Maureen staggered to her feet, using the rowan as a guide to vertical. Her head spun and her knees seemed to lack some essential parts.
"I thought being a witch was more fun. Don't I get to lure children into my gingerbread house and bake them for dinner?"
"I don't know. I've never been a witch. Some of the noises you made earlier seemed to imply pleasure."
She blushed. "I think we can talk to the hedge now."
Brian was staring at the cracked threshold. "Leaving behind a house filled with turmoil and strife. You don't mind smashing a walnut with a sledgehammer, do you? My dear sister may find it easier just to move someplace else. How did you do that?"
"I don't know." Shivers danced along her spine. "Words came to me. The blood, the rowan tree, the words, all came to me. Power seems to use me, more than the other way around."
He shook his head. "With the Blood, as with other things, power is a matter of will. Most of us have to learn spells as a focus."
{We go now.}
The cats strolled across the lawn, tails up, stopping to sniff this and that as if to imply total mastery of the situation. Maureen found the strength for a faint grin. It was such a typical cat attitude: "We're leaving now. You may follow us if you wish. Take it or leave it."
Brian tucked an arm around her waist, and they accepted the offer. She leaned on him in a pose that might have been a casual snuggle but actually was nine-tenths of her support. Her hand dripped red into the grass and she watched each drop fall, fascinated with the way the ground drank it in without a trace. Her sight pulsed with fatigue, the grass approaching and receding as if the ground was a heart beating in time with her own.
The cats padded quietly into a gap in the hedge and turned right, where no gap had stood a minute earlier. Right and right and right again they turned, impossibly, just like entering, and then they faced the dead-end again.
This time it was Fiona instead of a blank wall of hedge.
Maureen blinked twice to be sure. The hallucination spoke.
"So that's what set off the alarm. It would be you," she said. "With Dougal dead, it would be you. I warned him."
Brian's hand twitched toward his knife and then froze. Maureen's heart froze with it.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, embarrassed by her stupidity even as she mouthed the words.
"I live here," Fiona answered. "What's your excuse?"
"I came for Brian."
Fiona laughed. "He's not yours, love. You didn't want him, when you had the chance. Now you've changed your mind, but you're not strong enough to make it stick."
Strong enough? Maureen thought. I'm not even strong enough to stand. Brian was holding me up.
She felt his rigid hand slipping up along her waist, across her ribs, brushing past her breast. She felt like Jell-O oozing out of his grip, down the length of his body, unable to even lift a hand to grab him like a tree. She slipped to her knees and then toppled sideways in a quiet thump. Even the flagstones of the path felt soft and inviting.
She looked up into Fiona's face and saw pity there--pity and detached amusement. This isn't Fiona, she thought. This isn't magic. I'm just used up. No food. No sleep. Long day. Tired.
She reached out with her cut left hand and grasped the stem of a rose in the hedge. I tried to set you free, she thought. You, and the cats, and the rowan tree, and Brian. I'm sorry. I just wasn't strong enough.
{Kill!} echoed in her head, the only answer.
Maureen tried to snatch her hand back from Fiona's trap. The muscles wouldn't obey. Her whole arm just flopped into the tangle of stems and roots at the base of the hedge.
The rose didn't follow it. Blood still beaded on her cut palm and oozed slowly down to drip into the soil, to touch the grass at the edge of the path and vanish into the land. Maureen followed a drop along that road, and then another, and another.
Strange, she thought. It isn't clotting right. Women don't get hemophilia, they just transmit it. Must be short on vitamin K or something.
A sound like wind rustled through the hedge, followed by grunts of pain. She tore her attention away from the minor magic of her own blood and refocused higher, on Fiona battling with strands of thorny green.
Maureen blinked, woozily. The hedge was attacking Fiona. She stared at it, unbelieving. I'm not doing anything! Brian's not doing anything! She's still fighting for her life!
Green whips lashed at the dark witch and shriveled into black powder, only to be replaced by new legions. Vines clutched at her legs and sought her throat. Tufts of wool stood out from her sweater, and scratches lined her face and arms. Her face snapped from side to side, flaming with rage but with a touch of frantic madness. Even her hair stood out in tangles that mocked her usual cool elegance.
Brian stirred. His hand reached his knife, drew half an inch of steel, an inch. Sweat popped out on his face and dripped to his chest. Fiona screamed some inarticulate noise of power.
His hand froze and then retreated, eclipsing the steel in its sheath. The hedge attacked with a fresh spasm of vines and thorns.
Maureen forced herself to stir, to drag herself to hands and knees, to crawl across the rough stones of the path. She grabbed Fiona's ankle. She couldn't reach higher. She pulled her face up against the cool silk of Fiona's stockings and bared her teeth and bit down, hard.
She tasted blood. She couldn't tell if it was hers or Fiona's.
She tumbled sideways,
