Blood Magic (2 page)

No matter where it had come from, this book was Dad’s.

As I flipped through it, I saw that every page contained lines and lines of perfect writing and meticulous diagrams sprawling like spiderwebs. The diagrams contained circles within circles, Greek letters or strange pictographs and runes. There were triangles and octagons, pentacles, squares, and seven-pointed stars. Dad had made tiny notes at the edges of the pages, written descriptive paragraphs in Latin, and made lists of ingredients.

Salt dominated the lists, and recognizable items like ginger, wax, fingernails, mirrors, chicken claws, cat teeth, and colored ribbons. But there were words I didn’t know, like
carmot
and
agrimony
and
spikenard
.

And blood. Every list included a drop of blood.

They were magic spells. For locating lost items, for blessing new babies and deterring curses. For protecting against evil. For seeing over long distances. For predicting the future. For healing all manner of illness and wound.

I flipped through, heart alight with wonder and fear. I could taste excitement, too, like electricity in the back of my throat. Could it be real? Dad hadn’t been one to play elaborate tricks, and was the opposite of fanciful, despite his love for old books and heroic tales.

There had to be a spell I could try. To test it. To see.

As I thought about it, the smell crawled up the back of my throat again, blood clinging to my sinuses and trailing like sticky smoke down my esophagus.

I raised the book to my nose and drew in a long, cleansing breath. And I imagined I could smell him in the book. My dad.
Not the overwhelming blood that had saturated his shirt and the carpet beneath his body, but the slightly oiled cigarettes-and-soap when he came to breakfast every morning, after a shower and quick smoke on the back patio. I dropped the book into my lap and closed my eyes until Dad was right there, sitting in front of me, one hand touching my right knee.

When I was little, he used to come into my bedroom just before lights-out and touch my knee as he sank onto the bed. Gravity would pull me closer and closer until I could lean my head on his shoulder or climb into his lap while he told me condensed versions of literary classics. My favorites had been
Frankenstein
and
Twelfth Night
, and I asked for them again and again.

In the cemetery, another crow cawed, a loner flying slowly after his cousins.

I held the book up in my two hands and let it fall open wherever it willed. When the fanning pages had chosen their sides, I lowered it and glanced at the spell:
Regeneration
.

The diagram was a spiral inside a circle that narrowed to the center like a snake. I only needed salt, blood, and breath. Easy.

With a stick, I drew a circle in the cemetery dirt, and from the plastic bag I’d brought of ingredients readily available in my kitchen, I pulled out a box of kosher salt. The crystals glittered
between thin blades of grass as I sprinkled them around the circle.
Place the subject in the center of the circle
, Dad had written.

I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip. I had no cuts or dead flesh. And it was too far into autumn for flowers.

But a small cluster of dead leaves had collected against the base of the headstone across from me, and I got up to pick out a good one. Back in my seat, I gently placed the crinkled maple leaf inside my circle. The edges were black and curled, but I could still see lines of scarlet tracing the veins. Trees around here weren’t losing many leaves yet, so this was probably left from last winter. It had soaked up a lot of time in the cemetery.

Now came the difficult part. I dug my pocketknife out of my jeans and flipped open the blade. Resting the tip against my left thumb, I paused.

My stomach twisted as I contemplated how much it was going to hurt. What if this spell book was a huge joke? Was I crazy to even try? It was all impossible. Magic couldn’t be real.

But it was written in Dad’s hand, and he had
never
been that kind of mean. And he wasn’t crazy—no matter what anybody said. Dad had believed in this, or he wouldn’t have wasted his time with it. And I believed in Dad. I had to.

Either way, it was just a drop of blood.

I pushed the knife against my skin, puckering it but not breaking through. My whole body shivered. I was about to find out if magic was real. The electric thrill of terror was tangy on my tongue.

I cut deep.

A muffled cry escaped my tightly closed lips as blood
welled against my skin, dark as oil. I held out my hand, staring at the thick drop slithering down my thumb. The pain was a dull ache that drew all the way up my arm and settled uncomfortably in my shoulder blade before fading into nothing. My hand trembled, and I wasn’t afraid anymore.

Quickly, I let one, two, three drops of blood fall and splatter onto the leaf. They gathered in the center of it in a small pool. I leaned over, staring at the blood as if it could stare right back. I thought of Dad, of how much I missed him. I needed this to be real.

“Ago vita iterum,”
I whispered slowly, letting my breath brush the leaf and shake the tiny pool of blood.

Nothing happened. Wind fluttered my hair again, and I cupped my hands around the leaf to shield it. I peered down, thinking that the Latin had been bad. Squeezing my wounded thumb, I let more blood gather and drip down. I repeated the phrase.

The leaf shuddered under my breath, and the edges unfurled like growing petals in time-lapse photography. The scarlet center spread out, reaching for the tips and becoming a luscious, bright green. The leaf lay there in the circle, flat and fresh as if new-plucked.

Something rough-sounding against the grass drew my attention up sharply.

A boy was watching me, his eyes wide.

I’d like to say I came to the graveyard in search of my past, or out of sentiment or nostalgia. But I came to get as far away from my psychotic stepmother as possible.

We’d been at dinner: her, my dad, and me, sitting around the long table in the fancy dining room. I plucked at the white linen and wondered whether, if I spilled a few drops of wine onto it, Lilith’s eyes would roll back into her head and she’d start spouting Bible verses backward.

“Looking forward to school Monday, Nick?” Dad asked, raising his own wineglass to his mouth. He believed in introducing me to alcohol gradually and in a controlled fashion, as if I hadn’t made friends with it in the boys’ bathroom at school by the time I was fourteen.

“Like I look forward to sliding down a hill of razor blades.”

“It won’t be so bad.” Lilith slid a chunk of steak off her fork with her teeth: her version of a challenging sneer.

“Right. A new school at the beginning of my senior year in the middle of freaking nowhere. I’m sure it’ll be great.”

She pursed her Botox-lips. “Come now, Nick, I doubt
you’ll have any more trouble alienating yourself and being an outcast here than you did in Chicago.”

I deliberately set my glass down too hard, sloshing red wine onto the tablecloth.

“Nick!” Dad frowned at me. He still wore his tie, even though he’d been at home for hours.

“Dad, didn’t you hear what she—”

“You’re nearly eighteen, son, and you’ve got to stop—”

“She’s thirty-two! I think if anyone needs to act mature, it’s her.” I shoved to my feet. “But I guess that’s what you get for marrying someone thirteen years younger than yourself.”

“You are excused,” Dad said calmly. He was always calm.

“Great.” I grabbed a spear of asparagus and saluted Lilith with it. She won that round, clearly. She always did, since she had Dad wrapped around her finger.

As I strode out into the foyer, I heard Lilith say, “It’s nothing to worry about, darling. That’s what bleach is for.”

Grinding my teeth, I swung by the front closet, snatched a hoodie, and slammed out the front door. If I’d been at home, I could have jogged down the block to Trey’s house and we’d have headed for a coffee shop or Mikey’s to shoot some aliens on his Xbox. But instead I was alone outside a Missouri farmhouse with nothing nearby but a crumbling old graveyard. I finished chewing the asparagus spear as I marched over the gravel driveway and zipped up the hoodie.

The sun had set below the woods surrounding the house, so everything was pretty dark. But above, the sky was still pale. Only a handful of stars poked through. Shoving my hands into the pockets of the hoodie, I headed for the trees. I could see
the cemetery from my bedroom, and now was as good a time as any to see if I could find Grandpa’s grave.

Grandpa had died over the summer, leaving the whole of his property to me. Who’d met him once when I was seven and only remembered being sick most of the time and him yelling at my mom about something I didn’t understand. But I guess age did strange things to a person, and I was his only living relative besides Mom, who didn’t speak to either of us anymore.

Yeah, it was a nice family history.

But then Lilith and Dad descended upon what had probably been a charming farmhouse and tore all the quaint wallpaper off the walls and replaced it with black-and-white art deco soullessness. If only their sex life was so bland.

Lilith had spent several days ooohing and aaahing over the land. “What a perfect atmosphere for a writer!” “Oh, darling, I love it! Look at that view!” and “I’ll never spend three thousand bucks on a designer coat again!” Okay, she didn’t say the last part, but she should have.

The worst part was that Dad was planning to be gone four days every week, flying to Chicago to keep up with all his needy clients. So not only was I in a hick town where the most popular gathering spot was the Dairy Queen, but I was trapped here alone
with Lilith
.

At least I only had to live here for a few months before graduation. And at least I’d only missed one month of the school year, so I’d actually be
able
to graduate.

I kicked my way through the woods. I don’t know an oak from an elm in the best of times, but with the sun down it was pitch-black in the forest and all the trees crowded around me
like an arboreal downtown for squirrels. And bugs and frogs, which were making so much buzzing and whining noise I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear myself talk. The ground was covered in layers of old leaves, and when they tossed up under my feet, I smelled delightful things like rot and mold. I nearly tripped a couple of times, but flailed my arms and managed to catch myself on a tree. It was fun smacking through the leaves and low bushes, like it used to be fun to run through piles of raked leaves in our backyard when I was a kid. Mom used to make the leaves dance, and they’d float up around my head and dive-bomb me. She said they were little beetle airplanes and—

See, no. That was why I didn’t want to be in Yaleylah. Everything reminded me of Mom, and of all the things I wasn’t supposed to think about. In the house, I stopped in front of every door wondering which had been her bedroom. In the kitchen, I wondered if she’d taught herself to make that awesome spaghetti sauce or if her own mom had helped. Had she stared off at the cemetery like I caught myself doing before bed last night? Or had she been totally uninterested in ghosts? These were things I’d never know because she was off in Arizona pretending I didn’t exist.

I burst out of the woods really abruptly. I hadn’t even noticed the light getting a little better. A road—really just two wheel tracks overgrown with weeds—was between me and the dilapidated cemetery wall. I hiked across to the crumbling stones and climbed over easily. A thin little moon grinned at me beside a scattering of stars. The sky was purplish and clear. And the cemetery spread for at least a quarter mile before ending at a huge hedge keeping it private from our nearest neighbors’ house.

It seemed rude to keep kicking through the leaves now that I was in a cemetery, so I slowed down and walked quietly. Most of the headstones were blackened granite or marble, the epitaphs worn down and obscured by darkness. I could read some names and a few dates going back to eighteen-something-something. Touching them was irresistible, so I wandered with my hands out, patting one here and just dragging my fingers against another. The stone was cold and rough, also grimy. A few of the headstones had dying flowers clinging to them. There was no noticeable pattern to the layout of the graves; as soon as I thought I’d found a row, it bent out into a weird oval or courtyard. It wasn’t as though I was likely to get lost when I could easily see the black mass of the woods around my house on one end and the neighbors’ on the other. I wondered who lived there, and if the fields to the south belonged to them, too, or another farmer.

It was all quiet except for the low hum of bugs from the woods, with the occasional burst from crows yelling at each other. I watched a flock of them fly away, teasing and pecking at each other loudly, and I found myself relaxing. At least I could find some peace with the dead bodies. They were probably all decomposed to dust by now. Except maybe Grandpa. I kept my eyes peeled for a bright, new headstone.