Heart's Magic (23 page)

Harry's voice spat
sacrilege. Then, "She's workin' magic and I don't know 'ow
dangerous it is to try to pull 'er out. Where can she
sit?"

She was swept up into a
pair of powerful arms and carried away, back toward the guard
station, the tiny part of her mind still in her body decided. She
didn't have to concern herself with that any more. Harry was here.
He would take care of everything.

But when she tried to focus
on the larger part of herself inside Nigel Cranshaw, things began
to go wrong.

Harry had never hit a woman
in his life. Not even a girl, back when he was a kid himself,
living in the Dials. He wouldn't now. But for the first time, even
he understood how a man might be driven to it. God knew he wanted
to shake her till her teeth rattled and he just might, a
little.

He'd managed to spot her
going through the great iron and oak gate at Holborn Tower. The
traffic had been too thick for his cab, even here, so he'd paid the
man off and run through the gate on foot. He still hadn't been fast
enough to stop her from whatever fool craziness she had
planned.

Riding Cranshaw's blood, he
assumed. She had that distant, distracted look Amanusa and Pearl
got when they went out riding. But Amanusa and Pearl had the sense
to be sitting when they did it. He'd have thought Elinor possessed
of more common sense than either of those two ladies, but
apparently, when it came to magic, she hadn't a soup spoon of the
stuff.

He was carrying her back to
the chair in the little alcove of the guard's station when Elinor
convulsed in his arms. And kept convulsing.

Panic flooded up from
somewhere in his gut and he shoved it right back down. He didn't
have time for it. Ignoring the guard's cries of alarm, Harry turned
round and marched back to Cranshaw's cell door. Her shudders became
twitches, but she was still in a seizure. Maybe if he got her right
up next to Cranshaw, she would come out of it.

"Open the door," he ordered
the guard.

"Sir, do you think that's
wise? Let me call for help. Dr. Rosato--"

"Yeah, do that. And send
for Amanusa Greyson as well, but first, open the door. She's caught
'erself in that bastard's blood and I need to get her closer to
'im." He thought so, anyway. Hoped so. "If she's close, she can get
the blood untangled."

The guard's hands shook as
he fumbled for the lone key on his ring. "Isn't she the wizard's
magister?"

"Yeah, but she can work
sorcery too." Harry scowled down at her. "But she obviously ain't
quite learned 'ow."

The key finally went in the
lock and turned. The door creaked open and Harry burst through with
Elinor in his arms. He turned in a full circle, unable to see
Cranshaw.

Elinor went limp, her
twitches and stiffness vanishing so abruptly Harry had to look to
reassure himself she still breathed. She did, barely.

With a hoarse scream,
Cranshaw erupted from the dense shadow beside the door, rushing at
the guard and bowling him over. The lantern went out and in the
darkness Harry felt a chill rush past that froze his blood with its
foulness. Before he could take a step, the door clanged shut and
the lock turned, clicking the bolt home. He heard a grunt and a
thud and prayed the guard was still alive.

Carefully, Harry shuffled
his feet across the stone floor, searching for the cot without
light, trying to listen for what was happening outside. Cranshaw
searching the guard. Cranshaw running down the hall, searching the
alcove, plucking keys off the wall, opening the stairwell door.
Closing and locking it again. Damnation.

He didn't put too much heat
behind the oath. Elinor was hurt, but he was an alchemist locked in
a wizard's cell. He was surrounded by metal and stone, the elements
of his magic. Granted, the elements were heavily warded by magic
with keys he didn't have, but he was the alchemist's magister.
Surely he could grasp enough magic to escape the cell. Elinor
needed help and he knew damn-all to help her.

His knee banged into the
side rail of the cot and he cursed. The metal bunk was bolted to
the floor and he'd hit it hard. He would have one hell of a bruise.
He lowered Elinor to the rough woolen bedding and smoothed her hair
back. "Where are you, love?" he murmured. "You need to come
back."

Elinor put out her
hands
again, determined to
stop her wild tumble this time. The magic felt more settled, more
as if it had found its place in this body. And finally the crazy
spinning slowed and stopped. She let herself rest a moment, get
used to being motionless again. Or relatively so.

She could sense Cranshaw's
muscles flexing as if he were walking, going somewhere. She also
felt very odd. Stretched, or-- Did it matter? She was here. She
needed to do what she came to do and get out.

First things first. She
wanted a look at his burns from this side.

The burns on his chest and
arm and hip seemed to be healing nicely. The skin pulled when he
tried to move, but it would stretch enough to allow him to walk.
His hand, though--Elinor cringed a little when she saw the drawn-up
tendons and internal scarring. She wondered if she could push
something, stretch something, but--
first,
do no harm.
Later, they could
try.

She turned to his mind
then, willing the magic to show her Cranshaw's mental state. It
dropped her into such a maelstrom of fear and excitement and
abhorrence and anticipation and disgust and who-knew-what-else,
that she feared she could never break free. When she "stood" once
more inside his physical self--somewhere close to his eye, she
thought--Elinor realized she didn't know what to look for inside
his mind.

How did other sorceresses
know? Usually, they were looking for evidence of crimes, from what
Elinor had picked up. So what was Nigel's crime?

And she saw him at an
apothecary shop she didn't know, purchasing his illegal firebombs
from a florid-faced, bulbous-nosed man who smelled strongly of
onions. Cranshaw didn't know him, had only heard that one could get
whatever one desired here if one knew the correct words to be
spoken in the correct order. His fear of women was such that he
made sure to learn the words and the order. He could not allow that
horrid, horrible female to come near him. Her very touch would
corrupt.

Elinor got an image of his
flesh blacking at the touch of her hand, the blackness spreading
through him until bits began melting and falling off. The blackness
bore a resemblance to his self-inflicted burns, but she could see
that the resemblance had come after the fact. How could he have
thought such a thing? And why?

The magic brought her the
memory of a switch striking little boy flesh, of pain, and terror
for his life. The man wielding the switch was shouting, almost
incoherently, but Elinor could pick out a few words: "--whore's
embrace--" and "--beat the wickedness out of you--" and "--resist
corruption--" There was more, but Elinor's recoil had carried her
to the motherly hug from the family cook that had instigated this
punishment.

This was the moment, the
magic told her, that Nigel Cranshaw had decided that women were the
cause and root of all pain and wickedness. At the advanced age of
ten.

Elinor picked her way
through Nigel Cranshaw's memories, piecing his past together. His
family had been Catholic, father intended for the priesthood,
though apparently as ill-suited for that as he was for fatherhood.
Elinor thought the man on the verge of insanity, if not well across
that edge.

Cranshaw Senior had fallen
in love--or in lust--with one of the parish's young ladies and
succumbed as young men tended to do, even young men preparing for
the priesthood. And when Nigel's mother had turned up pregnant with
Nigel, both sets of parents had insisted on marriage. Though
Nigel's paternal grandparents had expressed severe disappointment
that their son would not become a priest and eventually, the
pope.

His father had blamed his
mother for tempting him and luring him astray. He blamed her for
Nigel's three younger brothers and for holding him back, making
them poor. When she died, not long after the youngest brother was
born, the little boys were farmed out amongst the various relatives
with women to mother them, but Nigel was almost seven. A man should
not be deprived of all his sons.

That was when Nigel's
father took it upon himself to teach his eldest son about the
wicked, licentious, corrupting nature of women and the evils of
sexual congress.

When Nigel was 13, his
talent for magic had been noticed by the day school he attended.
The day he was admitted to the Magician's Academy and opened the
Book of Wizardry was the best day of his life. Nigel had mellowed
in the all-male atmosphere, until Amanusa's appearance as the first
sorceress in 200 years brought all his fears back again.

Your father was
wrong,
Elinor whispered.
Bitter, angry, and wrong to take his
disappointment--his own sins--out on those weaker than
himself.

She whispered those words
into Nigel's own sense of fairness, his protection of the younger,
smaller boys at the academy.

Your mother loved
you.
Elinor gave him older memories.
Look at your life with adult
understanding.

She wanted to do more, but
his opinions had solidified into ideas so rigid, she feared
breaking his mind if she knocked those attitudes down. Nor did she
know if she could. But perhaps a few cracks wouldn't
hurt.

At the thought of cracks,
the magic swirled around her, spun her about, and showed her one. A
crack, right through Nigel's ... heart? Soul?

Elinor was no theologian.
Nor did she think a theologian, were one in her position, would
know what to call it, but it was definitely there. A weakness in
what made Nigel who he was. A place where bad things could leak
through. Things that were no part of him.

The flaw was laid straight
through the fear that had ridden Nigel Cranshaw most of his life,
and as Elinor wondered what to do about it, she realized she
already knew.

For a while, after the
Battle of Waterloo Station, she and the fifteen other magicians who
had participated in the fight had held the tiniest fraction of an
atom of angel's power. She'd given it all away, of course. That was
what the stuff was for--to be given away. But she knew now what it
was, where it came from, and where to get more.

Not like the pure stuff the
angel had poured into them. Mere humans couldn't bear up under that
kind of power. Then again, the ordinary human variety had its own
amazing power.

Your mother loved
you,
she repeated and she gathered up the
certainty of that love and plastered it into the crack. From the
place where the angel power had hummed inside her came more
certainty, more--more love. Straight from the Source.

It will be well,
she said.
All manner of
things will be well.
She'd heard something
like that once. She knew she didn't have the words of the ancient
saying right, but the heart of it--the meaning--she had that right,
she was certain.

Nigel whimpered, stumbling
in his painful hobbling.
Flawed,
he thought.
Afraid.

Elinor used what she'd been
given to spackle more of the love into the crack. He let her do it.
He could have stopped her, she thought, knocked out what she did,
but he didn't.
Yes, you have made
mistakes,
she thought at him.
There's only one who never did. But you've done
nothing that can't be forgiven. Just don't make those mistakes
again.

Nigel's thoughts fragmented
in the emotions surging through him. Still mostly fear, but now
there was confusion as he seemed to be remembering something
differently. The patch job seemed to be holding. He wasn't clinging
to his fault line.

She'd done as much as she
could for him, Elinor decided. It was time to end the ride and go
back where she belonged. She swept some of the potion toward his
terrible injuries, then reached for the hold to step out again. But
it wasn't there.

Before, when she was riding
Harry's blood, it had been easy. She had simply caught hold of her
own body and--and done it. Her body had been right there, next to
Harry's. Now--

She fought off panic when
she realized that during the entire time she'd been poking around
inside Nigel Cranshaw's body and mind, Nigel had been creeping down
the stairs inside Holborn Tower, away from the place she was fairly
certain her body remained. Inside Nigel's cell. And she wasn't
entirely sure what she needed to do to get back into it.

Oh, bloody hell.

Harry Tomlinson had been
worried before. In fact, he'd been terrified out of his wits on
more than one occasion. But that had been a terrible long time ago.
Well before he'd had much more than an inkling that he could pull
magic to work spells from the stones beneath his feet and the air
around him. He'd never been this scared since he'd found his magic
and he hadn't felt this helpless since his brother Jack had died,
which had been before the magic.