4. Targeted

(Morrison)

"Do it again," I said.

Ferren pressed. The sting came a half-second behind, hers, surfacing in me secondhand.

Not thoughts. For one bad hour on the plane I'd wondered whether I was hearing her, and hearing into another person is a door no Marwick is permitted to open. There were no words in it. No plans, no motive I could read. Only her body reporting to mine a fraction late: the chill of the steel table under her, the drag of Ferren's hands, a low hum of hunger that had nothing to do with me and put an edge on my own I hadn't asked for.

She worked it out before I'd finished hiding that I had. Of course she did. She'd quit watching Ferren and started watching me, and whatever crossed my face when her hunger reached me handed her the rest.

"Oh," she said. Pleased with herself. "You get it too."

"Get what?"

"You've kept your eyes off me since the plane. You're not managing it now." She sat up. "I can hear your heart, by the way. You keep forgetting I can do that."

I hadn't forgotten. My face I can hold. The one tell I can't hold is the one she can hear, and the slow spread of her smile said she was listening to it.

Then she did something. I never caught what. She didn't move, didn't touch herself, only held my eyes and let hers go heavy, and warmth rolled up through me from somewhere well south of reason, slow and deliberate, all of it hers. It took everything my training was worth to keep still while my body answered a call I hadn't placed.

"Stop that," I said.

"Make me." The smile widened. "That's the part you can't stand. You can't."

Ferren cleared her throat and made a show of reading her notes.

Then Ferren said my name, sharp, and I was already moving, because the ward on the east wall had gone wrong.

A Marwick ward doesn't fail quietly. This one didn't fail at all. Something came through it, which is worse, because coming through a ward means knowing the ward from the inside. A line of force left the stone straight for Maxine's chest, thin and fast, cut to open her up.

I had a containment shell around her before I'd finished deciding to build one. The working struck it and broke against the inside of my palm, close enough the discharge took the skin off two fingers. Maxine was on the floor again. This time I was over her. This time neither of us was laughing.

I held the shell until the last of the working guttered and went out. Then I made myself look at what had come for my wife.

I knew the make of it. That was the problem. The way the lattice had been tied. The way it slid past the ward instead of breaking it, quiet and clean. The old Coven notation folded down inside where almost nobody would think to look. I'd seen that hand exactly once, in a sealed teaching text I wasn't cleared to open until I made full magister, and I'd opened it years early because I have never once done what I was told. 

It was old Marwick work. The kind retired before I was born. The kind maybe a dozen people alive have ever been shown. One of that dozen had tried to put a hole through Maxine Varco on the second day of our marriage.

She was breathing hard underneath me, all that ease gone out of her, one hand fisted in my ruined shirt. "Morrison." The first time she'd said my name. "What was that?"

I didn't want to answer, because the answer started inside my own family.

"That," I said, "was Marwick magic. Someone in my own house wants you dead badly enough to burn the treaty down with you."