the death of one ferryman. Even if he was your friend.”
His jaw clenches and unclenches. “Innocence is a mortal invention…as is guilt. I don’t decide how much sand is in a mortal’s hourglass—though I might tap it a little.”
I slide my fingers from his collar to the sharp line of his jaw, feeling for stubble where I only find polished river stone. “Tap?”
Vale’s throat works once beneath my hand, a swallow that shouldn’t matter and somehow does. His pupils flick to my fingers on his jaw, then slide back to my eyes with that lazy, infuriating calm he wears when he’s deciding whether something will be amusing or merely tedious.
“I can…nudge.” His exhale comes with the slightest weight pressing into my fingers, almost as if he’s sinking into my touch without wanting to make it too obvious.
“Hours. A day. Rarely more. I can stretch a fraying thread a little, or pull it taut so it snaps sooner—if it was going to snap, anyway.”
In an instant, images of a cherry-red splotch running down porcelain skip before my mind. “The library scribe.”
“He was so close to his end, it took minimal effort.” His tone is bored, but his body isn’t. Not with how his breathing quickens the longer I trace his jaw. “I merely made a slight…adjustment.”