Page 28 of The Deathless One (The Gravesinger #1)

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 dark mass 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?”

“Jessamine, we don’t have time for these theoreticals.”

“I just want to know the answer.”

“I think it’s much more likely that I’m slowly regaining my form as I remember what I used to be,” he replied offhandedly. “The longer I spend time in this realm, the more I remember myself.”

“There’s a statue of you in the parlor.”

“A statue that was a version of me, not the same one that will eventually be resurrected. I never know who I will be or what I will look like.” He sounded cross as he stopped on the other side of the island and slammed his hands down onto the surface.

She jumped at the loud bang, and even he seemed to look down at his hands in surprise. A thick clay vase toppled over, fell off the table, and rolled onto the floor. “How did you do that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head before looking back at her. “You are trying to distract me.”

“I’m the one who summoned you!”

Senseless, arrogant god. She’d had a reason for summoning him, and now she had no idea why she’d done it.

Her mind had been so scattered today as she tried to get all the pieces together to move forward.

She had clothing, she could figure out what to do with herself now.

And he was right. They had to find Benji and force him to tell them who’d convinced him to betray her family, who was behind the plot to seize the castle.

“I need to learn more magic before I feel comfortable finding Benji,” she finally said. “I called you here because I found another spell book that I think might be useful in our research. It said that sometimes a gravesinger’s magic can be blocked, and if you can figure out where the block—”

“Why are you preventing us from going to this boy? Are you afraid of what we might find?”

A spike of anxiety coiled through her chest. “No.”

“I can see that in both your magic and in this, you are trying to slow down the process. Why is that, princess?”

“I won’t run blind into a situation that feels a bit like you’re manipulating me.

I know nothing about you, only that at this moment, you can only touch me and Sybil.

” She took a deep breath. “And the table, it seems. Everything is so far out of my realm of understanding, I don’t want to make the wrong choice. ”

He stared at her, and she stared at him, and she wondered just how wrong she was to hold him back.

He seemed so confident in everything he did.

She wished she had an ounce of that confidence.

Especially when he cocked his head to the side and she swore she could feel his eyes on her like a physical touch.

Curling her fingers in the hem of her cream-colored skirt, she told herself not to try to decipher if he was looking at what she wore.

It wasn’t one of the skirts they had bought.

Mostly she’d gotten pants in that store.

But this was one of Sybil’s, and it was rather pretty, even if there were a few colorful patches over her knees and one large one over the thigh where the fabric had torn.

The Deathless One rounded the island, turned her to face him, and took a seat on the stool right in front of her.

He sat with his knees on either side of hers, trapping her legs between his and making it so she couldn’t look anywhere but at him.

Suddenly, he was everywhere. The smell of him filled her nose with the sharp shock of mint and citrus as her gaze filled with black.

But it wasn’t entirely darkness anymore, was it?

She could see that his pants were made of the finest cotton she’d ever seen.

They weren’t leather as she’d imagined. They looked comfortable, even with the fine starched lines in them.

If she squinted her eyes and tried to see through him, she swore she could also see the toe of a leather boot.

“Jessamine.”

His sharp tone didn’t make her stop looking at him.

It was easier to focus on his shape than it was to focus on the tumultuous thoughts rumbling around in her head.

Like, she should touch him. She could drag her finger down the pants to see if they felt real.

No, she would just look at him instead. At the way his thighs bunched when he leaned forward and how there was the faint outline of a hand resting on his right leg.

“Nightmare.” He said the word so softly it made her squeeze her eyes shut. “Benji is the key to everything.”

“He’s the key to nothing. All he did was hold the gate open. What makes you think he knows more than a when and where?”

“Intuition. And he has something of mine that I need you to take back.”

“He has something of yours?”

At his silence, fear bloomed.

His honeyed words were so pretty, and she wanted to believe he was here to help her. But he was the Deathless One, a god with no love or ability to think about anyone other than himself. He was a dangerous creature who made deals with witches and consumed them in return.

So she whispered behind the safety of her closed eyes. “I’m afraid you’re trying to control me.”

“I’m trying to save you.”

Two warm hands landed on her knees. She could feel the heat of them through the fabric of her skirt, and quickly realized one of the patches wasn’t stitched closed.

Once again, she could feel his calloused fingertips against her skin.

But this time, she swore the scars felt like symbols etched into the pads when he touched her.

The heavy weight of his grip was more comforting than any words he could have said. He squeezed her knees, and he and Jessamine both let out matching gasps. She could feel him. Not just the sensation of him, or the strange warmth when he’d undone her laces in the shop.

He was really here. Holding on to her like she was a lifeline, and he didn’t know how to let go.

“I shouldn’t—” His guttural words cut off as she interrupted him.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine, I shouldn’t—”

“Just… Stay still. For a moment.” Eyes shut, she tried to memorize the feeling of him.

His hands were broad and strong, though swollen.

She could feel how painful they must be for him.

There was a give to them that skin shouldn’t have, especially not fingers.

And as he shifted his grip, she felt the creak of his joints.

But even through all that, there was a sense of strength in his touch.

She knew without a doubt that these hands would have been beautiful if he had not sacrificed so much for power.

His fingers were long. His palms were not necessarily broad, but graceful. In another world, these would have been the hands of a pianist, or an artist. A man who had hands that made people look at them and think of devilish things.

“If I keep my eyes shut, you feel almost real,” she whispered. “Can you feel me, too?”

“I can.” Though he admitted it, he sounded like he was in pain.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why can I feel you like this? I’m not… I don’t worship you. Not like Sybil. I’ve seen her leaving offerings at your altar, grisly dead things that she finds out in the sand. I don’t do that.”

Swallowing hard, she waited to understand. She knew perhaps some of it was because of what he claimed she was. A gravesinger. A witch who had no spell book, because apparently none of them wrote down how they did things.

Oral tradition, Sybil had said. Gravesingers weren’t allowed to keep anything in any kind of tome or grimoire. They were supposed to tell others how to summon the Deathless One, and therein lay a large problem. But the Deathless One knew the spell required to resurrect himself.

“Nightmare,” he rasped. “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be so surprised, now would I? Gravesingers are a direct line to their patron, but I have never stayed dead for this long.”

Jessamine was afraid to open her eyes. Because what if she did and he disappeared? What if she opened her eyes and realized that she had imagined all this? She wasn’t even sure what that would mean if she suddenly woke up on her pile of rags and realized her mind had conjured this entire thing.

“I just don’t understand why you can touch me.”

“Neither do I.” She heard the sound of a click, almost as though he’d swallowed a little too hard. “Do you want me to stop?”

She should. The idea of this villainous god touching her should make her want to sprint out of the room. But instead, all she could focus on was that scarred thumb gently moving against the inside of her knee. The delicate skin there felt like it was on fire.

And a wayward thought whispered through her mind that she wanted him to slide his hands higher. To know what it felt like for those calluses to touch even softer, slicker skin.

“No,” she whispered. “And that frightens me.”

His hands disappeared, and the stool he sat upon suddenly fell and slammed into the floor. Flinching, she opened her eyes to see him standing so far on the other side of the room she almost didn’t notice he was there.

All the details of his body had disappeared again. He was an undulating mass of dark shadows that twisted and warped the more she looked at him. Almost as though he’d lost all control over his body—or perhaps he didn’t want her to see him.

Gripping the bottom of her stool, she stayed right where she was. She couldn’t take the words back, nor did she want to. Jessamine had spent her entire life simpering and pretending to be something that she wasn’t.

She knew how to flirt. She knew how to quirk her eyebrow and have a man on his knees before her.

It was the sign of a good princess if she could manipulate men.

Her mother had trained her to capture their attention.

Plenty of visiting politicians and neighboring countries thought it was luck to get a few moments with a royal princess, and she would perform dutifully.

But this was the first time she’d said something like this and really meant it.

She hadn’t minded the feeling of his hands on her knees.

Every time he touched her, it felt like some wild and wicked thing unfurled its wings inside her body.

It stretched underneath her skin, awakening for the very first time in her life, and she was deathly afraid to admit she liked it.

Eyeing him, she wondered why that answer created such a visceral response in him. And she feared it was perhaps not a good thing.

“Why did you come here to talk about Benji?” she asked.

His voice was a low rumble of emotion as he responded. “I found the boy myself. He’s staying in a place called the Owl’s Nest. I don’t know where it is in the Factory District, but I suspect it’s on the outskirts, considering how shabby it was.”

“Thank you for finding him.”

“For all that you think I’m untrustworthy, I am bound to see you back on your throne, Jessamine.” His shape warped, melting into the shadows as they usually did when he was about to disappear, but then she saw him hesitate.

His shadows lingered in the room. And she didn’t think that was because he wanted to watch what she did next.

“Do you have something else to say?”

“He has a book in his possession that is very important to me. When we go to see him, we need to take it back.”

A book? Frowning, she hopped off the stool and took a step closer to him. “A spell book?”

“Something much worse than that.”

“You won’t give me a clearer answer, will you?”

“No.” The shadows drifted apart a little again before sticking back together. “You’ll know it when you see it, nightmare. And then I need you to take it back for me.”

Frustrated, she tossed her hands in the air and spat, “You won’t give me a reason why?”

“Because I said so.” The growled words were sharper than before, all edged in anger and madness. “I may be your patron, Jessamine Harmsworth, but you so easily forget that you do not control me.”

“You’re the one who insists I summon you—or do you no longer want that?”

A cry of rage blasted toward her like a swarm of bats. She raised her arms to protect herself from his anger, only to feel the shadows pass over her like a cool wind as he disappeared.

It took her a long time to drop her arms. Even longer to take a step on shaking knees that threatened to send her tumbling onto the floor. But she managed to stagger back to the island and sink down onto the stool again.

“The Owl’s Nest,” she muttered, before glancing down at her skirt.

There were two charcoal handprints there. Black stains through the very fabric, and she should have been frightened at the sight of them. She should have quaked with the fear that there were lingering marks every time he touched her, but instead…

That wicked thing inside her rejoiced. She enjoyed wearing his mark. She enjoyed knowing where he had touched her and that she had felt him.

But oh, she was afraid of the thing inside her. Because now that it had awakened, she wouldn’t easily cajole it back to sleep.