“Her voice was all shot.”
“She prayed for a long time,” Maksim said; he was not sure how long, but he had a recollection of the husking whisper continuing in a long broken stream while he sat, struggling slowly and dumbly with himself, at the bottom of a sticky well.
Stella frowned. “I just don’t know enough about this yet. But it seemed like the other ones only took a moment.”
“The other eggs were only to give sleep for a few hours. This one was to bind a piece of my soul.”
He’d meant it figuratively, but it sounded right, now that he said it. The dark piece of his soul matched with the black-stained egg.
“That sounds a bit sinister,” Stella said, shivering a little. “Lord, why’s it cold in here? It’s going to be ninety degrees again by noon.”
“You are tired,” Maksim said. “You waited up all night. Go, rest. It is enough for now.”
He spoke to her as he would to a fellow soldier, and she must have taken the tone correctly, for she straightened and nodded and rose easily.
She stopped and leaned toward the window, though.
“Gus,” she said, and both of them stepped quietly to the front door.
Gus stood on the front walk. She had taken a bit of care with herself, Maksim saw: clean, damp hair curling in the warming dawn, two layers of white tank top, bare shoulders dotted with freckles and old scars. He could see her nostrils pinching. If she’d been an animal, her ears would have been laid flat. He realized she did not want to approach any closer to the house.
“Come out to me,” she said, voice pitched low.
Maksim did. The sun warmed his bare skin; dew lay heavy on the grass. Gus stood very still until he was within reach, and then she embraced him tight, strong arms about his shoulders, cheek against his.
He felt her look up over his shoulder after a minute and draw breath to speak, but she said nothing.
She let him go then. “Are you ready to come home?”
“I promised to tidy the kitchen. Come inside.”
She glanced at Stella on the porch.
“Come,” said Stella. “I think there’s still tea.”
Gus came, though Maksim could see how much it bothered her. She took her tea black and stood in a corner while Maksim balled up his soaked and stained T-shirt and put it in the trash and wiped the bacon pan.
Stella tidied away the fruit peels and toast crumbs and stacked the dishes beside the sink. She kept looking at Gus, quick flashes of her long-lashed eyes. Finally, she said, “You’re his sister. Right?”
Gus barked out a laugh. “Close enough.” She grinned at Maksim, daring him to offer a different word.
He did not. He was the elder by a century, give or take, but not by enough to gainsay her, not any longer.
JUNE 9
WAXING CRESCENT
The night after the new moon, Lissa went to bed very early.
She’d fallen asleep in front of the television with a glass of water in her hand and only realized when it slipped to the floor and spilled. She left it there.
With Stella out at work, she hadn’t bothered to make dinner. Her stomach felt tight and hollow; she only gulped more water and crawled between her sheets.
She dreamed of a mass grave in Greenland. She’d seen it in National Geographic, maybe, when she was a child.
The grave contained bodies preserved by the ice: several adults and a baby. The baby had been wrapped in a shield of hides, securing it to a carrying frame, as its mother or father would have used to tote it around in life. The baby’s skin and hair, the wool of its swaddling, had all been tanned by the earth to the same palette of browns as the wrapping of hides.
The mouth, gaping open, showed a single brown tooth. The eyes had withered away, leaving empty sockets.
Lissa knew exactly how the baby felt.
She woke with her mouth open on a soundless howl. Her voice had worsened. She could not make a sound at all.
The thin cotton of her sheet rasped her skin as she turned over. The air in her room had gone cold and flat while she slept. She groped for the water glass on her bedside table.
Empty, and her throat ached.
She sat up, knuckling at her eyes. Without her sheet, the cold bit deep. She reached for the switch of her lamp.
No power. The room stayed dark.
It was still on her, the feeling of the dream. Dread and despair. She snatched her hand back from the lightless lamp and huddled as close to the center of her bed as she could get.
In the dimness, the shape of her doll, lying on the bedside chair, reminded her of the mummified baby. And of the chill in Baba’s voice, when she spoke, from wherever she was now.
Wherever she was, Lissa would be there too, eventually. Maybe it was the price. She’d made a binding at the dark of the moon. How had she thought this could ever be forgiven?
Then the clock ticked over.
Outside, a bird called.
Lissa raised her head. Warmer air breathed in through the window.
Beside her, the bedside lamp bloomed to light.
“Holy shit,” Lissa croaked.
Her face was smeared with tears and snot, her hair pasted to it. She put on a light nightgown and went to the bathroom to wash. In the mirror, under the fluorescent light, she looked puffy and too pink; she could not meet her own eyes.
The wrongness had left her, whatever it was; but she felt the bruise of it still. She wished Stella was home and was then violently thankful she was not. Lissa was afraid to go back into her bedroom.
She ended up drawing a bath and fell asleep in the warm water, with her head propped up by an inflatable neck pillow.
She woke up chilly again, but only because the water had cooled around her; and downstairs, she heard Stella’s key in the lock.
“This house smells funny at night,” Stella said when Lissa came down, hair wrapped in a towel.
“Does it?”
“Like a cave,” Stella said. “You know. Stone and cold water.”
Lissa’s skin prickled.
“What are you doing up, anyway? You look like the dog’s breakfast, quite frankly,” Stella continued. “Why don’t I make you some tea?”
Eleven
JUNE 9
WAXING CRESCENT
On the first day, they built bookshelves. Gus proved to be handy.
Nick was not, but he liked carrying lumber; he ferried over several loads of it from the nearby shop, delighting in the chance to use his strength. He sawed where Gus measured; he did the coarse sanding.
Maksim cleaned up the wreckage of the previous shelves and the books they’d held. He smoothed bent covers, taped torn pages, arranged titles spined alphabetically across the bedroom floor.
Around nightfall, Gus brushed sawdust from her jeans and stood back. “Not half bad,” she said.
She helped Maksim carry the books in. Shelved, they covered up the scars in the plaster where Maksim had hammered the wall with broken chair legs—or Nick with his fists.
On the second day, they cleaned.
Nick swept up the sawdust and then vacuumed. He swept the balcony and washed off the albumen stains of two broken eggs. Then he took everything out of the refrigerator and washed the inside of it.
He threw away the rest of the eggs, but he figured the mustard and beets were okay, and he knew he and Gus would drink the beer, even if Maksim didn’t.
He cleaned the kitchen cupboards. He mopped the floor and then dried it.
When he looked up from buffing, he saw Maksim and Gus sitting on the balcony outside. Not helping. Bristling, he approached.
“—until you figure out what to do with him,” Gus was saying.
“It is not up to me,” Maksim said. “I wish it was.”
“And? I don’t remember you giving me much of a choice about leaving Cadiz.”
“It was not the same. Those days were not the same.”
“Because I was a girl, you mean.”
“Yes: a gir
l in a country of men, in an age of men.”
Gus scrubbed her fists through her hair. “I don’t know why I’m fucking arguing with you. I have to go.”
“Augusta…”
“You don’t need me right now.” She pushed past Nick, boots heavy on the hardwood.
“Hey,” Nick said.
“Christ, will you shut up?” Gus said, pausing at the door, her hand clenched on the upright of one of the new shelves.
“I was just wondering if—”
“No,” she said, and she cast down the shelf.
Nick flinched back. Books cascaded. Nails shrieked in the wood.
Gus’s boot heels drummed down the outer stairs. The door banged open and shut.
Maksim sighed. “Will you help me clean up?”
“I have been. All day, in case you didn’t notice,” Nick said. “And it’s not really what I pictured doing with my superpowers, so far.”
He kicked a tumble of books out of his way and stormed out. He thought about following Gus, but her scent led toward the park, and Nick was tired of sitting around drinking out of paper bags like a street person, and so he went the other way.
He heard Maksim calling him from the balcony. He kept running.
JUNE 10
WAXING CRESCENT
On the following night, Stella did not have to work. She went out for a while and came back with a grocery bag bristling with frisée and baby lettuce.
“I’ve got the makings of a great big salad,” she said. “And a bottle of pinot grigio. I thought we could have a nice night in.”
“Sure,” Lissa said.
“I thought we could watch a chick flick.”
“Okay.”
“Throat still sore? I can do a soup, if you’d rather.”
“Salad sounds good,” said Lissa.
“For real? Because you don’t sound very excited,” Stella said, taking her head out of the refrigerator.
“I didn’t sleep well,” Lissa admitted.
Stella hugged her. “I know. That’s what gave me the idea. We’ll have a sleepover in the living room, you and me. Braid each other’s hair, watch our film, have our wine. Just the thing.”
The movie was about an editorial assistant at a fashion magazine in New York, and Stella seemed to find it hilarious. Lissa sprawled on the sofa and drank the pinot grigio and fell asleep while Stella was still sectioning her hair into tiny braids.
It did not help, though.
At the appointed hour, the cold came over her, and she woke gasping.
She reached out to rouse Stella, in a panic, but her hand stopped just short.
Lissa had broken Law; she had fraternized with evil. Maksim had blood on his hands. She had not even taken the time to find out what he’d done. Maybe she should have let him kill himself.
She had not seen, until now, that he’d meant exactly that when he said he should go before the ritual, but it was so clear now—he’d meant to go to the subway and throw himself on the track, and instead of letting him make his amends, she’d done a very wrong thing.
And after, she’d shared food with him. She’d let Stella share food with him. Stella would never shake it now, the wrong like a cancer infecting her house and her family and following her even back over the sea. And Lissa … she’d been wrong since childhood, wrong since Mama was ill, and she had been too small to help. People who needed Lissa would always be disappointed.
She might as well take her punishment.
She snatched her hand back and bit down on it and lay in silent terror until the hour passed.
JUNE 11
WAXING CRESCENT
Almost three weeks since he’d taken off. The air smelled flat and dusty when he got the door open. A piece of paper lay half-crumpled on the mat: a testy note from his landlord, inquiring about the June rent. Nick tore it in half and dropped it back on the floor.
He’d been three years in this apartment, and now he followed his old habits: dropping his keys on the table, toeing off his sandals, giving his heavy bag a quick pummeling, going to the refrigerator to uncap a beer, and then leaving a trail of sweaty clothes on the floor on his way to the shower.
The products in his shower smelled too strong to him now, but the water pressure had always been excellent. He stood under it and had a good wank, which had been a bit hard to accomplish lately, considering he was pretty sure Maksim and Gus would know if he did, and the idea of them knowing anything about his sex life was just fucking weird, like incest, and that was not a thought he wanted to be having while trying to get off, which meant he had to start over, thinking about Stella instead.
When he’d finished and thoroughly rinsed off the scented soap, Nick dried himself off with the cleanest-smelling towel he could find. He stared into the open dresser drawer: two stacks of folded T-shirts in dark, dull colors and a strip of expired condoms.
He opened the next one. Five pairs of cargo shorts and two pairs of pants. The informal uniform of every guy his age in Canada; in any country in the world, probably. He’d blend in the way he always had. He grabbed whatever was on top and got dressed.
He strode quickly to the kitchen and opened another beer. He could use his credit cards again, his bank card. No one would be monitoring them. Even if Jonathan had reported him, no one would pay so much attention to the perpetrator of a simple assault; and since Jonathan was fine, he probably wouldn’t have said anything to anyone at all.
Nick would be able to go wherever he wanted, so long as he could stand to get on the plane. Maybe he could ask a travel agent, find out flights with the fewest seats sold.
If he knew where he was going.
Someplace wild, he thought; someplace with fewer people and more space. Up north, maybe.
He rolled up his shorts and pants and some of the T-shirts and packed them into a duffel bag, along with extra socks and underwear and toothpaste. He did not pack any of the scented soaps or shampoos. He found a stack of maps left over from various summer holiday backpacking trips and added those and his passport.
He did not pack any of his books or his camera or his iPod or his PSP. He had not even thought about those things in the last three weeks.
He set the duffel bag by the door and looked around. On the table was a wide brown ceramic bowl given him by Hannah last Christmas; she’d filled it with clementines and pomegranates and told him someone needed to make sure he was getting his vitamins. After the fruit was gone, he’d mostly filled the bowl with overdue bills and unanswered family letters.
Now he ruffled his fingers through the paper, smelling the adhesive of stamps. He picked up the bowl and dumped out the mail on the tabletop. The ceramic felt chrome-smooth and faintly cool.
Nick raised it and brought it down hard on the table’s edge. The bowl split into five asymmetrical wedges, sharded with fractured glaze.
As a gesture, he thought it was perfect.
He wasn’t done smashing things, though, so he retrieved all the condiment jars from the refrigerator and broke them like eggs into the mess. He opened all the windows and tore out the screens to let the flies in. Then he shouldered his duffel and left.
JUNE 11
WAXING CRESCENT
“Does midsummer mean anything to us?” Stella asked.
“Us?” Lissa echoed.
“Witches.” Stella pointed to a page in the book she was reading. Lissa looked more closely. Witchcraft and Sorcery, it was called, and it looked to have come from the library.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not our kind, anyway.”
“It might help with my research if you told me what kind we were,” Stella said.
“What kind I am,” Lissa said. “Not you.”
She stood there looking at Stella’s face and hearing the echo of her own words in the heavy air.
“What I mean is—” she said.
“You’re right,” Stella said, snapping the book shut. “Thanks for reminding me you don’t actually want me around.”
She set the book very gently on the coffee table, picked up her bag, and walked out the front door.
Lissa waited. After a long time, she went out to the front porch, but Stella was not there. She could not remember whether Stella was working tonight, and she thought in any case it would be a bad idea to barge in on her at the Duke if she was upset.
And why should Stella be upset? She was pushing in. She and Lissa weren’t real sisters.
And who was a real sister if not a person who’d stay up with you, braiding your hair, while you tried to avoid nightmares?
They’d even started to fight like sisters, Lissa thought—at least she had—fixing on the thing she suspected would hurt Stella most.
She settled for leaving a message on Stella’s cell phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being a jerk. It has nothing to do with you, and I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.” She hesitated. “Love you.” And hung up.
Lissa cleaned the bathroom in penance, very thoroughly, taking a brush to the grout in the shower.
When the doorbell rang, she struggled up, dried her hands hurriedly, and ran downstairs to answer.
Maksim stood there under the porch light: clean-shaven, dressed in khakis and a T-shirt with the logo of his gym on it.
He looked rather shy as he held out a bundle of carmine-red alstroemeria. “Koldun’ia,” he said. “I did not thank you properly the other day.”
“That’s very sweet,” Lissa said.
He followed her inside, politely accepting her offer of a glass of wine.
“I suppose I am still not thanking you properly,” Maksim said, looking into his glass, “because I have come with a question. Can it be worked upon someone unwilling?”
Lissa blinked. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I thought you didn’t like it, what it does to you.”
“No,” he said simply. He shook his head and took a deep swallow of his wine, looking for a moment almost the way Lissa remembered from before.
Maksim set down the glass and looked at his hands. “It is not pleasant. It is a shackle, or a weight, and beneath it, I struggle sometimes.”
Spells of Blood and Kin Page 23
