Because You Love To Hate Me

by Ameriie

  Young face.

  Old eyes.

  Overhead, the rain slows, stops, turns to mist as he gets to his feet. He does not know how long he’s been asleep—hours? days? weeks?—but now he is awake, and he is cold, and he is hungry.

  Not a stew-and-potatoes kind of hunger—that is a thing he knows but doesn’t know—but a purposeful hunger, a marrow-missing-from-your-bones, no-blood-in-your-veins, heart-dragging-itself-along kind of need.

  Death is awake, and so he is hungry.

  He is hungry, and so he is awake.

  He climbs slowly, steadily, out of the deep hole, fingers finding the holds. He swings a thin leg over the side of the well, sits for a drowsy moment on the stone lip.

  It is nice to be awake.

  Beyond the well, the world has changed again.

  It is always changing. One day he climbs out of the well to find the leaves green, and the next they are beginning to turn. He wakes more often in winter, sees bare trees, bare trees, bare trees for days on end. The summers are long and sleepy.

  Today the air is cool and damp, with the fair palette peculiar to spring.

  He swings his legs absently, knocking bare heels against the mossy rocks. He knows he cannot be the only death, but he is the death of this place, with its rolling hills and its rocky cliffs, its wind like music, and its old stone well. The hills spill away around him, one side leading to the sea and the other to a forest, and there, through the mist, beyond the woods, the subtle shadow of a town. On and on, the world spills, waiting.

  Something clenches in his chest. A hungry heart.

  His feet hit the grass, and it begins to wither. The ground has gone to green again, the barren places where he’d stepped before now filled. Weeks, then. Maybe months.

  He tries to step on stones as he begins to walk.

  His strides are long, his steps are slow, but the distance falls away beneath him. He steps one foot down the hill, and the next in the field, one foot in the field, and the next in the forest, one foot in the forest, and the next at the edge of the town. He takes another step, but his bare feet move forward a single stride, solid, ordinary.

  That is how Death knows he is close.

  The town—Fallow, that is the name on the wooden sign—is waking around him, men and women spilling from their homes, moving in a stream of bodies toward the church.

  He stops in the middle of the square and looks around, humming softly, the tune familiar, though he doesn’t remember how, the words, if he’d ever known them, now lost.

  He is a stone in the river. It courses around him.

  Death slips into the crowd, tucking his hands—one flesh, one bone—into the worn pockets of his worn trousers. As he strolls down the lane, he plays a game with himself, trying to guess who it will be. The old man with his basket of bread. The young mother clutching her little boy’s hand. The girl bobbing on her father’s shoulders.

  Last time, it was winter, and the life belonged to a man sound asleep.

  Before that, a pair of children too close to the cliffs.

  Before that, he cannot remember. He has lost track of the order, the faces, the names. They are spots of light in his mind, flashes of warmth.

  Up ahead, the church bells begin to ring.

  The girl squeals as her father tosses her.

  The boy begins to cry.

  The old man coughs.

  Death follows them all.

  His bone hand aches.

  II.

  The girl is sitting on a flat stone grave.

  The whole world’s still wet from the storm, and the damp leaches into her skirts and chills her legs, but she’s never known a person to melt from rain. Catch a chill, maybe, but her blood’s always been hot as the rocks in summer.

  “Isn’t that right?” she asks, tracing her fingers over the grave. She does that more often than not, carrying on half in her head and half out loud, dancing between them the way one does from stone to stone in the low tide, and it drives her father mad, but the way she sees it, the dead don’t know the difference. They hear it all the same, whether it’s on her tongue or in her head.

  The girl’s got her hands busy, braiding a crown out of weedy flowers—it’s the day of the spring festival, when all the girls become May Queens and all the boys go as Green Men, and summer’s waiting at the edge of the woods, peering through the trees. The tall grass starts whistling around her, and she imagines it’s her mum, asking her to sing. She listens a moment, picking the tune, then kicks off, humming until she finds her mark.

  “I met a lad with wide brown eyes,” she sings, her fingers weaving stem to leaf. “He came to me in a dream. He was the fairest boy I’d never met, the loveliest I’d ever seen. I knew him by his smile, I knew him by his steps, I should have known to run—”

  “Grace,” calls her father from the house, and she trails off, letting go of the song. She can picture him standing there, scanning the garden, squinting into the field, casting a look at the cliffs, as if she’s fool enough to go near them when the rocks are wet.

  And for a breath, she thinks of ducking lower. Of pressing her whole self to her mother’s grave, and letting him look till he gives up and goes to the church without her. She thinks of it, but doesn’t do it. Instead, she sets the flower crown on the grave (it was for her mum anyway) and rises, sprouting like a weed.

  The church bells start ringing in the distance. Up close, they clatter and clang, but from this far out, the song is sweet and even.

  “We’re going to be late!” bellows her father.

  She jogs back to the house, barefoot, and he lets out a short, exasperated sound at the sight of her, white dress smudged with dirt.

  Grace doesn’t think God will care about a little mud.

  III.

  They do not notice his bare feet.

  They do not notice his damp clothes.

  They do not notice the cold breeze that curls around him—or if they do, it does not last. Gazes flit past. Minds slip by. People are peculiar. They have a way of seeing only what they want, of not seeing anything they don’t.

  Death walks behind them through the town, searching their faces for the light.

  A burning aura, like the last air escaping a log on the fire, sending up a plume of sparks and heat and orange flame. That’s how he knows whose hand to take. His bone fingers flex.

  He longs for the heat, for the lovely moment after they die when he holds their life—all they were, all they are, all they will ever be—in his hand, cupped like a wounded bird, before he sets it free.

  The white church is a quaint little building.

  Death doesn’t go in.

  He stands by the door, across from the priest, watching the congregation file past. Face after face. Life after life. None of them ready to end. He sighs when the stream of people trickles to a stop.

  A funny thing happens then.

  The priest turns, noticing him there. “You coming, son?”

  Death smiles warmly. “Not today.”

  IV.

  The service has already started.

  Her father mutters as he slides into the pew.

  Grace laces her fingers but doesn’t really pray.

  She thinks it’s funny, to spend the morning in a church and the night at a bonfire, saying prayers, then casting flower crowns into the blaze.

  “Got to have room,” her mum used to say, “for the old gods and the new. One’s tradition, and the other’s faith.”

  But when she died, Grace didn’t go to the church, didn’t stay by the grave.

  She went to the well.

  Climbed the hill to the ring of stones and the pitted spot like a grave dug straight down, so deep no one has ever seen the bottom.

  So deep that maybe it can touch the world below.

  When her father’s not drinking, he says that’s blasphemy, that there’s only heaven and hell and God with a capital G, but Grace doesn’t care, because she saw the bare patches outside her mother’s window
, like footsteps in the grass, saw the same ones at the well, and felt the cold drifting up from below, and heard the whistle from the stones, like a song she couldn’t quite remember.

  “Give her back,” she called, and the words echoed down, down, down into the well, and when they came up again, they were all broken.

  The priest talks on, and Grace lets her gaze slip to the stained glass window.

  It’s a beautiful day, and when the service ends, she’s the first one out, bursting through the doors as if she’s been holding her breath, and now she fills her lungs with air, smiles at the taste of summer on her tongue.

  Her father will go to the tavern and stay until it kicks him out.

  The rest of the day belongs to her.

  There’s a giant oak tree past the church, tall as a house, and all around the base are red blossoms, a blanket of flowers they call farewells because they only come right when a season is ending.

  They are the color of sunsets. Of strawberries.

  Perfect, she thinks, for a crown.

  Grace makes her way to the big old tree. She winds between the roots that sprawl across the ground and steps into the shade.

  And stops.

  The air beneath the tree is cold.

  The blanket of flowers is threadbare, patches of red missing from the cloth.

  Grace feels a prickle along the back of her neck, like someone’s watching, and turns around to see a boy with brown eyes.

  V.

  Her name is Grace, and she is on fire.

  Her life licks the air around her skin and sends up waves of heat, and his cold bone hand curls in his worn pocket, aching for the warmth.

  Beneath the flames, she is a girl in a white dress speckled by mud, a heart-shaped face dotted with freckles, a braid of blond hair escaping in wisps, blue eyes so bright they burn.

  He cannot shake the feeling he’s seen her before, or, at least, seen pieces of her—those eyes, that hair—but he cannot remember where.

  When he takes a step toward her, she takes a step back, glancing down at his bare feet, at the place where his toes dig into the ground, where the tiny red flowers wither and curl beneath his heels.

  Her blue eyes narrow.

  Knowing.

  He thinks they always know, the way a body knows when the sun is up, the way a heart knows when it’s in love, the way he knows to find the light, to take it in his hand, to snuff it out.

  He wonders if she will run.

  They try sometimes, the younger ones, and every now and then the old, but Death has that slow step and that long stride, and he can always catch them.

  Only she doesn’t run.

  She holds her ground, and the fire in her eyes is stronger than a dying life.

  “Go away,” she says, her voice heady, the words rich with command, but he is no fae thing to be wished on.

  “No,” he says, his throat brittle from disuse.

  Young mouth.

  Old voice.

  He draws his bone hand from his pocket, but she turns her back on him and crouches in the flowers, plucking the ones with the longest stems.

  “For the festival,” she says, as if the words mean anything to him.

  “The festival,” he echoes.

  “It’s the first of May,” she goes on, piling flowers in her lap. “That makes today Beltane, with the May Queen and the Green Man, and the great bonfire . . .”

  Something tickles the back of his mind, like remembering, but the memory itself is missing. Instead, there is a dark hole where memory should be, where it’s been worn away by time, or dug out like the well.

  The edges smooth, the drop steep.

  “I’m not here for the festival,” says Death.

  The girl keeps threading her flower crown. “I know.”

  VI.

  Grace forces her fingers to finish the crown while the boy and the tree lean over her.

  She knows who he is, of course.

  Knows even before she sees the dead farewells at his feet, even before she catches a glimpse of those bone fingers, even before he says her name.

  She knows, the way a mouse knows the twitch of a cat’s tail, the way feet know bad earth, the way children know fire.

  She knows because she’s seen him once before, out of the corner of her eye, standing beside her mother’s bed.

  She knows, and she is scared.

  A horrible, heart-slamming-in-her-chest, run-run-run kind of scared. But her mother said there’s no outrunning Death or the devil, so she holds her ground and tells herself there’s more than one kind of quick in the world.

  “I’m not ready,” she says, hating the quiver in her words.

  Death shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why me?” she says.

  “I do not choose.”

  “How long do I have?”

  Death doesn’t answer.

  “I want to say good-bye.”

  “No,” says Death.

  “I want to see the sun rise.”

  “No,” says Death.

  “I want to see the stars come out. I want to dance at the edge of the woods and throw my crown into the fire and taste the first summer fruit and—”

  Death sighs, rolls those brown eyes, and says, “You’re stalling.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” she snaps.

  The wind picks up, and overhead an old branch creaks, weakened by so many seasons and storms. She can hear the cracks spreading through the wood.

  Not like this.

  “Grace,” says Death, holding out his hand, and it is nothing but bare bone, and the sight of it should give her shivers, but she can only stare with fascination, smothering the sudden, mad urge to slip her hand in his, to feel the cool, smooth surface.

  The branch begins to snap.

  And then, mercifully, a girl is calling her name, and she sees Alice Laurie standing in the road.

  “Coming!” Grace calls, ducking out from under the tree a moment before the branch breaks and crashes down into the bed of red blossoms.

  She doesn’t look back.

  VII.

  Death frowns down at the fallen limb, at his empty hand.

  The girl is halfway across the field, not running, exactly, but moving briskly toward the other girl, the one in the road, the one that doesn’t burn.

  He sighs, a sound like winter air through ice, and sets off after her with those long legs, leaving a trail of bare earth in his wake.

  By the time he reaches Grace, she’s alone again, and he walks right up and curls that bone hand around her shoulder. The heat licks his fingers.

  “Caught you,” he whispers, and she stiffens, perhaps waiting for the world to end, but that isn’t how death works.

  Hand in hand with life, that’s how it goes.

  “You could let me go,” she says, keeping those blue eyes on the road.

  “I can’t,” says Death.

  The girl pulls free and turns on him, still gripping her red flower crown. “Why not?”

  The question scratches at his mind. He tries to remember what will happen. He can’t. But the knowing is there, solid as the hunger, that he cannot wait too long. He has to take her hand. Has to take her life. The knowing doesn’t have words, but it’s there all the same.

  “I can’t,” he says again, willing her to understand.

  She crosses her arms, and Death can hear a carriage coming up the road. The faint rattle of a wheel coming loose.

  Again, he holds out his hand. “Grace.”

  “A life’s got to be worth something,” she says. “What will you give me for it?”

  The carriage is rounding the bend behind her.

  “What is it you want?” he asks, knowing the answer.

  “A day, a week, a year—”

  He shakes his head. “It’s your time.”

  “Then let me have it. You’re taking a whole life. The least you can give me is a day.”

  Death stares at the girl.

  The girl st
ares at Death.

  He could hold her down, grip her hands in his, lace their fingers against the road.

  “Please,” she says. “You owe me this.”

  Death frowns. “I do not owe you anything.”

  “Yes, you do!” she snarls as a gust of wind cuts through, tousling her hair, and he remembers.

  Why she looks familiar.

  Where he’s seen those eyes before. Glazed with sickness, but just as bright, staring up from hollowed cheeks in a heart-shaped face. A woman’s frail fingers reaching for his own. A small girl beyond the window, hair white in the moonlight.

  “Yes, you do.”

  This time the words are a whisper, but he hears them all the same.

  “Do you know what it’s like?” she asks. “To lose so much? Can you even feel sadness, grief?”

  He tries to trace his mind around its edges, feeling for the shape, but it is like everything besides his hunger, flat and dull and heavy.

  “No,” she mutters. “Of course you can’t.”

  Death stares at the girl. He does not know what to say. What to do.

  “Dusk,” he says at last. “You can have until dusk.”

  Tears spill down her cheeks, even as she sets the crown triumphantly in her hair.

  “Shake on it?” he asks, offering his bone hand.

  At that, the girl makes a sound as sudden and high as birdsong, shakes her head, and turns away.

  It was worth a shot, thinks Death, stepping out of the road as the carriage rattles past.

  The wheel stays on.

  VIII.

  “Why?” he asks when she hands him the boots she nicked from Bobby Cray’s porch.

  “Some people track mud,” she says. “You track death.”

  He sits on a low wall and tugs the old boots on, and they’re just a bit of leather and cloth, but when he gets to his feet again and takes a few slow steps through the grass, it doesn’t wither. He marvels at this, like a child first learning about tricks of light.

  She holds out a leather glove, and he stares at it a moment before slipping it over his bone fingers.

  “Last thing,” she says, taking up the crown of green. He bows his head and lets her set the wreath in his red hair, but the moment it touches, the leaves go brown and brittle, and even though he cannot see the change, he seems to know what’s happened, the good humor sliding from his face.