A Perfect Blood

wasn’t.
    “I’m going to try it on the other one,” Chris said, and a drop of ice ran down my spine. Winona had gone white, her fingers gripping her knees stiff and clawlike.
    “No, you’re not!” I shouted.
    But Chris was drawing a long brown hair through her fingers, coating it with blood. I looked at Winona. Oh God. I couldn’t stop this. “Winona,” I whispered, and the woman’s eyes met mine, scared. “I’m sorry.”
    “Separare!” Chris shouted, and the strand of hair broke.
    Winona’s eyes bulged, and she stiffened. Her desperate, despairing cry of pain echoed in the small area. She pushed to her feet, and I lunged for her, grabbing her before she could run into the wire mesh. I felt helpless, but I tried to make the pain go away by just being there, giving her something to feel besides agony.
    “It’s okay,” I whispered, tears coming from me as she screamed in pain, her entire body stiff with it. “It’s okay. It will go away. I promise.” I didn’t know if she could hear me, but her screams turned to sobs as she shook.
    “It worked!” Chris crowed. “Jenn! It worked perfectly! We have it! I can do anything!”
    I brought my head up as I rocked Winona, the woman slowly starting to relax as the pain ebbed. The blond sadist was almost dancing, her finger and thumb red with my blood and the gluttonous light of power in her eyes.
    “It’s getting better,” I said to Winona, wishing I could help her. “See, it’s going away.”
    “I want to go home,” she cried as she slipped from me to the floor and huddled, her hair hiding her face. “I just want to go home. ”
    “Me too,” I said, feeling helpless. She’d be okay until they decided to do something else. “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t be here.”
    Gerald shuffled in, his expression irate and the cameras gone from his hands. “Keep it down,” he said, weaving past the woman in the lab coat doing a happy dance as if she’d made a touchdown. “I can hear you all the way to the stairway.” He looked at Winona, huddled in the corner with me, glaring at all of them. “What did you do?”
    “It worked!” Chris sang, and Jennifer made notations in a second workbook, her expression pulled up as if she was smelling something rank. I knew it was the idea that Chris had done magic, not that she’d caused someone great pain. “I did a curse, and it worked. Morgan’s blood is demonic. We have working demon blood, and it didn’t cost my soul to do it!”
    Which sort of answered the question of how they’d gotten a curse to hide that woman in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. They’d tried to get blood from a demon and had to settle for a curse to hide their mistakes. Whoever had twisted it was probably either laughing his ass off at their efforts or cheering them on to their destruction. God, I hoped it wasn’t Newt.
    I’d had it, and I fingered my silver band, feeling long past stupid. I had been so blind, clueless. If I’d been a normal witch, not having magic wouldn’t have been a problem, but what ran in my veins was unimaginable power. It came with the ability to protect that power—and I had thrown it away. This was my fault. All of it.
    “You made a woman feel pain,” I said sarcastically. “Congratulations. I can do the same thing with my foot and it doesn’t take a curse to do it.”
    “She’s not a woman, she’s an animal,” Chris said, and my face burned.
    The man frowned, then settled himself at the monitors, turning them on to show three new angles of dark basement. “Just keep it down,” he said, turning his back as if a woman sobbing in the corner was an everyday occurrence. “They have tours upstairs, you know.”
    And now I knew it, too.
    Jennifer slid her notebook in front of Chris, and the blond woman initialed it with a happy flourish. “I still don’t like you using magic,” Jennifer said as she put the notebook with the rest in the cardboard box. “It’s evil.”
    “Magic is what is going to win this war,” Chris said as she returned to her demon text. “If all it took was men with guns, we would’ve won it already.” The zeal of the stupid in her, Chris began turning pages as if it were the winter solstice gift catalog, earmarking pages and cooing in delight at the new possibilities.
    I gave Winona a last touch on the shoulder, then stood at the door to the cage. It was solid, locked with a chunk of metal. “You’re not going to survive this,” I said,