Page 203 of Famine

“Famine?” Now she’s the one who sounds afraid.

She runs over to me. I catch her by the waist and hold her close, my face pressed against her stomach.

Alive, I remind myself again.

“I thought he took you,” I say against her.

“Who?” she says, her fingers slipping through my hair. She tilts my face so that I’m looking up at her.

“Death.” Even as I speak his name, my fear begins to rise all over again.

If he didn’t kill Ana, it’s because he has some plan for her. A plan I want no part of.

“He’s here?” she says.

I nod.

Even now I feel him like a pulse off in the distance, though I can’t sense precisely where he is. He must be keeping to the sky, where he knows I can’t pinpoint him.

“And he’s close,” I say. I don’t bother telling her that everyone else is gone.

The expression is wiped clean from her face.

I take a deep breath and stand. I’ve gone over this moment every day for the past two weeks. What to do, what Ana’s to do.

“Listen to me carefully,” I tell her now. “I want you to hide far away, beyond the fruit trees.”

“But you said—”

I said a lot of things in the last two weeks, some of them lies and some of them truths. Amongst them all, I told her that running and hiding were pointless, which they are. Death knows all souls. He’d find us. He’d find her.

“Fuck what I said. If you stay here, he will kill you,” I say. “That is what he does.”

It’s not the complete truth. Thanatos could just as easily kill her here as he could several kilometers away. The actual truth is that I want Ana to be far away when I face my brother because I want his focus to be on me and me alone.

“What will he do to you?” she asks. Her voice wavers.

“I’ll be fine.” Now Iamtelling the truth.

“Can he kill you?” she asks.

Can Death himself remove me from the face of the earth?

God help me, but—

“Yes.” I wouldn’t die, but it would be the end of my existence in this form.

“I’m not leaving your side,” she says fiercely.

I feel a swell of love so sharp it’s almost painful.

“Damn you, Ana,” I say, “don’t make me force you away.”

Emotions flicker across her face too rapidly for me to follow.

“I’m not leaving you,” she says stubbornly.

This woman of mine.