Because You Love to Hate Me(58)

The white church is a quaint little building.

Death doesn’t go in.

He stands by the door, across from the priest, watching the congregation file past. Face after face. Life after life. None of them ready to end. He sighs when the stream of people trickles to a stop.

A funny thing happens then.

The priest turns, noticing him there. “You coming, son?”

Death smiles warmly. “Not today.”

IV.

The service has already started.

Her father mutters as he slides into the pew.

Grace laces her fingers but doesn’t really pray.

She thinks it’s funny, to spend the morning in a church and the night at a bonfire, saying prayers, then casting flower crowns into the blaze.

“Got to have room,” her mum used to say, “for the old gods and the new. One’s tradition, and the other’s faith.”

But when she died, Grace didn’t go to the church, didn’t stay by the grave.

She went to the well.

Climbed the hill to the ring of stones and the pitted spot like a grave dug straight down, so deep no one has ever seen the bottom.

So deep that maybe it can touch the world below.

When her father’s not drinking, he says that’s blasphemy, that there’s only heaven and hell and God with a capital G, but Grace doesn’t care, because she saw the bare patches outside her mother’s window, like footsteps in the grass, saw the same ones at the well, and felt the cold drifting up from below, and heard the whistle from the stones, like a song she couldn’t quite remember.

“Give her back,” she called, and the words echoed down, down, down into the well, and when they came up again, they were all broken.

The priest talks on, and Grace lets her gaze slip to the stained glass window.

It’s a beautiful day, and when the service ends, she’s the first one out, bursting through the doors as if she’s been holding her breath, and now she fills her lungs with air, smiles at the taste of summer on her tongue.

Her father will go to the tavern and stay until it kicks him out.

The rest of the day belongs to her.

There’s a giant oak tree past the church, tall as a house, and all around the base are red blossoms, a blanket of flowers they call farewells because they only come right when a season is ending.

They are the color of sunsets. Of strawberries.

Perfect, she thinks, for a crown.

Grace makes her way to the big old tree. She winds between the roots that sprawl across the ground and steps into the shade.

And stops.

The air beneath the tree is cold.

The blanket of flowers is threadbare, patches of red missing from the cloth.

Grace feels a prickle along the back of her neck, like someone’s watching, and turns around to see a boy with brown eyes.

V.

Her name is Grace, and she is on fire.

Her life licks the air around her skin and sends up waves of heat, and his cold bone hand curls in his worn pocket, aching for the warmth.

Beneath the flames, she is a girl in a white dress speckled by mud, a heart-shaped face dotted with freckles, a braid of blond hair escaping in wisps, blue eyes so bright they burn.

He cannot shake the feeling he’s seen her before, or, at least, seen pieces of her—those eyes, that hair—but he cannot remember where.

When he takes a step toward her, she takes a step back, glancing down at his bare feet, at the place where his toes dig into the ground, where the tiny red flowers wither and curl beneath his heels.

Her blue eyes narrow.

Knowing.

He thinks they always know, the way a body knows when the sun is up, the way a heart knows when it’s in love, the way he knows to find the light, to take it in his hand, to snuff it out.

He wonders if she will run.

They try sometimes, the younger ones, and every now and then the old, but Death has that slow step and that long stride, and he can always catch them.

Only she doesn’t run.

She holds her ground, and the fire in her eyes is stronger than a dying life.

“Go away,” she says, her voice heady, the words rich with command, but he is no fae thing to be wished on.

“No,” he says, his throat brittle from disuse.

Young mouth.

Old voice.

He draws his bone hand from his pocket, but she turns her back on him and crouches in the flowers, plucking the ones with the longest stems.

“For the festival,” she says, as if the words mean anything to him.

“The festival,” he echoes.

“It’s the first of May,” she goes on, piling flowers in her lap. “That makes today Beltane, with the May Queen and the Green Man, and the great bonfire . . .”

Something tickles the back of his mind, like remembering, but the memory itself is missing. Instead, there is a dark hole where memory should be, where it’s been worn away by time, or dug out like the well.

The edges smooth, the drop steep.

“I’m not here for the festival,” says Death.

The girl keeps threading her flower crown. “I know.”

VI.

Grace forces her fingers to finish the crown while the boy and the tree lean over her.

She knows who he is, of course.

Knows even before she sees the dead farewells at his feet, even before she catches a glimpse of those bone fingers, even before he says her name.