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  The wet heat of his mouth threatened to set the magic humming along her veins again. Or was this a different sort of warmth? This didn’t burn. It quivered. And it soothed all her scorched places.

  He stroked his tongue over the sensitive inner skin of her finger and sucked on it, gently at first, then harder and harder, drawing her tight inside herself. Slowly, he drew her finger out of his mouth, sucking all the while, and her nipples tightened into hard little peaks. But she wasn’t cold. If anything, she was too hot.

  “A little more,” he said, still watching her. “For safety.”

  She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only watch as he squeezed a bit more blood from her finger and curled his tongue around it, caressing long after the blood was gone. He trailed his tongue back down the length of her finger and probed the crease where it joined her hand. She shivered, whether from his touch or his gaze, she didn’t know.

  Jax sent his tongue swirling across her palm where blood had never touched and Amanusa let him, lost in the blue of his eyes and the shivery sensation of his teasing caress. With one last pulse of his tongue, he pressed a kiss to her palm, curving her hand around his face as if she caressed him in return.

  He let her go. She could pull her hand back, but Amanusa hesitated. His cheek was warm, bristled with two day’s growth of beard. Jax held absolutely motionless, his gaze fastened on her as she stroked her hand slowly up his jaw to touch the neat side whiskers in front of his ear, back down again, and away.

  He shuddered and, finally, blinked. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For—” He shuddered. “For not being Yvaine.”

  “That’s hardly any of my doing.” She rubbed her hand along the blanket’s rough wool to wipe away the sensations still tingling there as she brought it up to tuck beneath her cheek.

  “But the way you are not Yvaine—I am grateful.”

  “Now what?” Amanusa wanted to wipe away all the other tingly sensations, but didn’t want to scrub at her breasts with Jax there watching. What was wrong with her that she would feel so odd?

  “A brief wait.” Jax moved away from her in the deepening gloom inside the tent.

  She watched him spread the tarp on the ground in front of the door flap and lie down on it. “Why the wait?”

  “Yvaine told me once that it is possible to ride the blood from the first moments, once the magic is safely contained. But those early moments tend to be disorienting. It is better to wait five or ten minutes for the blood to escape the stomach and find the veins. Once your blood has entered someone, it will answer you until you call it back.”

  “I see,” Amanusa said, though she didn’t. But she would. “Has it been long enough?”

  “Not yet.”

  She rolled to her back, staring at the canvas overhead. After a time, she asked, “The protection around the tent—how does it work? Do people… run into a wall?”

  “No.” His smile showed in the deepening gloom, sounded in that one word. “If a person means you no harm, they can pass. If they intend harm however, it turns them aside. Sends them in a circle around us, or back the way they came. Or convinces them they didn’t want to come here to begin with.”

  “Like you trying to leave my cottage?”

  “Much like that, yes.”

  Amanusa fell silent again. She’d never been much good at waiting. She wasn’t used to the thick darkness gathering in the tent, either. In her cottage, the fire’s night-banked glow gave off enough light to see shadows. She could see almost nothing at all now, not even Crow’s black shape as he rustled atop her medicine chest.

  Her hands were clasped over her middle, she realized, her thumb rubbing over the tiny, lingering pain in her pierced fingertip. Not so much because it hurt, but the memory of Jax’s mouth—she shivered and set the thought firmly aside.

  “Are you ready?” His voice came floating out of the darkness, carried on the whisper of Crow’s feathers.

  “More than.”

  “Close your eyes—”

  “Why?” Amanusa interrupted. “It’s too dark to see anything. I see the same thing with them closed or open.”

  Jax chuckled. “Suit yourself then. These are your words: Blood of my blood, answer my call—”

  She repeated them and went on, asking for vision, truth, understanding as she rode. Again she felt the magic rise. The slow warmth inside her spiraled out, reaching for part of herself that was somewhere else.

  “Do you feel the magic?” Jax asked. “Your blood inside me?”

  “Yes.” Speaking was easier this time.

  “Catch hold of it.”

  Amanusa didn’t ask how. She doubted Jax knew. Instead she stretched toward that other warmth and the two pieces snapped together like the magnets she’d seen at local fairs. “I have it,” she said when he didn’t react.

  “Good.” He cleared his throat. “Now follow the magic inside and have a look ‘round. Please don’t interfere with anything—I took enough blood you should be able to tell if you inadvertently stop my heart or—or turn off my liver. But I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I shall be very careful.” Amanusa saw her mental self tucking her hands in her pockets and the magic seemed to pull tighter. Now, how did she follow it inside?

  The thought seemed to be sufficient, for she was moving, seeming to shrink, speeding along in a small warm space. Jax’s veins? But how could she look—

  Again, the thought sufficed. There was Jax’s heart, pounding away, a bit frantically it seemed to her. She didn’t know the other organs when she looked at them, their names or what they did, but they seemed to be working nicely together. Only the racing of his heart seemed worrisome.

  Relax, she thought at him, afraid to touch anything even to soothe. I won’t hurt you.

  She didn’t know if he heard her, but it seemed to help. His heartbeat slowed. She wandered through his body, looking at everything. He appeared to be an astonishingly healthy man. Not that she knew what to look for, precisely, but nothing looked wrong.

  The magic showed her a clean red-orange glow in his legs and back. When she looked closer, she understood that she saw the ache of their past few days of climbing mountains, living rough, carrying the medicine case on his back. He was fine.

  The magic could show her hidden thoughts, Jax had said. It could reveal a man’s secrets. Amanusa turned from body to mind and the landscape changed.

  She didn’t know how she did it, she just made it happen. She saw Teo shouting at her and felt a fierce protectiveness so strong it startled her. Protection, not possession. Jax saw himself as her possession, not the other way ‘round. His calm acceptance of it bothered her.

  She could see flickers of the moment Jax took her blood and turned away. Her own reaction bothered her enough. She didn’t want to know his. Instead, she went the other way, into the past. Beyond the moment Teo and his fellow rebels appeared, before the moment of their meeting when she towered terrible and beautiful over his kneeling form.

  Terrible and beautiful? She wasn’t—but she couldn’t deny that to Jax she was, or had been at that moment.

  Amanusa pushed on, sifting quickly through his wandering in the forest—for weeks, it appeared. There he was getting off the train in Nagy Szeben. Truth spoken about that. But when she tried to push further into his past, the memories began to crumble in her hands.

  Amanusa couldn’t get more than a flash of anything. Why?

  She pulled back to look, moving somehow up as well as out. She saw a great, seething mass of—of magic squatting in the midst of his mind like some vast warty toad.

  The magic that dead Yvaine had filled him with.

  Was it just the textbook she’d turned him into, or was the binding part of it? Whichever it was, Amanusa didn’t dare tinker with it. Not until she knew what she was doing.

  Carefully, she withdrew from his thoughts, following the magic toward her own body until the two pieces parted with a faint pin
g.

  Jax gasped. “Are you done?”

  “For now. Until I know more.” Possibilities and potential bloomed in her mind. “Teach me how to call the blood back to me.”

  “Yes, Miss.” Quiet noises in the darkness told her he approached. “There is no need of it.”

  “I want to know how. I find—” She broke off. She didn’t owe him an explanation. But she wanted to give him one. “The thought of being privy to someone’s innermost thoughts any time I wish… disturbs me.”

  “Of course.” He knelt beside her cot again. “You can use the lancet, but as the brier scratches from yesterday are not yet healed, they will do. These are the words.”

  Amanusa spoke the words he gave her and the metallic smell of blood rose again in the tent, bringing with it the tingle of magic. “Can you feel it?” she whispered. “The magic?”

  “No.” Jax knelt so close she could feel the faint puff of his breath on her cheek. “Now take the blood back to yourself.”

  She groped for his hand in the darkness, bumping his nose. He placed his hand in hers and she brought it to her mouth. Amanusa refused to put on a show like he had, merely swiping her tongue across the pad of his thumb. But he’d scratched more than just his thumb.

  “Be sure you get it all.” His voice sounded rough. “It can be dangerous to leave any behind.”

  He couldn’t lie to her. He could perhaps fail to tell her everything, but he couldn’t lie. She knew that from her journey inside him. Amanusa carefully licked clean all the bleeding scratches on his hand, reminding herself of a cat washing its kitten. Except Jax was no kitten. She thrust this thought away as well. The magic sighed, then folded away somewhere to sleep, like a banked fire, waiting to be stirred to life again.

  She lay back on the cot, her mind whirling. Now, finally after all these years, she could know real magic.

  And she could have justice.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning, Jax woke with the sun, as usual, with an odd sensation thrumming through his insides, one that was not usual at all. It wasn’t contentment, though that was present and distinctly unusual, but he could account for that.

  Yvaine’s command to find her apprentice no longer harried him. He’d found her, and the new sorceress was a much gentler mistress than Yvaine had ever been, even before the magic began to eat her. No, this peculiarity was something other.

  Jax crept carefully out of the tent, putting on his “stupid” face, and rushed through his ablutions in the morning’s chill, still pondering what felt so odd. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, he thought, as he carried the big kettle to the stream and filled it, Crow flying along to keep him company. The feeling hummed along his veins, whispering through his blood—

  The blood. That was it. He carried Miss Whitcomb’s blood in his veins. No—she’d called her blood back. This was her magic he still carried.

  He hauled the kettle back to camp and hung it on the hook over the fire he’d stirred up and rebuilt, then he stood over it, guarding it. The outlaws’ women would steal the water for themselves before it was properly hot if he didn’t stand watch. The men thought it was funny when he chased them off with animalistic roars and flapping arms. Jax didn’t mind their laughter if it meant he could have plenty of hot water for Miss Whitcomb when she woke.

  The magic burbled merrily through his veins, seeming almost to burst into song, now he’d recognized it for what it was. It poked into all his corners, polishing away all the dust and rust, putting things into proper order again. Jax shook himself, feeling the bindings settle into place, like harness around a plow horse after a winter’s snooze in the barn.

  Except he didn’t feel much like a plow horse. This magic was different. He felt more as if—as if armor were fastening around him, like some knight’s fine destrier being prepared for battle. Or… could it be possible?… as if he were the knight himself, arming in preparation for some noble quest.

  Could this be how Miss Whitcomb saw him? Not as some living tool or a beast of burden, but as a—a man. A protector.

  Jax scarcely dared think it. He knew the magic held the mark, the flavor of the one who wielded it. This was likely why Yvaine had wanted her apprentice to ride his blood as soon as possible, so that his binding could shift from the old master to the new. But such a change—

  He had to remind himself to stoop and shuffle as he dipped the heated water into Miss Whitcomb’s ewer. His spine kept wanting to straighten with… pride. He thought he’d forgotten how it felt, but here it came, creeping back again. Would this sorceress think it as dangerous as the last one had?

  Jax carried the water into the tent and set it on the table he’d moved inside, Crow walking in behind him to caw a good-morning to his mistress. Jax left again to collect breakfast while Miss Whitcomb performed her own morning ablutions. When he returned with her porridge—he’d wolfed his own by the outlaws’ fire to maintain his idiot’s illusion—he began tidying the tiny canvas residence, rolling up his tarpaulin from the spot before the entrance.

  As he bent to stow his bedroll out of the way beneath Miss Whitcomb’s cot, he paused. The space was filled with rows of bottles and jars. All the things Miss Whitcomb had brought in her box of medicaments.

  “Hand me another jar of the wound salve, will you?” She spoke from behind him.

  “Certainly.” Jax did as she asked. She asked. The thought made him smile and gave him the daring to ask. “Why is the salve under your cot and not in the box?”

  “I needed the box for something else.” She hesitated at the doorway, seeming to consider before reaching a decision. “Take a look and see if you know what it is.”

  “Yes, Miss Whitcomb.” He bobbed his head and watched her go, Crow hopping behind her, begging for bread. Morning sick call would come after she saw to the man in the hospital shelter. He would have time to do her bidding and still be at her side when the sick and the malingering gathered.

  Jax quickly finished tidying the small space and lifted the box onto the cot for a better look. Inside, he saw a bizarre metal contraption. The metal sheen of its central globe was pitted with a rusty-black corrosion, but despite its degraded appearance, the thing made his skin crawl.

  Swallowing down revulsion, he reached past the rayed spokes on either side with care and touched it. Instantly, his finger burned like ice, then went numb. With a yelp, he jerked it back and popped it instinctively into his mouth. His lips and tongue went cold, then numb, and he yanked his finger out again.

  Miss Whitcomb came bursting into the tent. “What happened?”

  “I touched it.” Somehow he managed to speak understandably, even with frozen lips and tongue. He frowned. “How did you know?”

  “I felt it.” Now she frowned. “I thought I called my blood back from you.” She lifted his hand, studying the damaged finger.

  It was blistered at the tip where he’d touched the metal monstrosity. White and dead-looking, then red and inflamed down to the first knuckle, and pale until it joined his hand where he could feel again.

  “You did. It’s the nagic.” Jax tried again. “N-nagic.” An “m” was apparently harder to say with numb lips than other sounds.

  Miss Whitcomb turned his face toward her, squeezing his cheeks to purse his lips. “At least your lips don’t look blistered. Let me see your tongue.”

  Obediently, he put it out to show her. Yvaine would never have bothered. It felt strange, having Miss Whitcomb look so intently at his mouth.

  “I don’t understand.” She sank back on her heels, kneeling on the flattened grass flooring the tent. “How can I feel what you do? I called my blood back. And why did the machine thing freeze you? I touched it. I held it against my stomach. It made me queasy, but it didn’t make blisters.”

  She raised up to flip the box closed and latch it. “Where’s the lancet? I want to lock this thing away, put a protective seal around it.”

  “Here.” Jax dragged her carpetbag from beneath the cot and found the la
ncet for her.

  He marveled as, this time, the new sorceress lanced her own finger and spoke new words, changing those used to weave protection around their tent to ward against the evil of the thing in the box and hide it from the unwary.

  “Now,” she said. “Explain.”

  Jax blinked, eyelids fluttering without his conscious volition as he tried to find a way to do as she demanded. He felt magic welling up from the crumbled ruins of his memory to grip his thoughts.

  “No.” Miss Whitcomb’s nails dug into his arm, her hand gripped his face as she shook him. “I want answers from Jax, not Yvaine. I do not want to hear Yvaine speak. Not unless I ask for her knowledge specifically. Do you understand, you old besom?”

  His blinking slowed as the surge of magic ebbed. He hiccuped, feeling light-headed and a bit fizzy in his belly region. “I nay not ve avle to exblain everything,” he ventured.

  “Tell me what you know, what you suspect, and we’ll figure out the rest, as much as we can.” She got off the grass to sit on the cot, patting the space beside her.

  “Szabo’s men will wonder what we do in here so long.” Jax sat where she indicated, feeling strange at this semblance of equality between them. They were not equal.

  “Let them wonder. They would wonder more at our conversation.”

  He dipped his head at the truth of her words.

  “Why did I feel it when your hand was hurt?” She began her questioning.

  “Nagic.” The numbness was wearing off a bit, making his lips tingle and burn. “Vecause I an your vlood servant. The nagic-n-m-magic is different. I am vound to you.”

  He gasped as his finger began to burn fiercely. Miss Whitcomb’s gasp echoed his. She captured his hand, enclosing his injured digit in the hollow between her palms, but when that didn’t help, lifted it toward her mouth.

  “No.” Jax jerked his hand free. “Zat’s how ny nouth went numb.”

  “But it hurts.”