“Fine.” The way Hadassah snapped the word would have given any other person in the world the hint that she was anything but fine…but Yael was not any other person in the world.
She was the woman Hadassah could imagine herself loving.
“Fine,” Hadassah repeated, softer this time. “Finish getting dressed. We’ll do it in the living room.”
She set up the tools she needed as Yael took a seat. She hissed at the slice of Hadassah’s engraved scalpel. Hadassah looked at her, holding her hand over the silver bowl to catching the dripping blood.
“Hurts,” Yael said. “More than it did the first time.”
“What do you want me to look for?”
“Go back to when I was born.”
“That’s too much,” Hadassah protested. “Almost three decades ago? My hemomancy talents don’t work over that length of time.”
“It’s not three decades. It’s only a few months. Look,” Yael insisted through gritted teeth. “Please, Hadassah, just try.”
Hadassah sighed and bent over the bowl. There were patterns forming, hovering and swirling. She narrowed her eyes, focusing. She drew on her power, digging deep inside herself. She expected to wade through blurry images of Yael as a teenager, a child, perhaps even an infant, if she could get back that far. But instead, she saw only Yael as she was now. As she’d been the day they met. Then, something earlier, a cluttered room, stinking of sulfur. Yael speaking to a woman…Mary. The witch. Earlier still, the images disjointed and fractured, like watching someone else’s dream. Nonsensical.
A body on the floor. Yael’s body, familiar even though it lay still and somehow broken looking. Eyes open. Lifeless.
Dead.
Chapter Seventeen
There is a growing pool of blood on the floor.
It leaks from the eyes, nose, mouth of the woman. Other places too. It has started to seep up from her pores. Her hair is sticky with it. Her clothes, saturated.
She is dead.
“Oh, you are a delight!” This from the witch, who coos and claps her hands and even does a joyful dance in place as she stares down at the woman she commanded Yael to kill.
Yael is drawn to the blood. She does not drink it, nor does she bathe in it. She can manipulate it, if she chooses, but in this moment, faced with what she has done, she does nothing. The push and pull of the witch’s desire surrounds her, but it cannot fill her. It cannot move her.
In this form, she is little more than essence. She has a shape of long limbs, claws, teeth. She is visible, but not solid. The weight of this world presses on her but, bound by the incantations that drew her forth, she cannot go back to where she began. She is a prisoner.
The witch crouches over the sprawled corpse. She doesn’t care about kneeling in the blood. She revels in it. She pokes at the body. She laughs louder, and louder, and louder, and her glee is a stench that sends Yael reeling.
This may have been the reason she was summoned, but it is not the purpose of her existence.
“Clean this up.” The witch gets to her feet, stumbling as if she’s drunk.
Yael cannot. She will not. Drawn by the blood her powers spilled, her essence coalesces…and enters the body on the floor. Yael fills it with herself. In every place where once was blood, now there is Yael.
The body rises to its feet. It stumbles under Yael’s hesitant and clumsy control. She stretches herself inside it, no longer what she was but something new.
And then, she runs.
Chapter Eighteen
The images had faded the instant Hadassah reeled in in her magic, but clearly Yael was in the midst of a memory. Her pale eyes had gone dark, the pupils dilated. She breathed heavily, her body tense, positioned as though she meant to flee at any moment.
“Yael?”
“What did you see?”
Hadassah hesitated. “I saw you. Hurt. What happened to you?”
“That wasn’t me,” Yael said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I want you to try again.” Yael’s voice dipped into a husky growl, nothing like a tone of sensuality. More animalistic. Chilling. Hadassah had never heard her sound that way—she’d never heard anyone sound that way.
“I’m not going to learn anything else.” Hadassah shook her head and let the lie slip from her lips as she kept her gaze pinned steadily on Yael’s. “It won’t make a difference.”
“That’s not true. Take more. Learn more. I need you to see.”
Hadassah stood and carried the silver bowl to the kitchen sink to rinse it out and wipe it clean. She sprayed the entire area with cleaning chemicals strong enough to sanitize it, to erase any signs at all that Yael’s blood had ever even touched it. She kept her mind focused on the mundane tasks so she didn’t have to think about what any of this meant.
“Hadassah. Please.” Yael came up behind her. Took her by the shoulders. Turned her.
“I don’t want to,” Hadassah snapped. “You can’t force it, Yael. Blood magic doesn’t work that way. You can’t force it, and you can’t force me.”
Yael drew in a heaving breath. Her eyes glittered, not with tears, but some emotion Hadassah couldn’t discern. Her fingers gripped Hadassah’s shoulders, pinching and hurting, but Hadassah didn’t cry out or make any move to get away. Yael’s touch hurt, but she’d rather feel the sting than lose that touch, perhaps their last.
“I wish you would just tell me what’s going on,” Hadassah said finally. Quietly. She moved closer, forcing Yael to release her grip and embrace her. “Please. Trust me.”
“I…” Yael shuddered.
Hadassah enfolded her into her arms. Yael had always been lean. Strong. She felt frail, now. Somehow fragile, like a finely blown glass that would easily shatter if you tried to hold it too hard.
“Yael, I love you.” The words slipped out easily, as though they’d been said a hundred times already. A thousand. If she’d had any doubts about her feelings, they vanished, now. Hadassah brushed her lips over her lover’s temple, feeling the frantic pulse that beat there. “Whatever it is, whatever you’re going through, you can tell me.”
“Whatever I’ve done?” Yael asked. “Will you…love…me…no matter what I’ve done?”
Hadassah hesitated. “Yes. I believe so.”
“What about no matter what I am?” Yael pulled away, stepping back far enough that Hadassah would have had to reach for her.
This didn’t make sense. Hadassah took a step toward Yael, who moved back, her hands up in a defensive posture.
“What do you mean, what you are?” Hadassah had to force the words out of a dry throat. “You’re a woman.”
“I’m not.”
Ice formed inside Hadassah’s guts. It spread through every part of her, making her go stiff and solid, a frozen statue. If she moved too suddenly, she thought, if something were to touch her now, she would shatter into a million pieces. Irreparable.
“What do you mean?” Each word fell, solid as a stone, from Hadassah’s numb lips.
“I am not a woman,” Yael said. “I have taken the form of a woman, and if I could be said to have a gender, it would be female. But I am something else.”
“What? What are you?”
Yael did not reply.
Hadassah’s hands shook. She turned back to the sink, meaning to finish cleaning it, but found she could not. She could only grip the edge of it to keep herself steady and upright. Her knees had weakened.
“What am I, Hadassah? I think you know.”
“Demon.” The simple word dropped like a stone from her lips.
“A blood demon.”
It explained so much.
Hadassah whirled. “That doesn’t matter to me!”
“It should.” Yael’s voice trembled. “I can’t be any good for you!”
“You are good for me.” Stubbornly, Hadassah shook her head and moved toward Yael, who held up a hand to stop her.
Her mind raced already with thoughts of spells, incantations,
the use of magics she did not understand. There had to be something, anything, that could make this work. Something that could keep Yael here, where Hadassah needed her to stay.
“I can’t lose you,” she said. “I won’t.”
Yael’s shoulders hunched. Silver tears streaked from her eyes and over her cheeks. They dripped off her chin, and she swiped them away. She lifted her face to look into Hadassah’s eyes, and her expression turned grim and stiff and cold.
“I stole this body.”
The confession set Hadassah back a step or two, but she worked hard to keep herself from showing any disgust or fear. “There must have been a reason.”
“You condone murder?”
“No, of course not —”
“Because you love me.” Yael spat the words, her mouth twisting. Her fists clenched. “Is that what love does, Hadassah? It makes excuses for terrible acts?”
“No,” Hadassah said sharply, but Yael didn’t let her continue.
She paced, the air between them fairly crackling with tension. “I was made to defend my summoner against enemies. Not to take life as though it meant nothing, for any reason.”
“Your summoner? The witch commanded you to kill this woman?”
“Yes. I don’t know why. Something stupid and small because that’s what she had become. She lured the woman to her house, and she called me forth, and I…she…” Yael drew in a few hitching, desperate breaths. She gave Hadassah a wild-eyed stare. “Her heart. She was on something, taking something that made it weak. When she saw me, she fell to the ground. I never touched her. Whatever the witch did, after, made sure she was dead. But I’m the reason.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Hadassah said gently, thinking of the images she’d seen in the blood.
“I killed her.”
“She died,” Hadassah repeated. “She’d worked her body to its limits, and it couldn’t handle what she was doing to it. Mary wanted her dead, but you didn’t kill her.”
Yael shook her head. “That doesn’t excuse my part in it. Or the harm I brought to the ones before her, the ones the witch wanted revenge on. I’ve been in this realm for less than a year, Hadassah, and all I have ever done in it is evil.”
“That’s not true. You’ve never done evil to me.”
“I’ve hurt you,” Yael shot back fiercely. “More than once.”
It was not untrue, but still, Hadassah regretted her earlier accusations. Yael pivoted on one heel and looked at her. The anguish on her face broke Hadassah’s heart more than anything else she’d ever done.
Hadassah wanted to embrace her but didn’t dare. “I love you, Yael.”
Those had been the right words before, but they sounded wrong this time. Yael gave a desperate, hitching sob. She turned on her heel and fled the kitchen. Hadassah ran to follow, but Yael moved so fast, with such grace—how could she not have seen this before? How could Hadassah have let herself believe that Yael was entirely human?
Because that’s how love works, she thought. You see the best in the ones you love; you make yourself blind to what you don’t want to see.
Except that she’d meant what she’d just said to Yael. It didn’t matter to Hadassah that Yael was a demon who’d slipped into a human body no longer capable of sustaining the spirit of its owner. She didn’t care about what Yael had done, had been forced to do, by the witch who’d pulled her out of the demon realm. The past didn’t matter, not like the future did.
Hadassah caught up to her in the living room. Yael struck out wildly, knocking a glass vase onto the floor. With a low cry, she bent to use the biggest shard of it to slice into the back of her hand. Crimson fluid welled up, spattering onto the floor as she stood. She held out her hand toward Hadassah.
“I am not a woman, Hadassah. I am a blood demon, wearing a stolen shell.”
“I’m not afraid of a little blood.”
How could she be? Hadassah had been manipulating blood since shortly after the appearance of her own monthly cycle. Blood had been her source of income. Blood had given her strength. Blood had been…everything.
“You should be afraid of me.” Yael shuddered. Staggered. Then she turned and fled through the front door.
Hadassah’s knees weakened and threatened to spill her onto the floor, but she managed to stay upright. Her breath now came in shallow, panting heaves as she tried her best to hold back the sobs. Weeping wouldn’t do anything for her right now. She would not allow herself to succumb to it.
Instead, she got to work.
The puddle on the floor had already started taking on that sticky film of old blood; it wouldn’t be the easiest to work with, but she’d have to do the best she could. Using an engraved silver spoon she’d inherited from Regina, Hadassah scooped up some of Yael’s blood and dripped it into a matching silver scrying cup from her shelf. She hadn’t used these particular tools in years—they’d been some of her first, and she’d graduated to better, but, as with the quantity and quality of the blood, she would have to make do.
She cleared her mind as best she could. Focus. Focus. Breathe. Hadassah closed her eyes. With the cup held in one hand, she waved the other over it.
You never captured the blood magic. It couldn’t be forced. You had to coax it. Ease it. Many times, Hadassah had thought of it as seduction.
But not today.
Almost instantly the colors swirled and rose, twisting into the shapes and patterns it had taken her years to learn how to interpret. It was not unheard of to use hemomancy to read someone who wasn’t there, but it had never been Hadassah’s practice. It didn’t matter, now. Nothing about her relationship with Yael had been normal.
Hadassah put forth her question, not with words, but simple desire. “What will happen to Yael?”
She held her breath. For the first time since she’d begun honing her hemomancy skills, Hadassah wished to fail. Instead, she easily interpreted the signs to see that Yael was going away—somewhere far away, to another country, or possibly, horribly, even another realm. Wherever she was going, it would be without Hadassah.
Again, she wanted to drop to her knees, to keen out her despair, but there was no time for that. Hadassah had seen something else in the blood. Something closer than the future.
She could see where Yael was right now.
Chapter Nineteen
Yael had run from Hadassah’s apartment with nothing—no phone, no wallet, no cash. That meant unless she wanted to walk all the way to the witch’s house, she would have to hitchhike. She wasn’t worried about coming to harm from a random driver, but she hadn’t counted on calling police attention to herself. When the cruiser pulled up next to her, Yael quickly shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans and kept walking, eyes facing forward.
“Hey, Jackie. What’s going on?” The cop in the passenger seat had rolled her window down, now addressing Yael.
“I’m not Jackie.” She kept her gaze ahead of her, but her heart had started pounding.
“I’m going to ask you to stop for a second, let me get some ID from you—”
Yael took off.
From behind her, the blue/red flash of police lights came on as the car followed. Yael pushed this frail physical form to its limits to keep ahead of it, pumping her limbs. She drew in gasping breaths of humid, sticky afternoon air. She kept ahead of the car for a few minutes before it sped up enough to turn and come to a stop directly in front of her, one wheel on the sidewalk.
She’d misjudged her strength, believing she could clear the car with a leap, but she’d been human for too long. Instead, her battered boot toe caught the edge of the hood, smacking the hot metal and pitching her forward. Her body slammed full-length onto the hood of the police car. The officers, one male, one female, were both already out of the car.
“Holy shit, did she just try to—?”
“Yeah,” affirmed the female cop. “But she didn’t make it. I got her.”
Yael expected rough hands to drag her from the hood of the car, but the c
op’s grip was surprisingly gentle. Firm, but not violent. The woman pulled Yael to her feet but supported her. She was shielding her, Yael realized.
“I got you,” the cop said. In a lower voice, softly into Yael’s ear, she said, “I know what you are.”
After that, Yael lost the ability to discern words. She felt hands on this body she’d stolen and abused so fiercely, and she felt pain. Exhaustion. The deepest need she’d ever experienced, a desire to simply cease to exist, filled her.
Yael had never feared death. How could she be afraid of something she could not imagine experiencing? She’d never been afraid of pain either. How could something that had been woven into the very fabric of her being terrorize her?
She was afraid now of loss.
Time passed differently for demons, but her months spent as human had changed her perception of it, and of grief. Of sorrow. She mourned, now, the loss of Hadassah. Even knowing that her leaving had been to protect her lover, Yael could not rid herself of the grinding, almost paralyzing grief. It made her stumble. It made her fall.
Perhaps death would be welcome, instead of this.
The hands holding her so tightly let her go. Yael stumbled back. The cop who’d been holding her waved a hand at her partner.
“It’s not her,” she said in a low voice ripe with magic.
Yael took another stumbling step away from the cops and the patrol car. The female officer pinned her gaze on Yael’s as her partner moved forward. Again, the woman who’d been holding on to Yael lifted a hand in her partner’s direction.
“We misidentified. This young woman is causing no harm,” she said in the same pleasant, neutral voice as before.
“All right then,” her partner said and got back in the car.
Yael tensed, waiting for the remaining officer to come after her, but the cop just put her hands on her hips.
“You’re Mary’s work. I can smell it on you. You’re the demon she had bound to her?”
“Yes, but—”
The cop shook her head. “I don’t need to hear it. She gives our kind a bad name. Personally, I think she needs to be brought up on charges, but she’s got friends with more influence than I have. Are you all right?”
Love, Blood, and Sanctuary Page 18