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 backthen, 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, shakingmy 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 amtrying.” 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.”
