You will not, Sal repeated. I will not cause you harm.
“Cut you. Drain you. Kill you.” Ellie held tight to my neck and waist. “No no no no no no no!”
Blood magic is too dangerous.
We didn’t have time to argue. Ellie’s magic burned my eyes and set every hair on my body on end. She wasn’t that far from burning out. “I’ll be all right.” I was always all right. “What’s the point of being half-dead if I can’t use it to our benefit?”
“You are not half-dead,” Ellie said. “I know you had mate magic in the truck.” She pulled her face away from my neck. “I know Mom stole it from you.” She leaned her forehead against my chest. “Mine manifested the night after the elves got you out of Vampland.”
She held up her hand and there, inside the torrent of her overheating witch magic, spun bright blue mate magic dust.
All this time, the cottage must have been draining it off with all her other magic.
“You will not sacrifice yourself for us, Frank Victorsson,” Ellie said. “Even if we are apart, I need to know you’re okay.” She inhaled sharply. “You have to be okay.”
Now was not the time of death and sacrifice. I wouldn’t allow it to be. I was done with the loss and the pain.
I kissed her deeply. “We’re going to be okay.”
A new sob broke free and she clung to me as I looked around the yard again.
Blood magic, I thought. Would a little blood on the cottage wall work? There had to be something other than Sal I could use to cut my arm. I looked back at the ash tree. Even a pointy stick might work.
“Your tattoo…” Ellie pulled away from my neck again.
“What?” Fire crept up my neck and into the spaces inside my Yggdrasil tattoo as if Ellie’s magic was filling all the spaces the cottage emptied of St. Martin’s magic.
“It’s glowing,” she said.
Blood magic transcended the elves and the fae. It touched the ancient beating heart of the planet, which was why it held so much power. Blood magic might be what I needed to siphon off enough of Ellie’s magic to allow the cottage to stay in Alfheim.
I touched the side of my face. Then I turned, still holding Ellie, toward the ash tree.
I’ve sat at a bar with the World Raven. I’ve stood in a magic place—one not all that different from the elves’ Great Hall—in the presence of a Wolf that was almost-but-not-quite the World Wolf. And I had the Norse version of the World Tree tattooed onto the side of my head.
The night I walked through the blizzard and into this very yard, I’d seen the stag under that tree’s branches. I’d seen the squirrel, eagle, and hawk in her canopy. Deep down, I’d understood.
I’d understood later, too, in the dream.
There were other magicks here. Magicks older than elves and fae. Magicks that touched the seasons, night and day, life and death equally.
And yet I could not describe what I felt. It sat under words, in that feral place where I controlled nothing, and it swirled up into my consciousness only when it wanted to. Just like all the stress generated by the uncalled memories.
I lifted Salvation off my back.
Do not—
“Trust me, Salvation,” I said.
I set Ellie down next to the ash’s trunk. “I need both hands for this,” I said, as I nicked the inner forearm of my dominant arm with Sal’s blade before transferring her back into my hand.
“Frank. Don’t.” Fire trickled out the edges of her eyes. “Let me go.” She gritted her teeth. “The cottage can’t hold off any longer. If you hurt yourself—”
I kissed her again. “I love you,” I said against her lips. Ellie needed to hear me say it. Honestly, I needed to hear myself say it. I should have told her earlier, but I had my rules. Insta-romance chaos wasn’t going to break the steps I’d built to me—except me needed to be more than my ways of being.
She wrapped her arms around me and I hoisted her up against the trunk, leaning in and holding her in place with my hips.
“Unzip our jackets,” I said.
She blinked.
“More contact.”
She wiggled in her hand and pulled down first her zipper, then mine. Then she threaded her cold hands under my t-shirt and placed them in the middle of my back.
I was the warm one in all this, and I was about to get warmer.
“Forgive us,” I said to the tree.
Ellie sucked in her breath. She closed her eyes.
I slammed Salvation’s blade into the trunk of the ash.
Chapter 22
When I was in the Union Army, I took several bullets to the gut. If I’d been a mundane man, I would have died on the battlefield. The balls rattled around in my innards for a decade and a half afterward, pressing here and distorting there. Most of my life up until that point had been pressings here and distortions there, so a little lead made no difference. At that time of my life, nothing made much difference.
Dagrun, in an afternoon fit of motherly annoyance, unceremoniously magicked the lead out through a slit over my left hipbone. “There,” she’d said. “Now heal yourself and stop complaining.” Then she’d dropped seven bullets in a tin cup and walked away.
That was my first real lesson in how well my body acclimated to circumstance. I was stalwart. I stood against all gales. I bent. I didn’t break no matter how much I fed my own wounds.
I used that acclimation to excuse a century’s worth of whiskey. Dracula used it when he stuck a pike through my chest.
Time to put it to real use.
Sal’s blade sliced in until her runes were buried in the tree’s wood. I pressed my bleeding arm against the tree’s bark as I held onto Salvation’s handle. The purple magic that allowed me to hold her pulsed in rhythm with my heart, as did the tattoo. Next to Ellie’s shoulder, I dug
