Bloodring

by Faith Hunter

  "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.

  Chapter 16

  The mage-heat was gone. Once I was sober enough to stand, I cleaned up the conjure implements and dressed in my work clothes, layers of leggings and two sweaters. I laid out more formal clothes for kirk and cooked mixed whole-grain cereal and ate it with yogurt. I needed to run errands—groceries, the laundromat, the library, and the shoe repair shop. I could add all that to my social calendar in place of dating and making whoopee, now that the mage-heat had cooled.

  By eight a.m. I was in the workshop, wearing a mask, protective goggles, ear protectors and my well-worn jumpsuit over my clothes, excising and drilling stones for the focal beads and pendants that attracted so much attention in the jewelry markets. In a few days, I would have cut enough to start the tedious process of carving, shaping, and polishing.

  The scent of hot metal was a tang in the air, almost obscuring the underlying smells of machine oil, gas logs, and acetylene from the torches. Rupert and Audric were working on settings, bezels, and mountings, production work for the jewelry we sold by the tens and hundreds from the online catalogue. It was our bread and butter, but it was boring work, as boring as drilling and tumbling the smaller stones, which I still had to do. Hardly creative. Not nearly as fun to make as t
he exclusive designs we created for particular customers or the unique items for retail shops that carried our work. For those, a customer had to shop in Thorn's Gems itself, or in the few upscale retail stores that stocked our merchandise in cities such as Boca Raton and Atlanta, or commission their own pieces. Thorn's Gems could afford to be picky.

  Using a diamond wet saw and wet drill, I cut, drilled, and examined for stability four citrine ovals and six free-form peridot pieces that would eventually be buttercups and leaves, stones both delicate and chunky for Emmanuelle Beasley, the film business's newest female action star. She wanted the stones mounted on a gold chain that was shaped like little handcuffs. Whatever. She had money enough to dictate anything she wanted.

  By the time I was ready for a break, I was globbed with stone dust and water that splattered whenever I used the equipment. I wiped it from the clock face, satisfied that I still had some time before I had to dress for kirk, and I retrieved the bloodstone I wanted to shape and carve for an amulet. I turned it over, envisioning a cat curled in sleep. This one wouldn't be drilled to hang as a pendant. Rather, I'd wrap it with wire and secure it with leather thongs. The final design of the necklace was coming together.

  I clamped the stone into a padded vise, a design of my own, used when I wanted to secure a stone but didn't want to risk scoring it with the hatch marks of the vise faces. Mage-sight half open, I started working the stone with delicate tools.

  I placed the chisel against the lower edge where the cat's face and front paws would emerge and tapped it with the hammer. From the storeroom, I saw a soft tendril of lavender energy rise. I ignored it and tapped again. I had been drunk with power already once today and was still feeling woozy. No way was I going to use the amethyst again.

  As if hearing me, the tendril curled away and formed into an eye, which blinked once. The lavender fug of energy wisped flat and then shaped into a hand, fingers long and elegant. It beckoned, pleading.