“Oh. Yeah. I went to his place. I think we were going to play video games.”
“You were found alone, lying by the wall of a garage on Brunswick Avenue.”
Jonathan thought about this hard enough to make his head hurt. “Is Nick okay?”
Hannah bit her lip. “He wasn’t with you.”
“Nick wouldn’t ditch me.”
“If he was confused, maybe. If he was drunk or something.”
“If I was being a dick to him, maybe. Give me my phone?”
“I’ve already called him a few times. He’s not picking up.”
“Well, call the police, then!” Jonathan said, pushing himself up. “What if the muggers got him?”
Hannah put both hands on his shoulders and leaned in close, pushing him back down. “You weren’t mugged,” she said very quietly. “You still have all your stuff. Even the cash in your wallet.”
Jonathan blinked. “I’m too stupid right now. I know you’re trying to tell me something, and I can’t figure it out.”
Hannah whispered, “I think he might have hurt you. And I know I’m not a nice person for thinking that. Only he hasn’t been himself lately, and … and if it was him, I don’t want to be the one who calls it in.”
Jonathan pressed his palm to his aching head. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Can we just wait?”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Jonathan said.
Hannah handed him a kidney-shaped dish.
“Give me a moment?” he said, and she pressed her lips together but withdrew beyond the curtain.
MAY 25
FULL MOON
Stella solved the full-moon problem herself, inadvertently, by calling up a friend she’d met while backpacking in Australia. The friend lived in Barrie, conveniently a half hour away by train, and she invited Stella overnight. It only remained for Lissa to steer her stepsister toward the correct day.
The house felt huge and echoing the moment she left, but Lissa spent no more than a moment standing before the screen door; after that, she began pulling out her spell equipment from the places she’d stashed it, checking all the while for the moment the sun would set.
She had just begun taking eggs from the refrigerator when the doorbell rang. She could see Maksim’s head through the glass, face shadowed by his cap, looking away.
He stood awkwardly, weight canted to one side, and when she opened the door, he seized its edge.
“I can go away if I am not wanted,” he said. “I hoped since the moon is full…”
“Stella’s out tonight. You can come in.”
“Thank you, koldun’ia.”
He followed her into the kitchen and settled carefully on the same stool as before. He bowed his head and folded his hands together. The two fingers still looked bruised, and Lissa could see fresh marks across some of the knuckles.
“I’m making extra tonight,” Lissa assured him. “The last week hasn’t been easy on you, has it?”
He shook his head.
“Did your friend find anything?”
“The boy was sighted in Parkdale, near where I first found him. We tracked him as far as the subway, but that was all.” Maksim hunched one shoulder and winced, but Lissa couldn’t tell if it was at a memory or at a physical pain. “Did you?” he asked.
“You mean, did I find anything? About Baba’s spell?” Lissa turned away to shut off the electricity and light the candles. She’d thought about it a number of times in the past week and had changed her conclusion each time. “Some,” was what she said now. “Maksim … I think it was against the law. Our witches’ Law, I mean.”
He looked up sharply from beneath his cap.
“It’s not any of the regular spells. I’ve figured out that much for sure,” Lissa went on. “For one thing, all the regular ones are impermanent—you have to take frequent doses. They’re almost all in fresh eggs, like the ones I give you. For more permanent spells, you have to do other things. Bindings with blood or hair. Sometimes there are eggs in those too. Ever hear the story of Koshchei the Deathless, who hid his life in an egg?”
“Koshchei the Deathless,” Maksim said, pronouncing it in a way that let Lissa know she hadn’t quite got it right. “I remember.”
“Well, he was evil,” Lissa said. “And eventually, some prince broke the egg, and then he wasn’t deathless anymore. The point is, there’s a price for the kind of magic that pushes natural laws too far. Until now, I believed my grandmother always followed the rules. I know she wouldn’t have broken them unless it meant a lot to her.”
“She owed me a great debt,” Maksim said, raising his brows. “Perhaps it was great enough to cover such a thing.” He slid off the stool and paced unevenly across the kitchen, still favoring one leg. “I did not know what I asked of her, though.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t know, either. I mean, I know there’s a price, whether or not you get caught; but it depends on what you’ve done, and I still haven’t figured out all of it.”
“She was good,” Maksim said, pacing back. “A good person.”
“I know.”
“I do not like to drag good people into my dealings.”
Lissa sighed. “D’you think she would have done it, whatever it was, if it was really bad?”
Maksim pressed a fist against his forehead over the brim of his cap. He went to the window, where his breath troubled a candle flame. “I wish I could think. I wish I could sleep.”
“You will once the eggs are done. Want a drink or anything? I’m ready to get started.”
All Lissa could find in the cupboard was gin, but Maksim accepted it gratefully, and he sat on the floor in the corner with his bad leg outstretched while Lissa began her work.
She didn’t have milk from a human mother this time; it wasn’t the kind of thing you could just pick up. Instead, she substituted fresh, unpasteurized goat’s milk from the Tuesday night farmers’ market, where she’d managed to converse with the farmer while Stella lingered over a selection of honeycombs. She worked quickly, consulting the grimoire, determined to get it this time. The memory of last month’s imperfect working was still fresh. If anything, this time her concentration was aided by the presence of Maksim, who trusted her. He made no sound except for the occasional breath and the tilt of liquid in glass.
Sometime after midnight, he rose quietly and left the room. Lissa barely noticed. She was finger-painting eggs by then, hastily, for the power in the mixture only lasted the length of the night it was brewed, and there were quite a few eggs to get through.
The front door opened and closed.
Two hours later, or thereabouts, it opened and closed again, but Maksim did not return to the kitchen. He went upstairs and turned on the water.
The next time Lissa thought of him, she was closing the last carton. The mixing bowl was empty but for a few lavender smears, and she set it in the sink, too tired to wash up. When she turned on the tap to rinse it, the water pressure was low, and it came to her that she could hear the shower still going upstairs. She thought it had been running for a long time.
She took the final carton in her hands as she hurried upstairs.
The bathroom door stood ajar an inch. She knocked and pushed it farther inward. The air from the room felt strangely chilly.
“Maksim?”
A shuddering, indrawn breath; in the near-darkness, Lissa could see the pale shower curtain shifting in the breeze from the open door.
“Maksim? Are you okay? The eggs are done.”
“Koldun’ia,” he said. “Thank God.” He drew the curtain back. He sat in the bathtub, fully clothed, visible by the white T-shirt pasted to him like papier-mâché. Water broke on his head, his shoulders, sending chilly spray all the way to where Lissa stood.
Maksim leaned out from the water, reaching.
“Turn that off,” she said, and he did. “Aren’t you freezing?”
He nodded. He beckoned. Lissa gave him the egg carton.
“Shouldn’t you get yourself dry?”
Maksim cracked two eggs in quick succession and sucked them from the shells. “Thank you,” he said, slouching back against the shower wall.
“You’re shivering, Maksim.”
“I think you turned off the hot water,” he said, closing his eyes. His mouth fell open, and his hand relaxed, letting the eggshells fall.
The eggs had turned out stronger, then. That was a relief, even if it did present her with a new problem.
“Don’t go to sleep there. I mean it. Come on, that’s it. Eyes open.”
Lissa went to fetch him a towel and herself a candle to see by. She came back to find Maksim out of the shower, hunched on the bath mat, with his T-shirt off and his arms wrapped around his knees. Water puddled from the cuffs of his jeans. Eggshell fragments decorated the top of one foot.
Lissa draped the towel over his shoulders. “I don’t have any pants for you.”
He made no move to hang on to the towel, which slipped off one shoulder.
“God,” Lissa said. “How do you survive in the wild?”
“It is easier when there is a war,” he murmured. “No one notices the things I do.”
With some assistance from the towel rack, Maksim managed to get to his feet.
“Can you handle the stairs?”
He shook his head and leaned over into the wall.
Lissa gritted her teeth. Why hadn’t she thought to warn him to start with a single egg? “This way,” she said, and she led him toward her own room.
Maksim limped and shuffled and left a trail of water on the hallway carpet. Lissa helped him to prop himself against the door frame, and she gathered up her pillow and sleepwear and hairbrush.
“The bed’s there,” she said. “Take off your wet pants before you get in it, or so help me, I’ll … I don’t know, I’ll do something witchy to you. I’m too damned tired for this. Next time, you’re putting yourself to bed. Somewhere else.”
“I am sorry,” he whispered. “I am a sorry creature.” He pressed his fist to his forehead. His eyelids were swollen.
“Stella’s coming back on the two o’clock train. If you’re not up by eleven, I’m going to wake you. And you’re going to help me tidy the house.”
He nodded again and twitched a hand at her.
Lissa left him and went to the bathroom, where the floor was awash in cold water and Maksim’s T-shirt lay in a sodden grayish wad in the bottom of the tub.
She did nothing with it. She brushed her teeth and went downstairs to put the fresh cartons of eggs in the refrigerator, and finally, she could retreat to the front room and drop into the armchair by the window.
The doll, in its wrap within her bag, looked like its hair was getting a little matted, but the eyes still worked; they blinked open and shut when she took it out and set it upon the windowsill.
She offered it a crumbled slice of heavy rye bread and a pinch of salt.
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.
“I’ve had a month to think about it this time,” Lissa said. “I won’t ask anything stupid.”
“Vnuchka, you have never been stupid,” Baba said from wherever she was: cold and old and far.
“What are the kin? It’s nothing to do with our family at all, is it?”
“Cursed with a hunger for violence. Blessed with long and hale lives,” Baba said.
Lissa waited, but this seemed to be the whole of the answer.
“Are they evil?” she asked next.
“Are you?” Baba said.
“Come on,” Lissa said after a moment. “That can’t be all you have to say about evil. Evil’s a big topic.”
“You might answer my question for yourself and see what comes of it,” Baba said.
“Fine. Okay. I’m not evil by nature. I guess that means the kin aren’t, either. But the way Maksim’s acting about this guy—the guy he might have, whatever it is, infected? He seems to think it’s the end of the guy’s life. If being kin isn’t evil, why is it such a bad thing—never mind. Don’t answer that! That’s not my question!”
Baba laughed. The laugh was not comfortable. Lissa physically cringed from it, in fact, and shivered in the warm night air.
“What new-moon ritual did you do for him?” she blurted. “I’m sure you did. He needs it again. It went away when you … when you…”
“When I died,” Baba said. “I am sorry I could not make it permanent. I liked to see him happy.”
“Then tell me what you did to make him that way.”
So Baba told her. Lissa wrote it all down in the faint light from the window: egg, ink, black wax, rusty nail. Spit. Blood. Three nights leading up to the new moon. The words she must speak, and the shapes she must inscribe upon the shell of the egg.
“Place it within a casket, and bury it where it will not be disturbed,” Baba finished. “But—”
“But?” Lissa said. “I know this one’s against the rules. What’s the price?”
The price counted as a separate question, apparently. Baba did not answer, and the place in Lissa’s brain was comfortless and empty once more.
Lissa folded up her notebook and placed it and the doll back in her bag. She turned the power back on, listening to the refrigerator hum to life, but she didn’t bother to switch on any lights, using the candle to light her way back to the front room. She did not want to lie on the sofa, which was Stella’s bed, still. Instead, she sat in her chair again, sliding down a bit against the cushions.
By the time her eyes fell shut, the room was gray with dawn, the birds outside had begun to chat, and the air was already warm. She turned her face against the high chair back and covered her eyes with the tumbled mass of her hair.
MAY 26
WANING GIBBOUS
“There’s a gin bottle on the front steps,” Stella sang out. “Oh! And you’re in the armchair. You haven’t been on a bender, have you, Lissa?”
Lissa rubbed her eyes. They felt crusted and swollen. “What time is it?”
“Ten,” said Stella. “I know—ungodly, right? I’ve had a ghastly night, and I escaped as soon as I possibly could. And I want to know about your night.”
Lissa sat up slowly. She could think of nothing at all to say.
“Bit the worse for wear?” Stella said. “I’ll make some coffee, and you can tell me all about it. And you will tell me.”
Lissa stumbled after her into the kitchen. The eggs and the grimoire she had put away, but the lavender-stained mixing bowl rested in the sink, with an inch of scummy water in it, and the shoe box of baby-food jars sat in plain sight beside the refrigerator.
“Cooking up a frenzy, I see,” was all Stella said as she bustled about, putting on the kettle and measuring coffee into the grinder. “I’ve just had the unforgettable experience of seeing an entire high school football team share a bad acid trip,” she confided. “One of them was a bit sweet and told me he was gay and he’d never come out to anyone before. The others were animals.”
“What brought this on?”
“Anne’s sister is a cheerleader,” Stella said. “Anne told me their parents were out of town. She didn’t happen to mention there was a party on. Good God, your Canadian kids can drink.”
“Can they?” Lissa said.
Stella paused at the stove. “Are you all right? You look a bit peaky.”
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“Might have something to do with being in the armchair.”
While Stella fussed with the coffee, Lissa had a few minutes to think of what to say to her and how to either explain Maksim away or, preferably, get rid of him completely, eggs and all, before he could invite unwelcome questions.
But the scent of brewing dark roast undid all that. Before Lissa had anything like a reasonable idea, she heard the floorboards creak upstairs, and Maksim shambled into the kitchen, shirtless and scarred and clothed in st
ill-damp jeans.
He stopped when he caught sight of Stella. “I smelled coffee,” he said apologetically. “I will go now.”
Lissa sighed. “Now that you’re up, you might as well stay for breakfast. Stella, this is Maksim Volkov. Maksim, my stepsister, Stella. Be very polite to her, or I’ll make your life hell somehow.”
“My life is already hell somehow,” Maksim said, unsmiling.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet one of Lissa’s friends,” Stella said, extending her hand. “How do you know each other?”
“Church—” Lissa began.
“I knew koldun’ia Iadviga,” Maksim said and shook his head. “And somehow, I think I have not said until just now how sorry I am for your loss.”
Lissa dissolved into unexpected tears, groped wildly for a napkin, and spilled her coffee all over the table.
By the time Lissa had located the napkin, smoothed her damp hair back from her face, and wiped up the coffee, Maksim was gone, and with him, two cartons of eggs from the refrigerator, although the wet T-shirt still lay in the bathtub.
Stella had made herself scarce when the crying started. Lissa found her in the front room, hunched over her phone.
“Your friend owns a boxing gym?” she said. “Now I know why he looks like that. Wow.”
“Were you just…”
“Googling him? Yep. Haven’t you? Or … maybe you’re just not curious.” Stella rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. He’s too old for me, right?”
Lissa choked on a hysterical laugh. “Definitely.”
“What about you? Is he your lifelong crush or something? Is that why you’ve been taking it so slow with Rafe? No, you didn’t look at him like that—and he said that thing about your grandmother … okay, no, wait … I know! Russian Mafia! What’s it called again? That’s why you didn’t want me to meet him—and come on, boxing and organized crime always go together.”
“Russian Mafia?” Lissa said. “Seriously?”
“Okay, you don’t have to make me feel mental just because I don’t know about organized crime. Just tell me.”
“He’s…” Lissa said.
She swallowed. Whatever she said now, Stella would remember it. There was no getting rid of Stella; it was too late for that. Maybe out of the house, maybe even out of Canada for the moment, but not forever. Lissa was going to be on the hook for this lie for the rest of her life.
Spells of Blood and Kin Page 16
