Bloodsong Ch. 03

Frankly, it stunned her that it was taking Jack so long to hit boiling point.

"Val."

She refused to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.

"We won't get anywhere if you keep acting like this."

Valerie shrugged. It turned out that Jack was easier to tune out while he spoke than when he stewed in silence, and for the first time she had the sense that bits of text got through to her. She leafed back to the beginning, decided that a monograph on Monian magitech was both too far above her knowledge level and likely useless, and put it away. The next one she tried had no cover, index or title. Browsing the chapter headings suggested it to be a history book.

She stood on the verge of placing it on top of the monograph and building the beginnings of what could wind up being a depressingly tall discard pile. However, it contained a section on the pre-Barashi epoch. Valerie paused, fingertips hovering over a page taken up entirely by a map. A map of worlds, different from any she'd seen. It showed the Bound Worlds and the locus they revolved around, and the gate network interconnecting them. So far, so the same.

The world at the heart didn't read Barashi, however. Barashi was found elsewhere, orbiting the emerald green sphere labeled ટ્સિકલલ્મેસૈ, a smaller gray circle among many others. More, at least, than the Bound Worlds she'd grown up knowing. Ida was one she'd never heard of before. Nor was . . .

Stirrings of memory, of being adrift in frightening darkness and in even more frightful company, brought to Valerie's mind an exchange from long, long ago. Gatemanship, lost with the fall of the Old World. Men who had mucked with matters meant not for their understanding. Unknowable roads best left unknown. Where we all start from and to which we all return . . .

. . . foolish . . . tear through . . . never learn the truth . . .

Valerie tapped the browning paper thoughtfully, unease growing within her like a fungus. There was — even working from imperfect intelligence, there was too much that gelled oddly when she thought about how the razing of Westmont had gone. Too many things ranging from the very unlikely to the heretofore thought impossible, too much that was a little too inconvenient to be coincidental.

Lost spellwork from a lost world turning up in a mailbox.

A town which she'd always regarded as the safest hell on Earth, set ablaze without warning.

Magic outlasting its expiry date, alive and—

"The humans you let squat here are likely dead, you realize? If those books are theirs, well. Taking out the magic users on your side was among the first things we did."

—alive and angry, a state which she came to resemble as fast as greased lightning. Hatred flared up inside her, and before Valerie knew it she was on her feet, book cast aside, hand on scabbard, murder in her gaze and on her mind.

That provoking her had been the goal, that getting a rise out of her was the reason Jack faced her with a broad grin and eyes glinting with triumph, didn't dampen her rage.

Anyone else would have taken one look at her and made sure not to further stoke her ire.

Anyone but Jack.

"Did I upset you?"

"Fuck off."

"I don't want to upset you, you know. Still, if you are going to ignore me, I have to get your attention somehow." He leaned in as little as the chains let him. Valerie brought the sword up, creating a sharp barrier between them. One wrong move, she swore to herself. Another word out of place. "You won't hear anything more from me about your humans, hand on heart. Just don't make as if I'm not here. As if we don't have things to discuss that are of greater consequence than whatever you hope to find in some dusty old—"

"Do you want a fist through your ribcage? Because this is how you invite a fist through your ribcage." She jerked him forward and leveled the sword with his throat, pressing it against the pulsing vein at the side. A red line appeared and leaked. Jack tilted his head aside, appearing more bored than worried that she'd go beyond nicking him.

She gave him a look withering enough to turn cider into vinegar, released him and retreated into the book. It turned out to be more useful for what it had reminded her of than for any new information it contained. There was a puzzle waiting to be worked out here, behind magic that obfuscated the moving gears of someone's plan. It was too tidy a confluence of variables for none to exist. Whose, though? Jack could be ruled out, but . . .

Gates, places vanished from memory. Marabeth at the center of all that, except the witch was dead and 'all that' had been a strange spot to find her standing anywhere near to begin with.

Why, though? It had been unexpected, but hardly out of character.

Foolish, a cold voice snapped throughout an even greater cold, stepping out from the shadow of years and decades. Valerie almost had it — would have had it, if Jack hadn't started chafing from being told to keep his trap closed and launched into a tirade. She ignored him in favor of pondering ways to gag him. While ransacking the living room, she'd spotted the skeleton of a scarf, abandoned on the couch along with two balls of yarn. Jonathan's, likely, as she couldn't picture Jo having the patience to knit. He probably wouldn't be too cross if she sacrificed it for her peace of mind. Those balls had looked the perfect size to stuff into a mouth that refused to stay shut.

She was shaken from her plotting by a chirpy beep.

"I think it finished preheating the water." Jack took a break from whatever he was flapping his lips about in order to jerk his head at the espresso machine and smile in a congenial way. "Can you get us our cups? I would, but I'm afraid I'm a bit tied up at the moment."

Valerie glared, holding back the urge to brain him with one of the thicker books. She stood up abruptly, marched towards the fridge, found what she'd expected to find where she'd expected to find it and walked to the counter with the sugar jar in hand, rolling in petty enjoyment when Jack's countenance morphed from priggishly self-satisfied to incredulous.

"It was in the fridge? Why?"

"Ants." She pulled what would have been a testing shot into the pink china cup and set it down in front of Jack, unsweetened, which was how he liked it. She'd give her left arm to stop herself from remembering details like that, but no matter. She pulled a proper shot in the blue cup after replacing the capsule, spooned sugar in until the result could be more accurately labeled caffeinated syrup, and returned to the table, where Jack pulled resentful faces at his own cup.

It was unclear what about it he found objectionable — the pink? The wateriness of the content? That he couldn't reach and drink while chained up, making its presence an obvious taunt? He didn't enlighten her by complaining aloud, and Valerie didn't care enough to ask.

She drank. He watched her drink. The resulting quiet was fragile and imperfect. It felt as though her lips smacked like whips against the painted ceramic. It felt as though the coffee went down her throat roiling like river rapids. Jack was silent in the way of people who'd intended to stop being so but gotten themselves sidetracked. The mesmerized staring bothered Valerie less than the softness of the smile he directed at her when he caught her eye. He looked pleased, too pleased. A can of worms to open — another time, when she summoned the energy and the patience she abundantly lacked at the moment.

Valerie went back to trying to squeeze something useful out of so much inscrutable paper.

"Val."

"Hush."

"Valeriana."

"I don't respond to that anymore."

"Valerie," Jack drawled, the concession visibly paining him. Still, it was one rare enough to merit a sliver of her attention. "We left our last conversation hanging on a distasteful note. I didn't get to explain myself as well as I'd like, and I fear that you may have been left with . . . the wrong idea."

"You mean the idea that if you get your hands on me, I won't fare better than a captured human? Fully agreed on distasteful, but I fail to see what about it I parsed wrong?" She smiled sweetly while Jack looked — livid? Hurt? Offended? He shook his head, as if the need to justify himself taxed him beyond measure. Like an astronaut faced with someone discoursing flat earth theory, trying to cobble together the wherewithal to address the nonsense.

"See, this is why we need to talk. You hold this wrongheaded notion that I'll treat you as a slave when, as I've repeatedly told you, I only want to fix what went wrong with us."

"And as I've repeatedly told you, nothing went wrong with us. You went wrong." Valerie fought the urge to rub her forehead, lowered her eyes to the history book and decided to temporarily trade it for Building Blocks of SpellCraft, the cover of which showed all the hallmarks of being targeted at a younger and presumably dumber audience. The magic user's equivalent of a middle grade science textbook. "You can't fix us. How could you? You won't even bother to fix the real issue: yourself. There, done. Good talk. Let's never again. Shut up."

"Are you happy like this, Valerie?" He stressed the name with mockery and spite, and Valerie scoffed, because although at the moment and for reasons all pertaining to him, she was not a happy camper, she felt content about the shape of her life. "I can't recall the last time I've seen you smile for a nice reason, you know? These days, it's as if someone has to be bleeding out on the ground for you to light up."

"Bonus points and increased brightness if that person is you."

"See? That's what I mean. What do you do when you are not hopping around the globe, fighting the good fight? Who are your friends? Do you still dream about anything beyond collecting enough rescues to convince yourself that you aren't the abomination in need of redemption that Aunt Briseis made you believe you are?"

This was the fifteenth hundredth iteration of this discussion. She could conduct it on autopilot. Even so, the gall required to pose questions like those defied belief. Asking who her friends were, as if she could keep any without risking them being massacred for mattering too much. Asking if she had 'collected' enough saves when she could only think of the people she had failed for having spent so long a time blind to what he was. Asking about Mrs. Drakma.

"I don't owe you satisfactions about the life I — and note this word — chose." She finished her coffee. She was both proud of her restraint and disappointed in herself for not breaking the cup over Jack's head. "Sucks, doesn't it, when people have free will, want to keep it, and there's nothing in blessed darkness you can do about it?"

"Here we go again. I'm not trying to strip you of your free will. It's a mate bond, not slavery. I remember when you used to understand the difference."

"I just hadn't bothered to look close enough to realize that in virtually all cases, there is no difference." If mated to him, magic, divine blessings and stupid, stupid biology would ensure his control was absolute. The bond would inject love in her heart and warp a smile onto her lips, and everything that was left of the person she'd been would wither, suffocated by layers of saccharine devotion. Mate. Master. It had taken her years to see that the line between them was so thin there might just as well be none. "Do you also remember how getting mated worked out for your parents? For mine?"

Jack pulled a face, scoffing. Classy. Classic. Tell him something that clashed with his narrow-minded worldview, and he would stick his fingers in his ears and his head up his ass.

"We're not our parents."

"No," she agreed. "Our parents were willing to be bonded and at worst neutral about each other. Oh, and none of them had a price on their heads. Did you bother to factor that detail in while planning our future? You'd never be able to return to Barashi, or any world under Council rule, again. Not to mention you'd have a fun and fruitless time finding a priest willing to mate us. I think I set every temple on this continent on fire at least once. Priests are only second to slavers when it comes to professions whose members want my head taken off."

"Glad to hear that Aunt Briseis also made you a heathen."

Valerie shrugged.

"I have no beef with the Pantheon," she answered, and truthfully at that. She even still prayed when she found the inclination and the occasion. "The gods need to revise their hiring policies so that there are fewer pricks working for them, that's all."

"I suppose that's something," he conceded. "As for the rest you mentioned, yes. I'm pleased to say that I did look for ways to work around you being a serial killer while planning this out."

"Around I—what?"

"It's alright, it doesn't bother me," Jack stressed. "You'd be surprised, too, with how much you can get away with if you talk to the right people and your interests align. I won't face prison time if I bring you back home, although your concern is appreciated. If you truly irked so many priests that all of them refuse us, well. Nick's mother wanted him to take the veil a couple of decades back, he technically knows how to conduct a binding."

"Right. That's it. This conversation is over."

The silence that followed was too deep, too weighted to be mistaken for acquiescence.

"Just tell me one thing."

"No. Shut up."

"It has nothing to do with putting Nick in a robe, I promise." Jack was unfazed by her glare and also by her tossing one of the discarded books so that it knocked over his cup, spilling espresso over the edge of the table and onto his pants. He took it as his cue to press on. "Was there anything I could have done that would have made you want me? Would it have mattered, if I had told you I loved you before that night in New York?"

Valerie snorted. Gods. That he had to ask.

"You being too craven to speak up before then was the only saving grace in the entire mess, trust me." She could only imagine how hard that hit would have landed if they'd been lovers rather than friends. "I'm curious; do you think I wouldn't have reacted terribly to learning you were working for Marabeth if we had been in a relationship?"

"If we had been mated—"

She slammed the book closed and looked him straight in the eye.

"If we had been mated, Jack, I would have slit my throat with my own dagger rather than spend the rest of my natural life chained to someone capable of pulling the crap you did. That's what would have happened. Or — did you think that a mating bond would have changed me so much that I wouldn't have minded? Or that you could have wiggled out of the situation by commanding me to forget?"

"Don't put words in my mouth."

"They're no more damning than anything you would, and have, said of your own volition." Her smile was sharp and thin and she cut herself with it more than she wounded her target, but no matter, no matter. Breathe and get through it. "I mean, isn't it why you are insisting on that? Because if we were mated, you'd be able to brainwash me to the point where I'd stop seeing all you are, all you do, as problems?"

Jack's body twisted with what looked like whiplash, the whole motion so bizarre that Valerie needed a moment to understand that he'd forgotten that he was chained and had attempted to stand up. The way he held himself after the chains did their job of keeping him seated — stiff lipped, while vibrating with pent up emotion — was a sight at once difficult to bear witness to and impossible to look away from.

"The purpose of binding you to me," Jack hissed, snarled, she couldn't find a proper descriptor for the sound he hurled at her but it had teeth, "is to keep you from running, to make you stay by my side, for however long it takes for you to understand how I feel about you. I don't want to change you. I want you to stop deluding yourself and denying—"

"Enlighten me. What am I supposed to be in denial about?"

There was beauty to the face Jack made in response to that question. Like an erupting, lava spewing volcano, it was undoubtedly a disaster, yet one couldn't help but marvel at the colors.

"I love you," he breathed, with despairing fervor, as if the possibility that she wouldn't believe him might shatter him. Here they were again. Same old road. Same song, playing like they'd never danced to it before, like her feet weren't tired and her patience shot to rubble.

"I know you love me, you plague ridden dingbat!" It brought Valerie no joy, pride or solace that she was the one who ended up making a dramatic stand, looking down on him with an excess of emotion, conflicted for pitying him half as much as she wanted to tear him a new one for the nerve, the colossal nerve. "Do you hear me? Are you listening? I know! So what do you expect me to do with that? I'm not a mirror! You can't just confront me with your feelings and expect me to reflect them! That's not how people work, Jack! That's not how anything works!"

"I don't expect you to reflect," he retorted, sounding calm, all things considered, all things being the fact that she stood over him spitting mad. "I expect you to understand that at some point you must have loved me, and that a shred of that has to remain buried somewhere. Because you can't tell me, can't convince me, that throughout all these years together there was never anything felt on your side, or that there is nothing left of that feeling anymore."

She would kill him. Strangle him, cut him up, gouge out his eyes and break his teeth.

"I did love you!" Jack's eyes went comically wide at her outburst. It might be the first time in their shared history that he listened better because she was shouting. "It just wasn't the love you wanted, was it? It was the wrong kind, it wasn't enough, and so you took it upon yourself to improve it, and now here we both stand and oh, trust me. There is not a shred of it left!"

Silence, loaded like someone had taken the moment existing in the space of a breath withheld, when sound drained from the world in anticipation of the coming explosion as a grenade sailed through the air, and stretched it out to cover seconds, a half minute, a whole minute, time which Valerie stopped bothering to count. Silence, waiting, silence that waited.

She fell back on her chair, fury ebbing and regret settling in its place. She shouldn't have—

"Did you think—" Jack's voice was as soft and low as hers had been loud and harsh. Valerie didn't know what expression he wore because she'd buried her nose in the book and wasn't planning on dragging it away, come what may. "I never meant to make you think that I didn't enjoy what we had. I loved what we had. If I hadn't been happy with it, if it hadn't meant enough to me to make me terrified of ruining it, I would have told you of all the ways in which I want you at least fifty years ago."

"Sure. Fear of rejection was truly madly deeply why you didn't say a word. I buy it."

"It was."

"Mm-hm."

"What other reason could you think I had?"

"Well, I don't know. It's interesting, isn't it, that you're only going all out in your attempts to capture me now that Marabeth is out of the picture? Almost as though she might have been a factor holding you back. I mean, if you'd shown up at the Mayfly with me slung over your shoulder, saying that you wanted to mate me, she'd have disowned you in two seconds flat. And, let's go one step further; if you'd gotten away with it somehow, made me yours forever while she still lived and breathed . . . can you imagine what family dinners would have been like?"