Page 77 of Mantle

I went to react, when something caught my eye.

His right arm was partially desiccated.

A groan escaped him as he put down the syringe and I watched the desiccation dissipate until his skin healed from any sign of the affliction.

The shock of it had me snagging his arm in a harsh grip. “What was that? That desiccation?”

“You just answered your own question.”

Our eyes locked, and the look in his made me very aware of my fingers on him.

“You’re a necromancer… this isn’t possible,” I said, releasing him and taking a step back. “You wield death, you don’t succumb to it. You’re its enforcer, not its victim.”

“I make it my bitch—that’s how I prefer to term it.”

“Then, what happened?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t strong enough.”

“Against what?”

He sighed heavily and rose to his feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said as he slipped his shirt back on over all that hard muscle, then snatched up his coat, placing the empty syringe inside.

“The fuck it doesn’t.”

He eyed me with a lift of his lips. “Aww, want to defend my honor, babe?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“My bad. It was just that one night where that was on the table.”

Fuck.“Sylas.”

“It doesn’t matter who was responsible, Kai.”

“Because it could implicate you in some form?”

His lips twitched. “You know me well.”

“This isn’t a mild magical affliction. The desiccation… you’re dying.”

“It’s worse than that. I’m being turned—transformed into a vampire. It’s not a standard turning, obviously. It’s botched and unnatural, so I’m becoming something between vampire and death. And my power… without the serum—a special concoction of my own design—it would already be slipping away substantially by now.”

Of course losing his magic would be far worse than death to him.

We were the same in that respect.

Our magic meant everything to us—it was the very essence of who we were.

I couldn’t imagine being without it.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to survive without it.

“This person who you can’t identify, he did this to you, so—”

“He can reverse it? Yeah. Obviously my first thought. It didn’t work. He’s gone to ground anyway. Nobody has heard from him in a few years.” He pulled on the hair at the back of his neck, his struggle to maintain his composure painfully clear—not the Sylas Morgrave that I knew. “At this juncture, only something along the lines of reversing the vampiric condition itself would work.”

I cursed and scrubbed my hand over my face. “And the serum?”

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