Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(79)

By the time I looked at the circle, Ruth’s mouth was already open. The first scream had almost no sound—because she had no air to make a noise. The second scream was even quieter, her whole body shaking with the effort of it. If she could have moved her body with Uncle Mike’s magic upon her, I think she would have done so, but all she could do was move her mouth and her rib cage.

My eyes teared up and I dug my fingers into Sherwood’s shoulder—because there was nothing, not a darn thing I could do to help her except break the circle (maybe I could do that) and waste all of Sherwood’s efforts.

The third scream was silent. Blood gathered in the corners of Ruth’s beautiful dark eyes and dribbled out of her mouth, staining her white teeth red.

Sherwood remained as he was, crouched near the circle—ready to intervene if matters didn’t go as he thought they should. I let go of him so he could move more quickly if he had to, but he just waited.

“And that’s why I hate witchcrafters,” said Uncle Mike, his voice a prosaic contrast to the events in the circle. “So much blood in their workings.” He sounded vaguely disapproving.

Sherwood raised his head. “And the fae are so gentle.”

“No,” Uncle Mike agreed. “Mostly we’re worse—but not as messy.”

As if the circle held the very air inside it as well as the magic, I could not smell the blood—or other things—as matters took their course. Ruth Gillman, elegant and tidy, would not be happy remembering this moment, but hopefully she would be alive.

Ruth’s mouth opened wider and blood, bright arterial blood, gushed out, flooding the circle where she lay, unable to move her body. The blood hit the edge of Sherwood’s drawings and stopped, as if the chalk and pencil were a raised ledge that it could not cross. Where it touched Sherwood’s work, it turned grayish black. Not a color I’d ever seen blood display.

As the liquid began to increase impossibly, I said, quietly, so as not to interrupt things that I might not be able to perceive, “She’s going to drown in that if she can’t get her head up. She’s also going to exsanguinate if she keeps going.”

“Patience.” Sherwood gave me a quick glance I could not read. I thought maybe he was just making 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.