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“Hah. I see what you did there.” She snapped her fingers. “Clever.”
“I get to make my own puns from time to time.” He smirked.
“That wasn’t really a pun. It was just a joke. Like, a pun would be me saying that your joke really hit my funny bone.”
He rolled his eyes.
“What? It’s not my fault you dug your own grave on that one.”
Putting his hand over his eyes, he let out a sigh. “Please stop.”
“What? Y’know, they say humor can really raise the spirit.” This was just too much fun. “What? I can go all night. I’ll just be dead tired in the morning.”
He groaned. But she saw him hiding his smile. “Are you finished?”
“Yeah.” She paused for a beat. “I mean, I have the skeleton of another pun in my head, but it really isn’t fleshed out yet.”
When he wailed, she burst into laughter and walked up to him, hugging his arm. “All right, all right. I’m done.”
“You delight in tormenting me.”
“Yup.” She kissed his bicep over his coat. “I do.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yup.”
When he shot her a playfully annoyed look, she shot him a playfully triumphant one back. “So, if you can’t raise a zombie to break into the crypt…then what can you do?”
“See, that is where people love to over-simplify. I am not just a necromancer, my dear princess.” He took a step away from her, his tone shifting to that fiendishness once more. “I am a lich.”
And with that, his body simply melted away. All in one moment, like a strange wind had taken him particle by particle, Gideon Raithe was gone in a swirl of dark smoke that curled along the ground like morning fog. It wound beneath the graves, rising in tendrils that came and went like ghostly appendages.
Then, as if rising from a lake of darkness, the figure of the monster from her dreams lifted itself up from the pool of blackened mist. Long, freakishly thin arms tapered off to claw-like fingers that were equally out of proportion, ending in sharp and dangerous points. She knew from firsthand experience precisely how true that was. Around his wrists hovered those silver circlets, orbiting him as if gravity had no effect on them.
Only by a matter of subtle shifts in the darkness that he was comprised of could she make out any kind of detail in him. It looked as though he were wearing a long, dark, ragged robe, barely discernable from the void that lived inside the hood. She knew it didn’t hide anything—she knew there was nothing there if she were to reach inside.
He loomed over her, easily a dozen feet tall, and she shuddered. She knew it was Gideon. She’d figured that out already. In a way, she had always known, she just hadn’t wanted to accept it. Like everything else in my stupid life.
Even though she knew he was just as dangerous now as he had been ten seconds ago, it still felt different to see him like this. To see him with the proverbial mask off and as he truly was. He was terrifying. And just because she knew this monster didn’t want to hurt her, it didn’t mean he still didn’t make her heart beat faster.
It also didn’t mean she couldn’t still find the strength to be a total wiseass about it.
“Ooooh. I get it now. Wraith.” She snapped her fingers. “I get it. I see what you did there.”
The creature’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. If he could talk in this form, she had never heard him do it.
“Come here.” She motioned her hand to him.
He tilted his head just slightly to the side.
“No, really, come here. I have something I want to tell you.” She gestured him closer again.
Clearly wary, he crept closer to her, lowering himself down to her height. She gestured for him to come in so she could whisper to him. When he loomed just a bit closer, she could feel the tendrils of his darkness brush against her. He felt like a cool mist, and there was a smell about him like fresh rain. Or like dirt after a storm. Petrichor, that was what it was called.
When he bent his hood to her ear, she leaned in and whispered. “Shiiiiiire! Baggiiiiiins!”
She felt his dismay more than she heard it. It was like a dog whistle. Something that existed outside her range of hearing. It set her teeth on edge. But she didn’t have long to dwell on it, before suddenly her world tipped upside down.
