Page 60 of The Deathless One (The Gravesinger #1)
The last words of the spell dropped, and he felt the hardening in his body, the sudden power that flowed through him far greater than ever before.
He lifted a hand, watching as the black smoke of his form slowly revealed skin underneath.
Warm skin. Skin that flexed and moved and felt .
He should be happy. Revel in the glorious sensation of being alive once more.
And yet, all he could feel was a single tear that slid down his cheek. Nearly boiling, it seared a trail to his jaw, where he knew he would wear the scar for the rest of his existence.
Callum stared at him, his eyes wide with a hunger for power. “Kill the witch,” he ground out. “Just to make sure there’s no more of your coven left.”
He waited to feel the insistence of the binding spell, one that would force him to do this man’s bidding. But it did not come. He stood there, in complete and utter defiance of an order, and he knew that he need not do what this man said.
Slowly, he looked down at the sheet covering Jessamine’s body. There, just barely, was the smallest hint of a rattling breath as his warrior of a woman struggled to stay alive long enough to give them a chance.
To give him a chance.
He leaned down, gently pulling the fabric from her face so he could look into those beloved dark eyes that had freed him from centuries of torment long before she resurrected him.
“Hello, my ruthless woman,” he murmured. “If you’ve still got some fight left in you, open your eyes.”
“What is happening?” Callum spluttered, the athame clenched in his hand like that would do anything to protect him. “I summoned you, Deathless One. I order you to kill that woman. Your power is mine to control!”
Jessamine slowly blinked first one eye, then the other open, clearly struggling to do even that. Perhaps she barely clung to the thread of life that grounded her here. But she let him know that she wasn’t done yet.
And then, just the barest of whispers. He heard the words no one else could speak. The words that only a gravesinger knew in her hour of need, a desire that boiled through hundreds of years. Witchcraft at its very essence, the core of who she was.
Jessamine Harmsworth drew upon the history of her people and her kind. She whispered with a hundred voices, a hundred witches who had summoned him before.
“Deathless One, I summon you.”
A feral grin spread across his face. “Then as above, so below.” He pressed his hand to his chest, drawing out a ball of shadowy power that clung to his fingers. And with the last words of his spell, he pressed life back into her. “As within me, so without.”
His magic lanced through her, powering into her veins and rippling through all her wounds. He could feel it sealing the jagged edges of the bleeding tissue over her heart. The magic pieced her together slowly but surely, giving him just enough time to look up and glare at Callum.
The man took a step back, but then stiffened his spine. “You are mine, Deathless One. The spell is complete. I have resurrected you.”
With the slightest of movements, Elric hopped up onto the altar and crouched above Jessamine’s body like a bird of prey. “No, you didn’t, Callum Quen. She did.”
His body rippled and surged with power. Lunging forward, he wrapped his hands around the other man’s neck and squeezed.
Shadows peeled out of Callum’s eyes, yanked from his mouth, memories of all the horrible deeds he’d ever done.
For a moment, Elric mused, it looked like he’d ripped Callum’s shadow from him, suspending it just so Callum could see the ugliness inside himself before he slammed it back into his body.
“I promised you death,” Elric growled, magic ripping from his body in giant tendrils that snapped out behind him.
Gurgling sounds erupted through the room as each henchman fell to their knees, choking on shadows that crawled into their mouths and wrapped around their tongues.
“But then you had to try to kill her. Don’t you know?
I’m the only one who gets to decide when she dies… and when she lives.”
Elric tossed Callum so hard into the wall that the studs cracked around him. Plaster and splinters of wood rained down on his head, though he doubted the man noticed over the pain in his shattered ribs. Elric would do more than knock the breath out of his lungs.
Looming forward, he let all that rage flow through his body, warping his form into something larger, bigger than he’d ever been before, and made entirely of slick, oily shadows.
“I told you I was going to peel you out of that skin. But first I want to hear you scream. I don’t want to hear you speak, though.
So I will take your tongue. Then I will flay your throat open so I can watch you gulp in terror every time I come near you.
I will pull your ribs open, one by one, forcing the bone to bend but never break, so you know the pain that I felt the moment you tried to kill her. ”
He was a creative god. Callum Quen would know pain unlike any being alive had ever felt before.
Until a soft hand touched his back, and all his shadows snapped back into his form.
The men behind Elric wheezed, falling onto their hands and knees as they sucked in whatever air they could get.
But he didn’t care what they were doing, or what they would do after.
All he cared about was the tiny woman standing next to him, naked and impossibly powerful.
An avenging goddess stood beside him. And who was he not to kneel at her feet?
“I don’t want him dead,” she said, her voice ringing out in the room. “I want his memories. I want to know everything he knows about what is happening to my kingdom and where we go from here.”
“He deserves to die,” Elric replied. And for a moment, he was furious that she would ask this of him. This man had touched her. He’d made her bleed.
Elric would make him suffer for that.
But then her hand slid up and down his back, and everything eased in his mind again.
She was well. She was alive. He could see it in the long lines of her body, the strength in her belly, which flexed as she moved, and the shimmering, writhing scars just underneath her ribs, higher over her breast and heart, and again around her throat.
Three deaths.
A trinity of pain that had brought her to this moment.
He took one step back from her, then another, before slowly sinking to his knees. “What do you wish of me, witch?”
Eyes glimmering with retribution, she turned her attention to the man still stuck halfway through the wall.
“Callum Quen, you told me you had become a coward because of your fear. I want all your memories that are connected to that emotion. Each and every one. I will leave you with whatever else remains.”
Though still wheezing, the man’s eyes widened. “That will leave me with nothing.”
“Then you will be a simpleton walking the streets begging for food. Everyone will remember who you once were. The Butcher of Grimoire Rise. A man who rose so high that for a brief moment he touched the sun, only to melt and fall to earth. They will know who you are now. A man who failed, and who now suffers in his failure.” She swallowed, her hand rising to press against the wriggling scar over her heart.
“I am merciful, because you will remember all that you did. To everyone else you will be nothing more than a child in the body of an old man, a doddering fool whom they pity. But you will know who you really are.”
Elric had thought his torture creative, but he had never thought she would bid him to do this. Callum Quen was a man who lived with pride that he had built an empire beneath himself out of a city made of dust and bones. Now, she would take that all away and leave him with nothing.
“I will build it again,” Callum wheezed. “I did it once. I will do it again.”
She walked up to him and knelt, her dark hair tangling around her form and giving her the look of some feral goddess who had selected her chosen prey. “What did you say to me? You’ve already run out of time, Butcher. You are old, and your days are numbered.”
His face turned white, blanching with fear and loathing even as Elric loomed over her shoulder. He cursed them both, hissing and spitting out obscenities that eventually faded as Elric passed his hand over Callum’s face.
He pulled the memories out of the older man, pushing them toward Jessamine so she could breathe them in as she had before.
Her ribs expanded, tiny hollows in between the thin bones rippling with movement as she sucked them inside herself.
Stealing memories and power from the man who had helped end her life.
She tasted his fear on her tongue, the acrid flavor burning with the memory of when he’d been infected.
She walked with him as he hid his wound, knowing that his time was short.
The wonderful flare of hope when he knew there was a chance to live, and the connection with Leon, who had somehow found out about his infection.
Tears gathered in her eyes along with Callum’s despair at knowing he only had the one choice: he had to betray those he loved.
But through all of it, she saw a weak man. A man willing to hurt others so he didn’t have to suffer, and righteous fury heated her blood. This was right. It was his time to end.
And then the Butcher of Grimoire Rise was no more. Instead, he slumped against the wall, an innocent smile on his face.
“?’Allo?” he asked, that grin turning slightly dopey. “Who we got ’ere, then?”
She stood and turned away from him, the long tail of her hair swishing below her spine as she strode toward Sybil and held out a hand for the woman to take. “Come, my sister. We’re leaving this place.”
“And the others?” Elric asked, practically vibrating with his need for vengeance. “Those who helped him?”
Dark, haunted eyes turned to look at him. The deep purple bruises around those black eyes seemed to deepen. “Kill them all.”