Bloodring

Chapter 6

He woke to a pounding head and a sharp pain in his wrist. The pounding was more than blood moving through his rattled brain, it was the sound of a steel maul pounding a steel spike into the stone beside his head. Chips of rock shattered and flew, and he covered his head with his free arm, jerking it from the other thing in the dark. Teeth ripped his flesh as he pulled free. A roar sounded, a blow landed, and something screamed close by. Sulfur burned his breathing passages with each breath; cold and pain traveled through his body with each heartbeat. Terror wound around him, the smothering coils of a serpent. He was underground. Gabriel's tears. He was underground.

Something rattled like metal and pulled unmercifully at his torn flesh. Unable to help it, he groaned. The thing near him stopped at the sound. It lifted his hand and he heard it sniff as it scented his blood. A moment later something cold and wet slithered around his wrist, burning. He heard a sigh, as of pleasure. And then his hand was dropped. It landed with a boneless flop, but the pain was, seemingly, less. The thing dragged itself away, the sound of its movement growing indistinct.

A moment later, he felt something else touch his hand, and he flinched.

"It's all right. I brought water," it whispered. Lucas felt something heavy hit the stone floor by his head. Iron, a shaped instrument, as cold as death, was placed in his open palm. With his other hand he discovered its shape. A dipper attached by a rope to a stoneware jug. By feel, Lucas dropped the dipper into the jug and brought the cup to his lips. Half expecting something horrible, he touched it to his mouth and tasted water. Sulfur tainted, but water. Desperately thirsty, he drained the dipper and then another.

"I'll bring more tomorrow," it whispered.

"Wait. What are you?"

The pause was fraught with indecision. Then it answered. "I call myself Malashe-el." And it was gone.

Audric's biceps bulged. From the sawdust came a cloth-wrapped packet that blazed, blistered, burned, in my mind. It called to me, a siren song of might so extraordinary, I wondered the humans couldn't see it. He placed it on the workbench; the wrapping fell away.

A lustrous lavender stone pulsed. Cried out. Shock surged through me, a jolt of power from the first creation. But, no, not quite that. Not quite. The thought seemed to disintegrate and fall away. My reasoning clouded. The stone summoned. My flesh ached, my skin, blood, muscles, the beat of my heart, every cell in my body, wanted to join with this stone, mate the beat of my heart to it, and glow with power. Instinctively, that safe part of me, the part set aside only moments earlier, resisted the attraction, drawing on a black-and-green-jade bear amulet beneath my clothes. The bear stored strength, keyed to mute my physical neomage attributes. I could not start to glow. Simply could not. The need to embrace the lavender stone and claim it as my own, the need to bond with it, eased.

"What is it?" Jacey asked.

"It's amethyst," I said, my lips slightly numb. "Gem quality, unless I miss my guess." Incomplete answer, but the safe one. Of their own volition, my hands reached out and enfolded the stone. Power smashed through my palms, the force of a mighty engine, the flare of a rocket lifting into outer space. I shuddered.

"Be careful. It's heavy," Rupert said, misinterpreting my reaction.

I held the jagged stone to the lights overhead, letting the crystalline center of the rock capture illumination and throw it back. It was dirty on one side, smooth where it had lain for long ages, buried in contact with the ground. But the other sides were crystal spires or cragged and irregular where it had broken from a much larger stone. Along the smooth side, the crystal curved in a strange shape, like the curve of a closed eyelid. A larger stone with this power is out there. And I want it. A shiver of warmth threaded along my nerves below my flesh. Heat like mage-heat, like sex, chocolate, whiskey, and wood smoke.

"Thorn?"

I snapped back, aware that I had slipped away from the reality of the shop. I was holding the heavy amethyst over my head, staring into its depths, connecting with it as if the stone had eyes in its heart, eyes that stared back with longing. The weakness caused by snow falling and collecting had vanished. In its place was this incredible… bliss. Desire. Hunger.

"Bond with me. Choose me," the stone sang. "I am lonely."

I shook the thoughts away and set the hunk of rough with three other stones on the table. Each had been cleaved from the same mother rock, though the others showed darker, oval shadings on one side. Their power held a fragrance, an incredible flavor, like lilac blooms, nutmeg, hyssop, something I could almost taste. It was like, yet unlike, mage-heat.

Suddenly Lolo was in my mind, her voice shocking me awake. She hadn't been in my mind since I was fourteen, when all the mages in Enclave had been there as well. "What you got, gurl?" she cried. "I feelin' power. C'est trop. Ca c'est de trop. Dem angels, dey hear! Ge' away from there. Run!" Instead I caressed the double-fist-sized hunks of stone, lifting each for inspection, seeing less with my eyes than with mage-sense.

"Danger, dis. Run, gurl!" I blocked out Lolo's warning. She wasn't here. She didn't see, didn't feel this ecstasy, this rapture. She wasn't a stone mage. She couldn't understand. Vaguely, I knew I hadn't been able to block voices when I was fourteen. No mage should be able to hear another a thousand miles away. This was new. But that thought too slid away.

"There are more boxes in the hallway outside the stockroom," I said, my tongue feeling thick and flaccid. "You might want to check them out."

In what seemed only a second, two more boxes were on the workbench, hammer and chisel ringing as they were opened. Power flowed from them.

"What's wrong with her?"

"Looks like she's having an intimate psychic rendezvous with that rock. Seraph struck, angel awed by a boulder."

I didn't know who had spoken, but the words brought me back from the faraway place the stone had taken me. This was the danger Lolo spoke of, that I could be swept away and consumed. I forced the silly smile off my lips as I fought for a sensible reply. And then that still, small part of me, safe in the back of my mind, unfolded with words, clear and concise, as if planted in my mind by another, but generated by years of familiarity with stone and with running the shop. Logic. Business.

"Just trying to figure out how many focal stones I could get out of this if it was cut free-form, and how much more profit we could make if we sent it off to be faceted." I stroked the stone, warm against my palm. "We'd lose carat weight but gain value if we sent it off."

"If it's gem quality," Jacey said.

"It's gem quality. I know it." I held a rock from another box up to the light. Their pulsing energies had achieved a harmony once the stones were close together again. They whispered and sang. I held the stone to my nose and sniffed, but the fragrance wasn't physical, not something my nose could sense. Not something humans could detect.

"Here's a letter," Audric said, "in with these papers." His voice was the mellow tone of an ancient brass church gong. He handed a slim packet to Rupert. My best friend brushed off the sawdust, and the motion of his hand was lissome, exquisite beyond bearing. His grace moved me to tears; they gathered in my eyes, dazzled in the gleam of the rocks.

My mind again retreated, hiding. I watched as Rupert tore an envelope, his fingers strong, dirty with the smut of solder and fire, Stanhope indexes longer than the middle ones. When I dragged my eyes to his face, I saw that his flesh glowed with heat and vivacity, as if I saw the cadence of his lifeblood beneath. His mouth moved, speaking, and I fastened on it as his sculpted lips shifted, poetry made flesh. "Thorn?" The word was drawn out, the last note in a plaintive song. As it fell on my ear, I heard beneath it the call of Lolo singing a nursery rhyme, her voice a cross cadence to the beat of the life force in Rupert. The drums and flute of her acolytes were penetrating rhythm in the childhood ditty. "Break dat call of siren song. Ring dat bell and right dat wrong. Blood and bone and seraph fire, drag her back from dangerous mire."

Deep in my skull I heard a crack, another, again and again, the sound of stone being split, broken, battered into dust. Suddenly I was free. The world spun and I swayed, catching myself before I fell. I was sitting on the workbench. Crack the Stone of Ages! What happened? I placed the rock on the table and jumped down, landing hard. My bones rattled, my joints stiff. My face burned.

Words bubbled out from that logical, protected, liberated part of me. "It'll cost us more than fifteen thousand dollars to have them cut and faceted, without a guarantee the resultant stones will have a value commensurate with the expenditure. And while we won't make as much if we work them as focals following the stone's natural contours, we'll retain a larger total carat value from each fist. As nuggets and free-form, we can work them into our existing lines, creating an upscale, high-end product that I think will sell well in today's market. I already have some ideas on designs." My babble clipped off abruptly. "What?"

"That's where you've been?" Jacey asked, her tone incredulous. "Doing math and cost-profit analyses? Designing a high-end line?"

I looked at her, my mind locked firmly away from the overpowering stones, buried in Lolo's sweet harmonies, the music of her distant mind balanced and bolstering. "What?" What have I been doing? How long? Between the mage-heat and the stone—

"I've been calling—" She spluttered, starting again. "For five minutes, you've been—were." She gnashed her teeth and ground to a stop. I was certain I had never seen anyone gnash her teeth. "I slapped your face," she said. "Hard." I touched my cheek. It stung.

"You were gone," Rupert said, his face normal again, without the otherworldly life it had possessed earlier. But he was worried. Over his shoulder Audric watched me, not falling for the innocent expression I forced onto my face. I didn't know what had happened, but now wasn't the time to consider it. Now I had to cover, guard, and protect them from what I was. I knew my comments about the value of the stones were dead-on.

Audric handed me a letter marked with Lucas' distinctive, crabbed handwriting. While I couldn't read it all, I did make out a few lines and read them aloud. " 'I found this in Grampa's something I can't make out. 'It was marked with a plat-map of the Trine. Ask Thorn what it is. I think it's…" something, something, something… 'valuable. Two lines of gibberish are followed by 'If I disappear… and more gibberish. Farther down the page are the words, 'Don't go… something, something… 'police and elders. There's a new Power in the hills… some more gibberish, then 'and I think some went over to it. All the Stanhopes are in danger. Keep… something… 'safe. " L followed by a slash was Lucas' hurried signature.

"The Trine. That's where Ciana saw her daywalker," Audric said.

"Daywalker?" Jacey said, alarmed.

"Tell you later," Audric said.

"Cops I can see, but elders involved with a Minor Power?" Rupert said. "No way."

"You saw the video," I said. "Something happened to him, just like this letter warns."

I set the sheet down and wiped my fingers as if it had left an oily residue. Audric lifted the page. "Does this say he's called for a seraphic investigation?" he pointed to a line.

I couldn't see words in the squiggled text, except for a single s. "Maybe."

"Why would the Stanhopes be in danger?" Jacey asked, tucking a strand of sweat-damp hair behind her ear. She was no longer watching me, but I wasn't fooled that she had forgotten my fugue state. I'd hear about it later. My face smarted where she had struck it.

"The Mole Man," Rupert said, taking back the letter and tracing two new words. "Something here about the Mole Man."

"And?"

"The Mole Man was our great-grandfather, Benaiah."

"For real? You got a warrior in your family line?" Jacey seemed to comprehend the term, drawing conclusions I didn't understand.

"Mole Man?" I asked. It wasn't a heroic-sounding name.

"The name they gave Benaiah Stanhope after a not-so-small mopping-up operation in the hills at the end of the Last War. He went with a group of winged warriors underground, into the earth, in the dark," he emphasized, "and the Cherokee named him that. He went in after a Major Power and its human helpers and half-human offspring, the Dark humans. Some say the Power was holed up beneath the Gunthor's place in a cavern. Others say it was beneath the Trine." Rupert shrugged and quoted, his voice acquiring the singsong of scripture. "Bright light shone from the earth, three days and three nights. And the mountains cracked open, and Light and Darkness spilled out over the land in battle dire. The townspeople prayed. Seraphs came back out. Mole Man never did."

"They left him?" I couldn't keep the horror from my voice. "Underground?" With the exception of salt mines and three shielded mines in North America protected by seraphic decree, including Henderson Shielded Mine, no one went beneath the ground. Not ever.

All minerals except for salt, which Darkness hated, were strip-mined, the only way to keep the miners safe. Darkness ruled underground, just as Light ruled above. It wasn't hell and heaven, but parallels for places the seraphs insisted existed elsewhere, or elsewhen.

"I remember that from grade school," Jacey said, her brown eyes bright. "A warrior of the Host claimed that Benaiah died to save the High Host's second in command, offering himself in human sacrifice to bind the Major Power." Jacey reached out and took a fist-sized slab of amethyst in her hand. "The demon was supposed to be a massive being with the head of a lion and the body of a lizard, with human hands. And the usual stink of sulfur and rot. Legend says the town reeked of it for weeks. The beast—a dragon—was given to the Host, bound in chains that were drenched with Benaiah's blood. So they say."

"But it was reported that several lesser Powers got away, vowing vengeance on the Mole Man and his progeny, unto the everlasting," Rupert said softly.

"Yeah. I remember that too," Jacey said.

"And seraphs were seen entering the earth for weeks after," Rupert finished the story. "No one knows why. Or so they say."

"Or so they say" was one of the usual disclaimers after any war story, because at the time no one wrote anything down. Only those things captured and recorded by the film media had been preserved, broadcast across the world via satellites and stored with crystal digital technology. At the time, seraphs didn't bother with public relations. They didn't explain what was happening or what they were doing. Explanations were the guesswork of witnesses. To the current day, no one knew what had happened in many parts of the earth. No one had bothered to keep a written, linear record of the end of the world. Supposedly, it was the end of time.

Except it hadn't been the end of the world. Time still dragged on, and much history had been lost. Earlier technologies hadn't survived, leaving only newer CDS recordings. Rock and roll, soul, R & B, some rap and hip-hop, and religious and gospel music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had been kept in storage, along with many films and old TV shows. And of course, the video of the Apocalypse, plagues, and battles of the Last War, which were still replayed every year on the anniversary.

"The Trine still belongs to your family, right?" I asked. "When Rupert nodded, I said, "Your great-great-grandfather bought a lot of land after the Last Battle, paying pennies on the dollar. And Ciana saw something on the Trine that might have been a daywalker."

"Or might not," Audric cautioned.

"And these stones came from the Trine."

"Maybe," Audric said, the voice of reason, the devil's advocate, though that phrase was fraught with meaning.

I ignored him. "So the Trine may be the glue in all that's happening, including Lucas' attack. Does anything else about the Trine come to mind?" I asked, proud that I sounded reasonable and calm, though I was still half aware of Lolo's chant just below my normal hearing, an insulation from the stone.

Rupert thought a moment. "I remember mining companies offered to buy land or mineral rights, back when Grampa was young, before the ice made it all inaccessible. Far as I know, he turned them down and we never heard anything else about it."

He tapped an ear, sending a silver earring swinging, and met my eyes. "The Trine didn't always look like it does now," he explained. "Once it was a single rounded hill with a lower elevation. Its trees were harvested to build the railroad in the early nineteen hundreds. It was farmed, stripped bare, and left fallow several times. At the first plague, it was a residential area. In Mole Man's war, the peaks blasted up from the earth, raised by the battles underground. With the ice cap so thick, it would be dangerous to try to get up there."

I had seen ice caps up close on the trek home from the swap meet, miniglaciers, sheets of ice hundreds of feet thick. Gaps had formed on all the highest peaks of the Appalachians, and recently, one had caused a disaster. Midsummer, unexpected temperatures in the sixties had undermined the caps. One had shifted and slid, burying an entire town, killing everyone. No one had even attempted to dig the town out from the thousands of tons of ice and debris.

Now there was talk of solutions. So far, there were three possibilities. The first two involved getting seraph help or neo-mage help to melt ice caps that threatened towns. The third method was evacuation. Acquiring seraph assistance might be impossible, due to their current lack of interest in human affairs. Contracting with mages was going to be expensive. Very expensive. One town, upon hearing the cost of neomage help, had simply packed up and moved, abandoning everything. Evacuating had left its well-off citizens nearly penniless refugees. Saving Mineral City could leave us equally broke.

The elders had held several town meetings but a course of action hadn't been decided upon. If accord was reached to get mage help, I was hoping I had time to get away before anyone came. An extended vacation to a tropical isle sounded a lot better than almost certain death.

"Lucas wants to buy neomage help," Rupert said, "using our inheritance to pay for it. He wants to offer the town a loan they can pay back over twenty years. Jason wants to sell it to the highest bidder and run, and let the new town owners worry about the ice. He needs money, as usual, and sees saving the town as wasting his nest egg. And then there's this one town leader who wants to buy the town at pennies on the dollar."

"What about you?" Jacey asked, settling into a cushioned chair with needle and thread. She began beading a patterned, punctured strip of leather with glass seed beads.

"I sided with Lucas in paying for mages."

Unable to help myself, I picked up a lavender stone, one side almost fuzzy with crystalline shavings. Light from bulbs and from the high alley windows seemed to be trapped in the stone. Power called to me from within it, pulsing with something close to life. That something was almost creation power, but wasn't, not quite. Lolo's block insulated me from it, but still, the might stored in the stone pulled at me, singing a haunting melody.

"Mineral rights, huh?" Audric said. "Bet a mining company would love to have the rights to this. For that matter, I'd like them, but I'm tapped out for the next five years with the salvage of Sugar Grove. If a big mining company knew about this much stone, they'd strip the mountain bare to get it. And they could pay for neomage help to do it too."

A spurt of possessiveness wrenched through me at his words. This is mine! I turned the stone again to the light, one palm cupping it tenderly. This piece was larger than my two hands, a flame-shaped rock, its light spilling out between my fingers. Warmth ran down my arms like honey.

"There's only one question that really gets me about all this," Rupert said, "and that's why, if Grampa knew the stone was on the Trine, he didn't mine it himself. And why is it in lead-lined boxes, soldered shut? Lucas had to open them, and then had to figure out how to solder them shut again, and my brother isn't the most handy man. And where did Lucas find them? I've been over that house with a fine-tooth comb several times since Grampa died."

"That's more than one question," Jacey said complacently.

"Maybe you should call your gramma and ask her all that," Audric suggested.

Rupert shivered dramatically at the thought. "Over my cold, dead, and decaying body."

"Okay. I see that point." Audric grinned. "So start with your grampa."

"He's dead," Rupert said, being deliberately difficult.

"Start with his papers," I said. "He never threw anything away. You could try to get all of them and search them first."

The three glanced at one another, a shared look of warning and worry that concerned and excluded me. Jacey's eyes were positively accusing, and way too speculative. She stabbed the piece of leather with special force. "What?" I asked.

Audric tapped one of the metal ammo boxes on the workbench. "That's what's in this one. Rupert's grandfather's estate papers. Lots of them. We were talking about them while you were… elsewhere."

Oops.

"We could call for a seraphic investigation," Rupert said. "If enough of us make the call, like Lucas' new wife did, then they'd have to come. And then we can ask about the peaks and the ice caps too."

No seraphs. Not in Mineral City.

"You think he really married her?" Jacey asked, redirecting the flow of conversation.

"No. Jane's a head case. Lucas knew that."

"We have an alternative," Audric said. "A state cop." The two men shared a glance.

"Thaddeus Bartholomew," Rupert said. "We met yesterday. I didn't particularly like him, but of the cops who stopped in after Lucas' attack, he was the least obnoxious. He's a Hand of the Law, which gives him more contacts than the local cops have, so maybe…"

I overlooked the hesitation in Rupert's voice, set down the stone, and took a deep breath, the first breath I remembered for hours. Calling in the kylen was dangerous for me, but the alternative was a death sentence. "Call him. He's staying at the hotel, he isn't seraphic, and he can help."

"And why don't you want to call in a seraph?" The look of suspicion on Jacey's face was unwavering.

"Because if a seraph makes a proclamation, we're stuck with it even if we don't like it. And because a seraph, if one comes, might decide that Mineral City deserves punishment," I said. When a seraph pulled a sword in punishment, people died. Lots of people, nearly half of them, all of them over the age of six. And a seraph would recognize me in a heartbeat. But I kept that part to myself. I had given something away today, something about me, about my heritage.

"No seraphs. Not yet." Audric sided with me, but he too had a certain speculative look about him.

I pulled the jumpsuit back on. "You may want to wrap that rock up and put it in the storeroom," I said, casual words and casual tone, giving away none of the discord I felt at the thought of the lovely rock being put away in the cold and dark. "It's valuable enough that it shouldn't be left lying around."

From a bag of rough, I pulled a hunk of moss agate in soft shades of green. I had last worked the rough six months ago, but now held it to the light and turned on the wet saw. The roaring whine shut out my friends. I settled safety glasses on my face and chose a triangular segment to crop free. Securing the rock in clamps, I maneuvered the whirring blade and began the tedious drudgery of cutting small beads.

I was aware the moment the others wrapped up my amethyst and put it away. Pretending I was free of its call was a fool's lie. I longed for the stone. Hungered.