Carlos had no compunctions on either score. He leaned against the wall nearby, eschewing the other stool, with his arms crossed over his chest. I watched him as he started speaking but he didn’t meet my eyes. Every other time we’d talked he’d stared at me, unblinking, his gaze boring into me as if he could capture my will or my soul by the pressure of that glance. “Don’t misconstrue this place, Blaine. This is not my home. This is my workshop, my . . . house of labor.” He flexed his hands into and out of fists. The house rustled above us and the fires of the magic circle surged as if a wind fanned them. “Where one finds peace, that is heart and home. But this . . . this is my blackened soul.”
If he’d still been alive he might have drawn a breath or two, but he paused and frowned, darkening the room with his expression. I thought I could hear the névoacria crawling across the floor above us and shivered.
“That object you brought here has wreaked more death than a hundred years of warfare. I was dishonest when I called it a mere knife.”
“I can tell it’s a magical implement. Like an athame?” I asked, trying to understand. It didn’t seem quite like a dark artifact, but I wasn’t sure what else it was. I don’t know much about magic-working—I don’t do magic—and I only had vague ideas about the tools required from Mara and some of my past cases. Sometimes it’s better to play the fool than be one.
“No!” he barked and finally he looked at me, his dark eyes glittering with the same black fire that rose off his magic circle. “An athame is a witch’s tool, ceremonial, dull at the point. They are not meant for bloodletting. That is the Lâmina que Consome as Almas—” He cut himself off and shook away the name, infuriated at his slip. “It is a blood blade for black work. Meteoric iron, its source rained destruction and death on the world millennia before men put their puny feet to the ground. It was forged in a fire of human bone, quenched in clay dug from blood-soaked ground. It was mine. I killed for it. The man I murdered had slaughtered a whole village for it. And so on, back and back to its first forging. It hungers for blood, for death. It wants, but nothing so much as it longs to be whole again. Do you understand?”
His voice rang on the stone foundation and played on my bones, rousing the chorus of the Grey in my head as he continued, echoed and amplified by the singing of the grid. The other sounds of the house in the former graveyard fell away.
“That was Edward’s mistake: He didn’t understand the instrument he stole. Had he chosen any other knife, it might have destroyed me. Had he not broken the blade in my chest, I would have expired in the wreckage of Seville. If the fool had understood anything of what he did, we would both be long quit of this world. The blade would have killed him also if he hadn’t locked it away—he could not have controlled it for so long otherwise. But luck favors fools. We both survived.”
I shook myself from the disgust that wove around me—I couldn’t afford to be squeamish or delicate about this. “Are you saying that the knife has some kind of will or . . . sentience?”
His voice dropped a little, no longer ringing the room with its resonance but still deep enough to throb in my chest. “It has purpose. You’ve seen this before. You were the one who brought me to the organ. . . .”
“That artifact had a ghost—he had the will,” I said.
“But the organ contained and channeled it. This knife has an owner and a desire. Brought naked into the heart of my power—this place that sings with the essence of what I have given myself over to—it longs for that which it lost. It pulls on the shard, compels it to rejoin the whole.”
I scowled. “You don’t want the broken tip out of your heart?”
“I wish it gone. But the blade does not have a mind; it does not know that rejoining the pieces by force will rip me apart. If they are brought together again, without control, that I would not survive. I am not ready to end this existence.”
“Then—” I started, but he pushed himself suddenly off the wall and leaned over the table between us, staring hard at me, cocking his head as he did. The reek of death and blood, the nausea that vampires always cast over me, was much worse with Carlos. It made me wince and pull my knees up as if I could roll into a protective ball around my churning guts.
He ignored my reaction, studying me with a stare as penetrating and precise as a laser. In the past, he could see things about me that even I didn’t know; what did he see now? “You could do it,” he muttered. “Not yet, but very soon. You are growing together.”
Shocked, I blurted out, “I’m what?”
He hesitated for a tense moment. Then Carlos grabbed onto both my shoulders at once, without any word or sign of what he intended. His violent twitch at the contact rocked us both and I felt like I’d been wrapped in a live wire. My hair rose on my arms and the buzzing sensation of electric shock crawled over my nerves and every inch of skin and bone as my muscles spasmed. Air bound up in my chest and I felt that I was choking. Panic surged over me and something that felt like resurrection and clear water flowed behind it, bursting outward from my core.
I flung myself backward, jerking my knees to my chest and lashing forward with both booted feet at once. I shouldn’t have had the strength to hurt him with such a short kick, but he ripped away and stumbled back to the wall he’d come from. I fell off the stool and sprang back to my feet with my back against the cold-burning foundation stones, gulping in breath that tasted like tombs.
I reached for my pistol, but stopped my hand on the bundled knife instead. “Don’t try that again.”
Carlos wasn’t looking at me but at his hands as he brought them away from his gut. He straightened up, frowning. I didn’t see anything wrong with them; they weren’t bloodied or burned as I’d almost expected from the force. “Very close,” he murmured. “So that’s what he wants. . . .”
“What who wants?” I demanded. “Wygan? What pieces are you putting together, because I want to see that picture, too.”
He raised his eyes to mine and I could see them smoldering red and yellow within the wide irises. “I’m certain that you do. The Pharaohn. His ruthless monstrosity, Goodall, came to bargain with me recently. The whelp didn’t seem pleased. . . .” Carlos tilted his head and looked me over again. “I should have given in to impulse: He would have made a pretty home for maggots.” Carlos seemed to enjoy my shudder at his image. “Edward did not know the viper he coddled. Now Goodall’s master pretends to cajole my assistance with a plan unnamed in return for my freedom, though in truth so long as he controls Edward and the knife, he commands me. But he does not have the knife.”
I wanted to know more about Goodall, but there was something more pressing and I asked about that first. “But so long as you thought he did, why wouldn’t you help him? I presume he made some offer to set you free from Edward in exchange for help with whatever he’s up to. You’re no friend of Edward’s. Why would you balk?”
He almost smiled, but what he said seemed disconnected from his expression. “I would rather lie buried alive ten thousand years than see any world the Pharaohn would build. Edward bred our hatred—mine and the Pharaohn’s—by what he made of us, by his . . . stupidity, for his ambition. What he sowed now comes to reap him. But our tie is a tangled thread and if one of us can use it to his advantage, the others are compelled to his purpose. Wygan now has the whip hand and plans to use it. Unless the cord can be cut.”
Now he did smile, a terrible thing of predator’s teeth, lit by the unholy fire in his eyes. “You’re hovering a hair’s breadth from the great weft of magic. If you reach for it, you can bend the shape of magic itself.”