New Blood Page 8

  “It shouldn’t.” He shook his head. “I mean, it shouldn’t hurt you! I was vound closely to Yvaine and she never suffered like this. You should ve able to block the pain, if not the awareness. Gather your nagic, the nagic vetween us, the magic that binds me.”

  “It’s not my magic. It’s Yvaine’s magic that binds you.”

  Did she still protest the truth—that she was already blood sorceress? Even after accepting the mantle and riding his blood?

  “It’s yours now,” he said. “Your blood brought your magic to my bindings.” His lips burned. Not as ferociously as his finger, but bad enough. Still, the fact that he could feel them made it easier to talk. He spoke faster, anxious to stop the pain Miss Whitcomb so obviously felt. She panted, her eyes wide with fear and pain.

  “Do you have it?” He touched her arm with his uninjured hand to get her attention.

  She nodded, swallowing hard. “I think so.”

  “Only part of the magic lets the pain through. Separate out that part and cut it off.”

  Jax watched her internal struggle play out in her eyes, in squints and gasps and tensing of this muscle or that, and he wished he could help her. He wished he understood the magic better so he could give more specific instructions. It was part of the binding, he knew, to care about his mistress’s well being. But her kindness gave it something extra. He didn’t want to cause her pain.

  “I can’t—cut it off,” she panted finally. “But I think I can—” Her whole face and body screwed tight with effort and abruptly she relaxed, slumping against him, her head falling limp onto his shoulder.

  Alarm skittered through Jax. “M-miss Whitcomb?”

  “I’m fine, Jax.” She stayed where she was another moment, a warm weight against his side, before pushing herself upright. “I couldn’t cut the magic off, but I could squeeze it down so that almost nothing gets through. It hurts so much. How can you bear it?” Her eyes swam with compassionate tears.

  Jax shrugged. His whole hand felt inflamed, throbbing agony with each beat of his heart. What else could he do but bear it?

  His sorceress cupped his wounded finger again. He didn’t think to stop her before she closed her hand around it. “Whatever happened to your finger, it’s not spreading to me,” she observed.

  “Why not?” Jax opened her hand with his other, looking for burns, but it was pale and perfect—well, it was rough and callused with work, but perfect for her.

  Miss Whitcomb shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  This time, when she carried his finger to her mouth, he didn’t jerk away, though he watched anxiously. She put out her tongue and touched just the pointed tip of it to the blister. It was the most erotic thing Jax had seen in—in as long as he couldn’t remember, past the holes in his ruined mind. He was as certain of that as he was of the stirring in his long-dormant body, stirring he fought to stifle. She might feel it with him, and know he hadn’t been precisely truthful about everything.

  Yvaine hadn’t quite rendered him eunuch. She hadn’t minded his arousal. But it had been so long since anything had tempted Jax to such a state…

  “No.” Miss Whitcomb’s voice broke into his thoughts, went shuddering through him. “My tongue doesn’t feel affected either.”

  Jax slammed his eyes shut and squeezed them tight as she closed her mouth over the tip of his finger.

  She’d done his thumb the same way last night when reclaiming her blood, but it had been different in the dark. Worse. And better. Being able to see her made it different. More arousing. Much more. Hugely, tremendously more.

  “Am I hurting you?”

  “No.” Jax choked the word out, easing his damp finger from her grip. “On the contrary. It feels much better.”

  He opened his eyes to examine his injury. The blister looked the same size, but older. Almost ready to slough off the dead skin. He rubbed the dampness across his lips, easing the burn there. “Thank you.”

  “Why didn’t it burn me?” she asked, turning on the cot to face him more fully, folding one foot beneath her.

  “I don’t know. You said the thing made you queasy?”

  She nodded, looking thoughtful. “The outlaws seemed to handle it without it affecting them at all. But it did. The thing sucked at their life…” She frowned, an adorable crease forming between her brows. “No. That sounds as if it fed on their life energy and it didn’t. It… ate away their life. Killed them by inches, like—like floodwaters on a riverbank, cutting the earth away. But a river carries the earth downstream to deposit elsewhere. That thing… destroyed what it touched. More like fire consumes. But slowly.”

  She looked up at Jax. “Does that make any sense at all to you?”

  “The burn felt more like ice than fire.” He couldn’t think what else to say. “You should let Yvaine speak. I don’t remember things.” And it frustrated him.

  “No. Not here.” Miss Whitcomb was thinking again, chewing on her lower lip as she frowned. “It’s too dangerous to have you out of commission. The thing was… anti-life. And anti-magic as well. The opposite of magic. But… I’m the sorceress, aren’t I? I’m the one with the magic.”

  “You’re the one with the power,” Jax said, beginning to make a bit more sense of it. “I’m little more than a bag of bones tied together with magical strings. Your strings. It’s your power in the magic that binds me.”

  “So it was… trying to burn the magic out of you?” She gave him a worried look. “I agree that we want to—to clip your strings, but I don’t think this is the proper way to do it.”

  “Nor I.”

  “Oi!” A shout came from outside the tent in the language Miss Whitcomb said was Romanian, a rush of irritated words.

  “Maybe you need to learn a little patience, Nicu,” she shouted back, rolling her eyes at Jax, sharing her opinion. “I’ll be there when I’m ready.”

  More words followed, along with raucous and probably lewd laughter. Jax could understand the intent, if not the words. He wanted to go out and pound a few heads. But there were many more heads than a few out there, and if he got pounded back, or knifed, or shot, he couldn’t look out for Miss Whitcomb.

  She grabbed him by the hand and hauled him out of the tent behind her, displaying his still-inflamed finger to the shouters. “My servant burned himself,” she said. “I was treating his injury.”

  Teo, the brute who’d led the party that dragged Miss Whitcomb to the camp, shouted something.

  “But I care,” she retorted. “Jax is my servant, and I most certainly do care more about him than about you. About any of you. Now, if you want me to treat your scratches, get back over to the hospital and line up. I’m not treating a rowdy mob.”

  Teo reached for her, but Miss Whitcomb skipped out of his reach. One of the others shoved him back, talking fast in a joking tone, apparently hoping to keep the thug from taking offense. Jax could feel her trembling through her grip on his arm, but nothing showed where anyone else could see it. Gradually, the outlaws faded away and she let go of him.

  Instantly, Jax took her elbow to provide support. She could stand on her own against these outlaws, he had no doubt. But with him here, she didn’t have to.

  ———

  That day passed much as the days before and each one that came after. Costel continued to improve. It was evident to Amanusa that he would live, but Szabo refused to believe her. In truth, he probably did believe, but he refused to let her go until Costel walked out of the hospital tent under his own power. He was sitting up in bed, taking small steps while leaning heavily on Miruna to collapse in a camp chair. And with every improvement in Costel’s health seemed to come a corresponding deterioration in the mood of the camp.

  Not because of Costel’s health, but because of Teo’s inability to break Amanusa’s will. He could batter himself against it until the end of time, but she would never give in, and with every failure, his mood grew blacker. And when Teo was in a black mood, everyone suffered.

  “Why don’t
you just give in and give him what he wants?” Szabo asked one afternoon when Teo went snarling and stomping away yet again.

  “Because he wants me broken and whimpering at his feet,” she said calmly, picking up the no-longer-clean laundry Teo had dashed from her hands. “And that will never happen. Ever.”

  “He will kill you.”

  Amanusa shrugged. “Then he kills me. He will not break me.”

  She could sense Jax stiffen behind her in denial. His reaction made it harder for her to accept her fate calmly, as she always had before, because she felt his rebellion.

  “He will kill your idiot first,” Szabo growled. “Have a care for him if not for yourself.”

  Amanusa had to force another shrug, this time through her own pangs of denial. Her own life she could risk as she liked. It was not so easy to treat another’s life as unimportant. But Szabo—and the rest of them—could not be allowed to know it. “Then our bargain is broken and you have no healer. This is your problem to solve, old man.”

  She turned away and marched back to the stream to rewash the clothing, leaving the bandit leader muttering to himself.

  “A woman should not be so strong!” he shouted after her.

  “A man should be strong enough not to fear a woman’s strength,” Jax muttered, startling a laugh from Amanusa.

  “When did you become so wise?” she asked, shooting him a teasing glance from beneath her lashes.

  Jax gave her a crooked smile in return, after first checking to be sure no one was near. “After a very long and painful education.” He winked, then his face lost all its humor. “This place is becoming too dangerous.”

  “Teo is becoming too dangerous.”

  He took the laundry from her hands and knelt beside the frigid mountain stream. He kept insisting on actually doing a servant’s job. But this time…

  “Let me do that,” Amanusa said. “You stand watch. I don’t trust that man not to come after me when he thinks no one is looking.”

  This time, Jax gave up the task without argument. Doubtless he too thought Teo might ambush them. “We must leave.”

  “I can’t. Not until Szabo says I may.”

  “No, I mean leave. Go to England, to Scotland and Yvaine’s tower. Szabo has no power there.”

  Leave Transylvania? Leave her cottage and… “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Jax sounded at his wit’s end. “Your friends will understand. We can replace whatever—”

  Amanusa shook her head, swallowing down the churning in her stomach. “It’s not—I haven’t got any friends. Not true ones. I—”

  “What?” he snapped. “What could possibly be more important than your life?”

  “Justice.”

  The word seemed to echo in the forest, against the mountain walls beyond the trees. It sent Crow fluttering up from his pecking at the ground to land in a tree. He cawed a question.

  “Or maybe revenge. I don’t know.” Amanusa pulled Jax’s shirt from the water before she scrubbed a hole through it. She poured the emotion crashing through her into the effort of wringing it dry. “These people hurt me. They owe me. I won’t leave until I collect what they owe. I swore it, Jax. I will have justice for the wrongs they’ve done me.”

  She looked up at him, standing tall and stalwart above her on the bank and called his eyes to her by the force of her will. “Teach me this magic, Jax. Teach me justice. Tonight.”

  Slowly he nodded, holding her gaze. “If you wish it of me, I will. But know this. It is a powerful magic, one that requires great strength of will to control.”

  “Do you believe I have the strength?”

  “Yes,” he said. “If you have the will to use it.”

  “I have it.” She did. She truly did not want revenge, but justice. She understood the difference. She wouldn’t let old grief get in the way.

  “Then I will teach you.”

  “Tonight,” Amanusa said. “In case Yvaine needs to speak.”

  ———

  The glories of Paris opened up before the pearly, mist-shrouded glow of the dawning sun, spreading a sumptuous feast before the eyes of any awake at this hour to see. The working people of the city, those not already hard at their labors, paused for a breath to see what the city offered up. Others, stumbling home after a night’s sinning, knew only that the sky lightened, and scurried like roaches for the darkness.

  A few, who had been striving all night for answers to seemingly unsolvable puzzles, welcomed the dawn’s light as a possible end to their struggle. The battle was far from won, but weary warriors deserved—required—a little rest before they could rise again to fight on.

  A quartet of these paladins paused on the doorstep of the anonymous building around the corner from the Bourse to take in the sky’s pastel glow.

  “Get what rest you can, gentlemen.” The senior of the party settled his top hat in place on his balding head and passed a hand over the luxuriant mustachios decorating his face, smoothing any stray hairs back into place. “We’ll go hard at it again this afternoon.”

  “You lads may be going hard at it,” the neat, slender man said as he began a glide down the steps of the building. “I, however, do not intend to waste my first visit to Paris in not seeing Paris. I will be… in Paris.” He flourished his walking stick as he bowed.

  “You can’t, Grey,” the older man protested. “You’re magister of the English conjurers. We need you at the meeting.”

  “Whyever for?” Grey waited while the others descended to join him in the street.

  “To represent the conjurers!”

  “Relax, Billy.” The stocky man in the bowler hat, whose expensive suit strained across his shoulders, moved between the two men. “If ‘e don’t want to come, an’ you make ‘im, ‘e’ll just kick ‘is ‘eels and sulk and be no use to anybody. Not that he’s much good to anybody now.”

  Grey crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out at the well-dressed Cockney, who rolled his eyes but ignored him otherwise.

  “Sir William, no.” The fourth man in the party spoke up. “If England’s conjurer fails to attend, we’ll be blamed if this conclave fails—and I can’t see how it can succeed against such a foe. We face nothing less than death itself.”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Nigel.” Sir William adjusted his frock coat on his angular frame, a stork settling ruffled feathers. “Henry is right. Grey will be worthless. He’s rarely anything else,” he muttered, loud enough to be heard. Grey grinned.

  “But—” Sir William lifted an admonishing finger. “I expect you to use this… expedition to sweep the rubbish from that indolent brain of yours and usher in some fresh ideas. Ideas which I expect to hear promptly.”

  The younger man, who wasn’t quite so young as he seemed at first exposure, gave the group a cheeky salute and sauntered off down the street in the general direction of the river.

  “He’ll be drunk as Dick’s cat when he returns.” Nigel, who towered over even Sir William’s considerable height, but otherwise possessed few distinguishing features, watched Grey’s departure with an expression that hovered somewhere between disapproval and envy.

  “Won’t affect him none,” Henry said, shifting his shoulders until the seams of his coat threatened to burst. “Just like stayin’ up all night arguin’ didn’t bother ‘im. ‘E’s fresh as a daisy, that one. I expect ‘e will come back drunk, with ‘alf a dozen new ideas to take to the conclave.”

  Sir William eyed the powerfully built man with a sour expression. “Henry Tomlinson, I swear you abandon your grammar and drop your H’s just to annoy me. I know you’ve been educated better than that.”

  Henry grinned. “It’s why I call you Billy, too.”

  “I am past being annoyed by that.” Sir William assembled his dignity. “Come. Let us return to the hotel and get some sleep. The meetings will begin promptly at half of three.”

  “Actually—” Henry fell into step beside the other men. “I thought I might take another look at the dead pat
ch here in Paris. There’s metal left in ‘em. Earth, water, fire. My elements. I know I’ve studied the patches in London an’ Manchester an’ such, but maybe this one’s different. Or maybe it’s the same. I dunno. I want to look again. Seems to me the more we know, the better.”

  “Yes, all right.” Sir William nodded, thinking as he walked. “But don’t venture into the zone itself. Not unless you take someone with you. Someone without magic. One of the serv—”

  “Sir.” A small woman in a modest gray walking dress, her hair tucked away beneath her bonnet, blocked their path.

  “Oh, for—” Sir William broke off in exasperation. “What are you doing in Paris, Elinor? Go home. I am not going to take you as my apprentice.”

  “Then I shall apply to one of the other master wizards.” Her chin tipped up, firmed with determination. “Someone will have the vision to accept what I can do.”

  “Here? The continental councils are even more conservative than we are in England. Give it up. You will never be accepted to the Magician’s Council. No woman will.” He pushed past her, the other men following suit. “Go home where you belong.”

  “I will never give up,” she called after them. “You need me. England needs women on its council. The world needs women among their magicians.”

  “Go home, Elinor,” Sir William bellowed without turning around. He shook his head wearily. “That woman will be the death of me,” he muttered. “I wish I’d never taught her anything. I never thought she’d be serious about it.”

  “She’s your daughter?” Henry raised a brow in surprise.

  “Goddaughter. Distant cousin, or niece of some sort. Parents are good people, though her mother’s a bit of a radical. Female education and all that.”

  “Women.” Nigel’s feet slapped the pavement. “Why can’t they just keep to their place?”

  “Don’t they realize?” Sir William’s frown deepened. “Magic is dangerous.”

  “Life is dangerous,” Henry said slowly. “How many women die in childbirth every year?”

  Both the other men frowned. As wizards, they would know intimately just how dangerous a woman’s life could be.