Her father caught the rage on her face. He seemed to shrink as her anger swelled to fill the room, and he slid furtively towards the door.
"You bastard!" Space twisted around them, shoving her into the doorway and leaving him cornered. Her shout echoed between hard plaster walls, but she knew the sound was trapped in here with them. Whatever happened between them, no stranger could hear.
"You did this." Her rage narrowed and turned quiet, hissing like a welding torch adjusted to pure blue flame for burning straight through steel. "You've hit her a hundred times, a thousand times. Never again. You'll never hit any of us again."
He cringed away, deeper into the farthest corner of the tiny room. "Sh-sh-she fell," he stammered. "Sh-sh-she hit her head. It was an ac-ac-accident."
"Bullshit!"
She stared down at him, huddled there like a child trying to escape a beating, like her trying to escape him. Contemptible. She'd lived in fear of that?
"She found out about another one of your ten-buck syphilitic street-crawler whores. What was that, the hundredth time? You were drunk, like you've been drunk six days out of seven of your life. You hit her. You hurt her, without thought or care like you've lived your whole life without thought or care for others. You'll never hit her again."
The magic took her then, flashing up through her legs and spine to the back of her skull to send shivers down her arms. She raised her right hand and pointed dead between his eyes as if she was carrying out an execution.
"If you ever touch another woman, may your manhood fail you. If you take strong drink, may it twist your guts into knots and leave you puking sober. If you raise your hand against her or any woman, may your own hand turn against you and be your death. I lay this curse upon you by the blood tie between us. I call on the stones and trees and waters to witness it, I call on the winds to spread it wide, I call on the sun and moon and stars to guard it. If you break this doom, may you be called to judgment before the altar where you swore faith to God and to that woman lying wounded by your blows."
Then the Power released her, and she nearly staggered with the sudden weakness that washed over her. Where had those words come from? Where had they come from, in the Summer Country, when she'd been taken by the magic and shaken and wrung dry?
She stepped to one side, allowing him to scuttle past sideways like a retreating crab. "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."
The plaster wall felt cool against her forehead, gritty, reassuring in its strength and hardness. She leaned against it, trying to draw that cool soothing in to quench her headache. The room seemed to pulse around her in time with her pounding heart.
Jo turned and leaned back against the wall, staring at the rainbow auras that lined the hospital bed and side stand and IV pole. Gods above and below, I thought I'd escaped from that. I killed a man. I strangled him with the twisting vines of Maureen's forest and enjoyed every twitch that he made dying, and I ran away because of what I'd found in my own heart. And it's followed me here, like a wolf I made the mistake of feeding.
Her mother had turned slightly, to stare across the bed at her. Her right hand stirred. Jo felt her purpose through their shared blood, the bond of the Old Blood flowing in their veins. Her mother was trying to cross herself.
Trying to guard her soul against the demon that had left the room and the more dangerous demon that had scared him away.
Chapter Seven
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense."
Was that the third time they'd read the Miranda card at him, or the fourth? At least they hadn't read it in Spanish or Ukrainian, to make sure they'd stopped up all the mouse-holes. Brian shook his head. The cop across the table looked so young and neatly crewcut and earnest and upright, the whole scene was bloody pathetic.
Under arrest? I could stare into your eyes, snap my fingers, and you'd escort me out through that locked door with a smile on your face. Or I could just lean across the table and kill you with one strike, then step through the edge of the world into Maureen's forest.
Cop procedures weren't designed to deal with the Old Blood. For that matter, cop procedures and cop stations and county jails weren't designed to deal with SAS commandos. Brian let his mind float, ticking off the worn scratched gray metal doors with their electric locks, the laminated glass judas windows smoke-dark so that you only saw anonymous shadows of the watchers on the other side, the concrete block walls with their dingy off-green paint designed to calm the inmates. He mapped the halls and cameras and checkpoints and the total lack of weapons inside the jail. They even had weapons lockers for beat cops coming in with a prisoner.
Three men, five minutes, I could take this place apart and be back out through the wire with my choice of prisoners.
He focused back on the cop in front of him, sheriff's deputy, really, corporal by the collar tabs. The man looked a bit twitchy now, with squint-wrinkles next to his eyes as if some of Brian's thoughts had leaked through to his face.
"And the charge
