My Forbidden Desire by Carolyn Jewel

along.” He frowned at his blade. “Especially when you give a gift of blood. Say the right incantation over a human and a mage can absorb his life force. The human dies, in case you wondered, and the mage, instead of dying at eighty, dies at eighty-one. Kill one of the kin—that’s monsters like me—and the mage lives a whole lot longer.” He glanced at her, and Alexandrine was careful to keep her expression noncommittal. “That’s why your father’s still alive.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “After all this time.”
    Alexandrine didn’t reply to that, because what Rasmus Kessler did was not her fault. It was creepy to hear Xia accuse him of such evil. “I thought you were going to tell me about talismans.”
    He looked away, but she saw his fingers tighten around the hilt of his knife. When he looked back, he said, “Do you know how a talisman gets made?”
    She shook her head. He held her gaze, and she recoiled from the blaze of hatred in his eyes. So much for keeping herself in a calm, relaxed state.
    With a quick gesture, he brushed his curls off his forehead. “I had to watch when Rasmus got himself a mageheld—a freshly taken one, which he prefers and laid him out so he couldn’t move.” Xia closed his eyes. “But he can hear and feel and think, and all of us magehelds felt what was happening. Rasmus pulled as much magic as he could, as hard as he could, and then he cut the fiend here.” He touched his sternum. “Sometimes, he’d kill another fiend first. To prime his magic. Without blood, he can’t focus the magic right. The whole time the fiend’s body is dying, and all of us feel our kin’s life and magic being siphoned into some object like that carving you’re wearing.”
    Alexandrine closed her eyes but opened them again when the images in her head were too hideous to bear. She didn’t want to believe him, but what little she’d read about mages and fiends paralleled what he’d told her so far. From a different point of view, sure. That just made it all the more sickening.
    “When it’s over, he’s alive in there. Trapped without a body. Separated from the kin.” He brought his hands together, slowly at first and then quickly until his palms met with a gentle slap. Xia’s eyes were looking inside himself. “You feel the screaming in your bones for days,” he whispered. “You live with it forever.” His focus snapped back to the present. Alexandrine recoiled again. “And then Rasmus learned Magellan’s trick of taking our power directly, and it got even worse.”
    Horror at what he was saying froze her in place. What the hell did you say to something like that?
    “I’ve seen that done, too. I’ve been there, at your father’s side, while he murdered one of my kin so he could live a few more years. And I’ve been there when he cracked open a talisman for what’s left of the magic inside.” His fist clenched and unclenched on his thigh. “Wondering if one day it was going to be my turn.”
    Alexandrine didn’t say anything. How could she? She had no idea how to respond to someone who’d just laid generations of atrocities at her feet. All those years wondering about her heritage and this was it: evil. She touched the amulet around her neck. “You’re telling me this thing’s alive?”
    “There is a life inside.”
    Her stomach turned.
    Xia kept talking. “Talismans don’t last forever. The life dissipates, finds ways out through flaws in the container. Magellan figured out he could crack one and make the magic his. Do that often enough, and you’re not going to die from natural causes. Ever. I was there when he taught Rasmus.”
    Still Alexandrine had no words. None at all. No wonder he hated her. No wonder.
    “When one of the free kin finds a talisman, we take it back if we can. And we crack it open. They have no body, so we give whoever it was our bodies.” His tongue came out and touched his lower lip. “It’s never easy to assimilate with what’s