Nine Minutes Before Damnation

Episode One: The Visitor at 11:51 The first time the demon came to my bedroom, I had a knife under his jaw before the clock finished coughing out eleven fifty-one. It was not my best knife. My best knife was still lodged in the throat of the thing I had killed beneath Tanner's Bridge, and I had not yet worked up the energy to fetch it. This one was narrow, iron, and badly balanced. Still sharp enough to open a vein. The demon looked down at the blade and then at me. "You're late," he said. Rain had followed me home. It ticked against the glass behind him and ran from my coat onto the bedroom boards. He sat as if the room belonged to him, one boot braced against the wall, black shirt open at the throat. No horns. No claws. Nothing obligingly monstrous. He looked about thirty-five, perhaps a little older, with a lean face, a crooked lower lip, and a pale scar that disappeared beneath his collar. Demons liked beautiful shapes. People opened doors for beauty. This one had chosen a face that looked as though it had been in several fights and enjoyed most of them. I have always had questionable instincts where damaged things are concerned. "Name," I said. "Rafe." "True name." "You don't give me yours, Imogen Rook. I won't give you mine." I pressed the knife harder. A bead of blood formed beneath the point. It was red. Warm, too, when it slipped over my knuckle. Most hunters would have found that reassuring. Most hunters are easily reassured. The six ash wards over my door were unbroken. The iron filings across the sill had not moved. A sprig of dried rowan hung above the bed, ugly but effective, and the little silver bell tied to it remained silent. Either Rafe had walked through protections that could skin a common fiend, or he had never crossed them at all. He glanced at the clock beside my bed. Eleven fifty-two. "We have eight minutes before you do something you regret," he said. "I can regret things quickly." "I remember." That felt wrong. Not the wards, not the blood. The word remember. I caught his wrist and dragged him off the sill. He came willingly, which nearly put us both on the floor because I had expected resistance. His back hit the wall. I drove my forearm across his chest and held the blade at his throat. He did not touch me. His hands remained loose at his sides even when I searched him. No weapons in his coat. No binding marks at his wrists. A hard ridge crossed his ribs beneath the shirt, like an old wound or a brand, but I did not lift the cloth to inspect it. I wanted to. That was my second questionable instinct of the evening. "What are you?" I asked. "Short on time." I nicked him. He smiled without showing his teeth. "Still mean when you're frightened." "You broke into my house." "No. I arrived in it. There's a difference, though I admit it isn't useful from your side of the room." Eleven fifty-four. Rafe told me he could appear each night when the clock reached eleven fifty-one. At midnight, the rules changed. At one minute past, he would be pulled back. Back where, he would not say. Hell was the obvious answer, so I assumed it was wrong. "And until midnight?" I asked. "I can't touch you." I looked at the thin line of blood on his throat. "I can touch you." "Yes." There was no flirtation in the word. I stepped away. He stayed against the wall, watching while I stripped off my wet coat and unbuckled the harness crossing my ribs. I had another blade there. Two, actually. His gaze followed my hands, not my body. Very disciplined of him. I distrusted disciplined men most of all. "At midnight," he continued, "I can do anything you permit." "For one minute." "One minute is longer than you think." "Spoken like a disappointing man." That earned me a real laugh, low and brief. Eleven fifty-six. I fetched salt from the bowl near the door and threw a fistful across his boots. He did not smoke or blister. I spoke the first three lines of the Litany of Exposure. His shadow stayed attached to his heels. When I held a consecrated coin to his cheek, the metal warmed until Saint Orra's stamped face went soft. Rafe watched me drop it. "The saint won't help you," he said. "She never helped anyone." That did it. I hit him. My knuckles split against his mouth. He turned his face with the blow but kept his hands down. Blood shone on his lip. He touched it with his tongue, slowly enough to make the gesture feel chosen. "Saint Orra sealed the Lower Gate," I said. "She gave her life to keep this city from Hell." "That is what Warden Halden taught you. He also taught you your mother died fighting a demon." My fist closed again. He spoke before I could swing. "She died beneath Saint Orra's. Halden was there. The demon wasn't." The room went very quiet. Even the rain seemed to mind its business. Eleven fifty-eight. I put the knife to the hollow beneath his ear. "Tell me what happened." "I can't yet. The future fights detail. Names. Dates. Anything that might turn you too far before the hinge arrives." "Convenient." "Painfully inconvenient, actually." He tried to say something else. The tendons in his neck drew tight. Black grains spilled between his teeth, fine as the sand inside an hourglass. He bent, coughing, but still he did not reach for me. I caught his shoulder without thinking. Heat came through his shirt. Not furnace heat. Human heat. His gaze lifted to mine. "Tomorrow," he managed, "Halden will offer you a black key. Don't take it." "Why?" "Because you already did." Eleven fifty-nine. The clock's second hand shivered toward twelve. I should have bound him. I should have cut out his heart to see what shape it had. Instead I stood close enough to count the dark flecks around the gold in his eyes. Rafe's voice changed. The mockery went out of it. "When midnight comes, let me touch your wrist. Nothing else. I'll show you why I'm here." "A vision." "A memory." "Whose?" "Yours." The first bell began to strike from the cathedral across the river. My bedside clock clicked onto twelve. Something shifted in the room. The wards over the door bowed toward Rafe as if a wind had caught them. His pupils widened. The air tightened around my skin. He lifted one hand and stopped a finger's width from me. "May I?" he asked. I had killed fourteen demons by then. I knew all the ways they entered a person: through hunger, pride, grief, sleep, blood. Curiosity should have been on the list. "My wrist only," I said. His fingers closed over my pulse. Pleasure was not the first sensation. Grief was. It tore through me so suddenly my knees gave. Rafe caught me with his other arm, permitted now because I had not told him he could not, and the bedroom vanished. I saw Saint Orra's Cathedral split open from roof to crypt. Black snow fell through red light. The city crouched below, roofs burned bare, every street filled with kneeling figures whose mouths had been sewn shut with silver wire. And I saw myself. I sat on a chair made from bell metal and bone. My hair had gone white at the temples. Nine iron points rose from the shadow behind my head, a crown that was not on me so much as driven through me. Rafe knelt at my right hand with blood on his face. Not a prisoner. Not a servant. He looked at that other Imogen the way starving men look through bakery windows. Future me bent and pressed her mouth to his forehead. Then she looked directly at me. "Don't trust him," she said. "You'll love him anyway." The clock clicked to twelve-oh-one. Rafe disappeared. I hit the floor hard, alone, with the taste of iron behind my teeth and a ring of bruises forming around my wrist. For several minutes, I remained there and listened to the rain. Then someone knocked on my front door. Warden Halden stood in the corridor wearing his ceremonial coat. He had not visited my rooms in six years. In one gloved hand, he held a long black key. "Imogen," he said, smiling like a father in a portrait. "It's time you learned what your mother died protecting."

Episode Two: One Minute After Midnight There are moments when good sense arrives dressed like cowardice. I told Halden I was ill. He looked past me at the wet coat, the blood on my cuffs, and the knife lying beside the bed. Then he looked at the bruises around my wrist. If he noticed they had the shape of a man's hand, he was polite enough not to say so. "You have never been ill in your life," he said. "Then I'm overdue." I left him in the corridor with his black key. It was not bravery. I shut the door, slid every bolt, and was sick into the washbasin. The memory Rafe had put in me kept returning in pieces: silver wire through lips, black snow, the hunger in his face. Worst of all was the tenderness with which I had touched him. I knew my own hands. They did not move gently unless I had been hurt first. Halden waited three minutes before walking away. He had raised me from the age of thirteen. He knew pressure worked better after silence. By ten the next morning, I was beneath Saint Orra's Cathedral pretending I had changed my mind. The public knew the cathedral as a place of weddings, funerals, and tedious sermons about obedient women. Hunters knew the older building below it. Our armoury occupied the first crypt. The cells occupied the second. Below those lay rooms with no names, which meant the Order used them often. Halden led me down past the cells. The black key hung from his belt. He spoke of duty and inheritance as we walked, using the fond voice he kept for recruits and bereaved families. My mother, he said, had guarded the oldest seal in Bellgrave. Her blood had allowed her to approach it. Mine would do the same. I asked why this had become urgent after nineteen years. His answer wandered. The centennial tolling was three weeks away. The Lower Gate was restless. The usual story. Every institution has a rat in the wall that only more money, blood, or obedience can keep quiet. At the bottom of the stair stood a door without hinges. Nine narrow slots had been cut around its arch. Eight contained iron spikes. The ninth was empty. Halden took the key from his belt. Up close, it was not iron. The shaft was yellow-white and faintly ridged. Bone, polished by handling. A tiny rook had been carved into the bow. I knew before he told me. My mother's finger bone. The middle one, I hoped. She had disliked Halden. "Take it," he said. "The seal will know you." Rafe's warning sat in my mind. Don't take it, because you already did. I kept my hands behind my back. Halden's face did not change, but the corridor cooled. He asked whether I had encountered anything unusual beneath Tanner's Bridge. A sensible question. I gave him a sensible lie. The trouble with men who have known you since childhood is that they remember the first version of your lying face. He turned to the two hunters behind us. One was Kit Mercer, who had taught me how to stitch a knife wound without wasting brandy. The other was a young man named Pell who still polished his boots before sewer hunts. Halden offered the key to Pell. "Warden," I said, and heard the warning in my own voice. Pell took it. The bone split his palm. Not metaphorically. It opened him from wrist to middle finger as neatly as a letter. Blood ran along the key, crossed the empty ninth slot, and climbed the door. Then the thing behind it breathed. All eight spikes bent outward. Kit shoved me down as the door burst. A wind came through carrying grave dirt, burned hair, and the sound of thousands of people whispering at once. Pell remained standing in front of it, though there was very little left behind his eyes. He smiled at me. "Little Queen," he said in a voice too crowded to be his. "We kept your chair warm." I killed him before the words finished echoing. There is no clean version of that sentence. Pell was twenty-one. He had a sister who sent him sugared almonds from the north and a habit of humming during weapons checks. I drove an iron blade under his ribs because whatever wore him had started pulling Kit toward the open dark. His body folded. The whispering stopped. Halden fitted the bone key into the ninth slot and turned it. The door sealed. He moved quickly for a man past sixty. Almost as if he had known exactly what would happen. Kit sat against the wall, one hand clamped over a bite on her shoulder. Halden knelt beside Pell and gave him the shortest blessing I had ever heard. I stared at the black key, now clean and whole. "My mother didn't die protecting that door," I said. Halden stood. "Grief is making you foolish." "Pell made me angry. You don't want to see what grief does." I left before he could order the doors locked. The Order sent two hunters to watch my building. I climbed in through the chimney at half past eleven, which sounds impressive until I mention the dead pigeon and the amount of soot in my underclothes. At eleven fifty-one, Rafe appeared beside my kitchen table. This time I did not put a blade to him. I threw the black key. I had taken it from Halden's belt while he bent over Pell. My mother would have approved. Rafe caught it against his chest. His hands worked perfectly well when they were not reaching for me. "Tell me everything," I said. "I can't." "Try. I want to see how much sand fits in your lungs." I understood by then that the sand was not demonic. It was time’s gag. Whenever Rafe tried to give me a fact that could change the future too soon, the missing years ground themselves into his mouth and stopped him. He laid the key down. "Pell wasn't meant to open the seal. You were. In the history I remember, you took the key. The door spoke your name, and Halden convinced you that only the Crown could shut it for good." "The crown I saw."

Saint Orra’s blood had survived through daughters who were never told what they carried. My mother had been the last woman the Crown called. When she refused it, the inheritance passed to me. That was why the door knew my name. It was not offering me power. It was collecting a debt. "Yes." "And you?" His attention shifted to the clock. Eleven fifty-three. "I came later." "How much later?" Black sand gathered at the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with his thumb. I had questions prepared. Sensible ones, written in a ledger while two hunters watched my front door. What realm had sent him? Who governed his passage? What event fixed our nightly window? Instead I asked why my future self had warned me not to trust him. Rafe considered that. "Because you know how persuasive I can be when I stop being honest." "Can you lie now?" "Not before midnight." "Another rule." "One you made." Eleven fifty-four. I walked around the table. Rafe stayed where he was. He wore the same black shirt, the same long coat, but the cut on his throat from my knife had become a pale line. Time did not pass normally wherever he waited. "You said you couldn't touch me," I said. "You didn't say I couldn't touch you." "I was hoping you'd notice under less murderous circumstances." I put my hand against his chest. His heartbeat struck my palm. Fast. Demons can counterfeit a pulse, but vanity usually makes them choose a slow one. Rafe's gave him away in a different fashion. He was nervous. I spread my fingers. His breath changed. "Is this how I interrogate you in the future?" "No. In the future, you know what it does to me." The answer warmed my face, which was irritating. I moved my hand to the ridge beneath his shirt and felt nine separate scars crossing his ribs. He watched me do it. He could have stepped back. He did not. "Who hurt you?" I asked. "You did." I pulled my hand away. "At my request," he added. Eleven fifty-six. Rafe explained that Saint Orra had not sealed a road to Hell. She had built one. The black door was a mouth through which the Order had fed souls for four hundred years. Murderers went through it, certainly. So did debtors, inconvenient wives, children born with second sight, and hunters who asked impolite questions. Every condemned soul strengthened the wards around Bellgrave. We had not protected the city from damnation. We had powered it with damned people. I thought of every mark I had delivered to the cells. I told myself I had hunted demons, not people. The excuse sounded weak even inside my own skull. "Why me?" I asked. "The bargain requires Orra's blood to renew it every hundred years. Your mother refused." "So Halden killed her." Rafe tried to answer. The black sand came harder, and he doubled over the table. I reached for him, then stopped. Pity can be an opening too. Eleven fifty-eight. When he straightened, his lips were dark with blood. "The details are locked behind contact," he said. "At midnight I can show you what I remember, if you permit it." "My wrist again?" His eyes went to my mouth and stayed there. That was answer enough. Perhaps shock had damaged my judgment. Perhaps watching Pell die had torn a hole in me and I wanted something hot poured into it. Or perhaps I had been staring at Rafe's crooked mouth since he arrived and was tired of pretending it was research. I caught the front of his shirt and pulled him close. He could not touch me. I put my mouth near his ear and felt the tremor he tried to hide. "What happens if I kiss you before midnight?" "I suffer." "That sounded almost cheerful." "I'm complicated." Eleven fifty-nine. I kissed him. Rafe held perfectly still. I had meant it as another test, something quick and cruel. Then his mouth opened under mine and he made a rough sound in his throat, and the plan deteriorated. I tasted blood and black sand. His lower lip caught between my teeth. I pressed him against the table and kissed him until my breathing turned clumsy. His hands stayed at his sides. The restraint was more intimate than being grabbed. Every second, he let me decide whether there would be another. The cathedral bell began to strike. At midnight, Rafe tore his mouth from mine. His hands lifted but stopped beside my face. "Imogen. May I?" I should have asked him to show me the door, the crown, my mother. Instead I said, "Kiss me back." He did. One hand closed in my hair, the other at my waist, and he turned us so my back met the wall. The force of it emptied my lungs. His mouth moved over mine with the desperation of a man who had been denied for years, not minutes. A memory opened inside the kiss. I saw Rafe lying with his head in my lap beneath a sky without stars. Future me threaded an iron needle through the skin above his heart. He was laughing, though every stitch bled. "Go back," she told him. "Make me hate you if you have to." "You never hated me properly the first time." Her face broke. Mine did too. The kitchen returned. Rafe's thumb dragged across my cheek. I had just enough time to feel how carefully he held me. Twelve-oh-one. He vanished, and my mouth closed on empty air. On the table, the black key cracked from end to end. From somewhere below the city came one deep stroke of a bell that no living hand had rung.

Episode Three: Permission For the next six nights, I arranged my life around eleven fifty-one. I stopped a marrow-eater in a boarding house, broke two fingers punching a possessed butcher, and spent most of Thursday copying names from the Order's sealed conviction ledger. None of it mattered as much as getting home before the minute hand reached nine. Rafe always appeared within arm's reach. The first night, he arrived in my bath. I threw the soap at him and learned he could laugh while looking at my bare breasts without once pretending not to look. The second night, I waited on the roof, curious whether the rule required walls. It did not. He appeared on the wet slate, slid toward the gutter, and could not grab me when I caught his coat because grabbing back would have meant touching me. I enjoyed reminding him of that for days. By the fourth night, we had developed habits. Tea for me. An empty cup for him, since nothing from my present stayed in his body after twelve-oh-one. Questions before midnight, when he could not lie. Touch after eleven fifty-five, when I had usually exhausted the useful questions and become less sensible. He told me he was not visiting from Hell. "Hell is a story the Order gives geography to," he said. "It makes cruelty sound far away." His Bellgrave existed seventeen years ahead of mine, in a future that began nine minutes after I accepted Saint Orra's Crown. The Black Bell kept that future close, the way a blade keeps the scar close. Rafe had found a weakness in the nine minutes before the bargain renewed each night. From eleven fifty-one until midnight, he could be seen and heard. For one minute after, he could become fully present if I allowed it. Then the future reclaimed him. I asked why he did not simply appear on the night of the centennial tolling and stop me. He said he had tried. The clock spat sand from his mouth whenever he pushed too hard. On the worst attempt, he choked until I put two fingers between his lips and cleared his tongue. He could not bite me. He could not even close his mouth without risking contact. "You always did enjoy an unfair advantage," he said when he could speak again. "Only when it is mine." The future had found the right man to send. Rafe did not flatter me. He knew I would hear the hook in it. He told me I was vain when I became vain, cruel when I crossed into cruelty, and frightened when I tried to disguise fear as anger. Then he stood where I put him and let me touch him like an answer I had not earned. On the seventh night, I found proof that the Order had condemned my mother. Her name was buried in a maintenance ledger, not the death roll. Elspeth Rook, transferred below by authority of Warden Garren Halden. No charge. No witness. The space for disposition contained one word. Refused. I carried the page home inside my shirt. At eleven fifty-one, Rafe appeared beside the bed. I was sitting on its edge in my shift with a bottle of plum brandy between my knees. "Did he kill her?" I asked. Rafe looked at the page. "Yes." No sand. No choking. Just the word. I drank until the brandy burned my empty stomach. Rafe remained standing. Before midnight, he could not put an arm around me, take away the bottle, or perform any of the small dishonest kindnesses people use when grief makes them uncomfortable. "She knew about the bargain," he said. "Halden told her to wear the Crown. She tried to break the Bell instead." "Did I know, in your future?" "Not until it was too late." Eleven fifty-four. I set down the bottle and reached for him. His coat fell first. Then his shirt. I had seen pieces of him during searches and hurried kisses, but never all of his chest. Nine scars crossed it. They were too straight for claws and too deep for a whip, each one running from his breastbone toward his left side. The lowest ended above his hip. I traced it. Rafe's stomach tightened. His hands curled at his sides. "Tell me to stop," I said. "I don't want you to stop." "That wasn't the question." He met my eyes. "I know." It was a strange education, learning the difference between helplessness and trust. Rafe could step away. He could disappear if the clock chose him early. He could refuse every question that did not trigger the truth-binding. What he could not do was reach for me, and he gave me that inability without making it my burden. I kissed the first scar. His breath went ragged. I kissed the second, then the third. At the fourth, his head tipped back. By the fifth, I had stopped thinking about grief and begun thinking about his skin under my tongue. "Imogen," he said. My name sounded indecent in his mouth. Eleven fifty-six. I pushed him onto the bed. His weight struck the mattress, but his hands stayed flat beside him. I climbed over his hips and pulled my shift to my waist. There was nothing coy left in the room. He could see exactly what wanting him had done to me. His jaw flexed. "Is this wise?" he asked. "No." "Good. I worried you had been replaced." I took his wrists and placed them above his head. He did not need holding. That was not the point. For three minutes, I used his mouth without letting him use his hands. I kissed him until both of us were breathing too hard, then drew back whenever he followed. I ran my palms down his chest and over the narrow line of hair below his navel. When I opened his trousers, his eyes shut. He said my name again, this time like a warning. I wanted him. No curse. No influence. No sweet fog laid over my judgment. Want sat in me with its boots on the table, rude and undeniable. Eleven fifty-nine. "Tell me what I let you do in the future," I said. Rafe opened his eyes. "Anything we both wanted." "That is an evasive answer." "It is the only one that matters." The bell began. I released his wrists. His hands remained where I had put them. Midnight. The pressure in the room changed. Permission waited between us, almost visible. I told him he could touch my hair, my mouth, my breasts, my thighs. I told him he could turn me beneath him. If I said stop, he would stop. His voice was wrecked when he asked, "And if you don't?" "Then don't waste the minute." He moved. One moment I was over him. The next my back struck the mattress and his mouth closed on mine. His hands seemed to be everywhere I had named, greedy but exact, never crossing the edges I had given him. He kissed my throat, lower, found my breast with his mouth and the wet heat between my thighs with his hand. The first stroke made me curse. The second made me bite his shoulder. He knew me. Not the general map of a woman's pleasure, not a demon's borrowed trick. Me. He knew where I went tense before I surrendered and how firmly to hold my hip when I tried to outrun the feeling. Seventeen years of memory lived in his hands. I hated the future woman who had taught him and wanted everything she had taken. "Look at me," he said. I did. Pleasure tightened, sharp enough to hurt. When it broke, it dragged a cry out of me that the hunters in the street probably heard. I did not care. Rafe covered my mouth with his and swallowed the sound while my body clenched around his hand. The clock clicked to twelve-oh-one. He vanished from above me. Cold air hit my skin. The mattress rose where his weight had been, leaving me sprawled with my shift at my waist and my dignity somewhere under the bed. I laughed. I could not help it. Grief was still in the room, but for one minute it had been forced to wait outside my body. The next night, I asked Rafe whether preventing the future would destroy him. I had spent the day in the old records vault and found diagrams of Saint Orra's Crown: nine nails driven into a living shadow, each one fed by a separate class of condemned soul. The scars on Rafe's chest copied their order. At eleven fifty-nine, I put the question plainly. "If I refuse the Crown, do you cease to exist?" The second hand crossed twelve before he answered. "No," he said. That night I gave him permission to take me further. I undressed before he arrived. There was no seduction in that, only a decision. For nine minutes I touched him while he knelt between my knees, his hands forbidden, his mouth close enough that each breath moved over me. He talked me through what he wanted. The words were plain, sometimes filthy, never rehearsed. I did as much as I wished and made him wait for the rest. When midnight opened, I gave it to him. He entered me with my name against my throat. The minute stretched, not in time but in memory. I felt other beds beneath us: velvet in the ruined palace, cold grass beyond the walls, the hard floor of a watchtower while black snow struck the glass. Other versions of my hands held his shoulders. Other versions of his mouth knew every place I had not yet shown him. But the body beneath him was mine. Present. Living. Furious with need. He moved as if one minute could be made enough by refusing to spare either of us. I held him close, legs locked around him, and came with the cathedral's final stroke shaking the window. Just before he vanished, Rafe pressed his forehead to mine. "I came back because I loved you," he said. Then I was empty, aching, and alone. I lay there listening to the hunters break down my front door. Halden entered first. He took in the torn sheets, the future-mark burned into my floor, and the black key on the bedside table. "Imogen Rook," he said, with no fatherly kindness left in him. "By the authority of Saint Orra's Order, you are condemned for congress with a demon." Only then did I remember when I had asked Rafe whether he would survive. After midnight. When he was allowed to lie.

Episode Four: The Crown in My Shadow The Order put me in the same cell where my mother had spent her last night. Halden told me this himself. He seemed to think it would soften me. The cell was six feet long, five feet wide, and soaked through with four centuries of other people's terror. Prayers had been scratched into the walls. So had obscenities, names, recipes, and one excellent drawing of Saint Orra engaged in an act the Church definitely did not teach. The condemned will make jokes anywhere. It is one of the reasons tyrants never quite win. They took my coat, boots, knives, belt, and hairpins. They did not find the sliver of the black key tucked beneath the bandage on my wrist. At noon, Halden brought food and the truth, or his preferred arrangement of it. The door below the crypt would fail on the centennial midnight. When it did, four hundred years of condemned souls would pour into Bellgrave. If I took the Crown, I could command them and renew the wards. If I refused, the city would choke on its dead. "Your mother chose herself," he said through the bars. "Thousands died in the breach that followed." I remembered the official history. Nineteen years ago, fever had taken nearly two thousand people in the river wards. The Order called it demon sickness. Bodies were burned before families could identify them. "You killed them," I said. "You needed souls to mend the seal after she refused." Halden did not deny it. He told me sacrifice was ugly only when viewed one body at a time. That was such a Warden's sentence. Polished, bloodless, pleased with its own arithmetic. I threw the food at him. At eleven fifty-one that night, Rafe appeared inside the cell. There was hardly room for both of us. He materialised with his chest against my back and jerked away so quickly he struck the wall. "You lied," I said. "Yes." Before midnight. Bound to truth. I turned. Anger had kept me warm for hours, but the sight of him hurt in a colder place. "If I break the future, you disappear." "Yes." "Not die." "I won't ever have existed. There is a difference, though I admit it isn't useful from your side of the room." His own joke, from the first night. I didnt laugh. "Why come back?" I asked. "Why make me care whether you survive?" "I tried not to." "You climbed into my bed." "You dragged me there." I slapped my palm over his mouth. He went still. Eleven fifty-three. "You knew what I would do," I said. "You knew what we were. Every time you looked at me, you had years I didn't. You let me think I was choosing something new." He waited until I took my hand away. "It was new to you," he said. "That made it new to me." The answer was unfairly good. Rafe told me he had not been my seducer in his history. He had been a hunter sentenced twelve years after I took the Crown. His crime was opening the cells beneath the cathedral and letting three hundred marked souls escape. Future Imogen had been sent to kill him. Instead, I had offered him a place at my right hand. "Why?" "I called you a sanctimonious corpse in a pretty coat." "That would do it." The corner of his mouth moved, but the smile failed. In that future, the Crown fed on its wearer as much as the condemned. It began with small bargains. One guilty soul to strengthen the north wall. Ten to stop a plague. Fifty to keep fire from crossing the river. I told myself I chose the deserving. Then there were never enough deserving people, and the city still wanted saving. Halden died. The Order knelt. I became the thing beneath Saint Orra's that mothers warned children about. Rafe tried to kill me twice. On the third attempt, we slept together. "That sounds like me," I said. "It was a confusing evening." Eleven fifty-six. He explained the scars. After years of serving the Crown, he had been mortally wounded. I refused to let him die. I drew the ninth nail from my own shadow and passed it through his heart nine times, binding him to every rank of the damned. Each pass left a scar. On the ninth, the iron stayed inside him and remade him. He had been born human. I was the one who made him a demon. The ninth nail allowed him to cross the weakness before midnight. It also meant the future could not be broken while he remained whole. "So I have to kill you," I said. "You have to take the iron from my heart and use it to ring the Bell backward." "Which kills you." "Which prevents me." "Do not correct my wording." He shut his mouth. Eleven fifty-seven. I asked why future Imogen had sent him. Rafe said she had finally understood that there was no good ruler of the damned. The Crown made mercy expensive and cruelty useful. After seventeen years, she had done unforgivable things for reasons that still sounded reasonable when listed in order. That frightened me more than horns or fire ever could. "She made the rules," Rafe said. "Truth before midnight. No touch from me until you grant it. No detail that time considers too dangerous without contact. She wanted you to know I could persuade you, but never compel you." "And the lie?" "Mine. She would have despised it." Midnight came. Rafe raised his hand, then lowered it. He did not ask. I wanted him to. I wanted to refuse and watch it wound him. I wanted to pull him down onto the narrow bunk and spend the minute proving that anger could be hotter than desire. All of those wants crowded behind my teeth. I said nothing. At twelve-oh-one, he disappeared without touching me. The absence was worse than the lie. Kit Mercer opened my cell at dawn. The bite on her shoulder had turned the veins in her neck grey. Halden planned to condemn her before the sickness spread. She had worked that out when two guards arrived with chains instead of a physician. I told her the truth while we climbed the old drain behind the cells. Not all of it. Kit did not need to know what I had been doing at midnight. She looked at the bruises on my throat and worked out enough. We escaped through the bone yard and separated. Kit went to warn the families named in the conviction ledger. I went deeper. The broken black key opened a passage behind my mother's cell. It led into the foundations of the bell tower, where Saint Orra's original bargain had been carved into nine stone panels. The Order's version began with a holy woman besieged by demons. The stone told a meaner tale. Orra had been a minor witch with a talent for hearing the dead. Bellgrave's rulers wanted an army no living enemy could kill. They promised her safety in exchange for a road into the afterlife. When she understood what they meant to do, she tried to close it. They crowned her with nine nails and called her a saint after she stopped screaming. The final panel showed how to undo the bargain. The blood of Orra. The bone of the last woman who refused. The iron willingly returned by a creature born of the Crown. At the centennial minute, all three could reverse the Bell. My blood. My mother's key. Rafe's heart. There was a fourth requirement, scratched away by the Order. I rubbed grave dust into the cuts and made out half a line. THE CROWNED HAND MUST PERMIT... The rest had been chiselled into rubble. Halden found me before sunset. He had expected the passage to answer the key. He had also expected me to run there. I escaped him by dropping through a burial shaft and breaking a bone in my left hand. He answered by moving the ceremony forward one night. At eleven forty-two, while I limped across the cathedral roof, the Black Bell began to toll. Below me, hunters dragged marked prisoners into the nave. Kit was among them, grey-veined and bleeding. Halden stood inside a circle made from their chains. Above his head hung the Bell, black enough to look like a hole cut in the world. My shadow lengthened toward it. One by one, nine iron points rose behind my head. At eleven fifty-one, Rafe appeared on the roof beside me. "You shouldn't have come back," I said. "You would have complained if I didn't." I kissed him hard enough to split his lip. He could not touch me yet. He stood in the rain and took everything I gave him: my mouth, my teeth, my anger. I tore open his shirt and pressed my palm over the lowest scar. Iron moved beneath his skin. Rafe made a sound I had never heard from him. "Tomorrow night," he said against my mouth. "The Bell reaches midnight. You must pull it out before then." "And tonight?" His gaze dropped to my wet clothes, then returned to my face. "Tonight is yours." I walked him backward into the bell tower. At midnight, with the black metal groaning above us and Halden's ritual gathering below, I gave Rafe permission to touch me. I told him not to be gentle. I told him not to apologise. I told him to make the minute belong to us and not to the future waiting to swallow him. He pinned me against the stone and obeyed. It was rough, hurried, almost angry. His mouth bruised mine. My broken hand throbbed where I held his shoulder. He pushed inside me as the Bell shook dust from the rafters, and I bit down on his scar to keep from crying out. There was no illusion of forever. That was what made every movement viciously alive. When pleasure caught me, it came tangled with grief. I held his face and watched it take him too. At twelve-oh-one, the future pulled him out of my arms. I struck the wall where his body had been. Below, Halden ordered the first prisoner brought to the Bell. The centennial tolling had begun. Tomorrow at midnight, I would have to destroy the only man I had ever trusted enough to let hurt me.

Episode Five: The Last Nine Minutes The centennial tolling lasted one day. Nine strokes, one every three hours, each fed by a condemned soul. The ninth would fall at midnight with me beneath the Bell. Halden had not moved the ceremony forward because he was afraid of what I knew. He had moved it because fear made the prisoners easier to bind. He always did understand fear better than faith. I spent the day ruining his preparations. At the second toll, I cut the chain holding the prisoner and dropped both of us through the choir screen. At the third, Kit opened the west doors and thirty marked families stormed the nave with butcher hooks, fireplace irons, and the excellent rage of people who had learned their children were fuel. By the fifth, half the hunters had deserted. By the seventh, Halden no longer bothered calling me daughter. The Bell ate seven souls anyway. That fact matters. We fought hard and clever and were still too late for seven people. Stories tend to misplace the dead once the hero reaches the important room. I remember their names. Pell Harrow. Mina Saye. Old Tom Vetch. Lysa and Corren Bale. A boy called Adder because his parents expected him to bite. Sister Winn, who had kept the cell keys for twenty years and used them properly only at the end. Their voices joined the Bell. At eleven thirty, it began calling mine. The cathedral had emptied except for Halden, Kit, and me. Rain came through a hole in the roof. The statues along the nave had cracked, revealing bones packed inside the plaster. Saint Orra's smiling face lay in pieces across the altar. Kit guarded the stair with Pell's sword in her good hand. The grey veins had faded from her throat as the seals weakened. "If this goes badly," she said, "I intend to haunt you." "Get in line." Halden waited in the bell tower. The eight iron spikes from the door below had been driven through my shadow and into the floor around me. The ninth point hovered above it, waiting for Rafe. Each spike held a chain. Each chain ran upward into the black metal. I still had my mother's broken key. I had my blood. I had nine minutes of a man who could not touch me and one minute in which he could. It would have to do. At eleven fifty-one, Rafe appeared inside the ring. He looked worse than he had the night before. Cracks ran through his skin, glowing faintly beneath his collar. The future had begun to come apart as we weakened the Bell. I wanted to cover every crack with my hands. Instead I gave him the black key. He could hold that. Just not me. "The missing line," I said. "What does it say?" Rafe looked up at the Bell. "The crowned hand must permit what the Crown made to touch the instrument of its making." "At midnight, I permit you to ring it." "You have to mean the permission when you give it. The Bell knows coercion. It was built from it." Eleven fifty-two. Halden stepped from behind the great wooden frame. He wore the white robes of Saint Orra and carried my best knife, freshly removed from the demon beneath Tanner's Bridge. I had missed that knife. He told me to take the Crown. His voice shook now. Without the wards, real demons would find Bellgrave. Children would die. Crops would fail. Every wicked thing kept outside by four centuries of sacrifice would smell the open road. He was probably right about some of it. That was the foulest part of the bargain. It had worked. Eleven fifty-three. "How many people does the Crown need next year?" I asked Rafe. "A thousand." "And the year after?" "More." Halden lunged while I was looking at Rafe. The knife went through my side. Pain arrived hot, then strangely cold. I caught Halden's wrist before he could pull the blade free and head-butted him hard enough to break his nose. Rafe could only watch. I saw the rule torture him. His hands reached, stopped, reached again. He could not touch Halden. He could not steady me. My future self had made the boundary absolute, and for the first time I understood what it had cost Rafe to obey it. Eleven fifty-four. I tore the knife out of my side, twisted it from Halden's grip, and drove it through the first chain. It parted with a cry in Pell's voice. The iron spike pulled free of my shadow. The second chain cried like Mina. The third cursed me in Old Tom's language. I cut through them one by one while Halden crawled toward the stair. Kit came up and kicked him back into the tower. "Mine," I told her. She looked disappointed but obeyed. Eleven fifty-six. Five chains lay broken. Blood soaked my shirt and ran down my hip. Rafe stood so close our breath mingled, unable to hold me upright. "Talk," I said as I sawed at the sixth. "I don't want my last memory of you to be that face." "What face?" "The noble one. It doesn't suit you." He laughed once. The sound broke in the middle. He told me about a night in his Bellgrave when I had stolen three bottles of the last drinkable wine in the city and taken him swimming in the flooded throne room. I had worn the Crown for fourteen years by then. People crossed streets to avoid my shadow. Rafe said I cheated at cards, sang badly, and became furious whenever he let me win. "Was I happy?" I asked. He could not lie yet. "Sometimes." That answer was kinder than yes. Eleven fifty-seven. The seventh chain broke. The tower lurched. Below us, every clock in Bellgrave began striking different hours. Halden rose behind Kit and drove an elbow into her wound. She fell. He took the stairs two steps at a time, running not from the Bell but toward the Crown gathering in my shadow. I understood then. Orra's blood was required to renew the bargain, but perhaps not to wear it. Halden had spent a lifetime feeding the Crown. He would rather become its next monster than watch his life's work judged. He seized the nearest iron point. The condemned seized him back. Hands pressed out from beneath his skin. Faces opened along his arms and throat, each mouth speaking a name he had reduced to a number. Halden screamed. I wish I could say I looked away. I watched until they pulled him into the shadow he had made. Eleven fifty-eight. The eighth chain snapped. Only the ninth remained, running from the Bell into Rafe's chest. He opened his shirt. The lowest scar had split, and I saw the point of the nail moving beneath it with every beat of his heart. "You have to reach in," he said. "I gathered that." "It will hurt you." "Everything hurts me. I'm beginning to think it's personal." My good hand shook. Rafe noticed and did not insult me by pretending otherwise. I put my palm over the scar. His skin was slick with rain and blood. He could not cover my hand with his. Not yet. "If I ask you not to do this," I said, "what happens?" "I stay. You take the Crown. The future survives." "And you would let me?" "Yes." Truth, before midnight. That was the dark shape inside his love. He had come to prevent my damnation, but if I chose it with my eyes open, he would choose me over everyone else. I should have been horrified. I loved him for it. I did not obey it. Eleven fifty-nine. I pushed my fingers into the wound. Rafe went rigid. The sound he made was low and animal, his forehead pressed to mine though he could not return the contact. Iron burned beneath my fingertips. I closed my hand around it and pulled. The nail came free with a wet tear. Rafe staggered. Black sand poured from the cracks in his skin. I caught him against me. I could hold him, but his arms hung useless at his sides. "One selfish thing," I said. "Only one? You have changed." "When the minute turns, lie to me." He knew what I meant. The first stroke of midnight rolled through the tower. The world opened. "Rafe," I said, holding the iron nail against the broken key. "You may touch me. You may touch the Bell. You may end what made you." His arms closed around me. For one second, perhaps two, neither of us moved toward the Bell. He kissed me with blood in both our mouths. There was no room for skill or seduction. It was an ugly, desperate kiss. My teeth struck his. His hand caught painfully in my hair. I wanted it to last until wanting became enough to change the rule. It did not. Rafe took the joined key and nail from me. Together we drove them into the Bell's lowest seam. He pulled the black metal toward us. The Bell rang backward. The sound did not travel through the air. It went through bone. The seven souls taken that day tore free in a rush of heat. Then came hundreds, thousands, streaming out of the crypt and the plaster saints, out of the Order's ledgers and the foundations of wealthy houses. They did not attack the city. They simply became visible long enough for the living to see what had paid for their safety. My mother passed close enough to touch my cheek. Then she was gone. The Crown ripped out of my shadow. Eight iron points shattered. The ninth dissolved in Rafe's hand. His body began to go with it. Twelve-oh-one approached. I held his face. "Will it hurt?" After midnight, he could lie. "No," he said. "Did we have enough?" His crooked mouth lifted. "More than most." I do not know whether that was a lie too. At twelve-oh-one, Rafe ceased to exist. Not ash. Not smoke. Nothing so comforting as remains. My hands closed on each other, and I fell beneath the broken Bell with no body to mourn. Bellgrave survived. Not neatly. Without the old wards, winter sickness returned. True demons tested the bridges. The rich discovered that walls cost money when souls were no longer accepted as payment. Kit and I built a smaller order from the hunters who stayed, one with public ledgers and cells that opened from both sides. It is imperfect. Anything run by people will be. No record of Rafe exists. The scar around my wrist does. So does the small white mark over my heart where the ninth nail burned through his hand into mine as we rang the Bell. Those are poor evidence. They are also all I have. Every night at eleven fifty-one, I look up. I wish I could tell you I stopped waiting. That would make a better ending, and it would be a lie. Some nights I still set two glasses on the table. At midnight, I raise mine to the empty chair. At twelve-oh-one, I drink his too.