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They say Death comes for everyone eventually. But I didn't wait — I summoned him.

On the night my sister's heart stopped beating in a sterile hospital room, I drove to the crossroads where the old cemetery meets the forest road, and I called his name. Not the name priests use. Not the name written in scripture. The real one — the one whispered by those who've stood at the threshold and been pulled back.

I expected a skeleton. A shadow. A void.

Instead, he arrived wearing the most beautiful face I had ever seen.

He stepped out of the darkness between the trees like he'd always been standing there, waiting for me to notice. Tall, lean, dressed in a black coat that moved like liquid smoke around his frame. His skin was pale — not sickly, but luminous, as if lit from somewhere deep within. His eyes were the color of a winter sky just before a storm: grey threaded with silver, impossibly deep, impossibly old.

"Vivienne," he said.

He already knew my name.

"You took my sister," I said. My voice didn't shake. I wouldn't let it.

He tilted his head, and something almost like sorrow crossed his perfect features. "I take everyone. That is what I am."

"Give her back."

"You know the price."

I did. Every old story agreed on one thing: Death could be bargained with, but the currency was always the same. A soul for a soul. My life for hers.

"Fine," I said. "Take mine."

He studied me for a long moment, those silver eyes tracing the lines of my face the way an artist studies a subject before committing brush to canvas. Then he smiled — not cruelly, not coldly. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen.

"You misunderstand," he said softly. "I don't want your death, Vivienne. I want your soul. There is a difference."

"What's the difference?"

He stepped closer. The air between us dropped ten degrees, and I could smell him — not decay, not earth, but something like winter rain and old libraries and the last breath of autumn.

"Your death is a moment," he murmured. "Your soul is forever."

Forever. The word hung between us like smoke.

"And what would you do with it?" I asked. "My soul?"

His gaze dropped to my mouth for just a fraction of a second. "Keep it."

Something shifted in my chest — a tightening, a warmth that had no business existing in the presence of Death himself. I told myself it was fear. I told myself the trembling in my hands was cold, that the flush climbing my neck was adrenaline.

I was lying.

"How do we seal it?" I whispered.

He raised one hand — long fingers, elegant, the kind of hands that belonged on a piano or wrapped around a pen. He held it out, palm up, an invitation.

"A kiss," he said. "That is how it has always been done."

My heart slammed against my ribs. "A kiss."

"One kiss, and your sister wakes. One kiss, and your soul becomes mine. You'll live out your natural life, but when it ends, you won't pass through. You'll stay. With me."

"For how long?"

"Eternity."

I should have hesitated. I should have asked more questions, demanded terms in writing, consulted someone wiser. But my sister was twenty-three years old, and her body was growing cold in a hospital bed, and this creature — this impossibly beautiful, impossibly dangerous creature — was offering me the only thing I wanted.

I stepped forward and took his hand.

His fingers closed around mine, and the shock of contact nearly buckled my knees. His skin was cool but not cold, smooth but not lifeless. There was a pulse — faint, slow, ancient — beating beneath the surface. He felt real. He felt alive. He felt like the most dangerous thing I had ever touched.

He drew me closer. His other hand came up to cradle my jaw, his thumb tracing the curve of my cheekbone with a tenderness that made something inside me fracture.

"Are you afraid?" he asked, his breath ghosting across my lips.

"Yes."

"Good." His mouth curved. "Fear means you understand what you're giving up."

"I'm not giving anything up. I'm buying something back."

Something flickered in his silver eyes — surprise, perhaps. Or admiration. "No one has ever corrected Death before."

"Maybe no one has ever cared enough to."

He kissed me.

The world dissolved.

It wasn't like any kiss I'd known — not the clumsy warmth of college boyfriends, not the practiced technique of the man I'd almost married. It was a kiss that tasted like the end of all things and the beginning of something unnamed. His mouth moved against mine with a slow, devastating precision that made my thoughts scatter like sparks. I felt it in my chest, in my bones, in the marrow of me — a pulling, a loosening, as if something essential was being gently unwound from the core of who I was.

My soul, I realized. He was taking it.

And it felt like falling.

When he pulled back, I was gasping. His eyes had changed — they burned now, molten silver, and for the first time since he'd appeared, he looked shaken.

"It's done," he said. His voice was rough.

"My sister—"

"She's breathing. Check your phone."

I fumbled for it with trembling hands. Three missed calls from my mother. A text: She's awake. The doctors can't explain it. Come quickly.

Relief hit me so hard my legs gave out. He caught me — of course he caught me — his arms solid and sure around my waist, holding me upright against the impossible reality of his body.

"Thank you," I breathed.

"Don't thank me." His jaw tightened. "You have no idea what you've done."

"I saved her."

"You bound yourself to me." He released me slowly, reluctantly, his fingers trailing along my arms as if memorizing the feel of my skin. "I will be in your dreams. In your shadows. In every dark room and quiet moment. You will feel me always, Vivienne. That is the nature of the bond."

"Is that a warning or a promise?"

He looked at me — really looked — and for one unguarded instant, I saw something beneath the ancient, untouchable exterior. Something raw. Something hungry. Something that had been alone for longer than human minds could comprehend.

"Both," he said.

Then he was gone.

***

He kept his word.

My sister recovered fully. The doctors called it a miracle. My mother thanked God. I said nothing.

But he was there — just as he'd promised. I felt him in the stillness before dawn, a pressure in the room like someone standing just behind me. I caught his scent in unexpected places: the stairwell of my apartment building, the back corner of the bookshop where I worked, the pillow beside mine when I woke at three in the morning.

And the dreams. God, the dreams.

In them, he didn't maintain the careful distance he kept in the waking world. In them, he was close — dangerously, devastatingly close. His hands in my hair. His mouth against my throat. His voice in my ear, saying things that made me wake flushed and aching and furious with myself.

I was falling for Death.

The absurdity of it wasn't lost on me. I'd made a clinical transaction — my soul for my sister's life — and somehow, inexplicably, my treacherous heart had decided to complicate everything.

Three months after the crossroads, I went back.

He was already there, leaning against the old stone wall of the cemetery, his coat pooling shadows at his feet. The moonlight carved his face into something almost unbearably beautiful.

"You shouldn't be here," he said.

"And yet you were waiting."

His jaw flexed. "I'm always waiting. It's what I do."

"Is that all I am? Something you're waiting to collect?"

He pushed off the wall and crossed to me in three long strides, stopping close enough that I could feel the cool gravity of him, the pull that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with whatever lived in the space between his ribs.

"You are the most inconvenient soul I have ever claimed," he said through his teeth. "You were supposed to be a transaction. A name in a ledger. Instead, you argue with me in your dreams. You leave your light on at night as if daring me to come closer. You are fearless in ways that terrify even me, and I have existed since the first star collapsed."

"That sounds like a confession."

"It sounds like a disaster."

I reached up and pressed my palm flat against his chest. Beneath the cool fabric, beneath the impossible architecture of bone and whatever substance comprised him, I felt it — that ancient, steady pulse. It quickened under my touch.

"Death isn't supposed to feel," he said, barely a whisper.

"And I'm not supposed to want you. But here we are."

His hand covered mine, pressing it harder against his chest, as if he wanted to absorb my warmth through his skin.

"If I kiss you again," he said, "it won't be a transaction."

"I know."

"It will mean something. And things that mean something to me have a way of becoming eternal."

I rose on my toes and brought my mouth to the corner of his jaw, feeling him shudder beneath me like a fault line before an earthquake.

"Then let it be eternal," I said against his skin.

He made a sound — low, broken, ancient — and then his mouth found mine, and this time there was no taking, no pulling, no unraveling. There was only giving. His hands cradled my face like I was the most fragile, precious thing in a universe full of dying stars, and he kissed me like a man — not a god, not a force, but a man — who had waited an eternity to feel something and was terrified of how much it hurt.

When we finally broke apart, the sky was lighter at the edges.

"What happens now?" I asked.

He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering at my temple.

"Now," he said, "you live. Fully, recklessly, completely. And when the time comes — not soon, not for many years — I will be there. Not to take you. To welcome you home."

"And until then?"

His lips curved into something that was almost — almost — a real smile. The kind that reached his ancient, silver eyes.

"Until then, leave your light on."

He stepped back into the shadows between the trees, and the night folded around him like a curtain falling. But I felt him still — that steady pulse, that cool presence, that impossible ache — nestled somewhere deep behind my ribs, exactly where my soul used to be.

Or maybe exactly where it still was.

Maybe that was the secret no one ever told about dealing with Death: sometimes, what he takes, he holds more carefully than you ever could yourself.

I walked to my car. I checked my phone. My sister had texted: Can't sleep. Want to get waffles?

I smiled.

I drove toward the light.

And in the rearview mirror, just for a moment, I saw a figure standing at the crossroads — watching me go with silver eyes and a heart that had just learned, after millennia of silence, how to break.