Page 41 of The Deathless One
His damned gravesinger was summoning him.
He was loath to ignore her. It took a lot of his power to deny someone that right, especially a gravesinger, and if he wasn’t careful, it would deplete all the new power that she’d given him.
Baring his teeth in a snarl, he spun in the direction of that tug, but he stopped as he realized a man stood beside him.
Or perhaps not quite a man. He was young, barely an adult. His hair was lank, dark, a little too greasy. His eyes were sunken into his skull, dark circles gathered underneath them as he staggered past the Deathless One, making his way to what appeared to be a cot in the corner. The young man tossed himself down on it, laying an arm across his eyes, with one leg dangling onto the floor.
His entire body went suddenly limp, and the Deathless One wondered for a moment if he had died. But no, his chest was still rising and falling.
Then he had the horrified fear that this young man had somehow stolen magic from him. This fool of a creature wasn’t good enough to even clean a god’s boots, let alone wield immortal magic.
No, it wasn’t this pageboy. There wasn’t an ounce of power in him, a pathetic little amount even to suggest that he was alive. But as he leanedover him and stared down into the features slowly revealed by a limp arm falling to his side, he realized this was the idiot Jessamine was looking for.
“Benji,” he said, his voice reaching out through the ether, stern enough that the boy snorted in his sleep. “We’ve been looking for you, Benji.”
The young man’s eyes flew open, and he sat up so fast that he actually passed through the shadowy figure looming over him. Wincing, the Deathless One gathered the scattered pieces of himself together before moving in front of Benji again.
Benji breathed hard, his eyes wild and wide as he stared into the darkness around himself. “Who’s there?”
“No one,” the Deathless One breathed into his ear. “Just your nightmares.”
Again, somehow, his voice crossed into the living realm. Benji bolted out of his bed, stumbled away from the cot, and then tripped over something that was so encased in darkness that the Deathless One couldn’t make out what it was. But as the young man landed on the floor, gulping in lungfuls of air, the Deathless One wondered just how much he could push.
Jessamine had given him more power than she realized, and he wasn’t even reborn yet. Soon, he would remember what it was like to have that much power. Soon he would recall exactly what it was like to be a god among men.
“No one’s here,” Benji muttered. “No one is here, you big idiot. You shouldn’t have taken those mushrooms.”
“Probably not,” the Deathless One replied, although this time he made sure the young man couldn’t hear him. “Mushrooms rarely give a man a vision into the future, and most of the time just confuse more than they clarify. What else did you expect?”
But then Benji climbed shakily to his feet and moved to the end of the bed. He opened a trunk there and stared down at something in it. “And I never should have taken you. Nothing but bad luck has followed me since.”
Curious now, the Deathless One wandered behind the young man and peered over his shoulder. What he saw in that trunk turned his blood icecold and sent fire surging through his heart, threatening to burn him alive. The magical signature hadn’t been coming from a person after all.
“That is my book,” he snarled. “Why does a wretch like you havemy grimoire?”
He thundered the words so loudly that they rang into the living realm again, filled with fury and frustration at this form’s inability to seize the grimoire and bring it with him. Benji let the lid drop with a thud that sent dust billowing around him. Coughing, the young man whirled again.
The Deathless One lunged at him, all shadow and magic that passed through the young man but also ripped through his mind. He could taste every single memory for a brief moment, every fear, every nightmare, every single thing that this door holder had felt. And details. Oh, the Deathless One had gathered so many details from that brush against this rotting mind.
“Who’s there?” Benji called out as the Deathless One faded from the room, answering the tugging call in his belly. “Who are you?”
“Death,” he replied. “And I am coming for you, Benji Broadback.”
He arrived already talking. “We have to go to this Benji.”
Jessamine knew this. She was more interested in the fact that she couldn’t light a damn candle, but apparently could summon him whenever she wished. “Why is it that I can make this spell work, but I struggle to do even the most basic spells for anything else?”
“Benji, witch.”
“Yes, I realize he’s a problem and that we should be working toward that common goal. I’m more interested in why this magic is fighting against me, since you seem to think I am actually a witch.”
She looked up from her perch on the island stool, waiting for him to realize that she hadn’t summoned him in the same spot she usually did. The altar room was nice, but she thought the kitchen was nicer. She felt more powerful here, perhaps because of her conversation with Sybil. She could be wherever she wanted now that she wasn’t in the castle. She was allowed to be whoever she felt like she was in the moment, and right now, she wanted to be a woman who sat in the kitchen.
He strode into the room like he owned the place, and she realized that he was more corporeal than she had ever seen before. Those were definitely pants that he was wearing. Black as night and dark as sin, but they were pants. And the shadows had coiled a little tighter around his shoulders. She could see that he really was an abnormally tall man, lean and strong, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist that were pleasing to the eye.
If only she could see his face. There was still nothing there but a darkmass surrounded by the beginnings of a sketch, as if she’d conjured him out of her dreams.
Bracing her chin on her closed fist, she stared at him a little harder before asking, “Do you only have a shape because I’m giving you a shape?”
