The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(11)

“They know,” Neven said, as if I needed any confirmation that Ivy had returned. His eyes glowed a nauseous green, and I suspected that the reality of running away with me had finally set in. But it was too late for either of us to turn back.

I tried to think of something comforting to say, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a lie, and I didn’t like lying to Neven. I wished I could promise him that I had a perfect plan, that I could defeat any Reaper that got in our way, that I could keep him safe.

But nothing that day had gone according to plan. All I could do, all I had ever done, was find a way to survive.

“We have to go now,” I said, releasing the cloak of darkness and grabbing Neven’s hand. Neither of us dared to mention that there was only one door out of the catacombs.



Chapter Three


The Door, of course, was guarded.

Neven and I had run through the shadows all the way to the main tunnel, where we crushed ourselves into an alcove and I pulled a sheet of darkness over us. Two High Reapers were standing in front of the Door, questioning the Collector I’d seen earlier that evening.

“She broke my glasses!” he said, holding his shattered lenses in one hand as pieces of them sparkled to the cobbled ground. I didn’t recall breaking his glasses, but it wasn’t the first time someone had tried to frame me. “She seemed suspicious, so I tried to detain her, but she just smashed my glasses into the desk and ran off! I wanted to stop her, but my astigmatism—”

“All right, Lester,” said the High Reaper, holding up a hand. The Collector jolted like he expected to be struck across the face. “Go back to your quarters, you’re finished for today.”

Lester’s spine snapped into a ninety-degree bow. “Yes, Reaper,” he said. Then he turned and hurried out of the main hall.

I hoped the High Reapers would leave as well, but they simply turned and stood in front of the door with their arms crossed. Ivy had definitely escaped the time freeze and reported me, and Lester had confirmed that I’d returned to the catacombs. The lower division of the High Council was probably running around the tunnels searching for me, hoping to secure their eternal positions as High Reapers by being the first to drag me to the courtroom. They would have had better luck working together to freeze all the catacombs at once, but Reapers were selfish creatures who didn’t like to share glory. As it was, all the different time turns had started to not only cancel each other out but to make me feel a bit timesick, yanked back and forth off the natural timeline.

There was still the matter of escaping. I glanced at the swinging chandeliers and wall-mounted candles and wondered if a sudden flash of bright light could incapacitate the other Reapers long enough for us to escape, like what had happened with Ivy.

But that had been a massive accident. I’d never felt rage quite like that before, never felt the light build up within me and surge out in every direction like I was an ancient star exploding to its death. I wouldn’t tell Neven just yet, but I was worried. I’d spent my entire life learning to keep candles from turning into sun-white hellfire when I lay at another Reaper’s feet swallowing my own blood, but suddenly I couldn’t hold it back. They said that a Reaper’s powers got stronger with age, but did a Shinigami’s? I didn’t know, and there was no one who could tell me, no book I could steal from the library that would enlighten me.

Regardless, I couldn’t do it again, not intentionally. It had taken several minutes for the light to build up to that degree, and the High Reapers had surely been warned of what had occurred. They would be prepared, because Reapers never failed the same way twice.

Wielding time against a High Reaper wasn’t an option that I particularly liked, either. Ivy had been incapacitated, but in their normal form, High Reapers were practically invincible. While Low Reapers like me and Neven finished our studies once we could freeze time and manipulate objects, High Reapers were trained to inflict time torture on other Reapers, ensuring that no one used time as their toy and irrevocably broke the timeline. Ivy and her High Reaper friends had always edged the line between bullying and time torture, and I didn’t want to see what happened when she had permission from the High Council to cross it.

The other option was waiting in the darkness until the guards left, but I doubted that they would give up until they’d searched behind every single brick.

Neven tapped my shoulder, then pointed to the hallway. I looked over and saw nothing, then turned back at him and raised an eyebrow. He pointed to the High Reapers, then his ears, then made an X motion with his fingers. I nodded in understanding and picked up my suitcase. He wanted to speak somewhere the High Reapers wouldn’t hear us.

We crept through the shadows and back out to the hall where we hid in another alcove. Luckily, the Reapers seemed too busy checking rooms to pay attention to a connecting hallway with no doors.

“I think we can get out through the vents,” Neven said.

“Vents?”

I looked up, scanning the walls for some kind of grate. Neven nodded toward the far end of the hallway, where a lattice-patterned iron grate about the size of my Tennyson book was fixed to the ceiling.

“You are vastly underestimating the circumference of my hips,” I said.

Neven shook his head. “If you move the bricks to get in, it’s big enough to crawl through.”

“And how would you know that?”