Blood Spells

His throat locked, but he got it out. “You and the boys.”

Her expression iced to the “don’t mess with my sons” look he had seen only once before, when Strike had told her they had to send Harry and Braden into hiding. “I’m not an idiot. I get that. But what I also get is that this has all happened because you’re so godsdamned convinced you know everything, that you have the right to make decisions for the people around you.”

“Bullshit.” His head hammered with his pulse. “That’s just bullshit. And can we please focus on what’s important here? We’ll deal with the relationship stuff later.”

“On your schedule.” Her voice was chill, but her reddened eyes were full of pain.

“Patience.” He held out a hand. “Please. Let’s not do this right now. We need to concentrate on figuring out how to get at the Triad magic safely.”

To his surprise, she took the hand he’d offered. But instead of twining their fingers together, she turned his palm up, so torchlight shone on the half-healed sacrificial cut. “Don’t you get it?

Everything’s connected.” Something new moved in her expression, a hint of grief existing beneath the anger. “None of this has been a coincidence.”

“You want me to have faith.” He said the last word like a curse.

She tightened her grip on his hand. “I want you to let me in. I want you to tell me everything, and listen to what I have to say. I want you to trust me. I want you to trust all of us.” Her voice went low and urgent. “You’ve got to stop making decisions for other people. And you’ve got to let us be your teammates. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to figure out how to fix this. As a team.”

“There’s no way to fix it,” he said harshly.

“You don’t know that for sure. Lucius might be able to find something in the library, or one of the others might have an idea.” She tugged on their joined hands. “Come on. Let’s go tell them what happened.”

But he stayed rooted. “I can’t.”

She let go of his hand. “Can’t or won’t?”

“I need time to think it through. An hour. Give me an hour to figure things out, so we can go in there together.”

“So you can tell me what we decided, you mean.” Her smile was bitter. “That would’ve worked six months ago, but not anymore. You don’t get to be the leader of a team within a team anymore. You either come out there with me now or I go on my own.” And with that, her request became an ultimatum. Come with me now, or don’t bother coming out at all.

“Fifteen minutes.” Pressure vised his temples, pounded behind his eyeballs, but he couldn’t give her what she wanted. And he didn’t know why.

He glimpsed tears as she turned away and pushed open the door. With her back to him, she said, “Woody once told me that it was impossible to change an eagle male, that I had to either learn to live with you the way you are or cut my losses.”

She paused for a moment, giving him a chance.

He opened his mouth to tell her not to go, to tell her that he would go out there with her, that he would try harder, but a surge of pain grayed his vision and took away the words. He put his face in his hands, digging his fingers in at his temples. Son of a bitch. He sensed, deep down inside, the moment that she gave up, the moment that she stepped through the door and let it swing shut behind her. But he couldn’t move. Nausea rose as the torchlight speared through him, gone suddenly far too bright.

The headaches were getting worse, but why? What was—

Oh, shit. He got it. He fucking got it.

And the moment he did, the headache snapped out of existence.

He didn’t wait around to enjoy the relief, though. He straight-armed the door and went after her.

“Patience, wait!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Patience marched down the hallway outside the royal suite, intent on telling the others what she’d seen in the vision . . . and, in doing so, making a clean break. She hadn’t planned it that way, hadn’t consciously decided to issue an ultimatum, but it was long past due.

Maybe he had a point that the timing was wrong, that they should table the personal stuff until after the solstice-eclipse. But, deep down inside, she didn’t believe that. The magic of a mated pair came, not just from the sex, but from the love they shared. Without that love, they were just exes who occasionally slept together.

And oh, gods, how that thought hurt.

“Wait,” his voice said from behind her. “Please.” Her heart thudded and she told herself to keep going. Instead, she stopped and turned back, because she was weak when it came to him. Weak, weak, weak. She got even weaker when she saw the hint of gold in his eyes, the suppressed excitement that said he’d figured something out. Be strong, she told herself, not even sure she knew what that meant anymore, but sure she couldn’t keep going on the way things had been between them for so long.

She lifted her chin. “What?”

He closed the distance between them with long-legged strides and stopped opposite her, so they stood face-to-face very near the heavily carved sideboard that was one of the few pieces of furniture in the hallway.

It was almost exactly where and how they had stood while he’d chewed her out for breaking into the royal suite six months earlier.

“You’re right that it’s all connected. But not the way you mean.” He reached to take her hands, hesitated, and hooked his thumbs in his pockets instead. “We were right that our problems dated back to the talent ceremony, but we were wrong about why. My warrior’s talent wasn’t trying to screw things up between us. . . . It was trying to protect you.”

It took a second. But then, like the last few pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle slipping into place, her perceptions realigned themselves, and she saw it. Of course. Understanding seared through her, paralyzing her. She couldn’t breathe.

“The talent ceremony must have punched partway through Werigo’s spell.” He paused, his voice going rough. “My subconscious knew I was cursed, and that I had to drive you away, but my conscious self didn’t know why. All I knew was that I was making you miserable and I didn’t know how to stop.

And when I tried to fix things, it felt like my head was ripping itself apart.”

“And now?” Her mouth had gone suddenly dry.

“The second I figured it out, the headache quit. I know what’s going on now, so my protective instincts don’t need to clash with my wanting to be with you.”

“Gods,” she whispered.

“Everything’s going to be different from now on. I promise.” He held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go brief the others. You’re right—we need to work together to come up with a plan.”

But as she took his hand and let him tug her into his arms, let herself rest her cheek on his shoulder for a moment, part of her held itself away. She had spent a long time telling herself that everything would be okay if they could figure out what had gone wrong, and how to fix it. Instead, things were more complicated than ever. And she wasn’t sure she trusted any of it.

Tired and sad, Patience mostly sat back and listened while Brandt brought the others up to speed. That was, until Lucius asked Brandt to draw the mark he’d cut out of his leg, and he sketched out a glyph that was reminiscent of a sailboat on the ocean, with seagulls flocking around the mast, all contained within a round- cornered square.

The air went thin in her lungs and the low-grade nausea in the pit of her stomach kicked up several notches. She leaned in, touched the picture. “Akbal.”

“What?”

“It’s the name of the glyph,” Lucius said. “Akbal. It symbolizes the third day of the everyday calendar of the