Prologue
The sky was dark, with throbbing purple clouds off near the horizon, threatening of a storm to come the night when Elvira felt the hands on Death’s clock move. They were white and spindly, with wiry ends that looked like hungry fingers leaving jagged claw marks against a black face, ticking down the time until the moment her life was severed. Her name, scratched in gleaming silver beneath the twelve.
She’d felt it begin to tick, jerking into a grinding start with a metal-on-metal screech, as if it wasn’t supposed to start so soon, as if her life had been cut severely short when she met the man with blood-red eyes.
Death was coming for her, and if Elvira knew anything, it was that no one escaped death. No one but Death himself.…
