Page 26 of The Malevolent Seven

She held up her wrist close to her face, peering at the blue veins on her pale skin as if she could see the crimson currents inside. ‘Am I some sort of vampire?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘You don’t drink blood or sleep in grave dust. You’re a wonderist who happens to be attuned to the wild magic of the Mortal realm rather than the otherworldly planes from which Corrigan and I derive our abilities. You won’t be able to cast spells like we do because your magic is more instinctual. You’ll be drawn to the flow of life nearby. Blood in particular will make you want to. . . play.’

‘Play. . . yes, that’s the word.’ She reached out her fingertips towards me, and I felt that strange nausea as the surface of my skin began to redden. She caught herself, thankfully, and closed her fist before dropping her arm by her side. ‘You said I can’t cast spells. Other than accidentally bleeding people to death, whatcanI do?’

I relaxed my own hands, which had been about to inflict a particularly nasty Infernal binding on her. ‘It’s hard to guess. Blood magic doesn’t obey the usual rules. It’s wild and unpredictable– like life itself.’

‘Can I bring back the dead?’

I’d known this question would come sooner or later. What she really meant was,‘Can I bring Fidick back to life?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t resurrect the dead.’

She gave a soft chuckle that didn’t quite hide the sob underneath. ‘I can only make more of them.’

Lots and lots more, I had the sense not to say out loud.

The sloop tilted backwards from a sudden burst of speed. That was Corrigan using more of his thunder to propel us forward– and to let me know he wanted me to shut the hell up, because to his mind, the more Galass knew about her abilities, the more dangerous she’d become.

‘How do you know so much about blood mages?’ she asked.

‘I know about all forms of wonderism. It’s an occupational hazard.’

She shook her head slowly, as if coming out of a trance. ‘No, that’s not true. I’ve been subjected to the company of other mages. They like to talk, to brag– always about their particular form of magic. None of those wonderists were like you. You’re the only one I’ve met who—’

I cut her off. ‘Just keep focusing on the canal,’ I said. We were getting perilously close to topics I didn’t want to discuss,especially in front of Corrigan. ‘The more you train yourself to sense the movement of life without obsessing about blood, the less you’ll feel the urge to. . . tamper with it.’

Sensing Corrigan’s glare burning a hole in the back of my azure wonderist’s coat, I joined him at the back of the sloop where he was using a spelled barge pole to propel us along the canal. Neither of us were sailors, so we kept the sail furled to the mast. Periodic bursts of thunder beneath the surface of the water lent a pleasant chugging motion to our little vessel.

‘She’ll develop a thirst for it soon enough,’ Corrigan said to me, keeping a wary eye on Galass. ‘Brittle thing like her, she’ll shatter sharp as glass from the strain if she tries to resist.’

‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ I insisted, though I had no basis for my assertion other than how hard she’d fought to protect Fidick.

Blood mages always go nuts sooner or later. When Corrigan pulls all his different forms of lightning from the Tempestoral demesne, the breach into our realm allows a different set of physical laws to operate. The effects are spectacular, but the violation is only temporary. Any time Galass drew on her blood magic, however, she’d be breaking the natural laws ofthisworld, and that, I’m told, does terrible things to the human mind– worse even than trafficking in Infernal magic.

Why had Fidick traded his life and soul to Tenebris in exchange for awakening her attunement to blood magic instead of just buying a few spells? Was it because he knew she wouldn’t be able to abide the thought of wielding Infernal magic? Or had he figured that whatever spells he negotiated for that first time would run out sooner or later, leaving her forced to trade away her soul and her conscience, a piece at a time, like he’d seen me doing?

Either way, he’d made a bad deal– for both of them.

Blood mages aren’t vampires like in the old stories. They’re not undead, for a start. But they do tend to drain their victims dry, so I suppose it’s a distinction without a difference. I was still surprised that Corrigan had allowed me to bring her with us. The only alternative would have been destroying her on the spot; leaving her for the justiciars would have been too cruel, even for him. My only hope now was that her indomitable will– the way she’d stood up to me back at my tent, even threatening Tenebris with that little blade of hers– might sustain her longer than most blood mages.

‘She can learn to control the urges,’ I muttered, more to myself than Corrigan, but my unfounded optimism still had him chuckling darkly as he concentrated on keeping the sloop chugging along the canal. After a while, I asked, ‘Any chance you’re going to share the details about whatever motley assemblage of moral defectives we’re off to recruit for this job?’

His scowl would have curdled milk. ‘That depends. Areyouplanning on explaining why a posse of Glorian Justiciars keeps turning up everywhere you happen to be?’

I kept my mouth shut. Corrigan and I had always had this unspoken pact: I don’t try to reform him, and he doesn’t ask about my past. Not that either of us has ever been particularly good at keeping our sides of the bargain. He emphasised his frustration on this point by taking one hand off the barge pole so he could hurl a bolt of red and black lightning at one of the corpses floating by. The crackling blaze obliterated the swollen sack of rotting flesh and waterlogged bones so thoroughly that all that was left were a few embers sizzling in the water.

‘Feeling better?’ I asked.

He grinned. ‘Yeah. You should try it once in a while. A little pointless destruction and desecration might help you come to grips with the fact that those are theonlyservices people hire us for. If you’re hoping for some righteous leader to come along and offer you a noble quest with which to assuage your guilty conscience, well, that’s never going to happen. That’s what scares the hell out of me about you, Cade. It’s like you’re waiting for old Sovereign Beneficent Jalbraith to rise up from his grave to knight you and give you a mission only you can do.’ Corrigan raised one hand to the heavens, lifted his chin and struck the sort of heroic pose you only ever see on marble statues erected outside the palaces of murderous tyrants. ‘“Arise, Silord Cade Ombra, take up this righteous sword, bear with honour this unbreakable shield and, in the purity of thine heart, awaken the true magic needed to vanquish the darkness!”’

He started laughing uproariously at his own joke. That’s often the case with Corrigan; nobody else finds him particularly funny.

‘There are no noble quests for people like us, Cade!’ he bellowed, wrapping both hands around the barge pole and sending another burst of his propulsion spell through the sturdy wooden shaft into the water. The sloop lurched forward and I nearly toppled overboard. ‘Half the world wants us dead for one spiritual crime or another, while the half who keep us alive and well fed do so only as long as we blow stuff up for them.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Mostly people.’

‘Well, a lot of people deserve to get blown up. That’s where we come in.’ He pulled out the barge pole and balanced it on his shoulder, spread his arms wide, and declared for all the realms in all the universes to hear, ‘Everybodyworks forsomebody, and that somebody is usually an arsehole!’

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