The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(5)

And he was right, because British Reapers didn’t control light. But Japanese Reapers—Shinigami—did.

My heritage was hardly a secret, but we both knew nothing good could come from High Reapers feeling threatened. They could turn time with more finesse than I ever would, but how effective would that be if they couldn’t see me? Who knew what lengths they’d go to just to keep me restrained, to keep themselves in power?

I might have hated my father, but he was right—I couldn’t show them my Shinigami powers.

“Aww, I think you made her cry,” Mavis said.

The sound of scissors stopped. Ivy grabbed my chin.

Was I really crying? I couldn’t feel my face anymore, could only feel the tremors through my entire body as I tried not to shower us all in fire and glass shards. The line between control and chaos was so very thin, and it took every part of my concentration to hold myself back. I needed Ivy to finish quickly before I got too angry and ruined everything.

“Poor thing,” Ivy said, cuffing a tear from my burning cheek. Her nails cut into my face, sharp like a snake bite. “And what did I tell you about looking at a High Reaper when they’re addressing you?”

I wrenched my eyes open and the words spilled out before I could stop them.

“Just finish, already.”

Ivy’s smile dropped. She grabbed my jaw and pulled it closer until it made a cracking sound and pain knifed through my face.

“Is that what you want, half-breed?” she whispered. “For me to end you?” Her words slithered across my skin, curling around my throat and wrists. Her eyes churned indigo, a dark undertow pulling me deeper.

Yes, a secret part of me whispered.

I knew it was an idle threat, but sometimes I wished it were possible.

Reapers lived for nearly two millennia unless a more powerful being cut them off early. Humans were weak creatures who could flay me and sever my limbs and carve my heart out of my chest, but they would never succeed in killing me. The church grims and demons were slightly stronger beings that could eat my flesh down to the bone, but still they couldn’t end me. But Ivy was a High Reaper, and if she wanted to crush every one of my bones into the pavement until I was nothing but powder and then collect my soul, she could.

But she never would, because Ankou extracted the memories of all his Reapers when they died, so my murder could never remain her little secret. Even Ivy wasn’t above Ankou’s punishing scythe.

Yet, sometimes, when my heart felt dark as the night that I carried in my eyes, I wished she would do it anyway.

Ivy leaned closer and her hair fell in a curtain in front of me, sealing us away from the rest of the world.

“What would happen if we tied you to this streetlamp until daybreak?” she whispered. “Would your little brother come to pluck the church grims off your bones?”

“Don’t,” I said, the word a shuddered exhale. My fingers twitched, already unnaturally warm. I hated when Ivy talked about Neven, and she knew it. My poor little half brother, lucky enough to be full Reaper but unlucky enough to be chained to me.

When Neven took the souls of children, he held their hands and sang them lullabies. He let the older ones pray and told them stories about what awaited them in Heaven, how everything there was beautiful and nothing would ever hurt them again. But because of me he would never have friends, never join the High Council, never be anyone but the Shinigami’s brother. He could have forsaken me like our father, but instead he brought me stray cats and built book towers over me while I slept and cast shadow puppets on the walls while I tried to read.

His name didn’t belong on Ivy’s lips.

“Would he cry when he saw they’d nibbled off your fingers and drunk your eyes from their sockets?”

“Don’t,” I said again, but the word was dead and heavy in my mouth.

“Or would he be happy that he was finally free?”

I bit hard into my lip and prayed that the pain would help me center, draw my focus away from the light of the streetlamp that was getting brighter with the promise of broken glass and fire, because words could only hurt you if you knew they were true.

“How long would it take him to forget about you?” Ivy whispered. “Half a century, maybe?”

My teeth gnawed deeper into my lip. Ivy was right. The lives of Reapers spanned millennia, and Neven had barely spent a century with me. Time would scrub my face from his memories whether he liked it or not.

The streetlight burned bright against the glass casing, orange and blue and sun-hot white. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was my hair on the snow and scissors and moonlight and my soul cast into an empty eternity and Neven’s face and it’s fine it’s fine it doesn’t matter at all, but the snow began to reflect the increasing light from the streetlamp and our little circle of refuge from the winter darkness was now a boiling spotlight in the middle of London and I couldn’t stop it.

Ivy leaned in closer, her cold lips brushing my ear.

“Then no one would remember you,” she said, “like you’d never existed at all.”

My control flew away from me all at once, a tether yanked out of my hands, spiraling fast and far away.

The streetlamp’s weak light swelled to fill its glass cage, no longer a dying flame but a searing starlight that bleached away the night sky and ripped the colors from the street. The High Reapers began to turn around.