Page 13 of Bound and Tide

Gods, why is this so bloody hard? All of this for a stranger? What was the point?

…a waste of the gifts I’ve given you…should take it all away…

He knew pain laced into his features as his own skin relived old wounds with the haunting voice in his mind. Fuck this insignificant human, it’s not worth—but Red’s eyes softened, and her fingertips touched his.

Well, that would bloody do it.

Xander pushed through the burning in his back like he was being lashed, teeth gritted and head pounding. Innards righted themselves as the noxscura latched onto the fleeting magic the priest had left behind in the hunter, skin coated in precious herbs mended under their hands, blood halted its pooling and traced back to its roots, and as Red’s fingers laced with Xander’s, breath filled the dying man’s lungs.

Shadows rushed in and blotted out Red’s face, and then Xander was on his back, blinking up at the grey clouds. He quickly righted himself, dizzy, wiping at his forehead with a blood-soaked hand. The hunter gulped for air, and he did the same, human healers crowding back in. One laid a hand on Xander’s shoulder, and despite the layers, his skin burned beneath as if he’d been beaten by a whole host of summoned infernals.

Covering how he wobbled by casting off the stranger, Xander stood, gesturing to the much more desperate charge on the ground. Red kept working, but those piercing eyes of hers were locked onto him. He backed into the crowd, holding his breath until he was free of the circle, shoulders sagging as he peered skyward once again. A jackdaw darted across the grey clouds, and a second followed into the trees.

You exist to serve me, his mother’s voice spat so clearly into his mind he would have sworn she’d been summoned just behind him. You will pay for that.

But before he could turn and cower, there was Red, ducking out of the gathered crowd and away from the man who would surely survive now. Her strides were long and intent as she approached. Frightening was another word for what those strides were, but Xander wouldn’t admit it applied. Yet he was still backing away.

When she closed the distance between them, she pressed a bloody hand to his chest and gave him a push. Bark bit into his back as he knocked into a tree, the shadows of the forest’s edge enveloping them. “Really, Red? Here?” He covered the twinge of pain and the dread running through him with a smirk. “I’ll admit I’m surprised but pleased that blood arouses us both.”

“Tell me who you need my help in finding.”

Xander opened his mouth.

“And do not lie to me,” she spat, no less imposing for her height, “or, so help me Dil’wator’wovl, I will hurt you.”

For a moment, nothing would have gratified Xander more than to be positively broken by the woman, but he could not, even under the salacious circumstance, get himself to come up with some obscene quip. “My father,” he heard himself say with a sincerity he had perhaps never once before uttered. “I’m looking for my father.”

Red wiped her hand down his front, barely cleaning off the blood but severely staining his coat. “Come on, then, I’ll show you where the iccali mushrooms grow.”

You ungrateful mongrel…

Xander shook his head, the voice quieting as the noxscura completely died away, and he hurried after the apothecarian.

Chapter 9

BUYING FAVOR

The dingy alley was a bit harder to find on foot when Xander had only seen it pointed out by Red from the air, but it wasn’t impossible. It no longer smelled of the fungus, Red had warned him it would be too cold for that now, but the jagged cobbles and the discarded junk matched his arcane vision.

Images from the blood tracking spell flashed in his mind, and he eventually found the door, unmistakable for its fanciful markings even in the shadows of fallen evening. The windows were blacked out, and no sounds came from within, but it was only one door beside many others. The building had once been some sort of warehouse or mill, but when that had fallen into disuse from a fire, by the looks of a burnt-out and collapsed half of it, opportunists had moved in.

Xander contemplated the place from where he sat, perched up on a crate and melting into the shadows with his cloak pulled over his head. He would blend in, at least, with the skulking riffraff and prowling cats. It wasn’t Xander’s way, hiding, and really the cloak was just to keep warm, but most of his magic was spent for the day. What churned in the vial around his neck had done surprisingly well with the dying hunter, but he wouldn’t be lucky enough for another display quite like that without the risk of running it dry.

And, of course, there was the voice. Xander often heard Birzuma’s criticisms echoing in the back of his mind, a good and needed reminder that his purpose had always been to serve her. It was fairly quiet and infrequent for the years he worked to free her from her crystalline prison, but it was quite a bit louder now and felt arcane rather than psychological in nature. There really should not have been a way for her to communicate with him that he didn’t initiate, yet his unease hadn’t settled since the forest, and he wondered, not for the first time, if she was somehow controlling his noxscura from beyond the planes.

I’m not a coward, just prudent, he reminded himself, alighting the cobbles again for another pace in the shadows to the building’s edge. Though perhaps this is not the best night for—

“I don’t have it.” The surly voice of the brat who had doused him with freezing river water cut through the alley’s silence.

“Didn’t have it last time neither.” That second voice, gravelly and pissed, was new.

Xander carefully peeked around the chipping brick of the nearest corner. He also didn’t typically do peeking, but there he was, reduced to a tentative snoop in the ruthlessness of his questionable noxscura.

A man twice Maia’s size shoved her up against a wall. It was easy to push her around since she was so small, and Xander groaned at the cravenness it took to threaten a child. The cur pinned her by the throat like she were some insect to be mounted and displayed. Is that what he had looked like? Hulking over a little girl and strangling her?

Bit unappealing…

Maia choked out an incomprehensible word, a box she’d been carrying falling from her grasp, and the thug’s grip tightened as he laughed. Something rose in Xander, an urgency that heaved his innards upward as if he could feel claws about his own neck. He took a too long pause before he identified it as the need to rescue the girl rather than indigestion. He would have wondered what was wrong with him if it weren’t for the fact he needed her to be able to speak, and the current state of her windpipe was counter to that. He just hadn’t figured out how to most dramatically emerge from the shadows without noxscura to help.

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