CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SEBASTIAN
Her feelings for me weren’t real and mine…were.
The dichotomy of the betrayal, of never being rid of the sorceress who implanted herself inside my head centuries ago and refused to leave brought me to the bitter edge of my sanity.
And so I stood at the furthest reach of the property I had purchased for myself beside a man birthed of stone who fished in a swamp and liked to make meals from the prehistoric lizards the overpopulated the waters.
A final salute of one predator to another.
Why not? Because otherwise I would scream myself senseless into the void until nothing remained. And yet, I couldn’t let go of the tang of defeat, and hated myself all the more for it.
What was one more dose in a daily regime four hundred years in the making?
“You mope loudly, my friend,” Dolion murmured, dangling his line as the dusk turned to full night and light lit a few of the swamp houses buried deep within the bayou’s depths. “Loud enough to damage my chances of a meal.”
“You should eat something real, for a change.” I turned my back to him, and the river. Perhaps one of his pet alligators would take a leg off and leave me to bleed out for an eternity stuffed beneath a log. The ignominious end I deserved.
“And boring,” Dolion commented. “She hasn’t left you yet.”
“Because you are the perfect courtesan,” I snapped, turning back to face him in full. “I love? What the fuck sort of wizardry do you call that?”
My gargoyle snapped his line and leaned his head back, letting one leg dangle in the water, his flesh changing to stone on command.
I envied him the control over his nature, the display more than anything I currently had.
“It is a simple truth. I love, or I don’t exist at all. You know how a stone birth works,” he said, his tone tinged with impatience for the first time. “This is not a conversation we need to have again, my friend.”
Regret swamped me. “You’re right. It’s not.”
Dolion’s attempt to turn entirely to stone on me halted mid-progress. “Did you just apologize to me, Sebastian?”
I offered him the ghost of a smile, a little of my earlier pain easing. “The damage she’s already done to me.”
My smile was returned. “To us both.”
His line jiggled. I shifted back, knowing he wanted no interruption to his nightly fun, but kept an eye on him, lest the evening didn’t quite go the way he expected.
A single bubble marred the surface around his line, and less than a breath later the water exploded around his stone form as the alligator launched itself at the man it saw sitting on the riverbank.
What it didn’t expect was the blade in Dolion’s stone fist to gut it, neck to groin along its pale flesh as it rose from the water, nor the man’s plaintive voice as he curled thick arms around its ridged back, while its lifeforce spilled on the earth where he had sat a moment before.
“A little help? This will feed the servants for a full week.”
“More, if they ration as they should.”
“It’s not like you are short of a penny.”
“Still counting in a coin you were never born to, I see.”
Our banter continued as I helped Dolion drag the beast from the waters, glistening intestines trailing its demise. His deft hands made short work of the meat while I skinned the behemoth in a single pull.
“Do you want me to save you anything?” Dolion eyed the night’s catch with a professional gaze, albeit a hungry one.
My gut clenched on nothingness. “This sort of fare doesn’t appeal to me.”
His yellow eyes rose to meet mine. “Ah. But there is a sort that will, back in the house,” he murmured.
“Perhaps.” I shrugged off the need to sprint back to see her, wrap my body around hers.
Not that she’d crave me the way she should. Or rather that she would, but her feelings weren’t her own. My chest bore down on an empty cavity at the thought of holding her, kissing her sweet lips turned up to mine, the way she let me take from her…all false.
She’d be up soon, if I knew her adjusted nightly routine. Seeking me, but I wouldn’t be there tonight. And she needed to learn that, too. I had…other work. “I need to see her.” I nodded in the direction of the lights beyond the rippling waters, and the remains of the impressive carcass.
Dolion snorted. “As you will. Make sure I get a belt, this time.”
I smiled and wrapped the skin into a bundled, hefting it beneath my arm as I pushed through the under growth away from the house.
Dolion’s voice gave me pause.
“What do I say if she asks after you?”
I mulled it over for a few steps. “Tell her she is her own person.” I turned back, a pathetic excuse on my lips, but Dolion was already gone. My lips turned up. He’d tell her whatever story he saw fit, something sappy and as equally pathetic as I love , no doubt.
She seemed to like that.
Maybe I should try it.
I pushed through the undergrowth that dominated the path until I reached the jetty and placed my bundle into the small boat, and reached for the pole, wary of the bayou’s underwater occupants.
Dolion might like to wrestle with the beasts, but I had other business tonight with a swamp witch who might have the answers I needed about my wife.
I stared into the watery eyes of the wisest creature I’d ever met with the knowledge she could end me in an instant.
Not so much this particular hedge witch who moved to the bayous; rather, her wolf-man companions, loyal to a fault who might like to bathe on rare occasion. Hell, at the rate my senses were assaulted by their lack of personal hygiene, I was ready to keel and be shunted into the next available coffin before sunrise.
“Her future is not set,” the bayou witch purred, her voice rippling the waters around us where we sat on a thick buttress root, a small, hand crafted table made of the same tree between us.
A python slithered from beneath the many shawls twisted around her skeletal frame, but in my not so limited experience, the relocated witch was not as fragile as she appeared.
One of her many talents in shifting her shape, along with the wolfmen who protected her between sunrise and sunset when the other predators came out to play. Another of her serpentine friends coiled around my ankle and nested there.
I ignored it.
“And mine, with her?” I asked, terse.
“Manners, Sebastian. Or have the years eroded those as well as your sense of survival?” She stared at me through brittle silver lashes, shuffling her tarot cards.
One drifted from the middle of the deck to the jetty planks beneath my feet, face down. I reach for it. “Apparently not,” I murmured.
Her sandaled foot slapped my fingers away, and the snake nestling around my ankle collected the thing for her like a trained pup.
“ Never touch the cards,” she hissed, her voice echoing weirdly as I withdrew my hand.
“My apologies.” I watched from my retreated place, pretending to ignore the hairy behemoth at my back and wishing I hadn’t come to this deity forsaken place.
Or maybe there were too many deities residing within these tepid waters lapping at the swamp witch’s doorstep, crowding mortals away.
My mortal .
The memory of Gisella in my arms, her pale throat exposed as she screamed for me last night, rose unbidden. My breeches tightened, and the wolfman behind me growled his disgust at my arousal for a woman who was safely miles away.
Thank a god who no longer acknowledges me.
A battle my soul, the remaining fragment I clutched to, childlike in my desperation for forgiveness of a sin that wasn’t mine to beg penance of in the first place, I continued daily with no answer.
Until Gella arrived, and my chance at a clean slate offered me a sliver of hope for the first time in half a millennium.
Until the bayou witch flipped the card over and smiled.
“The five of cups,” she whispered, drawing out the last sounds to wrap around us, weaving her magic. I flicked my chin, but her voice locked me in place as I listened beyond what she said and felt. “Loss. Regret. So much taken from you, Sebastian. And it will flow over your cup into hers.” Her eyes snapped back to mine as she swiveled the card to face me, upside down. “But the card is reversed. Luck may be with you both. What you see as irreparable, she views as a hurdle to drag you across. Oh, it will hurt. Ache and tear. And you will forgive her everything she does. Almost everything,” she added, flicking the card on the table.
I blinked, and the card depicting the five cups disappeared beneath her shawls, along with her scaly friend.
“Fascinating,” I murmured, shaking my shoulder free of the clawed paw that gripped me, still featuring an opposable thumb.
I flicked the monster’s digit and he backed off, shaking his hand, the fur retreating into his skin.
Who harbors the devil within here?
“It’s almost daylight, nightwalker,” the swamp witch muttered. “Best be back to your cave before death takes you.”
“Thank you.” I flicked an emerald from my family’s collection onto the table as payment for her tortures. “I’ll be back.”
Not that I wanted to return to her, but this place called to me, to us all, and she damn well knew it. None of us could stay away from her readings, desperate to know our pasts wouldn’t collide and destroy the futures of those we loved.
Or that we would earn love in some future version of our twisted selves.
As I climbed aboard the small punt and made my way back through the convoluted river system to where Dolion waited, sans river monster, the skin draped over his shoulders like a cloak, his words echoed through my mind.
I love.
A simple but powerful statement, and a fool’s errand.
But we all wore that facade here.