The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(13)

I couldn’t let them catch me.

Cromwell turned, his bones creaking like weary furniture, and looked directly at the thirtieth chair of the Council.

“Ambrose,” he said. “She’s your charge, is she not?”

The man flinched at the sound of his name in our language, hands curling into fists in his lap as all eyes in the room settled on him.

He was the father that Neven and I shared. The illustrious Ambrose Scarborough, Thirtieth High Reaper on the Council.

Having a bastard daughter with a Shinigami had demoted him from Fourth to Thirtieth chair, the very lowest of the High, but his reputation as an otherwise upstanding High Reaper had been enough to save him from being ejected entirely from the Council. When word of my birth got out, he’d quickly married a respectable Reaper—Corliss—and had Neven to show the Council he wasn’t loyal to a Shinigami.

Neither he nor Corliss had ever been cruel to me. They’d fed me, bought me new shoes and cloaks as I grew taller, brushed and braided my black hair to hide it beneath my hood.

But when I was young and woke up crying from nightmares of church grims eating my bones and pounded on their bedroom door, it was always locked, no matter how loudly I screamed. When I told them the other Reapers tormented me in our training groups, they wiped the tears from my face with a rag and told me to go to bed. Once, I’d run away for three nights, sleeping in the rafters over Big Ben while the church grims barked below, and no one had searched for me.

From that perch I’d watched the humans, how they carried their children on their shoulders and kissed their cheeks and held their hands and said they loved each other. Even when they had five or six children trailing after them, one was never left behind or ignored. Something sour had settled in my stomach, as if everything inside me had started to rot. The children all looked so sickeningly happy. Was this the reason that humans found so much joy in their pitifully short lives, while I, who had already outlived most of them, found nothing about life to be all that pleasant?

Reaper families were not meant to love like humans. Reapers married for alliances and had children to continue their lineage, and good Reapers had no practical need for love in order to be successful. In fact, those who cast too many fond glances at their wives or spoiled their children too readily were the first to see their families culled, the objects of their weakness eliminated. I knew this, and yet, as I’d watched families rushing through the market and couples stopping to kiss in shadowed alleys, I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to be human.

I’d returned home only because I’d gotten too scared of the rats, but my father and Corliss hadn’t even asked where I’d gone. When I’d come back to our quarters, dirty and trembling, my father’s eyes had dimmed with disappointment.

They’d tried to keep me away from Neven at first, but Neven had no reason to hate me the way they did. At night, I’d teach him new words from the language books I studied—French and Greek and Russian and (secretly) Japanese. He’d show me the mechanical toys that he’d pried open with jeweler’s tools, laying their sparkling carnage across my desk, where Corliss wouldn’t comment on it. And when the other Reapers smashed my clock, he’d gather the pieces and put them back together for me with skilled precision. When he realized that his parents acknowledged his high marks with stoic praise while any news of my success at school went ignored, he’d bring me dead flowers and shiny rocks and tell me I’d done well today, like Ambrose sometimes deigned to say to him. And when he’d turned one hundred and had the choice of living with his parents or living with me, he hadn’t hesitated.

“I’ve relinquished her,” my father said in the High Council chamber below, his words impassive, the same gentle coldness that I’d always known. “You know this.”

The words stung but didn’t surprise me. Though he’d never told me, I’d learned quite young that the population of High Reapers was never meant to increase beyond Ankou’s chosen few, to ensure that the High Reapers could never overpower Ankou himself. Couples with only one High Reaper, like Ambrose, could have only one child unless the child died or was formally renounced. I was very much not dead, and yet I had a younger brother. It wasn’t difficult to see what had happened. Before I’d even graduated, Ambrose must have signed away my rights to inheritance, both of his estate and his spot on the Council. On paper, I was an orphan, graciously allowed to live in his home because having the death of a child on his soul was apparently too great a weight to bear. For a while, I hadn’t even known whether I would be allowed to collect souls, but with the population of London increasing so rapidly in the last century and the death rate multiplying in turn, it seemed even High Reapers knew that turning me away would have been a waste.

Neven had gone very still beside me. He looked at me searchingly, but I shook my head. I couldn’t think about Ambrose right now, couldn’t risk losing control just a few meters above Cromwell.

“She’s taken your son, as well,” said another Councilor. “What do you propose we do about this, Ambrose?”

The question was meant as a taunt, a shift of blame, because of course none of them could do anything but wait.

“Neven will return,” Ambrose said with complete certainty. “He’s a coward who runs from shadows. He doesn’t know what it’s like beyond.”