“Yes, push me into the blue.” She gestured to the far end of the room, by the arched window where the sliver of moon bled through the glass.
As I nudged the ladder down the shelves, she said, more to the books than to me, “Death struggles with his duty. I can’t say more than that, but... it’s not something anyone walks away from whole.”
I hesitated. “What exactly is his duty?”
She was quiet for a moment, running her fingers across the spines. “He ends things. People, yes. But also dreams, choices,moments. He closes the door everyone else gets to keep open. Not one of us wants that job.”
I tapped my finger against my leg, picking at the hem of my dress. No wonder he carried himself like he did. “Last night,” I said softly, “he collapsed. We were at an inn, and he was feverish, shaking. I found these deep red gouges on his back, it looked as though something had clawed into him. He said he was fine, but... I was scared.”
Feodora stiffened. Her hand froze on a worn leather spine. “If he said he was fine, then he was.” Her tone clipped the sentence. Final. No elaboration. Warmth gone.
Another dead-end. And maybe I should’ve expected it, everyone here guarded their truths and I began to wonder if secrets were sacred currency.
“Found it,” she said abruptly, pulling a thick indigo tome from the highest shelf and letting it fall to the floor with a heavythud. Dust exploded in a mushroom cloud. The cover hung half-torn, its edges curled in the manner of old leaves.
I eyed it warily. “That thing looks like it’ll turn to ash if I breathe on it.”
“Then don’t breathe,” she said, grinning.
Feodora climbed down the ladder and hefted the book with surprising ease. For someone who appeared as a frail grandmother, she handled it as though it weighed nothing. Without ceremony—and with what I could only call literary blasphemy—she marched it to the desk and swiped everything off the surface in one grand sweep. Papers, scrolls, delicate glass orbs—all gone as she dropped the book with a spine-jarringthud.
She was odd, this woman.Fate.Zero respect for literature, apparently.
Thumbing through the ancient pages, she dog-eared a few without remorse before landing somewhere in the middle. Onthe page was an illustration of twins. Two young women, close to my age, their faces sketched in old ink and shadow. Lines spiderwebbed outward from them, names scribbled in looping cursive at each intersecting point. At the top, in faded yet careful penmanship:A. Wylde.
My heart stuttered. That was the name Nemo gave me. The one I’d searched for, the one that led me nowhere but an eerie article and a footnote on a man who dabbled in the occult. Gentry, I think.
Feodora pointed to the twin on the right. “That’s Alice. She’s the start.”
I tried to follow Alice’s line, but it ended abruptly, a road to nowhere. Her sister, Margery (Maggie) had the longer thread. Her name tangled with a man with the surname, Tempest. And from there, the branches sprawled. The ink traced bloodlines down the page, every union and birth a faint reverberation of the original curse.
“But that makes no sense,” I said, frowning. “How is Alice the start if Maggie married into the Tempest family?”
Feodora shook her head. “That I cannot answer. This curse… it hides. Shields itself from even us. You must uncover it. This is the only help I can offer.” She tapped Alice’s face again. “Start here.”
I studied the two of them. Sisters from the late sixteenth century, the year barely legible in the top corner. My stomach twisted. So this curse had been bleeding through centuries. The Tempest women weren’t just unlucky, they were doomed from the very beginning.
I traced the lines down. Past names I didn’t know. Past generations I’d never heard spoken aloud. Eventually, I found them.
A blank space, then my mother, Lucy. Below her, alone—Astoria.
The paper trembled between my fingers.
Above my mother’s name, there was nothing. No woman before her. No link. Just a smear of ink where a name had once been. My grandmother’s name had been wiped clean, even from Fate’s accounting.
“If you’ve had this all this time, why am I just hearing of it?” My voice cracked sharper than I meant it to, but I didn’t care. “Nemo told me he couldn’t help me. For months. Years, even. And now suddenly, I get a name scribbled on a scrap of paper like he’d done me some great favor, and you justhappento have a book with the same name tucked away on your celestial bookshelf?”
Feodora didn’t blink. She turned a page. “We guide. We don’t interfere.”
“You call that not interfering?” I gestured to the massive, cursed family tree staring back at me. A death sentence written in ink.
Feodora finally looked up, eyes steady. “Would you have listened if we gave you everything up front?”
I didn’t answer. Mostly because I wasn’t sure.
But something cold slid down my spine, because the truth was, what if a part of mehadn’twanted the curse broken? What if, somewhere between chasing Death and being chased by him, I’d stopped seeing the curse as the problem? The thought made my head spin.
I settled my anger at the missing name on the family tree. It seemed nothing was safe from our families malevolence.
