The Blood Keeper

by Tessa Gratton

  Mab said, “Reese.”

  I opened my eyes.

  She leaned over me, joy spread across her face and her hair falling everywhere. Normal. Her touch on my forehead was tentative. As if she thought I might break. “Mab,” I managed to say, but my tongue stuck.

  Her smile sweetened even more. “You need fuel. That transformation must have taken everything out of you.”

  I tried to sit up as she stood. The rafters overhead told me we were in her barn. My vision went out of focus, and I saw the barn from, like, ten different angles simultaneously. The ground spun and I closed my eyes.

  “He’s my familiar; this will make everything better,” Mab was saying to someone else.

  Before I realized who she was talking to, I managed to sit, and saw my legs. Shock slammed the breath out of me. My legs were black. And not a natural, human brown that looked black, but like I’d been roasted alive and come out shiny and black as coal. My hands, too—I held them out, and they immediately began to shake. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t my body. Where light caught my skin, it glinted purple and blue and gold like spilled oil.

  Dazed, I touched my thigh. My forearms were streaked with tiny soft feathers instead of hair. I was fascinated. Then it turned over in my stomach and became horror and nausea. Feathers trailed down my chest a little, too, and along my belly.

  I was naked.

  Only it wasn’t me. It wasn’t right.

  Mab knelt next to me with a plate of food. I drew up my knees and tried to make my nakedness as inconspicuous as possible. I stared at her, wide-eyed. Why wasn’t she horrified, too? Why wasn’t she afraid or even concerned? Instead something like happiness pressed out of her smile. There were a million questions beating each other up to be asked first, but I couldn’t get them out.

  Mab was holding out the plate. The smell of meat hit me, and I was starving. My stomach growled louder than I’d ever heard it.

  “Here, Reese,” she said. “Eat.”

  I was hers.

  “Oh my God,” I choked out. “Mab.”

  Someone from my left called, “It talks.”

  I knew that tone of voice. I pushed the plate of food away and was on my feet in an instant. I swayed, but found my balance, and stumbled to my brother. “Ben! What are you doing in there?”

  The rough wooden bars of a cage separated us. Ben drew away before I could touch his hands.

  “Ben?”

  His lips curled back, and I recognized the expression of about-to-fire anger. “Whoa, back off.”

  I gripped the bars of the cage and stared at my brother. Flashes of memory punched me: Ben catching me in the hallway, driving the car, Ben pulled to the ground by vines. I shook my head as if I could rattle the images out.

  “Reese?” Mab’s voice was soft. Her fingers dug into my arm.

  I turned to her. “Why did you put my brother in a cage?”

  Her hand fell away, and she stared up at me. Dirt was smudged under one big blue eye. “Will?”

  “Will,” Ben repeated.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said.

  Mab’s face split into shock, and she flung herself at me.

  I staggered back, arms flailing for balance. She held on, pushed her face into my neck, arms wrapped what felt like five times around me. Her hair scratched my cheek and chin. And her feet knocked loosely against my shins as she dangled. I put my arms around her, slowly. I was stronger than I should have been. Mab felt as hefty as a paper bag.

  Mab leaned back and grasped my face. “Will,” she said again.

  I tightened my arms around her. “What happened to me, Mab?” I whispered. “What happened to my body?”

  But Ben shook the bars of the cage and yelled, “Let me out of here.”

  Both Mab and I turned our heads to him. I didn’t let go of her. “Ben,” I said, not knowing where to begin.

  She wiggled to get down. I stepped toward the cage and heard Mab scrambling behind me. Wrapping one of my large black hands around a bar, I tugged. It bent, but no more than a thick tree branch would’ve. Ben stared at me, eyes wrinkling. I didn’t know if I looked like me but with black skin and feathers, or if I was totally unrecognizable. Ben shook his head, a hand coming up as if he would brush me away.

  And Mab was there, pricking her finger with a tiny metal thing. She skimmed blood against the cage and shut her eyes briefly. The bar shivered and bowed out. Ben climbed free, moving his body to completely avoid the possibility of touching mine. He stood next to Mab, facing me. Said to her, “What is it?”

  She reached out and touched my stomach. “It’s Will.”

  I remembered I was naked. Jerked away from her. “Do you have some of those pants?” I asked in a stupid high voice, just as Ben said, “Bullshit it’s Will.”

  “Yes,” she said to both of us. Spinning on one foot, she dashed over to a crate. Left me staring at Ben.

  “Ben,” I said.

  “You’re …” He shook his head. “No way.” Old sweat and mud streaked down half his forehead, and his eyes were tight. It was the expression he’d worn the whole weekend of Aaron’s funeral. “I’m not dead,” I said.

  “You aren’t Will, either.”

  Out of habit, I wiped my palms on my thighs as if they were sweaty. The feathers instead of hair were too weird. But I couldn’t let myself freak out about this new body thing. I was me. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes and tried to think of something to convince him. I said, “I am. I’m your brother.” I looked at him. “Remember in sixth grade we had this assignment to write a story about somebody we admired, and I wrote about you? Called it ‘American Hero.’ Mom mailed it to you, didn’t she?”

  I waited. The barn was so quiet I could hear the whine of an airplane flying over some field far away. Mab stood behind him with clothes in hand, not moving. I really wanted those pants. But didn’t move, either.

  Ben ran his hands up over his face and back through his regulation-short hair. “I still have it.”

  “Really?”

  He looked like he’d eaten lemon peel. But it wasn’t hostile anymore. “It tucks real nice into my boot,” he admitted.

  “Ben.” I moved as close as I could until he leaned away. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? Turning into whatever the hell you are? Or for letting me think you were doing drugs? Pretending I was the douche bag when you really were into some heavy shit?”

  Shrugging uncomfortably, since I couldn’t really deny any of the charges, I said hopefully, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  His expression darkened again. “You gonna kiss her with that one?”

  I looked at my hands, so totally not mine. My mouth hung open, and Mab tossed the pants at me. They smacked into my chest and I grabbed them. Turned around for no good reason to pull them on. The drawstring barely tied around this newer, broader waist. Irritably, I thought, I finally have a body more like Ben’s.

  “How did this happen?” Ben asked.

  As I turned, I realized he was asking Mab. Looking at her with something a lot like trust. She pointed behind her at a plate of chicken. “Will, you eat that, and I’ll explain what I think. And how we’re going to get out of this.”

  I shoveled the chicken in, sitting knee-to-knee on the floor of the barn with Mab and Ben.

  Mab gave me an abridged version of what had gone on since Saturday morning. Then, studying me with a half-calculating, half-awed look, she said, “This body was my crows’ doing. They’re my familiar, the way Gabriel is using Lukas as his, though more voluntary—we have no runes linking us. Only intention.” She sucked in a deep breath and skimmed her hand down the line of feathers on my forearm. “They knew what I needed, knew I needed them more than ever—a familiar to balance out Gabriel’s power. And not one that’s scattered as they were, as a flock of crows, but one as strong as a human familiar.” Her eyes shut, and she put her clasped hands against her heart. “So they transformed themselves.”

  “But I thought
Will,” Ben frowned at me, “was overwhelmed in his own body.”

  She looked at me again. “The crows caught you when Gabriel took your body, didn’t they? They were right there, and they caught you, pulled you up into them the way they’d escaped their own death. Do you remember?”

  Uncomfortable, I thought about what I remembered. Flying. Mab’s hair. Disjointed images. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” I agreed. They weren’t all from yesterday, or my life. I’d seen things from his old life, too. Reese’s. “What happened to him?” I stabbed my fingers into my forehead. “Reese. Is he here?”

  Mab paused with her mouth slightly open. Her lips were pale around the edges. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Do you feel anything?”

  “Like what? What would it feel like?”

  “A buzzing in the back of your mind, a song stuck in a loop. Something like that. Niggling and strange.”

  “Everything about this is strange,” I said, spreading my hands, and looked down at this dark body. Nothing in my head made me think of Reese anymore. It was just me in here. “I don’t think so.”

  She nodded, but I noticed her hands pressing hard into her thighs. I reached out and took one fist. Pulled the fingers out one at a time and wove our hands together.

  Ben grunted. “So. What are we doing next? To get Will his body back. And save your kid? And plant this jackass into the ground.”

  I was impressed how well Ben was taking all this. I said, “You’re being so compliant.”

  He half smiled at me, which looked a lot like a threat. “It’s willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t take it personally.”

  Mab squeezed my hand and climbed to her feet. “Come to the worktable; I’ll sketch out my idea so your brother can poke holes in it.” She shot a wry smile at Ben, who bared his teeth.

  I’d missed a lot.

  Just as we were getting up with her, I heard my voice call her name outside.

  Mab froze for a split second, then shoved at me. “Hide,” she hissed. “Don’t come out no matter what.”

  I whirled. Ben already was jumping back into the cage. Just as I dove behind an old overturned rowboat, the barn door shoved open.

  MAB

  I was a whirlwind of hot and cold emotions, panic flapping hard as a crow’s wing in my chest as I forced the cage closed around Ben. He glared out at the doors, and I turned my back, praying fast and silently that Will was hidden in shadows, just as Gabriel entered.

  “Ah, Mab,” he said with a slick smile. “There you are, and your new pet, as well.”

  He wandered in, hands clasped behind his back. I’d noticed that yesterday, while I’d talked to Ben for hours, he’d slashed the tires of all our cars and cut through the phone line. He was pretending to give me space, to trust me, but it wasn’t real, and we needed to be more careful now that Reese didn’t have many eyes to look out for him.

  I said, “What do you want, Gabriel?”

  “To visit, is that not enough?” He smiled at me, a very not-Will smile filled with sarcasm.

  “I’m busy.”

  Heaving a dramatic sigh, he said, “I thought I felt some magic pulling at the roots of the hill earlier.”

  “As I said, I’ve been working.” I swept around him to the worktable, and pushed around the papers I’d used to diagram ideas for Ben yesterday. “I need to focus.”

  “Well then. Tell me if you know where Arthur kept his drawings.” He fiddled with one of the old pencils in the coffee can on the table. “I went through his bedroom and found nothing. Nor in the den where he used to keep them in the footstool.”

  My back tingled as he neared me, as I imagined him ransacking Arthur’s things. I shuffled through some of the rune-circle sketches I’d made, folding them into piles. “He kept them in an accordion file over there.” I nodded at the crowded shelves. “Take them and go, if you would.”

  Gabriel wandered to the shelves and ran his hand over the wooden front of one. It was difficult not to hunch my shoulders against his presence, and I reminded myself to keep my mother in mind. With her easy living, her flamboyance, she’d have adapted quickly to Gabriel, I was certain, flirted and teased until she had him in the palm of her hand. I took a deep breath and imagined myself in a flared red dress, low-cut with thin shoulder straps, and my hair styled, my lips painted.

  But the little purring noises he made when he discovered something of interest and his sighs of dismay distracted me. When he glanced at me through the corners of his eyes, my cheeks filled with heat and I glanced down. I was not Mother. I couldn’t flirt with anyone, much less Gabriel looking at me from Will’s body. Especially while Ben observed from the cage with a dark frown.

  “Ah!” Gabriel turned abruptly, his hands full of old sheets of parchment he’d pulled out of a stiff accordion file. The portrait on top was of Granny Lyn, when she’d been young and first married, in a field of verbena and prairie phlox. She’d posed for Arthur with only a shawl draped around her bare shoulders. Every pencil stroke was a long caress, and when I was little I’d traced them with my finger as I recognized the shape of her eyebrows and the secret little smile she reserved for him. Her hair had come loose from its bun and fell in soft waves around her cheeks as she held her chin low.

  There’d been one of my mother, too, face alive with laughter and hair in a short bob. I’d taken it up to my bedroom and hidden it in a drawer. He’d drawn Donna in the garden, her hat pulled low to cover her identity unless you knew the shape of her shoulders. Faith in her overalls, Eli folding butter into croissant dough. Justin with his new eyebrow ring, Silla with her face a study in pain as she fed the crows. And me—well, I never would sit still unless I was practicing my runes, so all the sketches of me had my brow low and my lips pressed together in concentration. Arthur always shook his head and told me I didn’t really look like that, but he wasn’t skilled enough after a hundred and fifty years to capture it.

  Arthur had collected portraits, the way I marked all the blood kin who passed through our gates with a charm tied to the branches of my redbud tree.

  I drew a calming breath as Gabriel put the sheaf of pages down on the corner of the table. “So take them, and go,” I said.

  He shrugged one shoulder and walked lazily toward me. “Here.” Gabriel smoothed his hands over the top sketch, then held it up by the edges. It depicted a young man in a long coat. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his hair was braided back with beads and charms. His smile curled up, and he slouched on one cocked hip as though he needn’t be prepared for anything.

  I took it, bringing it close. It was a familiar drawing, of course, though I’d never thought much about it before. The edges of the man’s left boot had smeared, and I noticed he held a small bouquet of flowers in one hand. They might have been violets. Overall, it was a crude drawing, and it had to have been old, before Arthur gained skill. Turning the portrait over, I saw the single tiny word in the bottom corner: Gabriel. No date, but a tiny preservation rune and a brown blotch of blood.

  “Not many of the others are meant to last. He wanted to remember me,” Gabriel said quietly, coming up beside me. He breathed against my neck, and I shivered.

  “That’s nice for you,” I whispered. “Keep it. Take it and let me do my work.”

  “You don’t need to hate me, Mab.” Gabriel put both his hands on my shoulders, leaning close to my back. “In time, we’ll forgive each other, and think what a home we could fashion here.”

  I forced myself to keep breathing, though he smelled spicy like the earth and my lavender soap and sweat. Like Will, but more a part of this land. “Maybe,” I lied. “Maybe you’re right.” Turning in his arms, I touched his chest and firmly pushed him back. “But not yet.”

  A scuffling noise had him glancing swiftly behind me. “What was that?”

  “Crows,” Ben called. “Picking around in that back corner.”

  Gabriel let go of me and strode to the cage. Ben backed up as far as he could, until his shoulders hit the opposite
bars.

  “Let him alone, Gabriel,” I said. “I don’t need him worked up. It ruins what I’m doing.”

  Running a finger down the root bar nearest him, Gabriel smiled. “I think getting him worked up would help the magic quicken.”

  “Let me have this place to myself!” I cried, rushing forward and grasping his wrist. I pulled at him. “I need a refuge, Gabriel, or I will lose all my patience to stop fighting you.”

  “You can’t fight me.” He pressed close to me, taking my hands and holding them tight between us. “I will defeat you because I hold all the power of this land behind me, through little Lukas.”

  I rose up onto my tiptoes and said, with my mouth a breath from his, “I will hurt you beyond repair even as you destroy me.”

  “So like your mother,” he said, then nipped at my lips with his teeth. I shoved away, and he pushed me, too, so that I stumbled back and hit the floor hard on my hip.

  Gabriel stepped over me, sneered down. “I always hated that bitch.”

  He left the barn then, left me with the shocking memory of such disgust seeping out of Will’s own face.

  WILL

  I was on my feet, running for her, the moment he was gone. “Mab.” I lifted her up. “Are you all right?”

  My skin rippled. I squeezed my eyes shut and grit my teeth. I’d had a hard time breathing the moment that guy walked in wearing my body. Now it felt like my chest was falling to pieces.

  “Will?” It was Ben. His hand touched my shoulder, fast, like it burned him.

  “What’s wrong?” Mab frowned at my chest, ran her hands down it. I shuddered and wrapped my arms around myself.

  “I’m coming apart,” I said through my grinding teeth.

  Mab pulled me to my knees, put her hands on my face. “Breathe, Will, calm down. You’re too upset.”