The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(18)

I bumped into the broad chest of a middle-aged man, the bronze buttons of his coat stamping into my face. I couldn’t easily push past him, blocked by children on one side and an elderly woman on the other.

“Pardon me,” I said.

But he didn’t move. Instead, he glared down at me, his long nose casting shadows like a sundial under the singular overhead light. He stood close to a woman with a similarly sour countenance, brightened up marginally by a thin coating of white powder. His eyes were pearly blue and the woman’s were a misty green, both on the Reaper spectrum of colors.

They’ve found us, I thought, my knees starting to shake. They’re going to drag us back to England in chains along the ocean floor.

Then the crowd behind me pushed us closer, pressing me against the man’s warm chest. I exhaled. Even High Reapers couldn’t change the temperature of their blood. These people had static eyes and no chains for clocks in their pockets. They had to be human. I leaned back against Neven, every muscle relaxing. I wasn’t dead just yet.

I glanced at the children on their left and the old woman on their right and decided to split the difference, sliding between the couple while Neven sputtered apologies in English and French.

“Whore,” the man mumbled as I shouldered past him. Another human might not have heard it in the chaos of steerage, but my sensitive ears picked it up easily. “Just what we need, more Chinese selling themselves in Poplar.”

I nearly whirled around and shattered his nose, but Neven nudged me forward, the crowd drawing us in deeper.

I clenched my jaw and shoved across the room with more force than necessary until we reached the corner. I shuffled into the shadow, dismayed that it wasn’t as dark as I’d originally thought. Neven finally caught up and stood beside me, letting me tuck him into the darkened space as I dimmed it even more. I couldn’t hide us entirely—it wasn’t dark enough for that without someone noticing us vanishing—but I could at least make us harder to see.

In the reduced light, the tightness of my shoulders began to ease. Darkness meant safety. I so rarely experienced the privilege of being unnoticeable.

Only an elderly man reading a French book and a younger man holding a bouquet of roses stood near us. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

“Nothing will be different in France,” I said, so quietly that only Neven would hear. The ferry no longer felt like a passage to freedom but merely a longer chain. “Anywhere I go, it will be like this.”

Neven shook his head, shuffling closer to me in the shadows. The cold from his bones bled into mine, soothing in the chaotic heat around us.

“We’ll make it different,” he said.

“How?” I said, crossing my arms.

“I think there are good people everywhere,” Neven said. “I’ve met a lot of them while collect—”

I elbowed him in the ribs.

“—while working,” he continued, rubbing his side. “I think people who aren’t...like us...they’re less set in tradition.”

“Why would they be?”

“They don’t live more than half a century,” Neven said. “Old ideas die with them. With us, it takes a lot longer for the new to replace the old.”

“You better hope nobody overheard that,” I said, turning my head away so I wouldn’t have to actually respond to his theory. It was dangerous to hope for things. My lament had merely been a statement of fact, not a call for his optimism.

“No one knows us outside of England,” Neven said. “We can be anyone. We can be students—”

“Men can be students.”

“Oh.” Neven paused. “Well, we could work. What if we were librarians?”

I scoffed. “Who would hire a woman, much less a Japanese one?”

Neven sighed. “Well, what was your amazing plan, then?”

I glared at him. “Not dying. This isn’t a holiday for me, Neven.”

He wilted against the wall. “You’re being belligerent,” he said.

“I’m contending with my reality.”

“Ren, I was only trying to...” He shook his head and looked down. “Never mind.”

I tipped my head back against the wood paneling, staring at the cracked white ceiling. Neven meant to help, but he didn’t understand and probably never could. I sagged against the wall and curled into the shadows, wishing that I hadn’t taken out my frustration on Neven. It was so easy to be brave and calm for him when all he feared was darkness and church grims and ghost stories. It was much harder to do when my own death chased after me. After all, Neven wasn’t the one who would be executed if we were caught. I had no doubt that Ambrose would deliver me to the High Council in chains and beg on his knees for Neven’s life. Then Ankou would crack open my rib cage like a treasure chest and rip out my soul, tossing it into the void. Every time I imagined it, I thought I might shatter into white light and glass like the streetlamp that had started the whole mess.

“A flower, madam?”

I turned to the man on my left, who had plucked a pale rose from his bouquet and extended it to me. I wanted to yank the shadows over me like a human child hiding under her covers from monsters. Humans never looked at me without fear, never smiled at me or offered me flowers.

“I don’t mean to suggest anything,” he said, misreading my hesitation, “but you looked like you could use one.”