*INSERT DIMBFF EMOJIS*
 IT IS TIME.

OHOHOHOHOHO OHHHH YESSSS. NOW THIS. THIS CHAPTER IS WHAT I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

I EXPECT LOTS OF WICKED COMMENTARY FROM MY CUPCAKES FOR ME TO READ. *EVIL PURPLE EMOJI WITH HORNS FACE*

            Everything felt numb, like I was dissociating and separated from my body.

Whatever was left of my broken heart wept at the sight before me. When he turned his head toward me, time slowed to a crawl, those haunting, drained eyes like two lifeless black buttons against the vacant, pale, sunken features of a corpse.

His hair was a pale, limp blonde, still shaved shorter at the sides of his skull in the style I remembered. Caked in places with a dark oily substance and mirrored liquid. A jagged cut sliced through his sharp cheek, the ridges of the wound dark with black blood, telling a story that he'd been injured by one of those Forsaken and hadn't healed properly.

I didn't know what to believe. I didn't even know if he was real, or if I was hallucinating, or if I'd lost my damn mind. But I forced myself to move toward him to find out.

As I neared, the nearly unrecognizable version of Death rolled fully onto his side as though startled, his eyes widening with alertness and his posture tightening. The bones in his face were too prominent, the outlines of his skull too well-defined, too sharp, the fleshy meat once in his cheeks hallowed out, malnourished. His body had leaned down to the point that I could see the slight indent of his shoulders, his joints, his ribs as he lifted himself up and pulled his legs into himself. Curled up, I realized, like a stray dog being cornered in an alleyway.

And I knew. All the horrors I'd witnessed in the Unknown had paled in comparison to what Death had been through.

I slowly lowered to my knees on the ground. Close enough to him for it to be dangerous. Close enough for him to kill me. But he just looked at me, and I looked at him. His head cocked, and he blinked for the first time since he'd laid eyes on me.

The question that beckoned to release from my mouth lingered between us.

Are you real?

Death pushed his hand against the bookshelf beside himself to lift onto his knees, though his eyes were still wary and neither of us made a move to touch one another. My heart was pounding. We stared at each other closely, the cold silence of the library between us. What if this was a sick, twisted hallucination? A nightmare made of smoke. What if he went away again?

He reached out his hand. The skin was so pale it was nearly white, and I could see the joints in his long, bony fingers. I forced myself to stay still, to trust in the madness that this was real. His sharp talon brushed against my cheek bone, and I could feel it retracting back into his finger as the pad of his thumb brushed my cheek. Slowly. Unsurely.

I watched his dark eyes glint with the tiniest sign of life against the black shadow of his iris, his marble-like features moving like water as they reflected my own emotions. Joy. Confusion. Sadness. Then...fear. It widened his gaze as he pressed his fingers more firmly against my cheek, and then pressed his lips fleetingly against mine.

"It's you..." Tears swept past his fingertips as he pulled back to look at me and moved his hand over my cheek to my neck, where my pulse rebounded off his palm. "It's really you, cupcake."

A sob almost escaped me. His deep voice sounded so drained, fatigued, like any emotion at all had been sucked out of it. But it was his. It was him. It had to be. All I could do was nod at first so that I didn't break down into tears. "It's me," I said. "It's really me..."

My hand looping the back of his neck and I pulled him in. His body felt so cold, hard ice against my warm body. His hands lay stiffly against my waist, but I could feel them curl into the fabric of my gown as he turned his face into my neck and breathed me in.

"You jumped," he said.

I squeezed him harder, tears working their way down my chin to his shoulder.

Then his lips touched mine, and I felt my world right itself. For a moment, a brief, deserved moment, everything was okay, and nothing could take him away from me again. He was right where he belonged and I'd won, if only the love inside me had the power to stop time forever.

Death pulled back with a shake of his head, and I could tell he'd almost lost control. He gripped my face with both hands with a ferocity, like he thought I might go away, and I held onto his shoulders for dear life in the same manner.

"Why?" he demanded, smoothing my cheeks with the pad of his thumb. "Why didn't you listen? I told you to choose you. I told you..." He shut his eyes briefly like he already knew the answer and kissed me softly. "Damnit, Faith..."

"You would have done the same for me."

His touched his cold forehead to mine. "You don't understand," he whispered. "You should have left me. Now we're both... fucked."

His words were so preposterous that I laughed off the confusion they gave me. "Trust me, it couldn't possibly get any worse than it already has." Considering Ace and I were practically lined up to be executed by Victorian Death. "How could I leave you? You have no idea what I––" I choked out. "I thought you were..."

Death visibly flinched. Like I'd hurt him, but then his hand touched his chest, and I realized it was not because of me. His jaw was clenched shut, his whole body visibly shivering.

"Might as well be," he said, and then his face pinched in pain as he bowed his head, drawing my attention to his chest. He'd peeled away a covering of Forsaken skin across his skin, revealing a black, rotted wound at the center of his chest. He ran his hand over the wound, and like a hologram, it revealed the ghost of small blade embedded in his chest. "It's my damn scythe," he murmured.

The library was so cold that my teeth chattered together as I spoke. "How do I remove it?"

When he tilted his head up, his black eyes bore into mine like a dare to face demise. "You don't." I noticed sweat bubbled on his forehead and dampened his blonde hair. "Only a death creature like me can touch the blade. You'd turn to ash."

"But you can't touch it either."

"Hence, why we're fucked. You need to go back, before­­–– "

"Alexandru!" a woman's voice shouted.

Death's head snapped toward the noise, and he went stark still. The woman's voice continued to wail out for help, and his jaw tightened with a rage I didn't understand. In the corner of my eye, I saw the ghost of an off-white garment of a dress as a woman crossed our alley of books.

Death pulled me to the side fast and behind a bookshelf and covered my mouth with his hand. "One last forsaken," he whispered at my ear. "Stay."

Stay. The word pounded through my vision and left a bitter taste in my mouth.

"Alexandru, help me!"

Death prowled down the bookshelf aisle, his talons flexing at his side as he turned around the bend.

"Alexandru!" the woman was sobbing now, louder, and I could hear footsteps on the other side of the shelves as mine, like she was running down the aisle. "Why did you let it happen? Why didn't you stop him––?" There was a gruesome wet noise, and I recognized Death's monstrous growl. Responding to it came a Forsaken's animalistic howl come through like a shrill shriek I would never forget.

My heart pounded in my ears. I raced to the other side of the aisle. When I peered around the bookshelf, I saw Death standing over a broken body. Bare feminine feet. An off-white toga and a swollen stomach. And blood. So much blood. The image of the woman disintegrated, the illusion vanishing and revealing the mirrored body of a dead Forsaken.

Death turned over his shoulder to look at me with wide, petrified eyes, as his expression closed up in an instant. He bulleted toward me. "I told you to wait there."

"Who is that...?"

"A ghost." He briefly touched my arm as he went, cold tingles spiraling up my arm as he spun me around. "I don't have time to explain. Nest opens back up periodically."

I swallowed back the spiraling of questions about that woman, albeit reluctantly.

We jogged down the book aisle and made a left, running down the marble floor. Scattered here and there were dismembered Forsaken bodies on the floor.

"This way," Death said, pointing a sharp claw to the books against the wall to our right. "We'll go behind the shelves. They don't go in there."

Our hands reached for the Bible at the same time, and Death gave me a curious look as the secret passageway opened. We moved inside fast and let the door shut behind us with the turn of gears somewhere in the wall.

"Make sure any mirrors are covered," Death commanded, and he started dragging furniture across the room. "I'm barricading the door in case they smell you." He shouldered a freestanding bookshelf to push in front of the way in which we came. "How'd you know about that book was the key to open the door?" he wondered.

"Lucky guess."

He gave me another odd look, before slamming it down behind a stern expression. After barricading the door, he moved around the perimeter of room, his movements slower and clumsier than I was used to. Human-like.

"How do we get that thing out of your chest?" I asked, adrenaline still making my breaths come out in harsh pants.

"Your guess is as good as mine." I watched him pull the Forsaken skin off of his torso like a jumpsuit, carefully winding it down to his hips. He pushed aside a black sheet covering a bookcase and gazed at his chest in the reflection, prodding at the wound there.

The room seemed even colder than the library outside. Goosebumps pebbled my skin, and I started rubbing my arms. "Tell me I didn't make it worse. With my, um, light..."

He back at me, his hand falling away from his chest. "No. It's getting worse on its own."

I startled as he smashed his fist into every glass row of the bookshelf, before pulling the sheet off that curtained over the top. A big piece of glass clattered to the floor, and a few knickknacks fell to the ground, to which he ignored as he fisted the sheet and stalked over to me.

As he neared, my hand climbed to my mouth. His skin was so pale I could see the black of his blood in his veins, and the wound on his chest looked terrible. Black and dark blue filaments stretching out from the dagger was like willow tree branches weeping out from his heart.

Like he was rotting from the inside out.

"Here," Death said without meeting my eyes, and I felt guilty as he'd noticed my staring. "You're shivering. And I don't have any body heat."

I took the sheet from his hand and wrapped it around my shoulders. It was some sort of table velvety tablecloth. "Why did you smash the glass?"

"The Forsaken can travel through mirrors and anything reflective. Learned that the hard way."

My eyes tracked him like a hawk as Death walked to perimeter of the room again. Even as I pulled the sheet in closer around my shoulders, that prickly cold sensation seemed to get worse, especially as he walked somewhere behind me.

"That wasn't nobody," I whispered. "That was somebody."

Our eyes connected.

"It's a long story, Faith," he said. "Don't make me prod at an old wound right now when I already have one that I'm dealing with."

Another mysterious woman from his memories. Another door in his eyes slammed shut in my face. And an indescribable bad feeling souring my gut. It made me feel on guard all of the sudden.

"We should be safe in here," Death said and slumped into a couch against the wall with a groan. The cushions were torn up and something had shattered in the corner of the room. The Ruminants of the objects on display in Victorian Death's secret compartment in his library were scattered all over the ground, like there was a fight of some sort.

"You're sure they won't come in here?"

"They only attack me when I try to attack them," Death continued, his eyes half-opened now. "Once they found out I can...eat them...I quickly I became their apex predator." He gave a sheepish grin. "I pissed around the perimeter of this room earlier."

I grimaced. "TMI."

Coming closer to him, I ran my fingers absently over the torn material of the upholstery.

"What's the last thing you remember?" I asked. "Before you arrived here in this library."

His eyes were just as trained on me as mine were on him. "We were in the mortal realm in the mausoleum. Ace. My father. You... " His features hardened. "Ahrimad. We destroyed him."

"You destroyed him."

His eyes drifted over my face, but he didn't look focused. "Yes, yes, I remember... And I remember him plunging my own goddamn blade into my chest."

"How is that possible if he was holding your scythe after he stabbed you?" I wondered.

Death's hand, which was lazily resting on the arm of the couch, lifted to rub his face up and down in a tired way. "He must have found a way to split the blade temporarily in two," Death said. "Chances are that this blade, the one inside me, is hexed just for his hand. He didn't expect I would actually destroy him for good."

"What about the other part of your scythe? Where is it?"

"Again, your guess is as good as mine. I haven't exactly been able to travel much around here––"

His words cut off as he buckled over in a brief coughing fit. My adrenaline fired again as I moved across the distance between us to sit down beside him and rub his shoulder soothingly. The coughing seemed to settle down as he sat against the back of the sofa.

"It'll pass," he wheezed out. Then he shrugged me off, shame filling his expression. "Don't coddle me. I'm fine. I might black out at some point, though." He'd said it so calmly and matter-of-factly.

"What?"

"There's no going around it, cupcake. I'm fucked." He looked over at me, a sheen layer of sweat misting his hairline. "Time moves slower here, otherwise I'd be dead already. I'm hanging on by a thread by stealing the lifeforce of the Forsaken and drinking their blood for sustenance. But it's not enough. My body keeps going into shock, and I pass out. Then I wake up and I'm alert for a short amount of time. At least, I think it's a short amount of time. There's no clocks. No sun. It's a damn––"

"Nightmare," I finished, pushing a strand of hair from my face. "We have to get you home." I looked around the room, my heart thrashing against my ribs. "Any idea how to open a portal out of here?"

Death coughed again, his eyes squeezing shut as he winced. "Door on your right and take the hallway all the way down. If you reach a black hole that'll send you spiraling into nothing for the rest of eternity, you've gone too far."

Looked like he was still his old sarcastic self. "Could have just said it was a stupid question, asshole."

"Portal would be useless right now," Death said, leaning back against the couch. "My soul is connected to my body." He raked his eyes lazily over my frame, which drew my attention to my glowing body, and also the hunger weighing down his gaze. "Yours isn't."

Shit. "Right, I'm astral projecting. My body is...elsewhere..."

"Elsewhere."

"I can't tell you. Not unless I....know you're real, I guess."

"You want me to prove I'm real this long into talking to me?" He smirked, displaying a set of razor-sharp fangs that looked a little more predatorial right about now. "Clearly, we missed a major lesson on figuring out who to trust."

"Clearly. We need to think of a plan."

"There is no plan, cupcake. If you're smart, you'll get the hell out of here before it gets much worse for me."

"Can you stop? I'm trying to think."

There had to be a way to take his body back with me to Ace. Or bring Ace to him. But how? I was getting better at the astral projection thing, but I had no idea how to bring an actual person back to my body.

"You're probably wondering where we are," Death began, and my attention snapped to him.

He didn't know I'd been navigating his memories.

"I think we're stuck in parallel universe," he said, still clutching his chest. "When I fell through, I landed here. This library, or at least, the mimic of it, used to be mine. From a long, long time ago..."

"The Victorian Era," I said.

"Yes." His held my gaze for a beat. "How the hell did you know that?"

"Lucky guess." Every word I said risked everything falling apart, but it was a risk I had to take. "To be here, in this place, with you. I...used a bridge."

"A bridge." He furrowed his brow. "A bridge from where?"

"A bridge between our consciousness. Death, we're in the Unknown. A realm of lost souls and memories. And you falling through the portal and landing here has triggered some sort of path. A trail of memories that you're leaving in your wake." I took a deep breath "I think the memories I've been following are the ones that are haunting you the most. The ones flashing before your eyes before you...well, die."

He stared at me in silence, unblinking. I felt oddly on edge, and I couldn't ignore the constant fight or flight sensation fluttering in my chest. "You were traveling through my... memories? To get to me?"

"It was the only way." My hand lifted to touch his face. He seemed to freeze deathly still, and it was like touching a sculpture as I ran my fingertips down the sharp curve of his hallowed in.

Death's eyes closed, and he lifted a pale hand to capture my fingers, the slight pressure behind his ice-cold palm like a warning. "Don't," he whispered, and I could see his fangs poking out from behind his upper lip. "I need to know what you've seen, Faith."

I let my hand fall, wondering if that feeling of anxiety thrumming in my chest was something innate. My body telling me that a starving predator was right beside me.

"I can't," I said. "Not now. I have to get Ace back here before VD tears his head off."

Death's hand squeezed mine. "What did you just say?"

I didn't want to ruin everything. I didn't want him to go away again. Not when he was here, finally. Suddenly Death gripped me by the leg in a hard grip, his mouth tightening, and I realized it wasn't just him not understanding the acronym.

"You said VD," Death said, and my stomach lurched at how his voice dropped to a low, predatorial low growl. "Victorian Death. That's... what you call him."

I just looked at him with wide eyes.

"I wasn't dreaming, then," he said. "It was...real. All of it." Something happened to him, his whole-body shuddering, his hand pinned to his chest, as though he were stabbed all over again. He squeezed his eyes, his teeth clenched together. "That doesn't make any sense,"

Something in the air shifted. A brief mirage that rippled over the room, making everything suddenly feel like a dream. I realized I'd closed my eyes, and when I opened them, Death still sat on the couch in front of me. He had that cold, dead look in his black eyes, and dread shimmied down my spine.

"You kissed him," Death snarled.

"What?"

"You made out with Blondie!" he thundered, hurling to his feet. "You stuck your horny little tongue down his throat. I saw it."

"You mean Alexandru?"

"Yes, Alexandru. All of them!" He clutched his head with a wince.

"Are you kidding me right now? You're jealous of yourself?"

"Don't turn this back around on me. You made Alexandru think you were a seductress. A goddamn siren."

"Oh no, no, no," I seethed. "You don't get to be mad at me right now. It's not my fault that you find me hot in every memory of yourself!"

He started pacing again. His nostrils flared, his dark eyes raking over my figure.

"You're about to be saved because of me, bucko," I said, "but you'll be withering away all alone if you don't apologize in five seconds."

"Well, I guess I'm withering away, because I don't apologize."

"Fine!"

"Fine," he snarled back. "I thought they were nightmares," Death maintained. "I thought you weren't listening to me...because it was a nightmare. I kept trying to tell you to go home. To get away from him, because he...because I..." He shook himself. "It doesn't matter. I felt like I was trapped on the outside looking in while you...while you kissed––"

"Yourself?" I suggested.

"You were grinding your tight little body against Alexandru like a cat in heat. You made him feel...things."

"Things."

"A fucking raging boner, Faith! All you did was breathe in his direction, and the dumb caveman practically gladiated his undergarments."

I bit down on my lip to hide my amusement, and he shot me a dark look.

"I'm dead...or whatever the hell this is... for five seconds," Death growled, "and you get further with my past selves than you ever did with me. How does a virgin neanderthal somehow have more rizz than me?"

He took a few furious breaths and raked his hand through his hair. "I'm holding onto my sanity by a thread right now. Basic instinct keeps dragging me under, driving me to primal instinct. The thought of you kissing another man..." He had to stop again, his talons twitching at his side. "It's enough to hurl me right over the edge and tear this whole goddamn realm apart."

"You. They're you." I reached out and gripped his shoulder, forced him to turn toward me. "And maybe, deep down, all along, you were there inside of your past selves. Maybe that's part of all of this. I mean, do you remember me in your memories?" My mind was reeling, struggling to understand. "Then you saw me get tossed off the balcony by Victorian Death, too."

His temper disintegrated almost immediately, and he went dead silent.

"Victorian Death. He tried to kill me. He levitated me off the ground and threw me over the balcony. And as it was happening, you appeared. It was like you were helping him. You had your hand on Victorian Death's shoulder, and this...this freaky blank look on your face. And then you dropped me. And I..." I tried to swallow the lump down in my throat, but it wouldn't move, and tears filled my vision. "And I..."

"Died," Death finished. He shut his eyes; his expression indignant, like he could picture it vividly now. "Then what happened."

I pictured the Three standing before me in that endless dark void, their hooded faces, their ominous words as they brought me back to life. The memory of it all stained my soul.

"The Fates. They gave me a second chance."

"A third."

His words jarred me into alertness. He had somehow moved closer without me noticing. His black eyes bore into mine with no trace of the mismatched green that I'd once known.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your third chance." His words were clipped, almost angry. "Your second was when I spared you."

The acute awareness that something was terribly wrong made my pulse pick up a notch.

"You don't seem surprised by any of this." Something moved in my peripheral. A shadow. My head turned away from him, slowly, like moving through water, and what should have been a sharp reaction of fear hit like a dull ache in my stomach.

There were two of him.

Two Death's.

One of Death's corpses standing in front of me, and the other one slumped on the couch with his eyes rolled back in his head. His head writhed somewhat side to side, his arms and torso twitching like sleep paralysis.

"He blacked out," I whispered.

"Your soul burned like a sun. I knew it was you."

Second Death finger tipped my chin up with his pointer finger beneath my chin, everting my attention back to his face. Victorian Death stood in front of me. His features were no longer hallowed in, his mismatched green eyes bright, and his hair a lustrous black amongst the crown of bones. A chill shimmied down my spine as he brushed my bottom lip with the tip of his retracted talon scraping against my tooth before he pinned my bottom lip beneath the pad of his thumb.

Victorian Death started to laugh, a deep, insane, sinister laugh, and I couldn't wrench myself free from his hold. The sinister noise echoed as Death's corpse appeared behind him, shifting to the side into my sight. His eyes still rolled back in his head, and his mouth worked in sync with Victorian Death again.

"For there is no shadow without light," Death said. "Our souls will always find each other, Neriah."

Fright slammed into my chest like a punch of adrenaline, and my surroundings washed away like falling from a great height. Ace stood in front of me on the other side, his eyes wide, his hands lifted just outside the ward between our prison cells.

"What happened?" Ace demanded in a whisper. "What did you see?"

I couldn't stop hyperventilating, gripping the prison bars in front of me even as the ward seared into my hands. 

I tried to make sense of what had just occurred. My heart somehow felt wrenched out of my chest. The pain indescribably real but phantom at the same time. It grew like a storm of chaos, betrayal in the form of a fiery rage that spread throughout my entire being.

"What he didn't want me to see," I said. "I think I saw the truth."

***

WELL??????????

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS CHAPTER, YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE THE PUBLISHED SERIES. SO DON'T WAIT, PRE-ORDER "DEATH IS MY BFF" NOW!

IMPORTANT:
I am THRILLED to announce that Book 2 of the published series will be titled "DEATH IS MY RIDE OR DIE."

 You guys. GET HYPED and go buy book one! This is going to be one hell of a ride, and thank you for being on it with me. <3

Until next time, hugs and knives!
Kat

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