Spells of Blood and Kin (15 page)

“Maksim?”

“Out here.”

She followed his voice through the bedroom—unmade bed, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor. A sliding glass door led out to the balcony.

Maksim sat with his back against the brick wall, one leg outstretched and the other pulled up. As Lissa approached, he raised his head from his knee and held out his hand in a silent demand.

“You're like a toddler,” she started to say, and then she saw his face. Older bruises had bloomed to livid color, and newer ones overlaid them, redder and bloodier.

“Oh my God. Maksim, what happened?”

“Eggs,” he said.

She set down her bag and pulled out the cartons: all that remained of the sleep spell, plus the leftovers of two kinds of painkillers, made the full moon before Baba died.

She thanked whatever instinct had told her to bring the painkillers. She gave him one of those first, hoping it was still good. The spells lasted only as long as the eggs did, and the expiration date on these was drawing near.

He slurped it from the shell. One corner of his upper lip was split and puffy, and so was his eyebrow on the same side. He tossed the shell shards to the corner of the balcony, and Lissa, following the motion, saw a pile of other discarded shells there.

She waited for a moment until Maksim gestured again, and she gave him one of the sleep spells.

“Another,” he said once he'd taken it, wiping a string of albumen from his lip.

“No. You have to make them last.”

“I did not husband them earlier. I am sorry.”

“I can see that. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

He tilted his head back against the brick and shut his eyes. Lissa opened her mouth to chide him, but she saw his jaw working and set herself to wait.

“I do not visit with my own kind often,” he said. “I have been living apart, because of the spell.”

“Right, the thing Baba did for you.”

“The
kin
do not love witches. Many of them think it perverse to tamper with our nature.”

“No one loves witches.”

“I do,” Maksim said, smiling faintly. He showed her his left hand: knuckles bloodied and mottled with bruising, two fingers swollen stiff that could not join the rest in a fist. “See? I thought I had broken the bones there, but now it does not hurt at all.” He rolled his head on his neck and stretched his arms gingerly. “I would not tell many of the
kin
of you; we all have our ways and secrets. This one is … a friend. I asked her for help in finding the boy.”

“I take it she said no.”

“Oh, no. She agreed. We fought only because it is in our nature to fight.”

“I guess you lost.”

“I was not myself.” Maksim gave her a haughty flick of a glance. “And it made Augusta happy to best me for once. She is capable: she knows the area where it happened. She will ask questions of people who may have seen him.”

“I wish you'd told me about this earlier.”

“I wish your grandmother had made better provision for me,
koldun'ia
. I wish your eggs would let me sleep straight through until the full moon. I wish I was careless and could let this boy go his way and never think of him again.” Maksim rose stiffly and limped to the edge of the balcony, where he knotted his good hand on the railing.

“Why can't you forget about him? What will he do?”

“Die, most likely,” Maksim said, leaning out and sniffing at the air. “He will do something rash, and someone will kill him, because he is too young to know his own strength. And if it should come to that, it is still better than watching himself go mad and hurt the people he used to love.”

Lissa rose herself and set the egg cartons aside, watching Maksim shift his weight from foot to foot, testing. “How bad is it going to be, having this … Augusta on the warpath?”

“She will not hurt you. I have asked her to respect you, and she will not disobey me.”

“That's not what I meant, and you know it. What if she hurts someone else?”

Maksim lunged away from the railing, with a section of it still clutched in his hand. He shoved past Lissa and into the apartment.

She heard a crash and ran after him. Maksim hefted the length of railing like a club and swung it down onto the wreckage of the broken chair until both splintered. He set the chair seat on his knee and hammered his fist through it so that the splinters raked his arm. He snapped the railing between his hands and cracked the longer half in two again.

Lissa watched, flinching, from the dubious safety of the bedroom, with her arms hugging the cartoned eggs.

At last Maksim spun about, short, jagged kindling in each hand. The abrupt motion sent a spatter of blood from his arm arcing across the floor.

Lissa jerked back.

Maksim stood rooted, panting, staring at the mess. “Do not touch. You must take care with my blood,” he said. “That is how the infection passes.…”

He sat down slowly, and his knee buckled halfway so that he sprawled to one side. “I believe that should have hurt,” he muttered, easing his leg out straight. “No more easing of pain. I must have something to warn me to stop.”

“It's getting worse,” Lissa said. “Your madness. Isn't it?”

Maksim's lips skinned back from his teeth, and he would not look at her.

“Jesus. I don't know what to do with you.” She put the eggs in the refrigerator, except for one more of the painkilling ones, and sat on the other side of the room from Maksim while he washed up his arm.

He shuffled about slowly, sweeping the broken chair pieces into a corner and wiping the droplets of blood from the floor. Finally, he let himself down onto the sofa and covered his face. He said something in Russian into his hands.

“Maybe I could go out for you, pick up some groceries and first-aid stuff,” Lissa said.

“I am not hungry—and for medicine, there is no need to worry; we are all quick healers. All too soon, I will be running again.” He smiled, but there was no mirth in it; or maybe it was just the crooked cast of his bruised mouth.

MAY 15

  
WAXING CRESCENT

Lissa woke up in Baba's bed, and for no reason at all, she knew that today was the day to make it her own bed.

Baba's bedroom was the biggest room in the house. The window looked out into willow branches. Although the floor slanted, it was beautiful age-darkened hardwood. Over the last few years, as Baba's knees increasingly pained her, even with the eggs she made for herself, it had become Lissa's job to do the floors. She'd spent many hours first washing them with Murphy Oil Soap and then rubbing in cinnamon-scented beeswax. The scent mellowed into the rest of the old house, mingling with dust and books and wool, sun on aged paint, mothballs, and cedar.

Lissa tied her hair up and dressed in old denim shorts. She was halfway through her coffee and Special K when Stella found her at the table.

“You look … casual?” Stella said. “What's the plan?”

So Lissa filled her in. “I'm not, you know, handy. I don't want to renovate or something. Yet. I just want to clean out some things. Get some fresh air in.”

Stella nodded. “A good spring cleaning,” she said. “Mummy does one every year. I mean, the cleaning service takes care of all the mopping and stuff, but Mummy and I sort the things and put everything in its place.”

“I don't have a cleaning service,” Lissa said, hearing the bite to her tone a moment too late. “I mean, it's just me.”

“It's not just you,” Stella said. “I can help. I'd like to help.”

Lissa started to shake her head and stopped herself. What would it hurt? So Stella's mother had a cleaning service—Stella had been the one with the bucket, cleaning the spot in the kitchen when Lissa couldn't even look at it.

Lissa bit down on her reflexes and told herself to say yes. And when they were finished with their coffee and Special K, she and Stella marched back upstairs to tackle the room.

Lissa had already moved Baba's grimoires to the shelf that held her own in the kitchen sideboard. It was the personal things that remained: Baba's dresser was scattered with powder compacts and a thousand hairpins and the photo of herself with Lissa in its tarnished silver frame. The drawers were full of brassieres and nylon undergarments. The wardrobe held Baba's dresses, gray and navy and hunter green, and her faded eggplant coat. Far at the back, about where you'd expect to enter Narnia, was a shelf of sweaters wrapped in plastic against moths and a jumble of handbags and hatboxes.

Stella took down the curtains to give them a wash. Lissa began with the dresser drawers, sorting out the useful stuff from the things that even thrifty Baba would have thrown away if she'd thought about them anytime in the last five years. The bad went straight into a garbage bag. The good, Lissa folded into a very elderly blue suitcase to take to Goodwill.

“What about the things for you?” Stella said over her shoulder.

Lissa spread her hands flat on the bare wood at the bottom of the last drawer. “Oh.”

“You don't have to. I just wondered.”

“No, you're right. I wasn't thinking.” She stood up then and looked at the things on top of the dresser in front of Baba's mirror. The jewelry case folded open to display a tangle of necklaces. Lissa lifted out a rhinestone collar and found the settings and clasp gummed over with human dirt. One ring box, on inspection, proved empty; that was probably the one Baba had worn most often, which was still in the manila envelope from the hospital. Another box held a ring of clustered garnets set in what might have been white gold. Lissa slipped it onto her finger; it was too big and wanted to twist askew.

All at once, it struck her that Baba had not even been gone a month, and here was Lissa chucking out her things without even asking.

It would be another week and a half before she could speak with Baba again, and she'd have only three questions to spend. She did not want any of those questions to be about the disposal of Baba's belongings.

“She never said, did she?” Stella said, looking over her shoulder. “That probably means she didn't mind, you know. She trusted that whatever you did would be right.”

Sighing, Lissa left the jewelry case where it was and went instead to the closet.

Stella talked her into keeping the two silk scarves and a whimsical feathered hat; the rest they hauled downstairs and set by the front door. Remaining in the bedroom were a hatbox of old photos, the framed one, the jewelry, and a little chest that seemed to contain Baba's personal papers. And the urn containing Baba's ashes. Lissa took it in her hands a moment, met Stella's helpless gaze; but Stella couldn't offer much help on that. Lissa tucked the urn behind the bedroom door, which got her a raised eyebrow, but no commentary.

Stella helped move Lissa's clothes into the dresser and the closet and her shoes into the shoe bag on the inside of the closet door. They dried the curtains and hung them again. They set Lissa's comb and bracelets and necklaces and face cream before the mirror.

After Stella left for work, Lissa took the little chest down to the kitchen, where she could go through it in the bright light of her study lamp.

She'd been hoping for private diaries, something that would illuminate the question of what Baba had done for Maksim—or something personal and strange that might illuminate Baba herself, something to tide Lissa over these in-between days until she could speak with her grandmother again.

What she found was her grandfather Pavel Nevsky's passport. He'd been born in Canada, unlike Baba, whose passport must have been stashed somewhere else, if she even still had one. Pavel Nevsky had been a member of the church from birth; Father Manoilov remembered him a little and had said to Lissa once that he was a great bear of a man and had been a builder.

Below the passport, a photo of Pavel himself, a smaller and sharper image of the one Lissa knew from Baba's album.

Below that, a small chaos that included a vaccination document for Lissa herself; an old address book in flaking leather, in which most of the names were inked out and in which Maksim's did not appear; the birth certificate of Lissa's mother; a brass button; the business cards of two carpenters, a plumber and a mason; a handful of old rubles and kopecks.

Lissa tugged at her hair in frustration.

Whatever Baba had done for Maksim was either something so obvious that it had not needed to be written down or something so secret that—

Not secret; not quite. Lissa looked again at the tarnish-dark faces of the coins at the bottom of the box.

Whatever Baba had done, it had been done at the new moon.

 

Four

MAY 16

  
WAXING CRESCENT