Death is My Frenemy Rewritten (Book 3 of the Rewritten Death Chronicles)

Chapter 19: Breathtaking Lies

"You've telling me you've been collecting books for almost eighteen-hundred years?" I wondered.

Death made a clicking sound with his tongue. "Well, collecting maybe isn't the right word. I borrowed them."

My mouth fell open. "You stole all of these books?"

There had to be thousands upon thousands of books in here.

"With Greed and Envy come impulses to steal what others have. Books seem to satisfy the urge."

"It must be nice to place the blame of all your poor decisions on your Seven Sins."

Death arched a brow at me. "I can assure you, whoever I took them from are long gone now and have no use to them."

"Because they're dead."

His mouth quirked just a little, but he didn't grin. "Some of them arrive here without me doing anything at all. One day a new shelf appears and then the next..." He opened his gloved hand. "Poof. It's filled."

"Poof," I repeated incredulously.

Death slinked somewhere behind me, and I could feel his power like something sinister and silky lingering in the air. "You see, Faith..." He placed his gloved hand over mine in a heart stopping moment. Lifting my hand in his, he outstretched my arm and pointed my finger toward the starry ceiling. "Good books, they go to Heaven," he whispered at the shell of my ear. He lowered our hands together toward the ground. "Bad books go straight to Hell."

I glanced down at his gloved hand on my wrist, knowing he could crush my bones without any effort at all. "I didn't know books have souls."

"Oh, I wager there are many things I know that you don't, sweet Faith." I could hear the grin in his voice, feel his warm breath at the side of my neck, and I thought about how he logically shouldn't have any warmth to him at all. His gloved thumb sliding down from my wrist to my palm, which he rubbed in a slow, tantalizing circle.

I shivered, and I realized my breath was caught in the air. The temperature of the room had plummeted.

"Are you cold?" Death asked, and it came out like a delicious purr.

I turned toward him.

His green eyes always wicked, and his crown of bones stark white against his longish black hair from candlelight on the wall beside us. He lifted his hands and traced an outline of my shoulders, down my arms. Then he pulled back and snapped his hands in the air in a small, quick movement, as if shaking dust off a carpet. Black fabric unfurled from nothing from his hands like rippling black shadow, transforming into black cape.

"May I?" he asked, holding up the cloak. "Wouldn't want you freezing to death now, would we?"

I gave him a skeptical look, before nodding in agreement. He looped the cape-like garment around my shoulders. It was heavier than I thought it would be, made of the softest fabric I'd ever felt and instantly blocked any chill from my body. But it was Death who seemed to warm me the most, as he started tying the silken tassel of the cloak together.

"In your letters, in the dining hall," Death said, and I struggled to concentrate on his words as his gloved fingertips buttoned the cloak two notches from the tassel to secure it in place. "You mentioned Hell would need to freeze over for me to kiss you." He let his hands fall away from me, but the heat he'd left behind lingered. "Understand, Faith, that can always be arranged. It would take a much greater hurdle to keep me away from what I want."