“You’re the best, thanks Elizabeth. I’ll be back with some later dinner.”
One second her long arms were coming around me in a tight hug and the next she was rushing out the door, her phone already held against her ear, and the coffee I had bought for myself in her hand.
I had worked for the Kapoor family for the last ten years, ever since Piper gave birth to Ishani. As their full-time nanny, I rapidly became a fixture in the family. At the time of my hire, they had believed me to beElizabeth Rhodes, a nineteen-year-old college student.
It wasn’t as if I could tell them I was one hundred and forty-six and that I had been cursed to never age.
Every piece of my life operated with an expiration date, a time stamp. If I stuck around too long, people would notice and then they’d talk. Even if it took a while, eventually, someone would discover I did not age. Magic was something humans could notmake sense of, and I did not feel like becoming a test subject, even for the sake of science.
Ten years was perhaps too long to work for the Kapoors. Just the other day, Piper asked what skincare I had been using, but the thought of leaving them was painful. Especially considering what they were going through. I thought I could afford a few more years, even if it meant lying and pretending to be working on my doctorate. I knew though, that my time with them was coming to an end.
Almost two years ago, a tumor was discovered in Ishani’s spinal cord. It was fast-growing and cancerous. We’d spent many nights this way, taking shifts as she slept and went through various treatments and surgeries. She was in remission, proven by a long stint at home and life returning to a level of normalcy. Until she had another seizure a few weeks ago, landing her back in the children's hospital.
The room number sloppily written in marker on the whiteboard mocked me as I dwelled on Grim’s warning. I took a sip of the coffee meant for Piper, the one Death put his lips to. How long would she have? A few days? A week?
Death was coming for her, and I was the only person able to stop it, except that I knew firsthand the cost of such magic.
Someone would have to take her place.
two
Astoria
June 1925
The shape of a man stood just off the side of the road, half-hidden in the trees. For a second, I thought he wasn’t real—just a trick of the shadows or the crash rattling my brain. But then he stepped forward. Calm. Unhurried. As if he’d been waiting.
I knelt in the middle of the road with Beatrice in my arms, my knees soaked in blood that wasn’t mine. She was breathing. Somehow, impossibly, she was breathing.
My husband wasn’t.
The world cracked open.
I tried to wave the stranger down. “Help,” I said, but my voice cracked. I couldn’t make it loud enough as I pointed toward the wreckage. The car was smoking and James’s body was slumpedover the steering wheel, head turned at the wrong angle. I didn’t let myself look too long.
Beatrice whimpered. She was covered in blood, but alive. I tried to wipe her clean, scrubbing at her gown with my palm as if that would somehow erase the stains. Guilt built rampantly in my chest, as I worried the stranger would see me for what I was.
A murderer. Isn’t that what I had done? Murdered my husband. One second he was climbing out to help me, the next he was slumped over, in a pool of crimson and glass.
When I looked up again, the ghostly shape was gone.
I blinked, frantically scanning the tree line. Maybe I’d imagined him. Maybe there’d never been anyone there. Maybe none of this was happening.
Then he appeared again—closer this time.
And Bea went still.
Her body tensed, locked in place. No breath, no heartbeat. Like someone had pressed pause on her life.
I screamed.
And he knelt in front of me.
His eyes were dark, bottomless things that pulled the world out of focus. The smell of blood vanished. The bite of the wind, gone. Even the pain, my torn arms, the glass lodged in my leg, faded to nothing. There was something not quite human about him, something that made my skull throb as I met his unblinking stare. His lips curled into a sneer, revealing a mouthful of sharp, pearly teeth. Slowly, he dragged his tongue across them; a predator savoring the moment before the kill.
That’s when I understood who he was.
Not a man. Not a bystander. Not a rescuer.
