The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(3)

I ran through Belgrave Square, which the deep night had left near-deserted. Prodigious white estates surrounded the block, their fourth-story windows like prison watchtowers leering down on the streets. I kept running past the curved redbrick buildings of Wilton Crescent, then veered away from such exposed areas and slipped into the darker side streets, hoping the shadows would conceal me.

I’d just turned the corner to Cadogan Place when time changed again.

I felt the ghost of a hand on my throat and spun around, but I stood alone on a frozen street. There was no distant clanking of pipes or faraway echo of hoofs on cobblestone or blurred conversations a block away, just a barren expanse of silence, my every breath louder than a scream.

I lifted my hood and peered up at a million snowflakes frozen in midair, not by my own doing.

It didn’t matter then if I walked or ran or crawled—their cold hands had dragged me into their frozen world. They were watching me, waiting for my next move while they hid in the shadows.

They knew the longer they waited in the silence, the more my mind would spiral and fragment and imagine all the ways they’d pull me apart, bone by bone. Unlike humans who had the privilege of seeing them once and only once before their souls went into the void, I’d spent nearly two centuries with them.

The urban legends should have told of Reapers like them, not ones like me. Because even though I was a terrible person, I was not the kind of Reaper one should have feared.

Here is the tale that humans should have told:

First, you feel their hands on your face, their skin cold with Death’s chill as they wake you from sleep.

Second, the clocks stop ticking and you’re alone in the silence, where all you can hear are your breaths getting faster and faster.

When you’re somewhere between consciousness and death, vision hazy from lack of oxygen, a figure in a silver cloak will come to ruin you.

Time is ribbons in their hands, to cut or twist or tie around your throat.

They can freeze time so solidly that you’re no longer a part of the world, caught inside a painting.

They can grind time forward so slowly that you’re trapped in a viscous amber, spending centuries taking a single breath but agonizingly conscious.

They can dig their white nails into your heart and pull out your worst moments, then play them on an eternal loop.

They cull the weak from their own families and snap the spines of their lovers, and as long as they want you, you are never, ever safe.

“Hello, Wren.”

The words came from behind me, a woman’s voice in my left ear that hummed through my whole body like a death knell. The name sounded wrong in my head. Wren Wren Wren, like the little brown birds that eat spiders and die in the winter, and it wasn’t even my real name.

My mother, whom I couldn’t remember, had named me Ren, the word for lotus in Japanese. I knew, because just like all Shinigami, the kanji was burned into my spine in strokes of black ink that wouldn’t wash away. But my father had put my name down as Wren in the ledgers because that was an acceptable, albeit meek, name for a British Reaper. And while the pronunciation was similar, I always knew who was calling my real name and who was calling me a little bird.

“What’s wrong, Wren?” someone said, in my right ear this time, a different voice.

They loved to say the name that wasn’t even mine, stretching out the vowel like thick taffy because they loved to disrespect me. We were meant to address each other as Reaper outside of our families, but of course I didn’t warrant that kind of decency.

“You’re awfully quiet tonight,” said another voice, and this one I knew. But before I could answer, a pair of hands grabbed each of my arms and wrenched me onto my back in the snow. The time-frozen snowflakes spanned upward as far as I could see until they dissolved into the frozen infinity of gray-black sky.

A boot collided with my jaw and crushed my face into the street. My vision flashed white while my brain crashed against the walls of my skull. The heel dug harder into my temple, and I could only lie there like a dead thing until she was done with me, no better than the souls in my pocket.

Hellfire simmered in my fingertips, the gas streetlights burning dangerously bright. But before my flames could shatter the glass, I choked down a breath of cold air and squeezed my eyes shut, forcing the searing light down.

With my one eye that wasn’t scraping against snow crystals, I looked up at my assailants.

There was Ivy’s boot on my cheek, of course, because Ivy always appeared where I didn’t want her. Her silver cloak rippled like a clear river behind her, the fabric made of silk and moonlight. Ash blond hair, the color of bones, hung in soft curls around her face. She was beautiful in exactly the way Reapers were supposed to be—so fair that the snowflakes seemed to pass through her, like she had faded halfway into another world, features sharpened by the edges of her bones, eyes every color of the northern lights, shifting between jewel tones and faraway starlight.

I didn’t look like her, or any of the other Reapers.

My eyes and hair were the color of Yomi, the Japanese underworld and Realm of Perpetual Night, the place that light didn’t dare touch. To call it a color was too generous—it was the absence of everything. For that reason, I always braided my hair back and hung my hood low over my eyes—to be seen was to be targeted.

The hands on my left arm ground my bones harder into the street, and I guessed it was Sybil because of the strength. Where Sybil went, Mavis usually followed, though it didn’t much matter who held me down. All of the High Reapers had their fun with me at some point, but Ivy always loomed somewhere close.