King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,1

sure? It’s no small thing snatching a soul from Hell, my dear. When you go before Saint Derfel, and ask this of him, can you tell me that you’ve weighed this decision carefully?”

“Yes,” she said in English. In French: “This is the only thing I can do. The only.”

He nodded. Stood. “Very well.” Over his shoulder, to his fellow monk: “Go down and begin preparations. Tonight a saint walks, and a soul rises.”

Outside, thunder rumbled.

Hold on, my darling, Rose thought. I’m coming.

ONE

Before

The first time Rose met Beck, she was locked inside the pie safe. It was a tall piece of furniture, with wire-enclosed racks up top for the cooling of the pies Miss Tabitha never baked, and with a lower cabinet just big enough for a coltish eighteen-year-old to fit inside with her knees drawn up. Miss Tabitha had slid a lock through the handles after Rose crawled into the dark, clicking it shut with an instruction to think about what she’d done.

In the pitch blackness, stomach growling, hands folded up at the bend of her waist, Rose scolded herself for leaving the wash out on the line, her latest pie-safe-worthy transgression. One in a long line over the past four years. Had the world been a different sort of place, she might have complained, but the world was what it was, already dim and fuzzed at the edges with ash, already harsher, bleaker, more dangerous. No one cared that Miss Tabitha had forged the paperwork to say that Rose was only sixteen, and still able to earn a foster parent government funds. No one cared that she was locked here in the total dark.

Rose waited, breathing shallowly, and listened to Miss Tabitha light one of the cigarillos she smoked and pour herself a glass of vodka. Listened to that familiar heavy body strain the seat of a dining room chair; the drone of the fan in the corner, and the murmur of the TV when it clicked on: Miss Tabitha’s favorite evening “stories.” She tried not to think about the fact that she couldn’t turn up at work like this; that Mr. Fisher would finally fire her over this failure to show.

Then: unexpected sounds.

Miss Tabitha said, “Hey! What the hell? Who are you? You can’t…” And then there was a muffling, a garbled scream, a thump. A wet sound, like rain spattering against a window.

Footfalls: light, precise.

A clink, a rattle; sound of the lock on the pie safe falling, and then the cabinet doors swung open, the dim lamplight washed over her, and she saw a man, crouched there in front of her.

Her first instinct was to scream. Miss Tabitha invited men over sometimes, men who…

But this man didn’t look like any of them. No, he looked far different.

His eyes caught her first, and held her attention, a warm honey color, green-brown like river water. His hair, silk-soft and wheaten, fell to his shoulders, artful across his brow, behind his ears. He had a face of sharp angles: cheeks, jaw, chin.

“Hello, little one,” he said, and his voice was velvet, was silk, was sinuous and slippery and good. He tipped his head to the side, which sent his hair sliding over his shoulder with a soft rustle. “What are you doing in here?”

Strangers always meant danger in this city, and fine tremors had hold of her. But Rose swallowed, and managed to say, “Miss Tabitha…”

“Ah. She won’t be locking anyone else in a cabinet, I don’t think.”

Rose shifted as much as she dared, skin prickling with goosebumps, and peeked over his shoulder. He even shifted, obliging her, and she saw Miss Tabitha at her kitchen table: slumped forward, eyes open, unseeing. Red on the table, all down her front; a puddle in her lap, dripping down onto the floor. Blood. Rose could smell it.

“Tabby and I go way back,” the man said. “I can’t say we were ever friends.” He held out a hand, palm-up, in offering. It was speckled with blood. When Rose looked closer, she saw that he wore a stippling of red on his face, across the bridge of his nose. “Would you like to get out of here, darling?”

Rose swallowed. Considered. Placed her hand in his. “I’m Rose.”

“Simon Becket,” he said, and drew her forward, and up, out of the cabinet. When her knees threatened to give out, he steadied her with a hand at each of her elbows.

He was very tall, she noticed. Very lean. He smelled like dusty old books.

“Can you walk?” he