He knelt beside her and held out one hand. She didn’t even think of trying to keep the blade as her own and offered it to him immediately. When he took it from her, the relief was immense.

“I will have to make a new scabbard for it,” Lord Death said as he turned the knife over in his hands. His voice was as gentle as before.

Sidonie sank her fists into the edges of Morgan’s shirt, tears spilling over. She had never known such pain. It was tearing her apart.

She whispered, “Give him back.”

Azrael raised an eyebrow. “But this is the answer to your prayer. Morgan is now free from bondage. The first blow the Queen struck was irreversible—death was the only way to release him.”

“I don’t care.” The words scraped in her throat. “You’re a god. You can find a way. Give him back to me. Please, I’m begging you.”

Azrael’s expression turned indifferent. He stood and, from his tall height above her, said, “I’ve heard begging before, countless times. The echoes go back through history. Some beg for death, others beg for more life.”

The tears wouldn’t stop falling. Wiping at them, she stood. “Then take me. He was a slave for so long. Let him live in peace for a while and take me.”

“I have heard bargaining too, and I will have you soon enough.” Death turned to walk away.

She was losing him. Desperation drove her to speak faster. “You’ll have my death,” she called after him. “I’m offering you my life.”

Azrael paused for an infinitesimal moment, head turned to one side, the line of his jaw sharp as a scythe.

In that infinitesimal moment, her mind raced at supersonic speed as she desperately scrambled to think of something else to offer him, something that would make him stay.

But she didn’t really have anything. She was nobody of importance, and she had no Power of her own. Her connections were all mortal.

All she’d had ever had was her music.

“I’ll play for you,” she said. Stepping over Morgan’s body, she walked toward Death. “Let me play for you. Please. You have your knife back because of me. Give me this one thing: if I am able to move you in any way with my music, you will give him back to me. If my music doesn’t touch you, then you’ve lost nothing but a few moments of time. And what is a few moments of time to a god?”

Azrael still stood with his back to her, head tilted as he listened. His lean cheek creased as he smiled.

“Very well, musician,” he said. Turning, he flung ravens at her. At a midway point in their flight, they turned into a violin and bow, tumbling end over end. Heart leaping, she tried to catch them, and they flew into her hands. “Play for me. Show me what you are made of.”

Shaking, she clasped the instrument to her. What could she play that could move the god of Death? She had fought with everything she had just for the chance to play, but now that it was presented to her, she felt hollow, small, and inadequate.

Mortal. She felt mortal.

Closing her eyes, she fit the violin under her chin, and set the bow to the strings. Faith had never been as blind as this.

The first thing that came to mind was the sound of her fingers breaking. Her life, as she knew it, dying. The shock and the pain of it, and the utter devastation.

They’ve killed me, she thought.

So she played it.

Next came the memory of warm, strong hands reaching for hers in the darkness. The unknown clasping her fingers, healing her, lending her strength and reassurance. It was the only thing in the world when she had nothing. It had been her lifeline.

And she played it.

Then came trust, the tentative unfurling, when she believed against all evidence that the person who came to her in the darkness would help her in any way he could. The impossibly intense adventure of his arm, sliding around her shoulders. The miracle of warmth when she had known nothing but coldness.

That first kiss, oh, the surprise of it! The agonizing uncertainty… was it all right to allow this? How could it feel so incredibly good?

Could she possibly kiss him again?

Oh, when could she kiss him again?

The burning that took hold, the incandescent light that shone despite all the shadows stacked around them. The unbearable, delicious hunger that was the sweetest pain… that she would give anything, anything, if only she could feel it again…

Always before, when she had played, she’d had the awareness of the violin and the bow as instruments in her craft. Her music had been self-conscious, aware.

Now, as she played, she went somewhere she had never gone before. She lost awareness of the violin altogether.

She became the music.

She was the story, the vibration.

She became the story of love, the notes written in kisses and caresses on her skin. She felt the symphony, the swelling highs in the lifts, and the terrible lows in the falls, and hope was the cruelest note of all, the devastation that came afterward, utterly intolerable.

She poured it all out, all the emotion, the experience, the exquisite delight along with the terror. There was no hiding any of it from a god anyway. The only other being she had been so naked with was Morgan, and he was gone.

Gone, while the love she felt for him had become the very breath of life to her.

Give him back to me, she begged with her music.

Give him back.

When the last note speared through the air, she had nothing left to give. Lowering the violin, she stared pleadingly at the back of the one who held her future in his hands, whatever that future might be.

When he turned, there were tears on his cheeks.

Death whispered, “I knew a love like that, once.”

Her lips formed the words she no longer had the energy to say. Give him back.

Azrael strode to her, and she braced herself to bear the onslaught of his proximity.

Tilting her chin up with long fingers, he said, “You have moved me, musician. You’ve won your wager. But as I told you, the first blow Morgan took with my blade was irreversible, and Isabeau cast a spell with that blow that cannot be undone. Only death releases him from the geas.”

Despair crushed down, bending her spine.

Before she could crumple, he added, “The only way I can give him more time on this Earth is if someone else holds the handle of his chain, so you must claim it. But you must give me your life in return. Your life, not your death, which I already own. That is the only bargain I am willing to make. Do you have the courage to take it?”