Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  From the bedroom, Nick heard footsteps and a thump.

  The doorknob twisted on its short arc. Hannah: “Jonathan? What’s going on out there? Jonathan?”

  “He’s fine,” Nick said over his shoulder. “Be quiet.”

  “You’re scaring me,” Hannah said.

  “You’re scaring yourself,” he said. “I just came to talk.”

  “Nick,” she said, “I know you don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m not sure you’re feeling like yourself right now.”

  “Of course I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Nick said. “Unless someone wants to hurt me.”

  Jonathan twisted under him, jerked at his arm.

  “Don’t do that. You aren’t strong enough anymore,” Nick said. “That’s part of what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Nick, you need to let Jonathan talk to me,” Hannah said. “If he needs help, I’m going to have to call someone.”

  “Threats?” Nick said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  He let go of Jonathan and shouldered open the bedroom door.

  It came off the hinges and knocked Hannah off her feet. “Oops,” Nick said. “Didn’t mean to break it. Give me that.” He snatched the phone from her hand, turned it off, and threw it at the window; plastic pieces scattered, though the window glass remained whole.

  Hannah backed away, hands out.

  “Just stay in here. Shit, you’re not going to do that, are you? Come with me.” Nick took her wrist, dragged her into the living room, threw her down on the sofa beside Jonathan. “I’m trying to be nice here.”

  They didn’t speak. Nick looked at their faces, identically wide-eyed and blank.

  He clutched his own hair in frustration, squeezed his eyes shut. “Fuck!” he said. “You’re making this so much harder.”

  When he opened his eyes, Jonathan had his hand on another goddamn phone.

  Nick lunged, seized his arm, twisted.

  Jonathan came off the sofa, yelling, and dropped the phone. When Nick released him, he knelt on the floor, cradling his arm against his chest.

  “You should have listened!” Nick said. “I just wanted to talk.”

  Jonathan looked funny: sallow-faced, eyes too dark. Nick wondered if he was going to vomit.

  Hannah looked nearly as bad. But her eyes weren’t focused on Nick.

  Nick glanced over his shoulder.

  JUNE 12

  WAXING CRESCENT

  The sandals at the base of the wall were familiar. Maksim laid his face against the brick for a moment, and the scent there was clear.

  He untied his running shoes and removed his socks. This close and he wanted to slow down, wanted to turn back, almost. Wanted to walk back to his apartment and make coffee for Gus and tell her that Nick was gone. If Nick had any intelligence, he would be, after tonight.

  Maksim did not smell any blood, though. Not yet. He might still have a chance to keep Nick from shedding it.

  He cracked his knuckles and set his palms to the wall.

  Climbing proved awkward, with several of his fingers still stiff and the healing scabs down his side still cracking. He had never liked heights, either.

  He could hear nothing from within the building. Nick’s scent stopped abruptly. A thread of fabric caught in a cracked brick smelled of him, and then nothing.

  Maksim craned his head around. Above and to the left, the base of a balcony: Nick must have taken that route. Maksim hugged his weight close to the wall, pressed up on his toes, and swung up and out.

  The iron rail creaked when it took his weight. Even underweight, he was bigger than Nick. He clambered up hastily, tearing his shirt.

  Through the open door, a young woman watched him, open-mouthed—and before her Nick, poised and thrumming with violence.

  Maksim bulled in and took him.

  Nick had time to turn and inhale. Maksim caught him by the throat and squeezed.

  Nick kicked and swore and hammered at Maksim’s forearm. Maksim held on.

  “You’re hurting him,” the woman said. Maksim looked to her. She was backed into the corner of the sofa, hands raised protectively before her.

  “Look to your own,” Maksim said. The other man was hunched on the floor, and he wasn’t breathing quite right.

  The woman darted forward, falling to her knees beside the other man.

  She stammered something. Maksim did not listen.

  He waited until Nick was purple-faced and gagging for breath and then let him fall.

  “I will take him with me,” he said to the man and the woman. “You will not see him again.”

  “But…” the woman said.

  “What the fuck,” the man said.

  “I am sorry,” Maksim said. “I should not have let him escape me. I hope you are not badly hurt.”

  He bundled Nick up, arms behind his back. Nick wheezed and drooled.

  Maksim asked, “Where is the door?”

  The woman pointed. “When you take him back, are visitors allowed?”

  Maksim blinked. “I would not recommend it.”

  A few minutes later, hauling Nick down the fire stairs, he asked, “What did she mean, your friend? Where does she think I am taking you?”

  He’d thought Nick capable of answering by now, but Nick only gasped and choked and leaned on his arm.

  By the time they reached the ground floor, though, Nick had recovered enough to point to the place he’d left his bag. Maksim hefted it easily in his free hand.

  “Will you follow, or must I force you?”

  “I’ll follow,” Nick rasped.

  He was lying, of course. Maksim had to force him.

  ANOTHER COUNTRY: A CENTURY AGO

  Maksim had nearly ended Gus, once. He no longer remembered what city, what country, but he had found her in a barn. There had been a cock crowing, and Gus had been wearing a blue smock like a butcher would wear, and it had been bloodied like a butcher’s too.

  Maksim remembered waiting for her to wake up—from one of her rages? From a blow to the head? From a few days’ worth of drink?—while he sat upon a milking stool, empty hands upturned on his knees. She looked childlike, still, in sleep, with the stained fabric bunched around her, hiding the wiriness of her limbs.

  As he watched, the lines of her face tightened, and her eyes squinted. He met her gaze and smiled a little. “Augusta,” he said. “You have been busy.”

  She did not smile back. “People busy themselves with me. You cannot blame me for answering.”

  “Oh, but I can,” he said. “I ordered you to lie quiet.”

  “That was days ago, Maks,” she said, stretching, her hands finding the rents in her smock and covering them over. She wrapped the garment closer around her, shivering a little under Maksim’s gaze.

  “You did not come away clean this time,” he said, shaking his head at the mess of scratches on her bared legs, the torn soles of her feet.

  “I had to run away,” Gus admitted. “But some of them could not run after.”

  “Is this what you wished for yourself?” Maksim said. “When you fretted inside the walls of your father’s house?”

  Gus shrugged one shoulder. It looked as if it hurt her.

  “It need not be forever,” Maksim said. He turned fully toward her and withdrew the silver-chased dueling pistol from the pocket of his coat. “You need only ask,” he said.

  Gus sat up straight, wincing. “Of course not.”

  “Are you quite sure? This is no life for a girl.”

  “I am no girl,” she said, baring her teeth to him. “And I like this life very well.”

  He laughed and put the pistol away, and no more was said about it.

  He wondered now if he would have done differently in a different age; if the very reason he’d let her live was that he did see her as a girl, still, despite all the harm she could do. And by the time he learned to see her as she really was, he also learned to love her and forgive her all her tempers and lawlessness.

  She, in her
turn, learned the virtues of discretion and learned to point her temper where it might do good as well as harm and was better at all of it than Maksim was, although time would no doubt wear her down.

  Nick, now: part of the problem was that he did not want to learn. And the other part was that neither Maksim nor Gus had learned to love him yet.

  JUNE 12

  WAXING CRESCENT

  Maksim kept Nick in a hammerlock all the way back to his apartment. Nick bore it, seething silently, though Maksim could feel the deep tremor in the joint of his shoulder. He hauled Nick right up the stairs and through the door and into the shower, where he let go and cranked on the cold tap.

  Nick hissed through his teeth and shied away from the chill.

  “It will keep the bruising down,” Maksim told him. “And perhaps your temper, for now.”

  “I had it under control.”

  “No. I had you under control,” Maksim said. “Hush, now, and clean up.”

  Nick scowled, but under the icy water his mutiny was leaving him. He nodded and shivered; he stripped off his sodden T-shirt, wrapped his arms about his lean chest, and tilted his throat to the spray.

  Maksim left the shower curtain half-drawn and stood in the bathroom doorway.

  Gus, on the sofa, rolled over and set her bare feet to the floor. She padded close and leaned on the door frame opposite Maksim and whispered, “I will kill him for you, if it must be done.”

  Maksim looked at her: bloodshot eyes, hair flat on one side, a tiny scar at the corner of her lip that he thought he might have given her once upon a time.

  “You don’t need another reason to hate yourself,” she said.

  “No,” Maksim said. “Neither do you.”

  The shower turned off; from within the bathroom, Nick coughed painfully.

  Gus shrugged and stretched and knuckled at her temple. “Offer stands if you change your mind,” she said, and she got up to make coffee.

  Maksim watched her—the still-youthful grace under the clumsiness of her hangover as she ran water and measured grounds and rinsed out a couple of used mugs. She didn’t look at him. She was giving him time to see she meant it.

  Like a cat offering her master the corpse of a songbird, he thought; but that was not right, because animals were innocent, and the kin were not.

  The coffee finished brewing. It did not smell as rich as it would have before the spell tamed his nature again, but still it was good. And still he did not know what he should do.

  Nick, subdued and pale-faced, dried off and put on clean clothes. He ate a piece of bread and a plum, in small bites, swallowing carefully.

  “Are you ready to listen now?” Maksim asked him.

  Nick nodded.

  “I am going to send you away,” Maksim said. “With Gus, if she will take you.”

  Gus, sitting on the kitchen counter, dangling her boots, shrugged and nodded. Looked keenly at Maksim.

  He met her eyes and blinked.

  “I think,” Nick said, and he paused to clear his throat. “I think I know where I should go.”

  “Oh?”

  “Jonathan said it. I knew he’d know … only I fucked it up … Whatever. Look. There’s a job—you might’ve heard about it—where you plant trees. Up north. You live in a camp in the woods. It’s hard, and the pay’s not great, but you work outdoors.”

  With the words, his voice came a bit easier. Gus lost a bit of her wary poise and leaned forward, interested.

  The job would only last the summer, Maksim understood. Nick would be back in town and restless by fall.

  But maybe it was enough time for him to come to terms with his nature. And if not …

  Maksim nodded and gestured for Nick to continue.

  JUNE 23

  FULL MOON

  The full moon fell the day after midsummer.

  “I thought it was significant somehow,” Stella said, tapping the calendar with a manicured nail. “It always seems to be a big thing in stories.”

  “It’s different every year,” Lissa said.

  “Oh, right; I keep forgetting how the moon shifts about. Doesn’t that drive you a bit mad?”

  “When I was a kid, maybe. Now I just make sure to look at the calendar.”

  “Oh, snap! Some of us haven’t had a lifetime of witching,” Stella said. “I’ve got the patio tonight. Come and tell me how it goes, if you don’t mind.”

  Lissa kissed her on the cheek and waved her off.

  Restless, she prowled the house for almost an hour, running her fingertips over shelves that hadn’t been dusted since Baba’s death, reminding herself that she still had not canceled Baba’s credit card and that she owed Anna Malinina a batch of painkilling eggs.

  She’d take care of those later. First, her questions.

  When the moon showed a broad yellow face over the east end of the city, Lissa was watching from the porch with the doll cradled in the crook of her arm, a torn hunk of French bread ready, and the saltshaker.

  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.

  “On what matter may I counsel you tonight?” Baba asked, her voice harsh and still her own and very far away.

  Lissa felt her eyes flood over. “I performed the new-moon ritual,” she said. “The thing that’s happened, ever since … I hate it. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in two weeks. Stella worries. I worry. I worry you’re angry at me, and I worry I haven’t done the right thing.”

  Baba remained silent.

  Lissa supposed none of what she’d said was a question, after all.

  “How do I make it stop?” she asked.

  “Oh, vnuchka,” Baba said. “You do not. You bear it, because it is the price of breaking Law.”

  “How long?” Lissa asked. Her voice gave out again. She wondered if it would ever come back all the way.

  “Until the price is paid,” Baba said. “Not forever. Long enough.”

  Lissa drew in a shuddering breath. She had two more questions to ask, and only one could be answered.

  She bit her tongue on it, holding on to the sense of Baba in her mind. Until she had her last answer, she would not be alone.

  She kept sitting, cradling the doll, watching the moon brighten to white and rise up into a halo of thready cloud.

  Baba waited with her, endlessly patient.

  Finally, “Maksim says hello,” Lissa said. “He thanks you. He says he did not know what he asked of you.”

  Something in the quality of Baba’s silence gave Lissa her decision.

  “And Stella,” she said. “Stella never got a chance to know you, and she wishes she had.” Lissa could not say Baba and Stella would have loved each other, although she wished it were true. She forged on, “She knows what I do now. She’s curious and smart, and I think she’s capable. Should I teach her?”

  “You have already begun,” Baba said.

  And that was all she said. She didn’t go, right away, though. Lissa felt her there, lingering in the chilly open space that was not a space.

  She kept talking, telling Baba about the changes she was going to make to the house, about Stella’s job, and even a bit about Rafe.

  Sometime around her description of how they’d set up Lissa’s old bedroom for Stella, Lissa noticed that Baba was gone, leaving a warmth behind, or maybe it was only the contrast to the sense of chill she brought.

  Lissa wrapped up the doll and put it away.

  She tied up her hair in a loose knot, glossed her lips, and went to the pub.

  Thirteen

  JUNE 23

  FULL MOON

  The work was hard. He’d known that going in. He’d wanted it. But it was hard.

  Nick’s shovel stripped the skin from his right palm. His left hand, the one he shoved into the dirt a thousand times a day, had grains of dirt jammed up behind the fingernails. The sun raised crackling, bleeding burns on the tips of his ears and the nape of h
is neck. His boots blistered his feet raw. His planting bags, hanging from padded shoulder straps, rubbed welts into his thighs where they swung with his steps.

  The roof of his mouth ached with dehydration until he learned to drink well before he felt thirsty. His right Achilles tendon seized up most mornings so that he fell on his first steps out of his tent as often as not.

  “Aren’t we supposed to have some kind of awesome healing powers?” Nick asked Gus, retaping his ankle with duct tape over his wool sock as they sat at the cache at the end of a day, waiting to be picked up by one of the crew ATVs.

  “We do,” she said. “Imagine how the regular people are feeling.”

  “I don’t have to,” Nick said. “I can hear them bitching every night when I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Work harder,” Gus said, completely unsympathetic. “Tire yourself out enough and you won’t notice what anyone else is doing.”

  She stretched out her booted feet and cracked her back with a sigh of satisfaction. She wasn’t in any better shape than Nick was—worse, probably, because as far as Nick could tell, she’d spent the last few years just hanging around getting drunk, not keeping up any kind of a regular fitness program. But she seemed fine with it, somehow. She meticulously bandaged any injuries that broke the skin and then covered them up with extra duct tape, but she didn’t seem to care about anything else; she limped around like a drunken sailor for days after twisting her knee sliding down a trench, and she refused the foreman’s offers to take her to town for an examination.

  She was supposed to be some kind of role model for Nick, and sometimes he just wanted to smack her.

  He leaned over and did just that, right upside the head, and then he laughed at the look she gave him.

  “See?” Gus said. “If you were working harder, you’d be too tired to start shit with me.”

  “Does that mean you’re too tired to take it?” Nick said.

  Gus pretended to think about it for a second, but Nick could see the grin starting on her face. She didn’t even get all the way to her feet, just launched in and bowled Nick off his log seat. He got one arm mostly around her head and then half flipped her, only she grappled him along somehow so that they both rolled headlong into the rutted ATV track.