Page 62 of The Deathless One
Using the water, she dipped her hands to wet them and then used her palms to write a message on the wall. A message that all would see because it revealed clean stone under years of grime.
She scrubbed into being a message that would fill every person in this district with hope.
And when she was done, she stepped away to look at her work. Elric stood beside her, a low chuckle rumbling through his chest. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”
“Well, sometimes you have to spoon-feed it.”
Still, it did feel rather liberating to read the words cleaned into the wall. She’d even put her symbol beside it. A butterfly for a princess, but this time she had left it with its head cut off.
I am not dead.
And soon, the entire city would know it.
He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Even now, when he’d weakened enough to be forced back into this realm of ink and darkness, all he could think about was her face when she finished cleaning that wall. The message she’d written was dangerous. If Leon found out too soon that she was alive, she’d miss her chance to unravel what had happened.
But Jessamine’s expression had been worth the risk.
She looked alive in that moment, in a way he’d never seen before. He hadn’t realized how dead she looked all the time. Those haunted eyes were always so dark, and the scar around her neck rolled with every single swallow like it was a struggle for her to sustain herself. Instead, horribly, wonderfully, in that moment, she came alive again.
Here he was thinking he had given her life. But she had done that herself.
She’d worn a wild grin that he’d only ever seen on an avenging witch who had destroyed a kingdom. She stood before him like a goddess who would shatter the fools who had tried to crush her beneath their heel. And he’d been struck dumb, tongue-tied at the realization that she could be dangerous to him.
Because he’d forgotten what it meant to be alive. He had forgotten the nuances and the emotions that came with living. He had forgotten that it felt like the world was coming apart sometimes, especially when he saw happiness on the features of a woman like her.
A nightmare become flesh.
Shaking his head, Elric wandered through the dark by himself, wondering when she would summon him again. She had gotten better at asking for an audience. He was able to appear before her much faster than he had when they’d first met, and he’d gotten better at staying in the living realm.
But of course, that didn’t eliminate this moment. When he had to return and wait. For her.
He’d gotten used to waiting for her. And still, it never got easier.
Even now, he stood in the darkness and listened in the hopes that he might hear her words whispering in the air. The inky hands that plucked at his legs remained calmer than usual. Even they knew he would not remain for very long. Not when there was a gravesinger waiting for him.
He strode forward again—it was easier to keep moving than to stay in one place. He conjured up the image of when he’d first found her. Lying in a puddle of dark water that filled the hollows of her eyes so prettily.
Even now, he could see her. A bundle of light in the darkness. But the closer he got to the mirage, the more he realized it seemed as though she was actually here. With him looming in the darkness like he was the one who had summoned her.
Frowning, he blinked a few times to clear the vision from his mind. When the bundle didn’t move, he had to assume that it was another trick of this realm to drag him deeper into the painful memories. Still, something in him said to seek it out. To look at the bundle and hope that maybe, again, he had found himself in this realm with her. Elric’s boots sloshed through the water, which was only ankle deep these days, and he approached the small bundle on the ground.
It was her. Impossibly so, because this was the realm between life and death. He’d left her safely hidden in that alley. No one would notice that the bundle of fabric in the corner was a person, he was certain of it. Had she been robbed? Murdered? Had yet another person put their hands on her while thinking they had a right to do so?
Baring his teeth in a snarl, he tried to control the fear slicing through his body as he crouched and placed a hand on her shoulder. She was curledin the fetal position, her knees drawn into her chest and her wrists crossed underneath her chin. She looked so peaceful, but it was hard to focus on that when the fear for her safety made his heart skip a beat.
He didn’t want her to be in pain anymore. He didn’t want her to suffer.
Old memories filtered through his mind, and dark hands wrapped around his ankles. Another dark hand came out of the ink beneath her pitch-black hair and wrapped around his wrist, forcing him to freeze where he was, crouched above her like a bird of prey.
This was why he’d become a deathless god. He remembered now. He had found a witch just like this, curled up and frozen to death on the wrong side of a door. She was steps away from warmth, if only someone had allowed her in. But they hadn’t. Witches were never welcome.
He remembered the rage. He felt it, even now. He had wanted to end the world but had known that wouldn’t help, and so he went to the woman’s coven with her frozen body held in his arms. Holding her against his still-beating heart, and he had shown them how to create a god.
He remembered the altar. He remembered the flash of a ritual knife. But what had happened afterward was lost to him. Only that the witches had absorbed his power and that they worshipped him. Perhaps that worship was the key to his survival. He did not know.
The hands released him. The water lapped around her, moving from where he’d crouched and gently brushing against the back of her neck, her cheek, her lovely pale lips.
“Jessamine,” he murmured, brushing her wet hair off her cheeks so he could get a good look at her. “Nightmare, wake up.”
