The sight of the scars makes my stomach turn again and I focus on the unmarred portion of her upper back as I stride forward, fumbling the vial of ink out of my pocket.
“Are you ready?” I ask, sliding a knee back onto the bed to lean over her.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“It might sting a little,” I admit. It’ll be nothing to what she’s been dealt in the past. “I haven’t been marked since I was a baby so I can’t remember—I’ve done plenty of blood magic but none that’s tied me to another person. It could have…side effects. But if it does it’ll pass shortly.”
“What do you mean ‘tied’?”
“I mean…that there will be a transfer of blood.”
“You’re giving me your blood?” she asks, sounding genuinely curious now instead of perturbed.
“A drop of yours in mine and a drop of mine in yours. Or three drops for all three marks.”
“For good luck, protection and…”
“The triskelion for good luck. The triquetra so that I can detect when you’re in danger and the Mark of the Goddess.”
“What does the Mark of the Goddess do exactly?”
“It offers the protection of the Goddess among other things. No one really knows exactly what it does. There are a lot of rumors.”
She turns her head to peer up at me. “Rumors?”
“Just like that you could receive a visit from the Goddess when you most need her or that she might send another tribute of the Goddess to your aid.”
“If she was real she wouldn’t come for a nought,” she snorts.
“She is real,” I say sharply. “And she would. I’m giving you the Mark of the Goddess that makes you the same as any other—a tribute to the Goddess.” Her cheeks are staining pink again. This time for a reason I find more pleasing.
“It also offers you an alternative method of travel.”
Her eyes are wide and round as she peers up at me. “What does that mean?”
“Maybe I’ll show you someday?” I say, offering a small smile.
She quickly looks back down but I can see the faintest trace of her lip quirking. Relief floods through me. It doesn’t feel right to bestow her with these marks with bad blood boiling between us.
Her shoulders are strung tight and I place a tentative hand between them. “Try to relax, pet.”
She blows out a long breath, muscles loosening slightly.
I etch the first symbol there as quickly as I can muster. She flinches slightly. “That should be the worst part.”
Her shoulders slowly loosen, likely realizing it wasn’t as bad as what she was anticipating. Slashing a line across my own wrist, I gather her blood and mine into a floating accumulation of droplets and let them fall, hers across my wrist and mine across the mark.
I feel it the moment her blood hits my stream. It’s potent andwarm, blooming rapidly like an expanding fire as it traces up my arm and envelopes my chest. My breath hitches, and my eyelids flutter. My mind suddenly hazes.
I come to maybe a minute later, blinking rapidly. I’ve slumped forward, one hand splayed across the middle of her back. I’m using it to hold my weight up, pushing her further down into the mattress and smearing our blood across her back. I quickly shift my weight off of her as something shifts inside of me. The faint sheen of whatever it took from me—my luck, levitates between us and dispenses itself across her mark.
Blood beads across the pattern on her back. I clear it away, fumbling with the vial of ink before dribbling it across her skin. Incanting the ink with my magic, it slowly begins to shift. Like the ichor, it finds the slashes in her skin and embeds itself there, painting the cuts with deep black lines in the shape of the triskelion--the protection mark that's taken my luck and gifted it to her. The very same my parents placed upon me after I was born and here I stand alive, both of them dead.
“Pandora?”
“Hm?” Her voice is pitched high.
“Are you okay?”
