Page 41 of Destined to the Reaper

That gave me pause.

I turned back to face her and shifted my wings to loosen some of the tension knotting my back. She was making a fair point. Were our roles reversed, I would want Kali to be honest with me and allow me to make an enlightened decision.

“Understood. I will speak with her,” I said with a sigh, surprised to find it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. “I must go back to her now. She will awaken soon.”

I smiled and turned to leave.

“Pharos!” my mother called out.

She closed the distance between us and plucked two strands of her extremely long, silver-white hair from her head. Despite it being plaited into a single long braid, the strands came out effortlessly without breaking. I watched in fascination as she tied each one around my bracers. They fused with the metal, giving it a silver glow.

“I thought you couldn’t intervene?” I challenged as I felt the potent magic radiating from it.

She shrugged. “A mother is allowed to offer her son a gift from time to time.”

I snorted. “You know all the workarounds, don’t you?”

“I’ve lived since the dawn of time, Pharos. I’ve seen it all,” she said, her face taking on a serious expression. “Death Magic wielded by a Blood Mage is a powerful thing. People wrongly assume that Flesh Magic is best to control constructs. But what binds the various parts that shape them is blood and the fluids in their tissue.”

With these cryptic words, my mother drew me into her arms and hugged me. Too stunned by this highly unusual display of affection, I just froze. Before I could snap out of it and return her embrace, mother kissed my cheek then pulled away from me. Without another word, she returned to her spinning wheel, indicating this meeting was over.

My heart ached at the sudden realization that this maternal embrace was in case we may never meet again. As much as it saddened me, it also whipped me into being even more determined that it would not be. I had not been a prisoner all this time to only enjoy freedom for a couple of days before my final death. I would prevail, and I would live happily ever after with my soulmate.

“Thank you, Mother,” I said.

Although she didn’t glance back at me, the pleased smile that stretched her lips confirmed she had sensed my reaction. I smiled in return, understanding it had been her intention all along. She was constantly playing the most advanced game of chess, always five moves ahead of everyone.

I walked out of her house and took flight before opening a rift in the Veil to teleport back home. As soon as I appeared above my terrace, my blood turned to ice.

A Grim Reaper was in my house.

Chapter 11

Kali

Istirred, gradually emerging from the most amazing rest. My entire body felt languid, my skin tingling in a delicious fashion. Even as memories of the terrible ordeal we’d just been through flooded back to the surface, I couldn’t feel the slightest pain or discomfort.

But I could feel a presence nearby observing me.

My eyes snapped open. I was lying in an amazingly comfortable bed, a thick duvet agreeably weighing me down. The first thing I saw was the insanely high ceilings with intricate crown molding. The pale stones of the walls gave me the impression of ancient Roman architecture.

I jerked my head to the left from whence that impression of being observed emanated, expecting to see Pharos. Instead, a dark figure sat on the windowsill of one of the massive windows adorning the walls of the immense bedroom.

A frightened gasp escaped me as I shot to a sitting position, instinctively backing away, ready to cast a defensive or offensive spell. Judging by the broadness of the shoulders, I presumedthe intruder to be a male. But he was exactly how I had initially assumed Pharos looked like in person: a skeletal knight covered in a dark hooded robe. He was lazily spinning the long staff of his single-bladed scythe.

For half a beat, I wondered if it was one of Pharos’s alternate appearances. But a quick shift of my vision confirmed that Reaper did not possess the mesmerizing aura I had become so enthralled with. In a flash of lucidity, I also remembered Pharos wielding a pair of shorter scythes, one in each hand, connected by a bone chain. They’d been ghostly, not made of physical material like his. And when he joined them into a single staff, it had been double-bladed.

The stranger tilted his head to the side before rising to his feet. Despite his slow, non-threatening movements, I once more scrambled backwards, panicked.

“You can’t reap me! I didn’t die!” I blurted out.

Despite the absence of skin over his skeletal face, his features still moved in an uncanny fashion as his mouth stretched into a smile.

“You didn’t die…yet,” he conceded.

“It is not my time!” I said forcefully as I jumped out of the bed on the opposite side from him. “Pharos healed me. He marked me so that no one else could reap me!”

A rumbling chuckle escaped him. He rested the base of his scythe on the darker stone floors and stared at me with an amused expression. The red glow of his eyes felt ominous.

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