The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The Reapers Road

"There you are," he said.

The words came out of the lamplight, and she did not understand them, because she was still on the stone floor of the rite chamber with the fire in her arms, except she was not: she was lying on the bed, the white-remade bed, and the moon column had crossed the room and now lay across its foot, and the lamps were lit, and he was propped above her on one elbow, looking at her, and his face was doing something she had never seen it do. Open. Unarmored. Like a man who had been holding his breath for a very long time and had just been told he could stop.

"What do you mean?" she asked. Her voice sounded strange to her. Everything sounded strange. The heartbeat under her ribs was still learning its rhythm, and she could hear it, and she could hear the lamps, and the silk, and his breath, and the whole loud unbearable miracle of being alive.

"I mean there you are," he said. "Under the other face. I have been looking for you under it for weeks. I knew you were in there. I could see you in the eyes, across every room, in the Looking, at the feast, at the door. The rest of it was a stranger's face. This one is yours." His hand came up and stopped, the old gesture, a finger's width from her cheek, asking, the way it had in the Hawk Tower, the way it had at the open door. "May I?"

She could not answer. She nodded, and his fingers touched her face, and she felt his hand against her skin, her skin, the face she had been born with and forgotten she owned, and he traced the line of her jaw like a man reading a page that had been lost.

She sat up. She looked around the room for her face the way you look for a lost thing, and he understood, and he rose and brought the bronze mirror from his chest and held it up for her, and she looked.

The face that looked back was not Shen Xi's.

It was not the drowned girl's softness, the lavender-and-salt prettiness Hell kept in stock. It was younger than she had expected, and plainer, and grave. Dark brows. A mouth that looked like it had been silent for a very long time. And the eyes were the same eyes, because the glamour had never touched the eyes. They were hers. They had always been hers. That was how he had known her across every room.

"I had forgotten her," she said. "I had forgotten I had a face."

"You had it all along. Hell just made you wear other people's." He set the mirror down and looked at her, and his voice went soft. "I like her. I have been waiting to meet her."

"Chu Nian," she said.

The name was still strange in her mouth, and right, like a coat she had forgotten she owned. She said it again, slower. Chu Nian. The syllables fit her like a key.

"It's mine," she said. "I don't remember anything else from before. Not my family. Not the house I was born in. Not how I died. But the name is mine. I can feel it. Like it was waiting under everything, and you are the one who found it."

"The Moon showed me," he said. "In the fire. I looked at you and I saw what Hell had taken from you, and the name was in it. I think it wanted me to give it back."

"Why you?"

"Because I asked." He smiled, the real smile, the one that undid her, and his voice was light and rough and entirely his. "The Moon and I have an arrangement. It keeps trying to burn my wives, and I keep standing in the fire. We are learning to work together."

She laughed.

It came out of her without warning, a small rusty sound, the first laugh of her life, and she clapped her hand over her mouth, and he looked at her, and something went through the wolf-gold eyes like light through water, and he said, very quietly: "Do that again."

She shook her head, and the laugh died into something else, and the room got quieter, and she looked down at her arms.

Where the sigils had burned for three hundred years, the skin was new and pink and strange, like a page that had been scraped clean. She touched it and felt no old ache, no Hell, and she understood that the brands were gone, and she understood, with the part of her that would always be a blade, that the debt was not.

"They felt it," she said. "The moment the sigils died. Somewhere down there, they felt it, the way a hand feels a tooth pulled." She looked at him. "They don't forgive failure, and they don't give back property. They will send the collector."

"The one from the border stories?"

"The hand that carries blades." She said it flat, the old flat of the ledger. "Blades are forged for one cut. When a blade fails, they do not send another blade. They send him. He collects what is theirs, and he does not stop, and he does not hurry, and he does not pardon. They call him Wushe. No pardon. It is not a title. It is a description."

The prince looked at her for a long moment. Then he took her hand, the one that had worn the brands, and turned it over, and pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist, the way he had in the corridor the night of the feast, and he felt the hammering under the skin, and he smiled.

"Let him come," he said. "I have survived three blades and a court and the Moon's own fire. I can survive a man with a ledger." He lifted her wrist to his mouth and kissed the new skin where the sigils had been, once, and his voice went dark and warm. "Besides. He has to get through thirty nights of me first."

"Thirty nights," she said. "And then the line is sealed forever, and Hell can never send another blade against it."

"And you?" he asked. "When the seal is set, what happens to you?"

She did not answer for a moment. Then she said it, because she had promised him truth, and truth was the only currency she had left: "The brands are gone, but the deed is not. I was taken, not born, into the Abysses. My soul was bought three hundred years ago, and a debt outlives its ink. When the seal is set, the wolf line is safe, and I am still what they own."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he said: "Then we will buy you back. And if they will not sell, I will burn the shop down. I am a prince of the wolf line. I have options." He said it lightly, but the wolf-gold eyes were not light, and she understood that he meant every word, and she did not know what to do with a man who would burn down Hell for her, so she did the only thing she could do.

She kissed him.

It was the first kiss of her life, and it was clumsy and true, and she felt him go still under it, and then his hand came up to the back of her head, and he kissed her back like a man who had been waiting years for a door to open, and the heartbeat under her ribs and the heartbeat under his found each other like two animals at a river.

The moon had climbed. The column of light lay across the bed like a second sheet, and she looked at him in it, and she understood that the night was not over, and that everything that had happened, the fire and the name and the heartbeat, had been the door, and this was the room beyond it.

"I have never chosen anything," she said.

He went still.

"Three hundred years of orders. Walk. Kneel. Speak. Kill. My body was a tool, and then it was a gift I did not know how to give, and I have never once in my life reached for something because I wanted it." She looked at him, and the heartbeat under her ribs was so loud she was certain the whole tower could hear it. "I want to choose you. Before the seal, before the rite, before the Moon. I want it to be mine, the way my name is mine. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said. "I understand."

He did not move toward her. He lay propped on his elbow in the moonlight and he looked at her the way he had looked at her across the altar, and he waited, because he had said he would wait, and he had meant it every single time.

His hand went to her throat first, to Seven's collar, and she thought he would ask about it, and he only looked at it for a moment, the collar of the woman he had buried, on the throat of the woman he had married. "She would have liked you," he said. "She was always on the side of the ones who chose." He undid it, gently, and set it on the table beside the lamp, and looked at her. "Tonight you are only yourself."

She reached for him.

She undid his clothes the way she had learned to undo everything in her life: carefully, watching, learning the shape of it, except this time the learning was joy, and he let her, and his hands were patient on her, and his breath went ragged when she found his skin. He was gentle the way a wolf is gentle, which is to say careful and hungry at once, and he watched her face the whole time, reading her the way he read everything, and when she made a sound he stopped and asked her, and she said his name for the first time in her life.

"Xiao Jin."

It came out of her like a door opening. She had never said it. She had thought it, in the silence under her ribs, a hundred times, but she had never said it, because saying a name was a kind of claiming, and she had been claimed property for three hundred years. She said it again, and he made a sound like a man hit, and the wolf-gold eyes went dark and soft and entirely hers, and she understood that she had just given him something no one else in the world could give him, because no one else had ever chosen him.

"I would have waited forever," he said against her mouth. "I would have waited until the Moon went out."

She had been cold for three hundred years. She had not known she was cold. She had thought cold was what being a person felt like, the way you think silence is what rooms feel like until you hear music. His body was a furnace, wolf-hot, and the warmth went into her like a tide, and she felt herself warming from the outside in, his hands, his chest, his breath, and the heartbeat under her ribs kept time with his, and she understood that this was the other half of being alive: not just the beat, but the heat, and the heat was him.

He kissed the new skin of her arms, the pale scraped-clean places where the sigils had been, one by one, as if he were memorizing an empty page. "I will never let them write on you again," he said. "Not Hell. Not the Moon. Not anyone. You are done being written on."

And when he entered her, the moonlight lay on them like a witness, and she felt the thread. It came up out of the light, a line of silver that braided itself around their wrists where they lay tangled, his and hers, and tightened once, like a stitch being set, and then sank into the skin, and she felt it go in like a root, and she cried out, not from pain, and he said her name, Chu Nian, Chu Nian, like a vow and a prayer and a man learning a word in a new language, and she said his, Xiao Jin, into the dark of his throat, and the first night of the seal set itself into them both like a brand that did not burn.

Afterward she lay in the warm dark with her head on his chest and the heartbeat under his ribs under her ear and the one under her own ribs answering it, and she was not cold. For the first time in three hundred years, she was not cold.

"One," she said.

"One what?"

"The first night of thirty." She lifted her wrist into the lamplight; the silver thread had sunk out of sight, but she could feel it under the skin, a root, a stitch, a claim that was hers. "Twenty-nine more."

"We will do them all," he said. "Every one. And when it is done, I am going to spend the rest of my life making you say my name."

Sometime in the deep night, without deciding to, she slept. Blades did not sleep; they rested like drawn blades rested, waiting, and she had not slept in three hundred years, and she did not know how, and her body did it anyway, the way a bird knows south. She slept against his heartbeat, and she dreamed of nothing, and the nothing was warm.

While she slept, on the West Road, three days from Wolf-Fang City, a man walked through the night.

He was not a blade. Blades were forged, and they were made for one cut, and when they failed they were collected, and everyone knew the shape of a blade. This man had no shape. He was the hand that carried blades, and he had been walking since the moment, far below the world, a page had gone dark, and he did not hurry, and he did not tire, and he did not stop to eat or sleep or pray.

The villages he passed locked their doors after he was gone. No one could later describe his face; they could only say that he had walked like a man who was expected, and that their dogs had gone silent a long time before he came and a long time after he left.

Once, near midnight, he stopped in the middle of the road and looked up at the moon, which had begun its long way down from full.

"Thirty nights," he said to the moon, without malice, the way a man states the weather. "I have never needed thirty."

He walked on, and the road took him, and the moon did not answer.

In the tower, in the deep night, she woke.

She did not know what had woken her. The heartbeat under her ribs was loud; she was still learning it, still learning to sleep, and her body woke the way a drawn blade wakes, all at once, with no gray between. The prince lay asleep beside her, one hand loose on her waist, his breathing deep and easy, the trust of a man who had never needed to watch his own door.

She lay in the warm dark and listened to the first safe silence of her life, and then she looked at the open door.

She had set it ajar in the night. The new warmth of her body, the furnace heat of him, had become too much, and she had risen and opened the door to the corridor a finger's width to let the night air in, and it stood open now, a blade of dark with the lamplight dying at its edge, and she understood, with a small cold slide behind her ribs, that it was open wider than she had left it.

The lamp had burned low. The table beside it was bare. And in the doorway, in the last of the light, something was standing.

She knew the collar before she knew anything else. Pale leather, worn smooth, the throat it had been made for empty for a year and filled for a single night, hers, the luck of the dead blade who had never got her choice. It was around the throat of the thing in the doorway.

Her hand went to her own throat. Bare. And her eyes went to the table beside the lamp, where he had set Seven's collar before he undid her robe, and the table was empty.

The thing did not move. It stood in the open door the way a seal stands on a letter: patient, final, waiting to be read. It was not tall. It was not shaped like anything she could name. It wore the collar the way a key wears a ring, and it looked at her, and she could not see its face, and she did not need to, because she had been a blade for three hundred years and she knew the shape of the thing that came for blades when the blades failed.

It was not the hand. The hand was on the road. This was older than the hand, and smaller, and it had been in the palace for a long time. It had come to her once before, at midnight, on a locked door: three knocks, slow, courteous, patient, and she had not answered. It had not wanted in that night. It had wanted to know if she would answer.

She had answered. She had stayed. She had walked through the door it could not open and chosen the man it had been sent to take from her, and it had watched her do it, and it had waited, and now it stood in the open door wearing the collar of the dead, and it did not knock, because it no longer needed to ask.

It knew.

She did not wake him. Her hand went to the pillow, the old blade habit, for the blade that was not there, and found nothing, and she let it fall, because she was not a blade anymore, and the thing in the door knew that too, and that was the worst of it: it had watched her become a woman, and it had waited, and now it stood in the doorway with Seven's collar around its throat, patient as ink, and it looked at her the way the ledgers looked at property that had been gone too long.

She did not scream. She did not wake him. She lay in the warm dark with her hand over the heartbeat under her ribs, and she looked at the thing in the doorway the way she had looked at everything for three hundred years: steadily, without flinching.

It did not move. It did not leave. It stood in the open door on the first night of the seal, and it waited the way the ledgers waited: forever, if it had to.

She waited with it.

The moon went down over Wolf-Fang City. In the doorway of the bridal chamber the thing that had come for what the Nine Abysses had lost stood patient as ink while the first night of the seal passed into the second, and the woman who had been blade nine lay in the warm dark with her hand over her own heartbeat, and she did not look away.