The seconds that I lay in the mist, breathless and stunned, silenced the voices and I took my first new breath quivering but not afraid. I gulped in a few more lungfuls before I could look at Carlos again. He made no move, no indication that anything was amiss. He just sat where he was and waited.
“All right,” I told myself. “OK. Let’s do this and get it over with.” Carlos didn’t make any acknowledgment of my muttering.
I crept across the silver fog that obscured the floor, the lines of the circle gleaming like dim neon miles away below the ghostly maze.
I pulled the wrapped Lâmina from my pocket as I knelt in front of Carlos.
He held one hand out flat, palm upward and thumb tucked across it. “When you hold the knife, hold it in your palm like this, your fingers flat under the blade. Your hand becomes the knife, your arm the tang. Then cut. Like this,” he added, his hand curving upward and toward my own heart. “But slowly.”
He unbuttoned and opened his shirt so I could see the dusky amber of his skin marked with a thick scar nearly as broad as my own palm. The scar curved a little, raised into a long ridge that gleamed like oily water in the ghostlight. Low and to the left of his sternum, the uneven crescent made me think the blow had come from below, underhanded. Just like the urge that had driven it.
I nodded, tucking the still-wrapped knife into my hand as he’d shown, letting the silk fall away to a single layer between us. Carlos shut his eyes as a tremor moved under his skin. I sank down toward the grid, letting the color swell and burn out the mist of the labyrinth until there was only a thin smoke of substance clothing the lines and tangles of power in the world. The energy seemed to rush up, much hotter and more urgent than the cold steam of the Grey had ever been. The fearful silence stayed at bay this time, but I felt it nearby.
In the blazing net of the grid, Carlos, a smear of tangled threads wrapped in shadow, looked dim and weak but for a burning ruby ember at the core, gleaming like one of Dru Cristoffer’s earrings. A dull void of light or color—triangular and sharp—stirred across the face of the ruby that pulsed once, slowly, and shuddered as the dark thing scored across it. I wanted to stare into this fire wrapped in darkness and watch the gleaming heart of it as it trembled against the black shape, beautiful and horrifying. Then the voices were crying in my head that it was a heart, his heart, this burning thing was Carlos’s heart. The black shape was the broken tip of the Lâmina, stirring toward its missing part, cutting as it moved.
I tasted bile as I forced myself to action, pushing my hand toward his chest, toward the cloud of blackness that shrouded the fiery heart. I felt cold pressure against my fingertips, but I could barely see them. I put my other hand out flat against him, feeling the scar, the shape of his rib cage and muscles, invisible but solid and shockingly cold beneath my palm. I felt his shudder and the whispering told me to press with both hands, flat with one and forward with the other, press. . . . I felt the scar part at my fingertips as they sank into his skin. . . .
I had reached into zombies and into ghosts, into the warped and furious constructs of human madness, ambition, and anger, but never into a solid, living thing before. Though he was undead, as a vampire, Carlos still had the solid flesh of a live human being, cold as it was. One would have thought he didn’t need a heart and could feel nothing in that dead organ, and yet apparently he did. As my hand holding the knife pushed into his body, I tried to shut off my mind, tried not to gag as he tensed and shivered and the slow substance of his body resisted my cutting. I pinched the fingers of my other, flat hand into the trailing silk and let it pull away as the blade on my palm sank into him, drawing my hand into the cold flesh.
The naked blade sang to its missing tip and the dark triangle twitched toward it, cutting a path by centimeters across the vampire’s heart. Brilliant golden light oozed in the wake of the black shape and wrung a sound of suffering from Carlos’s throat.
I trembled also, every movement was so slow, hard fought for every half-inch, that my muscles ached with fatigue and knowing what I was doing sickened me. I wanted it over with. I could barely stand any more of this creeping torment. The perverse chorus in my mind teased me that I could kill him at any moment, if I wanted, that I did not have to follow the route already made. . . .
I eased the blade sideways, cutting further to the inside of his chest than the original path and pressing hard on the plane of his upper chest as he jerked against the sudden change of motion. A growling cry boiled out of him as the broken point wheeled sideways, nicking a deeper golden line in the blazing scarlet heart as it moved to align with its parent blade. I tightened the muscles of my arm and thrust harder into the new incision. I cut into his body, urging the knife to meet its missing part sooner.
The bloodless meat below his ribs gave reluctant way and the jagged edges of the Lâmina yearned toward each other. The point turned a bit further, making one last bright line, thin as a hair, across the surface of his heart as it pulled from it. A slow golden haze slid over the ruby fire, gleaming as Carlos shivered and buckled backward a little. I shuffled forward on my knees to keep the blade from ripping out of his unseen flesh and felt the Lâmina quivering like a tuning fork in my grip.
I looked down, setting myself into position to continue and saw the glitter of gold fade off his heart’s surface. I froze in terror, thinking I’d miscalculated and destroyed Carlos, but he shuddered, not yet truly dead. I stared at the black shape of the blood blade within the skein of red fire and black smoke and noticed the point had cleared the bright knot of his heart and changed shape. The broken edges of the blade seemed to reach toward each other, thinning and elongating until they touched and bound. The blade lurched in my grip, as if it could not wait any longer to meet its missing part and I hauled backward to stop its hungry lunge.
The separated pieces rang together and the Lâmina vibrated, tolling like a bell and surging in my hand. I braced myself and pulled against it, hoping I was guessing right. The knife drew reluctantly from Carlos’s undead flesh. I lurched backward, back into the ordinary Grey, as the blade came free. I wrapped the black silk scarf over it at once, hiding it and binding it tightly, afraid it might move on its own. I scooted back, away from Carlos, keeping the knife bundled in my hand as I groped for the key that would shut the maze and dump us back into the cellar.
The moment I touched the key to the walls of the maze it collapsed as if it, too, had been impatient to escape from my nightmarish work. Even the bloody red lines of Carlos’s magic circle seemed comforting after what I’d just done. I shivered and hugged myself against the incorporeal cold as I sat on the glassy black floor, tucking my head down against my knees.
I could feel Carlos stirring before I bothered to look for him. He was back on his feet, if a little less steady than usual, his shirt already buttoned. He glanced at me and the dark gleam in his eye frightened me to the bone.
He stepped close to me and put out his hand. “May I have the blade.” A demand, not a question.
I started to hand it over but paused, clutching it in its silk swaddling and holding it aside. “Only if you promise not to use it on me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I do so swear. Never on you.” His sharp white teeth shone in the gloom.
“And no fangs either. I’m not a blood donor.”
He chuckled. “Very well.”
His hand remained where it was, still waiting for me to hand over the Lâmina. I wondered if there was anything else I should say before I gave it to him, but no suggestions came to mind. The grid’s chorus was suddenly quiet.