Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(78)

Sherwood caught her arm before she could do it again. He looked at me. “Can you tie her up? I’m drawing a circle.”

“No need for bonds, I don’t think,” said Uncle Mike. The old fae touched Ruth on the shoulder. She quit moving.

“Will that harm your working?” he asked Sherwood. “I put a hold on her arms and legs and back muscles. Bound her a bit to the floor in case. We don’t want her moving into your work, but I want her to be able to breathe if she can.”

Sherwood looked at Ruth as if he could see something that I couldn’t.

“No,” said the wolf in Sherwood’s human body. “That will be all right. Good.”

He didn’t say thank you. He was wise enough to know better than to thank a fae, no matter how helpful Uncle Mike had been.

He fixed the symbol Ruth had marred, then went back to work. When his piece of chalk got too small, Sherwood took the pencil—grunting in approval when he saw it was a grease pencil. But he said, “This won’t last long and I don’t have time to unwrap the damned thing.”

“Pencil or chalk?” asked Uncle Mike.

“Pencil if you have a dozen so I don’t have to mess with them.”

Uncle Mike went back to the drawer and pulled out a handful of pencils—and the silver knife. He frowned at the athame, this time keeping it in his hand. When he got close enough to hand Sherwood the pencils, Ruth’s eyes opened, focused on the silver knife.

“Get that away from us,” growled Sherwood. “I’ll take care of it later.”

Every time Ruth quit breathing, I counted the seconds off in my head. I wasn’t sure why; I didn’t really know how long a person could go without air. But it seemed to me that she had been not breathing a lot longer than earlier episodes.

Sherwood must have been paying attention, too. He quit drawing long enough to put a hand on her forehead.

“Breathe,” he said.

She sucked in a breath of air and released it.

“Again,” he said.

When she had accomplished that, he went back to drawing.

“Can’t do that too often,” he muttered—to me, I supposed—but it might have been to himself. “Or I’ll disrupt what I’m trying to do here. Still, I suppose this won’t do any good if she dies in the meantime.”

Ten pencils were discarded the same way his discarded leg had been—as was the chair when it got in his way. The file cabinet acquired another dent—this one bigger than the first. Uncle Mike muttered something that sounded like “Werewolves,” but he didn’t sound too unhappy about the chair even though it was obviously broken.

Sherwood completed the circle before he had to switch pencils again. Then he lit the candle.

He did it by saying a word; I didn’t quite catch it, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t English. But at the sound of it, there was a pop of magic and the candle wick started to burn.

He held the candle sideways and let the wax drip into a place where the grease made a circle about the size of the base of the candle. When he had enough soft wax on the floor, he set the candle into it, using the wax to create a holder to keep the candle upright.

He took up Uncle Mike’s knife and opened it. He frowned at it and cast a wary look at Uncle Mike—who’d moved to the far end of the room, with the silver athame in one hand.

“It’s just a knife today,” Uncle Mike said. “It will do as you wish.” He wiggled the athame in his hand. “This one is not as cooperative. You might want to deal with it quickly, when you’re done. It seems to have a taste for one of you—probably Mercy.”

“Ruth,” said Sherwood, staring at the knife for an instant. “It’s supposed to kill Ruth.” Again, I had the impression that he could see something I could not. As if the patterns of magic were something his eyes could perceive. It seemed to be more accurate than my scent-and-hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck method.

Sherwood used Uncle Mike’s pocketknife to open up a cut on the back of his hand, keeping it open by moving the blade back and forth as he dripped his blood along the edge of the circle all the way around. It was made more difficult because he couldn’t use either of his hands to stabilize himself—and the missing leg seemed to put him off-balance.

“This would be easier,” he grunted, crawling awkwardly, “if I’d pulled off the liner and the pin with the damned leg.”

I got up and put a hand under his elbow to help stabilize him. “Does this help?”

“Yes,” he said—then turned his attention to what he was doing.

When he reached the candle again with his blood-drip circle, he dug a little deeper with the knife, pulled it away, and flicked his bleeding hand at Ruth. As the drops of his blood touched her, he said three . . . somethings. They sounded like musical notes more than words, but they were more complex than a single note, as if he could form a chord with his human throat.

For a moment, nothing happened.

That was not quite true. Nothing happened except that the moment he flicked those blood drops on Ruth, the foulness of black magic, or my sense of it, just disappeared. There was plenty of magic, for sure, but only a little of it felt like black magic.

I was eyeing the knife in Uncle Mike’s hand, and so I missed the first bit. The little movement that made Uncle Mike stiffen and Sherwood actually relax a little under my hand.