The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)
Kylie Lee Baker
Chapter One
Late 1800s
London, England
The legend they tell about me goes something like this:
First, you’ll see a streak of silver across the sky, like a comet burning through the fog.
Then, the clock hands will still halfway between this second and the next.
The world will fall silent, and the Reaper will knock three times on your bedroom door.
Whether you answer or not, Death will enter through the light in the keyhole.
She will reach down your throat and pull your soul out from deep, deep inside you, like an endless length of rope, and you will die in a world entirely your own. There will be no one but you, and the Reaper, and her unblinking green eyes.
But, of course, urban legends are rarely ever true.
On one particular collection night, the man was already awake when I opened his bedroom window and came in to take his soul. Humans, especially the very sick ones, always sensed when one of us was coming for them.
I stepped in through the window, pulling my long skirts after me, and found the man staring at me from his bed. He lay so still that I might have thought him dead already, but his eyes tracked me as I turned to slam the window shut. I pulled my clock from my pocket and closed my fingers around the silver-and-gold casing, locking the world into a time freeze.
The sounds outside of our little room silenced. No wind beat against the glass panes, no footsteps crunched through snow on the sidewalk outside, no floorboards creaked from the tenants below. The human lay frozen in his blankets, as if already dead. I crossed the room and pressed a finger to the hollow of his cheek.
With the touch of my cold skin, the time freeze unlatched its teeth from his throat and he jolted awake, joining me in our frozen infinity between moments. Our tiny world filled with his ragged exhales and scraping inhales, his wet blinks of fever-bright eyes, his twitching limbs shifting against the stiff sheets.
“Are you going to kill me?” he said.
Technically, I wasn’t. His time of death had been written in the high ledgers since the day he was born, and I had done nothing to interfere with that destiny. I was not his executioner but his deliverer, and I couldn’t extract a soul that wasn’t ready to abandon its body.
“Yes,” I said. I stepped closer and my shadow loomed over his bed, a wraith casting darkness over his pale face.
He closed his eyes and took several croaking breaths. When he opened his eyes again, tears pooled in the corners.
“Will it hurt?” he whispered.
I let him wait in suspense for my answer. I did not blink, did not breathe, only looked down at him with an unchanging expression.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never died.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but that wasn’t my problem. He’d asked a question and I’d answered. His pupils grew wide, like two yawning chasms of black, his bones quivering against the thin tarp of his skin. He reached out a shaking hand as if to touch me. I watched him struggle but made no move to help him, taking a small glass vial from my pocket.
“Is there a Heaven?” the man said, his frail hand somehow latching on to the sleeve of my robe. I looked down at the grayed skin stretched taut over bones, wrapped in the shimmering silver fabric and trembling hard. “Please, Reaper, tell me. Will I go to Heaven?”
I smirked. His trembling stilled, maybe in breathless anticipation of my answer, or maybe in horror that I’d smiled so cruelly over his deathbed. That look in his eyes—like I was horrible and magnificent and could tear the whole universe to ribbons if I wanted to—was the only part of the process that I truly liked. No one but humans looked at me with that kind of reverence.
In truth, I didn’t know where souls went after we released them. The High Reapers spoke of Heaven and Hell, but I had never seen such places and suspected they were fantasies conjured to absolve us of responsibility. Those places were no more real to me than Santa Claus, or unicorns, or God. But the humans believed in them so fervently, just like they believed that I came from a comet and slid through keyholes. The man wasn’t the first to ask me for answers, thinking I was Death and not one of his children playing messenger. When they asked me, I always answered.
“There is no Heaven,” I said. The man’s twisted expression went gray, his grip on my sleeve suddenly weak. “There is no Hell, either,” I said. “There is nothing but Death.”
The tears that bled from his eyes told me that if there was a Heaven, I would never see it. But my teachers always said that tainted souls like mine would burn for eternity anyway, so what difference did this brief unkindness make?
He started calling out names, probably those of the humans in the rooms next door who would never hear him as long as I kept the clocks frozen. But I didn’t like the sound of begging. I could tolerate threats and bribes and rage, but something about begging made my body wither into itself like a dried flower, as if every desperate word was being scratched into my skin in scars that only I could see. Long after the begging stopped, my skin always itched for hours and the words always rang in my head, shaking me from shallow dreams.
I looped the chain of my clock around my neck like a pendant, making sure the metal still touched my bare skin, and got to work.
I pressed one hand to his forehead and held it still while I forced his jaw open with my thumb. He choked and cried as I crammed my hand down his throat. When my fingertips finally brushed the milky edges of his soul, I grabbed hold and yanked it out.