Нора Робертс - Blood Magick

“You can have half a dozen.”

She stepped to him with the ritual knife and the cup.

“Don’t block it.” He drew her eyes to him. “The pain may be part of it. We’ll let it come, and let it go.”

“All right.”

She was quick—quick was best—and scored across the pentagram with the tip of her blade. She caught the blood in the cup—felt the pain though he made no sound, no movement.

“That’s enough,” she murmured, and set the knife aside to pick up the cloth she had ready, pressed it to the wound.

Then, putting the cup by the jars, turned back to him to gently heal the shallow wound.

Before he knew what she was about—perhaps before she did—Branna pressed a kiss to the mark.

“Don’t.” Stunned, appalled to the marrow, he jerked back. “I don’t know how it might harm you, what it might do.”

“It will do nothing to me, as you did nothing to earn it. I spent years trying to blame you for it, and should have blamed Sorcha—or more, her grief. She harmed you—she broke our most sacred oath, and harmed you, and many before you. Innocents. I’d take it from you if I could.”

“You can’t. Do you think I haven’t tried?” He yanked on his sweater again. “Witchcraft, priests, wise women, holy men, magicks black and white. Nothing touches it. I’ve been to every corner of the world where there was so much of a whisper of a rumor the curse could be broken.”

His rambles, she realized. This was their basis. “You never said—”

“What could I say?” he countered. “This visible symbol of what runs inside me can’t be changed, it can’t be removed by any means I’ve tried. No spell, no ritual can break the curse she cast with her dying breaths. It can’t be burned off, cut off or out of me. Considered lopping my arm off, but feared it would just sear in on another part of me.”

“You— Good God, Fin.”

He hadn’t meant to say so much, but couldn’t take back the words. “Well, I was more than a bit drunk at the time, fortunately, as cursed is cursed, two-armed or one, despite what seemed desperately heroic at two and twenty, when shattered on the best part of a bottle of Jameson.”

“You won’t harm yourself,” she said, shaken to the core. “You won’t think of it.”

“No point in it, as I’ve been told time and again when all attempts failed. The curse of a dying witch—and one who’d sacrificed herself for her children, to protect them from the darkest of purposes?—it’s powerful.”

“When this is done, I would help you find a way—all of us—”

“It’s for me, if there is a way, and I won’t ever stop looking, as because of this you can’t give me tomorrows. I can’t ask for them or give them to you. We could never have children.” He nodded. “I see you know that, too. Neither of us would bring a child into the world knowing he would carry this burden.”

“No.” Despair, and brutal acceptance, twisted her heart. “And when this is done . . . you’ll go again.”

“When this is done, could either of us be together as we are, knowing we’d never have the life we once imagined? Knowing this”—he touched his shoulder—“stands between us even after Cabhan’s end? As long as I wear it, he doesn’t truly end, and Sorcha’s curse goes on, in me. So I’ll never stop looking for a way.”

“So her curse comes back threefold. You, me, and the life we might have had.”

“We have today. It’s more than I believed I’d have with you again.”

“I thought it would be enough.” She walked into his arms, held tight.

“We’d best not waste it.”

“No, we won’t waste it.” She lifted her face, lifted her lips to his. “If I could wish it, we’d be ordinary.”

He could smile. “You could never be ordinary.”

“Just a woman who makes soaps and candles, and has a pretty shop in the village. And you just a man who has the stables and the falconry. If I could wish it. But . . .”

As she did, he looked at the counter, with the spell books, the jars. “If we were ordinary, we couldn’t do what has to be done. Best try the spell or you’ll be bleeding me again saying the blood’s not fresh enough.”

Duty, she thought, and destiny. Neither could be shirked.

She got the cauldron, lit its fire low.

The long, painstaking process took precision and power—step by careful step. Branna ordered herself to put all the previous failures aside, to treat this as the first attempt. The toxic brew bubbled and smoked as both she and Fin held their hands over the cauldron to slowly, slowly stir.

She drew a breath as they approached the final step.

“Blacken, thicken under my hands,” she said.

Fin followed. “To make this poison for the damned.”

“Power of me,” they said together as with the words the brew bubbled forcibly. “Power of three, here fulfill our destiny. As we will, so mote it be.”

She felt the change, the spread of power and will, from her, from Fin. They reached for each other, linking that power and that will, letting it merge and, merging, increase.

Blocking all else, she focused only on that merging, that purpose, while her heart began a hard, quick tattoo in her breast, while the warmth and scents of her workshop faded away.

All light, bright and brilliant, rising in her, flowing from her. Blooming with what rose and flowed from him.

A meeting, physical, intimate, psychic, potent that built like a storm, ripped through her like a climax.

Her head fell back. She lifted her arms, palms up, fingers spread.

“Here, a weapon forged against the dark. Fired by faith and light. On the Dark Witch’s sacrificial ground, three by three by three will stand against the evil born in the black. Blood and death follow. Bring horse, hawk, hound together, and say the name. Ring bell, open book, light candle, say the name. Into fire white, all light, blinding bright, cast the stone and close the door. Blood and death follow. Be it demon, be it mortal, be it witch, blood and death follow.”

Her eyes, which had gone black, rolled back white. Fin managed to catch her before she fell, simply folded like a puppet with its strings nipped.

Even as he swept her up, she pressed a hand to his shoulder.

“I’m all right. Just dizzy for a minute.”

“You’ll sit right here.” He laid her on the little sofa in front of the fire, then going to her stock, scanned until he found what he wanted.

He didn’t bother to put the kettle on, but made tea with a snap of his fingers, poured six drops of the tonic into it, then brought it to her.

“Drink and don’t argue,” he ordered. “It’s your own potion.”

“I was there, all the light and power rising up, and the brew stirring in the cauldron, thickening, bubbling. Then I was watching myself, and you, and hearing the words I spoke without speaking them. I’ve had flashes of what’s to come before—all of us have—but nothing so strong or overtaking as that. I’m all right now, I promise you.”

Or nearly, she thought and drank the laced tea.

“It’s only when it left me, it was like being emptied out entirely for just a moment.”

“Your eyes went black as the dark of the moon, and your voice echoed as if from a mountaintop.”

“I wasn’t myself.”

“You weren’t, no. What came in you, Branna?”

“I don’t know. But the strength and the light of it was consuming. And, Fin, it was beautiful beyond the telling. It’s all that we are, but so brilliantly magnified, a thousand suns all around and inside at once. It’s the only way I know to tell you.”

She drank more tea, felt herself begin to settle again. “I want to write it down, everything I said. It wouldn’t do to forget.”