Faith Hunter - Host

“He’s bleeding, isn’t he?” she said, sitting up. “I smell it. Kinda salty and rank, like the venison steaks Daddy cooked last week. He soaked them in milk.” She made a face and her blue eyes met mine, innocent and curious.

Contrary to mystery books and television, most humans can’t smell blood unless it’s decaying. There’s no coppery scent, no salty scent, there’s zilch to the typical human nose. I struggled to keep my reaction off my face and my voice calm. “Yes. He’s hurt. I used a healing amulet on him and it was able to repair most of the nerve and muscle damage, but I ran out before we could close the wound. Zeddy stitched it up, but it reopened and he didn’t tell us. He’s in bad shape.”

Ciana sighed and said, “Men.” Her tone was so world-weary I actually laughed. She sounded like she was eight going on thirty-three. She sounded like her mother, Marla.

“Yeah. Men,” I echoed. My stepdaughter was growing up.

She touched the seraph-wing pin and the healing glow seemed to withdraw, coalescing into a pinpoint of bright light beneath her fingers. She eased out from the covers, tucking them around Cissy to keep the other girl warm.

On sock-covered feet, the flounce of her nightgown dragging the floor, she crossed the intervening space and crawled up on the leather couch beside her uncle. His shirt was off, the wound exposed, and I got a quick look at it before Audric covered it with a clean pad and applied pressure, sopping up blood.

It was a foot-long gaping wound with muscles, blood vessels, and ribs visible in the ragged, broken flesh. The ruptured stitches looked like black spider legs splaying to either side. His skin was a dangerous gray, the edges of the wound white with blood loss. I would have shielded any other child from the sight, but Ciana was inured to such injuries. She had helped me following two previous raids on the town, assisting to heal the wounded, calling on domes of healing stored in the pin, seraphic incantations I had no idea how to use. When I asked her how she knew what to do, she had shrugged and claimed not to know. It was a heck of a burden for an eight-year-old and I felt more than a moment of discomfort at asking her. But I kept asking.

Ciana touched her pin with one hand and Rupert’s back with the other. Her uncle spasmed as if struck with an electrical jolt. When he sucked in a breath, it sounded wet and somehow sticky. She pushed the bandage away and bent over the wound, tilting her head first to one side, then the other. From the hand holding the pin, pink and blue sparkles flowed, pinpoints of glittery light that I could see with human vision. Mage-sight clicked on with an almost audible snap, and the sparkles became strings of light flowing into Rupert. But they came from Ciana’s fingers, not from the pin, which was really weird. And scary.

“Does that hurt?” I asked her. “I mean, does it hurt you?”

“A little.” She shrugged. “I get tired after. The domes are easier, but it’s all out of those.”

Healing domes were seraph energy constructs shaped like upside-down bowls, a type of curative conjure that had been permanently stored in the pin. She had figured out how to use them all on her own. Or maybe like my visa, the pin had suggested the domes, a kind of interactive relationship. I wasn’t sure I liked Ciana being tied to an artifact of seraphic origins, but that hadn’t stopped me from encouraging her to use it to help the town’s injured. And I wasn’t sure where the energy that powered the pin’s conjures came from, but I was guessing it came from the cosmos itself. A lot of guessing on my part. And guessing could mean throwing Ciana to the wolves. I was turning into a wicked stepmother, something from a fairytale.

“Bad stepmama,” Ciana said with a stifled giggle.

I felt myself go cold. She had heard my thoughts.

Ciana looked up at me, the gap where she had recently lost a baby tooth a thin black hole in her smile. “It’s okay, Thorn. It won’t hurt me. And I can only hear you sometimes. I tried to hear you in the fight, and you were just a buzz in my ears. No words.”

“What does she mean?” Audric asked. “This one looks deep.” He pointed to a place on Rupert’s back where the muscle was twisted, wrapped around a blood vessel.

Ciana put her fingers directly on the spot and pressed. The glittery pink and blue strands of light merged into a tight, shining braid and poured into the ruptured flesh. Rupert sighed as his pain began to ease. She said, “When I’m using the pin, I can hear Thorn’s thoughts. And I’m out of domes because the pin has to regen—regena—What’s the word? Make more?”

“Regenerate,” I said. “It has to regenerate itself, and draw more power.”

“Yep. From the Most High. He gives Raziel the power to make it work.” She looked up at me under tousled dark brown hair. “He likes you.”

“Who?” I asked. Raziel?

“The Most High.”

Before I could guard my thoughts Ciana giggled. “That’s a bad word. Shame on you, Thorn.” Her grin faded. “It’s okay. Really. I wasn’t human in the first place. None of us are.”

Mage-sight was already open, so I gripped the couch and opened a mind-skim, drawing in air and sensation through my nose and into my mind, blending the senses into one scan. Under it, Ciana was…changed. She no longer coursed with human energies; instead, her body coruscated with blue light that raced just under her skin. Her aura was pink, like the domes she could open, but whispering with the blue and pink sparkles that came from her fingers. Her eyes were bright blue flames.

And beneath her fingers, Rupert was changing too. Still human, in that his body was rich with life and with what I had come to associate with normal human energy patterns, normal human chi, but through his blood vessels coursed that same blue light. Seraphic light. The energy of the holy ones.

The world tilted, and nausea rose in the back of my throat as the vertigo that came with blending scans gripped me. I stepped back and went down, sitting hard on the wood floor and catching myself with both hands. I had looked at Lucas’ aura, not long after he ate food provided by the cherub Amethyst, manna or something close to it, while they were both imprisoned by Forcas in the Trine. Lucas, Ciana, and now Rupert had all been exposed to seraphic influences. And all three were changing, which humans simply did not do. Ciana said they weren’t entirely human, never had been. So what the heck were they? Not mage. Not half-breeds. Not seraphs, though Ciana could manipulate seraphic energies. And talk to someone she thought was the Most High God. Psychosis? Or spiritual reality?

Audric looked at me over the back of the couch, his mouth in a grim line and questions in his glance that he wouldn’t ask aloud in front of Ciana. “I don’t know,” I said to the unasked questions. I don’t know what the Stanhopes are.

In response, the big man bent nearly double and gripped my wrist. With an effortless tug, he pulled me to my feet and deposited me in a chair. His look warned me to guard my thoughts, and I quickly blanked my mind, envisioning a candle flame, unwavering in the night, the first meditation technique taught to all mage children. I let the first thing that came into my mind fill me, latched on to the first litany taught mage children. Stone and fire, water and air, blood and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and kin prevail.

Rupert’s eyes opened and he looked at me. “Cool,” he croaked. “I like that.”

Somehow, I was able to keep my reaction to myself, focusing hard on the verse with laserlike precision. Rupert stretched his neck and found Audric. “Where’s Death of Dragonets? I need it.”

His face impassive, Audric went to a low chest and brought back the tooled leather sheath and sword, the gift he’d had made especially for Rupert to celebrate the day when he reached master status in savage-blade. My best boy-pal had been the recipient of a battlefield promotion, and now he had named his sword. Men and their toys. I shook my head, amused.