He opened one eye and gave me an outraged look.

"Oh, right. Recovery time. Sorry. I forgot that men don't like to chat right away. You rest. I'll just lay here snuggly warm and remember how wonderful it felt when we merged together."

He groaned as my hand slid down over his belly. "Is there any reason you feel the need to draw wards on me?"

I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at his chest and stomach in growing horror. "I didn't… I mean, I don't remember how… I've never really drawn wards before."

"You drew a binding ward on Sebastian," he answered, both eyes open now, his irises a speculative light blue. Glimmering faintly in the dim gray light that seeped in through the curtains, an intricate pattern of green spread across his chest and down over his stomach. Beneath the swirls and curves and dips of the pattern, the harsh, sharp lines of the curse glowed red. "It takes a strong ward to hold a Dark One."

"I know I did it, but I don't know how! It just happened!"

His disbelief was strong in my mind. I shook out the mental welcome mat and allowed him in to see the truth for himself. "You must have had some sort of training. People do not just draw powerful binding wards by accident."

"It's kind of odd having you in my head," I mused, running my finger along one silky auburn eyebrow, smoothing out the frown that had formed. "I'm not quite sure I like it. Except when we… you know. Then it's really fabulous. And before you say what I know you're going to say, no, I haven't forgotten any Charmer training. I was never trained. Not formally. I met with a Wiccan a couple of times, that's all."

"But something happened to you, something so horrible you will not allow me access to the memory." His fingers touched my left cheek. What happened to you, Hasi? What happened, to leave the left side of your body weak, and a dark place of sorrow in your heart?

I looked away, biting my lip against the unexpectedness of his endearment (Hasi, a literal translation of "bunny," is a German term often used by lovers), and needing to pull away from his questions.

"I'm not allowed to ask?" His voice was a deep velvet rumble along my skin that had me shivering in sensual delight.

"No, you can ask. It's only fair, since you've put up with me asking you all sorts of personal questions." I took a deep breath, reminded myself that I'd been more intimate with him than with any other person, and looked him dead in the eye. "I killed my best friend when I was twenty. I had a stroke after that."

He stared at me, plainly waiting for more. I curled up on his chest, hiding myself so his cerulean eyes couldn't see into my soul.

"That is all you are going to say? That is all the explanation you are going to give me?"

"The stroke is why my smile is crooked, and why my left side isn't as strong as the right," I said to his nipple. Beneath my cheek, his chest rose and fell, warm and strong and alive, and I wondered how anyone could think of a Dark One as the undead.

It is a matter of some misconception, the silky voice whispered through my mind. Why did you kill your friend?

I heaved a mental sigh and knew I wasn't going to get away with not explaining the whole of my painful past. I stroked along his chest, feeling the slight tingle of the curse as my fingers crossed the path of its pattern. "I told you I couldn't charm the curse that binds you. That's not only because I don't exactly know how to charm, but because the one time I did try, my roommate ended up dead, and I spent three months in the hospital after having fried my brain."

Adrian's mind curled itself around mine as memory of that horrible night filled me, images dancing before my mind's eye of Beth's smiling face as she urged me to try to untangle the curse woven into an altar cloth said to have been owned by Tomas de Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor.

"Come on, Nellie," Beth had said with a hushed giggle that night so long ago as she unlocked the door to the antiquities room in the university museum where she did her work-study time. "Aunt Li said the curse is right up your alley. All you have to do is unmake it like a ward."

"And I'll say the same thing I said to your aunt, Beth: I don't know a thing about wards and curses. It's all Greek to me. Just because she thinks I'm adorable—"

"A Charmer, not adorable, you idiot," she replied fondly, flipping on her flashlight before hurrying to a tall locked cabinet on the far side of the room. "And Aunt Li should know."

"So she's a big noise in the Chinese Wiccan society—that doesn't mean she knows everything, Beth. She was remarkably vague when it came to explaining to me just why she felt I was going to be able to undo a curse. And as for those wards, she only showed me a couple. I can't even remember what they were for."

Beth sorted through a collection of keys on a ring as big as my wrist, selecting one to open the cabinet. "Well, you're really good with getting knots untied. How hard can a curse be?"

I laughed softly as she pulled a small wooden box from the cabinet, opening it to reveal a soiled, tattered piece of blue wool material. Beth seemed oddly reluctant to touch the cloth, instead shoving the box at me, gesturing for me to sit on the floor. I touched a finger to a rent in the material, noticing that despite its age, the gold embroidery on the cloth was remarkably preserved. "So this is it? The famous cursed altar cloth?"

"That's what Dr. Avery says. What do you think?"

I examined the material, trying to remember everything I'd learned thus far in my European history classes. "Mmm. It's old."

She rolled her eyes as she dropped down next to me, watching as I pulled the cloth from the box. "Duh! I meant, what do you think about the curse? Can you un-curse it?"

"No. I didn't understand anything that your aunt rattled off about curses, and how they were supposed to look like patterns or something. It just doesn't make sense! How can a curse look like a pat…" My voice came to a halt as I realized that my fingers, of their own accord, had been tracing an intricate, curved path along the altar cloth. I squinted at it, noticing for the first time the odd pattern of weft that had been woven into the rough cloth. It swooped and swirled, sometimes spiraling back on itself into tight coils, a detailed and beautiful maze of pattern. I'd always loved mazes, taking no little pride in my ability to solve even the most complex maze in a fraction of the time it took others. "Wow. Someone really had some skill. Look what's woven into the material."

"What?" Beth leaned her dark head close to mine to peer at the pattern my finger traced.

"That. See the red thread? It's very fine—probably silk or something—but it's woven into the cloth."

"Maybe it's the curse," she suggested, her voice strangely hushed. A joking response to such a silly suggestion died on my lips as a little shiver went down my back at the strained note in her voice. For a moment I was very aware that we were the only two people in the administration section of the museum, alone in the dense darkness. Just my best friend, a strange piece of cloth that reputedly witnessed some of the most horrific atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition, and me.

I tried to ignore the sense of foreboding that seemed to seep into my bones, shivering as I shook out the cloth to examine the pattern. "If it is a curse, then it will be a piece of cake to uncurse. It's nothing more than a really complex maze."

"That's what Aunt Li said about the wards she showed us earlier—that they were nothing more than intention and a pattern."

"Mmm." I spread the cloth out on the carpeted floor, crawling on my knees around it, directing Beth's flashlight as I tried to find the starting point of the strange pattern of red thread. "I think this is it. What did your aunt say I had to do?"