Heart's Blood(42)

"Please." She took a swallow, trying hard not to make a face. "Sit down. You will want to be comfortable for the magic."

He sat, draping one leg over the nearly nonexistent arm of the chair. The back of the chair, while high enough to lean against, lacked the wings to either side for proper lounging. At least half of his attempt to sprawl in a shocking, dissolute-looking manner was thwarted by his furniture. He still managed to look thoroughly dissolute, disreputable, and delicious.

She took another, larger swallow of the wine and somehow managed not to choke on it. Probably it was excellent wine, but she didn't like it. Plebian taste buds, she was sure.

"Drink up," Grey encouraged her. "I despise waiting."

This swallow was more of a sip. It wasn't as bad as the last. Maybe she was getting used to it. Maybe it had killed her taste buds.

"How long do we have to wait?" he asked.

"Longer than this." She choked down more wine.

"Yes, but how long, exactly?" He glowered at her. "Next time, we use tea. You're not drinking fast enough."

"Forgive me for not being a wine guzzler," she snapped, then blushed for speaking to her magic-master with such sauce. But she might have known Grey's response would be laughter.

"One can't gulp tea, either," she informed him more primly. "It's too hot."

"One would hope, at any rate," he said, still smiling. "But truthfully, Pearl, how long, exactly, must we wait?"

She delayed answering him with another swallow of blood-tinged wine. It was almost gone. Surely that was no more than a single swallow swirling in the bottom of the glass. She tossed it back like an old hand and then had to clutch the arm of the chair, invisible beneath her spreading skirts, to steady herself. "I think I drank it too fast. I apparently have no head for spirits."

"Port wine is not precisely the same as spirits," Grey said. "And you still have not answered my question. How long?"

"Oh." She put a hand to her forehead. It seemed to help the spinning sensation. It let her know precisely where her head was and what it was doing. "Um-the tenth part of an hour. Six minutes." Even she could do that much arithmetic. "Or thereabouts."

His eyebrows rose. He had four of them, two hovering above the others somewhere in the middle of his forehead. She blinked a few times and the upper pair slid in a semicircle and rejoined the others. She should not be this tipsy, not on a half glass of wine. She never had been before. When she'd lived in Whitechapel, only a few short weeks ago, she'd had tots of gin that hadn't hit her this hard, even on an emptier stomach. But those beverages hadn't been infused with blood and magic.

Pearl blinked, making Grey's features behave themselves again. She'd expected the magic's burn, because she'd read it in the book on justice magic. Not how much it hurt, but that it would. She didn't expect this dizziness. The book had mentioned nothing of the sort. Then again, the book's instructions hadn't mentioned the sorcerer drinking any of the subject's blood as part of the spell.

The other book, however, the one on beginning sorcery, had said that while it generally wasn't required for spells, it wouldn't do any harm to take on another's blood. As long as it was willingly given. Pearl didn't think Grey's could have come any more willingly. And he hadn't given much.

"Thereabouts?" Grey asked. "What does thereabouts mean?"

If it was the magic making her dizzy-Pearl was the sorceress. She was the one in charge, the one who directed the magic. Therefore-She took hold of the magic inside her and . . . put it away. It layered along her bones and dissolved into her blood, the fizzy sparks inside her head fading as it went back whence it had come.                       
       
           



       

"It means," she said, "that the length of time depends on the sorcerer's strength and the amount of magic called and the speed with which it spreads through the blood. The stronger the sorceress, the less time she must wait."

"So it seems we should wait a little longer than six minutes, for safety's sake." Grey pulled out his pocket watch, sitting up a little straighter to do so, and checked its time against the mantel clock. "What time did you finish your wine?"

"I don't know, I forgot to look." Not that it mattered when she finished. "But it's not the ability of the sorceress, her knowledge and experience in the practice of magic that matters. It's her strength. Do you see? The fact that I'm an apprentice and don't have much experience-or any-has an effect on how well I perform the actual spell. On what I see, or don't see, and how easily I find precisely what I'm looking for and nothing else. The strength of the sorceress affects whether she can perform the spell at all, and how long she must wait for the magic to permeate."

"And since you are a very strong sorceress, you should not have to wait long at all." Grey tucked away his watch and straightened himself in the chair, resting his hands on his knees. "Very well. Begin."

Pearl gaped at him. "How do you know I'm strong? For all you know, I could be a ten-minuter. Barely able to claim the name of sorceress. This is the test, you know. The qualifying examination, as to whether a sorcery apprentice can continue to study, or be forever relegated to love charms and ‘hide-me' spells. This is it. If I can't do this-"

She broke off and pulled herself back from the edge of hysteria.

"You can do this," Grey said, never moving from his position of repose. "You are a strong sorceress. I know because I have seen what you have done with no training whatsoever. I have felt you do it. I, who have little sensitivity to magic outside my own sphere, could feel you work sorcery. That is not a weak talent, Pearl. Now-begin."

Pearl took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. That had helped the first time, so maybe it would help this time, too. Yes, there was Grey, his glow brighter, more rosy.

"Think of England," she murmured as she reached out with magic-formed fingers and touched-

The magic in her locked onto the magic in him with a gut-deep thump, and she was inside him. Images of the countryside rolled past her eyes in daffodil-strewn glory, and she laughed.

"England is beautiful."

"So it is," Grey agreed. The images changed to debutantes waltzing past in a pastel swirl of ballgowns, laughing faces turned up one after another in adoration.

Of course they adored him. He was beautiful and he was wicked and it was daring just to smile at him.

"You are teasing me." Pearl couldn't suppress her smile. Why would she want to? "No matter how wicked you wish to appear, you would never dally with innocence."

"No?" Grey produced memories of Pearl, of her finger in his mouth, his tongue sliding sensually along it.

She quivered, all the sensations she had so unsuccessfully suppressed rising again to the fore. "Ah, but I am not so innocent, am I?"

She was, and she wasn't. But her state of innocence wasn't in question here. Her ability to ride Grey's blood and sift his thoughts was. And so far, all she'd done was intercept the thoughts he had allowed to rise to the surface.

She needed to find something he didn't want her to know. Something small and unimportant. Something that was at least nominally her business, even though he might not want her to know it-like how he truly thought she was doing in her apprenticeship.

His surface thoughts were still of her, but now they pictured her various fumbles and pratfalls. She hadn't tripped so flamboyantly over Meade's sprawled feet in the office. But she did fall out Grey's front parlor window. Had her skirts flown up so high? It didn't matter.

Carefully, Pearl slid past Grey's teasing surface thoughts and was captured in a maelstrom of lust. For her.

Fantasies of naked limbs and bare skin were interspersed with moments of reality, actual memories of Pearl licking her lips, or smiling at him, of their clasped hands and the moments he'd held her in his arms. Even the moments when she argued with him or defied his dictates seemed to fire his blood.

The visions of her naked in his bed-or some bed-kept intruding and-No. That wasn't her body. That was some other woman's body, larger and more curved, with Pearl's face stuck on. She couldn't take offense, since he didn't know how she truly looked beneath her clothes. It meant he didn't actually want her. How could he? She couldn't possibly compare, given the hordes of women he'd undoubtedly gone through.

Pearl didn't think she actually formed an intention, much less a question, before the magic gave her the answers. Grey's lovers didn't number in the scores. They didn't even achieve tens. Three. He'd been with only three women in his entire life.

She didn't want to know who they were. Truly. She wouldn't know them anyway. Before her family's fall from wealth, she wouldn't have run in Grey's rarefied circles, had she been old enough to do so. And after-well, she might have seen him with a paramour, when she was spying on him in the streets.

She hadn't. Even though she'd turned away from Grey's thoughts, told herself she didn't want to know, deep down, she did. Deep down, below her conscience, she wanted to see his lovers and know how she measured up. Not well. They were lush and beautiful women. Fair-haired and full-bosomed.