HELL F*CKING YEAH, BABY.

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On that rare occasion that the 'Prince of Darkness' fell asleep, he expectedly slept like the dead. Either that, or he was still fevered by demon blood.

My hand throbbed, and when I looked down at my palm, bile threatening to climb up my throat. Gently grabbing Death's wrist with my left hand, I lifted it up, and his talon slowly retracted back into his finger and out of my palm, where it'd embedded almost all the way through my hand. The pain stabbed at a greater level, my vision splotched, and the thought crossed my mind that I might pass out as I pressed my hand down into the comforter to stop the bleeding.

As gently as possible, I tried to lift Death's arm out of my lap. My heart burst into a faster pace as he stirred in his sleep, his lips moving over soft words. He turned over onto his stomach with a groan and muttered something incorrigible about 'smashing skulls' before he curled onto his right side.

My gaze lingered a moment on the two jagged V shaped scars in his back, before I slid off the bed. The ottoman at the head of his four-post bed was flipped over, and various items were scattered on the floor. The room was a disaster area, confirming my suspicions that the "ghost" of Death's corpse had come and swept me into the in-between. Blood trickled from my cupped palms, and I realized I'd zoned out with the fatigue in my brain. I picked up his discarded black silken shirt from the floor and wrapped it around my hand tightly.

I'd been closer than ever to Death's unconscious and that's why things had gotten so hectic. I recalled the way the Forsaken had brought to life Death's labyrinth of memory, making him think that he was talking to his past selves and then turning them all against him. It made me wonder just how much power the Forsaken had in this realm and how they were or could effect this memory.

I had to find Ace. He always knew what to do, as Victorian Death had said. But I could feel my palm filling my own blood and I knew my power of course wasn't healing my hand, and I figured the best thing to do was to clean the damn thing before I left. I had no idea where his talons had been.

I cast one last look at the Prince of Darkness' sleeping form. He was just a dark silhouette against dark sheets, and I wouldn't have seen him at all had there not been light coming from the cavernous tower directly above his bed like a skylight. What an odd place to put his mattress, directly underneath that towering space.

In the mirror over the bathroom sink, my hair was a little disheveled, but I looked surprisingly well rested and didn't jump to critiquing my appearance for once.

A shiver worked its way down my spine like icy chill. Cursing under my breath, I slowly glanced over my shoulder, to find the doorway empty. Except for that white cat, Circe, who strut across the doorway from the outside, her tail swishing as she paused to look at me before she scurrying somewhere else in the room.

Clenching my fingers against Death's shirt on my palm, I reached for a bar of soap but realized the faucet on the sink didn't run water. I remember what Death had said about no running water and cursed under my breath. How the hell had he turned that water on again? I moved my hand around the flaucet. "Turn on. Water on. Water flow. Water...flood. Water do something."

The sink started to drip, my eyes widening as the water began to flow. I quickly unraveled the shirt and tried to keep my stomach like steel as I rinsed the wound with water and soaped it up the best I could. The stab wound luckily hadn't gone all the way through, but I was confused as to why it wasn't healing. I must have fatigued all of my power in the in-between.

"Did we fuck?"

I still startled and dropped the soap into the sink, scrambling to grab it and place it back on the mantel. But I missed the mark and the silver soap dish fell to ground with it and rolled like a disc across the floor. It was stopped by a bare tanned foot with black markings, and my wide gaze lifted up to a tall shadowy figure filling the doorway.

Victorian Death stood shirtless; his trousers unbuttoned low enough to see that trimmed trail of hair leading down his taut stomach didn't stop below his pants.

"I asked you a question."

I tore my eyes away from his well, crotchual situation, feeling my face heat up in awkwardness that I'd even looked. "Do you even make a sound when you walk?"

"Answer me." His voice was quiet and didn't need any assertion. Just his eyes alone were a deadly reminder of how powerful and cruel he could be in an instant.

"No, we didn't," I muttered, biting my tongue before I added something else like, Like hell I would.

"You are bleeding."

"I have a cut."

"That smells worse than a cut." His eyes fell on my hand covering my palm. My heart raced as he held out a glove hand, and I knew he must have slipped those on. "Let me see it."

"No, thanks."

His arm dropped to the side, the offer vanishing of brief kindness like smoke. "You were in my bed. I want to know why."

"You don't remember?"

His jaw muscle twitched. "Would I be asking you to fill in the gaps if I knew?" His deep voice drawled out slower, like he was talking to a moron

I grated my teeth. "You were...inebriated," I said.

His eyes intensely stared at me. "Inebriated."

"Demon blood."

His expression did not change, but there was an aura to the air that seemed to electrify the air with his displeasure.

"I was taking a nightly walk," I continued, since I sure as hell didn't want to know where that displeasure would lead, "and I saw Kalace helping you to your room. Even though I feel is the last thing I should be doing, I couldn't just leave you like that––"

He waved his hand through the air, cutting me off. "Unnecessary details. I only want to know why you were in my bed."

"Because you wanted me there." His head jerked a little at the words, and I felt my face heat. "You wanted me to stay and take care of you, is what I mean. I must have dosed off."

"And you're..." He glanced at my hand. "Unscathed otherwise?"

I wouldn't assume he was concerned about my well-being­­––that would be a fool's mistake at this point––but seemed awfully focused on my hand. And of course, it wasn't just the physical wounds he had caused but the emotional turmoil building inside of me. "I've never been better," I answered at last. "Could you step to the side and let me pass, please? You're crowding the door."

Death tapped his fingers on the door frame, before eventually shifting to the side. Walking past him was like stepping past a giant jaguar with its jaws open, and I could have sworn he inhaled me as I passed by.

"Lying is certainty not your sin," Death continued, once we were both in the sitting area of his bedroom, "Miss..."

"Faith," I said, turning toward him.

Death narrowed his eyes. "Right. That. What a hapless forename to give your child. I normally do not address people formally here, or follow silly mortal rules, for you I will make an exception to avoid such"––His face scrunched up­­––"Christian name on my tongue. That simply will not do."

My attention skirted to the side, to a table with a tall candle holder and flame waning away wax. "Candle," I said. "My surname is Candle."

Death tilted his head down. "Candle," he repeated in deadpan. If he had any nerves that were alive, I'd definitely be on the very last one.

"Yes. Miss Candle. That's my name, don't wear it out."

Nothing to see here, just 'Death' and 'Candle.'

Victorian Death leaned his hands on the back of a velvet black couch with a sigh. "Yes, lying is evidently once again is painfully not your strong suit. However, it is a sin you are willing to break. There may be hope for you yet to become interesting enough for me to spare for a while longer."
Great. "I won't hold my breath."

His mouth curved unexpectedly, the low drone of his voice like a purr. "I wish you would."

It was a dangerous game. His deadly charm.

Amongst many things last night, I do not recall dismissing you."

A big, phony smile splayed over my mouth as I turned toward him. His expression was the epitome of arrogance. "May I be dismissed, Your Dreadfulness?"

The corners of his mouth lifted, mirroring my feigned pleasantry. "You think I'd so quickly dismiss a lady who I spent blocks of forgotten time with? You could be a thief, for all I know. Or a spy."

Here we go again. The paranoia. I had to physically bite down on my lip to not make a comment, and Death made a clicking noise with his tongue.

Circe stood up and stretched back on her hind legs, before pouncing forward and leaping toward Death. He caught her easily in his arms and she rolled over onto her back to be held like infant. She purred loudly in his arms, and his mismatched eyes glowed slightly. "There, there," he murmured.

It was so unexpected and heartwarming to see how he held her. Despite my adversion to this Death, I found it adorable. "She's like your baby," I said.

Death's smile dipped somewhat. He smoothed his finger over Circe's ear. "Circe shows me glimpse of what I've forgotten when I have an...episode. I remember fragments of my.... illness...and our conversation while I was bathing, and then...nothing on my end." Death straightened, inhaling deeply, perhaps out of habit, since I hadn't noticed him breathe yet. "But Circe saw me walking to my bedroom, and she saw me close the door behind me with you on the other side with me. She heard a lot of commotion in there, but the door was closed. Then there was a long stretch of silence, like we were sleeping. Then your scream rang out..."

He set Circe down and glanced down at his hand, his thumb talon extending as he examined it. His head turned in my general direction. "You really should let me look at that wound. It's still bleeding beneath the bandage."

"I'm quite alright," I said. "Your Highness, I would appreciate it if you released me. I have go find Kalace. I'm sure he will want to know you are up and about again."

Death just studied me as I spoke, in an unnerving way, like he didn't quite understand me. It was as if he'd tapped into the catlike side of himself that likened him to Circe and it hadn't yet dulled.

"Not to mention, you have that event coming up..."

"The Nocturnal Ball." He blinked at last and turned toward a small bookshelf beside him, raking a hand through his shoulder length black as he pretended to look through the glass panel at the books. "I plan on delaying it another day, for timing's sake. I do like the idea of keeping my guests on their toes. And above all perhaps, I'm not so sure my date is prepared to spend a majority of the ball at my side."

My pulse exploded in my ears. "Your Highness, I'm certain you don't mean..."

"You." I could see a wane of a smirk in his reflection in the glass, before he turned toward me with a stony expression. "I choose you as my date."

"But you haven't even asked."

He strode toward me now, although stride wasn't the word for the languid, slinking movement of his legs. "What would your answer be if I asked you properly to be my date?"

"My answer would properly be no," I replied.

When he moved, I moved at a distance away from him to the side, and we circled like the sun circling the moon but never touching. It was like a dance, and we were well rehearsed.

He cocked that scared brow over his lighter green eye. "If you're afraid how I'll react, perhaps you should take a moment to reconsider your words before you flap your lips."

"Or maybe you should let down your pride and acknowledge something is wrong with you if I'm afraid you will react."

A small smile lifted the corners of his lips, though I couldn't tell if he was entertained or losing his patience with me. We kept walking around each other like we were measuring each other up. "You must like my moodiness, since you are profoundly attracted to me and can't stop glancing at my unbuttoned pants."

I ignored that last part. "Attraction does not equate trust. Trust is something a woman needs to feel above all else."

That small smile on his lips stretched into a smirk. "This is understandable, though I will not be denied a simple request to stand by my side. Especially by a lady whose a lower class than I am, who I allow in my court only by sheer entertainment."

"Perhaps you can take a lesson or five-hundred on how to be a gentleman."

"I hear nothing but your heart. It's like a hummingbirds in my ears." His eyes fell on my lips, and I could feel my pulse race to an even higher tier.

"Nothing you have said has changed my unenthusiastic opinion of you or my answer," I said, stopping firmly where I stood.

His eyes darkened somewhat and he seized his stalking of me. When he took one step close to me, I shifted to where he stood behind Circe's couch, putting a piece of furniture between us and holding a pot with a wilted houseplant. The dark grin on his mouth brought pebbles across my skin. He looked at me as if he wanted to pick me apart and figure out what made me tick.

"You think a couch a dead plant can deter me?" he wondered.

"Choose someone else to attend this ball with you."

I watched him visibly struggle with the rejection. "Are you interested in another to escort you?"

"Yes, I am, actually." He is very different than you, and yet the exact same and that revelation is frightening.

"Name him," he said.

"Why, so you can kill him?"
"Yes," he admitted fast, his expression merciless. "Unless he is ugly, and you are an unpretentious woman. Then I will step aside and let his personality whisk you away into the unsightly night."

"If there was ever an ugly man after me, it is you, and you are so ugly on the inside that it corrodes through your eyes like a poison."

Death arched a brow. "As fun as this... dynamic... is between us, is your abhorrence toward me from our little playful accident in the dining hall? When I tore your corset?"

Playful. I scoffed at his choice of word. "You tearing my corset with your talons with the intentions to maul me is not playful."

"Maul you." He laughed, the sound rich and sparking an uncontrolled fluttery feeling in my stomach. "So dramatic. It was a good-humored swipe, and I was delirious."

"There was nothing good-humored about you ripping into my corset. And your delirium is not a good enough excuse for your­­—your unhinged behavior!" I could no longer hold in what I felt toward this Death and stormed closer to him with his dead plant in my arms. "You threw me over a balcony during your episode last night. Onto marble. Luckily, your friend, Kalace, healed me. Otherwise, I'd be dead."

Death blinked slowly with little to no reaction on his face. "Over a balcony? Brutal." His focus dropped briefly to my cleavage, then back up to my face. I felt his gloved fingers brush my bare arm before I realized he'd even reached out to touch me. "Were we fooling around beforehand?"

I tore my arm away from his touch, my face flushing. "No, weren't––what is wrong with you? Seriously? I just told you that you threw me over a balcony, and you think about sex?"

"As I have been consumed in my seven sins, I would not put it past me to get a little carried away with desire..." I didn't miss the pun or the flash of dark amusement in his eyes. "Did your skull crack open?"

"Like a melon," I said dryly.

He made a low noise. "Gratifying. I haven't the faintest memory of this encounter either, so I'll have to take your word for it that it was a beautiful, ghastly sight."

He spoke in such a nonchalant, 'Oh well' way that it made me furious. I couldn't just keep how I felt inside, either. "You hurt me. You hurt me, and that's what you have to say? No apology?"

"It's not personal. I have not genuinely apologized to anyone in centuries."

"Because apologizing when you are wrong makes you vulnerable and that makes you uncomfortable because you probably have trauma. That is not something to be proud of, it is something to improve."

My words seemed to register for him, but he was too stubborn to outwardly admit it. "You look fine and alive to me. With blood in your cheeks and a pulse that demands to be heard. You want your little apology though, sweetness? I am sorry you are not as tough in your delicate bones as you are in your rambunctious tongue."

"Ooooh! OOOOOOH!" I shook the plant in my hands for emphasis that I wanted to kill him, getting dirt on the floor.

"Enough with the damn plant already." Death snatched the ceramic pot from my hands, taking me halfway with it as I stumbled into him, my good hand landing over his heart to stop myself from falling. The connection was almost instantaneous. He inhaled sharply as I touched him, his muscles tensing and his face instantly taut. I could feel his gloved hands on my elbows, but his fingers didn't grip me or try to tear me away. The room seemed to darken, a sweep of shadows racing over his shoulders and around his back. Their whispers flooded my mind in vicious, incoherent whispering as their tendrils brushed against my hand.

Death's skin burned like furnace lay where his heart should have been, blackness spreading out from beneath my hand across his chest like a disease. When I tried to pull my hand back, I couldn't. And he couldn't move either by the straining muscle in his neck. My mouth gaped as it just kept happening, his illusion falling away like a curtain dropped, revealing the creature orchestrating it all. The monster was beautiful, like a toxin. It had ink black skin, massive horns that arched back against his skull and features that were so angular they were alien, nightmarish, even.

Death's true form stood before me like a restrained beast. Our faces were so close that I could see individual flecks of green in his mismatched irises. Something wicked worked its way free from their endless depths and suddenly I could feel him letting go of the fight, an invisible force snapping back at me like a rubber band.

A rush of merciless rage as red as blood, a dry thirst for desire clinging to the back of my throat and the sharp sting of revenge that disturbed me to my very core. The sensations rose to my neck and threatened to submerge me until I drowned, until I was blinded with my eyes wide open.

And all those emotions, all that vicious rage transformed into a clip of life, like a glimpse into a movie. I was looking over a tan, broad shoulder that I knew was Death's. He moved in the sauntering, determined stride of a warrior through a room of glittering gold, black markings creeping out from underneath his off-white shirt up his muscular neck. His hair was golden blonde, cropped shorter than Victorian Death's so that the ends of it barely reached the nape of his neck.

His head tilted back a little as he strode froward. He turned his body enough that I could see his face. The hardness to his features seem to slacken somewhat, his eyes broadening in awe. It drew the perspective up to where he was looking, to the high arches of a palace-like ceiling. The perfect night sky without city lights swirled at the center of the ceiling with the perfect summer day blue sky, coming together in a harmonious balance.

"You should not be in here, Guardian of the Gate."

Death's golden head snapped down toward the voice, drawing my attention to an elderly woman. She was dressed in off white colored pants and a shirt made of silken material with a golden cowl over her head. Her back stooped toward the top and around her neck dangled an intricate necklace with various colored gems.

Death's mouth curved with an easy charm. "What, are you supposed to be the book protector?" His voice was not as harmless as the young man I'd met in Rome, but instead a little more mischievous. I knew by his markings that this was some point after he was cursed and certainly not the innocent Alexandru I met in Rome.

"Not quite," the woman said, clasping her hands in front of her stomach. She had an eerie air about her that I knew Death could feel as well. "I have heard many stories about you over the years. Your reputation on the mortal plane proceeds you."

"I'm flattered­­––"

"It was far from a compliment, Alexandru." Her unsteady voice hit a cold, stern end, revealing her true sentiments toward him. "I have seen how you treated the mortals for centuries and I disagree with this...reawakening you have been gifted. Truthfully, I find it hard to believe a creature such as yourself can truly change for better or for good."

Death narrowed his eyes as he turned to face the old woman more fully, and his expression fell somewhat. If I didn't know any better, she'd managed to unsettle him. "Who are you?" he demanded. "You know my name, but I do not know yours."

"Here I was under the impression you knew all names, 'Death.'" Her weak, fragile voice held an amused, almost mocking edge to it. "Do not strain yourself on my account. You shall try to look through the window of mine eyes and see my wrongs and my kindness and my fears, but my soul will echo back to you like an empty room. I could put you in there if I wanted to." Her hooded head lifted enough to reveal the small smile on her lips. "For I am the one who keeps that Devil asleep."

I gasped for air as the connection broke. Victorian Death leapt back like an animal, tearing those shadowy tendrils from my skin. He recovered in a blink. One moment, a monster stood before me, and then it was the ghost of the man he once was again. As he rose to his full height, the shadow gathering behind him reminded me of a weapon, a curved blade half the size of my body.

The whites of his eyes flashed against the candlelight, but his expression subdued to a dim, chilling emptiness. A predator measuring its prey and a fatal thought he ignored.

"Never do that again," he said a rough, venomous voice. There was no need for an or else, I could feel it like the scythe just behind his back was curved around my bare throat. "Or I'll cut you in half."

The profile of his jaw was like the edge of a sword as he turned sharply, vanishing into darkness. The shadows in the room went back to where they were supposed to be, but I was stuck in the same place.

I watched that siren sing that snake to sleep, and I should have known, Victorian Death had said in the in-between. Her lullaby was not meant for him, but for me. I was the devil she sought to destroy.

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Author's note:

I have nothing to say after that chapter. EXCEPT.

Nobody:

You guys with Death's pants: BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooOooooO

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