The first sip spread slow warmth throughout her veins, and as always, Hadassah closed her eyes to let the sensation fill her up. The liquid went into her stomach, but the alcohol, plus whatever else made this wine so special, went almost immediately into her veins. She never missed the irony that she, a hemomancer, should be so affected by something that travelled in her bloodstream.
“I’ll have what she’s having.”
Startled, because when she’d sat down there’d been nobody else at the bar, Hadassah opened her eyes. The woman sitting two stools away wasn’t looking at her, and she had not even the barest hint of a smile on her face to go along with what had to be a joke. Right? At least an attempt at one? The callout to the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally… had to have been on purpose, but the woman who’d said it was showing no signs of humor.
Now the newcomer stared at the sloshing glass of crimson fluid Red had set in front of her as though she’d never seen a glass of wine before. She curled the fingers of one hand around the fragile stem so carefully Hadassah wondered if she’d been recently injured. Her hands were bigger than seemed to match the rest of her lean frame, the fingers long and slender, with black-painted nails that tapered to points. They matched her black hair, pulled into a loose and tangled ponytail at the base of her neck. Even gathered that way, it fell in thick waves to the small of her back. In profile, she had strong features, including thick dark brows that furrowed now.
She was…mysterious. Intriguing. She was gorgeous, and Hadassah felt the stirring of anticipation low in her belly.
The woman sipped cautiously and grimaced before setting the glass back on the bar.
“No good?” Red had been watching the woman as carefully as Hadassah had.
“It is good.”
“You look like you’d prefer something else,” Hadassah said to capture the woman’s attention.
She almost regretted it when the woman turned her full body on the stool to face her. In contrast to the glorious mess of her hair, her features were stern and fierce, neither masculine nor feminine, but not quite androgynous either. Hadassah tried to pin down her appearance but came up short. Not fey. Not witch. Not were, either, although this woman had a feral air about her suggesting something animalistic. Vamp? But no, she didn’t fit that either.
Could she be…human?
Humans came into Sanctuary all the time, but they were almost always supernaturally Talented, or if not, they were in the company of a supernatural. Hadassah herself was human, although her ability to use blood for divination purposes was inherited, genetic, and therefore meant that at least somewhere far back in the branches of her family tree, something Other had been there to roost.
“No. I like. It.” The woman spoke in a halting manner, almost a lilt, that suggested an accent but not one Hadassah could distinguish. As if to prove her statement as truth, she lifted the glass again to her lips and drank, gulping, until she’d consumed the entire glass.
Hadassah blinked. A flush gathered at the base of her throat as the woman licked the remnants of the red wine from her lips. Wine was only one of the things that soothed aches left behind from a day of reading blood.
“Another?” Red asked, her tone dry. She’d put a hand on one lush hip and was giving the woman at the other end of the bar a long, assessing look.
The woman’s nod was sharp. Almost mechanical. “Yes.”
“You got it.” Red filled the glass with another of her signature generous pours and then looked at Hadassah, who’d barely sipped from hers. “You let me know when you need another.”
Hadassah twisted on the barstool to look straight on at the dark-haired woman. “I’m Hadassah.”
The woman looked like she was about to gulp down the second glass with as much ferocity as she had the first, but something stopped her. She sipped instead. She was, Hadassah realized, emulating the way she’d taken her own sip.
“And you are?” Hadassah prompted when she didn’t answer.
“Thirsty.”
“I mean…what’s your name?”
The woman paused with the glass halfway to her lips. She put it carefully down on the bar. “I have always called myself Yael.”
In addition to the accent that Hadassah could not quite place, Yael had an interesting way of phrasing things. The name itself gave Hadassah pause. As the bearer of a biblical name herself, she couldn’t help feeling an immediate kinship with the woman.
But no, Hadassah thought as she lifted her glass toward Yael. It was more than the name. There was something else about Yael…something that called to her.
“Here’s to new acquaintances,” Hadassah said.
After a hesitation, Yael lifted her own glass. “All right.”
They were too far away to clink the glasses, so Hadassah simply tipped hers toward her mouth. After another of those seconds-long hesitations, Yael did the same. The red wine had stained her lips.
Another flush teased its way up Hadassah’s throat into her face. Many, many times she’d ended a session with a client by coming here to the bar, drinking a few glasses of wine, and finding a partner for the night. As far as ways to release accumulated tension went, she could have done worse to herself. Today, however, the bar was empty except for Yael, and while there was something compelling about her, there was also definitely something odd.
Not that odd was itself actually strange here in Sanctuary. The club featured this lovely bar, a fine-dining restaurant, and a cigar room, as well as several rental spaces for practitioners like Hadassah. The clientele was almost exclusively supernatural folk, or, as Hadassah liked to think of herself, supernatural-adjacent. To stand out as “different” here was no small feat, but Yael was managing superbly.
Hadassah had always had a soft spot for a mystery. “I haven’t seen you around here before, Yael. Are you new to town?”
“I am new.”
“Where did you come from?”
Yael blinked like a bird, rapidly and somehow sharply. “Where I had been before.”
Hadassah could not stop the burble of sudden laughter that slipped out of her. “Right. Of course.”
To her surprise, Yael laughed too. Her soft giggle had a bit of grit in it. Husky. “Where did you come from?”
“Me? I’ve always lived in the city. Born and raised.” Hadassah sipped more wine, not surprised to find she was almost finished with it. She looked for Red, but the bartender had disappeared momentarily.
“Born.” Yael said the word as though she were tasting it, rolling the single syllable on her tongue. “And…raised.”
“Yep. I’m a real native. Not sure where I might be going,” Hadassah said with a chuckle, “but I sure know where I’ve been.”
Yael tilted her head and gave Hadassah an up-and-down look. “Does anyone know where they are going?”
“It’s possible to try to find out, if they don’t. I can do that.”
“You’re talking about fortune telling.”
“I’m talking about magic,” Hadassah said.
The dark-haired woman frowned and stared into the depths of her glass for a moment before saying, “You could tell me everything I need to know?”
“Yes,” Hadassah said as a small flame kindled inside her, growing hotter. “Everything.”
Chapter Two
“Sit.” Hadassah waved a hand in the direction of the small table and two chairs placed toward the back of the small office space. “I’m just going to get set up.”
Yael didn’t sit right away. She took a few minutes to look around the room. Tapestries in vibrant colors covered the walls, giving the illusion of windows behind them, although she could tell the office was a completely interior room. Bookcases stuffed with books and other objects like goblets, bowls, and small cases lined the back of the room. A door along the back wall had been left cracked open, and through it she could see a sink. A soft scent of flowers hung in the air, without any hint of sulfur or something rotten. Hadassah didn’t delve into dark magic
, or if she did, she was extremely careful to hide all the evidence of it.
“Sit,” Hadassah repeated, but gently.
Yael pulled out the chair and did as she’d been told. She’d been created for obedience. The instinct was fading day after day, but she didn’t know if it would ever go away completely. The longer she spent inhabiting this vessel, the less she felt connected to what she was and where she’d come from…but she could only stay in this body for as long as it lasted, and humans were notoriously short-lived. At least compared to demons.
“Have you ever had a reading before? Any kind, not necessarily from hemomancy.” Hadassah turned around in her chair to pull open a drawer in the cabinet behind her. She pulled out a small plastic bowl wrapped in cling wrap and added a long rectangular leather case, a bottle of clear liquid, and a small cup of fluffy white cotton balls. She put everything on the table and busied herself pulling on a pair of purple disposable gloves and then unwrapping the materials from their protective coverings.
“No.” Yael hesitated, studying the process with much interest.
Hadassah studied her. “No Tarot? No tea leaves? Nothing like that?”
“No.”
“Are you familiar with how hemomancy works?”
“Blood magic,” Yael said. “Yes. I understand how it works. Blood is the source of everything.”
It had been her source, certainly, her natural form summoned with the blood of the witch who’d called her. There’d been blood in the creation of this body she wore now too. It had been pushed from its mother’s womb with blood and sweat and screams. With pain, but also joy. Yael had entered this world with blood and pain, but she had torn through the veil between realms with her own talons and teeth and suffered the agony of that birthing. If there had been joy at her arrival, it had not been her own.
“Good. Then I don’t have to worry about you fainting or anything like that?” Hadassah spoke the words lightly, but with an edge to her tone that made it clear she’d had trouble in the past.
Yael shook her head. “I won’t.”
“All right. If you do start to feel faint, let me know right away. I have smelling salts. Also, all of my equipment is sterile and disposed of after each use. I’ll be making a fairly deep wound, but due to the nature of this particular sort of magic, you’ll be healed quite quickly. You should have no lingering effects. Are you ready to get started?” Hadassah reached across the table to take Yael’s hand. Their fingers linked. Palms touched. Hadassah’s eyebrows rose a little, and she smiled but said nothing as she released Yael’s hand and turned it palm down, resting on the table.
With the other hand Hadassah lifted a small scalpel she’d removed from its protective paper covering. She used a small bottle of clear liquid and a cotton ball to clean the back of Yael’s hand, tossing the used cotton into a can beneath the table when she’d finished. Keeping the scalpel steady, she once more took Yael’s hand.
“It’s going to hurt, but it will be over fast,” Hadassah warned.
Yael had been told that before, plenty of times, and it had never once been true. The witch who’d summoned her had been arrogant, demanding, and short of temper. When she was displeased, she’d often resorted to using her magic to cause pain—at least until she’d summoned Yael to do it for her. What had started as using Yael for protection became retaliation against anyone who crossed her, for any reason at all. A person who cut in front of her at the grocery store, someone who wrote something vaguely unkind online, a clerk who forgot to give her a receipt. Any and all slights had become reasons for her to call Yael down upon them, and if Yael did not leap to obey, the witch had no problem hurting Yael in retribution.
Some demons of a different constitution might have obeyed with glee at being asked to commit constant carnage, but the witch, in her arrogance, had misread her instructional texts and refused the counsel of those with greater knowledge and power. She hadn’t understood that demons, like the angels with whom they shared an origin, had a hierarchy. Not all of them had been made as warriors. Her disappointment at discovering that Yael was not the kind of soldier she desired was surpassed only by her fury when Yael had refused to continue serving her.
“You don’t use any of those tools?” Yael gestured with her free hand toward the shelves of carved stone bowls and engraved silver knives displayed in velvet-lined cases.
Hadassah smiled and shook her head. “They are certainly more impressive, right? But hard to sterilize and certainly not disposable. Fortunately, I don’t need all the pomp and circumstance to practice my art.”
Yael thought of the witch, who delighted in the trappings of her rituals without fully being capable of controlling them. “I prefer competence to showing off.”
“Me too,” Hadassah said after a moment’s hesitation. She gave Yael a curious look that faded quickly. “You’re going to feel a sting.”
The cut across Yael’s hand went deep, as Hadassah had promised, but Yael had not been as ready as she’d thought. She’d taken this body from one who no longer needed it, but she’d not yet learned all the workings of it. She’d been teaching herself how to assuage the needs for sleep, food, sex…and now, she was learning the feeling of real, true pain.
“There we go,” Hadassah murmured, her gaze on the crimson blood welling out from the slash on the back of Yael’s hand. She turned Yael’s hand over so the blood could drip into the bowl between them. “Just a minute or so. You’ll be all right.”
“Are you…do you offer this comfort to all of your clients?” Yael bit the words out, her jaw clenched. Once she’d been able to fully manipulate all blood, but now she could only watch it draining from her.
Hadassah glanced up with another look of faint surprise. “Only the ones who need it.”
The hemomancer bent once more over the bowl and pressed the gauze cloth onto Yael’s cut to dab away the welling blood, which was already slowing. She placed Yael’s hand gently on the table and then cupped the bowl of blood with her own two hands and drew it toward her. Her brow furrowed.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“You said you could tell me everything,” Yael answered.
Hadassah looked up. “Narrow it down for me. One thing at a time.”
“Is there a limit to how much I can ask?”
“Yes,” Hadassah said. “But I can’t tell you what the limit is, only that we will reach it at some point.”
“And then?” Yael wanted to check the wound beneath the gauze. The pain, as Hadassah had promised, was already fading, and she wanted to see if the cut was too.
“Then you’ll have to wait until another day. Another drawing of blood. It’s magic, not science,” Hadassah said. “Magic is notoriously imprecise. So, start with one thing you’d like to know, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Am I in danger?” The words slipped from Yael’s lips like stones dropping onto glass, cracking the air between them.
If the question shocked or concerned Hadassah, she didn’t show any signs of it. She leaned forward, studying the small amount of blood in the plastic bowl. She passed a hand over it. Then again, in the opposite direction. Her lips pursed as she spoke under her breath. It was not an incantation, yet the words tugged at something deep inside Yael. A sensation of fire licked along her veins and the blood flowing there. She hissed in a breath at the sting.
“Are you all right?” Hadassah looked at her.
Yael could not speak, only nod. The flesh of her hand beneath the cloth itched and burned. Alternating ice and fire filled her right down to the capillaries. Her fingers and toes twitched, tingling. Was this what every seeker felt, when asking Hadassah for answers? Or did this body react this way because of Yael’s true nature?
“There is danger surrounding you, yes,” the hemomancer said when Yael did not reply.
Yael closed her eyes briefly. “How can I protect myself?”
“I see the need for you to hide. Be hidden. To…mask yourself. Disguise,” Hadass
ah corrected. “I’m not sure if that means literally or figuratively. It could mean going quiet on social media or changing your phone number. Deleting an email account. It could mean something more drastic, like moving to a new city, for example.”
Or taking a new physical form, Yael thought, but did not say out loud. Hadassah again passed her hand over the bowl. Yael’s hand burned more fiercely, but ice invaded her body. She blinked rapidly, unused to the sensations rocketing through her. Was this what it felt like to lose consciousness? She breathed out, then in. Her vision wavered before steadying.
“What will happen to me?”
“So, what you have to understand is that the future is not written in stone. Or blood. Your choices change what happens to you,” Hadassah said.
“How do I know what are the right choices?”
Hadassah gave a small, low, and rueful chuckle. “You don’t always know, Yael. That’s the way life works. All I can read from your blood is what path you’re on, and where it could potentially lead. No more than that. It’s always up to you, in the end, what you do.”
Yael’s teeth chattered. She’d never felt so cold, but Hadassah showed no signs of being uncomfortable with the temperature. It was all inside her. She clenched her jaw to stop the chattering, but Hadassah still looked concerned.
“Are you all right? If you’re feeling faint—”
“I’m not,” Yael interrupted.
Hadassah nodded. “You can change your mind, you know. Sometimes, people think they want to know, but they really don’t.”
“I want to know.” She had to know. Was the witch going to come after her? Had taking this body been the wrong choice?
“All right, then. Let me see what I can tell you.”
Again, Hadassah bent over the bowl. She murmured more words, the sound of them delicate but also strong. Like the woman herself, Yael thought, studying her. Anyone who could control their talents well enough to utilize them for the sake of others had to be strong, in body, will and mind.
Love, Blood, and Sanctuary Page 11