Page 24

eighteen

“ W hy is it that you call Grim... Death? If you all have names?”

Feodora had tea delivered to the room. I sipped at mine now, making small talk while she scoured the shelves, flitting from spine to spine mirroring a hummingbird.

“He’s asked us not to.” She said it simply, as if the name thing didn’t matter half as much as Day made it out to.

I took another sip.

“I don’t mean it that way,” she called over her shoulder, stirring a clump of sugar into her teacup with the flick of a finger.

Why couldn’t I have been cursed with magic? Even a petty hex or floating spoon trick would’ve satisfied me. I stared at the spoon stirring itself. “What way do you mean it?”

She paused and gripped the ladder, her worn hands straining against the wood.

“No one’s ever considered giving us names.

Us, Absolutes. We’re myth and metaphor. Fairytales.

Death the Reaper. Time the Keeper. Fate the Seer.

Fortune the Believer... and so on.” Her voice dropped as she added, “It meant a great deal to him—what you did.” She climbed higher, returning to her search.

“My grandmother was cursed to forget hers,” I said quietly, eyes on the tea leaves. “I suppose at the time, I thought no one should be without a name.”

“Our words carry weight, Astoria.” Feodora didn’t look at me, but her voice turned gentler. “You gave a cosmic entity an identity outside his duty. It meant a good deal to him, and so Death prefers his name be reserved—for you.”

My hand trembled, and the teacup clattered against the saucer. Hot liquid spilled over the edge, burning my fingers. I stared at them, stunned, but not from the pain.

Reserved... for me? Was I really so important he wanted to keep it? To savor it? Was that what this was? If it was a gift, it was one I’d given thoughtlessly.

“The greatest gift,” Feodora went on, as if reading the swirl of thoughts I hadn’t dared speak aloud.

“Do you all read people’s minds?”

She shrugged, beginning to descend the ladder with a groan of wood and bone. “You get used to it.”

I set my teacup down and stepped to her side. “Do you need help?”

“Yes, push me into the blue.” She gestured to the far end of the room, by the arched window where the sliver of moon bled through the glass.

As I nudged the ladder down the shelves, she said, more to the books than to me, “Death struggles with his duty. I can’t say more than that, but... it’s not something anyone walks away from whole.”

I hesitated. “What exactly is his duty?”

She was quiet for a moment, running her fingers across the spines. “He ends things. People, yes. But also dreams, choices, moments. He closes the door everyone else gets to keep open. Not one of us wants that job.”

I tapped my finger against my leg, picking at the hem of my dress.

No wonder he carried himself like he did.

“Last night,” I said softly, “he collapsed. We were at an inn, and he was feverish, shaking. I found these deep red gouges on his back, it looked as though something had clawed into him. He said he was fine, but... I was scared.”

Feodora stiffened. Her hand froze on a worn leather spine. “If he said he was fine, then he was.” Her tone clipped the sentence. Final. No elaboration. Warmth gone.

Another dead-end. And maybe I should’ve expected it, everyone here guarded their truths and I began to wonder if secrets were sacred currency.

“Found it,” she said abruptly, pulling a thick indigo tome from the highest shelf and letting it fall to the floor with a heavy thud . Dust exploded in a mushroom cloud. The cover hung half-torn, its edges curled in the manner of old leaves.

I eyed it warily. “That thing looks like it’ll turn to ash if I breathe on it.”

“Then don’t breathe,” she said, grinning.

Feodora climbed down the ladder and hefted the book with surprising ease.

For someone who appeared as a frail grandmother, she handled it as though it weighed nothing.

Without ceremony—and with what I could only call literary blasphemy—she marched it to the desk and swiped everything off the surface in one grand sweep.

Papers, scrolls, delicate glass orbs—all gone as she dropped the book with a spine-jarring thud .

She was odd, this woman. Fate. Zero respect for literature, apparently.

Thumbing through the ancient pages, she dog-eared a few without remorse before landing somewhere in the middle.

On the page was an illustration of twins.

Two young women, close to my age, their faces sketched in old ink and shadow.

Lines spiderwebbed outward from them, names scribbled in looping cursive at each intersecting point.

At the top, in faded yet careful penmanship: A. Wylde.

My heart stuttered. That was the name Nemo gave me. The one I’d searched for, the one that led me nowhere but an eerie article and a footnote on a man who dabbled in the occult. Gentry, I think.

Feodora pointed to the twin on the right. “That’s Alice. She’s the start.”

I tried to follow Alice’s line, but it ended abruptly, a road to nowhere.

Her sister, Margery (Maggie) had the longer thread.

Her name tangled with a man with the surname, Tempest. And from there, the branches sprawled.

The ink traced bloodlines down the page, every union and birth a faint reverberation of the original curse.

“But that makes no sense,” I said, frowning. “How is Alice the start if Maggie married into the Tempest family?”

Feodora shook her head. “That I cannot answer. This curse… it hides. Shields itself from even us. You must uncover it. This is the only help I can offer.” She tapped Alice’s face again. “Start here.”

I studied the two of them. Sisters from the late sixteenth century, the year barely legible in the top corner. My stomach twisted. So this curse had been bleeding through centuries. The Tempest women weren’t just unlucky, they were doomed from the very beginning.

I traced the lines down. Past names I didn’t know. Past generations I’d never heard spoken aloud. Eventually, I found them.

A blank space, then my mother, Lucy. Below her, alone— Astoria.

The paper trembled between my fingers.

Above my mother’s name, there was nothing. No woman before her. No link. Just a smear of ink where a name had once been. My grandmother’s name had been wiped clean, even from Fate’s accounting.

“If you’ve had this all this time, why am I just hearing of it?

” My voice cracked sharper than I meant it to, but I didn’t care.

“Nemo told me he couldn’t help me. For months.

Years, even. And now suddenly, I get a name scribbled on a scrap of paper like he’d done me some great favor, and you just happen to have a book with the same name tucked away on your celestial bookshelf? ”

Feodora didn’t blink. She turned a page. “We guide. We don’t interfere.”

“You call that not interfering?” I gestured to the massive, cursed family tree staring back at me. A death sentence written in ink.

Feodora finally looked up, eyes steady. “Would you have listened if we gave you everything up front?”

I didn’t answer. Mostly because I wasn’t sure.

But something cold slid down my spine, because the truth was, what if a part of me hadn’t wanted the curse broken? What if, somewhere between chasing Death and being chased by him, I’d stopped seeing the curse as the problem? The thought made my head spin.

I settled my anger at the missing name on the family tree. It seemed nothing was safe from our families malevolence.

“Before you ask, no—I cannot tell you. Even I cannot remember her name.” Feodora’s voice was soft, but not fragile. More like something weathered. “She was nameless, from beginning to end. I’m sorry for that too, Astoria.”

There it was again, that quiet grief in her eyes. A resignation so deep it made the air feel heavy. She closed the book and sat back in her chair.

“And what of the poem Death recited to me when he had me kidnapped?” I leaned forward, my pointed elbows digging into the soft flesh of my thigh. A run in my tights had already appeared above my knee.

“Ahh…” Her forehead creased, and then she turned the page.

There, barely legible, was the curse. Faded ink. A smatter of gold dust beside it.

Fate’s voice grew eerie as she chanted the words I should have committed to memory.

“At twenty-two, the clock will freeze, but blessings turn with bitter teeth.

No joy, no peace, no love shall last. All sweetness curdles into past. Each daughter born shall wear my scorn, till Death himself their fate is torn. "

“I don’t understand.”

“For once, Astoria. Neither do I. You not only cheat Death, but you stole from Time, and you blinded Fate. A few weeks ago, Death appeared and asked me to show him your curse, and this just appeared. ”

Worrying my lip between my teeth, I ran a finger across my damnation in ink.

Feodora lifted my chin, daring me to meet her swirling gaze. “Your threads are uncertain, whatever you choose. Choose wisely. Be earnest. Look to your heart, the heart never fails.”

Heavy words, bestowed from wisdom herself. And I couldn’t breathe beneath them.

I looked down at my hands, trembling against the old book’s cracked leather, and for the first time, I let the thought fully bloom: maybe I wasn’t strong enough for this.

It had taken me years to get here. How many more to unravel the curse? And if I did —what then?

Would I die?

Yes. Of course I would.

I’d traded my soul to the devil himself. Was I ready to die?

My thoughts flickered back to Ira, to Dante’s Inferno, to the funeral I still couldn’t fully mourn. There could be no more running. My reckoning was coming, and my sins lay piled like the bodies left behind.

Run , the voice inside me demanded. You can always run. Don’t save anyone and nobody gets hurt. You get to live. You get to breathe. It’s not your burden, not really.

But I quieted it. I’d heard it all before…