Page 7 of The Deathless One
He drew his finger away from her mouth, trailing the scarred tip over her plump lower lip.
She met his gaze without fear this time, a hardness settling inside her. “I want to fight. I want my kingdom back.”
“Revenge is a dangerous game, little nightmare.”
Still, she glared at him. No fear in her eyes any longer. Not even hope. Just anger and rage. “I want him to suffer for what he did to me. I want him to know how it feels to watch everyone he loves die, and then to see me standing above him with a knife.”
“I will give you that.” What a feral creature he’d found. He drew his hand along her jaw. “But you will give yourself to me. There will come a time when I have need of you, and you will not be able to say no. You will not like what I ask of you.”
“Anything,” she spat with surprising heat in her voice. “I will do anything.”
“And so you will have a chance.” He had never met a soul filled with such rage. He could hardly wait to understand what had given her such power. “But I want to see you burn your kingdom down and rebuild it in my name.”
Without hesitation, she ground her teeth together and replied, “I will.”
She tumbled through the darkness, rolling through the depths of death and some in-between place for which she had no name. It was cold. Bitter cold and biting against whatever she had left to feel.
Her mother, dead. Her family, gone. Her kingdom ripped from her hands without giving her even a chance to fight for it. She wanted to fight! She wanted to destroy everyone who had dared to take it from her.
Jessamine wanted a chance. That was all she was asking for.
In that darkness, she heard a voice. The black shifted underneath her eyes, and a figure stood above her, shadowy and obscured. She couldn’t make out anything other than the silhouette of a trim waist, wide shoulders, and shaggy hair. A hand reached for her, thick and broad-fingered, scarred tips dancing above her face.
“And so you will have a chance,” the voice murmured, low and rumbling. “But I want to see you burn your kingdom down and rebuild it in my name.”
In her desperation, rage, and fear, she heard herself reply, “I will.”
What madness had overtaken her? She did not know what monster visited her in this dark place. Nor did she have any clue what this deal might bring. But she felt…him.
Pulling. Tugging. Not letting her go when everything inside her screamed she needed to leave, to go deeper into the darkness and rest. But he wouldn’t let her. And with one final, hard pull, suddenly she felt it all. The cold. The bitter aching. The pain.
Oh, the pain.
It felt like ages, but she slowly became aware of her body again. Of how much everything hurt. Every inch of her burned with the heat of a thousand suns, and her throat…
“Is it… alive?” someone asked, the voice heavily accented.
“Och, aye, I think it’s alive. Did you see it twitch?”
Something hard nudged her side. A shoe? No, it would be too dangerous to touch someone who might have the plague with even a shoe. They’d prodded her with a stick, most likely.
With a low moan, she rolled away from the jabbing pain that made her ribs spasm. She ached, and the last thing she needed was yet another injury to add to the thousands that prickled over her entire body.
The first voice harrumphed. “Oh, it’s alive, all right. Sorry sap prolly got dumped over the cliff after they found out she was infected. Wot a shame. Pretty body and all that.”
“I’m not—” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. Rusty and rough, like she’d been screaming for hours on end. “I’m not infected.”
“It can speak!” the second voice said, decidedly more high-pitched than the first. She didn’t think it was female, more likely that of a child. “I didn’t know the infected could speak.”
“You ’aven’t ’eard ’em before? Mumbling about, constantly making those awful moaning noises?”
“I never really stopped that long when I saw ’em.” The child, and it had to be a child, made a spitting noise.
Jessamine reared away from the two when she felt the wet wad hit the back of her head. Her entire body cracked as she stood, or maybe it wasn’t her body, but whatever covered her. Black mud had hardened all over her skin and clothes, like a prison of darkness that left stains in its wake. The mud crumbled, shattering into dusty patterns as she moved. She scraped at her eyes, ripping the pieces away until she could finally open them and cast a dark-eyed glare at the two figures.
She was right: a boy and his father, presumably. They looked enough alike, their skin leathery from too many years in the sun. Their clotheswere ripped and moth-eaten, patched with different colors. The boy had a smudge of black on his cheek. The same substance that covered her, she thought.
They both jerked back at her movement, and the man dropped the stick he was holding. He made a gesture with a circle of his pointer finger and thumb, flicked the rest of his fingers upright, and held his hand to his eye to ward off evil. “I’ve never seen black eyes like that.”
