Page 33 of The Deathless One
“I am uncomfortable with emotion,” he grumbled before clearing his throat. “But I am sorry for your loss.”
Wiping away her tears, she nodded. “I am, too.”
Jessamine stood in the silence, feeling the ache of her heart still beating in her chest. She was supposed to be with them. All of them. Her mother, the nobles who had died loyal to their queen. They were all waiting for her, and instead she was here, fighting for a kingdom that might not even want her.
“You missed him,” the Deathless One said, breaking through her thoughts. “There’s your answer, nightmare.”
She blinked, then followed his pointing arm to the gates, where the infected were just making their way into her home. “Who… Benji?”
A young man with a pageboy hat and a stick in his mouth stood holding the gate open. He always had some kind of pick between his teeth, gnawing on the wood like it was his job. He was easy to miss.
“No,” she whispered, taking a step closer to the memory, even though it was hazy around the edges. “He’s just a pageboy. Mother used to send him to fetch her peach pie from the market.”
“Peach pie?” the Deathless One repeated. “That sounds terrible.”
“It’s delicious,” she corrected absentmindedly. “Why would Benji open the gates? We gave him a place to sleep, a home, food, and money. There was no reason for him to turn against us.”
“Then that sounds like what you have to find out, nightmare. Why did he betray you, and just how far was he willing to go to do so?”
“And who made him betray us?”
The memory shivered, warped, and then splintered apart like a cracked glass mirror. She could feel herself falling long before the memories disappeared and Jessamine was weightless. Floating between reality and her own mind. But this time, she wasn’t so afraid as she felt her body coming alive beneath her.
She blinked once, twice, three times, and the room came back into view.
This time, she was alone. No god to crouch by her side or make her feel questionable things.
But as she sat up, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms, she stared down at the black charcoal that came from where he’d stolen her sight. And she couldn’t help but wonder if he felt as bereft as she did.
He didn’t know what was happening, but the longer he was around her, the more real he felt.
Perhaps it was part of the magic that came with siphoning off some of his power to her. She was absorbing that, which in turn meant that he could steal some of it back from her. It allowed him to stay in the living realm longer, feel more alive. As long as she called him, at least. And she called him often, if his understanding of time was correct.
Time was so difficult to keep track of, especially when he spent so many days in his dark realm. The ink and the memories were always so convincing that it felt like ages, not days. It made him long to be around her, closer to her, and the other gravesingers whispered to give in to her allure.
A witch had made him trust her once before. He’d forgiven her every fault, because he’d thought himself in love. Countless times he’d ignored the warning signs as he played the fool who had hoped that to her, he wasn’t just a monster. That he could actually find someone who saw… him.
But those gravesingers whispered that he didn’t even know who he was. How could he? The only time he’d spent trying to discover himself had been under the watchful eyes of a witch who had guided him toward what she wanted. An end for both of them, filled with blood and power.
Shaking himself free from the dark thoughts yet again, he searched the void around him. He had come to realize that he now waited to hear Jessamine’s voice. He would stand still, for days on end, he feared, listening.
Sometimes it was just her voice bleeding into this realm as she took lessons from Sybil. Or maybe it was her dreams. She called out for him in that dreamscape, and it took everything in him not to place himself in her mind during those moments. Did she think she was dead again? Or did she cry out for him for other reasons?
Dangerous thoughts for a creature like him. Especially when he knew how this ended.
Now, though, he didn’t hear her at all. There was a strange stillness in this place. Like even the inky darkness held its breath, waiting for the moment when he would sense a change. Because there had to be a change, otherwise he wouldn’t be listening so hard. He wouldn’t feel all the hairs on his arms rising as he…
Waited.
“You’re a godsdamned fool,” he muttered to himself. “Waiting for her to call on you like she’s already turned you into her pet, just like the cat you made her. You could just go yourself.”
But he couldn’t do that either. He didn’t want to be her puppet, waiting with bated breath for the first order she would give him. The other gravesinger, the other witches, they had all tried to wield him like a weapon, and he had let them. For an ounce of their attention, for a drop of genuine affection, he would have ended the world.
These feelings had nothing to do with her, he told himself, and everything to do with his desperation to feel something other than pain or abandonment.
In her memories, when she said he appeared to have more of a shape, he’d realized that was dangerously true. Even when he’d watched her from the shadows as she scrubbed her eyes afterward, there was more definition to his body, a sensation of weightiness that he hadn’t experienced before.
His mind and time were all scrambled. When had he shown her the memory? It felt like years, but in truth was only a few days ago. The memory of the boy she’d called Benji.
