Bloodring

Chapter 15

By the time I was dressed for riding, with three blades hidden on my body and enough charged stones in my pockets to make a decent stand if my life required it, Jacey's stepson Zeddy had saddled Homer and taken him out front, where he stood in the sunshine, happy to be free of his stall and feeling frisky. Zeddy exercised the Friesian daily except when the blizzards blew, but there was seldom enough activity to satisfy an animal bred to work.

Thadd's mount was a high-strung, dappled gray, a big horse at sixteen hands, but nothing compared to Homer's nearly nineteen hands. Zeddy tossed me up as if I weighed less than his youngest sister. Of course, Sissy had turned nine before Christmas, so maybe I did. Neomages tend to be petite.

Below me, Thadd sat astride the smaller horse, looking perfectly at ease though I had the bigger mount. Part of me had been hoping he'd be distressed by the disparity in heights, all macho outrage, poorly hidden. Not so.

I kept hoping Thadd would grow another head or do something really outrageous to appear less attractive. But, besides being a Hand of the Law whose job description would see to my demise, it seemed he was an all-around nice guy. He sat the gray with the easy comfort of a cowboy, jeans-clad legs gripping the horse's sides. He looked good. Really good. My tummy did that little dip and curl that left me a bit breathless. Which made me even madder.

As if aware of my irritation, Thadd gave me an amused stare, which I could feel, even through the black wraparound shades favored by Hands of the Law. I snapped open my own sunglasses, set them on my nose just like a human, and clicked Homer into action. Extending his long legs, the Friesian lumbered across a mound of snow the gray had to go around, and proceeded northwest at a fast clip. Quickly, I guided Homer directly north, and we moved out at a quick pace, unspeaking, me pushing the speed, nursing an annoyance I didn't fully understand but felt entitled to. The antagonism helped to stifle my awareness of the kylen and helped ward off mage-heat that wanted to rise. I let the anger settle in for the duration.

A silent hour later and five hundred feet higher, Thadd moved up beside me at a fast trot. "So. If you were an undiscovered mine of gem-quality stone, where would you hide?"

"Underground and under the snow," I nearly snarled.

"So you're saying this is a waste of time?" When I didn't answer, he asked, "Or did your friends just embarrass you into this by playing matchmaker?"

I had a sudden vision of Thadd and me in my bed, pillows thrown away in haste, covers sliding off the mattress. A flush burned its way up my neck. Drat. "Figured that out, did you?" I said. My words were stiff, my tone even worse. And the rocking of the big horse wasn't helping mage-heat at all, not with Thadd so near. "My friends worry about me, since Lucas took off to greener pastures. I try not to let them bother me with their teasing."

"I think it's cute."

"Cute?" I made an indelicate sound. Homer's ears swept back and forth, and he curved his huge neck to glance at me, eyes rolling. "FYI? 'Cute' is right up there with 'girls. " I continued before he could reply. "Last month they tried to set me up with a feldspar miner named Ken. The poor guy showed at the shop on a Friday night with his neck washed, his fingernails clean, and a bag full of quartz rough as a gift."

"Fun date?" Thadd asked, not laughing, for which I was grateful.

"Agonizing." I bent under a low branch and guided Homer straight north, wanting to keep the kylen away from anything charged with power. Homer took a massive leap straight uphill, and I grabbed the pommel, holding on. "Easy, big guy."

"What's that?" Thadd pointed to the jumble of rock and mortar Homer had just bounded over.

"Shed, probably. You can find out more about the mountain from Rupert, but the Trine used to be one fairly small hill until one of the last mopping-up battles. People lived on the slope. We'll see foundations and roads and all kinds of stuff, until we reach the rock peaks. I haven't spent much time here, but ruins are everywhere." I pointed off to the west and to the east, to piles of moldering brick. "After a hundred years, there isn't much left but stone and brick, and even that's starting to decay."

The gray moved up beside me, Thadd visible in my peripheral vision. I didn't look his way. "What do you know about the Stanhopes?" he asked, his tone a hair too casual for the question to be idle.

"Less than I thought I did," I grumbled. I hadn't known about Mole Man, or about Lucas' roving eye. I hadn't known that Rupert's sweetie was a mule in hiding. "Why?"

"There's some indication that Jason has allied with a Power or a Principality."

A tremor of alarm shivered down my body. Below me, Homer reacted, his head coming up fast. I soothed him, stroking along his neck. "Is that part of your interrogation technique? Wait till your victim is calm and unsuspecting and then hit her with a zinger?"

Thadd ignored me. "This case attracted the attention of the Administration of the ArchSeraph pretty fast. You've met the investigator, I believe?"

"Oh, yeah. Captain Durbarge." The little assey.

"He thinks Jason may owe a blood gift to a Darkness, which then would be after anyone in the Stanhope line. Stanhope blood—Mole Man's blood—is important to the seraphic host, which makes a blood-demon doubly likely and doubly dangerous."

I didn't look around. Durbarge had speculated about a blood-demon.

"The AASI spotted signs of devil-spawn in the hills."

"Where?" I asked, my hand still soothing my mount. I didn't need Homer giving away that I was upset at the direction in which Thadd was taking the conversation. If the assey had been to my spring, I was in deep doo-doo. The cistern and pipes were spelled to keep long-distance and untrained observers away. A trained observer, however, would see a great deal.

"On the other side of the Toe River."

I made the connection fast and went from relieved to worried in a heartbeat. If Jason owed a debt to a blood-demon, then spawn would come after Ciana. Looking back at the cop through my tinted lenses, I saw he was watching me. "Where, exactly, and how many?"

"Outside Maria's home. A small pack of five or six."

Spawn travel in packs. If there was a daywalker watching Ciana, a blood-demon, and a spawn pack, then things were a lot worse than I thought. I wondered whether I should tell Thadd about the daywalker. But if I did, they might take Ciana into custody for her own protection. Asseys had no conscience. Any human caught consorting with Darkness, even an innocent, was carted off and never seen again.

A faint sense of vertigo made me totter, as a distant thought battled to rise and was pulled under. Something about stones and flowers? Whatever it was, I pushed it away for later and risked a question. "Is it possible that there's a war in Darkness?"

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," he quoted. The New Testament, the words of Jesus when he was accused of working with the devil.

"What if it's not divided? What if one of them just wants more power than before?"

"If you want to discuss theology, go to an elder." It was the perfect cop answer. I shook my head and pressed Homer uphill, a sharp grade that left Thadd behind. He seemed to realize he had lost ground both figuratively and literally. "Sorry," he said, catching up. "Knee-jerk response. The short answer is, I don't know." When I remained silent, he said, "So. Back to the stone. If you were a new mine of gem-quality stone, where would you be hiding?"

"My best bet is up high, on the bare rock near the peaks."

"And why is that?"

"Because no one's staked a claim or tried to buy mineral rights in years, not even Culpepper, so the find isn't easy to locate. Only a team with ice-climbing equipment could get to the peaks easily, and I can't remember the last time anyone took to the ice cap. And because, so far as we know, the stone wasn't found before the Trine was formed, so it's likely that it came to light during or after the battle with Benaiah Stanhope and the formation of the three peaks." It was the first time I had put all that together, but it felt right. The stone must have been pushed to the surface when the Trine was formed.

Homer tossed his head. Behind me and to the side, the gray danced several steps and neighed sharply. Homer's ears went back flat. The horses were spooked.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I tightened my grip on the saddle horn. Something was watching us. I opened my mage-sight and scanned the area. The world looked strange through the sunglasses, shadowed and sparkly, as if viewed through a prism. As far as I could tell, we were alone, but something was wrong.

Homer came to an abrupt stop, ears back hard. He danced around, facing the town, and bowed his back to buck. I hauled on the reins with all my might.

Thadd was having his own problems. The gray pranced, his head up high, neck arched, eyes wide with alarm. "What's going on?" he asked.

From above us, a scream sounded, long and agonized, echoing down the slope, followed instantly by another. The gray dropped his head and kicked, throwing Thadd forward across his neck.

The angry scream sounded a third time. Some kind of predator cat. I hoped.

Homer bunched his muscles and took four mighty leaps straight downhill. Midkick, the gray squealed, whirled, bucked once, and followed. Thaddeus hit the ground.

I hadn't been able to think of an excuse to bring the walking stick but had charged a malachite ring with a calming incantation and stuck it on my thumb. With a thought, I sent it into Homer. He stopped. I didn't. My body was flung forward, my hand jerked from the pommel. The horn slammed into my stomach and all the breath left my body in a single gasp. I tumbled over his head, across a mound of snow. The world reeled by me. Upside down, I glimpsed the cat, black and white, crouched on a limb, eyes watching me as I rolled in midair.

I landed on one shoulder, my arm knocked numb. I thudded on the muddy ground and rolled, out of control, arm flapping, useless. Into a half-frozen puddle. Snowmelt.

Icy cold drenched me. Everywhere the water touched, power was sucked out of me in a sudden, vicious extraction. The energy in the stones I carried was damped. Lust turned to agony. I may have screamed.

Overhead, far overhead, something moved. It flew, wings stroking, slow and lazy, taking it behind a cloud. I heard a whimper; the sound came from me.

"Thorn!" The sky vanished. I focused on Thaddeus. There were two of him, rotating. Hands of the Law. Kylens. In a sickening lurch his faces coalesced into one, greenish blue eyes wide and a trail of blood at one nostril. He'd lost the shades. "Are you all right?" When I didn't answer, he touched my shoulder. "Thorn?"

"Not so good, actually," I said. But feeling was sweeping back into my body, short, sharp stabs, and longer, continuous waves of throbbing. I rose slowly, pulling my upper body from the puddle. "But I don't think anything is broken. You?"

"The same."

"What kind of cat was that?" I'm lying in snowmelt. Bruised, drained of power, and feeling like I got hit by an El-truck, and I want to talk about kitty cats.

"A lynx, I think. It's gone now. Can you stand?"

"Yeah. Maybe." My teeth started chattering. A shiver gripped me in its fist and shook my entire body. "A bit chilly, though."

Thadd chuckled, pulling me upright. "If I give you a hand, can you get on the horse?"

"Homer. Sure. I can do that." Maybe. With a stepladder and winch. The world did a little stutter and wobble. I let Thadd balance me as I straightened my arm, testing my shoulder. I glanced down at my hands. They were gray with cold and energy loss.

"You have a knot coming up." Holding me by my good shoulder, he touched my scalp and I winced. "Headache?"

I nodded and wished I hadn't. "Yeah. And I'm dizzy."

A dull roar pulled our gazes to the sky. "Plane," he said. But there had been something else. Huge wings? Seraph? My imagination? Did I mistake a high-flying bird for something less mundane? The shivers worsened. I reached into a pocket, testing the stones. Most were dead, though several unpolished, uncut agates still held some strength. I drew on them, enough to make the pain bearable.

Thadd guided me to Homer and gathered up the reins, placing them in my hand. He cupped his hands and I put a knee into them. He lifted me slowly. I grabbed the saddle horn and pulled myself into place. Thadd held my foot when I would have put it in the stirrup. "I'd be happy to walk, but I don't think you can stay in the saddle."

A wave of vertigo had me gripping the horn with both hands as I said, "Nope. Me neither." When the wave passed, Thadd eased his hand from my thigh where he had steadied my balance. I wasn't sure I liked him being so nice. It was easier to keep my distance when he was just a cop.

As he adjusted the stirrups, I looked around. The gray horse was nowhere in sight. I turned back the way we had come and realized we had covered a lot of ground, too far to walk before sunset. The town was laid out below us like a model, a scene where a toy train runs through a town, along a river. In Mineral City, the train was pulling into the depot.

Thadd put a foot in the stirrup and swung up behind me. He scooted me forward and lifted me until I was pretty much sitting in his lap. Oh, no. Not good. Not good at all. Except other parts of me thought it was pretty wonderful. Warmth flooded into me when he wrapped his arms around me and took the reins, masculine and heated, with the underlying scent of silver and copper and a subtle cologne. Unable to help myself, I leaned back into him. Warm. Really warm. I closed my eyes and heard myself sigh. Without speaking, without thinking, I placed my hand over his. The mage-heat faded and was gone. I fell asleep.

I woke when we reached the shop. Rupert was locking the doors, shadows were growing long across the ground, and the sun was a huge red ball resting on the western mountaintops. I don't know how Rupert and Thadd got me upstairs, undressed, and into the tub, but I woke in hot water, all shriveled and wrinkled, Rupert waving a piece of cheese toast under my nose. It smelled heavenly.

I jolted upright. Water went splashing across the tile. "I'm naked."

"I noticed. And if I was straight, I'd be interested. Eat."

Suddenly ravenous, I ate the toast in two bites, cramming a half slice into my mouth and chewing, cheeks bulging like a chipmunk's. "Can I have some more?" I asked as I swallowed.

"When you're dressed, dearie. Can you get out on your own?"

I made a little turnaround motion with a finger and Rupert rolled his eyes. But he complied, turning his back to me, a towel held in the general direction of the tub. Gauging my level of stability, I stood up slowly. When I was halfway upright, the realization hit me fully. I was naked. In the room with a human. I looked at my body, and relief swept over me. My neomage attributes were still hidden, my skin not glowing, the worst of my scars blanked. I still looked human. But someone had undressed me, and that meant they had seen more scars than I had ever explained. And they had found my amulets. I was in trouble. Big, bad, wooly mammoth trouble.

On the small table beside the tub was the prime amulet I had tried to destroy. The circle donut of layered stone, stone fused by a means I never understood, had been moved and was now lying fully exposed. The broken chip was sitting in the exact center of the large stone ring. I looked around the room as I stepped from the tub. No Thaddeus. No assey Durbarge. No whips, chains, knives, red-hot pokers in the fireplace, or other devices of torture. "Who undressed me?" I asked, as I pulled on a robe.

"Thadd wanted to help, but we sent him off, if that's what you were wondering." Rupert crossed his arms, his weight on one hip, his back still to me.

"And?" I prompted.

"And Audric and I took off your clothes and put you in the tub. It wasn't the most disgusting thing I've ever done, but it wasn't fun. I never knew those scars on your arms were all over."

"Yeah." I knotted the robe's belt and went to the kitchen. "You can turn around now," I said as I sat and started stuffing my face with cheese toast and a glass of white wine.

"You will tell me all about them when you feel better," he said, fishing.

The alcohol hit my system hard. "Spawn scars. Thanks for the food."

"Spawn scars. Two words." When I didn't respond, he said softly, "Maybe someday you'll trust me enough to tell me your story." Rupert lifted the remote and clicked on the television, SNN with its divided screen. In the top left corner was a familiar video feed, Lucas, lifting his head to reveal his face. My gut tightened.

Rupert sighed. "They're still showing it every day on the six o'clock news."

The screen flickered with images: boxes, a woodpile, a tangle of bicycles half visible at the extremity of the circle of illumination. A shadow slithered across, disjointed and stiff.

I leaned into see.

Two more shadows resolved into the shape of men running. They collided, and Lucas went down. Arms punched, feet kicked viciously. Lucas fell, covering his head. His body was dragged away, leaving the ruptured knapsack. Blood smeared as they pulled him out of the camera's view. Lucas' blood.

This time, I saw something I hadn't recognized the first hundred times I'd watched. The shadow had wings. A Fallen. A Major Darkness.

Battle rage spiked through my system and died. Grief rose and crested into hopeless gloom. There was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. "Turn it off," I said. "Please."

I didn't look up at Rupert but I knew he was studying me. The TV clicked off. I bit and chewed another slice of toast. It tasted like dust in my mouth, but I ate it all, every bite. After my meal, I shooed Rupert out, turned off the lights, crawled between the layered down comforters and the mattress, and closed my eyes. Again, sleep was instantaneous.

The phone rang near midnight, the witching hour. I knew it was Lolo before I answered, snaking a bruised arm out from the warm covers. "Lolo?"

"What you do you pierre premiere? You amulet?"

"I broke it," I confessed, trying to pull myself from dreams.

"Why you do dis fol ting?"

"I took a maul to my wedding ring when Lucas left," I said, sleepily. "It was an accident."

"La pierre? Dat stone? It still a close-up circle? All part still dere? No part lost?"

"Yeah," I said, more awake now. "A chip broke away from the outer edge, but the inner edge is still solid. How did you—"

"Listen good. R'ember."

I sat up and turned on the light. Opening the bedside table's drawer, I took out paper and pen. I ached all over but pulled up a knee to support the pad. "Go ahead."

"Incantation de Reintegration, in you book." Her voice took on the singsong cadence of incantation. French, wouldn't you know it. "Mais tout a l'entour du moyeu," she sang.

I had her repeat all fourteen lines, a rhyming verse that would have been easy to learn had I spoken French. I repeated the incantation, making sure I had the pronunciation and rhythm correct. "Okay, Lolo, what's it mean?"

"No exact translation en anglais. Say de Cajun word. Follow de formula. Do it firs' ting as de sun tink to rise." The phone went dead before I could ask how she knew about the damage, but I had a good idea. Audric and I had to have a little chat.

I was awake before the sun rose, before the local roosters—the ones who had survived the mating frenzy and the cooking pots—woke. I was muzzy headed and sore but unable to suppress a small flame of excitement at the thought that I might repair my prime amulet. I found the Incantation of Restoring in the Book of Workings. It took up three pages late in the second third of the book, and one section was titled "All Around the Hub." I figured that was what Lolo's Cajun mais tout a l'entour du moyeu meant in English.

I turned up the flames on the gas logs and gathered the supplies the book called for—a silver bowl filled with springwater, a clean white towel, candles, salt, a ceremonial knife, several of each of the stones used to create the amulet, and the amulet itself. I put my necklace to one side. As an afterthought, I brought over all the drained amulets needing to be recharged but put them in a separate pile to the side, out of the way of the initial working. I locked the loft door, lit seven candles, poured a salt ring, leaving a six-inch opening, and sat in the middle of the kitchen floor. Instantly, cold leached up through the tile into my thighs.

After I centered myself with deep breathing, I opened my mage-sight and sealed an advanced conjuring circle. I felt the faint pop of energy from my head, down my bruised back, to my toes. Power seized me, the power from the beginning of time, a clear note of energy, a bell that pealed, an echo of the first Word ever spoken. The first Word of Creation. That echo of the beginning was captured in the center of the earth, a constant, unvarying power of stone and mineral and destructive potency.

I shivered as the vibrations rolled through my bones, pulsed in my flesh. I could see the thrum of strength, the raw, raging might deep below, liquid rock seeking a channel. Finding me, rising within me. I was the crucible for the incandescent energy.

Power. The hunger for it rose as well, waves of desire that bowed my entire body, clawed my hands into weapons. I could take what I wanted. The might burned below me, writhed inside me, welding me to it. I was the strength of the earth, the might, the power of creation.

I slid the necklace of amulets over my head. My need receded and fell away. The energy of creation became manageable, harnessed to my control. I inhaled a breath burning with cold and returned to myself and to the loft, which pulsed with power.

When I caught my breath, I read through the incantation again and made sure I had all the stones I needed for the repair. The prime amulet was a four-inch hoop composed of topaz, peridot, amethyst, citrine, and garnet, five inner layers, with a double helping of bloodstone sealing at top and bottom. Seven layers in all.

Following the directions in the book, I arranged the stones in the water according to the order of the stones in the amulet. On top, I set the prime amulet and the small chip, aligning the broken piece in its gap. When I removed my hand from the bowl, the water started to glow.

I dried my hand and gripped the ceremonial knife. I started the incantation. "Mais tout a l'entour du moyeu. Mais tout a I'entour du moyeu." I was pretty sure the next two lines were about knives and blood, and I pricked my finger. Blood welled. The next two lines had something to do with repairing and the Enclave. I dropped the first drip of blood into the water. With each of the next six lines, I added a drop of blood. It swirled and settled toward the bottom of the bowl and the pile of stones.

As I watched, the blood coalesced into a large glowing, shining bead of blood and energy. It fell into the crack of the amulet, sliding between chip and ring as if with an intelligence of its own, or as if the amulet directed the placement of the blood for its own healing.

The process would be slow. A mage working solo could take hours to complete the conjure. I repeated the incantation and added seven drops of blood. On the third repetition of the phrases, I heard a voice, tones full of light and bells. And I froze, a drop of blood about to fall.

"Mage!" a voice called.

"No. Too far from Enclave," a second voice replied.

"Mage, I tell you. Listen."

I couldn't stop the incantation—there was no place for the energies to go. No one had ever told me what would happen if I tried, but I figured it wasn't anything good—an explosion of wild magic, fire; me dead and splattered all over the walls. I had no choice. I spoke the lines as directed, dripping my blood into the bowl.

"I hear her. She's in heat!" the first one said, excited.

"Where? Where is she? I scent her." The voice growled with lust.

The flush of adrenaline was instantaneous, fear and excitement, followed by a sexual heat so strong it arched my back. Seraphs! Two of them. Danger. Heat welled up in me. I was going to die and I didn't care. So long as the seraphs took me first.

With the twenty-first drop of my blood, the amethyst sealed in metal boxes one floor below blazed into my awareness, a sudden influx of power so strong that it sizzled through me, a crackling energy. Power so vital I wanted to weep with the opulence of it. The water boiled. Steam and light erupted from the bowl. I heard a snap, another, and another, dozens of them, like firecrackers or distant guns, the sounds overlapping, a war of stone and rock. And a final crack, muted, muffled but powerful, that sent water into the air in a geyser of fine droplets. I jerked away.

Mage-heat died. In an instant, the force of the incantation, the voices in my head, the purple light from the storeroom, were all gone. I was drunk, sickeningly, violently drunk. I inhaled a breath tasting sharp and acrid, full of nausea and ozone.

In the bottom of the silver bowl, was my prime amulet. It was whole, a ring of layered stone, fused together with my blood. And below the amulet was a nest of crystal sand. The world tilted.

I caught myself on my clean palm and finished the last two lines of the incantation, not because I wanted to, but because I knew I was supposed to. Something about the cycles of mage energies. I giggled drunkenly as I spoke, but it didn't seem to affect the conjure. After the last word, the final incantation energies settled with a soft splash, like a low wave on sand.

I stared at my bloody hand, transfixed by the slow crimson crawl. It hurt, and the pain brought me back to myself. I took a deep breath and wrapped my bleeding hand in the towel. With my other hand I reached into the water. It was still hot, almost painful. I lifted the amulet into the dawn light and held it close. It felt like it always had, a four-inch ring, a few ounces of rock, smooth, cooling instantly to the temperature of my hand. But there was something different now. The crack outlining the chip was filled with a fine bloodred line like mortar sealing it together. Now the center layer, the amethyst layer, was subtly larger, and it glowed, just a hint, with power that wasn't mine.

I recalled the voices I'd heard while I was working the incantation. I had never met a seraph. Had only heard them speak on television, a medium that was said to dull the purity and melody of their voices. Yet I had no doubt that I had heard seraph voices in my mind until the amethyst stone in the storeroom had taken over the conjure and healed my prime amulet, fast, as if to shield me from the seraphs.

Still reeling from the power that had rolled through me, I fell back, lying supine, staring at the rafters. The amethyst had done something to the amulet, and by extension, to me. And there wasn't a darn thing I could do about it.