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           Death is a man, and at the budding, bouncing age of seventeen, I sold my soul to him. 

           I do not mean figuratively speaking. I mean literally. Like, there was a contract and a quill, the same kind you yourself use on the day-to-day, writing out your correspondences and such, whatever it is you do in the space between your afternoon teas and moonlit balls.

I signed the contract in blood. My own, of course.

            When he entered the room, I smelled him before I saw him. He had this scent of smoke and flames and things you do not exactly want to name out loud because it would be impolite to do so in front of your mother and her guests. I was in a pub, which had become my custom of late, surrounded by the same drunks who’d become my friends of a sort. Drinking our sorrows away, all of us together but somehow still alone.

            The entire thing was very business-esque. Which was surprising, really, because I’d always heard he had a flair for the dramatics. Not that night. That night he made the deal and was on his way without so much as a second glance. Maybe he was not in the mood for one reason or another. I do not know. Since then, I have seen more of his dramatics than I care to admit.

He sat down across from me, gliding in a way that was not natural in the least. He had to have walked over from the entrance, but I did not actually see him until he was right there in front of me. I said something and laughed without humor. All the while hiding the desperation that had made its home in my eyes somewhere between one breath and the next. 

Not that it mattered. 

Death is strange in that way. You do not have to look desperate for him to know it. He can smell it on you, like the rot from a discarded apple.

And that night, I was particularly rank.

            Had he wanted, I would have agreed to anything. 

Anything at all.

Certainly, he knew this too. Hells, it was not easy obtaining the meeting in the first place. Already, I had done things that would have made me cringe in past lives. Nevertheless, I would do more. And he knew this too. 

Choice had become a luxury of sorts—one I could no longer afford. All I wanted was to fix it all. Everything. As all desperate people in desperate situations want to do. Rewind the clock a hair. Take it all back. No matter the cost. In one swift tick tock to the left.

            Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

            The fable of a being across from me leaned back in his chair, something about the movement more feline than human. A trailing stream of darkness hung around him, a blanket of ebony. His shoulder length hair was tied back into a tail at the base of his neck, and as impossible as it sounds, his eyes were the same as mine. As though they, too, were cut and shaped from onyx stone. 

Dark matter we were. Dark matter we are.

When he spoke, his voice simmered between us in an elegant rumble that slithered in the air a moment too long. 

“You need to make a deal.” 

Need not want. Wording is everything in these sorts of situations.

Those depthless eyes stared back at me, dancing in their sockets above two sharp-boned cheeks that could almost be considered gaunt. 

            I gulped, a too large stone dropping into a pool of ink. My insides flipped upside down, and for a second, I thought I might vomit all over the small round table creaking between us. Luckily, I had already puked that evening, so there was nothing left to retch up. 

Thank the God of Small Favors.

Instead, I held his stare and did my best to forget about those same Gods, my family, my morals, and, lastly, my dreams, be them damned and buried. I was always forgetting about my dreams back then. That has not changed much in the years since. 

            It was then I heard her voice, whispering to me from wherever it was she had gone off to. Warm honey, sweet and golden, I could taste her on the tip of my tongue. It was everything to me. In many ways, it still is, even now after all this time and darkness has bedded itself between us.

            “Yes,” I answered, firm, “I need to make a deal.”

            Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

            Just one swift tick tock to the left.