The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(17)

“We have to get to the docks,” I said.

Neven nodded, brushing the dirt from his knees. When we closed the cemetery gates and headed into town, Neven did not once look back.

We stopped time just long enough to steal the clothes off a young couple. I took a hand-sewn shawl, along with a dirty white bonnet that helped to hide my shorn hair. We weren’t in rags—after all, impoverished humans could never afford a ticket—but we needed to seem poor enough to blend in with the steerage passengers, where the mass of people would hide Neven’s color-shifting eyes and my Asian features. Neven liberated a heavy brown overcoat and gray cap from the man before we hurried back to the dock.

Evading the fare was a simple matter of stopping time just long enough to slip past the ticket collectors, and without much delay, we had boarded a ship rapidly moving toward France, away from everything we’d ever known.

Neven stared at the retreating shoreline with wonder, even as the packed crowd shuffled us back and forth on the deck. The sea air felt new and clean. My chest filled with lightness at the idea that Ivy, Ambrose, and all of London would from now on be only a memory.

But yet, every time I blinked, I could see my name in Ankou’s book, slashed through with a single thin line.

And I could hear Cromwell’s age-crackled voice as clearly as if he were standing beside me, fingers cupped and whispering into my ear:

“Death will find you.”

We descended into steerage, the dim and crowded underbelly of the ship where we would pretend to be humans for the next few hours. Despite the chill of early January over the water, the air on the lower deck simmered from the warmth of so many compacted humans. Not a single window let in light or even a breath of ocean air into the smothering wood-paneled cage. The waves rocked the floor, sending us colliding into other passengers, elbows jabbed in stomachs and feet stomping on feet.

Maybe it was a result of being free from a contract, but the edges of the human world looked soft and unreal in the daylight, like beautiful illusions that would disappear and leave me back in my stone-cold loft. I felt untethered, the weight of my clothes and the suitcase in my right hand the only things keeping my feet on the ground.

I kept glancing over my shoulder, the same restless way I turned over in bed on long mornings that melted into evenings when sleep wouldn’t come. A ship at sea was a cage, and if the High Reapers caught up to me, there was no place I could run.

If they knew you were here, you wouldn’t be standing here thinking about them, I told myself. But that wasn’t entirely true. While High Reapers didn’t need to delay, they could if they wanted to watch me squirm. I thought of Ivy’s scissors and rubbed my eye at the ghost sensation, then pushed the stray pieces of my hair back under my bonnet and tried to make myself seem small and insignificant.

I’d rarely paid attention to the mannerisms of humans, and now I wasn’t quite sure how to mimic them. I’d hardly even touched humans, apart from wrenching their jaws open during collections. Suddenly crushed together with so many of them, their arms and chests pressed against me, I found their skin oddly warm. The heat of their blood burned even through their clothes. Reapers’ bodies, though we still had blood and hearts, always ran gravely cold. I tried to press closer to Neven, concerned that my icy touch might startle one of the humans and cause a disturbance.

“Are you all right?” Neven said.

“Fine.” I tensed as a man bumped into me, pushing me into Neven. Luckily, Neven was taller than me and quite difficult to knock over, but that also made him more visible. Especially when he was surveying the room like a slowly rotating lighthouse beacon.

“Stop looking around,” I said, grabbing the brim of his hat and yanking it over his eyes. “You’re too tall to be subtle.”

“I’m keeping watch!” Neven said, straightening his hat. “What if we’ve been followed?”

“Yes, exactly,” I said, yanking his hat down again so it covered more of his startlingly white blond hair. “If we have, they’re going to see a boy with color-changing eyes gaping like a fish at everyone else. Keep your head down.”

“My eyes are still blue,” Neven said under his breath, looking down at the floor anyway. “That’s a standard human eye color.”

“They’re navy,” I said. “Try a few shades lighter.”

Neven squinted for a moment, and when he blinked again his eyes were closer to sapphire, shockingly bright but passable so long as he didn’t get distracted and lose control.

I scanned the room and spotted a darkened corner near a door marked NO PASSENGERS just beneath a large overhanging vent on the opposite wall. It would be a perfect shadow to sink into, if we could somehow squeeze through all the other passengers and make it there.

I grabbed Neven’s arm and started to pull him toward the corner.

“Ren—”

“Shh!” I stopped and elbowed him in the chest, forcing a winded cough out of him. “Don’t say my name.”

Reapers had impeccable hearing—we knew the sounds of snowflakes landing on windowpanes, of blades of grass breaking through soil, of eyes closing and hearts stopping. A word whispered across a room might as well have been screamed in our ears. A High Reaper would have no problem hearing my name, even among all the human voices.

We shoved through the torrent of humans, heads down and trying to be as unobtrusive as one could possibly be while pushing people aside. I wished Neven had walked in front of me to carve the path, but there was no room to switch places. While humans were weak and I could have parted this human sea with one hand, sending full-grown men flying across the room wasn’t the best way to go unnoticed.