Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,101

the room.

How long had he been waiting?

“I didn’t mind. It wasn’t a long wait. I knew you were hurrying.” He said this as if we were already in midconversation.

Yeah, one of the more disconcerting things about the Mender was that he was a telepath. And probably psychic. He definitely saw possible paths of the future, even if he didn’t know which would come to fruition.

“He said you wanted to talk to me about the debt.” I didn’t need to clarify who “he” was. The Mender knew, either because Death was the only collector I was likely to talk about or because of that whole telepath thing.

“I’ve come to collect your debt.”

I nodded, sliding into the seat across from him. He hadn’t stated his demands yet, but I could already feel the magic binding me. I’d foolishly failed to set any terms on the favor he could ask of me. He could request anything, and I would have to comply—the magic in the debt would ensure I did.

The Mender’s features settled on something I’d classify as refined middle age; I wasn’t sure if he was in control of the shift, or if it was a natural condition of his existence, but this face made me think of a shrewd businessman. It didn’t reassure me.

The Mender held out his hand. A small polished wood box sat on his palm.

“Take it,” he said, nodding to me.

I reached out tentatively. I didn’t need to use my ability to sense magic or peer across planes to know the box was more than it appeared—that was a given considering who was offering it to me. Still, I was unprepared for actually touching it.

The box itself had no physical weight, but the moment my fingers touched the polished surface, my magic rose unbidden. I jerked back, nearly dropping the box as I squeezed my mental shields closed tighter. The Mender clapped his hands around mine, keeping the box pressed against my palm.

I gasped, using everything I had to reinforce my mental shields and keep my magic from spilling down into the box.

“What is this?”

“Just a little ball of reality,” the Mender said. He looked like a kindly grandfather again when he smiled at me. “Stop fighting yourself. You cannot win a battle against yourself, and I’m not giving you something meant to harm you.”

I didn’t know if I believed him. I didn’t understand enough about what the Mender was to trust him, but he was right about one thing—I couldn’t win against my own magic. Even as part of my magic battered against the mental shields I’d erected to hold it in, another part oozed through those shields, exploiting pores in my walls. The more magic that slipped through the shields, the larger the small holes became. It would wear down the shields in a matter of minutes at this rate and all I’d have to show for my efforts would be the exhaustion I’d earned fighting a losing battle.

I let go of my shields, and my magic moved.

There was no other way to describe it. Usually I directed my magic like a pair of hands. A tool to reach out, to pull, to push. Sometimes, if I let too much of my grave magic build, it hemorrhaged out of me, rushing for anything it could reach. But this wasn’t grave magic, it was my planeweaving ability. And it didn’t react like any magic I’d felt before.

I stopped trying to block the magic, and it moved like a wave engulfing the box. At the same time, the magic never actually left me. It stretched, folding around the ball of reality in my palm, connecting me to it and mixing it with the main pool of my magic. And then it settled. Seemingly content.

I mentally poked at the box in my hand. Physically it still felt like it wasn’t there, but my senses could feel the compacted strands of reality. I examined them. I could feel the land of the dead and the crystalline plane the collectors existed on. Other planes were there too, ones I’d felt before but had no name for. The ball of reality didn’t feel that different from many of the strands of reality all around us right now, it was just far more compressed. Now that my magic had encompassed the ball of reality, it seemed perfectly content to let it be.

“What is this?”

The Mender leaned forward, his face that of an inquisitive youth. “It is exactly as you suspect. A compact ball