{You have work to do.}
And how the hell had a cat followed her into this room? She'd barred the door. She remembered that quite clearly, and she hadn't seen any cats. None. No leprechauns sleeping against the far wall, either. Just bare stone walls, stone floor, stone vaulted ceiling, and a lot of dust. Nobody had used this room for decades. Maybe centuries. She'd brought the wine-bottles and goblet with her.
Leprechaun?
He lay slumped against the far wall, by the door, a small brown-skinned man in ragged clothing and bare feet.
"Who the hell are you?"
She set the goblet down, careful of its heavy fragile beauty, careful of the godawful cost and labor of it and of the priceless rotted grape-juice that it carried. No need to worry about a job in this place. Maureen was rich. So whyinhell did the cat keep talking about work?
{There is pain, and you can ease it. Come.}
A paw batted her cheek, just the pad, no claws. The cat flowed off her lap. It turned its head back over its shoulder, his shoulder, she could plainly see his potent maleness, and he stared at her and then at the huddled form slumped against the far wall, by the door. The barred door, just as she remembered.
Jeezum. The room spun around her, almost as if she had chugged all that wine. This place seriously creeped her out, people and cats that ignored locked doors. She forced herself to hands and knees. No way she was going to try to stand up. But hands and knees were still reliable, four-point stance that didn't depend on a mental gyroscope for stability. Why'd humans ever switched?
{Trading stability for thumbs. Nor are you human.}
Right. Thanks for the reminder.
The leprechaun stank. Not just B.O. and need of a bath, unless the Little People had some strange metabolisms. He smelled like he'd been left too long in the back of the refrigerator, rotting meat. Dead meat.
{He lives. The Stone needs him.}
Jo heard that capitalized title, loud and clear. The cat meant something specific, not the generic stone surrounding her. Stonehenge came to mind, or one of those rough-hewn windswept monoliths on an Irish hill. Grandfather O'Brian used to say that people left offerings at such places -- a bowl of cereal, spring flowers, a dead rabbit, a bottle of uisce beatha. Placate the old gods of the land. The offerings disappeared, between the evening and the dawning.
The Stone wanted this scarred lump as a sacrifice?
{The Stone wishes him to live. You have the Power to make it so.}
She heard that capital as well. But she'd tried using her Blood to heal, and failed.
{Your mother did not wish for healing.}
In fact, she'd fought against it. Jo remembered the old Naskeag woman, speaking, soothing, calming, after all the thunder and stink and blood. Mom's spirit beating at the walls of her body like a trapped bird, longing to be free. Longing to die.
Did this little man wish to live?
She ignored the cat. It was just a figment of psychosis, anyway. She touched hot dry skin, felt the weak and racing pulse under it, felt the spreading death in blood and lymph. Her fingers traced scars old and new, followed rivers of pain, felt weakening lines of Power, slipped into feverish dreams of a labyrinthine pattern etched in fire. A core of stone waited, deep inside, not cold stone or ash but living brilliance of rainbow gems in the sun. Yes, this man still wished to live. Did he deserve healing?
He wasn't evil. She could feel that, as well. He didn't love people, didn't care whether most people lived or died, but he did love stone. He loved this pile of stone around her. He loved its heart and . . . grieved for it?
Yes. Grief. Grief and rage at some scar or vandalism and a way of healing twisted through his fever dreams. But his heart felt nothing like her father's, nothing like Sean's. Calculation, but no malice.
Green threads bound him, draining Power beyond the poisons in his blood. Vines, twisting evil vines of magic that sucked at his life and thoughts and fed them back to another. Jo shuddered. Her loathing burned the tether, cutting the small man loose and leaving the orphaned vines to shrivel into dust.
His scars faded, but the livid infection still raged through his body. It would kill him, kill him soon. His own Power couldn't touch it.
Sweat dripped down Jo's forehead and stung her eyes. His fever burned in her veins, devouring the wine. Even the heat could kill. She reached to one side and found the goblet and drained it, ignoring the creepy feeling that it had followed her across the floor on magic feet. She let the alcohol flow straight through her body and the touch of her hand on his arm and turn its fire into cooling evaporation. He shuddered under her hands, relaxing as the binding died.
Bandages wrapped his arm, hiding the source of the infection. She tore them, her fingernails sharp as knives, and found black oozing sores underneath, and curved rows of pits down through his flesh. She gagged on the stench. Gangrene. A vision touched her, the black dragon she'd faced in the forest shrunk small and mindless, twisting claws and teeth and sudden pain and blood. Those tooth-marks would fit the curve of such a jaw.
Jo's shoulder muscles burned with strain. She reached back in her mind, seeking the Power, and the Stone responded. Power flowed from the heart of the keep, and she sent it pulsing through the man's blood and bone and nerve.
He writhed under her hand, slick now with sweat, the Power eating poisons and microbes, and he screamed. More wine foamed into the goblet, and she stared into it and willed the water in it elsewhere and transmuted wine into brandy. Alcohol splashed the arm, killing, sterilizing, alcohol flowed into the man's veins at a concentration that would kill him if she didn't
