Her grin had a brittle edge, so Luke didn’t protest, but anger lit him up. The mess she was talking about was a person.
Luke took a spot in the middle row of the car, next to Jeremy, with Natalya in the back seat and the Kovrov brothers in the front. He made himself focus on the bag—this, at least, he could do. It was a deep, achy cold, like concrete in winter. “The plaid. That means Malcolm, right?”
Natalya nodded. “It’s called tartan.”
“These stones must be a Malcolm thing, I don’t know. But the rest is standard nastiness. Bird bones? Mouse?” Luke pulled out a crumpled tarot card. “What’s the seven of pentacles?”
Everyone turned to Natalya, who twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “Profit? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Let me call Camille. She’s better at cards.” Luke called the counter at the store and sifted through the bag as he waited for the phone to ring.
“Helene’s,” Camille’s voice said.
“Hey. I need—”
“Luke! Are you coming home?”
“I will soon, but real quick, what does the seven of pentacles mean?”
Camille yelped. “Did you get a bag, too?”
“What?” Fingers fumbling, he put Camille on speakerphone. “There was a bag at home?”
“In a box of clothes. It almost got Dad, but he figured it out and threw it out back. Blue plaid, seven of pentacles. It means, uh, profit, investment, plans, harvest? I don’t understand.”
“Me neither,” Luke said. The car was all blank eyes and shaking heads. The Kovrovs didn’t mess with building spells by layering subtle meanings together—they bled on their problems, or threw money at them.
“There’s used gum in this,” Camille said. “So it’s aimed at someone, but I can’t tell who. Is there anything that shows a mark in yours?”
“I don’t think so.” Luke checked the bag more carefully, looking for hair or nail clippings. “Oh, wait—”
Luke pulled out six strands of hair, each three or four inches long and a fair, ashy blond color.
They all made pained, horrible sounds—a grunt from Sergei, a hiss from Alexei, a dramatic gasp from Natalya, and through the phone, Camille said, “What? What is it?”—except for Jeremy, whose voice was eerie with that resigned calm as he said, “That’s mine.”
Chapter Nineteen
Luke took them back home to dissect and burn the bags. Both were identical, except the one from the restaurant had Jeremy’s hair inside, and the one from the store had a dry fossil of chewed gum. Camille caught Luke’s eye, but she didn’t say anything, and neither did he. Though there was no way to be sure, the little white scrap looked like the minty gum Short Wesley carried around. Luke bummed them off him at least twice a week.
The bags hissed and snapped as they burned. Jeremy stood patiently, candle in hand, and prayed, and Luke crouched next to him as the spell fought and died. He burned everything else in that donation box, too, even though he didn’t catch any vibes off it. He couldn’t stop; he wanted to burn everything he could find. A woman leaned out of one of the upstairs apartments and started yelling about the smoke.
Yuri made a whole batch of dumplings for Jeremy, though Luke ended up eating most of them. Helene made everyone protection poppets. They talked in useless circles for hours, sitting around the Melnyks’ dining room table.
“Why do the Malcolms hate you so much?” Luke asked. He kept his eyes on Alexei, but his father’s glance was sharp enough to cut his skin.
“They stole Jersey from us about, god, twenty years ago?” Alexei said. “It’s been bitter ever since.”
“That’s it? Why Jeremy, then?” He hadn’t even been thought of twenty years ago—unless it had something to do with his contract, sleeping in the Kovrovs’ records. Luke filed that thought away.
Alexei shook his head slowly, face going tight. “It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. They have no reason to try to hurt Jeremy now. I am going to take care of this. And listen, you little firebombs,” he pointed at Camille, “no putting spells on the Malcolms.” He swung his finger to Luke. “No breaking spells on the Malcolms. Not unless I tell you to. You two are strategic weapons, and I can’t have you misfiring.”
Luke chafed at that, though it was true. Spells fell away around him. His own investigation could leave a trail he didn’t even know about. Still, when Alexei said, “I’ll take care of Corey Malcolm. It will be a pleasure. Trust me,” Luke wasn’t comforted.
After the Kovrovs left, Luke stood under the stream of hot water in the shower until his skin ached. He tried to sleep, but blood ran behind his eyelids. At midnight, he was wide awake, pacing around the back room behind the store as the glass bird he’d kept darted from table to shelf.
He kept thinking, Alexei didn’t have to kill that man.
But then he’d think, That man might have killed Jeremy.
If I wasn’t there, that man would have hurt Jeremy.
What am I going to do about Jeremy?
The day spun around in his mind. He’d woken up wondering why he couldn’t stop texting Jeremy, and now all he could think about was how he could get Jeremy away from the Kovrovs and hide him somewhere forever. He was in bad trouble. You can have whatever you want—who did he think he was?
The problem wasn’t the flirting, though he kept thinking of Jeremy diving at him in the car. The problem was that he’d seen a kiss, and that vision felt like the future. It was an excuse—if it was going to happen anyway, he could make it happen, even though it was a bad idea, and pretend the fallout wasn’t his fault.
Luke behaved. All the time, he behaved. He went to school and he worked with his parents and he didn’t smoke up and he didn’t get in fights. Even the Max thing was Max’s mess.
Finally, feeling like a human tornado, he pulled out his phone and texted Jeremy: What a day
The reply took no time at all. Tired of talking about it. Tell me another joke?
He replied with the dumbest thing he could think of: Where did the general put his armies?
He waited, looking out the window at the piles of ash they’d left in the alley. The bird beat dumbly against the wall near Luke’s arm—he couldn’t control it, but it stayed close to him anyway.
The phone rang.
Luke thought, Fuck. He answered. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” He waited for Jeremy to say no. Just once, for someone else to show some sense.
“Where?” There was already laughter in Jeremy’s voice.
Luke touched the window. In the room’s weak air-conditioning, the glass was warm. “In his sleevies.”
Jeremy laughed and groaned at once. “Oh, no.”
Oh, no. “Oh, yes.”
“Nope. No, no, nope.”
Stop it right now. “Yes. Say it. Say, ‘Oh, yes.’”
Jeremy was quiet for a long time. Luke opened his hand against the glass. Good, he thought. Hang up on me.
“Oh.” Jeremy paused. “Yes.”
Luke squeezed his eyes shut. “I changed my mind. Don’t ever say that to me again.”
“Yes?”
“Stop it right now. You will hang up your phone if you know what’s good for you, Kovrov.”
Jeremy didn’t hang up. “Can you not call me that?”
Luke put his forehead against the back of his hand on the window. There were lots of things he could have said, but the one he picked was, “Jeremy.”
Jeremy’s breath caught, a click through the phone. “You should hang up on me. I’m the one who, you know. All this. My family. Everything.”
“I don’t think I’m going to do that.” It had been a long day, but Luke hadn’t forgotten the beginning of it: that smile in the car. He’d known what he’d wanted before his vision and the attack, and he knew what he wanted now. “I think I’m going to kiss you.”
Jeremy was quiet. Luke could see him: gaze sliding everywhere, stretching his fingers out to tap his palm against whatever was near. His bed. Luk
e rolled his face up, putting his lips on the back of his hand.
“Yes,” Jeremy said.
Luke bit the back of his hand, and when he opened his teeth, he said, “Unless you make me faint again, with that.”
Jeremy laughed, nervous or confused. “You’re a little intense.”
“That’s true. In general. So now you’ve been warned.”
“Okay, I can handle that.”
Luke grinned against his hand.
Jeremy sighed. “Listen, the reason I called is about Sergei. What he said. That was uncalled for.”
Luke had to think to remember: trouble. “Sergei’s grown. He can speak for himself.” He turned away from the window to the dark, herb-sweet room. “I’m more interested in what you thought of Alexei killing that man.”
As long as Jeremy had taken to answer every question before, he was quick and calm now. “I already said you should hang up on me.”
“I don’t want to hang up on you; I want to know what you thought.”
“Do you really, or is there something specific you want to hear?” Jeremy spoke very clearly and sounded already disappointed.
Luke found a thick spot in a stack of carpet and sat on the floor, running his hand over the weave. “I want you to tell me you think it was wrong, too, but not because I’m trying to judge you. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.”
“Luke. That man had my hair in a bag with a bunch of dead bird parts. He pointed a gun at you. I know it’s like, what if he was a stranger, an innocent person they pulled off the street? But what if he had killed one of us? I’m not sorry Alexei stopped him.”
Luke found a loose thread and pulled. “It was the bag. It was in his pocket the whole time.”
“All that time we were bound, they were trying to disarm him. It’s hard to get to someone’s pocket when they have a gun on you.”
Luke didn’t answer. He couldn’t explain, but the horror of it—the danger of a firefight, the mystery behind those bags—wasn’t as real as the memory of a corpse under his hands.
“For what it’s worth, that doesn’t happen hardly ever,” Jeremy said. “Sergei’s always making me turn off movies because he thinks it’s dumb when people shoot each other too much. He says killing people is very complicated and expensive.”
“Expensive, huh? Is that how he handles the cops?”
Jeremy’s voice went even drier. “I doubt the police will get involved at all.”
“Must be nice.”
“Seriously? What do they even know about curse bags? They’d just end up hurt.”
The weight of the late hour and the long day fell on Luke’s spine, and he borrowed Jeremy’s words. “You’re a little intense.”
Through the phone, the sound Jeremy made could have been a laugh or a scoff. “You’ve been warned.”
I can’t handle that. There’s no way. The bird landed on Luke’s knee. Its wings rose and fell, glinting in a smudge of white light. “I can handle that.”
“No, you can’t. That’s all right. You’re a good guy. You think I don’t know we’re the bad guys? I know.” Jeremy paused, then all at once he said, “That’s why I like you so much. God, you should have seen yourself today. I should have been scared but you were so brave, and I thought I could be brave, too, and I always have to come back here and I just want—” One inhale shuddered through the phone before the call went dead.
Chapter Twenty
Jeremy got up early and dressed to go out instead of run, in case his brothers needed him for work—that curse bag was about him—but Sergei was gone and neither one answered his calls. Marta was a pink dervish of little favor and cupcake, would you mind. Undoubtedly, she’d been told to distract him.
He was plenty distracted on his own, but he helped her to fill up his time. The little boys needed to be fed, cleaned, and dressed, and once that was done it was time to make lunch. She took Seryozhka—little Sergei, the second son given Sergei’s name and the nickname Alexei still insisted on using for big Sergei—into the kitchen. He screamed and ran in circles around her as she tried to cook.
Jeremy sat at the coffee table with three-year-old Dmitri in his lap, and Vanya next to him, both coloring pictures from Cars in intent concentration. Dmitri could only scribble, but he was starting to get his swirls in the right colors and places.
Vanya was seven but colored ahead of his years, precisely inside the lines. Marta thought he was a genius. Jeremy wondered whether it was healthy that he cried when anyone made a picture “wrong,” giving Elsa a red dress or Buzz Lightyear feathery wings.
None of the babies had shown magic yet, but Vanya would have the binding running through his veins, and the other boys probably had their own gifts. Vanya didn’t seem suited to power, sensitive and persnickety, although he might grow into it. He would have to.
This was a conversation Jeremy’s brothers must have had about him—whether he was cut out for power, a Kovrov man who could lead or a Kovrov vulnerability who needed protection. He went with them for congenial business lunches or to use his party tricks to dazzle clients, but they never had him help with anything serious.
He could help. He was sure he could. He might as well, because it wasn’t like he could do anything else.
Jeremy dragged his thoughts away from all that and, like a butterfly, they alighted where they’d been waiting to go: I think I’m going to kiss you.
The buzz was like electrocution. It wasn’t only that Jeremy craved kissing Luke Melnyk like chocolate. It was that he’d been so sure that this summer job thing was a story he already knew, a story about Alexei’s big plans crashing to pieces against Jeremy’s high walls. This twist changed the shape of the world. He’d lain awake for hours last night, smiling in the dark until his cheeks ached.
And what had Jeremy done with that? Picked a fight to defend a grisly scene and hung up on him.
It was probably his responsibility to text back or apologize somehow, but Jeremy had one social skill for when things went wrong—freeze like a bunny and let someone else handle it—so that’s what he did. Noon’s settling, the house sealing around him and the fog that might be his own bad mood and might be magic, didn’t hit him as hard as usual. A new thread of anticipation swirled, shining gold through the gray.
Jeremy’s phone beeped, lighting up with Luke’s name. He’d snapped a video, his smile beaming through the screen. “Two peanuts were walking down the street. Suddenly, one was a salted!”
Jeremy huffed a small laugh. Dmitri twisted in his lap to try to see the screen.
“We have to take a picture, okay?” Jeremy told him.
“I want to be in the picture!” Vanya jumped up and ran behind Jeremy’s shoulder.
Jeremy lifted the phone so it caught all three of them. “This is a serious one.”
Both little boys frowned in unison, brows falling like their father’s. Jeremy pressed his lips together and made his eyes large, and sent the solemn picture back to Luke.
Vanya settled back with his coloring book. Luke wrote back fast: It’s criminal how cute that is
Do you want to come over tomorrow?
Jeremy wrote back yes—he felt it in his mouth, how the word sat on the front of his tongue, yes, and how Luke’s breath had hissed through the phone—before he remembered everything going on. “Marta! Do you think it’s okay if I go out tomorrow?”
In the kitchen, Marta squealed. “Only if you tell me everything.”
Sergei growled about it, but he drummed up a car he deemed safe enough to take Jeremy to the Bronx. Luke was working behind the counter, and the street and store were busy, so Jeremy paused outside the window to settle his nerves. Luke had that big smile for everyone, and he always wore these plain T-shirts that made him all shoulders. Jeremy pulled his lower lip between his teeth to stop the impulse to touch his mouth.
Luke looked out the window and caught Jeremy’s eye. His customer-smile changed, more flexible, and he gestured Jeremy inside.
J
eremy went to the counter, speaking brightly over the murmur of customers. “There’s so many people here!” He spread his hands out over the enamel to stop them fidgeting.
Luke looked at Jeremy’s hands, not his face. “Yeah, it’s a good crowd.” Luke dragged his gaze up so slowly Jeremy felt it on his arms and chest and neck. “Summer weekends. People want to be outside, exploring.”
Jeremy leaned over the counter, dizzily close. “I miss the babies being in preschool, to be honest. So much baby TV. Seryozhka does the musical numbers? Not in a good way.”
“Well, I have to work for a few more hours, but I can promise no musical numbers. You can come back here if you want.”
Jeremy leaned farther over the counter to scope it out. There wasn’t a lot of space. “Really?”
Luke’s smile grew wider. “Sure. I have a chair and everything.”
Jeremy crept around the counter like something would change when he crossed the line. Luke opened his arm over the pair of mismatched stools, torn edges of receipts, and blue and orange flakes of peeled-off nail polish. “Welcome to my castle. If you’re good, maybe I’ll show you how to work the register.”
“Oh, wow.” Jeremy rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t hide his smile.
The thread bracelets on Jeremy’s arm had gotten dingy with smoke when Luke had burned his feelings after the restaurant, and Jeremy had cut them away, leaving a fuzzy tan line above his watch. Luke’s eyes latched there, and he caught the underside of Jeremy’s wrist with his fingers. He ran his thumb over the line, pushing the small hairs on Jeremy’s arm against the grain in a way that made his whole body shiver.
Luke propped his other elbow on the counter, casual as if they did this every day. Jeremy had catalogued years of Luke’s rare touches—he still remembered when Luke had switched from hugs to handshakes, at fourteen or so, his palm firm and dry. That memory felt more real than this touch—more reliable, the rule that this exception would prove. When a pair of girls with weighty armfuls of clothes approached, Luke jumped up and guided Jeremy away from the register with a hand on his waist.
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