For once, I wasn’t speaking in metaphor.
“Ah, my old friend, the Lord of Shadows. Welcome to Sin City.” Sebastian entered the conference room with a flourish, then sat at the head of the long, sleek table, his image perfectly framed by two large paintings depicting nude women pleasuring scores of demons.
How the natural order saw fit to keep this despicable being in power was beyond even my understanding.
“My assistant tells me you requested a meeting,” he continued with a smirk. “Does this mean your rendezvous in the Shadowrealm didn’t go as planned?”
“Let us not pretend you don’t knowexactlyhow things unfolded in the Shadowrealm.” My temper flared, but quickly faded under the watchful eyes of the women in the paintings. They seemed to be disappointed in me, as though I’d managed to fail them as horribly as I’d failed Gray. I could hardly blame them.
Hanging my head, I said, “I’m afraid I’ve… miscalculated.”
“An understatement, I presume.” Sebastian chuckled, removing a small silver box from his inside jacket pocket. “Cigar? Something tells me you’ve got a doozy of a story to tell.”
The greasy demon prince held out the box, his thrill at my misfortune—Gray’smisfortune—plainly evident. When I waved him off, he removed and lit a thin cigar for himself, his cheeks billowing as he puffed the thing to life.
Smoke curled around his pockmarked face. I wished I had the power to bring disease to his lungs. To cause him a very long, very painful demise.
But Sebastian was immune to the powers of Death.
“So tell me. Did the witch refuse your proposition?” he asked. “Tell you to stick it where the sun don’t shine?”
“The proposition, as you call it, is no joking matter. It’s a matter of her true destiny. As such, it was not something to be entered into lightly. There are many facets, many details which must be explored and debated ad nauseam. We did not have the time to fully discuss her options.”
“You never even told her therewereoptions.” Sebastian sucked on his cigar, the end of it crackling. His eyes shone even more menacingly in the orange glow. “There’s a difference.”
A thousand retorts swirled in my mind, but every one of them turned to dust on my lips. Sebastian was right. I’d kept everything from her—everything that mattered. Her true choices, and what each one would’ve meant. Her legacy. Consequences. Information that would’ve altered the course of her destiny and saved a lot of lives in the process.
I’d staked everything on my ability to train her in time, to persuade her onto the right path. I was so certain, so blindly convinced she’d accept, none of the myriad other pathways spiraling out before her seemed plausible.
After all, who could refuse the call of Death? According to the scrolls in the hallowed Hall of Records, no one in a hundred thousand lifetimes had ever dared.
Then again, I was fairly certain Death had never fallen in love with his protégé, either. That was a complication I could not have foreseen.
I knew I should regret it, but I couldn’t. No matter the outcome.
Even now, the remnants of our kisses on the beach in the Shadowrealm warmed me inside. I closed my eyes, allowing the moment to replay itself. I smelled the salt of the ocean, felt the grit of sand and shells beneath my back as Gray fell into my arms, her mouth warm and soft, her hair tickling my cheeks, her laughter like music I’d only just begun to remember.
If I lingered there, if I allowed myself to partake in the comforting opiate of human memory, the pain burning through my body might finally ease, ever so slightly…
“In any case,” Sebastian said, wrenching me from that blissful haze, “she’s in my possession now, and though I can’t use her as I’d originally intended, what with her soul being trapped in hell and her body being—well, wherever that thing ended up, I’m not keen on relinquishing her. As you have failed to uphold your end of our bargain, it seems our partnership has come to its unavoidable end.” He rose from the table in a cloud of smoke, the fat cigar lodged into the corner of his mouth. “Now, if that’s all, I’m a very busy man, and—”
“Youmustallow me to reclaim her soul,” I said, suddenly frantic. “To reunite it with her body before she dies. There’s still time, Sebastian. She deserves better than lingering in hell, and you know it.”
He glared at me a long moment, then said with another smirk, “The way I see it, Lord of Shadows, you should be thanking me.”
“What ever for?”
He resumed his position at the head of the table, taking another puff on the cigar. “I’ve spared you the ugly task of killing her yourself. This way she’ll never even know abut our arrangement.”
“Ineveragreed to killing her. That was your term for it.”
“What would you call ending her life as she knows it, then? Tearing her from the ones she loves, forcing her into a service from which she’d most certainly recoil? What would you call eliminated one’s every last choice?”
“I did not sign her original contract.”
“No, of course not. You merely agreed to alter the start date.”
“I never should’ve accepted your terms.” The lava inside me sputtered to life once again, burning a hot path to my throat, though I was admittedly more upset with myself than with the demon presently taunting me. “The natural order is not something to be twisted and bent to one’s will, Sebastian. We must respect it at all costs, or what are we left with? What do we become but a rabble of unconscious ghouls, roaming the earth like the primordial beasts of old, tearing one another limb from limb for the pure sport of it.”
