Ritual Magic

He knows that. He would never take advantage of a twelve-year-old girl.”
    He rubbed his cheek along her hair. “What did you want when you were twelve, Lily?”
    “To be a cop.”
    She felt his smile in the way his cheek moved. “Let me put it this way. Suppose when you were twelve, strangers forced you to marry a man more than forty years older than you. Would you have felt okay about being married to him, living with him, as long as he didn’t touch you?”
    “Yech. No. I would have . . . if for some bizarre reason no one could help me, not even Grandmother, I’d . . .” Probably have found a way to make herself a very young widow. But at twelve, she’d had issues her mother didn’t. Julia was unlikely to turn homicidal if forced to live with Lily’s father, but running away was a real possibility. Lily sighed. “We’ve got extra bedrooms. No kitchen and only one bathroom, but plenty of bedrooms.”
    “Which is fortunate, because Madame Yu and Li Qin will also be staying with us.”

ELEVEN

    S HE was chopping carrots when the mouse ran across the counter.
    She was dreaming. She knew that, but it didn’t make what she did less important. There were so many carrots, a huge mound of them, and she had to get them all chopped. She’d come here to complete a task, but this wasn’t a safe place. She wanted to get the carrots chopped quickly so she could leave.
    But then a dirty little field mouse, all quick dun-colored nastiness, ran right over that mound of carrots. She exclaimed and swatted at it. Then another one ran right in front of her, and another was on the floor at her feet, and another . . . where were they all coming from? So many mice . . . She started counting.
    She’d gotten to twenty-one when she heard him calling.
    It was the call of the wind, alone on the heights. The cry of a mother grieving her lost child. His voice was the sound of tears turned to ice and unable to fall, sorrow frozen in crystal drops. It was beautiful beyond words and terrible beyond hope.
    Her hands shook. Her vision blurred. A mouse ran over her foot.
    She cried out in anger and swiped at the mouse with her knife. The mouse raced away untouched. She stabbed her own foot. Blood welled up along with pain.
    She dropped the knife and yanked her foot off the floor, frightened. It would be bad to get blood on the floor, very bad. This was a dangerous place to spill blood. If her blood touched this floor, something terrible would happen.
    He called again.
    She’d heard him before. She knew that suddenly—not a memory, but a bright, clear knowing. At other times, in other places, he’d called and she’d tried to find him, but she always failed. She hadn’t been able to reach him from where she was.
    Tonight, she could. She was in a different place tonight.
    Her heart began pounding. That was why she’d come here. Not for the carrots. Why had she thought they mattered? She had to find him and free him from the crystalline trap of his loneliness.
    She turned and there was the door, right where she knew it would be, though this wasn’t her kitchen. But the door was where it should be, and he was outside, somewhere out there in the darkness. She walked to the door and opened it, leaving bloody footprints behind.
    The black dome of the sky held neither moon nor stars, yet she had no trouble seeing the ground, pebbled and bare, and the trees she must go to. A tiny, shrill voice at the back of her mind gibbered warnings. There should be a moon . . . but the ground itself held a glow, as if it had soaked up enough moonlight over the eons that it was willing to share some of that radiance with her.
    Eons . . . yes. This was an old place. A very old place. And he was calling. She walked into the dark forest.
    The trees of this forest were black, truly black, not simply hidden by night, and very tall. She knew that, though she could only see them lower down, where the ground gave light. Over her head black trees merged with the sightless dark of the sky. At another time, she would have feared those trees and what they meant. She felt no fear now. Only urgency.
    He was calling. He was calling
her
. It was her name she heard in this windless place, her name carried by echoes and darkness and the hoarded light of the moon. Her heart lifted in joy and terror.
    And then, between one step and the next, he was there.
    Her heart skittered. Her breath caught and held. The beauty of him wrapped around her and made