The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(103)

I grabbed my throat, trying desperately to take in air, the cool metal of my cursed wedding ring stinging my neck. It burned like frostbite against my skin, and I moved to yank it off and hurl it into the darkness.

But my fingers hesitated as they brushed over the sparkling silver and gold. This, I realized, was my solution.

I sucked in a dizzying breath, then tore away a layer of my kimono and pulled the ceremonial dagger from my belt. Hiro watched with impatience as I unsheathed it.

“You think I can’t stop you, Ren?” he said. “I am a god.”

“And I am a Reaper,” I said, stepping closer.

“That means very little without your clock,” Hiro said. “Put that toy away, or there will be consequences.”

“You don’t know anything about Reapers,” I said. “If you did, you would know that we don’t need clocks to turn time.”

Hiro tensed.

“That’s a lie,” he said, though he no longer sounded certain. “You and Neven always needed your clocks.”

I shook my head.

“The clocks are tradition,” I said. “They let the timekeepers see our movements so that no one affects the timeline too much. But we don’t actually need them.”

I pressed the blade to his heart.

“What we need,” I said, holding up my left hand, the wedding band sparkling in the darkness, “is pure silver and gold.”

Hiro’s lips parted in surprise. Death sparkled at the edges of my vision, his power ready to compact me into dust.

But Reapers knew how to use time, and that every second contained a thousand moments.

There was the moment that Hiro understood his mistake, his face washed clean with shock.

Then the moment that he realized he would have to subdue me, and his eyes began to warp with anger.

Next would be the moment that Death crashed over me and snapped apart every vertebrae of my spine.

But that moment would never come.

The instant the world stopped turning, I plunged the blade into Hiro’s heart.

Just like before, when I set time turning again, the world fell to pieces.

The dead screamed and ran around the courtyard, the sky filling up with cries of terror and panic. But this time I ignored it, because I could look only at Hiro.

He gripped my sleeves, the only thing holding him upright. But soon his weight was too much for me and we fell to the floor of the temple. He wouldn’t look away from me, his black eyes still petrified with shock.

“Ren,” he whispered, tears running down the sides of his face as he looked at me and only me, his blood hot beneath my right hand, soaking my white kimono.

“Ren, I love you,” he whispered.

Even now, he loved me. I didn’t know how he could, how anyone could. But Hiro didn’t love me the way Tennyson had written in his poems, a love that was birdsong and golden mornings and endless fields of flowers. Hiro’s love was hungry and cold, an empty room that he’d tried to lock me inside of.

I moved to stand up, too shattered by the intensity of his gaze, but he let out a weak cry, his bloody hand grabbing at my sleeve.

“Don’t leave me,” he said. “Please, Ren, just hold me. I don’t want to be alone.”

I closed my eyes as tears burned down my cheeks. I wanted to hold him as his soul left for whatever hell awaited creatures like us. But I thought of Neven dying in the darkness, and I couldn’t bear to look at him.

I stood up and crossed the shrine, watching the chaos outside as the darkness fractured and tossed the dead back and forth, broke their bones and tore them to pieces in the chaos of a change in power. Behind me, Hiro coughed and cried for me, begged me to come back. But I would not turn around, even as sobs racked my body and I had to hold the wooden banister for support.

When he finally fell silent, the winds picked up, stirring dust into the air. The darkness began to flow into me, the feeling just as euphoric as Hiro had described. For a moment, I saw Yomi in the sunlight, the majesty of all the palace’s colors, the trees swaying against a backdrop of blue, the people flushed and alive. But the darkness returned, as it always did, poisoning my blood. I could feel the world above, all the stuttering final breaths and screams of agony and pleas for just a little more time. I could feel the Shinigami, carrying their lanterns throughout the country, facing their eternal servitude. I could feel the Yokai like a distant ache in my bones, shapeless shadows that burned in my blood. The exhilarating rush of power and the compounded sadness of all of Japan’s deaths brought me to my knees, heaving a wretched sob into the bloodstained sleeves of my wedding dress.

Death had finally come for me, but not as the Reapers intended.

They had set Death loose on me, but instead of it devouring me, I had swallowed it whole. I’d let it poison every inch of me and done nothing as it decimated everyone that mattered. I no longer had to run from Death, for I had become it.

Yomi had fallen quiet, the dead gathering themselves in the aftermath of the chaotic transfer of power. I cried as they bowed and called me “Your Majesty,” a title that I no longer wanted. I looked behind me, where Hiro’s body had dissolved to dust. The shrine lay still and empty, the stairs painted with blood, just as the Honengame had predicted.

Then I turned away from the ruins of my wedding ceremony and looked, instead, across the infinite darkness of my kingdom.