Blood Kin (15 page)

Lily to convince, as a starting point. She and Simon were going to be just as unhappy with me as Father Cho was.

“How long do you need?”

I calculated time against the list of things to do forming in my head. “I think if we set things in motion after the afternoon services, that should work.”

“All right. Go do what you have to do.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.” I saluted him and turned to leave.

“Guy?”

I turned. “Yes, Father?”

“Make sure you don’t forget who you are.”

Chapter Eight

HOLLY

The
pile of charms was awfully small. One invisibility charm, three hear-mes, the look-away, and the forget-me. Worse, I didn’t have any of the things I needed to fashion more.

Charms are odd beasts. Peculiar, contrary, and volatile. Everyone fashions them uniquely. Some use metal, some wood, some fabric or even leaves and grasses. The material isn’t actually important, it’s just a place to store your magic, but everybody has to find the way of coaxing that magic that works for them. I work with metal and glass and use leather and oils.

And blood.

Just trappings, Miss Evendale.
I could almost hear the prim tones of the reluctant tutor my father had hired to teach me when I’d first shown signs of having power. We hadn’t gotten very far past the rudiments before it became evident that my charms only worked well on me. Not useful in Cormen’s eyes. No point wasting any more coin on my education.

But the basics had been enough and I picked up the rest myself over the years, honing the craft until I could make almost anything I needed.

Anything
I
needed. I’d never been able to produce something that I could rely on to work consistently for somebody else.

Which was exactly what I needed now.

I swallowed against tears of frustration. I needed this to work. I was leaving St. Giles tonight. But I needed a way to keep doing what the geas wanted me to do. Otherwise, for all I knew, it would force me to turn around and come straight back as soon as I stepped over the boundaries of the hospital.

I needed a way to spy on Simon when I couldn’t actually be here to do it.

And, in the almost endless few hours since Guy had left to do whatever it was he was going to do, the only option I could come up with was a charm. Something to be my eyes and ears. Something to get through those wards guarding that iron door so far below.

I didn’t want to do it. Not if I could find my father and get Mama and Reggie back first. Not if I could figure out how to rid myself of his hells-damned geas.

But I’d run out of time. So I had no choice.

I stirred the charms with a finger.

Think,
Holly girl.

The charm I needed wasn’t anything I’d ever thought of making. Or even heard of anyone else making. The most reliable charms did one thing and one thing only.

I needed one that did many things and hid itself as well.

Question was, could I conjure the impossible?

GUY

“Sir Guy,” Lady Bryony said with a nod, straightening from the plant she’d been tending. “What can I do for you?”

She wore a dark purple dress, which almost matched the unnatural Fae shade of her eyes, her black hair piled on her head. The light caught the sapphires in her Family ring as she beckoned me forward.

“A favor, my lady,” I said, feeling awkward. Simon thought I had a “thing” for Lady Bryony. Perhaps I did. She was undeniably beautiful, but it was a dangerous beauty. Sharp and deadly like a knife’s blade. She could heat a man’s blood, sure enough, but like as not she could also boil it dry in his veins with a look. And beyond that, she made the air prickle around her. As though she had a thunderstorm under her skin.

Wiser to keep away. Not risk the lightning strike.

The Fae were nothing to trifle with. Nor beg favors from. A debt to a Fae was dangerous. Lady Bryony spent most of her time in the human world, and her affection for my brother might mean that she treated me as she would him and would take no obligation from me. But then again, it might not.

I waited while she considered this, head tipped to one side, one hand toying with the ever-changing chain around her neck. Behind me, I heard the door close firmly. Another reminder of her power. “Go on,” she said.

I held out my hands. “I need to go into the Night World for a time. These are going to cause problems. Can you glamour them?”

“You want to hide your tattoos? Why?” Her voice sounded genuinely shocked. “What does the Abbott General have to say about this?”

“The Abbott General is well aware of it,” I said. “But I can’t tell you why. And I must ask for your word that you will not speak of this.”

The chain around her neck darkened a little as her brows drew down. “Secrets, Guy? Haven’t we had enough of those lately?”

“Troubled times, my lady,” I said. “This way is safest.”

“Is it that you don’t trust me or you’re trying to protect me?” she said, the frown still marring her face.

“Father Cho and I agreed that this is necessary,” I said, trying to avoid the question. I wasn’t going to tell Bryony I didn’t trust her. And she’d probably laugh in my face if I told her I was protecting her.

Bryony pressed her lips together as though she wanted to argue, but knew better than to question me further if I had Father Cho’s blessing.

“Hold out your hands,” she said.

I did so and she took my hands in hers, inspecting them closely. “How old were you when you got these?” she asked.

“I took my final vows at nineteen.”

“I see.” Her grip tightened and something tingled through my skin, like the brush of icy feathers. Then Bryony looked up at me, shaking her head.

“These will be hard to hide with a glamour, Guy. They’re part of you now. I think you would fight the magic. Besides, in the Night World there will be many who’ll be able to tell you’ve glamoured your hands. Some won’t question it, but there will be those who do. Those who are capable of seeing right through the spell.”

I bit back the curse. Holly had said as much the very first time I’d proposed going with her into the Night World. I’d hoped she was wrong. “Is there something else you can do?”

The chain around her neck slid rapidly through several colors before settling on greenish silver. “That depends on what you’re going to be doing.”

I shook my head at her. “Nice try, my lady. But I can’t tell you that.”

She let go of my hands, smoothed her skirts, and sat down. “There’s no easy way to hide these. They’re old and the color is deep. I could come up with something to change the color, but it might do permanent damage to your skin.”

I looked down at the crosses, familiar to me as my reflection. Imagined them scarred and distorted. My gut twisted.

“Guy?”

I looked at Bryony, anger and disgust mingling as I realized what I was going to have to do. Father Cho had been right. This path was going to take me places I didn’t want to go. But that wasn’t a reason to turn around. I could live with a little darkness if I got what I wanted, if it protected my family and the order. “Thank you,” I said. “Looks as though I might have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

HOLLY

I was running out of time. Guy had said “tonight.” It was already midafternoon; the sun through my window was turning languid, losing the bite of the hottest part of the day. If I was going to act, I had to act now.

So, then. A charm to do what no charm did. Simple.

A threefold charm. To listen. To disappear. To protect itself. Any one of those alone I could do. But how to turn three into one?

My hand froze over the charms. Could it really be that simple?

Maybe not. But it wasn’t as though I had endless options available to me. I scooped up the invisibility charm, the hear-me, and the look-away. Three dangling circles of metal and glass glinted in my hand, their leather and silk thongs twisted around them.

I had no flame to melt them, to combine them, so I was going to have to do something more basic. More primal.

Three into one. I let my mind go blank, seeking that place where the magic flows without thinking.

I stood, carried the charms over to the window, let the light pour over them as I untied the thongs and then twisted the three onto a single loop, pressed tightly together.

The feel of them changed slightly under my fingers but not enough. They needed something more.

Change. Combine. Connect.

The old ways would say that the most basic key to bind something to your will is blood. Yours or theirs. That was, as far as I could tell, the reason that Cormen could bind me when nobody else could. Blood ties.

Charms weren’t flesh. They didn’t have blood of their own, though they did have a strange sort of life. Usually it took a tiny drop of blood to spark that life.

This time I would need more.

I thought for a moment. The cutthroat cut finely, but that didn’t feel right. Magic requires power. Desire. Emotion.

I needed something that would bite me deeper than the razor.

I looked around the room, trying to think what I could use. Then went to the bed and the bag Fen had brought me. Along with clothes and charms, he’d brought me my hair brush and various things scooped pell-mell off my dressing table. Amongst them was a small mirror, a pretty gilt thing that had been my mother’s.

One of the last things she’d given me before she’d drifted into whatever place it was she went to in her mind. I remembered her laughing as she tossed it to me, telling me that I needed such things more than she did now. The mirror’s glass was small but hopefully large enough that if I smashed it, it should yield a shard or two big enough to slice a finger.

I wrapped my hand around it, fighting tears again. I didn’t want to destroy it, but that was exactly why I had to. A sacrifice would add to the power of the charm. I pressed the mirror quickly to my lips. Then, eyes stinging, I wrapped it in the folds of a skirt and bashed it hard against the metal bed frame. There was a rapid
clink
of breaking glass and I felt the shape of it bend beneath my hand.

Mama
. Biting my lip, I unwrapped the folds quickly. Several large shards of mirrored glass glinted up at me and I picked one up carefully to carry to the window.

I gathered the charms and reached for the magic again. Nothing but my will and my blood to help work what I needed. I took a deep breath, slashed my forearm with the glass, biting down the protesting cry that rose in my throat at the sudden pain.

Blood welled. Came fast and red. Too fast. I fought for breath as the room wobbled a little around me.

I held my arm over the charms, letting the blood drip until I judged there was enough. Then I closed my fingers around them, feeling blood-dampened metal and leather and glass.

My arm throbbed as I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Change. Combine. Connect.

Sweet Lady, let this work
.

The song of the charms under my hand altered, a chord resolving. Three distinct notes hummed into one and I opened my hand cautiously. They still looked the same. Still a mess of thongs and metal and glass, but the bright red blood had vanished and only that single note sounded in my head like a benediction.

So I’d achieved something. Whether or not it would do what I needed was another matter entirely. As was how in seven hells I was going to be able to plant it on Simon before I left.

GUY