“If I take your place,” I said, my heart hammering hard—too hard, catching wise, it seemed, to this sudden conspiracy being formed against it. For, if I understood correctly, the muscle would have to cease beating for me to become as this thing was—a shade of death. A courier, he’d said. Of souls… “If I agree, Phineas will live. Is that the trade?”
“The life would be yours to grant—or to hold—as you see fit,” said the monster. “Should you bequeath that life to this child, it would grant him a long one but… know he will traverse that life without you. Never can he know what became of you. And then, decades from now, when the time comes,youwill be the one to perform the task that you now seek to prevent me from completing.”
So long as that moment remained far, far away from this one…
“He’s clever,” I said, my voice quavering, “and resourceful. He will find his way.”
Though I forced myself to speak with conviction, I couldn’t bring myself to feel it as wholly true. Phineaswasall of those things—tenfold. But he was still just a boy.
How could I leave him utterly alone in this heartless world?
Yet I could not bear to let him go with this stranger. Especiallynow that I knew therewassomething I could do to stop that from happening.
“This world is harsh,” said the monster, his words echoing my own thoughts. “It is my opinion that you deceive yourself into thinkingIam the cruel one when, really, it is you. But in abandoning your nephew, you domea kindness by releasing me from my duties and my oath, freeing this tired soul. Knowing you trade your soul, your life, your destiny for his, and that you will serve in this capacity and this role until the day you find someone to willingly change places with you… do you still wish to take up my scythe? My oath? My burden?”
“My destiny,” I said, extending my hand for the scythe, “I face it now.”
“Uncle Renwick?” came a small voice from behind us, and I turned my head to peer back at Phineas, who stirred on the mattress, eyes still thankfully shut, shadowed underneath by dark circles. “Who are you talking to?”
“No one,” I told him. “Not a soul. You must have been dreaming. Go back to sleep.”
The boy obeyed, most likely because he could not fight against the illness that lulled him back into the arms of sleep—that close cousin of death.
I would much sooner sleep have him thanthisdark relative.
“You are ready to take the oath?” asked that ominous figure, drawing my gaze back to the awful blackness within that hood.
“Quickly,” I said. “Before he wakes again.”
51HELENA
Renwick.
It seemed a fitting name. Sharp and quick, but also lyrical and, in a way, elegant.
I let the scene unfold before me, in awe of this version of Grim that, from his dated attire, our rustic surroundings, and the absence of any of his tattoos, I could gather was a memory.
As the two figures spoke, making their deal, I held my breath as Grim,myGrim, took the scythe from his opponent.
The moment he did, the tool, the reaper, the former reaper, vanished, unfurling to mist and vapor just as Sir Black had done.
The boy turned his head away, resuming a previous position, and Grim seemed to wake up.
Frowning, tears burning his eyes, he peered at the boy, his nephew. Then, after raking a hand through his hair—which currently lacked its white streak—he hurried to the door, which he opened.
I rushed to meet him there, but the instant he stepped out, something strange—somethingelsestrange—happened.
Grim blipped out of existence before reappearing with his back to me, as though the threshold represented some invisible portal that sent him straight back into the house.
“No,” he muttered, gripping his hair with both hands now.
“Grim,” I said, “I’m here.”
I surged forward, desperate to go to him, to embrace him, to let him know he wasn’t alone anymore. And that I’d come to get him.
That invisible barrier worked the same way for me as it had for him, depositing me in a flash back into the darkness and the night instead of allowing me into the house.
I whirled to find him pacing now, anxiously glancing from the doorway he could not get through—that he could not see me standing in—and that small boy he’d been forced to abandon.
