Because You Love to Hate Me(59)

She knows, the way a mouse knows the twitch of a cat’s tail, the way feet know bad earth, the way children know fire.

She knows because she’s seen him once before, out of the corner of her eye, standing beside her mother’s bed.

She knows, and she is scared.

A horrible, heart-slamming-in-her-chest, run-run-run kind of scared. But her mother said there’s no outrunning Death or the devil, so she holds her ground and tells herself there’s more than one kind of quick in the world.

“I’m not ready,” she says, hating the quiver in her words.

Death shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Why me?” she says.

“I do not choose.”

“How long do I have?”

Death doesn’t answer.

“I want to say good-bye.”

“No,” says Death.

“I want to see the sun rise.”

“No,” says Death.

“I want to see the stars come out. I want to dance at the edge of the woods and throw my crown into the fire and taste the first summer fruit and—”

Death sighs, rolls those brown eyes, and says, “You’re stalling.”

“Wouldn’t you?” she snaps.

The wind picks up, and overhead an old branch creaks, weakened by so many seasons and storms. She can hear the cracks spreading through the wood.

Not like this.

“Grace,” says Death, holding out his hand, and it is nothing but bare bone, and the sight of it should give her shivers, but she can only stare with fascination, smothering the sudden, mad urge to slip her hand in his, to feel the cool, smooth surface.

The branch begins to snap.

And then, mercifully, a girl is calling her name, and she sees Alice Laurie standing in the road.

“Coming!” Grace calls, ducking out from under the tree a moment before the branch breaks and crashes down into the bed of red blossoms.

She doesn’t look back.

VII.

Death frowns down at the fallen limb, at his empty hand.

The girl is halfway across the field, not running, exactly, but moving briskly toward the other girl, the one in the road, the one that doesn’t burn.

He sighs, a sound like winter air through ice, and sets off after her with those long legs, leaving a trail of bare earth in his wake.

By the time he reaches Grace, she’s alone again, and he walks right up and curls that bone hand around her shoulder. The heat licks his fingers.

“Caught you,” he whispers, and she stiffens, perhaps waiting for the world to end, but that isn’t how death works.

Hand in hand with life, that’s how it goes.

“You could let me go,” she says, keeping those blue eyes on the road.

“I can’t,” says Death.

The girl pulls free and turns on him, still gripping her red flower crown. “Why not?”

The question scratches at his mind. He tries to remember what will happen. He can’t. But the knowing is there, solid as the hunger, that he cannot wait too long. He has to take her hand. Has to take her life. The knowing doesn’t have words, but it’s there all the same.

“I can’t,” he says again, willing her to understand.

She crosses her arms, and Death can hear a carriage coming up the road. The faint rattle of a wheel coming loose.

Again, he holds out his hand. “Grace.”

“A life’s got to be worth something,” she says. “What will you give me for it?”

The carriage is rounding the bend behind her.

“What is it you want?” he asks, knowing the answer.

“A day, a week, a year—”

He shakes his head. “It’s your time.”

“Then let me have it. You’re taking a whole life. The least you can give me is a day.”

Death stares at the girl.

The girl stares at Death.

He could hold her down, grip her hands in his, lace their fingers against the road.

“Please,” she says. “You owe me this.”

Death frowns. “I do not owe you anything.”

“Yes, you do!” she snarls as a gust of wind cuts through, tousling her hair, and he remembers.

Why she looks familiar.

Where he’s seen those eyes before. Glazed with sickness, but just as bright, staring up from hollowed cheeks in a heart-shaped face. A woman’s frail fingers reaching for his own. A small girl beyond the window, hair white in the moonlight.

“Yes, you do.”

This time the words are a whisper, but he hears them all the same.

“Do you know what it’s like?” she asks. “To lose so much? Can you even feel sadness, grief?”

He tries to trace his mind around its edges, feeling for the shape, but it is like everything besides his hunger, flat and dull and heavy.

“No,” she mutters. “Of course you can’t.”

Death stares at the girl. He does not know what to say. What to do.

“Dusk,” he says at last. “You can have until dusk.”

Tears spill down her cheeks, even as she sets the crown triumphantly in her hair.

“Shake on it?” he asks, offering his bone hand.

At that, the girl makes a sound as sudden and high as birdsong, shakes her head, and turns away.