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Astoria

C ar horns blared beside me as rain fell in its consistent heavy droves, beating the sidewalk like a steady drum.

Pushing through the hospital doors with three coffees in hand and a heavy bag schlepped over my shoulder, I made a silent plea as I crossed over the threshold, a prayer to whoever would listen—that today would be good .

Fine, even.

It didn’t have to be great, but the ominous feeling I woke to settled over my chest and thrust my mother’s superstitious spirit to the forefront of my mind. It was a suffocating suspicion that I just couldn’t shake.

My phone was pinned beneath my ear as I mumbled the silly sentence. The man on the other end chuckled, as if he knew what I attempted to say with only a few short words spoken on one measly lung of breath. It was hardly morning and I was already a mess.

“It can’t be done,” Nemo reiterated.

Even though I had never met the man, I always pictured him with too-large glasses and an exasperated look about him.

Every time he told me “no,” I imagined him nudging the glasses up his nose as he rolled his eyes.

Probably because of the stressed sound he made as he explained himself. I did always tend to push boundaries…

Still, I couldn’t be dissuaded. Any attempt at reconciling an old life with that of the new was long forgotten with his dour words.

“And why not?” I argued, growing frustrated as he rattled off several reasons, none of which I understood. Nor cared about.

“You don’t pay me to tell you what you’d like to hear.”

“I don’t pay you at all.” Reasoning with Nemo was like reasoning with a toddler: it just didn’t work, but I couldn’t resist trying.

Juggling the coffee between hands, I went through the motions of checking in at the front desk.

As many times as I’d been here, the receptionist always asked for my identification.

It wasn’t that I was against hospital protocol, I was actually thankful for their due diligence, but every time I handed over the small plastic card, there was a voice of fear at the back of my mind wondering if this would be the time that someone would discover me.

“Exactly.” Nemo sighed, pulling me back from an anxious spiral. He hung up shortly after, no doubt annoyed with me.

I thanked the woman as she handed me my license back, then tossed my cellphone back in my bag.

That was apparently the end of our conversation.

I wanted to call him back and coax him into doing what I asked, but my frustration fell as the doors to the elevator creaked open to reveal a friendly face.

“I thought you went home,” Regina said, a tired smile on her face.

“Now I’m back.” I handed her a coffee and switched places with her as she exited the elevator. “An extra dry cappuccino.”

Regina was the charge nurse for the oncology floor at the Pacific Northwest Pediatric Hospital.

She was tough as nails and clever as a fox.

Nothing got past her, and she never left a room without leaving her patients and their families smiling bigger than they ever had before.

She’d quickly grown to be my favorite nurse.

She held her arm out, keeping the door from shutting as she took my offering. “You should be at home studying, don’t you have a big test this week?” It only took one sip for her face to change, morphing from exhaustion to relief. “Bless you, child.”

I smiled, rubbing my elbow over my forehead that still felt damp from the rain. “I can study here.” Not that I actually had anything to study, or a test to prepare for.

Regina clucked her tongue, removing her arm so that the elevator would close once again. “I’ll see you up there after my lunch break,” she called back.

As the doors shut I took a moment to tuck the wet strands of hair behind my ears, careful not to dump a hot coffee over my head.

The elevator rang, the number on the panel lighting up for the thirteenth floor.

A shudder ran through me as I fought hard to shove my mother’s superstitious thoughts out of my mind, but I had lived long enough and experienced my fair share of misfortunes to understand that perhaps there was more to throwing salt over ones shoulder than it would seem.

Not that it had done me any good.

My sneakers made that god-awful noise against the clean tiles as I rounded the nurse's desk and hurried past the other patient rooms until I found myself staring down the same sterile door with the same taunting number.

Room 13.

Why thirteen? I couldn’t be sure, but every day spent here grated against my nerves. He’d picked it to screw with me. It had been years since an incident, and as he enjoyed pointing out…

I was due .

I know what my mother would have said. She would have warned me against giving Death too much credit. I was only five when she told me off for chasing frogs in the creek near our house, “Don’t trouble the spirits, Devlin. You never know who might answer.”

She said it on more than one occasion and even though she wasn’t religious—frogs, like many other things, fell into her category of superstitions. Thus I was forbade from them, as I was from anything she felt would somehow drag us into ruin. As if we weren’t already there.

But I was just as wild as her, it was that Tempest blood hot in my veins. “You’re mad from the curse,” I would sass back with my hands on my hips, then take off running. If I had known the truth then, it might have saved me a century of heartache.

Even still, Death was a figure I couldn’t escape, no matter how hard I tried.

And I had known him far more intimately than my mother.

There wasn’t enough salt nor sage to cleanse his spirit from mine.

I recognized his calling card as well as I knew my own flesh.

His number on the door was only the beginning.

I stumbled my way through the dark room, cringing as my phone vibrated loudly inside my bag. Casting a quick glance to the small form in the hospital bed, I let out a sigh of relief as Ishani kept sleeping peacefully, her breathing shallow and even by tell of the monitor beside her.

Setting the coffee down on the table, I hung my coat and bag by the door. The room was silent. Piper was most likely pacing the halls on the phone with Sanjay who had taken the day shift and gone home to shower and rest.

A darkness pulled my attention toward the windows, the curtains obscuring the light from the street down below. I should have known, if only from the weight on my chest all day. Or perhaps the slight chill in the air.

A shadowed form sat on the bench beneath the window, silent and unmoving as I fumbled for the lamp on the side table.

“Aren’t you going to offer me a coffee?” the voice asked, startling me as I clicked the light on.

“What are you doing here?” My tone was bitter and demanding as I stalked toward the window. Reaching for his shadow, he disappeared beneath my grasp, like mist carried on the wind.

Death’s heady laugh then came in a warm breath against my neck, causing panic to rise in my chest as my skin pebbled to gooseflesh.

In the span of seconds my mind had taken me back to that street, holding my daughter’s broken body as I witnessed the impossible. I was frightened then, when the stranger emerged from shadows and ash. Now, I was just angry.

Stepping away, his boots echoed off the tile, met only by the dull tone of the machines hooked up to Ishani. “Thanks for the coffee, Tempest,” he taunted.

I wasn’t afraid of him, not anymore, but there was something in the way he held himself that dug up that seed of fear inside me.

He had planted it long ago, and for all my running, I never managed to dig it out.

His presence was powerful and intoxicating, but in the way of a great and terrible danger.

It was a snare that you couldn’t help but get caught in.

I looked him over in the dim light, unsurprised to see he hadn’t changed.

Not in the hundred or so years I had known him.

Grim glanced down at me with a lazy smirk, his dark features concealed by the hood he wore.

He didn’t need to pull it back to reveal himself.

His ink-stained, sorrowful presence was enough.

“Or what is it this time? Shall I guess?”

I didn’t have time for his games, or his riddles and jests. There was only one reason he would come, and I wasn’t going to let it happen. “Leave,” I commanded.

“As much as I am enjoying this reunion, I’m not here for you.” His gaze fell to Ishani who slept in the bed, her face turned away from us. Only the consistent noise of her monitors brought me peace as I stared down Death.

“ Elizabeth …” he spoke my name with a bite of dissatisfaction, his nose pinching as if he had tasted something sour. “It doesn’t suit you,” he said, tossing the lid from the coffee I had bought for Piper. He took a long sip, as if he wanted to wash the name I had chosen for myself from his mouth.

“It’s perfectly suitable.”

He laughed, raising a brow over the rim of the paper cup he held to his lips. “Pledged to God? You and I both know you are no such thing.”

Stealing the cup from him, I slammed it down on the nearest surface, spilling hot coffee over my hands.

The liquid burned, and I wanted to curse but made no move for the sink, as I was too distracted by the monster watching me.

Enchantment swirled in his dark gaze as he studied the way my pink and swollen skin returned to its original state.

The burn disappearing, thanks to my curse.

“As I said, you cannot hide your true nature behind angelic names and goodwill.” Striding toward the bed, he reached out to touch Ishani, running a long finger down the side of her cheek. His thin lips pursed, and his expression grew guarded.