The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(20)

Sorry, Neven, I thought, letting go of my clock and grabbing the hem of his coat, pulling him down after me.

When we crashed into the water, it felt like I’d been buried alive—the bone-coldness of frozen dirt packed six feet underground, no air or light, only the damp chill of forever curling cold around my skin. Neither the water nor the cold could kill me, but it could still freeze my bones to brittle ice and fill my lungs with salt water.

I swam deeper and deeper underwater to stay out of sight from the surface, Neven following close behind me. Above us, pale sun cast ribbons of light through the black waters, and before us the side of the ferry spanned forever forward like some great white sea beast. The muffled sounds of the deep ocean all around us rivaled the pure silence of stopped time. Maybe this was how it felt to float in the ether once your soul was extracted but before you went Beyond—floating in a hazy world that unfolded before you in slow motion, your limbs so cold that they hardly felt like part of you anymore, a distant light overhead just beyond your grasp.

The salt stung my eyes and blurred my vision, but I kept them open anyway, looking up for any signs that we’d been followed. The humans had probably seen Neven go over or at least heard the splash, which might draw attention to us.

As the sunlight fractured in the waves overhead, a glint of silver caught my eye.

That was the only warning I had before all the world’s weight crushed my throat and something dragged me toward the surface. Neven floated unmoving in the water below me, the fish around us suspended like a galaxy of strange stars. The Reaper must have frozen time and awakened me with the touch of their arm around my neck.

As we broke the surface, the only sound in the frozen sea was my frantic kicking and splashing as the Reaper wrenched me farther away from Neven, his silver cloak billowing in the water around us. He held his clock in his left hand while his right arm snaked around my throat, crushing me against him.

I grabbed my knife from my sleeve and stabbed at the Reaper’s arm, but he had the strength of iron chains and kept crushing my throat and twisting me around in the water. I kicked and scratched his face and elbowed his ribs, but none of it helped—he only pressed harder into my throat, my vision blurring and fingers going numb.

I bit down on my tongue until I tasted blood, desperate to stay awake. Every part of me screamed at the Reaper’s touch, as if he’d set my blood on fire. He was going to drop me at Ankou’s feet and laugh as he opened me up rib by rib, unraveling my soul before the other High Reapers. I clenched my teeth and fought back as dying humans did, with no plan or skill, just a mindless desperation to outrun death at any cost.

But, like always, it didn’t make any difference. Was this really how I would end? My whole life over after only two centuries, sad and short and meaningless? Just when I’d been on the cusp of something better, they dragged me away.

I looked at the horizon, where France was supposed to be. Even as the Reaper choked me and pulled me away and shook me so hard that salt water filled my mouth and stung my eyes, I couldn’t look away. I reached out toward that faraway place at the end of the horizon, clawing through the water as if I could grab handfuls of the ocean to drag myself there.

Don’t bring me back, my mind screamed, for my lungs couldn’t draw in the air to speak. Just the thought of London made my blood run cold, like I was already dead. I had lived there all my life, but it had never been my home.

I thought of the pictures of Japan in my suitcase, now abandoned in the ferry charging farther and farther away from us. The lush mountains with cherry blossoms, palaces like tiered cakes, bamboo forests, and embroidered kimonos. My home was somewhere in those photographs, with people who looked like me and would call me their own.

What right did Reapers have to take that away, to punish me by their laws, when they wouldn’t even call me a Reaper? I would not die at the hands of a Reaper, not before I’d set foot in Japan.

The Reaper kept choking me and my gaze fell to the black waters, silver glinting just below the surface.

Instead of trying to rip his face off or stab my knife into his eye, I plunged my hands into the water and grabbed his clothes, cutting long slashes through his robes.

“Your aim is terrible,” he said. “I can’t believe someone as pathetic as you managed to take down Ivy. You can’t even give me a paper cut.”

I don’t need to, I thought, clenching my teeth as my fingers felt around the water. I can win without even touching you.

My hand closed around the chain of his clock and pulled.

The metal, wet with salt water, slipped from his left hand and sank into the water. It should have caught on the clip attached to his pocket and stayed tethered to him. It would have, if I hadn’t cut a hole in his robe.

The clock plummeted with the heavy weight of gold and glass, straight for the ocean floor.

The High Reaper released me instantly, diving after his clock with a startled gasp. I coughed and grabbed my throat as the ocean came back to life, the waves slapping me across my face. I could barely stay afloat, but I reached down and cast clouds of darkness through the sea around the Reaper, so thick that even the clear water near the surface looked like the depths of night. That would keep him occupied long enough for us to escape.

Neven must have noticed my sudden disappearance, for he was swimming toward me, glasses in one hand.

“What happened?” he said. “Are they here?”