The Gauntlet (7 page)

But it would work. Coven magic was living
magic, based on the deep old secrets of the earth. And its
creations were living things, tied to the life of the one who bore
them. If she died, the ward died with her. It was why they had to
be passed from elder to elder before death, or new ones had to be
created.

And it didn’t get much deader than a
vampire.

It was the only way to survive this. The only
way to see Elinor again, to be there as she grew up, to protect
her. It wouldn’t be anything like the life she’d hoped to have, the
one she’d dreamed of for them. But it would be
something.

And that was more than her own kind were
willing to offer.

“Do it,” she told him. “Make me one of
you.”

The vampire scowled. “As I informed you, it
is not that easy. And there is a chance that it could make things
even worse.”

Gillian severely doubted that. “The Circle
promised you safe passage if you ceased to protect me,” she
reminded him. “If they find me dead, there’s a good chance they’ll
leave you alone rather than risk making an enemy of your mistress.
They have enough of those as it is!”

“That isn’t the point--”

“Then what is?” she demanded desperately. The
wood of the door was starting to splinter. They had minutes, maybe
less, and she wasn’t sure how long the process took.

“The point is that I am not sure how,” he
admitted, with faint spots of color blooming high on his
cheeks.

“But…but you’re a master,” she said,
bewildered. “You have to be! You’ve been running about in broad
daylight for the last hour!”

“Yes, but…” he sighed and ran a hand through
his curls. “It is too complex to explain fully, but essentially…my
Lady Pushed me.”

“Pushed? What--”

“It is done when a master wishes to elevate a
servant’s rank quickly. A great deal of power is…is shoved through
a subject all at once,” he told her, swallowing
.
“It is rarely done, because many times, the subject
involved does not survive. But the threats against her Majesty were
grave enough to make my Lady decide that she needed someone on the
inside, and no one in her stable was qualified. But a newly-made
vampire has many weaknesses that—”

“Newly-made?” Gillian grasped onto the one
thing in all that which made sense. “How new?”

He licked his lips. “A few years.”

“A few
years
?”

“If you round up.”

Gillian felt her stomach plummeting. “You’re
telling me you’ve never Changed anyone before?”

“I never had cause,” he said, looking
defensive.

“Didn’t they train you?” she demanded,
suddenly furious. She had found a way out of this, against all the
odds, she had found a way. And he
didn’t know how
?

“It is rather like sex,” he snapped. “The
theory and the practice being somewhat different!”

“You have to try!”

“You don’t understand. It is a little-known
fact that newly-minted masters, even those who took centuries to
reach that mark, often have…mishaps…before they succeed in making
their first Child. If I do this incorrectly—”

“Then I’ll be dead,” she said harshly. “Which
is what I will be when the Circle finishes with me in any case.”
She took off her kerchief, baring her neck before she could talk
herself out of this. “Do it.”

For a moment, she was certain he would
refuse. And why shouldn’t he, she thought bitterly. It sounded like
masters changed only those who could be helpful to them in some
way, and she’d been little enough use to anyone alive. Why should
dead be any different?

But then he swallowed and stepped closer, his
hands coming up to rest on her shoulders. There was fear in his
eyes, and it looked odd on that previously self-assured face. Like
the bruises purpling along his jaw and cheek, wounds his kind
weren’t supposed to get. Her hand instinctively lifted to touch
them, and found his skin smooth and blood warm, nothing like the
stories said.

She stared at him, wondering if his kind felt
pain, if they felt love, if they
felt
. She didn’t know. She
didn’t know anything about them but rumors and stories, most of
which, she was beginning to realize, had likely been fabricated by
people who knew even less than she.

“Try to relax,” he murmured, and she wasn’t
sure whether he was talking to her or himself. But then his eyes
lightened to a rich, honey-gold, as if a candle had been lit behind
them. The pounding on the door receded, fading into nothingness,
and the cool breeze flowing through the window turned warm.
Incredibly, she felt some of the stiffness leave her shoulders.

For a moment—until his lips found her neck
and she faltered in cold panic, the soft touch causing her heart to
kick violently against her ribs. Her hands tightened on his
sleeves, instinct warring with instinct—to push him away, to pull
him closer, the will to live fighting with the need to die.

“I’m not doing this correctly,” he said,
feeling her tremble. “You should not feel fear.”

“Everyone fears death, unless they have
nothing to live for.”

“And you have much.”

She nodded, mutely. She hadn’t realized until
that moment how focused she’d been on all that she’d lost, instead
of on what remained. She didn’t want to die. She wasn’t
supposed
to die, not here, not now. She knew it with a
certainty at war with all reason.

“I cannot do this if you fight me,” he told
her simply. “Humans tell stories of us forcibly Changing them
against their will, but that rarely happens. It is difficult enough
when the subjects are willing, when they want what we have to
offer.”

“And what is that?” she asked, trying for
calm despite the panic ringing in her bones.

“For most? Power, or the possibility of it.
Wealth—few masters are poor, and their servants want for nothing.
And, of course, the chance to cheat death. Quite a few transition
in middle age, when their bodies begin to show wear, when they
realize how short a mortal life really is.”

Gillian shook her head in amazement, that
anyone would throw away something so precious for such scant
reward. “But few become masters, isn’t that right?” He nodded. “So
the power is in another’s hands, as is the wealth, to give or
withhold as he chooses. And as for death—” This didn’t feel like a
cheat to her. It felt like giving up. It felt like the end.

The vampire smiled, softly, sadly. “You are a
poor subject, Mistress Urswick. You are not grasping enough. What
you want, you already have; you merely wish to keep it.”

“But I’m not going to keep it, am I?” The
terror faded as that certainty settled into her bones. She had one
chance, here and now, and it would never come again. She could let
fear rob her of it and die, or she could master herself and live. A
strange life, to be sure, but life, nonetheless.

“Do you wish to proceed?” he asked her,
watching her face.

Gillian took a deep breath, and then she
nodded.

Chapter Eight

He didn’t tell her again that this might not
work. He didn’t tell her anything at all. But golden threads of a
magic she didn’t know suddenly curled around her hands where they
rested on his arms. She had always thought vampires were creatures
of the dark, but the same bright magic shone around him as his
hands came up to bracket her face.

“I don’t know your first name,” he whispered,
against her lips.

“Gillian,” she told him, hearing her voice
tremble.

“Gillian,” he repeated, and her name in his
voice was full of so much longing that it coiled in her belly, dark
and liquid, like her own emotion. And perhaps it was. Because when
he suddenly bit down on her lower lip, the sensation left her
trembling, but not with fear.

He made a low noise in his throat and pulled
her close. The same strange magic that twisted around them sparked
off his fingers wherever they touched her, like rubbed wool in
winter. The tiny flashes of sensation had her arching helplessly
against him, one hand clenched on his shoulder, the other buried in
the heavy silk of his hair.

She could taste her own blood, hot and
coppery, on his tongue as he drove the kiss deep, and it drew a
sound from her, something animal and desperate. She gulped for air
when he pulled back, almost a sob. She wanted—she wanted more than
this; his hands on her body, his skin against hers, his tongue
tracing the tiny wound he’d made—

But when he returned, it wasn’t to her
lips.

A brilliant flash of pain went through her,
like a shock of cold water, as his fangs slid into the flesh of her
neck. She drew in a stuttering breath, but before she could cry
out, a rush of rich, strong magic flooded her senses, spreading
heat through every fiber of her body. She’d always thought of
vampires as taking, but this was giving, too, an impossibly
intimate sharing that she’d never even dreamed was—

He didn’t move, but it suddenly felt like he
was inside her, thrusting all that power into her very core. She
shuddered and opened to him, helpless to resist, the vampire
shining on her and in her, elemental and blazing and gone past
human. The pain was gone, the magic driving that and everything
else away, crashing over her like ocean waves, an unrelenting and
unending tide. She screamed beneath it, because it couldn’t be
borne and had to be; because there was no bracing to meet it and no
escape; and because it would end, and that would be even harder to
bear.

“Gillian.” It took her a moment to realize he
had drawn back, with the tide of magic still surging through her
veins. It felt like sea, ebbing and flowing in pounding waves that
shook the very foundations of—

She blinked, and realized that it wasn’t just
the vampire’s magic making the room shake. It wasn’t even the
pounding on the door, which seemed to have stopped in any case. She
frowned and watched as the few remaining charms jittered and danced
off the table, all on their own.

“What is it?” she asked, bemused. The vampire
pulled her to the window, and leaned out, dangerously far. “What
are you doing?” she tried to pull him back. “They’ll kill you!”

“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice
sounding as stunned as she felt.

“Why not?”

“Because I believe you may have completed
that ward, after all.”

He backed away from the window and she moved
forward, in time to see what looked like a black wave crash into
the side of the tower, shaking it to its very foundation. She
blinked, dizzy from blood loss and still burning with strange
energy. And then another wave started for them, rising out of the
earth of the courtyard, and she understood.

“In defense of your life,” the vampire said,
with quiet irony.

Gillian looked down to see the third spiral
of the triskelion, glowing bright against her wrist. She traced it
with a finger and power shivered in the air for a moment, before
melting back into her skin, joining the tide swelling within
her.

“I think it might be best if it didn’t hit,”
he said, glancing from the approaching wave to the cracks spidering
up the old walls. “Can you stop it?”

“I don’t want to stop it,” she told him,
flexing her fingers and feeling the warmth of deep rich soil
beneath her hands, the whisper of the age old magic of the earth in
her ears. But there was something else there, too, alien and
strange, but powerful, all the same. It wasn’t the vampire’s rich,
golden energy, but colder, more metallic, more—

She laughed, suddenly understanding what the
old Mother had meant. “You’ll have all the power you need,” she
repeated.

“What?”

“The Mother didn’t just link the witches into
her coven,” she told him delightedly. “She linked the mages,
too!”

He stared at her, and then back at the
awesome power of the land rising to meet them. “That’s…very
interesting, but I think we had better jump before the next wave
hits.”

“Let the Circle jump!” she said, and pushed
out
.

The magic flowing along her limbs followed
the motion—and so did the earthen tide. It paused almost at the
tower base, trembling on the edge of breaking like a wave about to
crest. And then it surged back in the other direction.

Masses of black soil rippled out in
concentric circles from the base of the tower, flowing like water
toward the old fortress walls. They hit like the surf on the beach,
crashing into stone and old mortar already riddled with tiny
fissures from years of neglect. The fissures became cracks, the
cracks became gaps, and still the waves came. Until the earth
shifted beneath the foundations and the stones slipped loose from
each other and the walls crumbled away.

There were shouts and curses from the guards
who fell with the walls, and from the bewildered mages who suddenly
found themselves at the center of a pile of spread-out rubble. But
the witches were eerily silent, turning as one to look up at the
tower for a long, drawn out moment. And then they gave an ancient
battle cry that raised the hair on Gillian’s arms.

And charged as one.

* * *

“Nope, nothing.” The distant, muffled voice
came from somewhere above him, right before something was slammed
down through the dirt, barely missing his head.

Kit swiveled his eyes to the side to stare at
it. It was wood, as thick around as his wrist and pointed slightly
at one end. A fine specimen of a stake, he thought, with blank
terror.

“Are you sure you saw him over here?”

That was the witch. Gillian. He tensed at her
voice, trying to force something, anything past his lips. He wasn’t
sure if he succeeded, but the stake was removed.

“Aye, although I don’t know why ye care,” the
other voice said. “He’s a vampire. He’ll just feed off ye
again.”