Spells of Blood and Kin (14 page)

Lightning rent the sky in the south, over the lake, and in the flash, she saw Maksim's face carved white, eyes closed, nostrils wide, his hat a sharp shadow over the bridge of his nose. He was standing beside her lilac tree again, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, ignoring the downpour.

“Good Lord, are you out of eggs again already?” Lissa said.

“Nearly so. And I have something else to ask.”

“Want to come in?”

He shook his head. “Thank you, no. Fetch the eggs and walk with me.”

Lissa ducked inside, found the carton; she did not bother with her umbrella since she was already drenched, and the rain was as warm as the air.

She came back outside to find Maksim awaiting her stoically. Under the beating water, the tension in him was banked but visible; Lissa found herself unwilling to turn her back to him—not out of fear, exactly, but out of concern that he might do something sudden.

They walked together northward along a street of narrow-roofed Toronto Victorians. Lissa's braided hair clung to her back in heavy ropes.

“So if you didn't only come for eggs…” she said.

“I wished to ask you about the spell Iadviga made for me,” Maksim said.

“I haven't found it in her grimoires. I was thinking maybe her journals.”

“She left you everything?”

“Everything she could. But she didn't have time…” Lissa bit down on a sudden hot rush of sorrow.

“Be easy,
koldun'ia
. I am sure she would be very pleased with what you are doing. One cannot go from apprentice to master overnight.”

If he only knew. “It's just—I miss her, that's all.”

Maksim paced, silent, while Lissa wiped rain and tears from her eyes.

“I'm sorry. I'm just tired, I think.” And, she thought, in need of someone to talk to about Baba: someone who was more than an acquaintance, someone who was apparently family of a sort, although she still did not understand exactly how. “Do you think you can make it like this until the full moon? That's the soonest I'd be able to fix anything for you, even if I can figure it all out earlier—it's kind of an important rule for us.”

Maksim knit his eyebrows. “I did not know. Of course I will make do with the eggs as long as I must.”

It wasn't exactly what she'd asked, but it sounded good enough to go on with. Soaking wet, hair plastered to his neck below his cap, tank top skinned to his body, Maksim did not look very dangerous; he looked like a roofer or a landscaper caught in the bad weather, the menace in him drowned to ordinary sullenness.

When she looked closer, though, she could see a muscle twitching below his eye.

“Do you need one now?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not so long as you walk with me. My home is not far.” He hastened his steps, though, as they went north.

Maksim turned out to live on Dundas, in one of the old Victorians near Bellwoods, above a Portuguese hairdresser. He fumbled for the key, kicked the door open, and tore at his bootlaces.

Lissa put away the fresh batch of eggs in his refrigerator, which contained a case of Czech beer, an orderly assortment of mustards, and several butcher-paper packages. When she returned to the main room, she could see through the bedroom door Maksim stripping off his wet shirt, and she turned away hastily.

She looked at the walls, hung with a sword of some kind and a couple of antique guns. A map, with characters in Cyrillic. A signed photograph of George Chuvalo. The sofa and coffee table were elderly and graceful. A bookshelf held military histories in English, Russian, and French.

“Koldun'ia,”
Maksim said, his voice gone hoarse again. “Where?” He had his hand at his bare throat, fingers dug into the muscle above his collarbone.

“I put them in the refrigerator.”

“I must go out,” he choked, pushing past Lissa toward the door.

“Wait! I thought you wanted me to walk you here so that you wouldn't do anything stupid.”

“You are right,” he said, turning again and wrapping his arms about his chest; he was bruised there, a mottling of red and purple over one side of his rib cage, and, beneath the bruising, older scars. “Bring me an egg,
koldun'ia,
and speak to me while you do.”

“I'm bringing you an egg. Um. Two eggs? I'm at the fridge already, and I'm—what are you doing?”

Maksim had one fist pressed to his forehead and the other hand blindly extended; she set an egg in it. Maksim punched the shell with his thumb and sucked it noisily, spitting out a fragment of shell into his palm. He held out his hand again, imperious, and Lissa gave him another.

On finishing it, Maksim cast the broken shells carelessly on the floor, tipped his head back, and let out a long sigh.

“You may go now,” he said.

“You won't go on some kind of a rampage, without your shirt?”

Maksim glanced down at himself, mouth twisting. He did not answer, only shuffled away toward the bedroom.

Lissa waited. Finally, she went to the bedroom door and cautiously peered in—saw Maksim sprawled, naked, facedown and snoring into his pillow.

She turned out the light and left him.

MAY 13

  
WAXING CRESCENT

Lissa took Baba's notebooks with her to the Duke of Lancashire, telling herself she needed a change of pace—and anyway, Stella kept saying that shyness could only be conquered with practice. Lissa did not think of herself as shy, exactly, but when she followed Stella into the air-conditioned dimness, she did find herself dropping back, touching her face, hugging the stack of notebooks, not quite looking behind the bar at Rafe.

He smiled sunnily and brought her the organic lager before she could ask and said only, “Hitting the books, I see. I'll keep out of your way.” And he bustled back down the bar. He was not wearing his toque today, and she had been right earlier: His head was shaved—lightly stubbled so that the tiny dark hairs lowlighted the contours of his skull. A pale, jagged scar stood out, as if he'd been hit over the head with a bottle; he looked like the kind of man who might have a few fights in his past—but only a few and only for boisterous fun, not like the scars she'd seen on Maksim.

That thought chilled her a bit: scars were a language, and she'd been reading without understanding the meaning. Now it began to come clear. A man like Rafe, a normal guy, might wear the signature of a couple of brawls or a car accident or some extreme sports. Maksim had a whole book traced on his skin, and Lissa had not really been conscious of seeing it the other day, but now her mind served up the picture of him shirtless, wealed with white or red keloid, several long, cruel lines, and one knot that surely must be a bullet scar.

Soldier: he had to have been. It went with the military books and the maps and the collection of weapons. And with the kind of muscle he had, hard and lean and functional.

It also spoke to her of what Maksim might be like when he did not have a witch to calm him down.

She found she was gazing at Rafe again as he leaned on the cash register twirling a pencil behind his ear. Just then, he turned her way, caught her gaze, held it a moment, and then smiled—not the goofy crooked smile he gave everyone but a smaller, sweeter one.

Lissa ducked her head, sipped from her pint, and flipped open the first of the notebooks.

Taken together, they formed a journal of sorts, recording trials of the spells Baba had later perfected and noted in her own grimoire. Sometimes the recipient of the spell was mentioned, sometimes the ailment to heal, sometimes even the due date for a much-desired child. Lissa found a spell against colic, created for use on herself in infancy. She wondered what her father had said about that: old-country superstition, dangerous nonsense. She knew Baba's influence had been one of the points of strain in her parents' marriage, but by the time Lissa had been old enough to pick up any of the finer points, the marriage was long over, Dad had relocated to London, and Mama was dying.

She turned another page. Baba had always preferred to write in pencil, heavily, every line and both sides of the page, embossing the cheap paper of her notebooks. The words formed an incomprehensible Braille to Lissa's fingertip.

They were nearly as incomprehensible to her eye; Baba switched between Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets and dotted the pages with drawings and symbols, some arcane but recognizable, others possibly nothing more than doodles.

This page, for instance, bore four circles—white, black, and halved each way: clearly the phases of the moon, drawn as on a calendar. Beside the moons, Baba had made a series of tally lines: one for the full moon, three for the first quarter, five for the new moon, and two for the last quarter. Tracking the frequency of something: requests for spells? The church ladies mostly knew that the full moon was the time for that, and so it was possible they would make their requests in advance. What else could Baba have been tracking?

Lissa flipped open her phone and called Maksim. Ten rings, no answer, and nothing to leave a message on. Annoying; maybe she'd bully him into getting a proper phone and voice mail if this situation was going to continue.

Just as she was about to pull the phone away from her ear, he picked up.

“Hey. Maksim. Question about the … your thing. Any relation to the phases of the moon?”

He made a sound like a stifled yawn.
“Koldun'ia?”

“Yeah, it's me. Did I wake you up?”

“One moment.” The phone clattered onto a hard surface. In the background, a momentary sound of water. “Repeat your question.”

“Phases of the moon. Any relation to your madness?”

“A witch should not need to ask.”

Lissa snorted. “You asked me for help, you get to deal with a few questions. I have a page here with some notes about moon phases, and I was wondering if it could be—”

“No. Witches are the only ones who traffic in such things.” His voice was rough again.

“I did wake you up. Jesus, Maksim, it's six in the evening.”

“I was not sleeping. Only thinking,” he said. “You should make more eggs.”

“I can't do that until the moon is full again.”

“You told me; I remember now. I will try to make the others last, then.”

Lissa flipped the phone closed, frowning. She'd figured on a maximum dosage of four eggs a day at most; for a regular person, two ought to be sufficient. Though that was based on eggs that actually worked the way they should, and these were clearly subpar strength. God only knew how often he was taking them. She thought about calling him back and asking how many were left.

“Let me guess,” said Rafe, wiping a spill from the varnished wood, setting a fresh coaster before her and upon it, a pint of water with a slice of lemon. “Study buddy is one of those people who expects you to do all the work?”

“Sort of,” Lissa said, flashing back again to Maksim's extended hand, imperious and yet desperate.

“What's your major, anyway? Stella didn't tell me.”

“It's not a formal program,” Lissa said.

“Oh. I'm being nosy again. Professional hazard,” Rafe said, touching her elbow in apology and grinning.

Lissa would have answered that smile. She really would. She could not think of anything to say, though.

After a moment, Rafe's face went a bit rueful, and he raised his eyebrows and backed away with his hands held up, empty.

Stella danced over to pick up a tray of pints. “It works better when you smile back,” she whispered.

“What works better?”

“Flirting, silly,” Stella said and slid away again, leaving Lissa pinned against the wall, fighting the urge to hide her hot face in her hands.

MAY 14

  
WAXING CRESCENT

Maksim's door stood an inch open. Lissa knocked, and it swung wider, showing her that the elegant coffee table was strewn with dirty mugs. Beside the telephone, a pressback chair lay on its side, one of its legs broken.