Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 110034 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 550(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 367(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110034 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 550(@200wpm)___ 440(@250wpm)___ 367(@300wpm)
Now I break for her.
I swallow it down, welcoming the anger again. The anger I can deal with, the rage I can use. I just have to learn to control it so it doesn’t get the better of me. I need to wield it like a weapon against the one who spurned me.
I need to make her suffer too.
“I’m getting her back,” I growl, and start storming out of the darkness of the cave, using all my senses to find my way back to the light. “I’m getting her back and I’m making her pay. No one escapes Death, not even her.”
Especially not her.
Chapter 1
Hanna
“The Rescue”
When I first got that phone call that my father was dead, my relationship with death suddenly materialized. Before, I hadn’t given death much thought. I mean, who really does? Most of us go through life believing—hoping—that the one truth of life will never touch us. We bury that impending reality deep inside and live as if we, and the ones that we love, will live on forever. Death becomes something that happens to other people, but never to us.
For me, the news about my father snatched the ground out from under my feet. I felt betrayed by the world, like my reality shifted into something new, something horrible and unsure, and my place in it was no longer a given. I just couldn’t trust life anymore. Leading up to the funeral, it was like walking on a tightrope, as if a single deviation would send me spiraling over the edge of despair. Death felt like a betrayal to life itself, and if I wasn’t careful, it would come for me too.
I started to hate death. With a passion. That unfairness and cruelty of it all. How dare he come for my father? How dare he come for any of us? All any of us want is to live, why can’t that be enough?
Then I met Death.
Face-to-face.
No longer this impersonal, nebulous dark thing, but a physical being with thoughts and feelings and emotions.
A God.
And this God of Death? He made me fucking laugh.
He made my body feel things it’s never felt before.
He awakened something inside of me, something I didn’t know existed, something deep and primal, and to be honest, fucking terrifying. Like there’s another version of myself that’s been living in a parallel world, a thin veil between us, and for the first time she made herself known. She only gave me hints at what I might be capable of, who I really am, but it was enough to let me know I am so much more than what I’ve given myself credit for.
She made me feel whole for the first time in my life.
And now I feel like I’m leaving her behind, this better, more powerful version of myself that I didn’t even have a chance to get to know.
And I’m leaving Death behind too.
I should be happy about this.
I know I’m doing the right thing.
The whole reason I ended up in Tuonela in the first place was to rescue my father from death and I did that. I took his place, and while there was a chance I would never see him again, I still made plans to escape. I just expected it would take time. The last thing I expected was for Rasmus to get me on my wedding day—today—and set me free.
And now I’ve been given everything I wanted. I can see my father again, go back to my old life, my real life, in the Upper World, and return to the reality I belong in, not this land of death and decay.
Yet why do I feel like I’m doing something wrong?
Like this is some sort of mistake?
“Hold on!” Rasmus yells, his voice swallowed by the wind, seconds before we almost collide with a mountain.
Right. Perhaps it’s natural to think everything is a mistake when you’re riding a flying skeleton unicorn, high above the Realm of the Dead, during a supernatural magic storm.
I pinch my eyes shut, my arms around Rasmus gripping him tighter as the unicorn jerks upward seconds before we become a bloody pancake on the mountainside. I let out a scream that feels like it lasts forever, until suddenly we’re leveling out again.
Sorry about that, a gruff voice says from inside my head, though it doesn’t sound very sorry at all.
I open my eyes but I only see the dark purple mane of the unicorn flowing behind it like kelp, and the charcoal gray of the storm punctuated by the occasional flash of lightning. It feels like we’ve been flying for a long time, but perhaps it’s only been minutes.
Who said that? I project inside my head, knowing my voice wouldn’t carry anyway.
“Hanna?” Rasmus asks, his voice faint despite being so close. “Are you talking to me?”
I forget that Rasmus can hear my thoughts sometimes. I think I’ve forgotten a lot of things about him since I’ve been held captive at Shadow’s End.