“This isn’t Earth. It’s Sang,” I said, dusting my hands off. “Guess your glance didn’t show you that part, huh?”
“Not this part, either,” my grandmother muttered, looking past me at the fire.
As I turned to give her a good talking-to, something slammed into my shoulder, driving me to the ground. It was the witch, and she wasn’t on fire, not even close. She wasn’t even abnormally warm. But she was furious and clawing for my eyes as if she’d forgotten she had fangs at all, thank heavens. I hadn’t forgotten, though, and my beast rose and hissed, and everything went over in that strange red haze, in slow motion, with the thump of my head on the settee and the witch’s boot kicking over the tea cart. We tussled like cats, hissing and clawing, slapping and yanking out hair. She got me onto my back, her bony arm pressing the breath out of my throat. I kicked her over, tried to snap her wrist like a pencil, and failed. I finally managed to crawl on top of her, pinning her hands, and my fangs grazed her neck with delicious victory.
And I stopped.
Somehow . . . it didn’t feel right.
I wanted the victory of ripping out her throat, but the feral domination I’d experienced during my fight by the boulders was missing. This almost felt like . . . like a play. And I didn’t know the right lines. I’d glanced on this woman’s life, and although certain parts of this scene matched what I’d watched in that fearful, sucking jolt all those years ago, neither one of us was poised to do any damage. This wasn’t how she was going to die, and we both knew it. Ruby and Torno sat on their couch, watching us with polite interest as if we were tussling puppies.As if they weren’t remotely worried.
I guessed my grandmother had had her own jolt, too.
“Are you done yet, sugar?” Ruby asked.
I stood up and brushed down my skirts. “Why are we even here?” I said, grouchy, returning to my chair as the fight drained out of me.
Hepzibah rolled over and stood, and I couldn’t help noticing that her movements were very much like mine. Even her swiftly healing face, in the firelight, showed commonality with mine and with Ruby’s. Had I really almost killed my own great-great-aunt on the floor of her witch’s parlor?
“When I touched you,” Ruby said, “I saw that I needed to come here. Not only because no one had seen my aunt since she died in a coma but also because it’s part of . . . destiny? Whatever it is I see when I touch people.”
“You saw us sitting here?”
She shook her head at me. “This part is just waiting. Something else is supposed to happen.”
“At least tell me why Torno is here.”
Ruby looked at the enormous strong man fondly—in a way that she’d never looked at my grandfather, actually. Their hands were clasped together, and thus far he’d just seemed like a benevolent mountain.
“You know, sugar, your grandfather was a harsh man from a different time, and I married too young. Until the day he died, I served him and danced on the end of his string. And soon after we buried him, I got sick. Didn’t really get to enjoy freedom much and never knew the love of a kind man who saw me for what I was.” She looked up at the strong man with more affection in her face than I’d seen for me since she’d landed in Sang. “My glance told me Torno was the one, and when I found him in the caravan, it was love at first sight. After that, he wouldn’t let me go alone.”
“Ah, cara mia. That is not so true,” Torno said gently, rubbing her arm. “It is you who would not leave me behind.”
I had glanced on him, long ago, in the caravan, but I had no control over what I saw when I touched someone’s hand. With Torno, I had seen that Catarrh and Quincy were going to betray him, and Criminy had somehow handled it. Well, and now that problem was permanently handled, I supposed. How would my life have gone differently if I had seen a vision of Torno and a young woman who looked a little like me and more like my grandmother’s old black-and-white pictures? Perhaps there was a reason glances left so much to mystery.
“I’m glad y’all found each other, and congratulations on being a hell of a cougar, but I still don’t see why I had to come here and why I’m not fighting that old bitch to the death. Why are we just sitting around, drinking blood tea and talking?”
“We’re waiting,” Ruby said in her don’t-defy-your-grandma voice.
“For what?”
The lemur appeared with the witch’s pipe, and she settled back to smoke, just as smug and cozy as she’d been the first time I’d met her. Her smoke rings floated up and up into the darkness of her cave, and she grinned a Cheshire cat’s grin and pointed her pipe into the murky darkness outside the fake fire’s dancing light.
“For him.”
A shadow coalesced, and I was drowning in joy and fear and adrenaline.
“Hello, love,” said Criminy Stain.
18
I leaped to my feet and hurried into his arms. My husband held me with a polite gentleness that I couldn’t stand, and I wrapped my arms around him and clung to him, struggling to get closer still.
“I thought you were going to die,” I whispered.
“There’s still time for that, love,” he whispered back. “Be gentle.”
I pulled away. “Crim, it’s actually not what I thought. The witch is being nice, and she’s my great-great-aunt, and Ruby knows her.” I sat back down in my chair and pointed to the tea tray. “It’s basically just a family reunion, but everybody’s an asshole.”
Criminy’s recent strain was evident in the paleness of his skin, the smudges around his eyes, the way he wouldn’t really focus on me or unclench his fists. And why should he expect anything less than a fight? The witch had been nothing but trouble for as long as he’d known her, which had started with him bludding her, a long time ago. My senses quivered with wrongness, as sure as a dog whose hackles rise before he’s heard someone on the porch. My grandmother and Torno were calm, Criminy was stretched as taut as a rubber band about to break, and the witch . . . well, she looked like a kid at Christmas, waiting for the lights to come on.
“Oh, it’s not a family reunion,” she said, with a cackle for emphasis. “More like a lovers’ reunion.”
“I saw him this morning,” I mumbled. “And he’s not even looking at me.”
“Hepzibah’s not talking about you, love,” Crim said. “She’s talking about her.”
He was glaring at the fire, and I watched in utter surprise as a tiny auburn-haired woman stepped out onto the rug, knocking ash off her boots and brushing down her skirts.
“Hullo, Stain,” she said in a husky voice like opium smoke.
“Hello, Merissa,” he answered.
19
I was on my feet in a heartbeat.
“What is it with all your psycho exes?” I shouted, my beast rising to the fore in a wave of jealousy.
Merissa was Crim’s first love, I knew, and as ageless and beautiful as a china doll in a ballgown. I wanted to smash her to bits.
“What can I say, pet? I’m a hot commodity.” But it came out hollow, resigned. I’d never seen my husband look weak, but something about her seemed to punch him in the stomach, hollow him out. I knew he’d never loved Tabitha Scowl, as much as she’d wanted him to and as dangerously cloying as her love potion had been. But, looking at him looking at Merissa, I understood that she’d broken his heart.
And now I wanted to break hers, but with my fist.
When she next opened her lush rosebud lips to speak, I howled and leaped at her. My arms closed on air, and I tumbled to the rug. The little bitch had sidestepped me and stood before Criminy, close enough to touch. Close enough to kiss.
“No!” I shouted, all ragged on the floor, and the witch landed her knee in the middle of my back, pinning me down.
Criminy wasn’t moving, wasn’t saying anything, didn’t even seem to see me.
Merissa was saying something low and slurry, the slithering Sanguine tongue of magic spells, and Criminy didn’t blink as she lifted his fine hands and slipped a gold rope around them
, tying a complicated knot. Hard as I fought, the witch wouldn’t budge and seemed to take great pleasure from grinding her bony knee into my spine.
“Criminy! Fight back!” I shouted.
The witch laughed. “Lived with a magician this long and don’t know a spell when you see it? He can’t fight back, fool. Just watch.”
Merissa led Criminy to the chair I’d been in earlier, turned him around by his shoulders, and shoved his chest to make him sit down. His eyes were wide, their pupils a sea of black.
“Nana! Help him!”
But Ruby just sipped her blood. “You’ve seen glances, sugar. Events unfold as they’re meant to. Nothing I can do about it.”
“Torno?”
The strong man shrugged. “I like you, my lady, but I cannot fight magic. I am only muscle.” He wiggled and frowned. “Also, I do think the sofa was magicked. I cannot stand.”
“Me, neither,” Ruby said.
I screamed, and the witch said, “Silence!” And suddenly my voice, like Criminy’s in Mr. Sweeting’s shop, stopped working. No matter how hard I yelled or how softly I whispered, nothing came out. It was the most maddening thing I’d ever experienced, and I bucked under the witch like a mad bull, although it did no good.
Merissa was moving around the parlor now, sweeping everything off the top of the tea tray and laying out packets from the pockets of her coat. My gorge rose when I recognized a chirurgeon’s kit with various scalpels and knives. But Criminy didn’t move a muscle, said nothing, merely sat there peacefully, his bound hands in his lap.
“Ah, Stain,” she said, as if they were alone. “How long has it been? Thirty years? I lose count. You’ve done marvelous things with old Bailey’s caravan. The clockworks, the new engine. It’s so much nicer than the last time I saw it. And do you know where I’ve been?” He didn’t answer, and she prodded him with a finger and said, “Speak, Stain.”
“Where have you been?” he asked placidly.
“Well, first I had to help Phaedro heal from your mauling. Then I had to learn his foul necromancy. Then I had to kill him, chop him up into tiny pieces, and spread them far enough around Sang so that they could never rejoin. And then I had to find you.” She caressed his face with sick fondness. “But that wasn’t hard, was it? Your posters are everywhere. The greatest circus in all of Sangland! And then that journalist published her little tell-all book last year, and I had pages and pages of your own words, telling me how very proud of yourself you are. Not one mention of me, of the caravan you took from me, which I had cultivated and held in my grasp.” Her sweet voice had become a bark, and with this last line she whirled back and slapped him, hard enough to make his head wobble.
“I never even loved you, and you ruined everything! And so I waited. I waited until you had everything you’d ever wanted in the palm of your hand, and now I’m taking it back. All of it. Your precious caravan. Your beautiful wife.” She walked over to me and let her boot tip dig into my cheek. “Your unborn child.”
Incredulity washed over me, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. But she went on.
“I’m going to strip them from you as you stripped my greatest dreams from me, and then I’m going to do to you what I did to Phaedro, when he was still great.”
She got very, very close to his beautiful face.
“I’m going to carve you into tiny pieces, scatter them, and laugh.”
20
At first, I was too stunned to process anything she’d said after “unborn child.” I had always assumed that my body on Sang was just as damaged as it had been on Earth, and for six years Criminy and I had enjoyed unprotected sex with no hope of little halfbluds running around the caravan. After the bludding, I told myself it was still impossible, because hoping for something that would never happen hurt too much. Criminy had always dreamed of having children, and it hurt my heart, too. But we had the carnivalleros, we had Demi, and we had a fondness for taking on orphans and outcasts and giving them a better life free from the cities’ oppression.
But hadn’t he told me flat out that I was in season?
Hadn’t I had . . . signs?
Sure, it had only been a few days, but still. Criminy had warned me that I would be more aware of my physicality, and he’d also mentioned that I was highly fertile, as much as I’d denied it.
I’d been drinking blood like crazy, for one thing. Just today, I’d had breakfast, then drained an entire assailant, then had two cups of blood since entering the witch’s lair, but I still felt a little parched. I reached my new senses deep inside me, focusing. Could I feel a new life there? Was a tiny heartbeat beating alongside my own? No, of course not. That was impossible. It couldn’t have been more than a few days along—if so, barely a cluster of cells. And yet . . . I did not feel entirely alone.
I looked to my grandmother, to Ruby. She was watching me fondly, and she must have seen the question in my face, because she smiled and nodded her head. Yes. Whatever she’d seen when she glanced on me, she knew.
And that meant that I had more to fight for than ever.
21
Merissa reached for a scalpel, and I wanted to throw up. Criminy was the most attractive man I’d seen in my entire life spanning two worlds, and he clearly couldn’t stop her from whatever her tiny white hands wanted to do to him. But even on the floor, trapped under a witch, I had my own weapons.
I couldn’t reach either of my knives, as the witch had a knee in my back. But as Merissa inspected her scalpel by the firelight, I feigned a struggle to escape and reached for one of my earbobs. They were cunning things shaped like hummingbirds, a special request I’d begged from Mr. Murdoch. After I’d destroyed several clockworks, all by accident, he had taken on the challenge of giving me metal weapons that I couldn’t accidentally sit on. The hummingbirds were my favorites, dangling prettily from my pierced lobes. The witch on my back was too busy keeping me on the ground and watching Merissa prepare to carve up her nemesis, and it was all too easy to poke her leg with the bird’s long beak and press the button that injected a very potent but not-too-damaging sleeping potion, chosen so that if I were to puncture myself by accident, I wouldn’t be harmed.
“What was that?” Hepzibah said, looking down and catching my wrist in her iron grasp.
I turned my palm up and showed her: nothing. I’d already dropped the bird, and I still couldn’t speak. In fact, every move I made was utterly silent.
“You poked me with something,” she muttered. “A pin? So childish.”
By the time she’d managed to frantically shove her skirts and petticoats aside and fumble with her stockings, she had started to slump over. Soon she was flopping across my back and snoring gently. Merissa hadn’t looked up; she was focused on Criminy. Ruby and Torno watched the scene, rapt, as if they were at the theater. From the ground, all I could see of Merissa were her psychotic smile and the professional detachment in her eyes while she did something horrible to my husband. I didn’t have much time; she could have already disfigured him, but he was still alive, still upright, and no blud yet dripped to the floor.
Hating my silence but grateful for my undesired stealth, I felt for my reticule and fished around inside it for two small bags that I knew by touch. The first held the same invisibility powder Crim had used when we’d journeyed to Manchester so long ago to take on the Magistrate, and the second held spell-breaking powder, a handy little something Criminy kept around for nullifying the minor magic others had put into effect. It was one of the few magical objects that anyone could wield, whether they had the knack or not, and I slipped silently from under the witch’s sleeping form and edged into the shadows.
I had the disappearing powder in my fingers when I remembered that I couldn’t speak. A dab of spell-breaking powder first, and then my breath thundered in my ears as I sprinkled the invisibility powder on top of my head and murmured Crim’s spell with my regained voice, grateful for the familiar, melty feeling as I went invisible. The first time he’d used this powder on me,
I’d been new to this world and helpless as a newborn kitten. Now I was a predator with a family to fight for, and even the puddle of blud now forming at Criminy’s feet couldn’t scare me into waiting a moment longer.
I paused only for a second to sprinkle a little spell-breaking powder over Ruby and Torno before turning to Merissa. Rage burned inside me, my vision went over red, and I snatched a knife from the tea cart and stabbed her in the neck. The blow knocked her sideways, and she staggered and tried to stand up. But I only had eyes for Criminy. The last bit of spell-breaking powder in the bag I poured directly on him, and the first thing he did was scream, a sound I’d never heard from him before. A sound that chilled my bones. My hands went to my mouth, and I realized I was no longer invisible—the powder had broken my spell, too.
In front of him now, I barely recognized my handsome husband. The tip of his nose had been cut off, along with most of one ear. She’d just started drawing a line from his forehead down through an eyebrow when I’d stopped her. I bent with trembling hands to help him get rid of the gold rope that bound his hands, and he was shaking, too—with fury.
“Get back,” he said. “All of you. She’s mine.”
I was no longer spelled, but I couldn’t move. Ruby and Torno stood in front of their sofa, hands linked, not budging. Criminy’s face was a sheen of red, his eyes on fire with rage, his teeth bared.
Merissa was unsteady on two feet as she pulled the knife out of her neck and put a hand to the ragged hole. Her Bludman’s flesh was already at work, healing with superhero speed as her fine lips pulled back over shiny fangs.
“Never was yours,” she hissed. “Never will be.”
They circled each other before the fire, somehow managing not to trip on the sleeping witch. Crim grabbed a knife off the cart, and it began to look like a fight from West Side Story, each of them going for a feint or a slice and accomplishing nothing. My eyes met my grandmother’s, and she nodded. Her mouth was turned down, a signal of disapproval. We might politely take tea with a witch, but Merissa wasn’t family, and she definitely wasn’t giving up. We were taking her out.
Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) Page 14