11
“THIS ISN’T GOING TO BE VERY EXCITING,” SEBASTIAN warned, as they climbed the stairs to his workroom. “Most magic isn’t, really. I hope you aren’t expecting all sorts of lights and colors and sparkly things.”
“I’d like it better if you would stop telling me what it isn’t and tell me what it is,” she said, but softened the rebuke with a smile. Unfortunately, he was ahead of her on the stairs and didn’t see it.
Bother.
“Well, what I’m going to do is find out if my bite set up an affinity between us,” he said, sounding uncomfortable. “If it did, then we need to be more worried about you changing. If it didn’t, we can be less worried.”
“And what’s an affinity?” she asked as they entered the room.
“It’s — it’s being related in some way. Like blood relatives. Here, sit down, would you?” He gestured to a chair, and she obediently took a seat. He went to a workbench and came back with a needle and a little swatch of linen. She eyed both dubiously.
“Are you going to stick me with that?” she asked pointedly.
“Well, erm, yes,” he said. “I need blood. If you’ve gotten infected, the thing that makes the change will be in your blood.”
“You are not going to stick me with that,” she said firmly.
His face was a welter of confusion. “But you said — ”
“I am going to stick me with that.” She plucked the needle out of his nerveless fingers. “You’d be trying so hard not to hurt me that you would never get any blood at all.” Steeling herself, she jabbed the end of her pinky finger good and hard, then squeezed up a little bead of blood and sopped it up with the square of linen. He took both needle and linen from her with visible relief.
“I still need your help,” he said, sounding much more at ease now that the part that clearly made him feel acutely uncomfortable was over. “I need an extra pair of hands.”
For the next hour or so, she followed his directions as they simultaneously sprinkled various liquids and powders over the two bits of bloodstained cloth while he chanted under his breath. Finally, he decreed the preliminary work done.
“Just what was that all about?” she asked.
“Well, we already have some affinity, and I just wanted to narrow it all down to whether or not we both have been contaminated by what makes the change. We live in the same place right now, we share meals, we breathe the same air… With something like this, you have to be careful to exclude anything that might be a kind of contaminant. You have to be very specific.” He picked up the squares of cloth in two sets of tongs, obviously to avoid undoing all the work they had just done, and placed them in the middle of the inscribed circle on the floor.
Then he took four little pieces of brass from a drawer and set them into the circles — only then did she realize that they had not been complete until he did that.
“Well,” he said. “Now we see.”
He said something aloud that she almost understood. And when he did, the two pieces of linen fluttered and moved closer together. Their edges just touched — and then they stopped moving.
She waited, but nothing more happened. “Is that all?” she asked, finally.
He let out his breath in a sigh. “Well…curses.”
She felt a chill. “Does that mean that I am infected?” Her heart seemed to stop, then it definitely began racing, while her mind just froze.
“No, it means that either the spell didn’t work, or I forgot to eliminate something, or — or there is something here that I don’t know about,” he replied, visibly put out. “It means it’s inconclusive. If you definitely had been infected, and your blood was now the same as mine in that regard, the two pieces of linen would have become one — they’d have fused. They moved together, which means that we have something in common, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe you are infected, but you aren’t so far gone that the spell actually worked the way it was supposed to. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe we are both passionate about the same something — it could be anything from being so fond of macaroons that you crave them even at the mention of them to both of us having the identical ideals. I don’t know. And there is no way to tell. Or it just could be that I’m not as good at this as I thought I was, which is pretty likely.”
The fear drained away, mostly, but was replaced by irritation. “I thought that magic obeyed rules — ”
“Well, it does, but I can’t always tell what’s going to interfere!” he snarled back, losing his temper. “Obviously something is, but I don’t know what! And I corrected for everything I could think of, but it’s not as if I know everything there is to know about you! For all I know, we could be related somehow! I’d get the same sort of result if I did this test with Eric — ”
That was when something inside her snapped.
She had been attacked, kidnapped, forced to live with the creature who had attacked her in the first place, kept from communicating with her family and her family had been kept from knowing what had actually become of her. And this was all at the orders of people who seemed to think that because they had rank and titles, they knew what was best for everyone. She had been patient. She had been hideously lonely. She was still afraid, all the time; she was just very good at keeping it under control. She was never told what, if anything, anyone was actually doing about her problem. She was supposed to take their word for it that they actually were doing something and not just giving her empty promises. She was basically being treated as if she was a child in the nursery, and the only reason, so far as she could tell, was because she was a commoner and a female.
So she turned on Sebastian and let loose with all the anger and hurt and frustration and emotions she’d been repressing for weeks. It was almost worse now that people were actually telling her things, because she had just enough information to be really terrified.
And when she finally ran out of things to say, and he still hadn’t responded, she turned on her heel and stormed out. She had not exhausted her anger, she had only vented it. How could she feel relief? Nothing had
