“How’d you get into this room?”
I whirled around to find a short, angry woman. She looked a few years older than me with high cheekbones and bright-amber eyes that burned with a fire behind each iris. I hoped those were contacts.
A mess of wild brown curls spiraled past a slim waist to the leather belt at her hips, where she kept two sheathed weapons.
“I-I was trying to find an employee to ask to use your phone.
Mine’s dead.” I said, waving my cell. Now that I had to focus on coherent sentences, my mind felt hazy, like I’d been awoken from some sort of trance. “I have an emergency.”
“An emergency?” Her voice was mellow, softer, not quite fitting her harsh appearance, so I had to conclude from her unwelcoming affect this was not the place to make a phone call. It was time to cut and run.
When I went to maneuver around her, she blocked my way. Her hand rested on the gun on her belt. I had to think up a way out of this, fast.
“Listen, I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “My friend is in danger.
He’ll die if I don’t get help. I was looking for a phone in here, but I seem to have gotten . . . off-track.”
Her eyes narrowed. In a flash, she slid a gun out of its holster and pointed it at me. “Sit down and shut up.” She motioned the weapon toward the palm-reading table.
“Holy crap, okay!” I walked to the table, lowering myself into my seat. “Listen, I only have ten bucks in my wallet and a piece of gum that I found at the bottom of my backpack. The gum might be warm because I’m sitting on it.” She continued to glare coldly at me.
“Please don’t kill me, I’m poor.”
“Nobody is going to kill anyone, ma chère,” announced a rich, French voice.
My eyes unglued from the end of the crazy woman’s gun. On the opposite side of the room stood a young, strikingly handsome man. He leaned against a golden cane straight out of a storybook. It had a large octagon-shaped clear crystal at the top of it and carved foreign symbols down the shaft. The cane itself was mesmerizing, almost more so than the man that came with it. He wore a luxurious deep-purple suit and had shoulder-length stark white hair with a multitude of colors at the ends. Various ornaments and rings layered around his neck and his fingers, and he wore a top hat, which matched the color of his suit. It was tipped over his face, concealing his eyes.
“Do not blame yourself for your friend,” continued the mysterious man. “The Fates work in mysterious ways. Thomas will survive and you will meet him again.”
How could he possibly know about Thomas?
The man limped closer to me, favoring his left leg. I pressed back into the chair. Noticing my recoil, he stopped, and removed his hat, revealing abnormally bright violet eyes. Just like the eye on that mystic pamphlet. “On my honor, you have no reason to be afraid.
Not here.” He held his hat to his chest and bent low at the waist in a bow, and then placed it back on his head. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“Expecting me?” I switched my attention back to the woman beside him and the barrel of the gun pointed at me. “For what?
Target practice?”
Frenchy looked sharply at the amber-eyed woman. “Put the gun down, ma moitié! This girl is our guest!”
“She was snooping through your things,” Crazy said. “Plus, she smells strange.”
“I was not snooping. I was . . . browsing. As for your second comment . . . ” I sniffed at my armpit. “I can’t defend myself there.
I’ve been running around a lot today and I nervous sweat.”
“I told you a special guest was arriving today,” Frenchy said to Crazy.
“You did not tell me that.”
“I left you a Post-it.”
“And you wonder why we have poor communication?”
I shifted awkwardly in my seat. Hearing these two loons bicker back and forth was the last thing I needed right now. As soon as I had an opening, I was gonna bolt.
Frenchy winced and transferred his weight to his other side, leaning differently on his cane. I wondered what sort of injury or disease he suffered from to need a cane at such a young age.
“Trixie is my security,” he explained. “I own many valuable items, and we’ve had a few break-ins over the years. She can get a little overly cautious.”
Crazy, now Trixie, tucked the weapon back into her belt. “Sorry.”
“It’s cool,” I squeaked.
“Wonderful, now we can all start over,” said the man. “You may call me Ace.” Frenchy, now Ace, offered me a hand. I hesitantly reached to shake it and he kissed the back of my knuckles. The press of his lips burned, like a Totino’s Pizza Roll straight out of the micro-wave. I wanted to sharply pull my hand back, when those electric violet eyes bore into mine, and I was held motionless. Every muscle in my body relaxed, all my worries and my guilt about Thomas sinking into a deep abyss.
“I already know who you are, Faith,” Ace said with a mischievous smile. “I know why you’ve come here too. People can’t hide much from me, you see.”
“You’re the psychic.”
“The psychic title is for the money.” He gently released my hand.
“Have to make a living somehow, besides selling old books and crystals. To you, I am the warlock.”
If the Angel of Death, demons, and Carrion Angels could exist, why couldn’t a warlock?
“Where’s your beard, wand, and pointy hat with stars on it?” I asked.
Trixie snickered. Since she’d laughed at my joke, I decided she wasn’t a trigger-happy psychopath and had just been doing her job earlier.
Ace gave me a flat look. “Ha-ha. I’m not a wizard. Wizards don’t exist.” A smirk broke free on his stony face. “Although, I’ve worn a pointy hat with stars on it once or twice, but I was highly intoxicated.” He lowered himself into the chair in front of me, removed his top hat, and raked his fingers through his colorful hair. “Let’s begin.
Trixie, mon ange, please wait outside.”
She obediently left the room.
“Wait, begin what?”
Ace smiled like a fox. “Do not worry, ma chère. I am going to perform a reading and go from there.”
“Um, hard pass. Thanks for the offer though.”
“If you think you came here out of chance, you are wrong. Those who enter my shop enter for one reason and one reason only. They are at a crossroads.” He leaned forward on his elbows, resting his ring-covered hands palm up on the table on either side of the crystal ball. An open invitation to put my hands over his. As oddly tempting as it was to accept, I kept my hands where they were, clasped tightly in my lap.
“A crossroads . . . ” For all I knew, this guy was a con artist picking at straws. “Great pitch you got there. Can I borrow your phone?”
“Do you believe in a force greater than yourself, Faith?”
I let out a mirthless laugh. “At this point, I’d believe just about anything. But meeting a warlock who conveniently has all the answers I need is kind of a stretch for my mental tolerance.”
“Non croyant de la magie,” Ace said with a wry smile. “You doubt my power. Will you allow me to prove myself to you?”
“Fine.” I shrugged. “Hit me with your best—” I cut my sentence short because my hair had whipped around my face from a gust of air and the candles surrounding us lit one by one.
“You’ve been attacked twice by demons,” Ace said, looking me dead in the eye. “Just today, you’ve caught a glimpse of what makes you so exceptional. You’re attempting to block it out because it terrifies you that you might not be as ordinary as you’d hoped.
You fear for your loved ones’ safety more than ever.” He paused and rubbed his jaw, as if figuring out a crossword puzzle. “The Angel of Death has gotten in your head and vice versa, and now you feel him and others manipulating you in more ways than one. You don’t know what to trust, including your instinct.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. “Whoa.”
“Nonbelievers are my favorite to impress.” He curled his fingers on the table, insinuating he wanted me to place my hands in his.
“Shall we continue?”
Coming to terms with the fact that I was in front of yet another supernatural being, my heart started to pound in my chest. “Can you . . . can you give me a moment? I’m a little nauseous.”
“You’re nauseous because you’re about to get your period.” Ace scrunched up his face, grimacing. “I really wish I didn’t know things like that. Perhaps we should discuss my payment before we jump into this?”
“Listen, man, I already told Lara Croft out there, I don’t have any money.”
Ace lifted his chin and his irises lightened from violet to lilac, like holographic foil. “I don’t want your money, ma chère.”
Then what the heck did he want?
Shadows danced over the warlock’s handsome features and crazy-colored eyes. “What I require is . . . more important to me than money.” His accent thickened as his voice dropped lower. “I seek a favor in return for my help. A trade. Comercio.”
“A favor?” I leaned back in my seat. “What kind of favor?”
“I cannot disclose to you what the favor is. Though, it will not be illegal, sexual, or harm you or any of your loved ones in any way. I am not a man who is true to his word—I am my word. The choice is yours. One favor, and I will give you what you want most: answers.
This is quite the barter, Mademoiselle Williams, especially considering my own personal information on the Angel of Death.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve known Death since he was human.” Those violet eyes darkened. “We were friends, once.” Ace produced a small business card from the inside of his suit and flicked it into the air. It landed perfectly in front of me. An ace of spades. The surface shimmered, revealing his business and contact information in fancy cursive. “Although I understand your hesitation in trusting me, I feel you would be making a grave mistake leaving here without my help. Please, at least take my card.”
I picked up the ace of spades, his warning echoing in my head.
Perhaps all the answers were sitting right in front of me. If I didn’t accept this help from Ace, I had a feeling, by the dread churning sourly in my gut, there would be consequences. Consequences I could not afford right now.
At this point, I had nothing left to lose.
“No need,” I said, flattening the card on the table with my palm.
“You have yourself a deal, Ace.”
“Fantastique, ma chère. Once we begin, neither of us will be able to leave this room, no matter the circumstances. Not until the crystal has cleared. Breaking our connection could harm either one of us.
Do you understand?”
“What if something goes horribly wrong?”
Ace pursed his lips. “Do you have good health insurance?”
“Let’s do this,” I said, shaking my head at the whole ludicrous situation. “I’m done thinking. Do your thing before I change my mind.”
“Silence, please.” Pulling my hands slightly closer to the center of the table, Ace bowed his head and shut his eyes. All I could hear was the crackle and flicker of the candles. He was quiet for a while, until he whispered foreign words under his breath.
He flinched. A candle blew out to my right.
“L’esprits.” The warlock’s lids slowly opened, and he raised his head up. His irises had morphed from a bold violet to a coal black, and I stiffened. Then he spoke in a monotonous, dry voice unlike his own. “You have been given the Kiss of Death. There are consequences to this. A part of your soul has died, replaced by a fragment of Death’s immortal one.”
“Would that make me . . . immortal?”
“Not exactly.” I couldn’t remember the last time Ace had blinked.
He was looking in my direction, but not quite into my eyes. It was as if he were torn between two worlds, interpreting what he was seeing to me in the elsewhere. “You are not immortal. You are not mortal either. You are . . . in-between.”
Another candle blew out. Okay. This was a bad idea.
Ace flinched and his head snapped sharply to the side. His hands gripped mine tightly.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
Ace remained locked in a rigid position, his breathing shallow for a few seconds, before he was able to turn his head back to me.
“Hurry, look within the crystal. Tell me what you see.”
Although I was shaking at this point, I did as he said. The liquid inside the crystal ball swirled around into obsidian smoke and my heart hammered in my chest.
“I see . . . darkness. Nothing.”
“Impossible.” Ace’s voice was now bottomless, distant, as if he were searching for something deeper in that other world. “Your spiritual path is uncertain, which could mean—” His words were cut short, and as his breath hitched, three more candles extinguished.
“There is no stopping the evil that is after you. The spirits are all talking at once. Chanting . . . They are chanting, you are her!”
“What do they mean I’m her? Who’s her?”
“Light.” His eyes shifted back and forth, as if he were reading something fast. “A pure soul, a girl, wandering between Heaven and Earth, will be pardoned by Death himself, and with her resurrection will come a great power. She will bring with her a war unlike any other, the final fight between Heaven and Hell and the in-between.
This evil, which is after you, is the most malicious of the rest. It thirsts for revenge. It cares not for your well-being, but for your purpose, for you will bring to it great power, and an ancient tome, called the Book of the Dead. If you do not bind yourself to the one who seeks this grimoire the most, he will kill everyone you love . . . ”
“Who? Who will kill everyone I love? Death?”
“Death is but only one who desires your soul,” Ace said cryptically.
Panic struck me hard as I tried to pull away from his grasp, but his fingers were like bent steel. One by one, the candles kept going out, as if switched off by a timer.
“Don’t!” Ace exclaimed. “Breaking the connection now will hurt us both!”
I took a few harsh breaths. “Ask them how I can stop the Angel of Death.”
“To have some power . . . over him . . . you must know his past, and you must know his true name.” His hands began to grow limp in mine and the howling wind around us died down. “The link between our world and theirs is weakening. They want to warn you, before it is too late, but I cannot hear their words.” Blood trickled from his nose.
“You’re bleeding!”
“I’m fine, mon chou.” Abruptly, the crystal ball in front of us burst into vibrant shades of blue and yellow.
The remaining candles began to flicker out. The crystal ball’s swirling black smoke cleared.
A frown creased between Ace’s brows. “The spirits tell me you share a similar ability to my clairvoyancy. With touch, you can see into the future and warp into the past through memories. If you can control this, you will be able to use this power without a physical connection. Before we part ways, they want to show you a different truth you seek. A memory of the Angel of Death’s, which will help you at your crossroads. Let us channel your gift and see what you are made of.”
Images instantly flashed before my eyes.
I fell into oblivion, plunging through darkness.
One by one, sparks of light appeared on a wall, candles hung up in beautiful ornaments. I stood in a hot, stuffy corridor, a hallway carved from brown stone, crudely lit with torches and candles.
Ahead of me lay a metal gate.
Studying my surroundings, I saw one other person here with me in this corridor. An enormously tall man, a gladiator. His shoulders and arms were weapons of their own, yet his waist tapered down with lean muscle. A gold military helmet curved around his skull, his face, and a majority of the damp golden mane at the nape of his neck.
Lavish, intricately designed armor adorned his torso and carried on down his right arm like a shield. The same armor also guarded his legs. All of the gear was fastened together with brass hooks and leather that clipped to a thick belt on his waist. The plate on his chest appeared heavier than the other garments, a perfect sculpted cast of what was, without a doubt, this man’s actual chiseled abs.
Despite his ornate gear, the man’s feet were bare. Around his ankles, blisters and scars lingered, wounds from shackles. I happened to have done a project about gladiators in honors history and presented a slide show for a group project on Roman games. I’d learned that although gladiators were pampered with banquets and massages before a fight and after a victory, most gladiators were slaves to the death match.
Metal grated against metal up ahead, and the heavy gate lifted away. Sunlight slanted in and chaos erupted, a roar of a crowd so blaringly loud, I swore the ground beneath my feet trembled. Drums rolled outside in a slow, rhythmic march. The gladiator clenched his hands so hard that veins protruded. He sauntered down the corridor into the rowdy arena with a modest wave to the crowd. I assumed, by his grand introduction, he was not only a slave to the death match, but one of the celebrity fighters.
The gladiator prowled to the center of the performance area and the crowd’s shrieking amplified.
In this place, I had no fear. Based on my experience with the first vision I had, I assumed I could not be seen or harmed, so I felt compelled to get closer to the gladiator. I walked down the corridor toward the arena, and the stone beneath my Converse turned to compacted sand with old bloodstains in various places. Everything about this moment felt real to my senses. The sweltering heat in the air, the humidity as it clung to my skin, the earsplitting noise of the crowd.
People of all ages gathered for the public spectacle, waving rags and other items of clothing in the air. A group of exceptionally giddy women in the front aristocrat area fawned over the gladiator. They jumped up and down with flushed faces, cupping their hands over their mouths to shout. I’d never seen so many people in one spot, sardined together in seating that extended all around the elliptical performance area. In unison, they started chanting the same foreign words over and over again. The longer it went on, the more the language slowly transformed, until I miraculously understood it.
“Dru the Beast! Dru the Beast! Dru the Beast!”
The gladiator, “Dru the Beast,” ventured to the center of the elliptical area and faced off with his challenger, who wore a midnight-black riding cloak.
The fight began as a performance of great skill, but when the challenger ruthlessly mutilated a jaguar, Dru the Beast unleashed his fury, which ended with the challenger knocked to the ground.
Dru the Beast picked up his challenger’s sword and I prepared for this to end gruesomely. To my astonishment, instead of finishing him off, Dru dropped the weapon with a shaking hand, pivoted, and made the choice to walk away. He didn’t want to kill this man.
People in the stands booed and heckled, hurling objects and food into the arena.
The fallen challenger, who was very much awake, held out his arm and his sword slid across the sand. He leapt off the ground and charged at Dru the Beast’s back, his sword charging orange in a blaze of fire. What the . . . ?
Dru twisted around, reacting quickly as he thrust his ordinary-looking sword into the competitor’s heart. I watched, paralyzed, as Dru the Beast freed the hilt of the blade. The competitor collapsed again, and this time, as his head hit the ground, his helmet was knocked off, unveiling his identity. Terror choked out my breath.
The gladiator in the black cape was Malphas. The raven demigod.
His black hair was cut shorter to his head, but he looked exactly the same now as he did in the current world.
“Dru the Beast” caught my eye as he wrenched his helmet off too.
Shock and confusion slammed into me again, except this time with a force that almost brought me down to my knees. Suddenly, I was no longer detached from this memory. This was very, very personal.
Although his features were much older than in the last memory I saw of him as a boy, I recognized Dru the Beast instantly.
Those mismatched green eyes were a dead giveaway.
The truth strangled my breath. “Dru” was short for “Alexandru.”
He was Death. The gladiator with the chain markings on his ankles.
But he wasn’t just Death; no, the betrayal cutting deep into my heart was for another reason. I struggled to understand what my eyes were capturing, what my brain was processing as the truth. How Death’s identity in his past was all too familiar to me in the future.
Although Alexandru’s hair was blond and his eyes were green, the similarities in his features revealed the undeniable. Alexandru was David Star. Death was David Star.
Ace was showing me some sort of battle centuries ago between Malphas and Alexandru. Alexandru had killed Malphas in a rage, but why? What had Malphas done to him? Alexandru knelt over Malphas’s body, the words exchanged between them too soft for me to decipher. The raw, pained emotion on Alexandru’s face as he bent over Malphas’s body—it conveyed a deep, complicated grief. They must have known each other well.
I could feel this vision starting to dissolve away, but I held on.
I had to know what was next. I had to understand the meaning of this memory.
Blackness crawled from beneath Malphas’s body. The hair at the back of my nape lifted as I tracked the large shadows across the ground. They stretched along the sand, forming a dark apparition of a man as he rose to a looming height with thunderous laughter.
Ahrimad. From the willow tree memory. His face was shielded by the draping hood of his cloak, except for the crescent of an evil smirk across his pale mouth.
“Do you remember me, Alexandru?” Ahrimad asked. “Trapped in that mirror in the woods?”
I remembered him. I remembered the deal that was struck between this cruel god and young Alexandru under the willow tree.
If Alexandru could kill the person he hated the most, he would have all of Ahrimad’s power. Ahrimad had tried to trick Alexandru by throwing Malphas onto his sword, but what he hadn’t expected was for death to be what Alexandru hated the most. I was rendered speechless as Alexandru got a hold of Ahrimad’s sword and destroyed the death deity.
Of course, it was not without consequence. Soon after his sword pierced Ahrimad’s heart, pure agony ripped across Alexandru’s features. He rapidly shrugged out of the heavy equipment. His skin was riddled with lingering wounds, and directly over his heart lay a jagged line of thick scar tissue. He clutched at the area as black filament veins pulsed out from his heart, spreading across his chest.
The darkness spread up Alexandru’s neck to his hair, strands of golden blond fading to jet-black from the roots down. Staggering, he gripped his skull.
With my heart in my throat, I took a step forward. Everything in me screamed to run to Death, despite how pointless it would be.
Strange, how I gravitated toward him, even his past self. Seeing him suffer in this way broke my heart. It was too late, regardless. I saw the exact moment Alexandru lost the fight, as he crumpled to all fours.
He writhed against the earth screaming, bloodied tears pouring from his eyes. His lips and face purpled and I watched him die.
“You will have an endless hunger in your stomach. Nothing will satisfy it. You will have to feed on mortals. An eternal monster unlike any other. Damned to steal away the souls of the living. Damned . . . to live . . . Alexandru Cruscellio.”
Alexandru gripped the sand with his hands and held on. He released a bellowing roar as redness poured from his gums, his teeth expelled from his mouth one by one. Bone like blades sprouted out from the empty roots in his gums. His already vertical pupils were rapidly dilating now, features sharpening and tightening abnormally against his facial structure. He laughed, a lurid, insane cackle, as blood oozed down his chin. Black filaments bulged in his face as he transformed. Transformed into the cloaked monster I’d known all along—
I was ripped back into Ace’s room. The warlock seized in his chair.
“Ace!” I shrieked, lifting out of my seat. His hands held mine so tightly I thought my bones would break. “Oh, God, Ace! Ace! ”
“Someone is overtaking my mind,” he wheezed.
The sensation of coldness licking up my spine made me arch forward, as a sharp sting of pain pooled over the skin of my stomach.
My memory snapped to an earlier moment when I’d experienced the same sensation. When I’d first met Death.
“Break the connection!” I shrieked. “It’s him, Death is here!”
“His Fallen soldiers are trying to break through my ward,” Ace gasped out, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “I don’t know how long I can hold them. You can leave this room now, ma chère! Go!
Through the back door!”
Ace freed my hands.
A blast of energy exploded from the table, knocking me backward. My skull banged against the floor, and my consciousness strobed in and out. Ace sat pinned in his seat; his head sat back at an odd angle that left his throat exposed. His body stiffened, mouth working through strangled words, as if he were fighting against something, someone.
Trixie sprinted into the room and froze.
“What’s happening?” she asked Ace in hysterics. “What do I do?”
“Find a sacred . . . potion!” he gasped out.
Trixie snapped into action, rifling through various cabinets, knocking bottles all over the place. Without a second thought, I picked myself up and ran toward the door at the back of the room, which lead down a long hallway to another door. I barreled into the crisp night air. My mind was static. Past a back parking lot into a narrow alleyway lead me back to Main Street’s sidewalk, where I clicked my key fob until I heard a beep.
I flung myself into my car, threw it into Drive, and sped home, fearing I’d opened Pandora’s box.
