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"....don't even get me started on the romance scenes that Kat is graciously spoiling us with in this book — really had me giggling and kicking my feet the entire time." - From an early Netgalley Review for "DEATH IS MY RIDE OR DIE," now available for pre-order everywhere books are sold!

My hand lit aflame against the handle of my blade––a blade, which was still wedged deep into Victorian Death's throat. Do not move.

Light bled into his veins like a poison, igniting his blood as it momentarily paralyzed him.

With only seconds to spare, my head lifted all around, waiting for the image of Death's corpse. Whether it was subconscious or not, he'd projected his soul to me before, and if he did it again, maybe I could use it as an anchor to get to his body. But the was nowhere to be seen, and Death was breaking free from my hold.

Death's knee lifted and smashed into my gut, knocking the wind out of me. He was gone in an instant, vanishing into a black mist. My knees hit the cushion on the throne, and I caught myself before I fell forward, struggling to heave in a full breath.

"NO!" I cried.

Hands tore me away, and I was lifted into the air. I slammed my weight down to the ground and threw out my arm, hurling a rage of light into five shadow guards. They disintegrated into smoke, ash swirling into the air.

Trapped in this endless dance, Death's voice whispered in my head like velvet. Cat and mouse.

My heart pounded in my ears. I turned toward the court in a whirl, scanning the throne room as I clutched my stomach. "Show yourself!" I screamed.

Where had he gone?

The courts people were shellshocked, trying to evacuate the room, but the shadow guards were keeping them in. Anarchy ensued, and my eyes widened as the castle around us began to deteriorate right before my eyes. The illusion of brick peeling away like wallpaper, until there was black. Endless, frighting black.

And in a clearing, at the center of the throne room, stood Victorian Death. He was staggering, clutching his bloodied neck with a trembling gloved hand. His head bowed, drawing attention his crown, which had been knocked sideways, that long black hair curtaining over his face. My dimming blade remained imbedded within his flesh, and he was...laughing. Laughing hysterically, like a psychopath.

Coldness swept down my back like a caress.

It should have felt like a victory to see him again.

Instead, it felt like the war that had only just begun.

He appeared again like a ghost, like before.

Death. My Death. Standing right behind Victorian Death with his hand on his shoulder. The puppet and the puppeteer.

Victorian Death reared to his full height, with his gloved fist wrapped around the burning blade buried in his neck, his other hand clutched at his chest over his heart. He looked up at me with black blood dripping from his lips and paling skin, but his health versus my Death's was heart wrenchingly improved. Victorian Death grinned, radiating shadow from his body like deadly tendrils. In comparison, my Death stood slightly hunched at the shoulders, frail, malnourished, sickly, horrifyingly so. However, the most disturbing part was the complete lacked any expression or life in his eyes, like his personality had fled this realm before his body had.

It hit me like a punch to the gut, how little time I really had. I hurled myself down the stairs with a dexterity I had not known I was capable of. Pure, raw instinct had clicked in. I was a live wire. I was strength. I was courage. I was focused. Ready for anything.

I'd reached the bottom of the stairs, the air around them rippled like a mirage, and they were both gone.

"What the hell?" I muttered.

"Faith!" Ace crashed into me. His hands were still bound by magic, and there was blood dripping down the sides of his face from a wound on his head. "The memory––it's fragmenting––"

"There's no time," I hurried. Holding out my hand, I grit my teeth and willed another blade to appear as I slashed apart the binds of his hands.

Ace stared down at his hands and mine in shock. "How did you––?"

A menacing boom vibrated apart our surroundings like lightning striking down on the room.

"Start that portal!" I commanded.

The courts people were warping away like a dream disintegrated. What happened next in this memory played out over the whirling fragments lie a film. In the whirl of energy, I saw Romeo seducing the court into a grand dance, their eyes seduced by the pink of his lustful power. From the throng of people, he selected three men, and brought them up those endless stairs to the throne. Victorian Death stood from his throne; his gloved hands outstretched as shadows raged from his body in pure unrelenting chaos. He was wielding a dark spell, and it consumed the room like a plague.

"None shall be spared!" Death's monstrous voice bellowed.

Suddenly the courts people were screaming, their shrieks like distant cries in the wind right before shadows plummeted down their throats. Their bodies writhed, ghastly, gruesome transformations overtaking their mortal bodies that made my mouth fall open in in pure terror.

Forsaken?

He'd turn them into Forsaken.

All of them, turned into monsters. Except for seven men. The Seven Deadly Sins kneeled before his throne with those seven stones around their neck.

My heart plummeted at the realization. The Forsaken...were the price. To divvy up the Seven Deadly Sins curse, to lesson his own suffering, these souls had been devastated by his dark power. Now they were faceless beasts roaming the realm of the Unknown forever.

The man that I had loved did not exist after all.

He was a ruthless, merciless, irredeemable monster.

"Come on!" Ace jarred me into awareness as he shook my shoulders hard. His hands, they were no longer bound. "It's time to go. If we stay here any longer, we'll both be lost forever."

Our faces were close, but I could not process his words. I felt detached from my body again, split into two different people. I could leave him. I could leave him before he ruins me, just like he did before.

The broken world pulsed around its edges, the warlock tugging hard on my wrist. "Faith, come on! Before it's too late!"

But I did not move. I stared bleakly over Ace's shoulder, a rippling portal hissing out behind him, bringing me back to the night everything changed. The night I'd jumped into the Unknown to save Death.

So much had changed.

"We'll find another way to bring him back," Ace said forcefully, though I could hear the wavering in his voice. "I promise you. But this isn't the way––" His eyes were roaming around us, and in. my peripheral, the black void surrounding the room had crawled over half of the stone wall. "Fuck! I've never seen anything like this, come on!"

"You asked me what I remember," I said, grabbing Ace's shoulder in a formidable grip. "I remember...everything. This is my destiny, not yours. I won't let you get in the crossfires of what happens next."

Ace just stared at me with wide eyes, and I could tell he wouldn't leave me. And I realized with a heavy feeling in my stomach that the immortal I had entrusted my safety in had finally reached his breaking point: Ace was too afraid to stay. Suddenly I had a horrible feeling in my gut that this fear would lead him to his death.

And I knew. I knew what I needed to do.

A smile trembled upon my lips. "I'll see you on the other side."

"What? No. Faith, wait––" I threw back my hand and hurled light into the portal behind him, before shoving Ace toward the swirling chaos. Ace tried to get up, but I pushed him back down. I couldn't bear to look at the betrayal in his eyes as the portal went wild and lurched out, dragging the warlock into its depths and hurling him into its depths before it slammed closed.

My chest heaved, and I clutched at my tight throat disbelief of what I'd done.

Around me, the world fell apart like an apocalypse, raining down fragments of stone and ash. I rolled back my shoulders and willed myself to focus even as my life now hung in the balance.

Where are you? I demanded in my mind.

There was a light tug in my chest, that invisible tether making itself known. And like a beacon pointing the way.

The library.

Victorian Death's library. I needed to get to him, before it was too late.

Falling into a sprint, I forced my fatigued body past every limit I thought was possible. The world seemed to warp around me, the hallway outside of the throne room swaying right to left, glitching as darkness consumed my peripheral, like some sort of simulation losing its realism.

The floor. A piece of it was missing ahead of me, the floor zigzagged as though an earthquake had raked through this room. My arms pumped harder. I leapt over the gap in time, my legs lunging and my hands catching myself as I landed and tumbled across the ground and got back up to my feet. I turned to look over my shoulder as the world behind me sucked into a terrifying black vortex

I threw open the two heavy doors, entering the grand library. It was dark, dim, like it was night, but the colors of the room different than Victorian Death's. This version was drained of color, cast in a cold, eerie blue light. My breath sucked in as I recognized this version of the golden library as where I'd found Death's corpse. Had the worlds merged somehow like Victorian Death and my Death?

I jogged forward and came to a slow stop. Bending, my hand reached for the dead Forsaken body on the ground. I turned it over, fresh silver blood leaking from its chest where its heart had been torn clean out.

My head tilted up. The ceiling that had once been swirling of stars was a black void, and from its horrible depths, Forsaken began to crawl out with monstrous hisses.

When I tried to move, the ground became tar beneath my feet. I lost my balance and fell forward, the darkness clung to my hands and bound them together. I tugged hard, shadow like thick molasses keeping my fingers from opening and closing.

"Your vessel is fatiguing."

My head snapped up, adrenaline rattling my teeth. Victorian Death stood just twenty feet away from me, his menacing frame intimidating.

"Why Heaven would allow an immortal soul exist in such a breakable mortal body is beyond my comprehension," Victorian Death continued in a purr, the epitome of arrogance in that arched brow. "It's almost as if..." His pinned his bottom lip between his teeth, dragging over it. "They wanted me to have fun picking you apart."

"I'm not here to have fun," I said slowly, evenly. "I'm here to stop you."

"Mmm." He strut toward me, a black panther taking in its juicy prey, his gloved hands clasped behind his back. "You know, you weren't supposed to find out this way A part of us were rooting for you to come around on your own and remember." He side-eyed me playfully. "But you know us. We get bored."

He turned his head to the balcony to my left, where he'd clutched my soul and dropped me, where my skull had split apart, and I'd died. His mouth curved with a sinister laugh.

"We thought for sure a little spill would snap you out of it," Victorian Death whispered at the shell of my ear, now standing behind me as my head trembled with rage. "Clear the cobwebs from that old, decrepit soul of yours. He thought it might kill you, and we didn't want that, now, did we? No, we need you..." He was rambling, slipping into an unstable version of himself. "Sometimes we like to gamble, though. I thought you might survive the fall. But, alas, I was wrong." He laughed again as he scuffed the floor with his boot. "I guess these marble floors are harder than I thought, after all!"

My chest heaved with adrenaline. "Listen to me. None of this is real. We're in the Unknown, the realm of lost memories and souls. When you killed Ahrimad, your body fell through the portal, and you're––"

"Dying, yes, I've gathered that, my sweet," Victorian Death said with an eerie cheerfulness to his voice, rubbing absently at his bare chest with his palm. His brows dipped inwards in puzzlement. "Why am I here? I should be with the Seven. This isn't how this was supposed to be. No, this is not at all how I remember. Memories, though, are mysterious in their shifts and change. In their biases..."

As he stalked back into my field of vision, and as he crossed into a beam of light from the demented portal above, and my eyes widened as his healthy features drain to that of Death's dying corpse. When he exited that eerie light, he'd returned back to the façade of Victorian Death.

My stomach felt like lead.

"Trauma is a fickle villain, isn't it?" Victorian Death asked, turning toward me. "Pathetic. How sad. To exist in fragments, even in a dream..."

I tugged hard at the shadows, my shoulders straining. "This isn't a dream, Death. This is real. If we die here, we die for real."

Sweat misted Victorian Death's forehead, and his mouth curved into a wry grin. "I'm not one to cower in the face of a romantic tragedy. If anything, I thrive in a cruel finale."

I tugged hard at the shadows of my wrists, and my vision swam with a swirl of dizziness. "You psycho son of a bitch," I growled. "Release me!"

His eyes swooped half-closed in a lazy, exhausted manner. "Your fear smells almost as delicious as your soul will taste." His tongue slid across the tips of his fangs. "That, I am certain, Neriah."

"Faith. My name is Faith Williams."

He visibly cringed, rubbing at his heart again.

"And you...are Alex," I continued shakily. "Alexandru Cruscellio. Your parents were Phoebe and Malphas Cruscellio––"

He covered his ears like a little boy and started laughing, the deep, insane cackle of a madman.

"Your childhood was robbed from you," I shouted over his laughter, "your mortality was robbed from you, too. And when you were given the choice to begin again, when you tried to start over, you made a choice to rob another life. For the sake of power, pride, greed––"

Death's head snapped up with a monstrous roar, his mismatched green eyes flaring to life. "Stop!"

"You used her power to free yourself and you got what you deserved ––"

"I didn't mean to kill her!" Death exploded. "I didn't mean to..." He shut his eyes and winced with a deep, sultry laugh. "But god, did her death taste so fucking good..."

Tears misted my eyes. Death clutched at his skull, laughing again like a madman.

"Make things right and come back with me," I said, prying the dead words from my dry lips. "I know you don't want things to end like this."

His hands were lowering from the sides of his skull.

"You cannot run from your demons when they're a part of you," Death said. "Cold, hungry, heartless, this is my making. This is the illusion of a man that you fell in love with."

His words didn't align with Victorian Deaths. No, he was coexisting as two different men, like his subconscious was splitting.

"I'm not leaving here without you," I maintained.

"You don't understand," Victorian Death whispered. "This is what he wanted."

"What who wanted?"

His lips tightened in resistance, his jaw tight. "Lucifer."

My stomach churned at his name, distant memories flashing to the surface of my conscious.

"He wanted me here," Death said slowly, forcefully, as though he had no control of the confessions now. "He wants you here, too. To weaken the mortal realm. He... wanted you to bring me back."

My blood went to ice. Death clutched at his skull, laughing again like a madman.

His lips twitched into a snarl as something furious and unstable overtook him. "You're just like them!" he bellowed. "Those mortals in those goddamn stands in Rome that wanted blood. You don't understand me. You could not fathom what I endure. All you know is what you've made me. All you saw was the monster, not the survivor. And you killed him, too!"

Death rose to one foot, and then the other, his face hardening to a mask. He held out his gloved fist with a snarl, his scythe manifesting into his grip with shadowy flames, like a horseman summoning the apocalypse.

"You do not know what true sacrifice is," Death said. "But you will, Faith. Because the moment you bring me back, you will sacrifice every precious moral you thought you had. And you will give them all to me. Willingly."

An eerie chill slipped down my spine, but I kept my stare unflinching, fearlessly against his.

"If you kill me won't end your misery," I said. "You and I both know an execution like this will not satisfy you. Not with me. What you want is a fight. A fight to the death. A fair one. And this isn't fair."

"You're right," Victorian Death agreed. "This fight is not fair. How about a hand?"

He lunged forward with his scythe and swung out in a hard, calculated strike, and I had little time to react as I tore up from the shadow with all of my might and rose my hands to protect my face. Metal sliced through the air, smeared with crimson as the weapon arced the rest of the way down. The weapon twirled skillfully to his side.

Pain.

I fell to the ground to the ground with a harsh gasp. Looking down at the bloody places where my hands once were.

Blood sprayed across Death's deadly features. My blood. His mouth parted, his tongue swiping out to lick his lips, spreading the bright crimson. "Your power burns like a sun. But even the sun can collapse in on itself..."

He strode closer, leather creaking as he gripped his scythe harder. Those wicked eyes flicked to the ground at my hands, and he laughed. Laughed like a lunatic, laughed like he'd won. Because he had won. He had me at his mercy.

Everything in me felt wilted, but I would not go down a coward. "Do it," I grated. "Kill me already."

Victorian Death reared back with that deadly blade, but his expression shuttered violently. "Shut your eyes."

"I won't," I hissed.

"Shut. Them!"

Blood. So much blood. I could barely keep my eyes open. "I won't."

His expression went frighting blank. "Life is a stubborn but fragile little thing," he whispered. "My poor angel. You never stood a chance against the dark."

Then his hands started to came down with the blade. It had happened so fast. One moment, Victorian Death was there, looming over me like a ruthless god prepared for slaughter, and the next...

He was headless.

The crown of bones clattered to the ground.

Time seemed to slow. And the scream lodged in my throat never left.

When his scythe clattered to the ground, the sharp collide of metal to marble brought me back to colosseum. When Death had sliced Ahrimad in half and then succumbed to the ghost of the blade in his own chest. The blade fragmented to the sand of lost time.

Victorian Death's headless form remained standing as though the gravity in the Unknown had not yet reached him, that menacing regal cloak rippling and flogging at the air like a black fire that wouldn't die. As his cape gently fell like a curtain, the silhouette of Death appeared standing behind him. My Death. His large, pale hand, with fingers that ended in blades were dripping in black blood. Victorian Death's blood. He lashed out again in a quick, predatorial movement, as he shoved Victorian Death's body roughly to the side, where it disintegrated into ash.

My body swayed. When I fell, Death followed, landing halfway on top of me. His thin shoulders were hunched as cradled me, his eyes like a demon with the irises consumed in black.

Stay with me. I watched his lips trace over the words like a lullaby, but I could not hear them over the earsplitting whistle in the air.

It's not your time, cupcake. It's not your time, I promise...

My blood pooled around us like a horror film, like a sacrifice. I was shaking so hard from the loss and the pain that it felt as if I were seizing, or maybe it was his limbs that were quaking. Our bodies were one unit, suffering together in this torment. But when his lips touched mine, I found solace in a dark star. I tasted his blood. It dulled my senses in a cocoon of brief bliss. That sweet, toxic venom, pouring into me. He'd bitten his tongue. It dulled my senses in a cocoon of brief bliss. I squeezed my eyes shut as it wet my dry mouth, letting it fuel me as the world came down around us.

It's mine.

My throat hitched as he pulled away, and so did his, except with a painful gasp. And when his body rolled off of me, our roles reversed. I pushed up from the ground in alarm, pulling him frantically into my lap. My hands, healed, ran over his cold, stark white face. My voice, desperately calling him back. But his eyes were rolled into his head as he seized, as he stiffened.

As he wilted.

How my heart wilted with him, despite it all.

"Death!" I shouted, tears blurring my vision. I shook his shoulders. "Fuck! No, no! Death! Hang on!"

A monstrous roar rattled my spine and jarred me into the awareness that we were not alone. A massive, hunched mirrored Forsaken landed on all fours to the library floor. Then another. And another. Soon, we were surrounded, and the hair at the back of my neck stood.

My mind honed in on one word: survive.

They were reaching for Death, their sinewy limbs and their screams straight out of my worst nightmare, and I had no other choice but to fight them off.

"Get back!" Light raged from my arms, and I cried out with a roar that came with it a great force of energy. Energy that exploded out of me and took me down to my wobbling knees, slamming into one of the creatures and burning a hole straight through their head. I looked down at my palms, illuminated by a bluish white aura, just before another Forsaken came down and leapt onto my back. It clawed into my neck, and I cried out, punching into its face with another surge of electricity.

Light consumed my vision as I rose to one foot, and then the other, power swirling around me as the edges of my vision blackened. I arced my arms down and shot them forward, a portal appearing like a swirling mirror.

My power illuminated the darkness surrounding us, and in the chaos, I saw their faces like hell was raining down above. Hundreds of Forsaken summoned the black void of the library's ceiling, crawling toward my light.

And that was when my power burned out.

The world rocked around us, and the ground gave a great, unsteady tremble. The Forsaken backed away, retreating, and pure dread sliced through me as the floor began to crack apart.

I was so fatigued that when I grabbed Death, I briefly fell to one knee to the floor and nearly collapsed. Taking both of his cold hands in mine, and I tried to pull him toward the portal I'd formed. His once hulking frame was severely malnourished, but I was so weak that it physically pained me to move him. My joints ached, my shoulders screamed as though they had been torn deep into the muscle, and deep in my bones, I knew something was wrong with my body. With my power. I'd reach some sort of draining point with my energy and pushed past a point of no return.

My feet slipping over my blood on the floor as I strained to pull Death in a panic. This couldn't be the end. I had him. My hands clutched his again, a scream ripping my throat as I hauled. And hauled his weight across the floor.

And when my back hit the portal, a gasp escaped me as it grabbed me like tendrils of silvery water and sucked me in like a black hole. Darkness hurled all around me, and although I couldn't see Death, I could feel his hands still in mine. But they were slipping. And I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe.

When light finally broke through, my body was thrust from the Unknown. I rolled across a concrete floor, bruising with every crinkle of my limbs like paper machete. My heart pounded and thrashed against my ribs, and I couldn't remember how to breathe. Was I dead?

"Faith? FAITH!"

I knew that voice.

My head was turned at an awkward angle, stuck. Through blurred eyes, I saw Death's pale, frail hand, limp in mine. Feet pounding against the ground. Someone rolled me over, and I felt something at the base of my neck snap back into place. Bones. A horrible wheezing sound escaped me as I inhaled a long, ragged breath.

"Oh, thank you, God! Thank you, God, you're alright, kid..."

The woman hovering over me, wracked with worry, had my mother's eyes.

Aunt Sarah.

I tried to speak, but it came out as a gurgle as warmth slipped from my lips.

"I'm here." Her tears were splashing across my cheeks, but I was too exhausted to speak. Was this real? Was I dead? "You're safe now. It's over. It's over."

"Death," I croaked. "Get. Hurry... Lucifer. Get..."

Aunt Sarah leaned back to look at me, stilling.

Her image wavered as my consciousness threatened to close in, but I caught the confliction in her expression. Time. There was no time. No time to No room for hesitation. 

And she was hesitating.

I gripped my aunt's collar suddenly in a vice grip, the terror in her eyes reflecting off the light blazing within mine as I commanded, "Bring me my father."

The words carried with them an ancient power that overlay my voice, spearing out every last ounce of my energy. My body gave into the exhaustion as I collapsed to the ground, darkness slamming away the light again.

There was no peace in this place of rest. No, in the black void of my unconscious, I dreamt of what had once been, of the memory that what had irrevocably changed me forever in Victorian Death's dungeon.

I dreamt of the day that Alexandru Cruscellio had freed the Devil.

WELL?????????!!!!! *insert keyboard smashing*

GIVE ME YOUR BEST PICK UP LINE FOR DEATH FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER ASAP!!!

GUESS. WHAT. I'M HAVING A BOOK SIGNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AHHHHHH IT'S HAPPENING!!! Saturday, September 21st at 4:00PM, I'm celebrating the launch of the second book in my Death Chronicles, DEATH IS MY RIDE OR DIE! Get excited because this book lives up to the word RIDE in the title!!!!I'll be signing books and I'm SO excited to meet my readers face to face and have a good ol' time! Last year was SO much fun and I met so many lovely people and did an awesome Q&A!

Will you be there????

Can't make the event? You can also buy limited signed and personalized copies of BOTH of my Death Chronicles. Links in my Wattpad bio!

Thanks so much for your support!!! Until next time, Cupcakes!!

xx KAT <3