Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  “Does it?” Lissa said. “Suck, I mean?”

  “The vampire stepfamily?” Stella looked startled. “I know, I know, not really family, not really vampires. But come on—of course it doesn’t suck. It’s like finding out there’s really a Saint Nicholas.”

  “But there was really a Saint Nicholas. In history. Wasn’t there?”

  “Whatever. The point is, magic’s real, and people can have superpowers.”

  “Superpowers they want to get rid of,” Lissa reminded her.

  “I meant you, idiot.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you’re going to show me, right? How you do the magic?”

  Lissa shut her eyes. She had already had her three questions of Baba for the month, and none of them had touched upon this.

  Though she couldn’t quite see how showing Stella the magic could make anything worse. That part was safe enough—came with rules and guidebooks. No. The things she really wanted to keep from Stella were already out there, and she had a dismal feeling that Stella wasn’t taking them seriously.

  “That shirt,” she said, her mouth dry. “You’ll have to change it for something that doesn’t have ties or hooks. And your hair, leave it down. And turn off the lights upstairs on your way back. We’ll work in the kitchen.”

  “Right now?” Stella asked, eyes huge.

  “It’s the second night after the full moon,” Lissa said. “We have three days for our workings. That’s the first rule.”

  “Oh my God. I’m going to learn the rules of magic. Look out, Hogwarts, here I come.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you have Harry Potter in Canada? Never mind—it’s a book. I’ll lend you mine if I can get Mummy to mail it to me.”

  “Slow down,” Lissa said, fighting laughter. “I promise you won’t think it’s very cool once you see it. It’s like cooking, only even more boring.”

  Stella embraced her, squeezing tight. “It’s going to be perfect.” She ran for the stairs, almost skipping.

  Lissa put their glasses in the sink, biting her lip on the fear that Baba was going to be furious.

  But Baba was not here, and she had left this to Lissa, and Lissa would have to leave it to someone too, wouldn’t she? And Stella liked it, liked her. Wasn’t slamming the door like Dad had done.

  “I’m ready,” Stella said, sliding into the kitchen, barefoot and braless in a loose T-shirt. “What are we going to do?”

  Lissa stood on the step stool to fetch down the grimoire she wanted. “A remedy,” she said. “Most of it is stuff like this. This one’s for Izabela Dmitreeva, who’s one of our best customers.”

  “What kind of a remedy? Is she sick?”

  “It’s for fertility,” Lissa said.

  “Does it actually work?” Stella said.

  If I get it right this time, Lissa didn’t say. “It would probably work better if she and her husband didn’t live with her husband’s mother.”

  Once she and Stella had the giggles forced back down, they faced each other over the kitchen countertop and the array of grimoires and ingredients and a stack of egg cartons.

  “So like I said, it’s basically cooking,” she said. “Only a bit weirder. Think of it like cooking Communion wafers or something.”

  “I’m Anglican,” Stella said.

  “I don’t know how they’re made, actually. I was trying to prepare you for the part where I have to … sort of pray over them.”

  “Seriously?”

  Lissa covered her eyes. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  “No. No. You know what’s embarrassing? I didn’t know you had your own money in Canada. I thought I could use regular money from home. That’s embarrassing. Saying magic words? That’s just quaint and unusual.”

  Stella gamely held each egg and dabbed it with paste and then passed it to Lissa, who muttered over it in as unintelligible a manner as she could manage.

  “Dad must know you’re into this, right? I mean, didn’t he used to live here too? Only I don’t remember him ever saying anything about witchcraft, and that’s not the kind of thing you forget,” Stella said as she piled Lissa’s grimoires in an untidy stack at the end of the counter and swept around them with a damp cloth.

  Lissa bit the inside of her lip. “He’s not totally cool with it,” she said.

  “But it’s obviously good witchcraft,” Stella said.

  “There’s a word for it,” Lissa said. “For a witch who works with eggs, I mean. We’re called kolduny. It just means ‘sorcerer,’ basically. If you meet some of the people from church, you might hear them call me koldun’ia.”

  “Yeah. Maksim said that too. I remember.”

  “Anyway, Dad … it wasn’t his heritage, you know? Good, bad—didn’t matter. He didn’t want Baba teaching me. He won’t like it if he knows that you’re involved.”

  “Then we just won’t tell him, will we?” Stella said brightly.

  Lissa shelved the stacked grimoires in a high cupboard and turned back to Stella, who was setting the last batch of eggs carefully in their carton. “Thanks,” she said. “For your help. Do you want to come with me later this week when I drop them off?”

  “Gah!” said Stella, fumbling an egg.

  “Okay, I guess that can wait. The church ladies will be scandalized anyway. They’ll think it’s all wrong that you’re not my full sister.”

  “Look what I did,” Stella said mournfully, pointing at the mess on the floor.

  “Don’t get that on your hand,” Lissa said.

  Stella jerked her hand back. “I could be fertile just by touching it? Well, I guess it makes sense, if you have to have them all the time. There’s only so many fried eggs a person can eat, anyway.”

  “Raw,” Lissa said.

  Stella shuddered, gingerly wiping up broken yolk with a paper towel. “Now I get why you were laughing.”

  “Welcome to the glamorous world of real magic.”

  “Shut up, or I’ll give you fertility,” Stella said, brandishing the paper towel. “Oh my God. I just figured out why you’re so weird about dating Rafe. How do you come out as a witch?”

  “I told him my hobby was Russian folklore,” Lissa admitted. “You know, in case he’s ever curious about my books.”

  “That’s … not bad. He might buy it. As long as you can persuade your freak friends not to drink blood in front of him.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Aww. You told me to shut up,” Stella said, grinning. “It’s like we’re real sisters now.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Lissa said, more honestly than she’d meant.

  “It means I pester you to include me in everything, and you try to get rid of me, and you can’t; if anyone hurts me, you threaten them with something awful; we cry at each other’s weddings; we steal each other’s clothes—”

  “Wait. Have you seen my blue camisole top?”

  “We watch Pride and Prejudice together; we eat ice cream together when one of us has boy troubles—”

  “That’s like the Hallmark version of sisterhood,” Lissa protested.

  “Well, I’ve never had one, either.”

  “Make it up as we go along?”

  “Make it up as we go along.”

  MAY 27

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Nick woke.

  Blood-warm night air, rich with blossom scent, wafted in from the balcony. Indoors, everything smelled of Maksim. Nick wanted to run outside; he wanted to jerk himself off all over Maksim’s furniture; he wanted the others to wake up and drink with him; he wanted Jonathan, all at once, very badly, and then he wanted to punch a hole in the wall.

  He did that. His hand smarted, and he sucked on the knuckles. Around the fresh scrapes were the scabs of other scrapes, and he thought he remembered licking those clean as well.

  No one woke; no one scolded him.

  No one was in the apartment with him. He rolled to his feet and stood still. Maksim’s bed was empty but for a twisted s
heet; the sofa where Gus had been was in darkness, but Nick could tell from the lack of scent that she was not there.

  Nick padded out to the balcony. Green pallor in the east told him dawn was an hour off; far down Dundas, a streetcar swam heavily away, trailing sparks.

  He shut his eyes. The scent of Maksim’s blood was out here too, some old and some new. And liquor sweat, though some of that was Nick’s own.

  And voices: hoarse and hushed. One of them might have been saying Nick’s name.

  He rested his elbows on flaking iron and leaned over.

  They weren’t talking about him at all.

  “Outside of Durban,” Gus was saying. “Haven’t been there in a dog’s age.”

  “It might be best,” said Maksim.

  “Not until you’re ready, though. Right now, you need a minder.”

  “I need to mind myself.”

  “And I’m here to make sure you do,” Gus said.

  “I wish you would leave.”

  Gus did not answer, or if she did, Nick, above, could not hear.

  “Sometimes,” said Maksim, “I catch myself wishing for war.”

  Gus made a sound, a laugh or something else. Then a door, opening; a confusion of footsteps. Nick hurried to lie back down.

  In the morning, when he woke again, Gus was out. Nick did not ask Maksim, and Maksim said nothing.

  Maksim ate raw eggs cracked from the shell and went back to sleep.

  Nick took a twenty from the bedside table and wandered out to Dundas Street to find a Starbucks.

  He sat over his coffee like a regular person, browsing the headlines in the paper. Wishing for war. He wouldn’t have to look far, if war was what he wanted: Sudan, Afghanistan, Chechnya. He wondered why Maksim was here instead of out there.

  Gus was into war too; Nick remembered her saying as much.

  Yet here they were, both she and Maksim, fucking about in Toronto the Good, where a black eye earned stares on the street.

  Crazy. Clearly someone was—and maybe, in fact, it wasn’t Nick.

  After his coffee, he went for a walk, which just happened to take him past the witch’s house. Nick stood on the sidewalk, not quite bold enough to go closer. Were the witch and her sister at home? He thought he could smell them, a softer, sweeter scent than before, like fresh sheets or baking bread. A homelike scent. Maybe they were cooking. Maybe they were sleeping late.

  He kept walking.

  MAY 28

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Maksim kept returning to the pyre. The splintered planks and the reek of kerosene. The ear.

  He had managed not to think about it for thirty years. Thirty years: a long time in a human life. Not long enough in Maksim’s life.

  The ear. The feel of it under the toe of his boot.

  He did not want to be there again.

  His reverie was broken by a chilly touch upon his lips. He reared away.

  A spoon clattered on the floor. “Damn it, Maks,” Gus said wearily.

  Maksim opened his eyes. “I thought it was something dead.”

  “It is,” she said. “Dead cow, with vegetables. I took it out of the can all by myself.” She retrieved the spoon, wiped it off, and stuck it back in the bowl. “Remember what to do with this?”

  Maksim took the bowl and propped it on his knee and, with his good hand, stirred the gelatinous brown mess and then lifted it to his nose. The stuff smelled chemical.

  Gus read it on his face. “I can shove it down your throat,” she said.

  Maksim shrugged his good shoulder. “I would like an egg.”

  “They’re not good for you.” She gestured at his cast, at the cracking scabs down the right side of his body.

  Maksim’s last egg had been long enough ago now that the haze of it had mostly lifted, leaving physical pain and bleak confusion. He wanted to ask Gus if the witch had said anything more about the spell he needed; he could not remember for himself, although it was so important. The last few days were a series of blurry tableaus, silent film stills, nothing at all in the soundtrack.

  “Stay awake for a while,” Gus said. “Talk to me.”

  She nudged him with her hip, and he curled his body to make space; he was on the sofa, though he thought he recalled putting himself to bed.

  “I wish you would leave,” he said.

  Maybe he had said it before, for Gus sighed. “Nope.”

  “Then give me an egg. Do not anger me. I am afraid I will hurt you.”

  She snorted. “With one hand? Not bloody likely. Besides, you’re not in top form just now.”

  “I was not then, either,” Maksim said.

  “When?”

  He shook his head.

  “When, Maks?”

  “I hurt someone I did not wish to hurt.”

  “As is our nature to do, Maksim.”

  “This was worse.”

  Gus turned an inquiring gaze to him.

  She’d done things, her look said—knowing and cool and sad. She was his. She could not be shocked.

  She was his, and she should not be here, and the surest way to drive her off would be to tell her the story. And still, he could not bear for her to know it.

  He buried his face in the crook of his arm. Tried to think of something else. Failed.

  MAY 28

  WANING GIBBOUS

  The apartment was nearly dark, just after sunset. Nick let himself in. He stepped on something just inside the door, which crunched wetly.

  “Gross,” he said.

  Flame kindled in the center of the room and touched the wick of a candle.

  “You came back,” Maksim said.

  “Um. Yeah. No place else to go right now.”

  “But you went.”

  “Just … out. Read the paper, hung out in the Market, went to a pub, that kind of thing,” Nick said, wiping egg from his sandal. “Should I have left a note or something?”

  “You’ve been fighting,” Maksim said. “Show me.”

  Nick came and knelt by the candle, tilting his face to show the split over his cheekbone. He was reminded strongly of the night all this had begun. He trembled very slightly under the touch of Maksim’s fingertip and less slightly under the rasp of Maksim’s tongue.

  “You must be very careful with your blood,” Maksim said. “You can infect others if you are not.”

  “It didn’t bleed much at all.”

  Maksim waited, sitting back on the sofa with one hand open and relaxed upon his knee and the other, the bandaged one, curled over his stomach.

  “Some people in an alley,” Nick said. “They were giving a hundred bucks to anyone who would challenge this one guy. He’d already taken down two other guys. He was a huge motherfucker, so I thought he’d be interesting. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “So I took the hundred. I think it’s a frequent gig, this thing. They had tape for my hands and everything. Maybe fifty people watching. Long odds on me,” Nick said, and he felt mad laughter bubbling up. He’d been small as a kid. Avoided the neighborhood bully—played soccer rather than hockey. Couldn’t remember if he’d ever hit anyone in real rage in all his life before now.

  Oh. Wait.

  The knuckle he’d split on Jonathan’s face hadn’t even finished healing, and what the fuck kind of best friend could do that and then forget about it? Even for a second?

  “You like it,” Maksim was saying.

  “No. What kind of freak likes getting off on hurting other people? I mean, I do, but I don’t want to…”

  “You like the life.”

  “My other life was full of shit, to be honest. I couldn’t seem to get through it without a whole lot of booze.”

  “I still can’t,” Gus mumbled, rolling out of Maksim’s bed and padding into the room. Her plain white tank top was twisted around her body. She sat on the floor beside Nick and drank water from a cracked cup.

  “That’s what I mean,” Nick said. “I like being tougher and everything, but I still have to
figure out what to do with myself, right?”

  “If you could see yourself now,” Maksim said, reaching out and touching Nick’s cheek again and a lock of his hair. “You are like an angel.”

  Nick lurched back. “I don’t want that.”

  “It is not that,” Maksim said. “It is as if I gave you wings of wax. The fault is mine, but you will find your way to your own ruin.”

  Nick had no idea what to say to that.

  “Come here,” Maksim said. “Sit. Lay your head down. Be still if you can.”

  Nick obeyed. He was still for a while, and Maksim stroked his hair, and the candle flame flickered.

  Outside, someone argued in Portuguese, and someone drove by with the Gorillaz on the car stereo. Nick felt the restlessness rise in his limbs, slowly but inexorably.

  “Before the new moon,” Maksim said, “the witch will have to make a choice.”

  But he did not say what the choice was. Maksim sat, dreaming, and his hand moved more slowly until Nick could not bear it anymore and bolted up.

  Gus gave him a significant look, but whatever she meant was lost on him.

  In a moment, Nick got his reactions under his control again, and though he was breathing heavily, he managed to shake his hair back from his face and go to the refrigerator for a cold glass of water.

  “Go,” said Gus. “Here, take some money. Go pick up some more beer or something.”

  “Okay, I can do that,” Nick said. “I’ll be back. In a bit.”

  Nick opened the last two bottles of pilsner for them before leaving and descended the stairs while Gus sang a song about Spanish ladies.

  He would come back. He wanted to come back, even. Not right away, though, and not forever.

  MAY 30

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Stella danced through the pub with even more than her usual brio. Rafe watched her for a second, eyebrow up, and said to Lissa, “Like a five-year-old who’s got into the jelly beans. What did you do to our kid?”

  “Our kid?”

  “Well, sure. You’re the big sister, I’m the boss; she’s our kid.”