Page 101 of The Deathless One
One of the henchmen behind him chuckled and muttered, “What kind of woman must that have been to have a god begging for her?”
He ignored the man, even though he wanted to turn his tongue to ash in his mouth. “The world has never met a woman like you before, Jessamine Harmsworth. You should not have ended like this.”
“Which time should she not have died?” Callum asked, cleaning the blade off on his shirt. “It’s been so many now, it’s hard to keep track.”
With a glare that should have been a warning, Elric opened his mouth to let more empty threats fill the room. Except he couldn’t say a word while Callum started speaking in the old language. A pull, a tug, a ripple deep inside his body flared wide.
He remembered this feeling. This summoning that would resurrect a god into a new form. A form where he could touch, and taste, and eat. He could do anything he wanted in this form, or always had, but he knew that Callum summoned him to bind. He waited to feel those chains looping around his neck and wrists.
Elric had been bound to another before, and likely would be again. Witches would always seek to thread their fate together with his, twining them together until the end of all time. He knew what they wanted. A god at the end of a chain they held, but he had never been bound to someone who wasn’t a witch.
There would be long years in the service of this man. He would do monstrous and terrible things in the name of someone who did not deserve to hold the chains of his life. Throughout all of it, he would mourn the loss of an exceptional woman while he tried to hold on to the faint flavor of her life. Absinthe and lilies and bittersweet revenge.
The last words of the spell dropped, and he felt the hardening in his body, the sudden power that flowed through him far greater than ever before. He lifted a hand, watching as the black smoke of his form slowly revealed skin underneath. Warm skin. Skin that flexed and moved andfelt. He should be happy. Revel in the glorious sensation of being alive once more.
And yet, all he could feel was a single tear that slid down his cheek.Nearly boiling, it seared a trail to his jaw, where he knew he would wear the scar for the rest of his existence.
Callum stared at him, his eyes wide with a hunger for power. “Kill the witch,” he ground out. “Just to make sure there’s no more of your coven left.”
He waited to feel the insistence of the binding spell, one that would force him to do this man’s bidding. But it did not come. He stood there, in complete and utter defiance of an order, and he knew that he need not do what this man said.
Slowly, he looked down at the sheet covering Jessamine’s body. There, just barely, was the smallest hint of a rattling breath as his warrior of a woman struggled to stay alive long enough to give them a chance.
To givehima chance.
He leaned down, gently pulling the fabric from her face so he could look into those beloved dark eyes that had freed him from centuries of torment long before she resurrected him.
“Hello, my ruthless woman,” he murmured. “If you’ve still got some fight left in you, open your eyes.”
“What is happening?” Callum spluttered, the athame clenched in his hand like that would do anything to protect him. “I summoned you, Deathless One. I order you to kill that woman. Your power is mine to control!”
Jessamine slowly blinked first one eye, then the other open, clearly struggling to do even that. Perhaps she barely clung to the thread of life that grounded her here. But she let him know that she wasn’t done yet.
And then, just the barest of whispers. He heard the words no one else could speak. The words that only a gravesinger knew in her hour of need, a desire that boiled through hundreds of years. Witchcraft at its very essence, the core of who she was.
Jessamine Harmsworth drew upon the history of her people and her kind. She whispered with a hundred voices, a hundred witches who had summoned him before.
“Deathless One, I summon you.”
A feral grin spread across his face. “Then as above, so below.” He pressed his hand to his chest, drawing out a ball of shadowy power thatclung to his fingers. And with the last words of his spell, he pressed life back into her. “As within me, so without.”
His magic lanced through her, powering into her veins and rippling through all her wounds. He could feel it sealing the jagged edges of the bleeding tissue over her heart. The magic pieced her together slowly but surely, giving him just enough time to look up and glare at Callum.
The man took a step back, but then stiffened his spine. “You are mine, Deathless One. The spell is complete. I have resurrected you.”
With the slightest of movements, Elric hopped up onto the altar and crouched above Jessamine’s body like a bird of prey. “No, you didn’t, Callum Quen. She did.”
His body rippled and surged with power. Lunging forward, he wrapped his hands around the other man’s neck and squeezed. Shadows peeled out of Callum’s eyes, yanked from his mouth, memories of all the horrible deeds he’d ever done. For a moment, Elric mused, it looked like he’d ripped Callum’s shadow from him, suspending it just so Callum could see the ugliness inside himself before he slammed it back into his body.
“I promised you death,” Elric growled, magic ripping from his body in giant tendrils that snapped out behind him. Gurgling sounds erupted through the room as each henchman fell to their knees, choking on shadows that crawled into their mouths and wrapped around their tongues. “But then you had to try to kill her. Don’t you know? I’m the only one who gets to decide when she dies… and when she lives.”
Elric tossed Callum so hard into the wall that the studs cracked around him. Plaster and splinters of wood rained down on his head, though he doubted the man noticed over the pain in his shattered ribs. Elric would do more than knock the breath out of his lungs.
Looming forward, he let all that rage flow through his body, warping his form into something larger, bigger than he’d ever been before, and made entirely of slick, oily shadows. “I told you I was going to peel you out of that skin. But first I want to hear you scream. I don’t want to hear you speak, though. So I will take your tongue. Then I will flay your throat open so I can watch you gulp in terror every time I come near you. I willpull your ribs open, one by one, forcing the bone to bend but never break, so you know the pain that I felt the moment you tried to kill her.”
He was a creative god. Callum Quen would know pain unlike any being alive had ever felt before.
Until a soft hand touched his back, and all his shadows snapped back into his form. The men behind Elric wheezed, falling onto their hands and knees as they sucked in whatever air they could get. But he didn’t care what they were doing, or what they would do after. All he cared about was the tiny woman standing next to him, naked and impossibly powerful.
