A taste of the voice
And that is when I see him. He is standing on the black shelf above us where there was no one, twenty feet off, and the rain is coming down on him the way it comes down on anything, and I understand at once that he has been there longer than the lightning has.
His gaze goes to my right hand. Not to my face. To my hand, hanging open at my side with the rain washing the blood off my fingers.
“Show me your arm,” he says. His voice is low and unhurried and it arrives somewhere under my ribs.
“Buy me dinner first.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The place a smile would go, if he had let one live there in the last hundred years.
From The Salt-Bright Crown, a Teaser written for a reader named Tess. Yours is written around you.