“Everything’s changed.” He drew up his knees. Something in his eyes clicked off. He was a million miles away. “This isn’t my world. Not anymore. Not the one I remember from before.”
“Before Rasmus, you mean?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Before him.” She didn’t like this reflective Xia. It meant he had depth, and it was much easier to dislike someone you thought was shallow and egotistical. “I don’t know the rules anymore. If I ever knew them. And if there are new ones, I’m not sure I want to follow them.”
“I’m sorry.”
He drew a long, slender finger along the blade of his knife. The gesture was oddly loving, and yet she didn’t care to know what thoughts were in his head while he did that. She could practically see sparks leaping between the tip of his finger and the bluish surface. “I know. But you’re still a witch,” he said softly. “Your kind murder my kind, and if you don’t kill us, you enslave us.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. There was a lot she didn’t understand about the world he and Harsh lived in, but she knew herself and she knew others like her, and none of them had ever dreamed of anything like that. “I don’t do those things.”
He looked at her with eyes that were a little bit sad. “You’re a witch, Alexandrine.”
“That’s not fair.” She was annoyed to be lumped in with slavers and murderers when she’d never, never do something like that. Not even if she had the ability. “I’m not like that.”
“Believe what you want.” He looked up. No trace of a smile remained. “You have a goddamned talisman. So pardon me if I don’t bow down to your bleeding heart, lady.”
She pulled her legs up so she sat cross-legged on the chair. “I can’t do that kind of magic, Xia.”
“Like that makes any difference.”
“We’re sharing, right? You tell me some stuff, I tell you some stuff?”
“Yeah.”
If he was ex-mageheld, then for one thing, he wasn’t human. Was Not Human. And then there was that whole enslavement thing. Given that, he must have seen and done some awful things. That would screw with someone’s view of the world. Talk about some baggage. They had a lot in common. She could cut him some slack. If her biological father really did want to kill her, the plain fact was she needed more friends like Xia.
But she didn’t imagine he’d like what he was going to hear.
Chapter 8
When I was a teenager,” she said, “barely a teenager, really. I guess it wasn’t long after I turned twelve, a lot of strange things started happening to me. I got my first premonition about then. I thought I was going crazy, and I was too scared to tell anybody. My folks were realists. Stone cold. They didn’t believe in ESP or any of that crap. I tried to tell my mom, but she said it was all in my head and took me to the first of many counselors. My folks, the family that raised me, I mean, they didn’t have any magic. Complete normals, you’d say.”
“Vanilla.” Xia nodded and gazed at her. “Typical age to start training up a witch. Twelve or thirteen. That’s when the magic really comes on.” He clasped his hands behind his head. “Magellan started messing with Carson’s magic when she was younger than you were then, but even Rasmus thought that was sick.”
He talked about Carson like she was special to him. A girlfriend, maybe? But he also made it sound as if Carson was with Nikodemus. Even worse, then. Unrequited love. They were miles and miles apart, she and Xia. “I still have nightmares about what it was like back then. I really thought I was crazy.”
“Yeah?”
Their gazes met, and for a while there, she thought she might end up trapped in his eyes and never get free. A shudder went down her back. She had to remind herself he wasn’t human. Much as he looked human, he wasn’t. He was something else entirely. Her inability to interact with him as a nonhuman was a disadvantage. He didn’t have trouble making that distinction where she was concerned. “I got worse, and Mom hauled me off to doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors, and then Harsh disappeared. I found out that when I stopped talking, everyone liked that better. So I stopped talking about it. Everybody was happier that way. But none of it went away. I was still a freak.”
Xia continued playing with his knife. He probably wasn’t interested in hearing about her life. Why would he be? Better not to talk, right? Not talking made everyone happy: able to get on with their lives. Besides, there wasn’t much more to say that she was willing to share. The problem was, she wanted Xia to understand, and that meant she had to keep talking. Even if she didn’t want to.
“Go on,” he said softly. “I’m listening.”
If he’d spoken with even a hint of a smirk, she wouldn’t have said another word. But he hadn’t. “There are mage-kind who aren’t like Rasmus or Magellan. People like me who got discarded when we didn’t pass whatever the hell test they give when we’re three. Farmed out to normal families or given to relatives who don’t know what we are. Only we’re not normal kids, and some of us have more magic than you’d think.”
“Yeah, well, a mage is a mage is a mage is a mage, baby. You’re all the same inside.”
Her stomach clenched hard. She didn’t want Xia to keep hating her. “You’re wrong. Not only that, but there are also more of us than there are mages like Rasmus or Magellan. Mages like my birth father don’t mix with the proletariat; that’s for sure. We weren’t even sure magehelds weren’t all a big fable. And—”
He lifted his head to stare at her with an expression she couldn’t begin to decipher. “How many?”
“Of what? Oh, you mean like me?”
“Like you,” he said.
“In San Francisco, five or six that I know about. Maddy—she’s the strongest of us—she thinks there’s more who never find out what they are. They either go insane or they go on living normal lives and everybody’s happy.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. “That’s a fucking scary thought. That there are more of you out there.” He shook his head. “How’d you find out what you are?”
She made a face at him, but he was smiling, at least a little, so she didn’t put any attitude into her grimace. “I found my birth certificate in my mom’s stuff. I wasn’t getting along too well with my dad back then. I left home for good not long afterward. When I got out here, I started looking for my real parents. My biological mother is dead.” She let her head roll back. “So I went looking for my birth father.”
“That so?”
She snuck a glance at Xia to see how he was taking this. Hard to tell. He looked thoughtful. Maybe. “I found the adoption agency—it was here in the City—and they told me I was born in Turkey. That’s where I found out who he really is.” She hung her head. Talking about her past connected her with feelings that were rawer than she’d expected. “I came back with the amulet, and here I am.”
Xia didn’t say anything, and she had no idea how to read his expression. She returned to her semi-lotus position on the chair and touched her middle fingers to her thumbs. The pose was a trigger for her. Helped her relax. He didn’t say anything, just kept staring at his knife as if he was imagining himself cutting out her heart. What a cheery thought.
“In the spirit of getting along,” she said, “how about you tell me about the other half?” Every time she looked into his eyes, she got a shot of heat through her, a tingle at the back of her head. Chemistry? Uh-huh. Some serious chemistry. Didn’t that just blow chunks that she was totally hot for someone who thought hate wasn’t a strong enough word to describe his feelings for her?
“You can’t trust me. Except for not letting you get killed, you can’t trust anything about me. Everyone who knows me thinks I’m a fucking bastard, okay?”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
He got the point of her dry tone and smiled enough to make her toes curl. Total asshole, but in the looks department? He was exactly the kind of guy she went for. Tall. Dark and wicked as all get-out. If she was really lucky, maybe he was the kind of guy who didn’t talk much
when he had sex, because then they could do it, and she could pretend he didn’t hate her guts and neither of them would say something to ruin the moment. He waved a hand. “About the talisman you’re wearing.”
“You keep calling it a talisman. Why?”
“On my side of the world, witch, that’s what it is.” He pressed his lips together and ran his fingers through his still-damp hair.
“Okay, okay, I’m listening.”
He lifted his head, and she was hit once again by the unnatural blue of his irises. Damn, but he was good-looking. She wondered if beings like him were into meaningless sex. Seemed like they ought to be. Did that mean they could have some meaningless sex without him blowing the don’t-let-Alexandrine-get-killed part of his assignment?
“For the magekind,” he said, “the ones like Rasmus or Magellan, their words have power when they’re said just right and with the right magic pulling them along.” He frowned at his blade. “Especially when you give a gift of blood. Say the right incantation over a human and a mage can absorb his life force. The human dies, in case you wondered, and the mage, instead of dying at eighty, dies at eighty-one. Kill one of the kin—that’s monsters like me—and the mage lives a whole lot longer.” He glanced at her, and Alexandrine was careful to keep her expression noncommittal. “That’s why your father’s still alive.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “After all this time.”
Alexandrine didn’t reply to that, because what Rasmus Kessler did was not her fault. It was creepy to hear Xia accuse him of such evil. “I thought you were going to tell me about talismans.”
He looked away, but she saw his fingers tighten around the hilt of his knife. When he looked back, he said, “Do you know how a talisman gets made?”
She shook her head. He held her gaze, and she recoiled from the blaze of hatred in his eyes. So much for keeping herself in a calm, relaxed state.
With a quick gesture, he brushed his curls off his forehead. “I had to watch when Rasmus got himself a mageheld—a freshly taken one, which he prefers and laid him out so he couldn’t move.” Xia closed his eyes. “But he can hear and feel and think, and all of us magehelds felt what was happening. Rasmus pulled as much magic as he could, as hard as he could, and then he cut the fiend here.” He touched his sternum. “Sometimes, he’d kill another fiend first. To prime his magic. Without blood, he can’t focus the magic right. The whole time the fiend’s body is dying, and all of us feel our kin’s life and magic being siphoned into some object like that carving you’re wearing.”
Alexandrine closed her eyes but opened them again when the images in her head were too hideous to bear. She didn’t want to believe him, but what little she’d read about mages and fiends paralleled what he’d told her so far. From a different point of view, sure. That just made it all the more sickening.
“When it’s over, he’s alive in there. Trapped without a body. Separated from the kin.” He brought his hands together, slowly at first and then quickly until his palms met with a gentle slap. Xia’s eyes were looking inside himself. “You feel the screaming in your bones for days,” he whispered. “You live with it forever.” His focus snapped back to the present. Alexandrine recoiled again. “And then Rasmus learned Magellan’s trick of taking our power directly, and it got even worse.”
Horror at what he was saying froze her in place. What the hell did you say to something like that?
“I’ve seen that done, too. I’ve been there, at your father’s side, while he murdered one of my kin so he could live a few more years. And I’ve been there when he cracked open a talisman for what’s left of the magic inside.” His fist clenched and unclenched on his thigh. “Wondering if one day it was going to be my turn.”
Alexandrine didn’t say anything. How could she? She had no idea how to respond to someone who’d just laid generations of atrocities at her feet. All those years wondering about her heritage and this was it: evil. She touched the amulet around her neck. “You’re telling me this thing’s alive?”
“There is a life inside.”
Her stomach turned.
Xia kept talking. “Talismans don’t last forever. The life dissipates, finds ways out through flaws in the container. Magellan figured out he could crack one and make the magic his. Do that often enough, and you’re not going to die from natural causes. Ever. I was there when he taught Rasmus.”
Still Alexandrine had no words. None at all. No wonder he hated her. No wonder.
“When one of the free kin finds a talisman, we take it back if we can. And we crack it open. They have no body, so we give whoever it was our bodies.” His tongue came out and touched his lower lip. “It’s never easy to assimilate with what’s left. It’s impossible to know its condition until it’s too late. But if we live through it, we honor the one whose body died. Their magic lives in us. With us.”
“You’ve done that?”
He laid his knife across his lap, and his gaze unfocused again. The pit of her stomach turned cold. He stroked the knife from hilt to tip. “No.”
“But you intend to.” With her amulet. She realized she was stroking the carving through her shirt.
“Yes.”
How did she even begin to address this? “I… I didn’t know. I didn’t know what this was.”
“I know,” he said.
She felt about an inch high. “Even if I wanted to, Xia, I couldn’t trap someone’s magic in a can of tuna fish.”
His head swiveled until they were looking at each other again. “You’re still a witch.”
“My magic doesn’t work.”
He gave her a dismissive look. “The talisman is changing that.”
“No, it’s not.”
“That thing’s working on your magic. I can feel it. Sooner or later, you’ll be pulling just like Daddy.”
“No,” she said. Her heart shriveled to dust. “I refuse to accept that. For me, it’s just a bit of carved rock. That’s all. It doesn’t do anything.” That was a lie, though, wasn’t it? The talisman had done something to her. Or did she have a nonmagical explanation for her inability to take off the amulet? She pulled the amulet from under her shirt. The stone leopard stared at her with lifeless eyes. “Rock,” she said, more to herself than to Xia. “Nothing but a carved rock. Maybe there used to be something in there, but there’s not anymore.” She was rationalizing, and that made her feel dirty. Actions had consequences, sometimes, oftentimes, unintended ones, and consequences ought to be faced. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
She knew as well as he did that she didn’t believe that. Not really. He leaned toward her. “Take it off.”
“Bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Come on, Alexandrine Marit.” He gave her a look. She knew better than to think he meant anything sexual by it, but she still had a sexual reaction. “If it’s just some carved rock, take it off for me, baby.”
Denial rose up, swift and hot and burning. The damn thing wasn’t magical, if it ever had been. And yet she couldn’t make her hands move to the cord that held the talisman. Right now, this minute, she believed to her core that taking it off meant she’d die. And that was just plain crazy, because she hadn’t thought that thirty seconds ago. Alexandrine slid off her chair but grabbed its top rail when her legs wobbled. “Why is that?” she whispered. She hadn’t felt any of this happening to her. “Why can’t I take it off?”
“Because you’re a witch,” he said. “The talisman has been leaking into you for months. Changing you so slowly you never noticed what was happening.”
“No.” With anger and terror mixing into sheer nerve, she yanked on the thong. The leather bit into the nape of her neck, cutting her. The pain was a relief that cut into her panic. The leather broke with a faint snap and a scrape along her skin. She heaved it at Xia with everything she had in her.
She watched the talisman arc through the air. And she saw Xia catch the leather thong. The amulet spun from the end, dark then light, dark then light. The breath in her lungs fr
oze. Her skin prickled. Fire flashed in her head, and the heat grew until she was convinced she was going to go up in flames. Every inch of her body burned. A shudder ripped through her, and on its heels came more searing heat. Just like that, the amulet was back in her hand.
From the bed, Xia said, “Don’t ever tell me again you’re not a fucking witch.”
“I didn’t do that.” But there the amulet was, on her palm, with the two ends of the broken thong dangling toward the floor.
“Put it back on,” he said.
“I don’t want it.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t want it near me. It’s horrible.” She fought back a sob, but it didn’t work. God, what a pathetic noise that was. “I can’t live like that. Knowing the truth about what it is. I won’t.”
Xia slid to the edge of the mattress and extended a hand to her. “Come here.”
“What for?”
He made a face. “Just do it, all right?”
She put her hand in his, and he pulled her onto the bed. Alexandrine knelt on the mattress, talisman in her hand while he grabbed the broken ends of the thong and tied them together. He put the thong around her neck.
“I don’t want it.” But she was still gripping the carving like her life depended on her holding it.
“It’s going to take some doing to get that off you without damaging you.” His palm lingered on her nape. “I can’t do it here. Not now. That kind of magic takes preparation. You understand me?”
“But you’ll get it off me, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I will.” He pried her fingers open. “I’m just going to look at it, all right?”
“Okay.” She felt like her mind was being split in two. Half of her wanted to stop him from even looking at the amulet, and the other half, apparently the weaker half, wanted him to take it off her, because she knew she didn’t have the strength to do it by herself. Not again.
She ended up putting her hands on his shoulders for balance. He went still. Statue still. Then, after a bit, he tilted back, taking her with him so that the amulet swung away from her body. He slid two fingers behind the carved stone.
My Forbidden Desire Page 8
