23. Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
When Rook invited me to watch a fight, he promised that Saturdays were the most exciting night of the week.
“Watching men knock each other out isn’t really my cup of tea,” I’d said.
“No, but seeing me afterward is.” He’d attempted one of his cheeky grins, but there was something longing in his eyes. “It’s the only way I’ll get to see you tonight.”
Which was why I now stood in Rook’s club suffering other people’s body heat and a cloud of smoke wafting from cigarettes and cigars.
I didn’t much care what was going on inside the cage, so I sat at a table sipping a drink I didn’t pay for.
I’m not sure what Rook said to his staff or threatened them with, but the bartender recognized me immediately and gave back the money I tried to pay with.
“You’re all set,” he said.
From my seat near the bar, I could hear the screams, grunts, and rattling metal of the fighters’ battle.
Rook had mentioned there were fights that involved more than two people tonight, and I suspected that was the cacophony of violence I heard blasting from the cage, so loud it could be heard even over the roaring crowd.
The fight was long and messy, if the two men carried out and wheeled elsewhere in the building on stretchers were any indication.
In the break between fights, others filled the tables around me, drinking and chatting.
Rook took a break too, emerging from a door at the top of a set of stairs that looked over the cage.
That must have been his office. As he stepped into the main room, a few people stopped him to say hello or congratulate him on the excellent fight, but he gave them only half his attention. The other half was scanning, searching.
For me, I realized, when our eyes locked for half a second as he passed by to talk to the bouncer at the door. He made no expression, nor did he greet me, but the heat and recognition blazing in his eyes were enough to satisfy me. He knew I was there, and he had plans for me afterward.
I neared the bottom of my drink and debated asking the bartender to refill it. Two men sat at the table in front of me and lifted their heads as Rook passed by.
“He’s such a fucking boss,” the younger, thinner one admired.
The slightly older one, graying around the temples, with a beer gut that he’d probably been working on for a decade, laughed. “That’s why he runs the show and the rest of us peons are giving him all our money.”
“I’d kill for his job,” said the younger one.
The older one snorted. “He probably has. You don’t end up running a place like this without doing some fucked-up shit.”
Young One shook his head and laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Beer Belly hummed. “You ever notice you don’t see him with a girlfriend?”
I straightened slowly, listening harder. I stroked my thumb up and down the condensation on my glass, then lifted the small amount that was left and sipped.
“That’s because Rook’s the kind of guy who can get any pussy he wants. Why settle for one when you can have them all?”
“I’m just saying, it would be funny if the big man is actually…” He made an exaggerated, limp-wristed gesture.
Young One shook his head. “No, there’s no fucking way Rook is taking it up the ass.”
“I didn’t say he was taking it up the ass. Maybe he’s the pitcher.” He let out another greasy laugh. “All I’m saying is it’s weird. Maybe he’s a faggot.”
My hand tightened on the glass, but I looked away, toward the bar, where anyone who saw me might interpret it as the desire for another drink rather than eavesdropping.
“Whatever you say, man. You’re delusional.”
Not delusional, but very much on my radar.
When he rose to watch the next fight, I memorized his face.
That fight took twenty minutes, after which Beer Belly declined another drink with his friend and stumbled out of the club, griping about the money he’d lost. I waited until he was halfway to the door, then rose from my seat.
The bouncer nodded to me on the way out.
There were two more fights scheduled that evening, so most of the crowd would be occupied for another hour or two.
The man trekked around the building to the back alley. His car was much too exquisite for the bag of pus driving it, and he was too drunk to do so, which I gathered from the way he dropped his keys twice trying to open the door.
I cast a spell that flattened him against the metal.
“What the fuck?”
I stood over his shoulder. “You know, I don’t actually like fighting. I was here as a personal favor to Rook, but you and your disgusting mouth just had to ruin my evening.”
“What the hell? Are you his boyfriend or something? Let me go!” He struggled, but his arms and legs refused to budge.
“I can’t do that. The world needs one less ugly stain, and I’m afraid I don’t have enough conscience to overlook you.”
For all the lives that Death gave me, she left other marks.
The voices chased me everywhere, spying, prying, and haunting my steps.
But there was another gift she gave me, either intentionally or inadvertently.
It didn’t matter. Exhausting as using it had become, there was a time and place for it, and this man was more deserving of it than most.
I pressed my hand flat between his shoulder blades and channeled death into his putrid body. No last words. No dramatic exit. No blood. His skin rotted and his body went limp before I let it fall to the ground. I kicked his blackened corpse for no other reason than to satisfy my ire.
I pulled out my phone to text Rook.
There’s a dead body in your back alley.
Rook: What did you do?
Took out the trash.
Rook: Fine, I’ll send one of my guys to deal with it. There’s one more fight, but I’m in the office. Come up?
See you in a few minutes.
My shoulders sagged and it took me a moment to catch my breath. My limbs felt full of sand as I trudged back to the club, bypassed the bouncer, and made my way to the office. The door opened before I knocked.
“Come in,” Rook said. “Fuck, you look terrible. What happened?”
I dropped into the first chair I saw and rubbed my eyes. “Nasty killing spell. Effective, but exhausting.”
“Do you want to explain why you’re murdering people in my back alley?” He passed me a bottle of water and peered out the window on one wall that overlooked the cage. His eyes snapped back to me.
“He suspected you were a ‘faggot,’ and slurs are so uncouth.”
Rook scrubbed both hands over his face. “People love me. People hate me. People want me dead. You know how this works. You can’t just kill everyone who suspects I’m gay or talks shit about me.”
“Do you want to test that theory?”
I realized my fists were clenched in my lap, and my fingers tingled when I released them.
“You look half dead yourself. Can you make it downstairs?”
“I’ll call my driver to come get me.” I stood and swayed.
“Don’t worry about it.” He took a key off a nail on the wall and pressed it into my palm.
“To the left of the room I took you to before, there is a black door. This will unlock it. There’s a bed inside.
Sometimes fights run late and I don’t make it home after work.
Go lie down and I’ll be in after we wrap up for the night. ”
My stomach turned like I might vomit, and I nodded, clutching the key.
***
The room was exactly as Rook had described it and nothing more—four white walls and a queen-sized bed. I melted into the mattress without even climbing under the sheets, completely spent.
It might have been an hour or the whole night before I woke to Rook crawling into bed with me and curling himself around my back.
“How are you feeling?” he murmured against my shoulder.
“Like that corpse I left in the alley.”
“What the hell did you do to him? He looked like you drained the life out of him.”
“Other way around,” I said. “I pushed death into him.”
“That sounds like some dark shit,” he said on an enormous exhale.
“It’s not mine,” I mumbled. “That’s why it takes so much energy to use it. I don’t think I’m supposed to have it.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but whatever this is with you, you can’t keep carrying it alone.” His hand slid past my ribs to my stomach, where his fingers stretched and pulled me closer. “What is the point of all this if you won’t let me get close to you?”
What was the point? We still hadn’t named the thing between us.
Rook described it as an addiction—he couldn’t quit me—and I thought that might be something much more dangerous than dark magic.
But Rook’s hold over me was an invasion, a conquering, an epic defeat of my attempts to keep him at a distance.
So I let him destroy the last wall I had standing.
“My mother was human. My father used to say she was the loveliest human in London. He adored her.
“She was murdered in front of me when I was ten. It was completely mundane—a burglary gone wrong. My father wasn’t home, and I wasn’t strong enough to save her. She bled out before the ambulance even arrived, and when she took her last breath, a woman appeared.”
A shiver ran through Rook, like he already felt the ominous part coming.
“She was beautiful—every part of her was the color of night. Her skin. Her hair. Her clothes. She was like a shadow come to life, except her eyes that burned like two flames. I wasn’t frightened of her.
If anything, her presence was soothing, but there was something final about her, like a door closing. ”
“Death?” Rook asked.
“Yes, and I begged her for my mother’s life, but she said it was too late.
I was a weeping child covered in my mother’s blood.
She took pity on me and gave me a gift—thirteen lives for the one she wouldn’t spare.
She never gave me the chance to refuse it.
She was gone, and so was my mum. The voices—the spirits trapped on this side—started soon after that.
I learned later that I could touch others with death.
“But I never forgave her for what she took from me. I want revenge. That’s what I’ve traveled the world looking for since I was eighteen. I’m going to kill her, and I’m close.”
He was utterly still at my back. “Shit. That’s…a lot.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be. I’m just processing.” He turned me gently toward him and brushed his hand along the side of my face. “What do you mean you’re close?”
“There’s a ritual to summon and trap her in a corporeal form.
It’s in a grimoire. I recently imported a collection of books and artifacts about Death on loan from Prague.
It’s—” I sucked in a breath, picturing the vast amount of information at my fingertips.
“It’s more than I ever dreamed I’d find on her.
The book is in there somewhere. It has to be. ”
Rook’s attention never wavered. If anything, it sharpened.
“What does the ritual involve?”
“That’s more complicated. She can only be killed with a blade coated in my blood and tears of grief, and it requires a sacrifice of love, whatever that means. I can figure it out after I get the book.”
“You have balls,” he said. “Going after Death is kind of crazy. You know that, right?”
I nodded, thinking of all the years I’d sacrificed to get here. “I’ve spilled blood for this. I’ve died for this more than once. It’s all I have.”
He curled his fingers around the back of my neck and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Then I’ll help you.”