Deathless by Belinda Burke

he sighed, felt Kas shift against him, draw him closer.
    “Sleep, love. Sleep .” Kas’ voice startled him, made him wonder. He blinked up into that black gaze, as bright now as ever—and as dark. Did he ever sleep? But Myrddin had no problem with the command he’d been given, and almost before he closed his eyes, he had dozed off again.
    When Myrddin woke for the second time it was abruptly, his dreams canceled by a crackling shift in atmosphere.
    Something is coming .
    His first conscious awareness was that he was alone. He turned sharply, surprised and unhappy, but the first pass of his gaze found Kas for him. He was standing noiseless and still in the early winter snow outside the boundaries of Myrddin’s sudden garden. There were shadows around Kas, mobile silhouettes touching him. Filaments of darkness caressed his skin and faded away as they did so.
    The silence of the night was nothing natural. The moon illuminated, but did not brighten, and occasionally a shade would slip away up the curve of that light and be cradled in moondust until it vanished.
    Myrddin sensed their passage as it occurred, the spirits of mortal creatures and beings vanishing over the threshold of an ethereal door. It was soul-shadows that Myrddin was seeing, the dead in transit, forsaking the world of flesh. The truth crystallized for him in an instant. Kas was death, and this was the duty he had come into existence to perform.
    What happened to those that disappeared in the moondust, Myrddin couldn’t tell. The rest, Kas was sending outward. He opened a door for them, prepared a way that led into the other world, into Annwn.
    An invisible curtain opened and closed in the silence of Kas’ own shadow. The veil of reality was drawn back again and again, and Myrddin shivered where he lay watching. Gooseflesh broke out on his arms, the back of his neck. He couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it . Death, dragging him in more the more attention he paid to it.
    A powerful undertow tried to grab hold of Myrddin’s being and could not. The immortal blood he had inherited made his soul too slippery for a trick like that, but as he pushed himself up on his elbow, Kas turned to look at him. Myrddin felt something cold seize hold of his heart and hold it still. He could neither breathe, nor move. He no longer had control of his own flesh.
    Like a deer in line with a hunter’s arrow, he felt himself compelled to stillness and was, for an instant, terrified. That open door! He had no desire to pass through it—but in the next moment he was free of all restraint, all power. The cold threads had been cut off at the source, and his heart was beating freely again. A word came floating to him, soft as the outlines of those shadows against the night. “ Love .”
    He met Kas’ eyes, knew that it was Kas that had spoken, that he was aware of Myrddin’s wakefulness, that he was pleased, that he was busy. So much in one word, and Myrddin wasn’t sure whether he should be surprised or not—worried or not. That it was one word—maybe that was only good use of his time. The word he chose…
    Myrddin bit his lip, sighed and shook his head, then dropped back down into the tangle of vines and leaves and brambles he was lying on. Time passed slowly, and the moon rose higher and higher in the sky, came to a peak, then fell. As it began to do so, sinking toward its set, the drag of Kas’ dark power ebbed away and left him…drained.
    His body felt as tired as if he’d never slept at all, but his mind was working, wondering, active, and his eyes darted to the quickening of motion in the night that was Kas’ blacker presence moving through the void.
    “Awake, love?” The words floated toward him out of the darkness, but Myrddin didn’t answer, pushed himself up and drew green thread out of the ground. The thread spun into fabric under his eye, a tunic and trousers.
    By the time Kas was beside him, Myrddin was half dressed, and he pushed himself to his