I shook my head. “I’m not a mage or a witch. I can’t use magic.”
“I said you could bend it. Or you nearly can. That is not use, only ability. With that power, you could remove the blade’s shard from my heart and make the knife whole. Then I would not be subject to the whim of either Edward or his captor.”
I started shaking my head. “I don’t—I don’t think I can do that. . . .”
He stared at me like a collector evaluating a piece. “You have no idea. What you ‘know’ is a handful of salt in the ocean. I don’t guess this, Blaine. This I know. But I can guess why the Pharaohn would find such a skill useful, given what else he now commands.”
I looked at him as narrowly as he had inspected me and saw the black aura around him shaping itself into sharp spikes whose tips reached deep into the Grey, like rigid fingers seeking a grip on the grid. “What does he command? Do you have some idea what his plans are?” I demanded.
“I do.”
I was drawn toward him but held myself back after a few steps. “Then you must understand why I want your help.”
He leaned in again, lowering over me. “But the knife alone is nothing—more likely to destroy me than aid you. Agree to do what I ask, and I will help you.”
“The help I need is not half-guessed plans or horror tales. I need to stop Wygan. I have no intention of being his pawn.”
“You could simply flee. How could he compel you?” He was playing with me; he knew there was more at stake and was pushing me to say so.
“Aside from not letting him rule the world, or whatever he’s after? Shouldn’t that be enough for anyone?”
“Perhaps once. But I can see your white honor crumbling. There is something more personal for you, now. Darker.”
I squeezed my eyes closed a second, so I didn’t have to see the certainty in his eyes. “He has my father.”
That wretched eyebrow rose and his mouth quirked into half a cruel smile. “Your father died when you were a child. What part of him does the Pharaohn hold?”
“His ghost. He has him trapped in a sort of magical cell—an oubliette—and he’s discovered a way to . . . torment ghosts.”
Carlos focused past me, thinking aloud. “Interesting. . . . I wouldn’t have thought he had the skill. Oh, but he has his ushabti.”
“This trick predates Goodall—he wasn’t Wygan’s ushabti two weeks ago.”
Carlos waved that aside. “He hadn’t made the final offering, but he was the Pharaohn’s man. Once the Pharaohn knows the thing can be done, he need only teach each ushabti how. Generations of his servants could have known it.”
“Wouldn’t you have heard of it before if he had?”
“That is not important at this point. His plan and your place in it are what concern you. And me. All else will fall in the scope of that. His plan depends upon you and Edward—who stupidly put this train in motion. He has Edward. Even if you run, it matters not to him: He will keep Edward prisoner until he captures you and forces you to do what he desires.”
“And what does he need you for?”
Carlos gave me a sly look. “I am merely convenient. He controls Edward, Edward controls me, and I have skill to do something the Pharaohn needs. There is another with the ability, but the Pharaohn has no leverage on that one. He would have to bargain with something more precious than threats and torment. He would rather press me into service than deal with the other. And so would you.”
Carlos knew me too well. I wanted to tangle with some unknown mage even less than I wanted to deal with him. And he’d confirmed something I’d suspected since Edward first asked me to go to London: There was a powerful blood mage somewhere in the area—one strong enough to have controlled and installed the ancient blood-worked panels on Edward’s bunker doors. The price for those services might be as awful as whatever Wygan was already planning. Better the devil I knew.
And he knew it. Carlos gave me his wolf smile and chuckled; the house shivered. “When the power comes to you, then you can relieve me of the knife.”
I was not letting him off easy. I pushed through the Grey, pushed on the blackness in the cellar and made a geas that thrust its spines into us both. His surprise quivered through the iron-hard shape in the Grey. I stared him down before he could recover, trying not to cringe from the pain and the cold. “And if I help you get free of the Lâmina, you will take my side in this confrontation with the Pharaohn. You’ll tell me his plan so far as you know it and you’ll do all you can to help me stop it.”
The death-cold fingers of the compulsion and bond pierced into me. I could see the dark magical form, a barbed helix, coiling deep into both of us. Carlos resisted and I stopped breathing as the geas surged and throbbed a moment, cutting me with such chill agony that tears sprang from my eyes and ran in viscous, icy trails down my face.
He threw back his head, eyes shut. “Yes.” He gave in and the cold pressure of the geas collapsed, dissolving into us in a shimmer of black threads. “I will.” He brought his head down again, making a small, respectful nod. But his glance was wary and appraising. “You do not need to bind me.”
I caught my breath—I didn’t care if he saw I was shaken—and wiped the back of my hand across my cheeks. “Oh I do. I remember the last time you helped me.”
He made an ingenuous face. “I only advised—”
“In the Wah Mee,” I said, my voice like acid.
He gave a dismissive shrug and looked aside. “I didn’t kill the boy.”
“You absorbed his life and drove him insane.”
He glared back at me, his chin down and only his eyes showing between the dark swaths of his hair and beard. He was angry and it shivered in his voice, growing louder as he spoke, making the creatures of mist and shadow scurry a scratching tarantella on the floor above. “An unhappy consequence of his own design. He intended your death as well as others; it reeked on him like sweat. I only showed him his own mind. You required my assistance and there is always a price. You could not pay, so I took what I needed from him—he will toil in his madness a shorter time for that. Is that not mercy? Insanity was his fate, but you stopped him from practicing it upon others. Is that not righteous? Has not justice been served?” he roared. “Are you dissatisfied with your role, Paladin of the Dead?”
I reeled under his fury and a slap of self-loathing: I was guilty of thinking only I could do right or bring justice to the dead and the things of the Grey and I had been secretly relieved to see Ian Markine sent to the prison wing at Western State and not escape justice for what he’d done. I could have left it to Solis to solve, but I hadn’t; I’d gone out to capture him and I’d taken Carlos with me to make sure. I had hated the way it happened, but I had caused it and I had been glad of the end result. Now I saw myself as a hypocrite for it.
The shocking strength of Carlos’s anger and my disgust with myself sent me stumbling back against the wall as the building seemed to shake. I wanted to scream or cry, but I choked it off. I slapped my hands against the stones to keep from falling and felt something brush past my palm with a wet, sticky sensation. One of the névoacria slipped away, leaving a crimson trail on the wall that the stone seemed to drink. I twitched away and stared down at my hands, appalled with what I had done and horrified by what I saw.
The backs of my hands were streaked red where I’d wiped away my tears: half-frozen, bloody tears that now ran bright across my knuckles as they thawed. No. No, not this too . . . I wanted to flee, to hide. What was happening to me . . . ? Denials crescendoed in my head in mocking, shouting chorus. . . .
I didn’t realize I’d given voice to those fears until I felt Carlos touch my hand. I hadn’t even seen him come close and reach; it was the softer chill of his finger sweeping across my hand that startled me back to sense. I gasped and jumped away from him, but there was no place to go. He wasn’t going to hurt me; he couldn’t—we were bound together to a purpose—but I was still afraid and my stomach knotted, twisting in my gut and freezing the air in my lungs.