“Did you open it?” I pressed.
He frowned. “Well, no. There’s a lock on it. The seller said they didn’t have the key. And I don’t want to damage it. Of course, before I sell it, I’ll hire an expert to carefully pick the lock.”
“You held it without the cloth over it?”
He blew out a breath and leaned forward. “I cannot believe you are so dense. Here.” He lifted the book out of the cloth, bare fingers on the cover, no cloth shielding him, although there was a blur of power, a swift glow that lit beneath his fingers. “Do you believe me now? I touched it, I am touching it. I don’t know why you’re so worried about that. It’s magic, not poison. Here.”
He tossed the book at me. The act startled me, and I reacted without thinking. I caught the book in one hand.
Magic hit me like a tsunami wave. I drowned in it, unbreathing, the underwater sensation of weightlessness while being dragged beneath the ever-growing pressure, a punishing agony. It wasn’t a lightning strike of power hitting me like last time.
It was consumption.
And I was the meal.
“Now do you believe me?” Mad Mat asked, his voice coming from over my head, under my feet, everywhere around me, and inside my mind. “Play me the fool, Brogan Gauge, but I see what you are. Unfortunately for you, you are extremelyuseful.
“In the right circumstance, you are the key to what I desire.”
He stood, or maybe had already been standing, but now he was taller, larger, filling the room and staring down at me from somewhere far above the glistening waterline.
“But not like this. No, you can’t be my key like this. That’s what I have Lula for. You, Brogan, only become useful to me one way.” He drew a weapon from behind his back. Something magic, something sharp.
“The only way you’re useful is dead.” He chanted three words and struck.
The weapon plunged through the air, across a great distance, piercing through the deep, deep water. It should be slow. The water should dull the strike, but the weapon plunged fast and true.
Pain shattered my chest, stabbed my heart, burning hot, then freezing cold.
This was what it felt like to be harpooned.
My heart beat too fast, panicked, and then it slowed.
The world went soft. My vision closed in. Gently, the darkness fell.
I inhaled, and that was soft too, velvet filling me, smothering, comforting.
I remembered Lula, her smile, her eyes, her laughter, her sorrow. I wanted to tell her one more time that I loved her, but couldn’t sort out the words.
I’m sorry…
And then I was gone.
The fog was rose-colored.I hadn’t expected that. Fog, yes. But that blush, like a sunrise, like a sunset, draped over tropical water.
It glittered. That was the best word. It glittered.
I wanted it. Wanted to feel that soft sunlight.
I walked toward it.
“This,” a low melodious male voice said, “is an interesting choice.”
I was alone. I had to be alone. Just me and the sunset. The sunrise. An end and beginning together.
“A man such as you…” the voice went on, and maybe it wasn’t melodious. Maybe it was dry, observant, but with something beneath all that, a keen sense of curiosity lending it texture. “…has the very rare chance to make other, interesting choices.”
I stopped. The light hadn’t drawn any closer, and I was sure I’d been walking for…time. For something that felt like time, but the measurements of it slipped, dream-like, away from me.
