Page 45 of The Edge of Darkness

This was my only chance.

I opted for begging. “Please, please help him. He is needed for what’s to come too!”

Æbon eyed me once more and shifted his scythe to his other hand. “Indeed, he is.” He seemed to sort things out in his head before he spoke again. “I will offer you a bargain.”

I sucked in a breath. At least it wasn’t a “no.”

But a bargain . . . A bargain with a god . . .

“I will remove the poison from his body and restore his life, as you request. But you will give me something in return.”

What could the god of death want more than . . .

“Death,” I whispered, the word hitting a hollow spot at the bottom of my gut. “Mine?”

The god took his time thinking again, then blinked. “No. Your fate has been written.”

“Whose then?”

Would it be my child . . . if I ever considered having any?

Awful things usually happened to people who made bargains with fae—according to the old stories. Would a bargain with a god be any different? Worse, even?

This time his voice was more of a hiss than a whisper. “You ask too many questions.”

His long fingers drummed along his scythe in a rhythmic pattern, once, twice. “You will give up something that is precious to you. Something that the ancients feared, and what haunts ones’ dreams. I will come to collect it when the time is right.”

Before I could question him further, I heard a guttural cry from Roirdan, echoing from somewhere far-off—even though he was physically right below me. From the sound of it, I knew he was in absolute agony.

“Do it,” I agreed without hesitation. “Save him.”

I swore I saw a hint of victory flash in Æbon’s eyes, but he quickly closed them, and his robes stirred on a phantom wind as he breathed in deeply.

He moved his scythe from left to right in slow, smooth motions. Black ink began streaming up the tip of the sharpened blade, as if the poison were being sucked out of Roirdan’s veins and into the weapon itself.

No, not his weapon, his talisman, I realized. It was gold, like Lyceius’s band, and had the same strange, sentient presence about it.

A few moments passed, and when he was finished, his eyes opened, flashing black, before fading back to the palest white. He bowed his head gently before reaching up to return the hood over his head. “I will see you again, Daughter of Karios.”

A black mass opened with a rush of wind, and he stepped backwards into it and disappeared. Despite his absence, I still felt the eerie warmth of peace he left behind.

Peace in death—two things I never thought I would associate together. But his presence had given me a taste of it, and a part of me realized what some people meant when they said they didn’t fear death.

Death’s presence felt like peace.

Or perhaps that was just the essence of the god of death, not death itself. Either way, I found myself lingering in the moment, internally weighing the experience for longer than I should have.

I hadn’t realized I was in a daze until I felt a desperate tug on my ankles, bringing me back to my wits. I followed that pull back to the physical realm, and my consciousness was thrust back into my body, where I fell forward onto my hands . . . which landed right on Roirdan’s thighs.

He was breathing, thank the gods, and all of the foul poison that had previously confiscated his veins was gone. His skin even looked brighter than it had before. When his eyelids fluttered open, I practically cried out in elation.

His gaze went straight down his body to me, and a coy smile spread across his lips. “Now this is one hell of a way to wake up.”

I looked down, noticing that my face was hovering just above his hips, the Alatyr dangling near his⁠—

“Watch your tongue,” Niall warned him as he walked over to help me off the bed. “Are you all right?” he asked me, brushing the hair back from my face.

“I’m perfectly fine,” I answered. Though, had Amarna and Maeson not been anchoring me, I probably would have been lost to my own wandering thoughts, pondering the essence of death.