Page 27

Chapter 27

Andy

P hysical pain was a distant memory. I couldn’t feel my body. Soon, couldn’t even remember that I’d ever had a body.

But a new kind of pain took its place as I slowly “woke” from nothing into the dark emptiness that was something… just shy of nothing.

This isn’t what I expected death to feel like. The thought floated around, coming to me from…somewhere… only to skitter away a moment later, like a spider fleeing back into the dark nothing that was not nothing, blotted out by the pain that was not pain.

It ached.

I ached.

Something important was missing. The last remnants of it were leeching away into the nothing. And though I had no body, still, it felt like shard sharp shards of ice piercing whatever was left of what I was….

I craved the nothing that I had woken from. There had been no pain when I was there. When I wasn’t conscious. When I didn’t exist.

“No! Witch. My witch, do not crave the nothing.”

A new sort of blackness that contrasted with my current darkness and the nothingness that beckoned me so sweetly…. I didn’t hear, exactly. Since I had no body. No physical me to receive the sound. But the blackness spoke to me, nonetheless.

And I felt drawn to it, somehow. Pulled toward this new darkness, even if it didn’t soothe the ache the way I knew the nothingness would.

“You are mine,” the dark thing said. “Cleave to me and do not heed the siren call of the forever silence.”

Nonsense. And yet, it made perfect sense to me.

I could feel it there. Some sort of thread. A tether tying me to this black thing that should feel chilling, but instead felt warm. Blackness. Limned in a faint glow the color of fresh, hot blood.

Color.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized color didn’t exist anymore. Except for there, hazing the new blackness that called me its own. Something about it felt familiar. It almost felt like a memory. But the fleeting sensation rippled and wavered, battered away by the nothingness around me like sand at the mercy of any angry ocean.

“Mine,” the dark thing commanded through the nothingness between us. And I knew I was. I belonged to it. “You are mine, and I will never let you go.”

Cold spikes of agony. Through a body I did not possess. Through the last lingering essence of what I had been. The nothingness would wash me away too, like the ocean wore away solid stone, turned to sand again. I was a drifting grain of sand. About to be ground down to something even smaller, and then down to nothing at all…

“Witch!” The dark voice commanded, snapping through me. Jolting whatever it was that still made me me . “Remember who you are,” it demanded . “You are stronger than this magic. Stronger than the nothing. Stronger than death itself.” There was a yank down that tether that connected us. A jolt. A reminder. I belonged to this dark entity that gave even death itself a run for its money. I was his. And he was mine.

The sudden realization galvanized me, made my still wildly incoherent thoughts and feelings home in on a single blood-red point in the darkness. Mine. Connected to me through blood and magic. Blood magic. Power. Strength to fight back against the darkness that was trying to consume me.

Mine.

“No!” The dark thing cried out into the nothing, as we fought a violent tug of war over that bright thread of magic . “Not that one,” it insisted. “That one is too faint for you to consume. Find the others.”

Not for me to consume? How dare this thing tell me what was and was not mine to devour. And yet… the red energy seemed sickened somehow… wrong. I was too scattered to feel confusion. But I felt as though I… drifted … for a moment, or for several centuries or ages of man. It was hard to tell, here in the blackness.

There was a hunger in me. Something awakened by the dark thing with its red aura of blood and power, and dominion over death. I was ravenous. Depleted. Starving.

I thrashed in the darkness, every lingering molecule of my unstable being reaching, reaching. Grasping for something to hold onto. Something to consume. Power. Life force.

A presence touched mine, somewhere in my mind, in the shattered layers of my being. An anchor. One custom made for my magic. And it joined with the darkness, directing me, shifting my awareness ever so slightly, until…

There! More threads burst into being around me, dimmed by the darkness, but there, all the same. There within my reach if I only strained…each thread I brushed brought a rush of lifeforce with it and the thread brightened, thickened and strengthened.

Green growing things. Orange-gold fire. The silvery slate gray of an immovable mountain. Gold, radiant and live-giving. Another darkness, this one filled with the cool power of midnight stars and dreams. The turquoise essence of water. The fierce primal sense of mother nature in a sleek, shadow-dappled form. I pulled the elements and magics to me. Hungry for more.

The threads grew into thick cables of energy, bright and unbreakable. Mine. I clung to them in the darkness. And pulled.

“Yes, my witch,” the formless dark thing with the red aura whispered directly into my soul. “Yours for the taking. Claim the power. Drink deep of it and throw off this silly curse.”

A curse? Yes. Somehow the information was there. Like a distant echo of a past life. I had been cursed, hadn’t I?

Anger boiled through me then. I couldn’t recall exactly what had happened, or exactly why I was so enraged, but the emotion was there. It was a dark, bubbling thing inside me that rivaled even the blackness of the nothing that whispered to me of restful forever sleep…

Something had been taken from me. Something had been done to me. And something inside whatever was left of me was not going to tolerate the insult.

“Lovell,” the dark thing whispered, as I started to feel what might be an actual ear. “Remember who you are. Lovell. They all want to possess you. They are all terrified of you. Because deep down, the part of them that is prey recognizes an apex predator when they are near one.”

I shuddered. Only then realizing that I could shudder. I was still hungry. Still drinking from the bright lines of power and lifeforce that grounded me. But I had a body. Heavy and cold. Resting on the cold, hard ground.

I pulled again at the tethers I could sense in my mind’s eye. Lifelines. I drew on the power, on the magic, until I felt strong enough to finally, finally reach my own.

And then I pulled some more.

The hunger. The magical deprivation. The fucking soul hunger. It drove me to soak up every bit of power around me, then reach inside. Deep. Deeper. Into a bottomless well that was mine. The thing I had always been so afraid to claim. I reached down into the shadowy well and wrapped my hand around it, taking hold of my dark inheritance.

My witch. The dark voice inside my head faded as I drew in a sudden, harsh, gasping breath and sat up, my eyes flying open and seven new lifebonds snapping into place without discussion or consent.

I was alive. I was awake.

And I was fucking pissed!

Someone was going to die. They were all going to die.

I would burn the world down.