ROSES ARE BLACK

DEATH FANS ARE BLUE

KAT ROCKS IS BACK

AND SO ARE YOU!

The humiliating things I do to make you ungrateful mortals giggle...

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Kissing him felt like approaching the breakthrough of either a cure or a poison to all this chaos.

And I couldn't decide which.

His heart had felt so alive beneath my palm. His lips soft, his hands gentle at my waist, so unlike Death, so unlike Death. And yet...

That surge of pain the moment we had kissed, the rush of adrenaline in my veins had been to fight and not flee.

But then that cold, blank vacancy had slid over his face. The image of it stained my eyes even as I squeezed them harder to shut it out. Shut it all out. As soon as I had thought there was a sliver of a chance Death was in there–– that my kiss had somehow awakened his dying conscious through Alexandru––that he saw me and he remembered me, vacancy had slammed over his features, and he was a blank slate.

Just like that, I saw Alexandru as something else. Not as Death, not as past Death, but an empty imitation of what once was. It made me question if any of this was real. If I'd kissed and talked to something not even connected to Death at all. Was it possible? The fearsome thought disturbed the already wavering foundation of my sanity.

Suddenly I didn't feel on track at all. I felt on the verge of losing control, I felt so damn alone.

I wiped away a stray tear with an aggressive swipe of my forearm and rolled onto my side, facing the closed door of my room.

There was no time to throw a pity party.

Caito had given me three days. I'd already lost one. Wasted one.

Uncomfortable again on this foreign bed, I rolled over again, I looked up at the ceiling of the Cruscellio's villa, I squeezed Romeo's backpack to my chest. This bag was the only anchor I had to home, the only concrete thing that truly separated me from this hellish realm.

I couldn't even imagine what Death was feeling right now, if he even felt anything at all. I hadn't allowed myself to think about it much and I wouldn't start now. I had to be strong. I had to stay focused. It was the only way I would bring him back.

I stared at the small flame of the oil lamp with that determined thought, my eyes drifting closed...

Someone was watching me.

Burned it to the ground.

I jolted upwards from the bed with gasp, my breath coming in and out in harsh rasps.

The room was plunged almost entirely in darkness. Though, I could still make out the lines of furniture in the Cruscellio's guest room.

With no recollection of having fallen asleep, I slowly swung my legs over the bed, my eyes sliding cautiously over every inch of the room.

Coldness washed down my spine, like a finger trailing downwards.

My bedroom door was ajar.

I stayed there for a long moment, staring into the dark hallway, frozen in fear.

I knew I'd closed that door. The longer I looked, the larger the gap seemed to become. Beckoning me to seek what awaited on the other side.

"Love it here," I muttered sarcastically.

I slowly, blindly reached down at the table beside my bed, keeping my eyes glued to that door for as long as possible. The wick of the oil lamp was smoking, as though it had gone out by itself.

I snapped my fingers, the spark of my light lighting the wick.

I had two options here. Stay in that bed and wait or meet hallway with whatever I felt was toying with me.

The wooden floor creaked as I crossed the floor to the door. Anticipation tightened every muscle in my body. I expected something climatic to happen, but the hallway was empty.

Still, I felt compelled to turn my head to the right. Down the end of the hallway, Alexandru had retreated from me after our kiss like a zombie.

I crept down the hallway against every cowardly part of my soul screaming against it. The room ahead, all the way at the end of the hallway, I recognized as the room where Alexandru had bandaged my ankle. I had a strong feeling Alexandru would be behind the door to my right, which was closed.

But I hadn't even glanced at his door. My eyes were narrowed in on the door ahead, how it was set perfectly ajar, just like my bedroom had been. I held my breath as I nudged the door wider. The glow of my oil lamp glowed a halo in my hands, I surveyed the room in a different light and landed on a chest at the head of the small cot. I hadn't even noticed it because of the blanket draped over it.

I stood in front of the dark treasure chest and knelt down to try and open it, but there was a lock. I looked down at the blanket on the floor and cast a look toward the door from which I came.

Setting down the oil lamp, I picked up the blanket and held it around the lock. White electricity balled into my palm, right before I grabbed the latch beneath the blanket. A small explosion sounded, the sound smothered by the wool blanket. My plan had worked!

Then I smelled the burning blanket.

"Shoot," I whispered, quickly stomping out the small spark of a fire with my foot. I listened to the quiet house for a minute or two to make sure Alexandru hadn't woken up, before lifting the top of the treasure chest. I lifted my oil lamp and head it over the dark void of the bin. 

 Inside, there were a few folded blankets and a tunic. I dug around to the bottom, when I found a massive roll of scrolls fastened together with string.

I pushed aside the blanket in the way and untied one of the scrolls, my breath catching in the frigid air as I flattened it out on the ground. The images on the right of the page made my skin crawl with goosebumps. They were sketches of a man, a corpse, with its heart cut out, beside a diagram of symbols and animals drawn around each side of the cult-like shape. One of the gruesome images was of a cat. And a black bird.

I knew instantly this spell was from the Book of the Dead.

"His mother had the book, too...?"

I looked to the left of the page. The foreign words shifted around on the page, letters bending and twisting, until I could suddenly read what it said. They were instructions. Instructions to bring someone back to life. The scroll was splattered with red in the corner, and I hovered my thumb over the dried edge in horror. His blood? My mind harked back to when Alexandru had emerged from the river, how I hadn't even given the scar at the center of his chest a single thought. I'd seen it so many times before.

Here, tied in scrolls across this floor, was the beginning of the world's deadliest tome. In his mother's room of witchcraft. A mysterious book that had chosen me to touch. It was lost to portal, just like Death.

I sat back on my heels with a different scroll in my hands. When I unwrapped it, there was a small leather bag inside. The image accompanied with this scroll were two figures facing each other. The one figure to the left had its hand outstretched toward the other, while the figure on the right appeared to be dying, their body sprawled upon a table of some sort. The writing spoke of some sort of rebirth, but this one was different than bringing back life. This one was about power. Blood sacrifice, read the page. I stared down at the small leather bag with dread in my gut, before unbinding it.

The oil lamp shone against the empty bottom, though I had a feeling this was intended to be filled by Death's mother.

Had this been what seemed to call to me in the middle of the night?

One of the jars on the shelves in the room made a clinking noise, before it shattered on the ground. A shadow darted across the floor.

Alarmed, I rolled the scroll back up fast and stuffed them back into the chest. I stood up fast, my eyes roaming around the room. Fur rubbed against my ankle. I would have shrieked, had I not clamped a hand over my mouth. The shadow of a cat skirted across the ground with a hiss. The light of my lamp briefly revealed its brown and white fur, before it darted fast into the hallway.

Once I checked to make sure I hadn't actually shit myself, I gathered myself enough to wander back into the hallway. I stared at Alexandru's undisturbed closed door, before casting my eyes down the hallway. I could see the shadow of the brown and white cat, its tail swishing side to side.

I followed the cat all the way to the Cruscellio's courtyard, when it seemed to vanish into the shadows. The oil lamp blew out and wouldn't light again. Cursing, I set the damn thing down, rubbing my arms to keep them warm as I looked around the moonlit garden.

I did a double take and froze. I'd almost missed the creature standing on the other side of the pool.

When I landed in the Unknown, in that eerie, endless forest, three creatures had tracked me down. They had no faces, no eyes, no mouth. Their skin was silvery and reflective, like a mirror. I called them the Three Crawlers. They'd tried to kill me, once. And they almost had. Until Caito, Guardian of the Unknown, had saved me. He'd given these terrifying creatures another name: The Forsaken.

The First Crawler prowled forward from his concealed spot, the light of the fake moon casting over his reflective skin in an eerie glow. He was the tallest of the Three Crawlers, the leader of his pack.

"Lost to your dreams?" taunted the First, his otherworldly voice carrying a crooning serpent across the pool.

"Lost to her dreams," echoed the Second in its decayed voice, emerging somewhere to my left.

"Has she realized yet," wondered the First, "nothing is as it seems?"

I kept my back to the wall, my hands fisting tightly, prepared to attack. "What's going on?" I demanded.

"You are safe in neither wake nor sleep when in the Unknown," answered the First. "Sleep is more dangerous for a wanderer. The darkness behind your eyes beckons the predators. Not to mention, one memory could bleed over into another."

"Bleed into another," murmured the Second.

I stared at the two crawlers in confusion. "Why are you telling me this? If it's a fight you want, I'll give you a fight. But don't fuck with me. You tried to kill me."

"Not kill you," corrected the First. "Free you."

The Third Crawler's growl made the hair at the back of my neck rise. Its massive silvery hunches reflected the Cruscellio garden as it prowled onto the patio on all fours from my right.

"I know what running for my life feels like," I snarled at the First. "Your buddy over there tried to rip my off my arm––"

"I cannot control Brute's animalistic instinct. Besides, you fired first." The First's head tilted to the side. "Remember?"

The tight muscle in my shoulders fell slightly. He was right. I'd been so focused on how frightening these creatures looked, that I'd almost forgotten our first encounter. How I'd landed in the Unknown and wandered around for hours in the dark forest in constant fear. Exhausted, I'd stumbled upon the Third as it prowled out from behind a tree. My first instinct had been to defend myself against such a massive, menacing looking thing. I'd fired my power toward it and missed, hitting the ground beside it. The Third had jumped as though startled, before ripping open its invisible jaws and roaring. That's when the rest of the Three appeared.

Carefully, I took a step closer to the First. Even from far away, I could see my reflection narrowed in his face. As if talking to a faceless creature with mirror-like skin wasn't spooky enough. "So what, you telling me you were trying to help me?" I wondered.

"Caito's rule remains unyielding," said the First. "You are running out of time."

Ah, so they were just here to taunt me. "You three are Caito's messenger monsters now?"

The third opened its jaws in a snapping motion, its hunches rippling with reflective muscle. I pictured the way its claws had torn into my bicep, and I shuffled back in alarm.

"Play nice," said the First, his faceless head angling toward the Third. "Mortals fear what they do not understand."

In my peripheral, the second stood hunched over with its back to me, watching the wind sway the grape vines hanging down from a pillar. Its head turned around like an owl and tilted its head, making my stomach turn. "Fear what you do not understand..."

"Then make me understand," I said, determined to figure out what these things were all about. "If you're trying to help me, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Because every time I think I get through to Death"––I thought of that blank mask after we'd kissed––"I feel like I'm putting a greater distance between me and him."

Suddenly, the Third hissed, although it sounded a lot more like, Shhhh.

"Forsaken are sensing we are near," the First said in a quiet voice. "The others are not like us. They are too far gone. They will either see you as food or a threat. Which is why all three of us must leave this pathway very soon."

My stomach felt heavy as the night sky above appeared to drape down the pillars, fading everything to black. "Wait!" I shouted, fearing they would disappear. If they were telling me the truth, I needed their help more than ever. "Am I doing the right thing? Should I keep following Death's memories the way that I am?"

"Hurry," whispered the Second. "Something awakens in the shadows. Speak in riddles only."

A chill raked down my spine at the Second's words. It was the first time it had not echoed the First's words. I looked up, staring through the pillars of the courtyard, into the Cruscellio's dark villa.

"In sleep, a clearer bridge is drawn," said the First, drawing my attention back to his mirror-like face and the slight indents where two eyes should have been. "On this bridge, you can stand and see each other on either end, two bodiless forms haunting across broken memory. It's a dangerous dance, to move closer together, when one side of the bridge is unstable. One wrong move, one wrong word, awake or asleep, will disintegrate recollections into the sands of frozen time."

I hurried to comprehend his words. "How do I speak to Death and make him aware of what happened to him, if he's in such a fragile state of unconsciousness?"

"This I cannot answer," said the First, the volume of his voice barely audible as an eerie hush came over the courtyard. "Only one has succeeded in a task such as yours, but many lost souls have tried to escape the grip of the Unknown."

I stared into each of the three creature's faces, understanding. "Including you."

The Three Forsaken now stood on all three sides of the pool ahead of me and looked down into the water. A chill slid down my spine, my feet shuffling forward as my bare feet reached the edge of the pool to do the same. I looked down into the clear water, my own reflection shimmering. My eyes lifted up, following the slight ripples in the pool, and my breath held for a silent moment. There, in the water, the Three Crawlers had faces. The First and the Third were men, the Second, a woman, all of which I had never seen before.

"Too loose or tight the tether," said the Three Crawlers together, "both souls lost, forever."

The temperature plunged, their reflections clearing with a howling wind.

The Forsaken were gone.

But I was not alone.

Movement slinked to my right. It was the white and brown cat, strutting out from behind a pillar. It slowed as looked over at me, pausing, before gliding forward and vanishing into the darkness.

I followed it through two pillars into the back entryway, where Alexandru had first taken me into his home. Darkness shadows every inch of this part of the house, except for the silhouette of furniture that my mind fashioned into shadow persons. I spotted another oil lamp sitting on a table and snapped my fingers a few times, lighting it with my power.

Sighing in relief that I had some light, I crossed into the Cruscellio's living room into another hallway, where I'd seen the cat slink away. At the far end, I could see the feline again. It had decided to sit down and was facing away from me, right at the edge of crossroad between two hallways to the left and right.

Suddenly the cats head flicked sharply to the left, as though it had heard a noise. I wondered what had caught its interest.

Suddenly I had my answer, as a large, shadowed figure crossed the opening of the hallway and strode past the cat, disappearing down another threshold of the villa. I saw nothing except for the outline of a regal cloak billowing out from behind them like black silken shadows.

My heart launched into a race in my chest.

"Death?" I hurried down the darkening hallway, cupping my hand around the flame so that the light wouldn't go out. "Death!"

The world muted, my heartbeat rebounding off my ribs with every slam of my bare foot against the cold ground. Everything seemed to slow down as I rounded the corner into another hallway, the outer rim of my focus fuzzy around the edges. Just like running through a dream.

Moonlight slanted over the stone hallway from the open windows on either side of me, the grapevines curtaining over the pillars of the courtyard swaying viciously back and forth into the hallway like a pendulum. The vines swung in one direction, a figure appearing at the other end of the hallway.

I stopped hard in my tracks, my eyes widening to their full depth.

Burn it all...

He was so massive that he crowded the entire width of the archway. An obsidian cloak hung from his broad shoulders, cascading down to the floor. Beneath that, he wore a high-collared black vest, almost Victorian in appearance. Haloing his obsidian black hair was a crown of what appeared to be made of bones.

He lifted his head, two furious mismatched green eyes gazing scathingly back at me.

No cage will ever keep me again...

His mouth did not move as the words echoed through my head, and everything seemed so silent, as though his figure were a phantom divided from me. Suddenly his cloak snapped through the silence like a whip against the stone archway. His lips curved, peeling back into a wide grin. His dark laughter echoed down the hallway, my heart pounding into overdrive. Red stained his sharp teeth, trickled down his chin to the floor.

Burn it all, Faith...

The oil lamp fell from my hand and shattered.

The floor caught aflame, a raging wall of heat catching on the plants and climbing up to the ceiling. It spread impossibly fast, a raging intention to trap me, as it encompassed all the vines across the length of the hallway and turned them into prison bars. And the fire was real. It snapped at my skin with vicious heat, burned my fingertips as panic tightened my throat. I lunged back and threw up my hand to shield my face as the flames struck toward me again like vipers.

Through the fiery chaos, I looked back through the blazing wall at the center of the hallway, where Death's regal form still stood. The blackness of his figure seemed to oscillate through the fire, before he disappeared like a mirage.

My eyes snapped to the open window beside me leading into the Cruscellio's courtyard. The grape vines were still aflame, and with no other way out, I dove forward and hurled myself out the open window. My shoulder connected with the stone on the ground and pain exploded in the bone. But all I could fear was the searing heat of flame, the sleeve of my tunic on fire. I rolled fast, turning over into the pool and plunged into the freezing water.

 
I emerged a moment later with the taste of metallic in my mouth and the smell of burning in the air. The water had grown thicker, warmer, the smell around me undeniable as my hands rubbed frantically at my eyes to clear them. The crimson sight of the water sending me into full panic. Blood. The pool was filled with blood.

Something brushed my back, and I spun around with a scream. It was just an object in the water. Something gold, a chest piece––floating to the red surface. The angry flames had consumed the outer edge like a prison, though it didn't touch the pool.

When I reached for the golden plate with shaking fingers, the chest pace rose higher and a body arched toward my hand, a neck and face emerging from the pool. Alexandru rose to his towering height from the blood, his hair slicked back with blood. I could tell it was him from his sheer size and his profile, as blood poured down his whole face.

He slowly turned toward me. I moved backwards as far as I could, my back hitting the ledge of the pool. When I turned to get out, the blood seemed to dissipate back into water, but my legs locked in place, like I'd stepped into a molding for concrete.

Coldness scraped down my spine.

There was nothing here for me. 

Nothing but tragedy...

When I looked back at Alexandru, he was gone. In his place stood a sight that rattled me more than anything else in this gruesome realm. Outside of the pool, directly across from me, another version of the Death had appeared. The Death I had suppressed to the deep corners of my mind, the last time I had seen him in our world. The sickly thin, pale, anguished ghost of the man I'd held dying in my arms. I could see through to the sharp edges of his bones beneath that hallowed skin, his arms limp, his head bent slightly to side.

Powerless. Frail.

His expression is what haunted me the most.

Vacant. Dead.

It reminded me of Alexandru, right after we'd kissed. Tears leaked freely from my eyes, though I didn't dare blink away this nightmare.

The mortals never wanted a hero in me...

His voice raged in my skull, rising like an impending doom. The flames crawled closer to the pool, the heat licking at my damp, trembling skin. His eyes slowly blinked, his head lifting out of that dead, angled bend. His eyes flickered briefly to life, fury striking like lightening within them. They mirrored the fiery blaze like a creature rising from hell.

They wanted a monster.

They wanted death.

The fire consumed the entire courtyard, feasting on us both.

I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, tangled in the blankets of the Cruscellio's guest bedroom.

***

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