“You should also kiss me on the lips.”
She takes my mouth so fast I’m unsure if it was even related to me asking. “Come back to me when you want more.”
I nod, and she lets me down.
As she drives away, I notice enough desperate glances—like she’s hoping I’ll decide to go with her anyway—that it hurts.
But this is what’s good for us.
I turn away from her and face the stars. “Great Ring, I heard from you before. I can’t tell how you told me, but I know it had to be you. You gave me the secret to your gift. Please. I’m willing to pay the price this time. Show me how.”
My heart crawls, my skin sputters cold, and my eyes cling onto a road sign. Surgical hospital, five minutes away.
The Ring’s price is life, but the people entering here appear so limited in it. I can hear the torment of all of them as I enter the bottom floor.
The soul grows as the body withers.
Yes… yes! I want to be closer to death. Show me the ones who yearn!
“Tirit lavdexi.”
“Ma’am? Are you searching for something?” A clinician in black scrubs taps on my shoulder. Her eyes clearly try to peer between my lips for fangs.
I stare through the walls at someone coughing their lungs out. “No, I know where I’m going.”
Gabriele Capello need to see her.
“I’m sorry, didn’t Gabriele Capello need to see you?”
“He’s already taking a visitor…” The clinician’s eyes widen. “Fuck—Fuck. Shit, no. Ring damn me.” Her expletives drag on as she runs down the halls.
Is this the Great Ring who invades my thoughts? Or its servants, the dead? They also have its blessing, so I am following its will either way.
I reach the door of my victim, deciding to enter without knocking. The Great Ring would’ve impeded me if it didn’t want me to enter.
The Ring has a plan. It wants this to happen.
“Hello?” An older woman lies in a hard bed, surrounded by candles and ritual symbols.
The smell of death is heavy in this room. Bothliterallyand in the overwhelming eminence coming from that woman.
I can taste her dying heart. I almost wish I could be like her.
The Great Ring brings me.
“The Great Ring brings me.”
“Oh sweet Angel of Death!” the woman cheers up and comes to life. “You’re just like the stories they tell of the sweet Lich Queen, aren’t you? You’ve come to shuffle me along?”
A string width fragment of my mind wonders if I’m acting unusual. I’m clearly not. This is what the Ring wanted of me.
It’ll make Vincenza love me.
I stare down at my hands and search for the spell that was almost mine. It took the blood of a victim—as well as my own.
“Your death will be quick, my promise.” I search the table stand next to her bed for sharp items.
Next to the ashtray with a heavy smell of tobacco is a cigar cutter. It flips out into a knife with a hole in the handle for bracing cigars.
