“Koldun’ia,” Maksim said, his voice gone hoarse again. “Where?” He had his hand at his bare throat, fingers dug into the muscle above his collarbone.
“I put them in the refrigerator.”
“I must go out,” he choked, pushing past Lissa toward the door.
“Wait! I thought you wanted me to walk you here so that you wouldn’t do anything stupid.”
“You are right,” he said, turning again and wrapping his arms about his chest; he was bruised there, a mottling of red and purple over one side of his rib cage, and, beneath the bruising, older scars. “Bring me an egg, koldun’ia, and speak to me while you do.”
“I’m bringing you an egg. Um. Two eggs? I’m at the fridge already, and I’m—what are you doing?”
Maksim had one fist pressed to his forehead and the other hand blindly extended; she set an egg in it. Maksim punched the shell with his thumb and sucked it noisily, spitting out a fragment of shell into his palm. He held out his hand again, imperious, and Lissa gave him another.
On finishing it, Maksim cast the broken shells carelessly on the floor, tipped his head back, and let out a long sigh.
“You may go now,” he said.
“You won’t go on some kind of a rampage, without your shirt?”
Maksim glanced down at himself, mouth twisting. He did not answer, only shuffled away toward the bedroom.
Lissa waited. Finally, she went to the bedroom door and cautiously peered in—saw Maksim sprawled, naked, facedown and snoring into his pillow.
She turned out the light and left him.
MAY 13
WAXING CRESCENT
Lissa took Baba’s notebooks with her to the Duke of Lancashire, telling herself she needed a change of pace—and anyway, Stella kept saying that shyness could only be conquered with practice. Lissa did not think of herself as shy, exactly, but when she followed Stella into the air-conditioned dimness, she did find herself dropping back, touching her face, hugging the stack of notebooks, not quite looking behind the bar at Rafe.
He smiled sunnily and brought her the organic lager before she could ask and said only, “Hitting the books, I see. I’ll keep out of your way.” And he bustled back down the bar. He was not wearing his toque today, and she had been right earlier: His head was shaved—lightly stubbled so that the tiny dark hairs lowlighted the contours of his skull. A pale, jagged scar stood out, as if he’d been hit over the head with a bottle; he looked like the kind of man who might have a few fights in his past—but only a few and only for boisterous fun, not like the scars she’d seen on Maksim.
That thought chilled her a bit: scars were a language, and she’d been reading without understanding the meaning. Now it began to come clear. A man like Rafe, a normal guy, might wear the signature of a couple of brawls or a car accident or some extreme sports. Maksim had a whole book traced on his skin, and Lissa had not really been conscious of seeing it the other day, but now her mind served up the picture of him shirtless, wealed with white or red keloid, several long, cruel lines, and one knot that surely must be a bullet scar.
Soldier: he had to have been. It went with the military books and the maps and the collection of weapons. And with the kind of muscle he had, hard and lean and functional.
It also spoke to her of what Maksim might be like when he did not have a witch to calm him down.
She found she was gazing at Rafe again as he leaned on the cash register twirling a pencil behind his ear. Just then, he turned her way, caught her gaze, held it a moment, and then smiled—not the goofy crooked smile he gave everyone but a smaller, sweeter one.
Lissa ducked her head, sipped from her pint, and flipped open the first of the notebooks.
Taken together, they formed a journal of sorts, recording trials of the spells Baba had later perfected and noted in her own grimoire. Sometimes the recipient of the spell was mentioned, sometimes the ailment to heal, sometimes even the due date for a much-desired child. Lissa found a spell against colic, created for use on herself in infancy. She wondered what her father had said about that: old-country superstition, dangerous nonsense. She knew Baba’s influence had been one of the points of strain in her parents’ marriage, but by the time Lissa had been old enough to pick up any of the finer points, the marriage was long over, Dad had relocated to London, and Mama was dying.
She turned another page. Baba had always preferred to write in pencil, heavily, every line and both sides of the page, embossing the cheap paper of her notebooks. The words formed an incomprehensible Braille to Lissa’s fingertip.
They were nearly as incomprehensible to her eye; Baba switched between Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets and dotted the pages with drawings and symbols, some arcane but recognizable, others possibly nothing more than doodles.
This page, for instance, bore four circles—white, black, and halved each way: clearly the phases of the moon, drawn as on a calendar. Beside the moons, Baba had made a series of tally lines: one for the full moon, three for the first quarter, five for the new moon, and two for the last quarter. Tracking the frequency of something: requests for spells? The church ladies mostly knew that the full moon was the time for that, and so it was possible they would make their requests in advance. What else could Baba have been tracking?
Lissa flipped open her phone and called Maksim. Ten rings, no answer, and nothing to leave a message on. Annoying; maybe she’d bully him into getting a proper phone and voice mail if this situation was going to continue.
Just as she was about to pull the phone away from her ear, he picked up.
“Hey. Maksim. Question about the … your thing. Any relation to the phases of the moon?”
He made a sound like a stifled yawn. “Koldun’ia?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Did I wake you up?”
“One moment.” The phone clattered onto a hard surface. In the background, a momentary sound of water. “Repeat your question.”
“Phases of the moon. Any relation to your madness?”
“A witch should not need to ask.”
Lissa snorted. “You asked me for help, you get to deal with a few questions. I have a page here with some notes about moon phases, and I was wondering if it could be—”
“No. Witches are the only ones who traffic in such things.” His voice was rough again.
“I did wake you up. Jesus, Maksim, it’s six in the evening.”
“I was not sleeping. Only thinking,” he said. “You should make more eggs.”
“I can’t do that until the moon is full again.”
“You told me; I remember now. I will try to make the others last, then.”
Lissa flipped the phone closed, frowning. She’d figured on a maximum dosage of four eggs a day at most; for a regular person, two ought to be sufficient. Though that was based on eggs that actually worked the way they should, and these were clearly subpar strength. God only knew how often he was taking them. She thought about calling him back and asking how many were left.
“Let me guess,” said Rafe, wiping a spill from the varnished wood, setting a fresh coaster before her and upon it, a pint of water with a slice of lemon. “Study buddy is one of those people who expects you to do all the work?”
“Sort of,” Lissa said, flashing back again to Maksim’s extended hand, imperious and yet desperate.
“What’s your major, anyway? Stella didn’t tell me.”
“It’s not a formal program,” Lissa said.
“Oh. I’m being nosy again. Professional hazard,” Rafe said, touching her elbow in apology and grinning.
Lissa would have answered that smile. She really would. She could not think of anything to say, though.
After a moment, Rafe’s face went a bit rueful, and he raised his eyebrows and backed away with his hands held up, empty.
Stella danced over to pick up a tray of pints. “It works better when you smile back,” she whispered.
“What works better?”
“Flirting, silly,” Stella said and slid away
again, leaving Lissa pinned against the wall, fighting the urge to hide her hot face in her hands.
MAY 14
WAXING CRESCENT
Maksim’s door stood an inch open. Lissa knocked, and it swung wider, showing her that the elegant coffee table was strewn with dirty mugs. Beside the telephone, a pressback chair lay on its side, one of its legs broken.
“Maksim?”
“Out here.”
She followed his voice through the bedroom—unmade bed, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor. A sliding glass door led out to the balcony.
Maksim sat with his back against the brick wall, one leg outstretched and the other pulled up. As Lissa approached, he raised his head from his knee and held out his hand in a silent demand.
“You’re like a toddler,” she started to say, and then she saw his face. Older bruises had bloomed to livid color, and newer ones overlaid them, redder and bloodier.
“Oh my God. Maksim, what happened?”
“Eggs,” he said.
She set down her bag and pulled out the cartons: all that remained of the sleep spell, plus the leftovers of two kinds of painkillers, made the full moon before Baba died.
She thanked whatever instinct had told her to bring the painkillers. She gave him one of those first, hoping it was still good. The spells lasted only as long as the eggs did, and the expiration date on these was drawing near.
He slurped it from the shell. One corner of his upper lip was split and puffy, and so was his eyebrow on the same side. He tossed the shell shards to the corner of the balcony, and Lissa, following the motion, saw a pile of other discarded shells there.
She waited for a moment until Maksim gestured again, and she gave him one of the sleep spells.
“Another,” he said once he’d taken it, wiping a string of albumen from his lip.
“No. You have to make them last.”
“I did not husband them earlier. I am sorry.”
“I can see that. Are you going to tell me what happened?”
He tilted his head back against the brick and shut his eyes. Lissa opened her mouth to chide him, but she saw his jaw working and set herself to wait.
“I do not visit with my own kind often,” he said. “I have been living apart, because of the spell.”
“Right, the thing Baba did for you.”
“The kin do not love witches. Many of them think it perverse to tamper with our nature.”
“No one loves witches.”
“I do,” Maksim said, smiling faintly. He showed her his left hand: knuckles bloodied and mottled with bruising, two fingers swollen stiff that could not join the rest in a fist. “See? I thought I had broken the bones there, but now it does not hurt at all.” He rolled his head on his neck and stretched his arms gingerly. “I would not tell many of the kin of you; we all have our ways and secrets. This one is … a friend. I asked her for help in finding the boy.”
“I take it she said no.”
“Oh, no. She agreed. We fought only because it is in our nature to fight.”
“I guess you lost.”
“I was not myself.” Maksim gave her a haughty flick of a glance. “And it made Augusta happy to best me for once. She is capable: she knows the area where it happened. She will ask questions of people who may have seen him.”
“I wish you’d told me about this earlier.”
“I wish your grandmother had made better provision for me, koldun’ia. I wish your eggs would let me sleep straight through until the full moon. I wish I was careless and could let this boy go his way and never think of him again.” Maksim rose stiffly and limped to the edge of the balcony, where he knotted his good hand on the railing.
“Why can’t you forget about him? What will he do?”
“Die, most likely,” Maksim said, leaning out and sniffing at the air. “He will do something rash, and someone will kill him, because he is too young to know his own strength. And if it should come to that, it is still better than watching himself go mad and hurt the people he used to love.”
Lissa rose herself and set the egg cartons aside, watching Maksim shift his weight from foot to foot, testing. “How bad is it going to be, having this … Augusta on the warpath?”
“She will not hurt you. I have asked her to respect you, and she will not disobey me.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. What if she hurts someone else?”
Maksim lunged away from the railing, with a section of it still clutched in his hand. He shoved past Lissa and into the apartment.
She heard a crash and ran after him. Maksim hefted the length of railing like a club and swung it down onto the wreckage of the broken chair until both splintered. He set the chair seat on his knee and hammered his fist through it so that the splinters raked his arm. He snapped the railing between his hands and cracked the longer half in two again.
Lissa watched, flinching, from the dubious safety of the bedroom, with her arms hugging the cartoned eggs.
At last Maksim spun about, short, jagged kindling in each hand. The abrupt motion sent a spatter of blood from his arm arcing across the floor.
Lissa jerked back.
Maksim stood rooted, panting, staring at the mess. “Do not touch. You must take care with my blood,” he said. “That is how the infection passes.…”
He sat down slowly, and his knee buckled halfway so that he sprawled to one side. “I believe that should have hurt,” he muttered, easing his leg out straight. “No more easing of pain. I must have something to warn me to stop.”
“It’s getting worse,” Lissa said. “Your madness. Isn’t it?”
Maksim’s lips skinned back from his teeth, and he would not look at her.
“Jesus. I don’t know what to do with you.” She put the eggs in the refrigerator, except for one more of the painkilling ones, and sat on the other side of the room from Maksim while he washed up his arm.
He shuffled about slowly, sweeping the broken chair pieces into a corner and wiping the droplets of blood from the floor. Finally, he let himself down onto the sofa and covered his face. He said something in Russian into his hands.
“Maybe I could go out for you, pick up some groceries and first-aid stuff,” Lissa said.
“I am not hungry—and for medicine, there is no need to worry; we are all quick healers. All too soon, I will be running again.” He smiled, but there was no mirth in it; or maybe it was just the crooked cast of his bruised mouth.
MAY 15
WAXING CRESCENT
Lissa woke up in Baba’s bed, and for no reason at all, she knew that today was the day to make it her own bed.
Baba’s bedroom was the biggest room in the house. The window looked out into willow branches. Although the floor slanted, it was beautiful age-darkened hardwood. Over the last few years, as Baba’s knees increasingly pained her, even with the eggs she made for herself, it had become Lissa’s job to do the floors. She’d spent many hours first washing them with Murphy Oil Soap and then rubbing in cinnamon-scented beeswax. The scent mellowed into the rest of the old house, mingling with dust and books and wool, sun on aged paint, mothballs, and cedar.
Lissa tied her hair up and dressed in old denim shorts. She was halfway through her coffee and Special K when Stella found her at the table.
“You look … casual?” Stella said. “What’s the plan?”
So Lissa filled her in. “I’m not, you know, handy. I don’t want to renovate or something. Yet. I just want to clean out some things. Get some fresh air in.”
Stella nodded. “A good spring cleaning,” she said. “Mummy does one every year. I mean, the cleaning service takes care of all the mopping and stuff, but Mummy and I sort the things and put everything in its place.”
“I don’t have a cleaning service,” Lissa said, hearing the bite to her tone a moment too late. “I mean, it’s just me.”
“It’s not just you,” Stella said. “I can help. I’d like to help.”
Lissa started to shake her head
and stopped herself. What would it hurt? So Stella’s mother had a cleaning service—Stella had been the one with the bucket, cleaning the spot in the kitchen when Lissa couldn’t even look at it.
Lissa bit down on her reflexes and told herself to say yes. And when they were finished with their coffee and Special K, she and Stella marched back upstairs to tackle the room.
Lissa had already moved Baba’s grimoires to the shelf that held her own in the kitchen sideboard. It was the personal things that remained: Baba’s dresser was scattered with powder compacts and a thousand hairpins and the photo of herself with Lissa in its tarnished silver frame. The drawers were full of brassieres and nylon undergarments. The wardrobe held Baba’s dresses, gray and navy and hunter green, and her faded eggplant coat. Far at the back, about where you’d expect to enter Narnia, was a shelf of sweaters wrapped in plastic against moths and a jumble of handbags and hatboxes.
Stella took down the curtains to give them a wash. Lissa began with the dresser drawers, sorting out the useful stuff from the things that even thrifty Baba would have thrown away if she’d thought about them anytime in the last five years. The bad went straight into a garbage bag. The good, Lissa folded into a very elderly blue suitcase to take to Goodwill.
“What about the things for you?” Stella said over her shoulder.
Lissa spread her hands flat on the bare wood at the bottom of the last drawer. “Oh.”
“You don’t have to. I just wondered.”
“No, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She stood up then and looked at the things on top of the dresser in front of Baba’s mirror. The jewelry case folded open to display a tangle of necklaces. Lissa lifted out a rhinestone collar and found the settings and clasp gummed over with human dirt. One ring box, on inspection, proved empty; that was probably the one Baba had worn most often, which was still in the manila envelope from the hospital. Another box held a ring of clustered garnets set in what might have been white gold. Lissa slipped it onto her finger; it was too big and wanted to twist askew.
Spells of Blood and Kin Page 10
