A Crown of Hollow Bones

Persephone Melas has spent three thousand years being a minor death goddess. She has opinions about that word, minor. She also has a professorship in classical antiquity at the Imperial University of St. Petersburg, a translation of the Orphic Hymns that is going to be definitive if the department chair stops reassigning her seminars, and a very carefully maintained life that does not include Kas the Deathless.

Kas Bessmertnyi has been avoiding one specific woman for approximately eternity. He is excellent at it. He has avoided wars, empires, and the entire Greek mythological tradition with equal competence. He does not think about her. He has made not thinking about her into a discipline so refined it is practically an art form.

Then death starts stuttering. In St. Petersburg, in the autumn of 1882, people who should die are not dying. The mechanisms of natural ending are backing up, and the crisis requires two kinds of knowledge no single being possesses: Greek death-lore and Slavic death-power. They are assigned to the same investigation. They are given adjacent apartments. They are expected to cooperate.

He has been alive forever. She has been surrounded by the dead for three millennia. Neither of them has any idea what to do with a living thing that will not look away.

Dark romantasy for readers who like their immortals ancient, their tension annihilating, and their love stories written in the language of what you have been refusing to survive for.