The first thing I learned was that the articles called him Death.
He said he didn’t kill them. Most of what I read claimed otherwise.
But I did find a few sites that talked about Thanatos as a guide—what Zander asserted he was—leading souls from one world to the next. The Ancient Greeks thought most people went to Hades, which, despite being cold, damp, and dark with the dead bumbling around like pathetic ghosts, was not the equivalent of hell. That was Tartarus, for the very wicked. Elysium was their heaven. Without proper death rituals, the soul would struggle to gain access to its proper realm, suffer during the passage, or be trapped indefinitely between worlds. This, according to Zander and two of the thirty-plus things I read, was where Thanatos came in.
I’d been so caught up in the tornado of revelations about myself that I’d learned almost nothing about Zander’s role—what exactly he did and how. Online it said Thanatos and his brother, Hypnos, carried off the dead or enveloped them in a black cloud. I couldn’t imagine Zander walking around suburban Chicago with dead bodies or surrounding them with a spooky mist and getting away with it.
I was about to give up, my vision blurry from reading the convoluted language of ancient writings that seemed to be taking me nowhere, when a quote from Thanatos in a two-thousand-year-old play by Euripides caught my eye: “The woman goes with me to Hades’s house. I go to take her now, and dedicate her with my sword, for all whose hair is cut in consecration by this blade’s edge are devoted to the gods below.”
I printed it out, remembering how the first day I’d spoken to Zander, he’d held my hair, twisting a lock of it between his fingers. Beautiful, he’d said. Don’t ever cut it. It gave me chills. Was that how he did it?
It was easy to imagine a consecrated blade—a sword, a knife, even an old pair of scissors—among all the antiques in his house.
I sat back, trying to assimilate what I’d read, what I’d heard from Zander, and what I’d known before. What was true? What did I believe?
I believed there had once been Fates and that I was descended from them, even though I still had no real proof. Only that Zander had known what I was, things about me that I hadn’t told him. And then there were the notes in my mother’s file. And the letter and the myths Nan had told me throughout my childhood that, in retrospect, seemed more purposeful than just bedtime entertainment. All of that taken together was like person after person telling me the sky was red. Like the people in the Greek Orthodox church, I now believed.
The question remained: what was I supposed to do about it?
Chapter 20
Zander and I met by his car, parked in its usual spot outside school. It was Monday, five days after he’d hijacked my visit with Demetria. He’d pushed me to get together sooner, talk more. Even texted me over the weekend, but I’d said no to everything. I needed time to think.
I’d picked up hours at Wilton & Ludwig instead, wearing scrubs Friday night while my new “date sweater” stayed home. Ryan and his dad were loading up stuff for the annual Funeral Directors Convention in Milwaukee. They’d be gone this weekend, Ryan told me, but maybe we could try a synagogue next week? Maybe, I agreed vaguely, our visit to Zander’s church feeling like a hundred years ago, though it had been less than two weeks.
At school, I’d sensed Zander watching me. By my locker, walking to class, leaving homeroom. I pretended he wasn’t there, but in truth, I felt him more than ever, as if there were an invisible string connecting us. Binding us.
“Zander’s staring at you,” Liv told me at our table in the cafeteria.
“Yeah.”
“Well, why doesn’t he come over? You have a fight?”
“No, not really. We’re just taking a few days.” I shrugged. “Like a cooling off period, you know?”
She glanced over my shoulder, where I felt Zander’s eyes searing into me. “He doesn’t look cooled off,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “He looks like he wants to eat you for lunch.”
I didn’t feel cooler either. As days passed, things just got more jumbled. I wished I could forget that I’d wanted to be with Zander and approach him with a rational game plan like I’d had before coming to Bellevue. But I couldn’t do it. I felt an overpowering need to see him, so now, standing near his car, every inch of me was zinging with anxiety and anticipation.
My stomach flipped as he walked out of the school’s doors, the wind making him wince slightly. He came toward me, wearing the same intense look I had pictured in the lunchroom. The one I’d seen when I glanced sidelong down the hallway toward his locker each day since we’d last spoken, always finding his eyes on me, as I knew I would.
He stopped just inches away. We weren’t touching, but the space between us was so charged that I knew even if my eyes had been closed, I’d have felt him there. He paused for the shortest second and without waiting for a hello or any sort of consent, reached down, sliding a hand behind my neck, into my hair, his bare skin somehow hot against mine despite the rawness outside, and kissed me so forcefully that I lost my footing, bumping into his car.
“I’ve been waiting days to do that,” he whispered, holding me steady as he pulled away.
I looked down at my boot kicking leftover snow so he couldn’t see the things I knew he would if I met his eyes. My head was buzzing. I felt him slip his arm around me, the only thing keeping me upright as he guided me into the passenger seat.
I studied the fuzzy gray ceiling while Zander rounded the back of the car, recalling the things I’d read about Thanatos. Get a grip, I told myself. This is not just a hot guy from school. This is Death, or some version of him. Nothing is surer to have an unhappy ending than swooning over Death.
I heard the rush of wind, a swish and rustle of fabric as he sat, the double-click latch of the door closing firmly. Then silence. For a minute, neither of us spoke. It was still freezing in the car and I squeezed my gloved hands together, the leather crinkling and stretching.
“Zander …”
“I know,” he interrupted, his voice low and earnest. “I promised I wouldn’t do that again. Truly, I couldn’t help it.”
I rolled my head to the side and found him watching me, smiling, but without any irony or mischief. As if he was sure I’d understand what he meant. I did.
I took a deep breath. “We need to stay focused,” I said primly, as much to myself as to him. “There’s a lot I don’t understand and I need to.”