Heart's Blood(62)

"I meant it." Amanusa gave Pearl a quick hug. "I'll want to observe your riding of the blood first, and-I ride the blood of all my students. To be sure of their character."

"Particularly mine." A crooked smile flashed across Pearl's lips. "Given all Grey's accusations."

"I do not doubt the truth of what you have told me." Amanusa's English took on the faintest of foreign accents.

"Still, it's best to be sure." Pearl smiled again. "I want to be sure."

Elinor knocked on the door left open by Grey's explosive departure and put her head in. "I only wanted to tell Pearl I was on my way home, if you want to walk with me."

Pearl's smile felt as battered as she did. "I would like that, yes. Amanusa has asked me to help her teach."

Elinor beamed her approval. "We must talk about the Female Magician's School I have in mind. For sorcerers and wizards."

"Tomorrow." Jax took his wife's arm. "It's too late tonight for that talk."

"Yes, tomorrow," Amanusa agreed. "After I take the girls to the library."

"To the books." Elinor nodded her understanding. "Until tomorrow, then."



THE PARADE OF sorcery students into the academy library had boys, and grown men who acted like boys, gawking and whispering. Pearl was glad that awful Magister Cranshaw wasn't there as they went in, though she had no doubt he would be present when they departed. Someone was bound to carry tales, to watch the fireworks, if nothing else.

All of Amanusa's pupils opened the sorcery book easily, save one. Amanusa told her to try the other books, and when she opened the wizardry book, Elinor had her first wizardry student.

The students checked out a large pile of sorcery books and a wizardry tome or two-of which Pearl felt envious, because they were written in modern English. Elinor departed then to inspect prospective school buildings, while all the students trouped past Cranshaw's gauntlet back to the hotel for reading and study. Pearl went aside with Amanusa for her tests.

She felt peculiar while Amanusa rode her blood. Not because she sensed anything of the ride itself, but she knew it was occurring. Now and again, it seemed she could feel the magic stirring about inside her. After the spell was concluded and Amanusa called back her blood, the master sorceress pronounced herself satisfied.

"You're a little underweight." She set the strip of rice paper with her recalled blood alight in a candle flame and dropped it to burn in a ceramic dish meant for cigar ash. "I don't know whether its due to too much magic use or the lingering effects of your earlier life, but-" She fixed Pearl with a stern eye. "Eat. None of this nonsense about ladies' delicate appetites."

"Yes, Magister." Pearl dipped her head.

"Now shall we see how well you ride, yes?" Amanusa spoke English like a native, which Pearl had been told she was on her father's side, but sometimes hints of her mother's Romanian came through.                       
       
           



       

"Of course." Pearl nodded again. "Who?"

She had assumed she would ride the sorceress and was startled when Jax came forward with a fresh pot of tea on a tray. He'd done such a good job of making himself unobtrusive, she'd forgotten his presence.

Amanusa poured. "You will ride Jax. I will attend to ensure correct procedure and safety. You should see how a healthy body works, so you can better understand the healing spells."

The ride went well, Pearl easily plucking out the information Amanusa asked for-Jax's memory of their first meeting. That brought on more looks and smiles. Pearl fled, returning to her flat for study. Though Amanusa did take the time to mention that Pearl had qualified as a full-fledged sorceress, and might be ready for her master's test by the new year. That was for later, after the murderer was caught.

Over the next several days, Pearl studied sorcery. Sometimes Amanusa tutored her. Sometimes Jax explained magic to the both of them. Sometimes Pearl taught the younger girls. Always, she read. And missed Grey.

She endured the ache of missing him, trying not to be angry with him for his refusal to listen to her explanations, but she wasn't terribly successful. Yes, she had done it, but she hadn't meant to. Didn't that mean anything? Something?

She also missed I-Branch, which surprised her until she realized that I-Branch had been a huge part of her life. She missed going to the office every day and knowing how the investigations were going. She missed talking to the Briganti and brainstorming theories. Grey didn't want her there, and she wouldn't intrude. Yet. Amanusa was her magic-master now, and she had plans for the justice magic. Pearl would wait on her magister's timetable. She was doing just fine.

On the day that would have been her wedding day, Pearl discovered she wasn't doing as fine as all that. Grey had published the announcement of their broken engagement in the newspaper. She was reading the morning papers over breakfast in the private parlor at Brown's that Amanusa had taken over for her school. Pearl didn't live with the other students, since she was teaching now, but she ate with them.

Her eyes went right to the item in question, a plain, stark notice of fact. Agony stabbed through her heart and she doubled over with the pain. Harsh, desperate noises echoed around her.

"Breathe," she heard Amanusa say, and tried it. The air caught on the spear stuck through her, but enough got past that the pain . . . didn't go away. She just breathed around it. Somewhat.

Amanusa held her while she shuddered with the grief. She might have cried. She didn't know. It hurt too much. They took her away to someone's hotel room, and eventually she slept. When she woke, she felt better. Empty, as if all her emotions had drained out.

Elinor was there and gave her a cup of tea brewed full of magic. It helped, somehow making the pain a little more distant. She would survive.

No, she would do better than that. She would shine.

Not today. But soon.



TWO DAYS AFTER the day he did not get manipulated into marriage, Greyson Carteret woke in a foul mood. Exactly as he had every morning for the past week. He woke in a foul mood. He stalked through his day in a foul mood, and he went to bed in a foul mood.

He tried to keep it to himself, but his I-Branch Briganti had begun to evaporate whenever he appeared. They'd never behaved like that before.

His mood began to affect his magic, since his spirits didn't take to being shouted at. He had caused Mary to burst into tears one day last week, and she'd sulked for three more. Not that he blamed her. He had been the beast she called him.

It was all Pearl Parkin's fault.

She could not possibly have broken the spell binding him to her. If she had, he wouldn't miss her. He wouldn't wake in the morning aching for her presence in his bed, in his arms. He wouldn't have to remind himself how she'd stolen his blood and used it to force him to do things he didn't want to do, to feel things he did not want to feel.

His father had tried to control him, to hem him in, clip his wings, and deny the magic singing its silent music in his ears. His mother was the same, always carping about propriety and rank and all those things that didn't matter when the magic whispered its seductive song.

Grey had freed himself of those chains. He would not allow anyone to chain him again. He alone chose his path.

So it infuriated him when he worried, those times he saw Pearl outside Brown's, and saw the circles under her eyes, dark against her pale skin. He would not care. If he did, it was due to her spell. She was at fault. She was the seductress, the manipulator, the liar. She must have deceived Amanusa as well, convincing her the spell was broken.

He would have discussed it with Amanusa, but Pearl seemed to be always at her side. Until Pearl eliminated the lingering remnants of her spell, Grey could not afford to let himself be near her.

He'd thought publishing the announcement of the end of their engagement would help, but when he saw it, printed in black and white, he felt sick.

Sickened by what she'd done to him. How she'd played him for a fool. Not because he missed her. He did not look up from his work to hunt for her presence nearby. He did not listen for her laughter. He did not wonder what she thought. Or if he did, it was her fault, because she'd bespelled him.

On this Wednesday, still wrestling with his foul mood, Grey descended to the I-Branch laboratory in search of his evaporated Briganti. He found the long room invaded by an army in pink skirts and white scholar's robes, brightening its usual stark appearance. Grey's eyes immediately found Pearl in the crowd of identically dressed females, and it ratcheted up his anger. He did not care that she still looked too pale. He would not care.

"What is going on here?" he demanded, far more sharply than he wished.

"Sir-" Duncan began.

"Mr. Duncan was explaining the alchemist's process for deciphering a spell," Amanusa said.

She would be here, wouldn't she? With her students.

"This is the Investigations Branch of the Briganti," he snapped. "Not a schoolroom." He knew he trod dangerous ground, and could not stop himself.

Amanusa stepped forward, her eyes narrowing, almost on a level with his own. "Sorcery is the knife blade of justice. Do you think you can keep us out?"

He was not so foolish as to fail to recognize his peril and step back. "I do not wish to, save for those who practice deceit. I will not admit her."