It was a relief, telling someone.
I wondered what else an unknown something breaking open inside me might have let loose, besides a little radiant dye leak. I wondered if the jackknife of a bad-magic cross would glow in the dark. Sure. And when I went nuts it would transmute into a chainsaw.
He looked at it, but made no attempt to touch it. “That helps to explain. One of the reasons it has taken this extra time for me to come to you is that it has puzzled me you are not weaker, having borne what you bear two months already. I have been seeking an explanation. It could be crucial to our effort tonight.” He paused. When he went on, his voice had dropped half an octave or so, and it wasn’t easy to hear to begin with because of the weird rough half-echo and the tonelessness. “What you show me is a judgment on my arrogance; it did not occur to me to ask you for information. I have much to learn about working with anyone, for all that I believed I had thought through what I said to you last time. I ask pardon.”
I gaped at him. “Oh please. Like I’m not sitting here half expecting you to change your mind and eat me. Oh, sorry, I forgot, I’m poisonous, I suppose I’m safe after all, I get to bite the big one without your help. I’m your little friend the deadly nightshade. But that’s just it: humans and vampires don’t ally. We’re implacable enemies. Like cobras and mongooses. Mongeese. Why should you have thought of asking me anything? If there is going to be pardoning between us, it should be for lunacy, and mutual.”
At least he didn’t laugh.
“Very well. We shall learn together.”
“Speaking of learning,” I said. “I take it you have learned what to do about this,” and I gestured toward my breast. “Since you’re here.”
“I have learned what will work, if anything will.”
“And what if it doesn’t work?”
“Then both of us end our existence tonight,” he said in that impassive we’re-chained-to-the-wall-and-the-bad-guys-are-coming voice I remembered too well.
Oh gee. Don’t pull your punches like that. I can take the truth, really I can. I said something like, “Unnngh.”
“I believe it will work.”
“I’m delighted to hear it.”
“Your wound is worse.”
“Oh well. No biggie.” I was a trifle preoccupied with his little revelation about our joint even-more-immediate-than-Bo impending doom. He’d said he wasn’t sure what he was doing. “It comes and goes.”
“Will you remove the bandage?”
Or you will? I thought nervously. I unbuttoned the top two buttons of my nightgown again and peeled the gauze away. Ouch. Of course the cut began to bleed at once.
“Er—I don’t suppose you want to tell me what you’re going to do?”
Badly phrased question.
“No,” he said.
“Will you please tell me what you are going to do.”
“If you would take your knife, and open the blade.”
My heart, having tried to accustom itself to vampire in the room, began to thump uncomfortably. The knife lay between us on the bed, where I had set it down. I looked at him a little oddly as I picked it up, and he, I suppose, well accustomed to blood-letting and thinking nothing of a little more or less of the same, misinterpreted my look.
“I would prefer not to touch your knife, it will burn me. And it is better if you cut me yourself.”
EEEEK.
“Cut you?”
“Yes. As you are cut. Here.” And he touched the place below his collarbones. A lot less bony on him, it occurred to me. I hadn’t registered it before, but he was a lot more filled-out-looking generally than he had been when we first made acquaintance.
When he was half-starved and all. I hadn’t seen him with his shirt off four nights ago. Well.
I could have sat there quite a while thinking ridiculous thoughts—anything was better than thinking about the prospective hacking and hewing: a two-and-a-half-inch blade is plenty big enough to do more damage than I wanted to be around for—but he said patiently, “Open the blade.”
The knife seemed much heavier in my hand than usual, and the blade more reluctant to unfold. I snapped it open and the blade flared silver fire.
“You said it would burn you.”
“And so it will. I would appreciate it if you made the cut quickly.”
“I can’t,” I said, panicky. “I can’t—cut you—at all.”
“Very well,” he said. “Please set the tip of it, here,” and he touched a spot below his right collarbone.
I sat there, frozen and staring. I even raised my eyes and looked into his: green as grass, as my grandmother’s ring, as my plaid socks from last night. He looked steadily back. I could feel my own blood— my poisoned blood—seeping slowly down my breast, staining my nightgown, dripping on the sheet.
He reached out, and gently closed his own hand around mine holding the knife. He drew hand and knife toward him, set the point where he had indicated. I felt the slight give of his flesh under the blade. His hold tightened, and he gave a tiny, quick twist and jerk, and the knifepoint parted the skin; I felt the moment up the blade into my hand when the skin first divided under the glowing stainless-steel blade, when it sank into him. There was a sound, as if I could hear that sundering of flesh, or perhaps of the undead electricity that guarded that flesh, a minute fizz or hiss; then he drew the sharp—the burning sharp—edge swiftly across his chest in a shallow arc—just like the wound on me. And pulled the knife away again. It was over in a moment.
The slash he had made was deeper, and the blood raged out.
I was—whimpering, or moaning: “Oh no, oh no,”—I dropped the knife and reached toward him as if I could close the awful gash with my hands. The blood was black in the moonlight, there was so much of it, too much of it—it was hot, hot, running over my hands…
“Good,” he said. He took my bloody hands and turned them back toward me, wiped them down the front of my poor once-white nightgown, firmly, against the contours of my body; pulled my hands toward him again, smeared them across his chest, and back to press them against me: repeated this till my nightgown stuck to me, sopping, saturated, as if I had been swimming, except the wetness was his blood.
I was weeping.
“Hush,” he said. “Hush.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, weeping. “I don’t understand. This cannot be—healing.”
“It can,” he said. “It is. All is well. Lie back. Lie down,” he said. “You will sleep soon now.”
I lay down, bumping my head against the headboard. My tears ran down my temples and into my hair. The smell of blood was thick and heavy and nauseating. I saw him leaning, looming over me, felt him lie down upon me, gently, so gently, till our bleeding skins met with one thin sodden layer of cotton partially between: till the new wound in him pressed down against the old wound in me. His hair brushed my face as he bowed his head; his breath stirred my hair.
“Constantine,” I cried, “are you turning me?”
“No,” he said. “I would not. And this is not that.”