Spells of Blood and Kin (22 page)

“Right.”

The waitress came with pints and bourbons.

“I thought you wanted a quiet night,” Nick said after she'd gone. He leaned over the table and let his eyes fall half-closed, inhaling the aroma of the bourbon.

“I do want a quiet night,” Jonathan said. “And I'm clearly only going to get one if I make you drink yourself stupid. So those are both for you.”

Jonathan ended up having one himself, though, of course, and then another. He came back from the bathroom to find Nick had introduced himself to the tube-top girls and bought them a round of some kind of nasty-looking layered shots.

“When was the last time we even had shots? This is stupid,” Jonathan said, but he took it, anyway, and shared in the high fives of the girls, who were celebrating a bachelorette.

Then at some point, the girls were gone, and he leaned on the wrought iron patio railing and tried to light the wrong end of his cigarette, which he should not have been smoking in the first place. The guy who'd given it to him seemed to be talking about psychotherapy or something. Jonathan turned his cigarette around and got it to burn properly.

“There you are,” Nick said from the other side of the railing. “God! Put that out.” He snatched the cigarette from Jonathan's lips. “What a stink.”

“You used to like them.”

“Only when I was drunk.”

“I'm drunk. Right now,” Jonathan said, raising his hand. Nick came around the railing and led him away. “Where are we going?”

“Someplace more interesting.”

“Don't we have to pay and stuff?”

“I took care of it.”

“Are you, like, mad about something?”

“You sound like a girl,” Nick said, slowing. He turned to face Jonathan. Under the streetlights, his face looked open and wild.

“I just can't … I can't figure you out right now,” Jonathan said.

“Nothing to figure. I'm just me. And I'm really, really,
really
tired of getting shit from you.”

“Not giving you shit,” Jonathan said, spreading his hands. “Really. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

Nick wrapped his fist in the collar of Jonathan's T-shirt. “No.”

Jonathan flailed at Nick's hand. “Let go. What the fuck are you—”

“Trying to get you to shut up,” Nick said. His eyes were narrow and dark and too close for Jonathan to focus.

And then they were far away, and the ground was much closer.

 

Six

MAY 24

  
WAXING GIBBOUS

Lissa didn't tell Stella about the date until Stella caught her prepping for it, winding her hair up into a crown of braids and dabbing gloss on her lips.

“That's … new,” Stella said, leaning around Lissa's shoulder to pout in the mirror.

Lissa didn't say anything. In the mirror, she watched the color rise in her face, hot pink and patchy.

“And it's Rafe's night off,” Stella said. “Hmm.”

“Don't say anything else. Or I'm going to cancel it.”

“And punish an innocent man for my nosiness?” Stella said, grinning. She tapped her comb on the careful coil of Lissa's hair. “D'you think that's a bit tightly wound? You don't want to make him think you're tightly wound.”

“But I am.”

“Okay, I guess you are, a bit. But—”

“Seriously!” Lissa said. “Just be quiet. Quiet!”

Stella doubled over laughing and flung her hair back and skipped out, calling over her shoulder, “Don't do anything I wouldn't do!”

Lissa had no idea what Stella would or wouldn't do on a date. What was normal on dates, anyway? What was normal in love? How did anyone figure this stuff out?

The last time Lissa remembered having a clue was back in high school, and so many of the things she'd believed then had turned out to be incomplete or untrue or just hopelessly naïve. She believed Crystal Brink had given blow jobs to the entire football team in a single night; she believed true love meant roses and diamonds and waiting until marriage. She believed her mother was a bad wife who hadn't been able to make Dad stay.

None of it gave her any idea of how to get what she wanted from another person or how to figure out what he wanted in return.

She opened by saying as much to Rafe while she twisted her unbound hair around her hand as they sat on the patio at an Italian place on College.

He laughed and shrugged one shoulder. Everything about him was asymmetrical: his body language, one eyebrow higher than the other, that one crooked tooth. “I think it's like that for everyone,” he said. “No, really. If we're being honest.”

“I just wanted to warn you.”

“Warn me,” Rafe said. “Huh. Fair enough. I guess I'd better bring my A game.”

“‘A game'? What does that even mean?”

Rafe spread his hands. “Sorry. Sorry. It's just … I guess you don't know this, but honestly, everyone pretty much has to start at square one every time. That's part of the fun. Finding out what the other person likes and whether you'll, you know, fit together.”

“And if you don't?”

“Well, then you go your separate ways. No hard feelings.”

“That sounds really … not as bad as I was expecting.”

“Oh, there's hard stuff, sometimes,” Rafe said, a bit of the cheer dimming in his face. “Let's not do it that way, though. Okay? Deal?”

“Deal, I guess.” They toasted: Lissa had a very pale pinot grigio, and Rafe had something called barbera, meaty red, tinting the glass.

“So what goes on in the world of printing?” Rafe said. “Stella tells me that's what you do.”

“It's a job,” Lissa said. “It's a paying-the-bills kind of job. It's not what I do.”

“Bartending's what I do,” Rafe said. “I guess I'd better get that right out there. I like it, and it likes me. I'm not saving to go back to school or anything. I'm a lifer at this.”

Lissa thought of how he looked behind the bar—that cheery quirk to his face, the easy movement from tap to cash to refrigerator—and felt an answering cheer come to her own expression. “I could tell,” she said. “You're a natural, right?”

“If only you could tell that to my da,” Rafe said. “Wanted a surgeon. Would've settled for something else as long as it came with a Bentley and a really nice flat.”

So this was what people did on dates, Lissa thought—talked about their families and the things they were and weren't and the things they knew and didn't know. She didn't think she'd ever had a conversation quite like this. With Stella, a bit, but she'd thought Stella was one of those people who would talk about everything. Before that, Lissa's normal was a lifetime of Baba and her meditative silences and the long evenings she spent reading her grimoires while Lissa did homework or wrote letters to Dad, which would rarely be answered.

Talk. She soaked it up. Rafe's voice, a bit hoarse; his accent, which she was beginning to realize was upper class, veering into broader dialect for effect. Once in a while, he started to wind down and she had to ask him a question, and then he'd wind up again, his hands rising, touching his glass or his toque. Or her hand.

She agreed to a second glass of wine and then a cup of tea, and the tea was what she tasted on his mouth, under the black walnut tree at her front walk, where they said good night.

MAY 25

  
FULL MOON

Nick got all the way up the steps of the Greyhound before realizing what a terrible idea he'd had.

The smells of people and air freshener throttled him, the smells of McDonald's fries and Cheetos and the prickly upholstery on all the seats. Blindly, he turned and shouldered his way back down past the other people trying to board the bus. He stumbled through the line and out onto Elizabeth Street, where he found a piss-stained wall to lean against while he squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over them for a minute.

Three million people in this sprawling city, and just now they felt like three million bricks in a very high wall. He could not travel in this state or ride a bus or a train. And he couldn't fly.

He could drive, maybe, but he did not have enough cash at hand to rent a car, especially now that he'd bought the bus ticket. If he used his line of credit or his Visa, they'd be able to find him.

The police. The police would be able to find him. No point in refusing to think of the word, like a child afraid of monsters. Police.

Jerkily, Nick shouldered his pack and began walking south.

The morning grew brighter and hotter. A cop car passed him on Yonge, and he ducked his head a little so that his cap would shade his face. The cap was of the John Deere trucker variety, with the synthetic mesh and the plastic snap band at the back. He'd found it in an alley last night while he was running. It was not very clean, but at least it had been rained upon.

He could not walk through Nathan Phillips Square. Instead, he went into the alleys again, this time on the south side of Queen. He knew where he was going now: the place in Parkdale. He had beaten two men there, and no one had noticed or cared.

Parkdale had had a bad name for a long time, though lately it had begun to gentrify. Jonathan used to like to flirt with the badness, back when he still had his edge, the way some of Nick's high school buddies had been into butterfly knives. Until lately, Nick hadn't quite believed there was anything to it. Until a month ago, when the place had somehow possessed him. Did places have spirits? Evil, violent, craving spirits? How did other people live there? Nick had seen mothers there, nice people, pushing babies in strollers, buying coconut juice, checking out romances from the library.

Maybe they were not nice. Maybe they didn't return the romances by the due date. Maybe they shook their babies.

Maybe it was just Nick.

Just Nick, alone now, on the crazy train.

He bit down on his knuckles until his teeth parted the flesh; he told himself to stop, but his hand kept rising back to his mouth, and his tongue kept worrying at the gash there and liking the taste of the blood.

Something was different, new and nightmarish, rising up through the broken rind of Nick's old self. Like those ants on the nature show with David Attenborough, the husks of them standing still, hollowed out, transfixed by massive fungal eruptions from the centers of their skulls. If ants had skulls.

If Parkdale was infected, where was the chancre? Where was the cholera-tainted well? Was it the sports bar? The alley behind it?

Was it the man in the low-brimmed cap, all solicitous until he pressed his tongue into Nick's open cut?

Was it Nick himself, or even Jonathan, coming back around, buying shots, looking for a fight?

When had the world gone so weird? Why hadn't he noticed before now?

MAY 25

  
FULL MOON

Someone was holding Jonathan's hand. Hannah. Hannah was holding his hand.