Free Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey Page B

Spanish.
    They seemed to know where the injured woman lived; they brought her right to a townhouse door and made a hubbub there. Maksim followed everyone inside.
    An elderly man ran into the parlor, wheezing with dismay. “Augusta! I did not even know she had left the house. Where is her servant? Has someone fetched the surgeon?” He collected himself and seemed to be repeating the same things in Spanish. A number of people ran out again; someone gave the old man a drink; others carried Augusta into another room.
    Maksim went to follow.
    The old man fixed upon him then. “Sir? You are?”
    Maksim had not thought at all about who he might be, in this city, in this house.
    He fell back upon a favorite subterfuge: stumbled forward, leaned upon the back of a chair, and pulled it down with him as he let himself drop.
    As he lay boneless on the old gentleman’s parlor matting, he thought how much he liked Cadiz already, with its sunny plazas and steep streets and its ships endlessly coming and going; and unless he very much missed his mark, he’d have a place here for a few days, at least.
    Someone came to lift him to a settee, and he feigned awakening and weakly accepted a glass of what turned out to be canario. A sympathetic maiden held it to his lips for him, even.
    When the surgeon had finished with Augusta, he came to Maksim, sleeves tied up and arms bloody to the elbow.
    He carried a curved needle and a fine length of gut. He cut away Maksim’s slashed shirt and sponged gore from the surrounding skin.
    Maksim swallowed down some excellent whiskey and lay back with his eyes half-lidded as the surgeon placed his stitches, tiny piercing pains that spread into the duller flare of his injury, and though it was pain, it was also pleasure.
    He slept in a narrow bed spread with a starched coverlet, and in the morning, he awoke to the sympathetic maid, who brought him black coffee and bread and told him that Miss Hillyard had survived the night, and she thanked him tearfully for saving the woman’s life.
    The maid had a romantic notion; Maksim could see it. She thought him a hero and a gentleman and probably had him as good as married to Augusta and herself elevated to a grander position. The maid would be disabused of it all soon enough: when Miss Hillyard began to feel the effects of Maksim’s blood, she would cause a scandal one way or another. Maksim found himself eager to see where the madness would take her: he had never made a woman kin before, and he wondered if she would feel it as men did. She had not been raised to the sword as Maksim had—or any of the other kin he had encountered. She had probably been trained to sweetness all her short life, though Maksim thought, from her rage in the alley, that it had not quite taken.
    For the time being, Maksim accepted the coffee, smiled bravely, and allowed that he was well enough to sit up and speak with Mr. Hillyard this morning. Two weeks, he gave it, and then Mr. Hillyard could hang, while Maksim took his daughter to the devil.
    Two weeks turned out to be too generous: barely a single one had passed before Augusta was well enough for trouble.
    Maksim had formed a habit of looking in on her in the mornings, after breakfasting with her father. The first few days, she’d scarcely been well enough to greet him before sleeping again, but her new nature sprang strong in her, and before long, she was sitting up in bed, eyes bright below the new scars at her hairline and prevailing upon the sympathetic maid to very improperly wait outside the door while Maksim visited.
    â€œI do not know precisely what you did to me, Mr. Volkov,” she said, “but I fancy it was something un-Christian.”
    Maksim blinked. He had not been expecting such directness, though now that he thought of it, he should have: was this not the woman who’d tried to stab him even as her own life ebbed away?
    â€œUn-Christian,” he said. “That is