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

Chapter 29: Pleasant Nightmares

"Your hand now?" Death asked, holding his bare, tattooed fingers.

I picked one foot up onto the bed. "Alright, I'm playing your game. Now what?"

His catlike eyes gleamed with a secret. "Now we levitate."

Death hooked his arm around me and scooped me up over his shoulder. Then he bent his knees and pushed off the mattress. I screeched as he propelled us into the air with little momentum, the narrow passage soaring past us and the bed narrowing to a tiny point below. The air rippled around us like a mirage, transforming. Death hoisted us over a railing, and suddenly we were in a hidden room.

He bent down and set me on my feet. I stumbled; the blood having rushed to my face. With my hair sprawled all over my face like Cousin Itt, I glared and picked hair out of my mouth.

"Seriously?"

"I did warn you, did I not?"
The room was small and dark, with just two candles on the wall lighting the way on either side, and another on a table. My eyes widened as flame danced over an onyx velvet cloth, where a row of colorful rocks gleaming under the candlelight.

"Well?" Death stood somewhere behind me, his presence like a fingernail teasing a path up my spine. "Do you like them?"

"They're...pretty."

"Pretty." He murmured the word under his breath with a low laugh, silent for a long moment. Then he stepped closer to stand beside me, and my pulse quickened with his closeness again. "I wonder, is that a word you'd describe yourself? Pretty."

"You don't like the word pretty?"

"Not to compliment an entire being. Your mouth is pretty. Your hair is pretty. You are not pretty."

I looked away from him. "Did you take me in here to insult me––"

"Radiant," he said. "You absorb the light, and it amplifies you into the most radiant person in the room. Even here, in this dim space. It's strikingly beautiful."

Death lifted the blue gem and laid it in his carefully in his palm. It dwarfed in hand, shimmering as he rolled it around against the candlelight. He glanced over at me; a small smile edged the corners of his mouth. "You remind me of this one. It matches your eyes."

"Where did you find these?"

He set the gem down, and the mood notably shifted. "I stole them. From the realm of Heaven. Seven stones, seven conduits that can withstand powerful magic."

"Seven sins," I whispered.

I could feel his fingers absently playing with the ribbons on my corset. "My Death curse is manageable. However, what Heaven punished me with, this plague of the Seven Deadly Sins, it is unbearable. It will only get worse. And it weakens me. It keeps my main vessel here, in Hell's castle, while my other mindless duplicates reap the souls of the living above." He held my back and turned me toward him, the candlelight angling over his sharp features and distorting them to something sad, misunderstood. And a little deranged.

"I don't want to be caged anymore, Faith. I don't want to be Lucifer's pawn. But as long as I am weakened by the Seven Deadly Sins, I am susceptible to him. You understand, don't you? You see that I have no other choice?"

The silence before my answer beckoned the correct words. The only words that would take me further through this labyrinth. "Yes, I do. I understand..."