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I awoke lying flat on my back with my hands crossed over my chest like a mummy. My eyes flicked heavenward, and I looked up at the cavernous tower directly above the bed. The one that had no visible stairwell leading to it but a balcony that indicated there were secret passageways.
Victorian Death's bed.
"Pleasant nightmares?"
"Ah, shit!" I bolted upward. Victorian Death lounged on the pillows beside me, his large body sprawled out over a collection of blankets and pillows. He lay on his side with his hand propping up his head and a sheet up to his hips. His torso was bare, and I tried not to stare at the incredible muscle show of his carved upper body.
"Um, why are your clothes off?"
He snapped the sheet off with a fast movement, showing me he was in fact wearing pants. "You were shivering, so I made a fire. I got warm."
I cast a look at the fireplace at the head of the bed, now roaring with flame. Considering the frigid temperature of the rest of the castle, this felt like a rarity. "You got warm."
"You're a fine listener."
"What I mean is, you get cold? Aren't you...dead?"
"My heart will rouse to life and tick occasionally. Especially when there's a stunning creature in my bed." When I looked back at him, his eyes were roving over me, and I felt my face get hot. A grin spread upon his devastatingly beautiful face. "You were moaning in your sleep. Was it for me?"
The ruminants of what I'd seen flashed before my eyes like a horror show. Death fighting off the mirrored creatures, the Forsaken. Had he resorted to eating them to keep his corpse alive?
"No," I clipped, and could barely catch my breath. Swinging my legs off the bed, I jumped down and pushed my hair away from my face.
I touched both wrists for a hair tie to quickly braid my hair but couldn't find one.
"Looking for this?" I turned over my shoulder at Victorian Death to find him dangling my purple hair tie from the tip of a long talon. He stretched the band with his fingers a few times and slipped it down his tanned wrist. "It is not my color, but I do insist you do without it. Your hair is lovely down."
There was something gentle about his voice, his behavior, that kept me on guard. Maybe it was his enigmatic expression, how his eyes seemed to be doing all of the talking. Right now, they were gleaming and testing and prying their way inside me. I felt flush.
"What happened to me?" I asked. "We were dancing in the library, and then I..."
"Fainted." He rolled over with a low noise as I moved out of his vision, his movement languid and lazy. "I find it happens quite often to females in my presence."
I strode around the room, fanning around inquisitively. "I fainted...and you put me in your bed?"
"By any chance, are you related to a parrot? You're like an echo."
"You don't have to be such a dick," I snapped, and his eyebrow popped up in a wicked arch. "You haven't exactly been welcoming toward me since I've arrived her."
"Maybe don't take it so personal, I despise everyone." Victorian Death rose from the bed and gripped the canopy post above his head, stretching out his shoulders like a massive cat. He sighed, scratched his pec and glided across the room. "Your corset is over there on the dresser, my darling pest."
I watched him run a hand through his dark shoulder length curly wavy hair in the mirror, confused as to why he was being so nice to me.
Crossing the room, I got one hand on the corset, when I felt his marked fingers slide over mine. He hadn't even made a sound when he walked. "A lady should never have to tie this herself. Allow me."
He stepped into me with the garment in hand and knotted the bottom of the ribbon along the back. Leaning down, he fit the ribbon side of the corset along my spine and pinned the first hook of the corset at the middle of my waist.
"You really should be more careful around here," Victorian Death said, clasping the front of the corset over my breasts as my heart raced from the intimacy of it. "The ribbon was tied far too tight around your ribs. You could have fainted before someone far less trustworthy."
I nearly snorted at the implication that he was to be trusted. His face was locked in concentration, and he showed no humor in his expression. He swiftly turned me around to tie my back, the feeling of him at my back making me feel a little bit dizzy.
"Where did you go in your sleep?" The question was like a caress against my ear. "You sounded so distressed."
My throat felt dry. "Nightmares have that effect on people."
"Indeed, they do, those torturous things." His flashed with intrigue in the mirror like two wicked, unmatched gems. "I'm jealous you can dream."
I turned toward him, mostly to free those magical fingers from my neck, but his hand remained on my nape, and he held me tilted back in his hand like a lover. My pulse rebounded off his palm. "You don't dream?"
His eyes drifted my lips. "You have to sleep to dream."
He released this hold on me, and I felt myself get colder outside of his embrace. Death turned his back on me and crossed the room in a few strides to leap onto his massive bed. Standing at the center with a wide stance, he tilted his head up, the knob in his throat sticking out as he did so. He stretched his arms over his head and tore down the canopy from his bed so that he could look straight up at the tower directly above his mattress. It was a miracle his pants stayed in place throughout the entire thing, and he hadn't flashed his whole dick.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
Grinning, Death tossed the canopy curtain to the side onto the floor. "Come stand on the bed with me."
I walked warily closer. "Why?"
"Because I need your assistance."
Though he was leaned slightly forward toward me, his feet balanced perfectly on the edge of his bed. His obsidian hair "Is it to button your pants and put a shirt on? Seems like you're having some trouble there."
He didn't even glance down at himself, but he did reach down and slowly clasp a single button on his trousers. At least now it wasn't up to just gravity but also that teenie tiny button of sanctity. His head remained tilted down as he gave me a look from under his lashes that told me the shirt request wasn't going to happen.
"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..."
Though I didn't understand why he needed me to understand.
Death lifted his hand, and I shivered as his thumb caressed my bottom lip. "So beautiful, and so...deceptive." He released me in a rough movement. "Tell me, do you think me a common idiot, Faith?"
"Excuse me?"
"Such a shame, how that pretender friend of yours will not be attending the ball tomorrow night," Death seethed. "I'll have the lying hog served at dinner with an apple in his mouth."
I turned toward Death in quite horror. "Who are you talking about?"
Victorian Death laughed. "Oh, my apologies, I forgot to tell you. While you were asleep, it was all uncovered. How there was an impostor Kalace in my castle. The shapeshifter turned himself into one of my guards and rendered the real Kalace unconscious. The phony is in currently in my dungeons. To be executed before my court."
"No, no you've got it all wrong––"
He clutched my forearms, walking me back into the wall. "You act as if you did not know. The two of you were awfully close, whispering and skulking about my castle. My cats hear everything, you know. They see everything. They saw what you did to me that night, the night I was inebriated. I know you're here to hinder my plans. How when you touch me, you go somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere you damn well know you don't belong."
My heart was pounding in my chest. Was this memory of Death aware of everything all along?
"Nightmares are a funny thing," Death said, his baritone voice lowering to a purr. "Those dark, painful, twisted things like thorns embedding into your heart while you sleep. Yes, I remember mortal nightmares quite fondly. Some say the true curse of immortality is remembering. That forgetting is a blessing the wicked are not spared, but I have to say, Faith, forgetting can leave one at a great disadvantage."
Our stares pinned against each other, and I knew my life was in immediate danger.
I struck out. Death's hand instantly came up to protect his face. He released a bestial noise as the light dissipated shadow pooling in his palm like instinct. The light hit is palm and ricocheted off of his power like polarizing material and came back at me like a rocket.
My torso collapsed inward, as his power slammed into my stomach like a fist, knocking the wind out of me. Another ball of shadows blasted at me, linking around my wrist. It hurled back a few feet into the wall, pinning my left hand back. When he prowled toward me, light spiraled in my right hand and I hurled it at his head again.
This time, both of his hands came up. The one countered my strike with two instantaneous decisions. His left hand darted outward, accomplishing a perfect shot at my right wrist and pinning my hand to the wall. While his left hand had snatched my incoming light from the air like a mitt. My eyes widened. My light swirled around and around with the shadows in his palm and turned into something else. Something powerful and unstable, crackling like lightning in his palm as the dark and light fought to take over each other.
He turned his hand over, and the mixture of dark and light fusing into his skin. It crawled up his skin, igniting the markings along his arm all the way up to the tattoos crawling up to his wicked face. He shut his eyes and groaned, as thought it had brought him pleasure and grinned real slow.
"I knew from the moment I saw you what your soul was made of," he said, my heart pounding as he neared. "You see, Faith, everyone here, in this castle, is a person that is dead. A soul that I keep animated. Except for the fake Kalace. And except for you. Whatever ploy you two fiends carry with you here shall die in a grand display of my excellence."
"Lucifer wants to alliance with the Fallen arriving tomorrow night," he continued in his mad rant. My body felt hot as his talon slowly traced my neck down to my chest. "I plan on thoroughly entertaining them. Tomorrow night, I intend on dividing my sins and merging them into seven tainted hearts. Seven worthy sacrifices."
My chest was heaving with adrenaline. "Why are you telling me all of this?"
"Because, Faith, you're the distraction." Death turned toward me, the color in his irises swallowed by black. It made my blood run cold. "I will use you to draw every scoundrel's attention at that ball. Enough to blind them as the night unravels. And then each and every last soul in this castle, including yours...shall die."
***
IJWEIOJFWIOEFIJOWE OH NO SHE DID NOT!
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Kat