A full moon rose as dusk fell, and the smallest hint of sunset still touched the deep blue sky when Gaius arranged his tools in the courtyard. Charcoal, candles, string, braziers, and incense. His lamp. He had a hundred incantations to learn, a hundred symbols to memorize and write, then write again, until he had them perfect. Practice, as the potter had told him.
Such good advice.
He had a lamp to infuse with power.
Kneeling, tools in hand and bright moonlight silvering the courtyard, he hesitated. The hair on his arms stood up, and a sudden tension knotted his shoulders. It was the sensation of being stalked by a lion. He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder.
The danger was outside the courtyard, approaching. If he quieted himself, he could sense every beating heart in the town, he could follow the scent of warm blood and the
sound of breathing to every hidden soul. But the thing approaching had no heartbeat, and its blood was cold. The hold it had on Gaius Albinus was difficult to define, but even after decades, the bond remained and called to him. He set down his tools and marched to the courtyard door, wrenched it open, and looked.
An old man, his skin shriveled, his bones bent, pulled himself along the alley wall, creeping from one shadow to the next on crooked limbs. Hairless, joints bulging, he should not have been alive. His ragged linen tunic hung off him like a crucifixion. This was the source of nightmare tales that kept children awake, the stories of ghouls and demons that hid under beds and in wells.
Frozen, Gaius watched him approach. His teeth ground, his jaw clenched with rage, but he couldn’t move, he couldn’t flee. He ought to murder this monster. But he couldn’t.
The shriveled old man heaved up against the wall and stared back at him. Laughing, he pointed a crooked finger. “Salve, Gaius Albinus, salve! I found you. Given enough time, I knew I would find you. And my dear son, all I have is time.”
“I am not your son,” Gaius said reflexively, as he had done a hundred times before, uselessly. He glanced around the street; he didn’t want anyone to witness this.
“Yes, you are. I made you. You are my son.”
The old man, Kumarbis, looked desiccated, as if he had been wandering in a desert, baked by the sun. Which was impossible for one like him. This meant he had not been eating, going weeks between feeding on blood, instead of days. He was starved; he was weak. How was he still existing?
Something dug hooks into Gaius; a connection between them that he’d never be able to deny, however much he wanted to. A feeling: compassion; gratitude. A tangle emanating from this creature, binding them together. Gaius had tried to escape these lines of power, fed through blood and woven with terrible magic, created when Kumarbis had transformed him.
“No! I disavow you. I broke from you!” “You are my son—”
“You are a mockery, you are not my father!” Gaius’s father had died decades ago, never knowing what had become of his son, who’d vanished into the service of Rome.
The old man stepped forward, reaching an angular hand, and grinning, skull-like. “You owe me . . . hospitality. The tribute due to a master from his progeny. You owe me . . . sustenance.” Horribly, he licked his peeling lips.
“You’ve fended for yourself for millennia before you ruined me. I will give you nothing.”
Perversely, the old man chuckled, the sound of cracking papyrus. “I knew you were a strong man. Able to resist our bond? Very strong. I knew it. I chose you well.”
“Leave here. Leave. I never want to see you again.”
“Never? Never? Do you know what that means? You are only just beginning to realize what that means. We will always be here, we will always be bound.”
“Come in, get off the street.” Gaius grabbed the old man’s tunic—he refused to touch that leathered skin—and pulled him into the courtyard, slamming the door behind. The ancient fabric of the tunic tore under the pressure, as if it rotted in place.
Kumarbis slumped against the wall and grinned again at Gaius as if he’d won a prize. “You have servants.”
“They’re mine, not yours.”
“You are mine.”
“I am not.” He sounded like a mewling child.
What he ought to do was drink the old man dry. Suck whatever used-up blood was left in him, destroying him and taking all his power. But he would have to touch the monster for that. And . . . that pull. That bond. It made the very idea of harming the man repulsive. He couldn’t even bear the thought of stabbing him through the heart with a length of wood, putting him out of his misery. It was the terrible magic of his curse that he could not bring himself to kill the one being in the universe that he most wanted to.
“I don’t have time for this,” Gaius said, turning back to his tools, the mission. He should just buy a slave for the old man to drain and be done with him.
Kumarbis pressed himself against the stone. “What are you doing here, Gaius?”
“Showing my strength. Proving a point.”
Wincing, craning his neck forward, the old man studied what Gaius had prepared, the writing he had begun. “This magic . . . have I seen anything like it?”