sure I wasn’t going to try to rescue her. “And that blood is . . . not all her blood. Well, no, it’s her blood but it’s reproducing. Cloning, you could say. Though I wouldn’t.”
“And that makes sense,” said Uncle Mike dryly.
“How would you have put it?” asked Sherwood. Sherwood’s wolf, I thought, and he put a bit of a growl in his voice.
Uncle Mike smiled slyly. “Magic blood.”
Sherwood snorted. “Makes it sound as if it weren’t blood at all—or as if you could do something powerful with it.” He paused. “But, since it is blood, her blood even, I suppose that’s true enough.”
They might have been . . . not precisely joking . . . sparring was more like it. But they were both watching Ruth intently.
“She’s breathing,” I said.
Ruth was still vomiting blood (and everything else she had eaten or drunk recently), but she was inhaling and exhaling in between spasms.
Sherwood nodded. “This is a nasty bit of work. There’s probably a more humane way of breaking this spell, but I don’t know it. Maybe if I were in my own space with my own . . .” He shook his head and didn’t complete that thought.
He leaned forward, careful not to get too near to the circle. “Poor darling,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. It’s rough, I know. But you’re going to be all right in a moment. I promise that the worst is over.”
It was ten or fifteen minutes before the blood and horror subsided. Sherwood, still watching something I couldn’t, said, “There now, that’s done it.”
He snapped his fingers, the candle went out, and the room suddenly bloomed with the smell of everything in the circle, blood and vomit and other things—the sour smell of terror and dissipating black magic underlying everything. Fluids that had been held back by Sherwood’s marks slid out over them. But the mess looked to have been reduced to only the nonmagical substances, so it didn’t flow very far.
Uncle Mike started over and Sherwood snapped, “Knife. That knife needs to stay away from Ruth.”
Uncle Mike gave the knife an . . . intrigued look.
“Hah,” he said. “I’d forgotten I had it. What an interesting knife for them to let come into enemy hands.”
I glanced at Sherwood. “Is it safe for me to touch her?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But she’ll not thank you for it. Everything will hurt just now—like being parboiled alive, as I recall. Give her a few minutes.”
I’d been reaching for her, but at Sherwood’s words, I backed off.
“Ruth needs a shower and clean clothes,” I told Uncle Mike. “Is that available here?”
“Of course,” he said. “But perhaps Sherwood should deal with the knife first. I need to touch her so she can move again. But I can’t get near her with this knife. I don’t like the feeling that I should just set this knife down and forget about it.”
“Mercy,” Sherwood said, “could you get my leg for me, please?”
Happy to have something I could do to help, I fetched the prosthesis for him. He hiked up the leg of his jeans and I saw that he had a spike sticking out of the bottom of the stump of his leg.
He saw my look and smiled with his wolf’s eyes.
I was raised by werewolves and I’m mated to one. I’d never seen one smile quite like that. Werewolves just don’t do merry, not their wolf part. And the emotion seemed a little out of place with Ruth recovering painfully in a puddle of blood and other substances. But wolves don’t always react the way a human might to dire situations.
“The pin isn’t coming out of my leg,” he told me. “There’s a silicone sleeve around the stump that holds the pin.”
He took the leg and fitted it on, and got up using only his good leg in a smooth movement that proved he was not human. Someone who was all human would have had a lot more trouble doing that gracefully. Then he put the artificial foot on the ground and stomped with it until there was a sharp click.
“Good,” he said. “I was afraid I’d broken it.”
He strode over to Uncle Mike and took the knife from him. He looked at it a moment, weighing it in his hand. Then he jammed it point first into Uncle Mike’s scarred wooden desk. It sank two inches, more or less, and then he snapped it.
I sucked in a breath as a wave of horrid, filthy magic burst out and left