Page 56 of The Deathless One
Let her keep her little secrets if she wanted. He had more important problems than figuring out what had happened to his coven.
“She’s hiding what she saw in Benji’s memories. If I do not restore this woman to the throne, then she will not summon me. She’s made it very clear those are her terms, and I am not going to lose this opportunity because I didn’t win her a measly little throne.”
“A throne for an entire kingdom.”
“I have changed the tides of war before, and I have placed kings on thrones who were less worthy than Jessamine. It will be easy enough to do.” He prowled around the altar, pacing behind her as his witch pretended he didn’t exist. “But I need to know what she saw.”
“Deathless One.” Sybil sighed. “Perhaps you should just ask her.”
He startled at the sound of his title. How strange it was now that he’d remembered his name. He didn’t actually enjoy the title. He wanted to hear other people say his name, just like Jessamine had done.
Because his name had sounded so pretty coming from her lips.
He’d forgotten that he even had a name. He’d forgotten that he was a person before all of this. Before the first knife, the first sacrifice, the first time someone saw him as a tool rather than a being. She’d given that back to him.
So perhaps he had reason to help her. If only because she had returned to him that little piece of humanity.
Sybil sighed and dropped her hands onto the altar, effectively ending the spell, which likely had taken hours to set up. “Just talk to her.”
“I have no interest in pleading for information that she should freely give.”
“Then I will ask her for you.” Sybil stood, her hands on her hips as she glared at him. “You’re how old and you cannot ask a woman to give you the information you want?”
“I’m not going to beg!” he repeated, although even he could hear the petulance in his voice. “I am her patron. I should know everything that she knows. If she’s unwilling to give me the information, that is her own fault. Not mine.”
Sybil looked up at the ceiling and expelled a long sigh. “I am exhausted by the both of you. Things were so much simpler when it was only me in this house.”
“You had very little power,” he pointed out as she started out of the room.
“I had enough!”
The sound of her voice trailed through the halls, and then he could hear the quiet murmuring from another room. Fading through the shadows, he followed her to a room where the two witches stood.
Jessamine had been working on restoring this room. In its time, it had been a gallery. Artwork from many of the talented witches in his coven had graced the walls, depicting gods and goddesses as they performed their most heroic deeds.
He’d forgotten that he used to be so well known. Standing in this room, however, surrounded by empty canvases that had long since rotted, he remembered that he had once helped people readily and often. There were so many paintings of him before his sacrifices.
How he had fed an entire town as he hunted for days on end in the middle of winter. The cold hadn’t affected him, and he’d been bloodthirsty during that reincarnation. Another painting showed him swimming through the sea for hours, seeking a witch’s child who had been lost at sea. He’d found the boy miraculously alive.
But then, as he turned to the opposite wall, he realized there was one painting still more or less intact. A depiction of a dark room deep in the heart of the earth, its walls shiny with constantly dripping water. The soft plinks had echoed in his ears for hours as he bled out from a hundred tiny cuts dotting across his chest, thighs, and arms. He had been in so much pain, and that pain had brought the coven a massive amount of power.
Swallowing, he turned his attention to the witches in the room, who hadn’t yet thought to sacrifice him.
“Jessamine, you have to tell him whatever you saw. Otherwise, neither of us can help you.” Sybil patted her shoulder. “No matter how hard it is to face.”
“I don’t know if I can say it.” Jessamine stood in the corner of the room, her hands clutching his book like a lifeline.
“Then don’t say it. Just show him.” Sybil turned to leave, jolting at the sight of the block of his shadows before she pressed a hand to her chest. “I hate it when you do that. It’s even worse now that you have a face.”
The witch left them together, awkwardly standing at opposite ends of the room, with Jessamine barely even looking at him. She stared at his feet, her hands white against the leather book, her fingers twitching every now and then.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it. “I can just take a look at your memories.”
“I’m not sure why you need to.”
“We have to keep going. You already killed a man, Jessamine. What could possibly make you want to stray from the path now?”
It wasn’t the right thing to say. He had always known he was a cold and callous creature, but he had forgotten how fragile humans could be.
