3. Contaminated

(Morrison)

She was still on the floor, laughing at me. Not out loud. It lived in the corners of her mouth and in how comfortable she'd made herself in a froth of white silk, six feet from where my magic had thrown her. My blood was dark on her lower lip.

I'd married her ten minutes earlier. I didn't know her middle name. And she'd opened one of my veins with her teeth on our first post-wedding meeting like it was a party trick she'd been saving.

"You bit me," I said.

"I did."

"Vampires can't drink witch or mage blood. It's poison to your kind. It should be burning a hole through you where you sit."

"Someone should tell my body." She dragged her thumb across her lip, checked it, and her mouth turned down when the bleeding had already closed. "It disagrees."

Every working I've ever cast comes home. Magic leaves the body, does the job, settles under the skin where I keep it, and I've trained since I was six to know how much I hold and where all of it sits, down to the last thread. I could account for the ward I'd thrown on reflex and the containment that had flung her off me. Both spent, both accounted for. But something else had gone out of me in all that and never come home, and I could track the direction of the leak the way you track a draft to a cracked window.

It ran toward her.

I got my face flat and held it. "What did you leave in me?"

"Nothing. I tasted you. That's the whole crime." She pushed onto her elbows, unhurried. "There's a difference between tasting a man and cursing one. You'd know that if you'd ever done either."

I ran through what she could have done to me anyway, because naming the threat is the first step to unpicking it. 

“What is it? Blood-binding? A tracking curse keyed to my line? A compulsion anchor? Slow poison timed to bloom a week out, once I'd stopped watching for it?” Every one of them opens the way this had opened: contact, a taste, a working left behind to do its damage on a delay.

"Stop me," I said, "when I get close."

"You're nowhere near." She tipped her head, taking me in. "Is accusing your wife of cursing you a Nachtigall wedding tradition, or am I special?"

The Council's people came through the door just as she picked herself up from the floor and made a show of dusting off the white silk. I made the one useful decision on offer: I stopped it being a scene and turned it into a problem I could carry home. Whatever she'd done to me was Marwick-shaped, and I wasn't going to stand in a Council room while their healers took readings off my bloodline and wrote the numbers down.

She came without an argument. She'd have come running if I let her, and I couldn't work out why that bothered me more than the bite had. By nightfall I had her on a plane to Nachtigall with two of my people between her and the door and me in the seat across the aisle, and I had a headache nothing in the world was going to touch.

The Coven put us in the warded suite in the east tower, the one built to hold things that would rather not be held, and sent Ferren to look at us. Ferren has kept Marwicks breathing for forty years and has never once been afraid in a room with me. She checked Maxine's mouth. She checked the bite on my wrist. She drew blood from us both, then went still in a way I didn't care for.

"Your magic's active," she said. To me.

"I haven't cast since the island."

"I know." She turned Maxine's arm over, studying the vein. "It's active in her."

That isn't possible. Witch or mage blood doesn't survive a vampire; it comes apart in them inside the hour, and the vampire doesn’t survive their blood. Mine hadn't done that. It was up and moving under her skin, wearing her body like it had signed a lease.

Nothing about this made sense, and I had the uneasy sense that she knew exactly what was going on and preferred to keep me in the dark.

Ferren set two fingers to the bite on Maxine's arm. Maxine didn't flinch; she'd have that closed by supper. But a thin sting opened across my own wrist, the bandaged one, in the exact place Ferren was pressing on her. I turned my hand over. Clean skin under the gauze. Nothing there to sting.