Page 175 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 28

The Failed Ritual

Chapter 645: In which our heroine discovers that even death can’t go according to plan.

Death is familiar.

What I find here is not.

The void between dying and waking—I know this place. I’ve passed through it, brief as a held breath, blank as dreamless sleep. The magic pulls me back before I can get comfortable. Before I can think. Before I can remember why I keep doing this.

Usually.

This time I chose to stay. I meant it. Walked straight into that shadow blade with my eyes open and my heart full of something terrifying and my last thought about a cat who’d be angry I missed dinner.

This time should be the end.

But the void isn’t empty.

He’s here.

The Hungering King stands in the darkness like a wound the universe forgot to close. He looks younger here. But his eyes are still wrong. Too deep. Too old. The void where something used to live.

And he’s smiling.

“You did it.” His voice is soft. Patient. The voice of someone who’s been waiting eleven centuries and finally, finally, finally got what he wanted. “I knew you would.”

I don’t have a body here. I’m not sure what I am—thought, maybe, or echo. But my ribs ache anyway. Ghost of a feeling. Memory of fear.

“Didn’t have much choice,” I say. “The shadow blade was very persuasive.”

“You gave me willing sacrifice.” He steps closer, and the darkness parts around him like water. “Blood of my beloved’s blood. Fueled by love.”

“Obviously.”

“The ritual is working. I can feel it. Mei-Ling is—”

He stops.

His expression shifts. Confusion first, pulling his brows together. Then something else. Something that looks almost like fear.

“No.” His voice drops. Fractures. “No, that’s not—why is it—”

I feel it too now.

The pull.

Familiar. Inexorable. The magic that’s dragged me back six hundred and forty-five times, reaching for me like a hand through dark water.

But I chose to stay dead. I meant it.

How is this—

“The ritual is rejecting you.”

I stare at him. “Rejecting me?”

“Something is—” He reaches for me, and I feel it—cold, so cold, the absence of warmth where his fingers should be. He’s trying to hold me here. Trying to keep me in death long enough to complete whatever ancient, terrible magic he’s been building for eleven centuries.