Faith Hunter - Bloodring

"Actually" —he turned back to me, his gaze penetrating and merciless—"we have a report that Lucas was attacked in an alley and dragged off."

The words were like a blow to my stomach. My fingers curled into fists, my reaction surprising to me. I was supposed to be over Lucas. "Is he hurt?" I whispered.

"We don't know, ma'am."

My breath stuck in my throat, throbbing, as I tried to make sense of it. "He's missing?" And then I knew. The bloodring. "He's been kidnapped."

The cop's eyes were steady, watching me. "It appears so. But no ransom demand has been delivered."

"When did it happen?"

"Monday at dusk. But we learned of the attack only this morning."

Monday. While I was eating stew on the trail from Boone. Misery throbbed along the length of my scars, their sensory pathways laden with pain and blanked luminescence.

"Does Ciana know?" I asked.

"I spoke to her and Maria earlier this evening."

I should have been there for Ciana. I should have checked my messages. Shame and a feeling like grief lashed my nerve endings. "Are they all right?"

"As well as can be expected."

And then the pieces clicked into place. I knew why Bartholomew was here in the middle of the night. Warrior instincts flung anger heat through my limbs. My muscles tensed with battle readiness. "Let me guess. I'm your 'woman scorned' suspect."

Thaddeus' brow quirked slightly and when he spoke his words were careful. "There would seem to be an awful lot of women in that category."

My anger vanished in a whip crack of laughter, the sound shaky with adrenaline overload. "You could say that. Lucas is charming and beautiful, and he sleeps around. A lot." But I noted that he hadn't discounted the idea that I might be a suspect.

I looked from the clock to the phone and answering machine, which blinked a tiny red light. I hadn't bothered to listen to the messages. It was so late. If I called now, Maria would have a hissy fit.

I couldn't sit still. Throwing off the afghan, I walked across to the kitchen, poured water into a kettle, and lit the gas stove with a match from a box on the table. The lighting mechanism on the stove had died ages ago and I had never bothered to replace it. A fire amulet worked well enough, and I had matches for when there was company. I set the kettle on the burner.

Ciana would be mad with worry. Maria would only make things worse. I could almost see Lucas' first wife joking about the incident, finding humor in his being hurt, laughing about it in front of Ciana. "What happened? Can you tell me?" I asked over my shoulder as I got out two mugs and a jar of herbal tea. Chamomile, passion fruit, and rose hips for their calming properties. I dumped four tablespoons into the pot, needing a powerful draught.

When I turned around, the cop was right behind me. He was wide, tapering to a narrow waist, taller than any mage, who are small and trim. Much taller than I, at my four feet ten inches. One hand was in his pants pocket, the cashmere suit coat pushed back, exposing the silver and turquoise of his belt buckle and, surely accidentally, a gun, reminding me of the danger he represented. Yet he looked so right in my home, as if he'd been there forever. "Nice house," he said.

"It was the town livery," I said, an inane comment, but the silence was charged, my emotions in a snarl. I had a powerful desire to slide my hand between the buttons of his shirt and touch his chest. Would he arrest me for assault? A witless laugh tittered in the back of my throat and I chattered to cover it. "It was built for the horses and mules used to build the railroad back in the early twentieth century. The wooden parts are post and beam, hand-hewn logs, twelve-by-twelve supports, and ten-by-ten beams for the roof structure," I pointed over his head, his eyes following my hand. "Exterior walls are four-foot-thick stone and brick." It was a charming mishmash of materials I loved, a style unique to Upper Street.

When I looked back to him, his eyes were on my hair, which was still piled high in a scarlet tumble from the bath. Then his eyes trailed down, over my ear, my jaw. My neck. To my mouth. I shivered, need purling deep inside. "Where have you been the last two days?"

I hadn't expected the question. I had expected him to say something else entirely, or hoped he would. The heat he generated quivered in my belly. "At a Salvage and Mineral Swap Meet."

"At the market in Boone?"

"Yes," I said, surprised he knew about it.

"Can anyone substantiate that?"

"I was seen by a few people I know. I have receipts for purchases—" I stopped. I had released a rune of forgetting after most of my sales, and I had been disguised for almost all the purchases. I had to be careful. Few would remember me, and the cop would think that strange. "I had coffee with Fazelle and Nova Henderson, owners of Henderson Shielded Mine. I had a spa day Sunday afternoon, after kirk services were over and locals were allowed out to work. I left for home on the Monday morning mule train, with Guide Hoop Marks. Spent the night on the trail. I got into town tonight after eight p.m. You can check."

"I will. Will you provide me the names of the people you remember from the show?"

My first stubborn instinct was to refuse. It wasn't his business whom I had seen in Boone, but Lucas was in trouble. Which shouldn't have bothered me—shouldn't, but did. I gave him the names and addresses of people with whom I had bargained while not wearing my glamour disguise, including Audric, and he copied them down in his little notebook, seeming not to note that one address was right next door. The kettle sang and I poured out two mugs of tea, straining the loose leaves with a silver strainer, and handed him a cup. He asked a few more questions that seemed to slide right out of my memory the second I answered.

And then he was leaving. I followed him down the steps to the outer door of Thorn's Gems and locked the shop behind him. Standing in the shadow, I watched as he moved through the snow across the sidewalk toward the town's only hotel.

The last hour was a blur of nothingness in my mind, a fuzz of sound and need, and when he was gone, I made it back upstairs, where I fell against the closed door. A kylen! Had Lolo sent him? Why hadn 't I been inside his mind? Was it his human genes? I had to stay away from him. But if mage-heat kicked in full force, I'd be hard-pressed not to take him in the streets.

Dizziness and need rocked me. I stripped and pulled on flannel pajamas, but heat and cold, sexual attraction and fear, seemed to have invaded my body. I couldn't get warm, couldn't get comfortable. I pulled three more bath stones from the tub and huddled with them under the down duvet on my bed, drawing from their power. When I had myself under control, I listened to messages while sipping cooling tea, hitting the button until I heard the sound of Ciana's voice. She was crying, begging me to call.

Knowing she wouldn't be able to sleep after learning her father was missing, I dialed her number. Of course, Maria answered and wouldn't let me talk to Ciana, though I could hear the child of my heart begging in the background. Instead, Maria called me a few names banned just after the start of the Last War and hung up on me. Frustrated, my last nerve thoroughly stomped on, I replaced the receiver and sipped my cold tea.

I slept with the charged bath stones, still warm from the water and leaking power that I absorbed as I rested. The radiance healed the effect of two days of rigorous riding and of having been in a city surrounded by technology and strange people, of bathing in water collected from both sky and earth, pooled stream water augmented by snowmelt, which confused my senses and drained my neomage gifts. The stones restored energies spent hiding what I was under almost constant glamour, a glamour hard to maintain now that I no longer had my strongest prime amulet. When I woke, I felt healed, though my bath had been interrupted and snow was piled high beyond the windows. I'd have to sleep with charged stones more often. The princess and the pea, I wasn't.