9. Haunted

(Maxine)

Not dark. Elsewhere.

We were standing in a stone hall that stank of iron and old smoke, the two of us, together, which should have been impossible and somehow wasn't. 

In the middle of the floor a woman knelt inside a ring cut into the stone. A vampire. I knew it the way you know your own reflection: pale, dark-eyed, snarling through a gag of woven silver that stopped her doing anything about the men pinning her down. Across the ring, a man fought four others to reach her. A mage, robed, blood pouring from his nose with the effort of whatever he was hurling at them, screaming a name I couldn't hear. Between them, someone had painted a working on the floor in two scents of blood, hers and his, and it was doing something to the air that made the marks on my wrist burn—

Except… I didn't have marks on my wrist.

The woman turned her head. Past the men, past the spell, straight at us. Straight at me. Her eyes were older than the hall, older than the treaty, older than anything that had a right to be watching a girl come apart in her husband's lap, which looked like from centuries down the line.

She stopped snarling. Something crossed her face that might have been grief, or relief, or both wearing each other's coat.

"You finally found each other," she said.

The hall tore like wet paper.

I slammed back into my body all at once, still in Morrison's lap, both of us gasping, and then the pain arrived, bright and exact, a white line of it opening across the inside of my wrist. Morrison jerked in the same instant, his hand spasming open, and I watched a mark sear itself into the center of his palm in real time, black lines rising under the skin like something written from the inside out.

I turned my own wrist over. The mark had come in over the vein, a fine black tracery that hadn't existed a minute before: three thin arcs bending around one another, not quite a circle, broken clean on one side like a ring with a piece snapped out. Smaller lines branched off them, dense and deliberate, script in an alphabet I couldn't read, and they wouldn't hold still. When I moved my hand the lines shifted with it, the way ink drifts across wet paper.

His mark filled the center of his palm. Same black weight, same refusal to sit quiet, except where my ring broke off, his picked the shape up again, the missing arc and the rest of the unreadable writing curled into his hand. Fit them together and they'd close the circle. 

I couldn't have told you how I knew. I knew it the way I'd known the woman in the vision was one of mine: no proof, no argument, only certainty in the blood.

***

We sat in the wreck of the bed, both of us breathing hard, wearing each other's magic and now each other's marks, and I understood with total clarity that I'd lost control of this in a way I would not be getting back.

Morrison found his voice first.

"What the fuck was that? Who was she?" Barely a question. Then, quieter, the one that mattered. "What did she mean, found each other?"

"I don't know." And I didn't. A dead woman had held my eyes across some other century and I had no explanation for it, and the blank on his face said he had even less of an idea.

But he'd given me his blood. He'd caught me when I went down. He'd asked me a straight question with this mark still burning into my wrist, and I was too wrung out to reach for a lie. I couldn't answer the question he'd asked. I could answer the one he'd really been asking since the night I bit him.

Because I was so tired of carrying it alone.

"I have a brother," I said.

The words came out before I could sand them into something safer. His brow creased, grasping for a link between his question and my answer.

"His name is Theo. He's twenty-three. He's the only family I ever chose, and he's dying, and every healer in Marinescu has run out of gentle ways to tell me they can't stop it." My voice did something humiliating. I let it. "Months ago I found a record nobody was supposed to have kept. It said the only thing that had ever touched a wasting like his was mage blood from one specific line." I turned my wrist over, the fresh mark still screaming on it. "Yours. It said Marwick."

He didn't move. I kept looking at him anyway, because I have never once been sick and then refused to look at the mess.

"So, yes," I said. "I volunteered because of you. I let you believe it was for a crown. I let three hundred people call me a social climber and I smiled at them. And I'd do every bit of it again tonight, because he is worth every lie I've told and every one I'm still telling."

I braced for the part where he threw me across the room again, metaphorically this time. For the disgust. For the door.

What I got was worse.

He reached out, slow, and turned my wrist over in his marked hand until the two of them lay together, his black lines and mine, and he studied them a long moment, reading a sentence neither of us had agreed to be part of.

"Then we have a problem," he said. Quiet. Not cruel. "Because helping you means going to war with whoever in my own house wants you dead, and I decided to do that before you opened your mouth." 

I'd married Morrison Marwick to take one thing and give nothing back. Somewhere between the island and this bed, without signing off on a single line of it, I'd started to give.