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attracted some attention. I took a hit and couldn’t get under cover fast enough.” Max shrugged. “I figured you’d prefer that to the Hag falling into the wrong hands, right?”
Giselle leveled a suspicious look at her. “You were thinking of what I wanted?”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t seem to be all that happy being trapped and tortured.”
Giselle sighed. “Thirty years and you still can’t get past it,” she muttered, recognizing the dig for what it was.
Anger rippled hot through Max. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Which did you want me to get past? Being turned into a mutant freak by my best friend? Being enslaved by her? Or maybe all those hours of torture on your altar while you chained me tighter? Oh, yeah, I can see where you would think I could just forget all about that. After all, it’s only blood under the bridge, right? Hardly worth thinking about.”
“Max, I need you. I don’t think anyone has ever made a stronger Shadowblade than you. Whether you know it or not, you’re very precious. If you wouldn’t resist my magic so strongly, I wouldn’t have to drive you out of your head with pain before I can start working on you.”
“Must be all my fault then,” Max said acidly.
“You know, it’s not like you didn’t benefit from becoming a Shadowblade. You’re stronger, faster, you’ll never grow old, you don’t get sick, and you’re hard to kill. And I pay you very well. Most people would kill to be you.”
Max felt her face contort. She willed her muscles to relax, feeling her usual mask sliding back into place. She took a breath. One more.
“Don’t act like you’ve done me any favors. You screwed me over and you still are. Not giving me a choice is called rape and slavery.”
There was a pause. Giselle lifted her chin, meeting Max’s hot gaze squarely. “I couldn’t have bound you if you hadn’t agreed.”
“I never agreed to this.” An old argument. Max was tired of it. “Are we done here? I’m hungry.”
“Not yet. What is your impression of what happened in Julian?”
Max forced herself to shift gears away from her anger. It served no purpose at the moment. “Someone sent the redcaps after the Hag, and I don’t think it was the territory witch’her Blades were on cleanup. Whoever was behind it has to have balls of brass if half the rumors about Selange are true.”
“They are,” Giselle confirmed, her gaze narrowing hard on Max, who pretended not to know what she was thinking. Which was, what sort of payback for Max’s trespassing was Selange going to demand tonight at the Conclave?
“Then our fearless invaders took a big chance. But why would anyone want the Hag? If the redcaps hadn’t been stopped, they’d have killed her.”
“Most likely they didn’t care about her; they just wanted her staff. It has a great deal of power and anyone can use it. Legend is that it controls the destiny of humans’at least any humans near enough to get caught up in its spell. Which means either it’s a powerful weapon for killing, or it can be used to control the population. Think about it. A flesh witch gets ahold of that and suddenly has an unlimited source of power. All she has to do is stir up the local humans and magic pours into her.” Giselle paused. “Selange is a flesh mage. Now that she knows the Hag is there, she won’t be able to resist that staff.”
Flesh mages siphoned their magic from ordinary humans, who vented it like steam off a sauna. It came from their passions, their hatreds, their battles, and their burned-out hopes. Every emotion and interaction a human experienced created magic, and a flesh witch collected it like a big vacuum cleaner. And if that wasn’t enough, or if they needed a really big spike of magic, they turned to sex rites and blood sacrifice. Thank whatever beings looked out over the universe that Giselle was not a flesh mage. Max couldn’t draw a lot of lines as a Shadowblade, but she
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