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The ballroom filled the way a cup fills under a steady hand, silk by silk, jewel by jewel, until the great chandeliered room glittered with the very rot Eleanor had spent decades learning to read. Grell stood at her side near the head of the stair, and that simple positioning was its own confession. A reaper did not stand at a demon's shoulder while she received her guests. A reaper recorded. A reaper withdrew. Grell did neither. She had pinned a crimson camellia to her lapel and angled herself half a step behind Eleanor like a duelist's second, and she found she had no wish to be anywhere else in the world.
"There," Eleanor murmured, lips barely moving, her smile fixed for the benefit of a passing dowager. "By the doors. The ink-stained shepherd has brought his flock."
Grell followed her gaze. Josiah Pell had come in a coat better than his birth, the small silver cross at his throat catching the light. Behind him came three men who did not belong, men who looked at the room the way butchers look at livestock, one already sketching the cornices, another scribbling, the third simply watching the flowers in their great urns with patient, predatory attention. Waiting for the lilies to brown. Waiting for the cold to bloom.
"He has chosen his witnesses well," Eleanor said. "They will write what they are paid to write, and they will half believe it, which is worse." Her hand found Grell's wrist, hidden in the fold of crimson skirts, and pressed once. Not for steadiness, Grell realized, but to give it. "You asked me not to eat him. I have decided to do something far more difficult. I am going to let him watch."
Grell turned to her. "You mean to—"
"To wither nothing. To chill no room. To let every lily live and every glass stay warm." The blue eyes gleamed. "A demon may starve for an evening, darling. The question is whether I can keep my nature from leaking out of me like a cheap perfume. It has never been asked of me before." She lifted Grell's gloved knuckles to her lips, briefly, scandalously, in full view of forty peers. "Stay beside me. When I falter, be cold instead of me. You are death. They will feel your chill and blame the draughts."
It was, Grell thought, the most romantic instruction she had ever received.
They moved together into the room. Pell saw them at once and stiffened, his whole frame sharpening toward Eleanor like a needle toward north. He crossed to them through the dancers, his pressmen drifting in his wake.
"Lady Wright." His voice was steady, pitched to carry just far enough. "You keep beautiful gardens. I confess I have walked them. I have noticed how little survives near the house."
"Mr. Pell." Eleanor inclined her head with perfect graciousness, and Grell felt the demon gather herself the way a tide draws back before it does not crash. "You are welcome to walk them in daylight, when you might see them properly. The roses by the south wall are forty years old." She gestured to the urns flanking the orchestra. "Tell me, do these lilies look ill to you?"
They did not. They stood vivid and white and shamelessly alive, and Pell's eyes went to them and could not find the death he had come to document. One of the pressmen frowned and touched a petal as if to catch it in the act of dying. It did not oblige him.
Grell watched Eleanor's jaw tighten by a hair, watched the faint dark sweetness of her gather at the edge of becoming something visible and Grell stepped a half pace forward and let her own nature breathe out of her, the deep grave-cold of a creature who had stood at a hundred thousand deathbeds. The temperature near them dropped. The nearest pressman shivered and glanced at the windows. The chill had a source now, and it was not the lady.
"A draught," Grell said pleasantly. "This old house. The mortar remembers winter."
"It is not the house," Pell said, low and certain, looking now at Grell with a flicker of something he could not name. "Three men died at her table. Beswick among them. You know what she is. I have watched you watch her."
The accusation hung. Grell could have ended him with a sentence, confirmed it, denied it, turned the room. Instead she thought of the young boy in a cold cell-mouth of grief, and she felt the thing the bible of her order had no word for.
"I know," Grell said softly, so only he could hear, "that Beswick was a thief who ruined better men than himself, and that your father was one of them, and that you have carried him on your back for thirty years." Pell flinched as though struck. "I know your grief is true. But look around you. Nothing dies here tonight. No room goes cold but the one I stand in. You have built your fire out of facts, and the facts have just refused to burn."
The pressmen were lowering their pencils. There was nothing to draw. A glittering ball, living flowers, a radiant hostess, a grieving man making wild accusations against a noble in her own house. The story was curdling in front of them, turning from exposé into embarrassment.
Eleanor swept in then, all warmth, all mercy, and laid a hand on Pell's arm. "Your father deserved better than Beswick gave him," she said, and for once there was no performance in it. "That much is true, and I am sorry for it. Stay. Eat. Drink nothing you fear. Watch all night, and find me innocent of everything but good hospitality."
It undid him more surely than any teeth could have. Pell stared at her, at Grell, at the impossible undying lilies, and something in his certainty cracked and let confusion pour through. The pressmen began, one by one, to drift toward the champagne.
Grell exhaled. Eleanor's fingers found hers again in the crush of dancers, and held on, and did not let go for the length of a waltz.
1. If SKZ didn't exist. ATEEZ would easily be best 4th gen male vocals. SKZ are indisputably 4th gen leaders. As wonderful and beautiful as Jongho and everyone's vocals are. They just don't have the same amount of umph that SKZ does.
2. BTS rarely releases good music and haven't had more than maybe two or three good releases in the last three years.
3. Dives are ruining the fun of young kpop fans by dissing KDH for sounding similar to IVE. Girl groups of their genre tend to sound similar. Like how SKZ and ATEEZ can sound similar at times. It's not because one is directly copying the other it's because they're using similar samples and patterns because they're the same genre. It's a children's movie and the kpop community has bigger problems to face.
4. The people who still sell out known problematic and racist groups (BlackPink, BTS, etc) and people who keep crossing boundaries are the main issue we need to focus on. Not to mention the people who do not listen when people try to tell them their favorite idols are being abused. I know and am wary of what I do because it's come out that SKZ are being mistreated by their label (Changbin seemingly being forced to diet for being "too fat", Lee Know not being seen as often, Han not having partnerships while Felix has 11, Seungmin not receiving much rest despite his injury).
5. Eyekons are too territorial and immature. They can't stand seeing their faves being rightfully called out. Not to mention the eyekons who believe the Yoonchae is perfectly innocent in the Manon situation simply because she's cute.
6. Eyekons need to acknowledge Dani's faults. She's clearly meaner than the other girls and also definitely overdances. Eyekons tend to pull up Lee Know or Hyunjin to try to say they overdance because they think stays are against them. Hyunjin in the clips they bring up is matching the energy of his members and Lee Know is the lead dancer, he has every right to be dancing harder than everyone but he doesn't dance too hard to make him look scary or too out of place.
Don't tell. But. I do not care for Zombie Stage. It's redundant and way too explicit than needed. Mizi's sexualization could have been handled far more tastefully. I much prefer the way Ivan and Till's abuse was handled in Alien Stage than I do Mizi's in Zombie Stage. Besides it doesn't even make sense. If a real female idol were to be seen grinding on men like Mizi was shown to be then that idol would be bashed to hell and back by netizens. Parasocial stans cannot even handle a male or female idol simply looking at the opposite gender. If they saw that idol visibly grinding on someone of the opposite gender that idol would be cancelled faster than you can even say the word idol. I liked that Alien Stage let the viewer fill in the gaps and didn't have to explicitly show most of the abuse. Also to be completely honest. Most stans probably wouldn't like Mizi after she lost half her face. I DO NOT hate Zombie Stage. I simply don't care for it!
I'm not responding to any more comments. This is simply my opinion! I don't plan on changing it anytime soon until the creators manage to find a way to tell their story without explicitly showing abuse. I do not think Alien Stage was perfect. I hated seeing Ivan's abuse towards Till. That's why I say I don't like him in the second half of this post.
Also bonus fact I yume Till as my brother. Oh and I greatly dislike Ivan
Tall freak of a man. I also imagine he has a crazy hunchback from bending down to talk to people. Also yes his smile is supposed to look unusually big. His arm is also intentionally disproportionate
Cute that you think Grell loves you when I’ve been into bb since day one and she’s married to ME. But whatever delusion helps you sleep at night, fucking loser
If you're gonna be rude at least show your user loser. Hiding behind anonymous is a real pussy move dude. Grell hates people who hide away. Plus she's a fictional character. She isn't married to EITHER of us. Saying you've been into it since d1 also just makes you old and washed too
Grell found Eleanor in the long gallery, where the afternoon light came thin and silver through tall windows and lay across the parquet like spilled mercury. The demon was inspecting the placement of candelabra for the evening, directing servants with a flick of her wrist, every inch the gracious hostess preparing to receive her guests. She wore the red dress that Grell privately considered an act of war against good sense, and she turned at the sound of heels striking marble with a slow, knowing smile.
"You wear an expression," Eleanor said, dismissing the servants with a glance, "that I have learned to mistrust. Out with it, darling. You look like a person carrying a corpse she has not decided where to bury."
Grell waited until the last footman had gone, until the great doors swallowed his footsteps, and then she let the lightness fall from her face entirely. It was not a thing she did often, and Eleanor noticed.
"There is a man coming to your ball tonight," Grell said. "Josiah Pell. A small, ink-stained, dangerous man who has been walking your grounds with a notebook, measuring how your guests have died. Beswick. Ashworth. Crane. He has the dates, the hours, the symptoms. He has assembled you out of grief and arithmetic, and he is rather good at it."
Eleanor's smile did not falter, but something cooled behind her eyes, the patient, ancient stillness of a thing that had survived a great many men with notebooks. "Men have suspected me before. They suspect, they accuse, they are not believed, and they die of old age muttering. It is the oldest comedy in my repertoire."
"He is not relying on being believed." Grell crossed to her, close enough to smell the faint dark sweetness that clung to Eleanor like smoke after a fire. "He has hired men of the press. Pressmen, Eleanor. Paid to make the unbelievable believable. He means to bring them through your front door tonight and have them write down everything that withers in your presence. The flowers that die. The cold. Whatever they can catch with a pencil. He is not building a case for a court. He is building a story for the cheap papers, and stories do not need to be true to be ruinous."
For a long moment Eleanor said nothing. She turned to the window and looked out over her grounds, the gardens she had cultivated for decades, the great pale face of the house, the whole careful architecture of a life she had built brick by stolen brick to walk among the rotten and feast unnoticed.
"The press," she said at last, very quietly. "That is new." She laughed, but there was no music in it. "How tediously modern. In my grandmother's day they burned you on suspicion and a rumor. Now they print you, and the burning lasts forever."
"He has cause," Grell heard herself say, and was startled by it. "Beswick ruined his father. He has spent the rest of his life learning how men like Beswick die, and now he has found the one place where they all died at once." She spread her gloved hands. "He is not a villain, Eleanor. That is the inconvenience of him. He is a wronged child wearing a grown man's coat, and he means to set fire to your house to warm a ghost."
Eleanor turned back to her, and for the first time since Grell had known her, the demon looked not amused, not seductive, not regal, but simply tired. Tired in the bones-of-the-world way that only the very old can be.
"You pity him," Eleanor said. "You came to warn me, and yet you pity the man who would destroy me."
"I am a reaper. I have stood at the side of a hundred thousand deaths." Grell's voice dropped low. "I have watched the rotten fall and I have watched the innocent fall beside them, and I have learned that the worst grief in the world is the kind that has nowhere left to go. His has gone into you. That does not make it false."
"And what would you have me do?" There was an edge now, sharp and cold as a blade drawn in winter. "Spare him? Let him bring his pencils and his rumors and his righteous little army of newspapermen into my house, and stand smiling while they unmake me? Greed is what I am, darling. I cannot apologize for my own teeth."
"I would have you not eat him." The words came out fierce, before Grell could weigh them, and they both went still at the sound. Grell pressed on, because she had never in her existence known when to stop. "You feed on the rot, you told me. The greedy, the cruel, the men like Beswick. Pell is not that. If you make him vanish tonight, you prove him right with his own absence, the pressmen will write that too, and louder. And worse than that-" she faltered, then finished it. "Worse than that, you will have proven him right to me."
The silence that followed was the most dangerous thing Grell had ever stood inside. Eleanor studied her with those ancient blue eyes, weighing her, weighing the whole strange impossible shape of what was happening between a predator and the one creature sent to record her sins.
"You should have entered me in your ledger the night you arrived," Eleanor murmured. "You should be a hundred miles from here, filing your reports, and instead you stand in my gallery begging me to be merciful to the man who would burn us both." She reached out, slowly, and laid one cool hand against Grell's cheek. "What are you doing to me, Grell Sutcliff?"
"The same thing," Grell whispered, leaning into the touch despite every rule that had ever been drilled into her, "that you are doing to me."
Outside, the first carriages were already turning up the long drive, lanterns swaying in the gathering dusk, and the ball that would decide everything began to arrive.
The morning before the ball arrived gray and businesslike, the sort of weather that suited a reaper down to her crimson bones. Grell did not waste it on idleness. A man asking questions about Eleanor's dead was a complication, and complications, she reminded herself with no real conviction were meant to be entered into the ledger, not entertained over breakfast.
She found his name with little effort. The Wright household ran on the gossip of underpaid servants, and a footman with a fondness for being flattered surrendered it before his second cup of tea. Mr. Josiah Pell, lately of the city, a gentleman of modest birth and immodest curiosity, who had taken rooms at the inn in the village and ridden out to the estate twice already on the pretext of paying respects he was owed by no one.
"He measures things," the footman confided. "Walks the grounds with a little notebook. Asked Cook when the late Lord Beswick took ill, and on what hour, and whether he'd eaten anything peculiar. Asked the same of two others. Wrote it all down very neat."
Grell thanked him with a smile that showed too many teeth, and went to find the man herself.
Pell had returned, as it happened, and was being kept waiting in the morning room like an unwanted parcel. Grell observed him first from the doorway, the way she observed everything. As a study in lines and shadows. He was perhaps forty, narrow through the shoulders, dressed in black that had been good once and had been brushed too many times since. His hands were ink-stained. His eyes never stopped moving. And around his neck, on a chain tucked half beneath his collar, hung a small silver cross worn smooth by a thumb that had clearly worried it for years.
"You're not a noble," Grell announced, sweeping in. "One would have demanded brandy by now. You've been sitting there cataloguing the wallpaper."
Pell rose, startled, then settled into a wary courtesy. "And you, sir, are not a mourner. Mourners weep. You look as though you've come to enjoy yourself."
"I always come to enjoy myself. It's my one consistency." She arranged herself on the settee opposite and let the silence stretch until he was obliged to fill it. "You've been asking about the dead. Three of them, I'm told. A peculiar hobby for a man who knew none of them in life."
Something flickered behind his restless eyes, calculation, and beneath it, something older and more brittle. He sat slowly. "I knew one of them. Lord Beswick. He ruined my father over a railway scheme that never laid a single rail. Took everything, and laughed, and called it the cost of doing business with one's betters." His thumb found the cross. "My father hanged himself in a debtors' cell. I was nine. I have spent rather a long while learning how men like Beswick die."
Grell, who had spent many years watching the rotten fall and the innocent fall with them, felt the small, unwelcome tug of recognition. "And how do they die, Mr. Pell?"
"That is the trouble." He leaned forward, the wariness burning away into a feverish certainty. "They don't, properly. Beswick was strong as an ox at sixty. Then he dines here, and within a fortnight he's a withered thing in his bed, complaining the marrow's been sucked from him, refusing food, dead before the doctor can name a cause. Then Ashworth. Then old Crane. All three at her table. All three rotting from the inside out as though something had drunk them dry." He looked at her, and his voice dropped. "I don't believe in ghosts, sir. But I have read enough to believe in worse things. And I mean to prove what she is."
Grell kept her face a still red mask, though her heart performed something acrobatic and traitorous behind it. He is not wrong, she thought. He has assembled the truth out of grief and arithmetic, and he means to bring it to the ball like a loaded pistol.
"You believe Lady Wright a murderess," she said lightly.
"I believe she is something for which there is no charge in any court I could name. Which is why I have invited certain men of the press to the festivities tomorrow night. Men who are paid to make the unbelievable believable." He sat back, satisfied, mistaking her stillness for sympathy. "You're a clever man. You've seen it too. The cold of this house. The way the flowers die. You feel it."
"I feel a great many things," Grell murmured. She studied him: the threadbare grief, the decades of nursing a wound until it became a vocation. He was not rotten. That was the inconvenience of it. He was wronged, and a wronged man was the hardest thing in the world to be fair to. "Tell me, Mr. Pell. The child you were, at nine. If you proved your monster and tore down this house, would he sleep any easier in his grave?"
Pell faltered. For an instant the certainty cracked, and beneath it she saw the boy, still standing outside a cell door that would not open. "He would have justice," he said, but the word had lost its edges.
"Justice." Grell rose, smoothing her coat. "I know a great deal about the subject. More than is good for me." She paused at the door, and her smile, when it came, was almost gentle. "Come to the ball, Mr. Pell. Bring your notebook and your gentlemen of the press. But do try to dance at least once. Even the dead would tell you. It is a terrible thing, to spend your one allotted span counting other people's deaths."
She left him sitting there, thumb on his cross, and went out into the gray morning with the whole tidy shape of her duty turned to splinters in her hands. The man was a danger to Eleanor. The man was also, unbearably, sympathetic. And the ledger had no column wide enough for grief.
She told herself it was for the investigation. A reaper did not abandon a disturbance in the machinery of death simply because the disturbance had a lovely mouth and a laugh that arrived like an unexpected guest. She told herself she would observe, gather her evidence, and file her report in triplicate when the time was ripe. She told herself a great many sensible things, and believed none of them, and unpacked her trunk in a guest room papered in funeral lilies as though she meant to make a season of it.
The Wright estate after dark was a different animal. The mourners had gone home with their condolences and their schemes, and the great house exhaled. Grell wandered its halls with her boots in her hand so the heels would not betray her, following the only warmth in the place to its source. She found Eleanor in the conservatory, among orchids that had no business blooming in an English autumn, coaxing them open with a fingertip.
"They die so quickly when I'm away from them," Eleanor said without turning. "Flowers. They feel the hunger in me and they spend themselves trying to be beautiful enough to be spared." She glanced over her shoulder, and the moonlight made a stranger of her. "Rather like the gentlemen at dinner, wouldn't you say?"
"I would never compare a noble to an orchid." Grell set her boots down and padded across the tiles. "Orchids are useful. They give pleasure. Your peers only ever gave themselves indigestion."
Eleanor's laugh was quieter this time, more careful, as though she had decided this reaper was a thing worth not frightening. "Sit with me, then. Tell me how a creature sworn to order finds themselves smiling at the worst possible company."
They sat on a wrought bench gone cool with the night, closer than two strangers ought, and Grell watched the demon watch her. There was a game being played, she understood that. Eleanor was measuring how much truth a reaper could be fed. But Grell had spent a lifetime among colleagues who measured everything, who filed their feelings the way they filed their forms, and she found she had no patience left for fencing.
"Three of them in a month," Grell said. "That is what brought me. Three names that never reached my book, three souls that slipped their schedule. Do you know what happens, my lady, when the ledger goes quiet? The whole great clock of the world skips a tooth. Somewhere a child who ought to have lived dies in his cradle to make the numbers balance. Death is not cruel. Death is fair. It is the only thing that ever is."
The orchids trembled. Eleanor had gone still, and the amusement had drained from her face, leaving something Grell had not earned the right to see yet.
"And do you mean to balance me?" Eleanor asked.
"I mean to understand you first." Grell leaned in. "You don't feed the way the others do. I've met demons. Sebastian and his contracts, that ghastly Trancy creature and his spider. They make bargains. They devour the desperate. But you-" she gestured at the dark house around them, "-you sit at the head of the table in pearls and let the gluttons gorge themselves on you instead of the other way round. You choose the ones no one will mourn. Why?"
For a long moment Eleanor said nothing. A moth threw itself against the glass and gave up.
"Because a starving thing learns to be choosy about its disgrace," she said at last. "I have eaten for centuries, reaper. I have eaten saints and soldiers and a woman who wept the whole while and forgave me at the end, which was the worst of it. If I must be a monster, I will at least be a monster who only eats the rot. It is a small mercy. But it is mine, and I have paid for it in loneliness, because you cannot keep company with what you intend to consume."
Grell thought of the loneliness she had glimpsed in the drawing room, that flicker behind the blue. She knew its shape. She had carried her own through too many decades of being told she was too much, too loud, too bold, too unwilling to bleed quietly into the margins of someone else's tidy ledger.
"You needn't dine alone tonight," she said. "I'm dreadful company, but I'm warm, and I've nothing to fear from you. I am rather difficult to swallow."
Something eased in Eleanor's shoulders. She reached out, slowly, giving Grell every chance to flinch and tucked a strand of dark-red hair behind the reaper's ear, her fingers grazing the chartreuse glow of her eye, unafraid. "All that crimson," she murmured. "You wear your heart on the outside, where anyone might take it."
"I wear it where it can be admired," Grell corrected, though her breath had gone unsteady. "There's a difference. A heart in a glass case is still a heart. It simply has the good sense to be seen."
They stayed like that until the candles guttered, trading the truths that two solitary immortals hoard, and Grell did not once reach for her scythe. When at last she rose to go, Eleanor caught her wrist.
"The ball," the demon said. "Two nights now. The whole rotten flock will come, and there will be one among them I'd dearly love your opinion on. A man who's begun asking questions about my dead. Promise me a dance, reaper. Just one. Before you decide what your fairness demands of me."
"My lady," Grell said, and her grin was all teeth and tenderness at once, "I would let the whole clock of the world skip three teeth for a dance with you. Try and stop me."
She climbed to her room among the painted lilies, and for the first time in many years the reaper lay awake not dreading the morning, but counting the hours until a waltz.
Description: There's been deaths of many nobles that have not been documented by reapers. Grell has been tasked with figuring out the cause of peculiar deaths.
This is a seperate universe from the Black Butler original story. Some aspects of demons, reapers and plots have been changed. Grell will be referred to with He/Him pronouns unless being referred to by Lady Eleanor, herself and the narrator. I am not from the United Kingdom myself therefore the vocab may be slightly off than what would actually be said.
1. A Color of Mourning
Rain had a way of making London honest. It washed the soot from the rooftops, beaded on the polished flanks of carriages, and gathered in the gutters where the city kept its secrets. But the rain that fell over the Wright estate fell on no honest thing at all, and the woman who stepped down from the hired hansom knew it the moment her heel touched the gravel.
"Three nobles in a single month," Grell Sutcliff murmured, tilting her face toward the great house. Lamplight spilled gold across the wet stone, and she drank it in the way she drank in all beautiful things. Greedily, with a smile that showed too many teeth. "All dead at the same address, all smiling in their coffins. How positively scandalous. And not a single one of them on my list."
That last detail troubled her, though she would not have admitted it to William. A reaper's ledger was the spine of the world; names appeared, souls were collected, curtains fell on schedule. When men died and the book stayed silent, it meant something had reached into the machinery and stopped the gears with its bare hand. It meant a demon was hunting.
She climbed the steps. Her death scythe waited disguised in the long case slung over her shoulder, its engine quiet, its appetite patient. She had dressed for the occasion in mourning that was not quite mourning. Black, yes, but threaded everywhere with crimson, because grief without beauty was simply a waste of an afternoon.
The footman who admitted her looked half-asleep, his eyes glassy as a doll's. Already half-eaten, Grell thought, and pitied him a little. He led her down a hall hung with portraits of dead previous Lord and Lady Wrights, every painted face wearing the faintly hungry expression of people who had never been told no.
The drawing room, when she reached it, was warm and overfull with mourners. Widows in jet beads. Gentlemen murmuring over the price of the deceased's racehorses before the bodies had cooled. Vultures, all of them and at the center of the flock stood the only creature in the room who was not pretending.
Lady Eleanor Wright turned, and the candlelight turned with her.
She was poured into black silk, her auburn hair catching the firelight, her blue eyes finding Grell across the crowded room as though the two of them had arranged to meet here a hundred years ago. There was nothing of the doll about her. There was, in fact, nothing human about her at all, though the room full of fools could not see it. Grell could. A reaper always could. Beneath the perfume of civility there was something older and warmer and very, very hungry.
"You're not one of my husband's creditors," Lady Eleanor said, gliding close. Her voice was low, amused. "And you're not weeping. So you must be the most interesting person here. Are you here for the dead, then?"
"Darling, I'm always here for the dead." Grell let the words roll like a line delivered to a packed house. "It's the living who never quite know what to do with me."
Something flickered behind those blue eyes, recognition, perhaps. The way a swordsman recognizes another's stance. "A reaper," Eleanor breathed, so quietly that the word died between them. "How bold, walking into a demon's parlor in scarlet."
"You noticed the red." Grell pressed a gloved hand to her own chest, delighted. "Most people are too frightened to compliment a lady on her color scheme. I think we shall get along terribly well."
"That depends." Eleanor's smile did not waver, but her hand drifted to a glass of wine on the mantel, fingers curling around the stem like a creature deciding whether to drink or to throw. "Whether you've come to swing that pretty axe at my neck."
Grell considered her. By every rule William had drilled into her neutrality, restraint, the sacred dullness of the ledger. She ought to have flushed the demon out, marked the disturbance, and let the higher branches decide. Demons who interfered with the order of death were a complication, and complications were to be filed in triplicate.
But the demon before her was not feeding on a child or a saint. She was feeding on men who counted their gold while their tenants starved, on widows who'd buried husbands with relief, on a whole ballroom of beautifully dressed greed. And she was exquisite.
"My quarrel," Grell said slowly, "is with souls that leave before their scene is written. Yours have all rather overstayed their welcome, haven't they? Cruel little men, dying full of their own importance." She tipped her head. "I find I'm not in any hurry to avenge them."
The surprise on Eleanor's face was genuine, and lovely for being so. For a heartbeat the predator slipped, and underneath Grell glimpsed something she had not expected in a demon's eyes, a flicker of loneliness, quickly veiled.
"And you're not what I was warned demons were." Grell stepped nearer, until she could see the candle-flames reflected twice in those blue eyes. "I was promised a monster. You're far more dangerous than that, my lady. You have taste."
Eleanor laughed, a real laugh, startled out of her and the sound of it did something inexcusable to Grell's carefully ledgered heart.
"Stay," the demon said, before she seemed to decide to. "There's a ball in three nights. The whole rotten flock will be here, fattening themselves. Stay, and we'll see whether your scythe and my appetite can keep their manners at the same table."
Outside, the rain fell on. Inside, two creatures who served only death stood very close together and discovered, to their mutual alarm, that neither of them wished to step away. Somewhere far above, in a tower of files and disapproval, a clerk would soon notice that Grell Sutcliff's report was late.
She found she did not care for being late at the moment.
I feel like what people don't understand about Gold Dancer as tragic as the death was (and it was) Gold Dancer was a steeplechase racer not a standard derby racer. Steeplechase racing is far more dangerous for both horse and jockey than standard derby racing. His jockey should have never made him continue racing after his spine broke but it's not the issue of horse racing in general. It's the training plus the age of the horses that is the major issue. Derby horses have it easy compared to steeplechase horses. Horses are meant to run. Not run AND preform tricks
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