And blood continued to pour from the wound in his side, just as warm, just as terrible.
“Why isn’t it working?” I asked, looking up at Rhea, who was staring down at the man in shock, as if she’d never seen him before. And she probably hadn’t, not this version anyway, since instead of ninety he now looked about sixty, maybe younger. Younger, but no better. “Rhea!” my voice snapped. “What am I doing wrong?”
She looked at me, startled, and then her expression softened. “Nothing.”
“But he isn’t healing.”
She shook her head. “No. We—we can manipulate time, but not bodies. We still need healers—”
“But this worked on a vampire just a few days ago!” And it had. Jules, one of my bodyguards, had stumbled into a battle-strength curse that had done its best to erase him right out of existence. Instead, I’d erased it, by taking him back to a time before the spell was laid, making it as if it had never happened at all.
So why wasn’t it working now?
“Vampires aren’t human.” That was Marco’s voice, from behind me. I turned my head to see him, still half dressed, pulling one of the golf shirts he liked over the mat of hair on his chest. “And Jules was cursed, not stabbed,” he added, pushing a vamp out of the way and crouching down beside me.
“That shouldn’t matter! I’m making him younger. I’ve already taken him back before it happened!”
“You’re applying power to him; you’re not sending him back through his life,” Rhea said, looking at me sadly. “You can make him younger or older, but he will still be what he was when you began.”
And what he was, was dying, she didn’t add.
Because she didn’t have to.
“But Jules.” I gripped Marco’s arm.
“Way it was explained it to me, you can’t go around changing the components of a spell and expect it to work,” he told me. “And once that curse was cast on him, Jules became a component. But the spell had been cast on Jules the vampire, and when he became Jules the human, it unraveled. Or whatever magic does, I don’t know.”
“But . . . but he was human when he became a vampire, and I removed that—”
“You may have had some help there,” he told me gruffly.
“Mircea.” Marco gave me a nod I didn’t need, because I should have known. Mircea was a five-hundred-year-old senior master with a talent for healing. His power mixed with mine . . . Who knew what it could do? “Then can he—”
“He’s too far away.”
“He was just as far with Jules!”
“But Jules was his—his Child, his blood. This guy ain’t. And none of us has his skill.”
I stared from him to the mage and back again. And read the truth in Marco’s black eyes. He’d been a gladiator once; he knew battle wounds. Both the kind you survived, and the kind you didn’t.
No. No.
The bubble snapped, as useless as the one who’d made it, and the mage touched my arm. I stared down at him, furious and hurting. But I didn’t see any recrimination on his face. Only desperation to tell me something. I bent over him to hear the whispered words. “Heard them talking—”
“The dark mages?”
He shook his head slightly. “Acolytes. Before—” He cut off, choking.
“The acolytes want the Tears.”
A nod.
“What are they planning to do with them?” I didn’t get an answer, and his eyes were starting to go vague.
“His name is Royston,” Rhea told me, kneeling on his other side. “Elias Royston.
”