The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(4)

The boot lifted and the tremendous pressure on my skull subsided, leaving me light-headed. The bruises would melt away in a few minutes, but Ivy would certainly make more before they could heal. I tensed up when she moved again, but this time she only kicked my hood back.

My black hair poured out like an oil spill onto the snow, half of it fallen loose from my braid after Ivy’s violent kick.

“As if anything could hide what you are,” she said.

“Half-breed,” Mavis said under her breath, crushing my arm another degree into the pavement.

“Won’t you look at a High Reaper when they’re addressing you?” said Ivy.

I dragged my gaze skyward and locked eyes with Ivy, her irises a nauseating swirl of purple and green.

She reached down for me and I couldn’t help closing my eyes again, imagining the thousand different kinds of pain she could inflict. Every muscle in my body pulled taut, flinching away from expected agony. My legs kicked out half-heartedly, but I was no stronger than a pinned butterfly. I clenched my jaw so hard that my teeth scraped together, and I imagined a world where I could fight back without consequences from the High Council, where there was anyone in power who cared what happened to me.

The pain didn’t come for an agonizing stretch of time. My muscles wound tighter and tighter, shaking from the force.

Then, with uncharacteristic gentleness, Ivy gathered my hair and lifted it from the snow. I opened my eyes just as a pair of scissors crossed my line of vision, gleaming in the weak streetlight.

“No!” I said, surging against the arms that slammed me back into the street. I lunged up again, but the hands ground deeper into my bones. I couldn’t get up without hurting them, and if I hurt them, the High Council would hear about it. So instead I thrashed like a speared fish and glared up at the unmoving snow above me and tried to make the process as difficult as possible for them.

I knew my hair was the wrong color and that nothing I did with it would ever make me beautiful, but it was mine, not Ivy’s to take.

She grabbed my jaw with one hand and held it still, the scissors suspended a breath away from my eye.

“Stop moving, or I’ll take your eye instead,” she said. Her words sent a numbing chill through my bones. It must have been the voice she used on humans before she took their souls, because her words made my whole body want to wither like a dying plant. Though cuts on my skin zipped themselves up and shattered bones always snapped back into place within minutes, I’d never had the displeasure of regrowing eye jelly and didn’t particularly want to find out how it felt.

I went still, afraid to move in case the silver blades dropped down even a millimeter. It wasn’t the threat of pain that stilled me, but the anticipation of the squishing sensation, how it would feel to have scissors plunged through my eye, the way my vision would fracture and kaleidoscope. I grew nauseous at the thought, unable to do anything but stare at the sharpness of the blades, the polished twinkle of silver in the streetlight.

The background softened into a dreamy haze and I realized too late that Ivy was turning time on me, stretching the moment longer and longer. I lay trapped in a world of only me and the scissors and the breathless promise of the blades plunging into my eye. She could keep me here for centuries if she wanted to. I started to panic even though I couldn’t breathe or move, my slow-beating heart racing and my lungs screaming for oxygen they didn’t need. I stared and stared and couldn’t look away and the blades only seemed to grow sharper and more sinister, moving closer and closer to my open eye, and suddenly I wanted Ivy to gouge my eye out just to end it end it end it—

The scissors disappeared from my line of vision and I gasped, falling limp against the snow while Sybil and Mavis laughed on either side of me. Cold sweat caked my skin and my eyes burned with dryness, even though only a second had passed.

“Look how scared she is,” Sybil said, jamming her finger into my cheek. “This is supposed to be the heir of a High Reaper?”

“She’ll never ascend,” Mavis said, grabbing a fistful of dirty snow and shoving it in my face.

Surely nothing would anger them more, and part of me wanted to ascend as a High Reaper just to spite them. But it would never happen. My father would never train me for ascension, even though I was his firstborn.

Ivy yanked my half-undone braid and I remembered why she’d had the scissors in the first place. I clenched my jaw at the sharp snip of scissors and my own hair falling into the snow, dropping my gaze to the gas streetlight caught in our time freeze, the light still casting a weak circle onto the snow around us.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. It’s fine, you’re fine, and it doesn’t matter at all.

But the words whispered under my breath didn’t reach my brain. The flame of the streetlight contorted angrily against its glass cage, echoing my despair. A severed piece of hair blew over my shoulder and I clawed my fingertips into the snow, forcing my eyes shut and praying that the dark sanctuary would calm me. But even with my eyes pressed closed, I could see the light burning brighter than before.

I needed to calm down before the light got any brighter. I remembered being half a century old and my father grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me so hard that I couldn’t see, shards of exploded light bulb all around us. Reapers don’t control light, he’d said. Don’t let anyone see. Keep it a secret. Be a good little bird and don’t ever do that again.