The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(12)

He lifted the cat, who blinked sleepily at me.

“It’s where I found Oliver,” he said. “I heard him crying in the walls, so I climbed inside to try and get him. He was scared and ran away, but I bribed him with some rats.”

“You had a collection of dead rats at your disposal?”

“They weren’t dead.”

I groaned and clapped a hand over my eyes.

“I didn’t pack them!” Neven said.

“Small mercies,” I said, dropping my hand from my face. “All right, let’s try it.”

I froze the entire hallway and prayed that it held while Neven got to work opening the grate. Doing so required standing on his suitcase and time-turning the bricks away like we did at the Door until the opening was large enough to climb through. It was difficult to perform two different time turns at once, so I was once again infinitely glad Neven was with me. Hopefully a stronger Reaper wouldn’t come by and sense the change.

I moved a safe distance from the bricks raining down from the ceiling until Neven finished. He climbed into the vent, then reached down for me to hand him the cat, then the bags, and finally my own hands so he could pull me up.

I climbed up into a round tunnel carved into the stone prison of the catacombs, about the width of my shoulders. The vent left me enough space to hunch over and crawl with my bag in one hand, but not much else. It smelled of dampness and mold, the stone slick beneath my fingers.

Neven repaired the bricks and I waved away the time freeze in the hallway below.

“I don’t suppose you know which way is out?” I said.

“Well...”

Oliver squeezed under Neven’s arm, crawling through my legs and strutting through the vent.

“Let’s follow him,” Neven said. “He must have come here from the outside, so maybe he’ll go there again.”

I sighed but nodded, thrilled by the fact that Reapers—some of the strongest creatures in the land—were on their knees crawling after a stray cat.

We shuffled through the dim passageway, my knees growing soaked from the suspicious-smelling wetness, the jagged edges of the stones scraping my elbows raw. Whenever we passed over a grate, Neven or I would freeze the room below us so no one would notice the sounds of shuffling clothes and dragging luggage. All the Reapers frantically searching wouldn’t notice one extra time turn among all the others they were casting, and none of them thought to try to freeze a place they couldn’t see.

Suddenly, the voice of a High Reaper thundered through the vents, echoing with the language of Death. The words blasted the warmth from my bones and raked coldness across my skin, as if my whole body had been flayed.

“Where is the Shinigami?”

Both Neven and I froze. I imagined Ankou’s skeletal hands coming through the grate and dragging me to the darkest and coldest depths of the catacombs.

Oblivious to our terror, the conversation continued in the room directly below us.

“She couldn’t have gotten far,” said a man’s voice, muted through the vents but still tight with anger.

“She’s a monster,” Ivy’s voice said, sore and strained. “She can probably bleed through walls or turn into a roach and crawl away.”

I held my breath and crawled closer to the grate, peering down.

It was the High Council chamber, that much I could tell from the arrangement of thirty throne-like chairs around the perimeter, each one with a tall back that loomed like a shadow, different beasts carved into each of the arms—lions, bears, spiders, dragons.

Ivy occupied the twenty-fifth seat, white bandages wrapped around her face, concealing her eyes. I found that odd, considering I was an inferior Reaper and shouldn’t have been able to cause much lasting harm to her. Either she was weaker than she pretended to be, or I was much stronger than I thought.

“We’ll find her,” said the first man, the one who spoke in Death and occupied the first chair. High Councilor Cromwell, the primogenital grandson of Ankou himself, and Ivy’s father. His face looked as if time had grabbed it and stretched it downward like white clay, fingernails scoring lines of age into his forehead and the skin around his thin lips. Even the flesh under his eyes drooped, a sweeping penumbra of shadow in contrast to the startling brightness of his ice-blue eyes. Signs of age didn’t show on Reapers until they neared two millennia. My nearly two centuries of collecting had rendered me the appearance of a young adult by human standards, while Neven’s one century of life made him more of a scrawny and graceless teenager. But eventually, the Death that we delivered to humans would come for us, too, a slow repayment for our sins.

“She is too dangerous to let live any longer,” Cromwell said.

The words, because he spoke them in our language, were not an opinion, but a promise.

My fingers trembled against the damp stone. I’d assumed that my punishment would be a few centuries in one of Highgate’s mausoleums with only corpses for company, as was the case for most transgressors. But death was a far more terrifying prospect. I thought of all the souls I’d collected and tossed into a void without thinking about what became of them. What would become of someone like me? If there was such a thing as Hell, I would burn there. But I didn’t believe in silly Christian tales. In the way that some people believed in God, I believed that nothing awaited us after death. And the idea of closing my eyes and being nothing at all was far worse than an eternity on fire.