Page 54 of The Deathless One (The Gravesinger #1)
She was so stupid. Or maybe she wasn’t stupid, just too trusting.
Jessamine had known Callum Quen was a wicked man.
She could feel it the moment he stepped out of that building.
Only lies fell from his tongue, and that meant she could expect everything he said would continue to be lies.
But she had a hard time connecting this person with the man she knew.
Every time he started talking, all she could think about were her memories.
She had been afraid of dogs when she was little.
One of the hunting hounds had bitten her arm when she was just three years old, and after that she hadn’t been able to even walk by the kennels.
All she could think about were those sharp, wicked teeth.
The aching fear had stuck with her for years until Callum learned she was afraid of dogs, and he’d brought her to the kennels every day.
Holding her hand and never pushing her too far.
Just so that she learned not all dogs would bite.
But this dog? The one who had put her in a prison below the home where he had amassed an army? She knew he would bite.
She had no way of knowing how many days had passed since they’d tossed her in this room.
All she knew was that they weren’t very gentle with her.
She’d been thrown bodily into the wooden crates behind her, nearly cracking a rib and spreading bruises up and down her back.
Survive death twice, and apparently no one sees any reason to be gentle.
They brought her food and water whenever they thought of it, but she was so hungry, she suspected it wasn’t very often.
There wasn’t much to do in this pit other than sort through the crates behind her.
Empty crates mostly, though some of them contained clothing, and there was one filled with worn boots.
A single window at least eight feet above her head cast dim light into the room, though it was barred. She guessed the window opened to the street, because every now and then a spray of water would erupt into the room. Either the street, or perhaps the sewers. She didn’t know what was worse.
Sitting on a crate, she tried her best to think of some way out. There had to be a way.
But it didn’t escape her notice that every time she fell asleep, Elric wasn’t there. She couldn’t see him, hear him, nothing. Every night she searched for him in that realm between places, and every morning she woke without finding him.
Callum had done something. She just didn’t know what.
The door creaked open, the sound somehow strangely loud after sitting for hours on end in silence. Jessamine didn’t even stand as the wide bulk of a man joined her in the room.
“I’m so sorry, Jessa. I shouldn’t have kept a princess waiting this long, but I’m afraid your god friend is not exactly easy to talk to.” Callum turned, his arms laden with a tray of food. “I thought you’d like a real meal.”
She said nothing. Instead, she glared as he pulled one of the crates between them like a table and then another crate for him to sit on across from her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he chided. “You know why you’re here.”
“I do? Then please, enlighten me. Because it seems like you’re only keeping me alive because you haven’t yet figured out how to get the Deathless One to crack. I’m your last chance at him, aren’t I?”
He took his time setting the makeshift table in front of her, making sure that every item was arranged perfectly.
There was bread, cheese, grapes, even a few treats that she was surprised he could get here.
Like the strawberry jam they’d always had in the castle, her favorite for every toasted slice of bread she had in the morning.
This had always been his tactic with her. He knew that Jessamine hated silence, particularly when she felt like she was in the wrong.
He made her sit in that discomfort, knowing that eventually she would break. How could she not? Just having him in the room with her was oppressive. Callum Quen filled a room with his energy. It was why no one had ever been able to stand up to his interrogations.
And probably the reason he’d been able to command a complete underground society of people who were supposed to be her subjects. There was so much she did not know, but living on the streets of the kingdom was teaching her far more than any of her tutors ever had.
Finally he sighed, cracked his knuckles against the edge of the table, and answered her. “This is just business, Jessamine. That’s all.”
“Business? My life. My mother’s life. Both of those were just business to you?”
“Not… entirely.” She saw a shadow of the man she knew just then. Like he was uncomfortable with what he’d said before—perhaps there was a shred of humanity still left in him. “Not in the beginning, at least.”
“You want me to believe that? No man could have treated us like we were his family and then murdered us in cold blood. It’s not right, and it’s not true.
” She crossed her arms over her chest, leaning back against the crates behind her as though this wasn’t her prison. “Is your name even Callum Quen?”
“I was born Callum Quen, although these days I’m mostly known as the Butcher of Grimoire Rise.”
She refused to feel any pity at the self-hatred she heard in those words. “How long have you been the Butcher?”
“For a very long time.” He huffed out an angry breath.
“Before I met your mother, I lived here, and I spent every hour of every day protecting myself. Eventually, that grew into a family of sorts, people who knew I would do anything to keep them safe. It didn’t start out as what it is now, but that was built out of necessity. ”
“So you ended up in the castle serving my mother? How?”
“She had something I wanted.” He finally straightened, looking more like the vagabond who had thrown her into this room. “And now I think you have it.”
As if she was going to believe that for a second. She had nothing other than a connection to the Deathless One, and her mother had certainly not had that. “The only thing I had, you already took from me. Where is my god, Callum?”
“You tell me where the book is and I will tell you where he is.”
What book? She didn’t have a book. She only had the ones that Sybil gave her and…
The one she’d taken from Benji.
The one that was written about the Deathless One himself. Even though it had been empty when she looked into it, there was only one book he could be speaking about. Her backpack. They must have it, or someone in service to Callum did. And if they had it, then soon enough, so would Callum.
Schooling her expression into a serene mask, she tried her best to hide her thoughts.
“I don’t know what you mean. I have nothing from the castle or from my mother.
All I have is what I wore on my wedding day.
The dress is ruined. And if you mean the ring, I pawned it for safe passage through the sewers, where I washed up after my husband slit my throat. ”
She had hoped the details of her survival would be enough to distract him. But nothing would lure him from his purpose.
Callum leaned forward, the food and drink forgotten in front of him. “Where is the book, Jessamine?”
She swallowed. “I don’t know what book you’re talking about.”
“Have you no loyalty left to me? Have you forgotten all our years in the sun?” He tilted his head to the side, an almost fanatic expression on his face. “I taught you how to ride. Tucked you in at night. There are a hundred gifts I gave you. I was the father you never had. You owe me.”
“If you feel as though you are owed for your kindness, then it is not an act of kindness.” Her mother used to say that. She saw when he recognized the words, too, because he flinched as though she’d shot him.
“Jessa, I am running out of time.”
“You look fine to me.”
“I am the Butcher of Grimoire Rise. This entire district runs under my command. If you lose me, then you lose control over this district. We could still be a team, you and I.”
It was a mad bid for her compliance, and he knew it. She knew it.
Jessamine leaned in as well, both of them twin bookends trying to crush the crate between them. “I thought this district was flooded with the infected. That’s what all the rumors say, because my husband was supposed to turn this entire kingdom into a graveyard.”
His throat worked in a swallow, and she knew then that she had him. He didn’t want to tell her whatever deal he had made. He didn’t want her to know the truth at all.
But then he shifted to sit up straight and pull his shirt over his head. That perfectly pressed fabric revealed bandages beneath. Bandages that were seeping yellow with infection.
She said nothing as he unraveled the cotton that bound nearly his entire torso. And every pass around his body revealed more and more broken pustules. Bleeding, weeping, dripping yellow fluid down his stomach the moment he released the pressure on them.
She tried very hard not to react. In this moment, he deserved nothing less than stoic apathy. But this was the man who had raised her, after all.
“You’re infected?” she asked, her voice wobbling only a little.
“I am.”
“How long?”
He ground his teeth. “Four months.”
“Impossible. People lose themselves in days.”
“Not if they have this.” He reached into his pocket and slammed a piece of paper down onto the crate. She stared down at it, recognizing the same unreadable language that had disappeared in the black-bound grimoire.
The ragged edges suggested only one thing. “You tore this out of the book?”
“So you have seen it.”
“I only know there are spell books we should not touch, and that is one of them. It is meant to be whole and in one piece.”
“I know,” he snarled. “I read the whole thing. Front to back. Spells to bring back the dead. Spells for immortality. And the spell to bind a god. But I couldn’t take the book in that moment.
Your mother would have immediately found out, so I thought to just steal a spell or two.
The moment I ripped out that page, the whole thing went blank.
It was just luck that the spell for stasis was on the back side, but I should have torn out more.
It slowed the progression of this infection, but it didn’t cure me.
A damn shame, since I wasn’t infected at the time I ripped out the page.
They were useful spells, I’ll tell you that.
But they are not the spells I need. There is a cure in that book, and I will stop at nothing to get it. ”
“If there’s a cure in the book, why wouldn’t you use it to cure everyone?”
His expression twisted, growing uglier by the moment. “After I have cured myself, I intend to. For the right price.”
“That’s a monstrous thing to say. If the infected can be cured, they should be cured.”
“And they will be, if they pay.” He stood, picking up his shirt but leaving it off.
“Truthfully, I don’t give a shit about money, Jessamine.
If it didn’t make our world turn, I would have renounced it long ago.
But money keeps this place going, and I need this place to stay the way it is.
I haven’t given up my entire life to see this fall apart. ”
“You bartered my mother’s and my life for this?” The question was small and aching as she let it fly free. “To save yourself?”
As he paused in front of the door, she could see the man he used to be.
The hesitance in his step, the way his right brow twitched with tension, and how he stuffed his hands into his pockets.
He looked like his world had ended. Not from her words, but long ago.
Months ago, when her mother had died in front of him.
“This isn’t easy for me, Jessa,” he replied quietly. “Making a choice like this ages a man. And I know there aren’t many years left. Perhaps it makes me selfish that I’m not willing to sacrifice those few remaining years for you or for her.”
She didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t the reasoning she expected. She wanted him to be a real villain. To tell her that he’d been plotting for years against her family, and that he’d never truly loved them.
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“How long did you know Mother had that book? And how did you know there was magic in it?”
He winced. “Oh, Jessa, you don’t want to know the answer to that.”
“You said that was why you were in the castle. Why didn’t you just take it and go?”
“Because of her.” He wasn’t looking at Jessamine, but off into the distance, like he could see her mother’s spirit standing somewhere close by.
“She was a woman to be reckoned with, and the mission got blurry. I kept making excuses not to leave. It was better for me to be in the castle and have a royal in my back pocket, I told myself. I could still run things here through my second-in-command, while still being in the castle. And then there was you. A little girl with dark hair and eyes like a banshee. You both wriggled your way into my soul, and it was so hard to leave you.”
“Why didn’t you ask her to help?”
“Your mother hated witches more than the average person, and with good reason. She’d lost a lot of loved ones to spells and curses gone awry. That book was meant to be locked up for good. She’d have burnt it if she knew what I was there for.”
Oh, how it hurt to hear those words. Jessamine hadn’t known any of this.
She didn’t want to know that he had loved them.
It made all of this so much worse, somehow, because it meant that he had thought about this, planned it, and chosen to let them go when she had hoped for just a few moments that maybe he hadn’t wanted to.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she finally said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “Doing all that doesn’t make you selfish.”
She waited until he looked back at her. Until she could see the flicker of some hope in those eyes, like he thought it was possible for them to continue as they once were.
“It makes you a coward. And I never thought you to be one until this moment.”
The muscles in his jaw jumped before he gave her a curt nod. “I’m sorry to make you pay for my fear, Jessa. But I won’t give up my life. Not even for you.”
He left the room empty and cold. She wanted to scream and rage and fling things at the wall, but that was not who she was.
Instead, she sat on the crate in the frigid room as the night fell once more, with nothing but her heartbreak to keep her company.