Spells of Blood and Kin (20 page)

Winter returned. With it, illness. Trinkovich and Tretiak, on the tank squad, took sick first, limp and yellow and vomiting, and by the end of the week, a third of the platoon had it.

Something to do with their livers, said the medics, and so everyone was ordered not to drink. Something to do with contaminated rations, said rumor, and so rations were stopped and started and stopped again. Men grew thin. Tempers grew unpleasant. At half-strength, the squads had to pull double duty. Even Maksim grew fatigued.

Still, it was war, and he much preferred it to peace.

Or so he told himself, even as he watched himself fret at his leash, growl at his comrades, say the wrong things to the
Zampolit
. He told himself he was too tired to run off his anger. Told himself it did not matter that there was no liquor ration now, because he didn't love it the way Augusta did.

Told himself it was not taking him any longer than usual to come back from his battle rages; told himself he had never been able to remember much from them, anyway.

Told himself he could handle everything. Told himself this was better than desertion.

Until he proved himself wrong.

MAY 21

  
WAXING GIBBOUS

“I'm so tired of Russian food,” Lissa said into the refrigerator, where a gallon jug of borscht was getting down to the dregs, separating unattractively, pulp floating atop a livid purple brine.

Stella made a face. “I didn't want to say anything, but thank God. Want a falafel?”

“I don't know how to make a falafel.”

“Well, you walk into a Middle Eastern fast-food place, and you hand them a couple of quid, and you tell them whether you like hot sauce—”

“Seriously?” Lissa said, laughing.

“What? I don't like cooking.”

“Me neither.”

“And yet when I first got here you were messing around with all kinds of things—which I don't think I even got to taste, now that I think about it—”

“I'm not any good. It was just to keep me busy.” More true than she'd meant.

“Fair enough, but it doesn't really help right now, does it?”

Lissa shut the fridge and leaned on the counter. “I just want french fries.”

“Come with me to the Duke, then. We can grab a bite before my shift. Rafe would love to see you.”

“No. No, no, no. You can't—”

“Can't be a matchmaker? Come on, it's a grand old British tradition, meddling in people's love lives.”

“I don't have a love life,” Lissa blurted.

Stella looked at her, really looked, drawing her sculpted brows down. “You're not joking, are you?”

Lissa felt her face going hot, blotchy, shamed pink. She shook her head.

“Do you mean right now? Or never?”

Lissa shrugged one shoulder.

“Never? Seriously?” Stella said. “Like … wow. Okay. No wonder you don't … no wonder we aren't always on the same page, you know?”

“I don't think it's that weird,” Lissa said.

“Of course not. You wouldn't, I mean. And it's not. It's only, my friends and I, we were kind of … precocious, you know?”

“This is really awkward.”

“Yep. Kind of,” Stella said, and she burst out laughing. She swung her hair back and whistled up at the ceiling. “Hey, at least there's something I can really do for you, you know?”

“No. You can't.”

“Oh, yes, I can. You're going to be kissed, sister. I can make it happen.”

“Shit,” Lissa said, trying to back away.

“So what is it? You don't seem that shy. And you do like boys, right? Maybe your baba scared all of them away with a broom or something—”

“Stop pitying me,” Lissa said, and it should have come out firm and cool, but somehow there was a laugh in it.

“Ha,” Stella said. “You're into it. I can tell. Put on a nice top, then—that candy-striped kind of one. You're coming with me. There's chips in it for you, anyway.”

“That'll make me feel much better when I'm dying of embarrassment,” Lissa said, but she went upstairs and found the candy-striped cotton blouse, twisted her hair up into a loose knot, and stuck a chopstick through it.

“Lovely,” Stella said. She'd changed into her little kilt, black sneakers, and a black tank top, an inch of skin showing at her narrow waist. As if anyone would look at Lissa when Stella and about ten other nineteen-year-old stunners were dancing around like that, Lissa thought.

At the Duke, they sat at the end of the bar closest to the kitchen. Rafe grinned hugely, showing his off-kilter canine, and said to Stella, “Good girl—that's worth a nice bonus right there. Now there's a raise in it for you if you can get her to actually talk to me.”

“Get Seamus to make her some dinner first,” Stella chided. “Can't you see she's about to keel over? She wants chips.”

“Let her speak for herself, you overbearing brat. What'll you have, Lissa?”

“Yes. Chips, please,” Lissa managed. “And a pint?”

Rafe brought her the organic lager without being reminded and said, “Your money's no good here, you know. Just get comfortable and let me know if you need anything at all. I'll be right here when you're ready.”

“See?” Stella said as soon as his back was turned.

“He's just nice,” Lissa said. “Or you're putting him up to it somehow.”

“Just let him talk to you. You don't even have to talk back.”

“Well,
that's
a relief.”

“Come on—you know how to talk to other people. I've seen you. It's the same with guys you think are fit, only you might also eventually get to have sex.”

“That's what I'm…”

Stella's face shifted, her brows going wider and her chin tilting, signaling readiness to listen.

“—not going to talk about,” Lissa said. “Look. I think I'm doing pretty well. I'm still here, right?”

“And now you have chips,” Stella said as Rafe went to the kitchen pass-through and brought over a plate for Lissa and a burger for Stella.

Lissa doused her fries with vinegar, earning an approving grin from Stella. They were crisp, with the skin on, deep brown, just the way she loved them. She added extra salt.

Just as she'd filled her mouth, Rafe asked, “Did you bring your books tonight?”

Lissa shook her head.

“Did you come to check up on your sister? We haven't broken her yet—I think she's going to be okay.”

Lissa shook her head again.

“So you came just to see me,” Rafe said, hand to his toque.

“Fries,” Lissa said through the last of her mouthful.

Rafe sighed. “I'm being such a git. I shouldn't be talking at you, should I? How about I'll be over here at the bar, and you come and say something when you feel like it?”

Lissa blinked after him.

“See?” Stella whispered. “Smarter than he looks.” And she tucked away the rest of her burger, wiped her mouth, and went to start her shift.

Lissa finished her fries. She twisted up her napkin into a greasy corkscrew. She finished her pint.

She ran lip balm over suddenly dry lips and wrapped her hand around her empty glass.

“Hey,” she said. “Rafe? I'd like another, please. And…” What could she talk to him about? She couldn't tell anyone about magic, of course. He wasn't going to be interested in the gossip of the church she wasn't allowed to attend. Her job at the print shop was utterly uninteresting. They had Stella in common, but another person wasn't the right thing to talk about with someone you wanted to date.

She took a deep breath. “You were asking the other day about what I'm studying. It's Russian folklore. My grandmother left me some books—she was kind of a specialist.…”

AFGHANISTAN: 1982

Maksim came to himself like a sleepwalker awakened by a shout: he stood dizzy and shocked for a moment, quite blank, before a flare of pain caught up with him. He saw that his hand held a Zippo lighter, and the flame bit hard against the web of his thumb.

He snapped it shut, cursing. His voice came out in an overused rasp. He swayed a little.

He'd been fighting, then: the fatigue told him so, and the way his voice did not answer. And he could smell blood.

He was standing in some of it. He felt the warmth and wetness on the bare soles of his feet. And he was standing on something soft.

He looked down and saw that it was an ear.

He looked around him then. He was in the rough, single-roomed house that his squad had been using as a barracks. But instead of orderly sleeping bags and a card table, the room held a haphazard haystack of splintered planks, bundles of straw, kerosene-soaked rags. And bodies.

Maksim wondered in that first bare moment, coming to himself among the wreckage, if the
mujahideen
had come into the town, had penetrated the house. If he had somehow driven them off. If he had somehow survived such an incursion alone.

All the bodies in the pyre wore the same, familiar Russian uniform. There were no strangers. No
mujahideen.

His hands trembled with fatigue, the muscles of his arms swelled with oxygenated blood. His chest heaved with breath. Splinters pricked here and there in his palms.

His right hand, when he looked down at it, was still clenched over the blistering-hot Zippo lighter. His forearm was red with gore up to the elbow.

He had done this himself. He, Maksim Volkov. This was his work.

Maksim looked at the pyre. Most of the bodies were tumbled, chaotic, facedown or thrown like dolls into the man-high heap of scrap: it looked as if Maksim had built it out of every piece of wood in the building, every door and window frame and cot and chair. But at the peak of it, laid out cleanly with arms crossed, lay Stepanovich.

As Maksim jolted forward in shock, he knocked against the pyre, and the balance of the loosely piled kindling shifted, sending Stepanovich's body rolling down. Maksim caught him reflexively, smelling the reek of his long illness, seeing the gauntness of his stubbled cheeks.

He had not killed Stepanovich. He remembered that much: Stepanovich had been taken by the same illness that had taken so many others. Maksim had been holding one of Stepanovich's dry, bony hands in his own while Stepanovich made wordless gasping moans and turned his yellowed eyes upward.

It was the last thing Maksim remembered with any clarity, although he thought maybe someone had offered to pray.

He did not think he had taken the idea with good grace.

He would have taken it now if he could. But his voice had not returned to him yet. And he had to make himself face the fullness of what he had done.

Maksim hefted Stepanovich's body in his arms, carried him a few feet from the pyre, and laid him down. His weight was too slight, eaten away by weeks of sickness; his mouth caved in around jutting teeth. He looked nothing like the Stepanovich who was always talking, always joking, keeping Maksim's temper from rising too high.

Without him, Maksim had barely lasted ten minutes.

Maksim returned to the pyre, digging at the rubbish, flinging planks aside. He found
Starshina
Petrov's body next: face mostly unmarked, eyes unclosed. Gutted. It looked as if Maksim had reached his knife all the way into Petrov's abdominal cavity.

Why Petrov? He had always been kind to Stepanovich, hadn't he? And tactful toward Maksim himself; surely he wouldn't have said or done something to set Maksim off.

Trinkovich was next. Trinkovich had been shot: once in the shoulder and once in the face. Maksim wondered dully why he had used a gun instead of his hands.

He went on unbuilding the pyre, plank by plank. Comrade by comrade. Looked each of them in the face.

Andreev, who had first given Maksim his nickname.

Junior Lieutenant Ushakov, who always carried with him a picture of the two hounds he had left at home in Moscow.

Tretiak, who had a pair of sunglasses he'd said had come from America.

Netevich, who could not grow a beard.

And
Zampolit
Ogorodnik. It was his ear Maksim had been standing on.

When he saw the place he had cut it from, Maksim fell down in the bloody wreckage and lay there for a while. Of course it would have been Ogorodnik he'd killed first. His body was there at the bottom of the heap, and he was the one Maksim had always disliked.

He had probably said something stupid or cruel. Probably while Maksim's hands were still feeling the warmth ebb from Stepanovich's skin.

Probably Maksim had killed him without thinking at all, and the others would have reacted, of course. They tolerated Maksim's nature when he was using it on the
mujahideen,
but they would be duty bound to stop him when he used it on one of their own.

And Maksim must already have been too far gone to do anything but kill again.

He thought this was how it must have been, but he could not know. Maksim was the only one left alive, and he did not remember anything much, and so there was no one to bear witness to his squad's passing. He lay boneless in the dust. Kerosene fumes and the stench of opened bodies surrounded him. He did not move until he felt a warm, slow crawl upon his shoulder. He slapped at the place, thinking it was a fly, and the flare of pain told him instead it was a bullet hole he had not noticed before.