6. Don't Bite the Prince

(Morrison)

"Under normal terms," Ferren said, "your wife should be dead."

She'd spent the morning running Maxine's blood through every test the Coven owned, and she delivered the results the way she delivered all catastrophe: hands folded, voice level, gentle. Ferren only went gentle when the news could kill someone.

"I'm right here," Maxine said from the window seat. She seemed to like that spot.. "You can tell me I should be dead to my face."

"You should be dead to your face." Ferren didn't rattle. She'd raised three generations of us; she was unrattleable on principle. "Mage blood isn't food. It's live spellwork. When a vampire takes it in, the magic doesn't lie down and get digested. It reads the new body as a working left unfinished, and it finishes it, usually by taking the vampire apart from the inside out. Minutes, not hours." She turned to me. "That is what should have happened the moment she bit you."

"And instead?"

"Instead it moved in, made itself comfortable." Ferren turned my wrist over, the bite long closed. Then she moved to Maxine, and pressed two fingers to the vein in her neck as though she could still read something under the skin. "His magic is threaded all the way through you and behaving like it pays rent. I have never seen it. I have never read about it. And I've read everything."

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"One thing, chiefly." She said it to Maxine, not to me. "You don't drink from him again. Whatever this is, you've fed it once. Feed it twice and we may lose track of where he stops and you begin. Am I clear?"

"Crystal," Maxine said.

Her eyes were on my throat when she said it.

I did the arithmetic while they talked, because arithmetic was the one thing in that room I could still control. Two days ago this woman had been a stranger with a killer body and a dangerous smile. Then she'd opened a vein in my wrist, and I'd thrown her across a room, and then someone in my own house had tried to kill her and I'd shielded her on reflex and taken the discharge across my own hand. Now my magic was loose in her blood, unmaking her by degrees, and the only remedy anyone could name was the one thing that would tie us tighter together. 

I'd married her to keep two kingdoms from war. I was beginning to suspect I'd signed on for something with a far higher body count.

***

No one prepares you for being looked at the way Maxine looked at me for the rest of that day.

She wasn't subtle, and I don't think she was trying to be. Every time I moved, her attention slid to the side of my neck and stayed a beat too long, the way you'd track a dessert cart rolling past on the first day of a diet. By afternoon I'd caught myself standing so my collar rode higher, which was absurd. I'm a grown magister. I have killed things. I was fussing with my shirt because my wife kept eyeing my jugular like it owed her money.

"You could stop that," I said, somewhere around the third hour.

"Stop what?"

"You know what."

"I really don't." She was folded into the window seat, a picture of innocence, and she peeled her gaze up off my throat with open reluctance. "Is it distracting you? That would be a shame."

"It's a medical instruction. Not a suggestion."

"I'm not going to bite you, Morrison." The smile came slow. "I'm only going to think about it. Loudly. In your general direction. You can't ward against that."

The trouble was, she was right. The trouble under that trouble was that it didn't stop with her. The bond ran both ways. Every time her hunger sharpened it reached me a half-second behind, secondhand, and my own body kept trying to answer a question no one had asked me. 

Once, when she stretched in the window seat, every considerable asset on display, and let her attention settle on the pulse under my jaw, the want that rolled off her hit me so cleanly I lost my place on the page I'd been pretending to read and had to start it over. I had to think of arithmetic to get rid of the hard-on while pretending to read.

She caught me do it. She filed it away with everything else she was quietly collecting, adding it to a ledger I badly did not want to be on.

***

The game stopped being a game around dusk.

I had it before she'd admit to it, because I had it secondhand: a tremor that started in her hands and climbed, a heat pouring off her that owed nothing to the fire, a hunger gone from playful to something with teeth in it. I sent for Ferren. She took one look and swore, which I had also never heard her do.

"It's hunting its source," she said, already working. "The magic. It's his, it wants to go home, it can't, so it's tearing around inside her looking for the door."