“Ruth,” said Sherwood, staring at the knife for an instant. “It’s supposed to kill Ruth.” Again, I had the impression that he could see something I could not. As if the patterns of magic were something his eyes could perceive. It seemed to be more accurate than my scent-and-hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck method.

Sherwood used Uncle Mike’s pocketknife to open up a cut on the back of his hand, keeping it open by moving the blade back and forth as he dripped his blood along the edge of the circle all the way around. It was made more difficult because he couldn’t use either of his hands to stabilize himself—and the missing leg seemed to put him off-balance.

“This would be easier,” he grunted, crawling awkwardly, “if I’d pulled off the liner and the pin with the damned leg.”

I got up and put a hand under his elbow to help stabilize him. “Does this help?”

“Yes,” he said—then turned his attention to what he was doing.

When he reached the candle again with his blood-drip circle, he dug a little deeper with the knife, pulled it away, and flicked his bleeding hand at Ruth. As the drops of his blood touched her, he said three . . . somethings. They sounded like musical notes more than words, but they were more complex than a single note, as if he could form a chord with his human throat.

For a moment, nothing happened.

That was not quite true. Nothing happened except that the moment he flicked those blood drops on Ruth, the foulness of black magic, or my sense of it, just disappeared. There was plenty of magic, for sure, but only a little of it felt like black magic.

I was eyeing the knife in Uncle Mike’s hand, and so I missed the first bit. The little movement that made Uncle Mike stiffen and Sherwood actually relax a little under my hand.

By the time I looked at the circle, Ruth’s mouth was already open. The first scream had almost no sound—because she had no air to make a noise. The second scream was even quieter, her whole body shaking with the effort of it. If she could have moved her body with Uncle Mike’s magic upon her, I think she would have done so, but all she could do was move her mouth and her rib cage.

My eyes teared up and I dug my fingers into Sherwood’s shoulder—because there was nothing, not a darn thing I could do to help her except break the circle (maybe I could do that) and waste all of Sherwood’s efforts.

The third scream was silent. Blood gathered in the corners of Ruth’s beautiful dark eyes and dribbled out of her mouth, staining her white teeth red.

Sherwood remained as he was, crouched near the circle—ready to intervene if matters didn’t go as he thought they should. I let go of him so he could move more quickly if he had to, but he just waited.

“And that’s why I hate witchcrafters,” said Uncle Mike, his voice a prosaic contrast to the events in the circle. “So much blood in their workings.” He sounded vaguely disapproving.

Sherwood raised his head. “And the fae are so gentle.”

“No,” Uncle Mike agreed. “Mostly we’re worse—but not as messy.”

As if the circle held the very air inside it as well as the magic, I could not smell the blood—or other things—as matters took their course. Ruth Gillman, elegant and tidy, would not be happy remembering this moment, but hopefully she would be alive.

Ruth’s mouth opened wider and blood, bright arterial blood, gushed out, flooding the circle where she lay, unable to move her body. The blood hit the edge of Sherwood’s drawings and stopped, as if the chalk and pencil were a raised ledge that it could not cross. Where it touched Sherwood’s work, it turned grayish black. Not a color I’d ever seen blood display.

As the liquid began to increase impossibly, I said, quietly, so as not to interrupt things that I might not be able to perceive, “She’s going to drown in that if she can’t get her head up. She’s also going to exsanguinate if she keeps going.”

“Patience.” Sherwood gave me a quick glance I could not read. I thought maybe he was just making sure I wasn’t going to try to rescue her. “And that blood is . . . not all her blood. Well, no, it’s her blood but it’s reproducing. Cloning, you could say. Though I wouldn’t.”

“And that makes sense,” said Uncle Mike dryly.

“How would you have put it?” asked Sherwood. Sherwood’s wolf, I thought, and he put a bit of a growl in his voice.

Uncle Mike smiled slyly. “Magic blood.”

Sherwood snorted. “Makes it sound as if it weren’t blood at all—or as if you could do something powerful with it.” He paused. “But, since it is blood, her blood even, I suppose that’s true enough.”

They might have been . . . not precisely joking . . . sparring was more like it. But they were both watching Ruth intently.

“She’s breathing,” I said.

Ruth was still vomiting blood (and everything else she had eaten or drunk recently), but she was inhaling and exhaling in between spasms.

Sherwood nodded. “This is a nasty bit of work. There’s probably a more humane way of breaking this spell, but I don’t know it. Maybe if I were in my own space with my own . . .” He shook his head and didn’t complete that thought.

He leaned forward, careful not to get too near to the circle. “Poor darling,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. It’s rough, I know. But you’re going to be all right in a moment. I promise that the worst is over.”

It was ten or fifteen minutes before the blood and horror subsided. Sherwood, still watching something I couldn’t, said, “There now, that’s done it.”

He snapped his fingers, the candle went out, and the room suddenly bloomed with the smell of everything in the circle, blood and vomit and other things—the sour smell of terror and dissipating black magic underlying everything. Fluids that had been held back by Sherwood’s marks slid out over them. But the mess looked to have been reduced to only the nonmagical substances, so it didn’t flow very far.

Uncle Mike started over and Sherwood snapped, “Knife. That knife needs to stay away from Ruth.”

Uncle Mike gave the knife an . . . intrigued look.

“Hah,” he said. “I’d forgotten I had it. What an interesting knife for them to let come into enemy hands.”

I glanced at Sherwood. “Is it safe for me to touch her?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But she’ll not thank you for it. Everything will hurt just now—like being parboiled alive, as I recall. Give her a few minutes.”

I’d been reaching for her, but at Sherwood’s words, I backed off.

“Ruth needs a shower and clean clothes,” I told Uncle Mike. “Is that available here?”

“Of course,” he said. “But perhaps Sherwood should deal with the knife first. I need to touch her so she can move again. But I can’t get near her with this knife. I don’t like the feeling that I should just set this knife down and forget about it.”

“Mercy,” Sherwood said, “could you get my leg for me, please?”

Happy to have something I could do to help, I fetched the prosthesis for him. He hiked up the leg of his jeans and I saw that he had a spike sticking out of the bottom of the stump of his leg.

He saw my look and smiled with his wolf’s eyes.

I was raised by werewolves and I’m mated to one. I’d never seen one smile quite like that. Werewolves just don’t do merry, not their wolf part. And the emotion seemed a little out of place with Ruth recovering painfully in a puddle of blood and other substances. But wolves don’t always react the way a human might to dire situations.

“The pin isn’t coming out of my leg,” he told me. “There’s a silicone sleeve around the stump that holds the pin.”

He took the leg and fitted it on, and got up using only his good leg in a smooth movement that proved he was not human. Someone who was all human would have had a lot more trouble doing that gracefully. Then he put the artificial foot on the ground and stomped with it until there was a sharp click.

“Good,” he said. “I was afraid I’d broken it.”

He strode over to Uncle Mike and took the knife from him. He looked at it a moment, weighing it in his hand. Then he jammed it point first into Uncle Mike’s scarred wooden desk. It sank two inches, more or less, and then he snapped it.

I sucked in a breath as a wave of horrid, filthy magic burst out and left me staggering. I did not fall into Ruth’s miserable huddle and the solidifying liquids surrounding her. But it was a near thing.

Judging from the past few days, witchcraft affected me more powerfully than other sorts of magic. Black magic was worse than the other kind. Or maybe I was just getting more sensitive to it.

“Was that wise?” Uncle Mike asked Sherwood with a raised eyebrow. “You might have blown us to Underhill doing it that way.”

“Only way I know of,” Sherwood said, tapping his head. “I have to work with the limits of what I’ve got.”