Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  APRIL 27

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Augusta lived in a squalid apartment at the top of a fire escape: iron stairs switchbacking up the side of a pitted cinder-block wall. The motion-sensor light at the top was long dead, but the ambient light of the city was strong enough to show Maksim the way. Some of the stairs were weak with rust. Maksim jogged up them carelessly, feeling the whole assemblage tremble under his weight, daring it to collapse.

  “Augusta!” he called as he ascended. He thumped on the door with his fist. “Augusta!”

  He couldn’t hear anything from within. The narrow pane of safety glass in the door was dark. Midnight was long past, but from elsewhere in the building, Maksim heard percussive music and shouting. Maybe Augusta was there, partying.

  He thought he could scent her near, though: warm and unwashed and boozy. Maybe she was sleeping. She should not sleep when he had need of her.

  Maksim settled his weight and punched through the safety glass. It didn’t break on his first try, so he kept at it. First the glass webbed into pale cracks, and then after a few more hits it fell inward, taking a few splinters of the frame with it. Maksim reached through and unbolted the door and let himself in.

  Augusta sprawled facedown on her slumped sofa, head pillowed on one arm, the other flung outward. She was snoring very lightly. An army-surplus T-shirt was rucked up above her waist, exposing the worn waistband of her jeans and a few inches of skin.

  Maksim kicked the leg of the sofa. “Augusta,” he said, not quite a shout.

  She stirred then, finally, with a sleepy murmur. “Maks?”

  “Get up,” he said.

  “Mmm, nope.” She buried her face in the crook of her arm.

  Maksim took hold of the nearest object and threw it at her.

  It turned out to be a glass, and it bounced off Augusta’s shoulder and shattered on the floor.

  “Asshole!” Augusta growled, sitting up. Her pale hair was crushed flat on one side and matted into a wild tangle on the other. “Stop breaking my shit.”

  “I must speak with you.”

  “What did I do this time? I don’t remember doing anything.” Her voice was rough with sleep and drink; Maksim wondered if she would even remember this conversation later.

  “You did nothing. That I know of,” he said.

  “Then it can wait until morning.” But Augusta was already sitting up, scrubbing a hand through her hair, tugging her khaki T-shirt roughly into place, groping around for something. She located it tucked within the threadbare cushions of the sofa: a mostly empty bottle of rum. She upended the bottle over her mouth. Most of the rum made it in.

  Maksim sat down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the sleepy heat of her. “I wish you were sober just now,” he said. “I need your help.”

  “You’re being weird. And you’re bloody,” Augusta said, blinking sandy eyes in the dimness. She ran a fingertip over the split knuckles of Maksim’s right hand.

  “I broke your door.”

  “Haven’t seen you lose your temper in so long, I didn’t know if you were capable of it anymore,” Augusta said. “It’s kind of a relief. You’re not so much better than me, after all.” She raised Maksim’s hand to her mouth and licked gently over the raw, broken skin, soothing it with her tongue.

  “I have never been better than you,” Maksim murmured. “I have been so, so much worse. You should turn from me. Maybe you will yet.”

  Augusta reared away from him. “What the fuck?” she snapped. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” She emphasized it with a sharp smack from the flat of her hand across Maksim’s chest.

  Maksim felt his mouth snarl. “I need help,” he said again. “Something is wrong. I feel like … something is wrong.”

  “You smell different,” Augusta said. She leaned in again and sniffed at his neck. “Better.”

  He could smell himself: sweat and blood and rust from the fire escape, and none of that was what Augusta meant.

  “What did you do?” she said. “You gave up the curse, didn’t you? About fucking time!”

  His hand wrapped around her throat, silencing her, before he had even thought. “It is a balm, not a curse, and I did not give it up,” he said. “I cannot. I would not.”

  Augusta shoved his hand away. “Then what?”

  Maksim was on his feet, turning. “I wish I knew. All I know is that I feel wrong.” Wrong, or all too right. The last couple of days had been too delicious, too much like the old days. The miles he had felt the need to run, the sweet ache in his calves only spurring him on faster. The hot sweat sliding down the hollow of his spine. The way he had not been able to resist that young man. All the pleasures Iadviga’s invocation had blunted.

  More than any of those, the craving for harm.

  He should have thought of it right away, of course; only he had been drunk with it as he had not been in years. He should have known his pleasure for the ill omen it was.

  “I must go to the witch,” he said.

  Augusta scowled. “No.”

  “You may not command me,” Maksim said, fisting both hands in the denim of his jeans to stop himself lashing out.

  “I know I can’t. But you never fight me anymore,” Augusta said and grinned through a yawn.

  Maksim tipped her chin up to see her face in the angle of brightness from the streetlight outside. Her eyes looked puffy, lined, older than the rest of her.

  “You are too foxed to fight,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “You were the one who woke me up, breaking shit,” Augusta said. She tugged free of his hand. “Come on. Let’s put some coffee on, and then you can punch my lights out. Just tell me you’ll stay away from that unnatural piece of work.”

  Maksim hesitated for a second. Didn’t he usually want to be kind? But Augusta’s tone was too much to swallow when his body thrummed with this urge to move. He slapped her openhanded across the ear.

  Augusta laughed and surged to her feet, butting her forehead right into Maksim’s chin, knocking his cap off. “Yeah! Let’s go. Come on.”

  He came back with a messy uppercut, catching her in the ribs and making her grunt. At the gym Maksim owned, he taught students of all levels, but none of them were kin, and Maksim was always pulling his punches. Here, and only here, he could let fly with close to his full strength.

  “See?” Augusta gasped, ducking to let Maksim’s fist overshoot her head and smack into the door frame. “That’s it!” And he took her full in the cheek with his other fist, splitting the skin.

  But she had been passed out drunk earlier while he was furious and on edge, and he shortly sent Augusta reeling backward into the scatter of broken safety glass.

  She hit the wall hard with one shoulder and bit off a curse word.

  “I take no pleasure in damaging you,” Maksim said.

  “Liar,” Augusta said, without heat, twisting to tug down her torn shirt collar and inspect her shoulder.

  Maksim picked up the rum bottle and held it up to the wash of light from the window—a finger left, at most.

  “Give me that,” said Augusta, stumbling over to drop to the sofa. “It wasn’t my best fight. I’ll do better tomorrow.”

  “That is what we all say,” Maksim said, gulping the rum and tossing the empty bottle in the direction of the kitchenette.

  Augusta cursed him, so he turned his back on her before he succumbed to the want in his fists again. He left her dim, stuffy room, jogged down the iron stairs, and vaulted over the last half story.

  Then he went to see the witch.

  APRIL 28

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Lissa closed her bedroom door. The air hung still and stuffy. She’d told Stella she wanted a nap. She sat on her bed, back against the headboard, and opened the lockbox.

  The doll, unclothed muslin body scalloped with faint brown stains, had eyes that opened and closed. Its porcelain head was capped with carefully sewn curls of auburn hair. Human hair. Baba’s hair, it
would be, cut when she was young enough that it held no gray. Lissa thought Baba must have made the doll originally for her daughter, Lissa’s mother. Lissa tilted it back and forth, watching the clear, glassy gaze, and laid it on her lap.

  The letter was on lined paper torn from a Mead notebook and folded small. Baba had written it in pencil, dark, spiky, and sprawling.

  The letter reminded her again of the old story for which Lissa had been named: Vasilissa the Beautiful, or Vasilissa the Wise, depending on the version.

  Vasilissa, like so many girls in old stories, grew up with a stepmother who hated her. The stepmother sent Vasilissa into the forest one night to ask the witch Baba Yaga for a light. Baba Yaga lived in a house that strutted about on hen’s legs, and she rode through the sky in a mortar. Her house stood in a yard ringed with a fence of skulls mounted on spears, and the skulls’ eyes burned with fire.

  When Vasilissa explained her predicament, Baba Yaga said she might stay and work, and then she assigned her three tasks: cooking enough dinner for ten people, sorting and grinding a sack of millet, and squeezing all the oil from a sack of poppy seeds.

  Vasilissa’s sole memento of her departed mother was a doll, which she brought with her everywhere, even into the forest to visit the witch. At the full moon, Vasilissa could ask this doll three questions, because as usual in stories, everything came in threes. Vasilissa asked the doll to help her through the three tests Baba Yaga set for her, and the doll gave her such good advice that Vasilissa was able to do everything the witch had asked. Baba Yaga was so impressed that she agreed to give Vasilissa a light to take back to her stepmother: not just any light, but one of the fiery-eyed skulls.

  When Vasilissa returned from the forest, bearing the skull aloft on its spear, her stepmother was at first grateful, for there had been no light in the home since Vasilissa left. But the skull’s flaming eyes began to scorch the stepmother, and when she tried to hide, the skull followed her and burned her to a cinder.

  Vasilissa then took up the skull again, went back into the forest, and asked Baba Yaga to teach her all her magic. With the help of her doll, Vasilissa was able to perform all the tasks Baba Yaga demanded in exchange. Eventually, Vasilissa became a powerful witch in her own right, so powerful that she drew the attention of the czar, who made her his wife; and the story said she carried her mother’s doll in her pocket for all her days.

  There were other stories about Vasilissa, or maybe there was more than one Vasilissa, but this one was important for the kernel of truth in it, or so Baba said: a witch could make such a doll and hand it down to her daughter or to her granddaughter. Once a month, around the full moon, such a doll could be of help.

  Baba’s letter ended with instructions and a charm, which Lissa read through a few times before sneaking down to the kitchen to pick up the supplies she would need.

  Back upstairs, she set the doll on the bedside table, crumbled a slice of bread before it, and sprinkled salt from the shaker.

  She felt almost embarrassed, even though she was alone: this was a new thing, this ritual, and she had only a folktale to suggest it would work. It wasn’t like Baba could have tested it in advance. Maybe Lissa was getting her hopes up over nothing … and maybe, even if it didn’t work, it would only be because Lissa herself didn’t know how to do it correctly.

  Before she could talk herself into a spiral of doubt, Lissa took a sharp breath and whispered the charm: By the white rider of dawn, by the red rider of day, by the black rider of night, I call to you: Iadviga Rozhnata, your scion desires your counsel.

  “How long has it been?” said Baba from somewhere in the bottom of Lissa’s brain. Her voice was a cold wind.

  “This is the fourth day,” said Lissa. “There was the funeral, and then Stella came, and the lawyer—”

  “And on what business do you desire my counsel?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lissa. She found she was crying again. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and wiped that upon her skirt. “I don’t know.”

  “Vnuchka, I am not to be called idly. Ask counsel.”

  Baba sounded a bit lecturing, Lissa thought, like always. And very far away.

  “Where are you? What’s it like?” Lissa said. “Can you counsel me about that?”

  “I may not speak of it.”

  “I always thought that story was just a story. I didn’t know you’d be waiting.…”

  Baba was silent.

  “I’m going to make up some spells for a few of the ladies,” Lissa said. “Will they all still come to me … will they trust me to do it right?”

  “You have learned some of my trade,” Baba said. “They will have no cause to complain, so long as you remember your lessons.”

  Not quite the wholehearted endorsement she’d been hoping for.

  Three questions. Lissa bit down on the tip of her tongue to stop herself from saying anything careless.

  Finally, she settled on, “Was there anything you left unfinished?”

  Baba did not answer quickly. Her silence felt alive and dark and chilly. Lissa began to wonder if this was another forbidden question or if she had somehow made Baba angry.

  “Maksim Volkov,” Baba said. “In life, I was sworn to help him. In death, I may do so no longer. If he comes to you, know that he is kin.”

  “Kin? You mean we’re related to him somehow?”

  But silence was her only answer. Baba was gone. When Lissa said the charm again, nothing happened. She shook the doll. The eyelids fluttered open and shut; one of them stuck higher than the other, giving the thing an expression of drunkenness.

  Lissa carefully jiggled it back into place and set the doll in her lap. She folded the letter up small and zipped it into a pocket of her purse.

  “If you can hear me,” she said, “I’ll talk to you again as soon as I’m allowed, next month. I love you. If you’re there.”

  When she came downstairs, Stella looked at her face and went to hug her again.

  “I’m fine,” Lissa said, backing into the banister and rubbing at her eyes.

  “Another delivery came,” Stella said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “What was it?”

  Stella didn’t answer but led her into the dining room, where a box sat on the table.

  “It’s the urn,” she said. “A gentleman from the mortuary brought it over.”

  “I never asked her what she wanted done with her ashes,” Lissa said.

  “You didn’t know she’d go suddenly,” Stella said. “She was in good health, wasn’t she? Dad said she was strong as a horse. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “I should have asked,” Lissa said. Three questions, and she had not managed to make this one of them.

  She took the urn upstairs to put it on Baba’s dresser, for now.

  Stella followed her into the big, dim room. “How many rooms does this place have?” she said. “I’ll bet this house hasn’t been sorted in a dog’s age.”

  “She had better things to do,” Lissa flared, thinking of the third bedroom, a warren of boxes dating from when her mother was still alive. “I should’ve. It was my job to keep things clean.”

  “Even her knickers?” Stella said, wincing at the overflowing laundry basket.

  “Don’t,” Lissa said. “Don’t.” She couldn’t get anything else out of her mouth. She crowded Stella backward out the door and into the hallway. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  Stella stumbled, caught herself on the banister. “I want to help,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Lissa said. “Where were you before?” Which didn’t even make sense, and damn it, when had she started crying again?

  Stella had her hands tight together, and she was looking at Lissa with that face, and Lissa pushed past her into the bathroom and locked the door.

  “Lissa? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” A breath. Feet shuffling.

  Lissa shoved her fists against her temples and wiped messy tears all over. She u
nrolled a crumple of toilet paper and blew her nose.

  “Lissa … I don’t quite know what to do,” Stella said through the door. “I’m getting it all wrong. I think I should go out for a bit, okay? So you can have some space.”

  “Yes. Please,” Lissa managed to say, thick and wet.

  Silence. Lissa blew her nose again.

  Eventually, she heard Stella’s footsteps moving away, pausing at the top of the stairs, and then descending.

  A minute later, the front door opened and closed.

  Stupid, this was all stupid and wrong, and she needed to do something different. Well, there was something she’d been avoiding, and today was the last day she’d be able to do it until next month.

  She went to the house mains and shut off the breaker. The subterranean hum of the house cut off, leaving blank silence. Lissa wondered how the kolduny had discovered that electricity was unfriendly to magic: had they gathered somewhere in the old country to discuss it? Had they written each other letters? Baba had rarely spoken of such things, but when she did, Lissa could not always tell whether she was learning rules or merely Baba’s habits. The most important Law she knew because of the way Baba looked whenever she mentioned it: flinty and staring, holding Lissa’s eyes until she was sure Lissa understood.

  Magic was to be done only on the full moon and the next two days after. Never on or near the new moon. That was Law.

  “Like, the kind of law where if you break it other witches will arrest you?” Lissa had asked when she was a young girl. Baba had not laughed but had answered, “No, vnuchka. Law like the law of gravity. Nature imposes it, and if we break it the consequence is inevitable and severe.”

  So the kitchen corkboard always had a calendar with the phases of the moon highlighted, right underneath the cookbooks where Lissa could easily see it.

  The grimoire of the koldun Anatoliy Ievlev stood on a shelf up higher, inside a cupboard, above the cookbooks and the calendar. It was a heavy tome with ragged-edged pages and a gold-stamped spine, printed in Moscow toward the end of the nineteenth century, probably as a curiosity more than a text; Baba had learned from a different grimoire, she said, but that one had been lost when she fled Russia, and so this one had been ordered at great expense from an antiquarian in Yekaterinburg on the occasion of Lissa’s twelfth birthday. For Lissa’s benefit, Baba had interleaved her own penciled translations, written on envelopes or notebook sheets, tucked in between the musty-smelling pages of Cyrillic. Lissa still had to stand on a step stool to reach that cupboard; she’d done it so many times now that her fingertips found the right book unerringly.