“Get that away from us,” growled Sherwood. “I’ll take care of it later.”

Every time Ruth quit breathing, I counted the seconds off in my head. I wasn’t sure why; I didn’t really know how long a person could go without air. But it seemed to me that she had been not breathing a lot longer than earlier episodes.

Sherwood must have been paying attention, too. He quit drawing long enough to put a hand on her forehead.

“Breathe,” he said.

She sucked in a breath of air and released it.

“Again,” he said.

When she had accomplished that, he went back to drawing.

“Can’t do that too often,” he muttered—to me, I supposed—but it might have been to himself. “Or I’ll disrupt what I’m trying to do here. Still, I suppose this won’t do any good if she dies in the meantime.”

Ten pencils were discarded the same way his discarded leg had been—as was the chair when it got in his way. The file cabinet acquired another dent—this one bigger than the first. Uncle Mike muttered something that sounded like “Werewolves,” but he didn’t sound too unhappy about the chair even though it was obviously broken.

Sherwood completed the circle before he had to switch pencils again. Then he lit the candle.

He did it by saying a word; I didn’t quite catch it, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t English. But at the sound of it, there was a pop of magic and the candle wick started to burn.

He held the candle sideways and let the wax drip into a place where the grease made a circle about the size of the base of the candle. When he had enough soft wax on the floor, he set the candle into it, using the wax to create a holder to keep the candle upright.

He took up Uncle Mike’s knife and opened it. He frowned at it and cast a wary look at Uncle Mike—who’d moved to the far end of the room, with the silver athame in one hand.

“It’s just a knife today,” Uncle Mike said. “It will do as you wish.” He wiggled the athame in his hand. “This one is not as cooperative. You might want to deal with it quickly, when you’re done. It seems to have a taste for one of you—probably Mercy.”

“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.”