Spells of Blood and Kin (17 page)

“For the worse,” Maksim said.

Gus leaned close to look at his face. “Always?”

“Yes,” Maksim said, a bare whisper from the depth of his chest.

“But—”

He shook his head and pushed the soup bowl away. A flaw in the glaze scraped the surface of the table, and the sound made Gus twitch and shiver, pale hairs rising on her forearms.

She met Maksim's eyes again. When he would have looked away, she caught his chin roughly.

She said finally, “Okay. I told you I'd help, and I will.”

WESTERN RUSSIA: 1952

The borders of nations were drawn and redrawn. Maksim returned to his homeland now and again, but the familiar landmarks aged and the people wandered, and though he stood on the soil of his birth, he no longer recognized it.

Home became a collection of remembered scents and weather and accents and angles of light, which found him unexpectedly in places very far from the banks of the Don.

It was the smell of thunder that drew him this time. He knew what it meant. He'd come across it first in the hut of the
koldun
near his home; the storm smell mixed there with dried blood and old leather and dusty herbs and the thousand other things the
koldun
hung from his ceiling.

He had come across other
kolduny
now and again. One healed his
ataman
of an infected wound; one lived in Rostov and sent evil wishes upon people for the price of a cockerel. He had come to understand that their scent was the scent of their power.

When he smelled it in the rail yard, then, he found it curious.

The rail yard was somewhere in western Russia, and he was crossing it after midnight on his way to someplace warm. As he passed between the shadows of cattle cars, he smelled people: a number of them, some of them ill, all of them afraid and unwashed, and one of them a
koldun
.

The Second World War was over. It had been over for several years. Maksim had spent the last two of them working in various ports on the Black Sea, and he had not been keeping up with politics. His nature craved simple, head-on violence, one person to another. These last few wars, he had been struggling to keep pace with things he did not understand. Camps designed to contain and eliminate civilians. Weapons effective over great distances. Wars fought for abstract political reasons between nations many thousands of miles removed from each other.

War was not what it had been. But apparently peace wasn't, either.

He stalked around the cattle car that held the
koldun
and saw the slats had been stuffed with cardboard and newsprint and rags. He found a gap and whispered into it, “What is happening here?”

Someone sobbed within. Someone made a shushing hiss.

“No one is about,” he said. “Only me. I am a stranger here, and I wish to know why you are prisoners.”

“Only God knows that,” a woman whispered back.

“I stole the silver from a church,” said another one.

“Are you all thieves, then?”

Dry laughter. “We are all children of God, and that is all we share.”

“Except for this one,” said another voice. “Who is a child of Satan.”

A blow or a push, then, and a hushed cry.

Maksim slipped around to the door of the cattle car and broke the lock between his fingers.

“Show me this child of Satan,” he said, and he slid the doors wide.

Moonlight glinted from eyes and teeth and buttons: fifty women or more, huddled in sparse straw.

They did not move at first. The woman closest to the door flinched away from him—or from the frosty air.

“Show me this witch,” Maksim prodded.

Someone hauled the witch to her feet and shoved her toward Maksim. “Take her and be damned.”

“Someone has ill-used her,” Maksim observed. The witch's coat hung open, most of the buttons torn from it, and her hair straggled down on one side.

Silence, and a few averted eyes.

“Koldun'ia,”
Maksim said. “Point out anyone here who has served you an insult.”

The witch raised her eyebrows. “Do you think I care about the scratches of cats when I am in the jaws of the wolf?”

Maksim laughed at that. “This wolf has a healthy respect for witches,” he said.

“I did not mean you,” said the witch. “We are in the grip of the Gulag. There are guards in the station office; they will take us north in the morning. They will put us to work in one of their camps, along with all the others impolitic enough to question them.”

“Not you,
koldun'ia,
” Maksim said. “Unless you wish it, of course.”

She tipped her head to one side. “I do not,” she said. “Though I wish to know the price of my freedom.”

Maksim did not tell her right away, because he heard voices at the door of the station office and saw a lantern bobbing in the hand of a man.

He killed the lantern bearer, the other two guards outside the door of the station office, and the three remaining within. For good measure, he killed the engine driver, the mechanic, and another man who had been playing cards with them.

He returned to the cattle car to find that most of the women had departed, leaving only the prints of rag-wrapped feet in the frost.

The witch waited for him with her arms wrapped tight around her body.

“The price,” Maksim said. “You have been watching me, yes? You have seen what I can do. Someday … someday I might not want to do such things anymore. And I will need someone to make me stop.”

The witch sighed. “Not yet, I hope. It is many miles to the border, and this country is full of madmen.”

“Not yet,” Maksim agreed, smiling and wiping his hands with dirty straw.

“How do I know you will not turn on me? Your
kin
are not known for constancy when your temper takes you.”

“We are not,” Maksim allowed. “And I cannot promise. Yet I do not think it likely that my temper will run unsated in these parts.”

“I suppose that is something.”

“You remind me of home,” he said. “I think it will be enough.”

And it was: enough to get them out from under the Gulag and all the way across Europe.

When had it stopped being enough? When had the memory of home lost its power to calm him?

Perhaps it had never been enough; perhaps it was only that he'd met Iadviga at the end of almost thirty years of warfare and that for much of his time with her, struggle was in constant supply.

Perhaps the world had let him fool himself, year after year after year. Perhaps it was only a miracle that he had not gone fully mad much earlier.

MAY 17

  
WAXING CRESCENT

Nick could see right away that this wasn't going to go well.

He had a bottle of pinot grigio on the table; he didn't own an ice bucket, but he'd improvised with a plastic camping cooler. The place was cleaner than it had been in his whole tenancy, probably; he'd always been lazy about food in the past, leaving banana peels on the counter until he had ants, but now the smell of rotting fruit bothered him so much he'd given up on having any produce in the place at all.

He'd washed all the counters, walls, and floors, first with cleanser powerful enough to make his nose smart and then with a ton of plain water to get rid of the cleanser scent. And he'd eliminated a bunch of musty-smelling things, like the curtains and his old armchair and his futon. He had no problem sleeping on a Therm-a-Rest until he could find a mattress that didn't reek of chemical treatments.

But it wasn't the new spartanness of the place that had drawn his friends' attention. It was the heavy bag he'd mounted from the ceiling.

“That's … different,” Jonathan said.

“Can I try it out?” Hannah socked her fist into the leather. “Ouch.”

“You let your wrist buckle,” said Nick. “You have to get your forearm straight, like this, and line up your knuckles.” He demonstrated, causing the bag to jerk on its chains.

“How does your landlord feel about the ceiling?” Jonathan asked.

“He's not allowed to come in here without giving me twenty-four hours' notice,” Nick called over the thunderous pummeling of a series of one-two punches. “I figure I can cover it up with something.”

“What if you get a noise complaint?”

“What? Sorry, I couldn't hear you.” Nick finished off the bag with a right hook and stepped back. “I bought some of that iced tea you like,” he said to Hannah. “In the cooler over there beside the wine. I figure it will get me brownie points with the judge.”

“Don't be that way, Nick. We're your friends.”

“Sure about that? Because that message sounded more like a summons.” But he opened the iced tea for Hannah, seated himself on a pressback chair facing the sofa, and spread his hands. “Go for it. I'm ready.”

“This isn't a test, Nick,” Hannah said. “Really. I can see it feels that way to you, but think about it. You've known Jonathan for ten years. You've been in all kinds of trouble together, and he's been right there with you. That's why he's concerned now.”

“Then why isn't he speaking for himself?”

“Because I'm no good at that shit,” Jonathan said. “You got mad at me yesterday when I tried.”

“Damn right, I got mad. You pulled all this hypocritical crap while we were supposed to be having a good time.”

“That's just it. The good times are going weird lately, Nick. And it's not me that's changing.”

“The fuck it's not. You told me you wanted Hannah to
move in with you
. That is some serious change, my friend.” Nick pointed a stabbing finger at Jonathan while he spoke and half rose from the chair.

“What?” said Hannah. “You told Nick you want me to move in?”

“It's called growing up,” Jonathan said. “What Nick's doing is
fucking
up.”

“He didn't tell me,” Hannah said blankly to Nick.

“Maybe he's not sure,” Nick snapped.

“I just hadn't got around to it! And don't change the subject. I'm not the one with the problems here.”

“Oh, seriously? You think you can just sail on and pretend to be a grown-up and play house with your girlfriend and forget everything you used to be? You think you can start, I don't know, buying espresso makers and shit? What are you going to name your fucking kids? Yeah, I didn't think you'd thought about that yet. Ask
her
. I bet she's got a boy and a girl name already picked out for you.” Nick paced around the chair while Jonathan and Hannah sat frozen on the sofa. “You aren't that guy, Jonathan.”

“Hey,” Jonathan said. “This is going off the rails. This might be news to you, but most people grow up to buy houses and have kids. Just because I haven't got names picked already doesn't mean I won't be happy when the time comes.”

“Happy,” said Nick. He wound up and punched the bag. “How can you be happy like that?”

Jonathan covered his eyes with one hand. “I love Hannah. I like Toronto. We'll buy a condo here when we have enough money. This is how life goes, Nick. When you're normal.”

“Maybe I'm not fucking normal!”

“That's kind of what we've been trying to say,” Hannah said softly. “Listen, just listen. I know you don't like me. But I want you to know it's not mutual. I like you, and you're important to Jonathan, and I want you to be happy. So it's kind of hard to watch whatever is going on with you.”

“Of course I like you,” Nick said after a slack-jawed moment. “Where do you even get that?”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Your face is not subtle, Nick. But I'm glad you try to be nice, anyway. For Jonathan's sake, especially. You've been friends for so long—I'd hate to be the thing that drives you apart.”

Nick bit his tongue on a rush of pure hot fury.
Drive me and Jonathan apart? I'd like to see you try.
Only that was what was happening, wasn't it? Nick growled in frustration. “I think you should leave.”

“He's right,” Hannah said to Jonathan. “All of us getting upset isn't going to help anything. Nick, maybe we can get together again in a couple of days, once we've all had time to take a deep breath.”

She led Jonathan out into the hall. Nick shut the door very firmly behind them, not quite a slam.

“You see what I mean,” Jonathan said heavily, out in the hall. His voice came to Nick as clearly as if he'd been miked.

“I wonder if he's jealous of you,” Hannah said, a bit more muffled, as if Jonathan was embracing her.

“I wonder if he's trying to distract us so that we won't ask him the right questions.”

“Which are…?”

“Hard drugs? I don't know.” A sound of fabric sliding roughly against paint, as if one of them had leaned back against the wall. A sigh.