Spells of Blood and Kin (32 page)

At home, she'd left the windows open all day. The house felt humid. She moved around the kitchen in darkness, unbinding.

The first part of the ritual called for wax. Black wax and a rusty nail. Lissa had found the nail in the gardening shed, lying beside a tomato sauce can full of more of the same. Now she sat close to the candle, tucked her loose hair back behind her ears, dipped the nail in the pool of wax around the wick, and began scribing: rough lines, awkward and uneven, the wax clotting heavily at the beginning of a stroke and then too quickly scraping away to nothing.

It was the first time she'd had to do this: instead of just painting the egg with a paste, making an actual design upon it. The design wasn't too complicated, fortunately: a black circle that might represent the new moon and a few Cyrillic letters arranged around it. Baba had not told Lissa what they stood for, but at least it was the kind of design she'd been able to describe verbally, while Lissa took notes, back during their last full-moon conversation.

Before Lissa had finished the first section, the point of the nail broke through. Yolk slimed her fingers. She tossed the ruined egg in the compost, washed her hands, and tried again.

The second egg she crushed in her own hand, startling when the house settled and a stair creaked.

Quiet,
she told herself, wiping her hands again.
You're not used to the quiet anymore.

She could not put on the stereo with the house powered down, but she hummed to herself a little while she set up again.
Whistling in the dark,
the spooked part of her brain said, and so she shut up.

Third egg was the charm, of course. She scraped the point of the nail over the shell, thankful there weren't too many curved lines. Thankful she didn't know enough Russian to guess what the Cyrillic letters might stand for.

Ridiculous. Spooked again. A full-grown, practicing witch ought to do better. She elbowed her hair back and let her shoulders fall square again, deliberately exposing her back to the kitchen doorway.

When she had finished the design, she propped the egg on a mini-tripod to let the wax harden, poured herself a glass of tap water, and stepped out to the porch.

Light, high clouds covered the sky, red with the reflected lights of Toronto. If they had not been there, she would have been looking at an empty sky or maybe at the dark, covered face of the moon. She was not usually awake on such a night.

The heat wave had broken sometime while she was indoors. Air flowed up from the lakefront, almost chilly. Lissa let her hair fall forward about her neck and crossed her arms.

When she went back indoors, she lifted the drying egg into one of the high cupboards, where she had a faint chance Stella might not look at it.

Lissa had already, in a scant few weeks, introduced Stella to Maksim Volkov, who had to try very hard not to be a monster, and to Gus Hillyard and Nick Kaisaris, who did not seem as if they were trying as hard, and she still did not know what that meant. She did not want to be the one to introduce her stepsister to forbidden new-moon rituals. She was only just getting to know them herself.

Not that she knew Stella so well yet, either; but she did know Stella well enough to wait up.

Stella bounced in after three, just as Lissa had begun to nod off on the sofa. “I'm brilliant!” she said. “Look at all the tips I made. It just keeps getting easier.”

She cast herself down beside Lissa, stretching out her long legs. “It's true Canadians are polite, you know. Even the rowdy lads.”

“They know you'll have Rafe chuck them out if they cross the line.”

“The power! The power!” Stella cackled. “I've never had any before. I think it's rather nice.” She rubbed her eyes with both hands and yawned indelicately. “Beddy-bye,” she said. “You too. You look fagged.”

Lissa shuffled upstairs, shivering a little in the late cool. She actually unfolded a blanket from the chest at the end of Baba's bed and wrapped it close about her neck and shoulders.

She thought she would lie awake, but sleep came down over her as thoroughly as if she'd had one of her own eggs.

JUNE 7

  
WANING CRESCENT

The ritual's second night demanded more.

Lissa drank a cup of coffee as soon as Stella had left for work. She washed her hair and let the damp mass of it hang down her back; the heat had come again, steamy and stifling, and the house smelled damp.

She drank a glass of water and used the toilet as if in preparation for a long car ride.

Lissa stood on the porch to watch the sun setting peachy orange at the end of her street, between a factory converted to lofts and a row of Victorian houses, and breathed in the scent of trees.

In the twilit kitchen, she took the egg down from its hiding place. The design of the spell, drawn upon it in black wax, looked ill done and crooked. She ran her fingertips over the letters.

She took the egg up to her bedroom, where she'd set up the necessary things on top of her dresser, in case Stella came home before she was done. Last night's candle had only half burned; she lit it again and set another one, unlit, beside it.

She uncapped a bottle of black ink bought in Chinatown: cheap, slightly gritty, and as dark as anything she'd ever seen. She poured it into a stone bowl she had found in the back of one of the lower cupboards. It looked heavier than water, and it reflected the candle flame like an open eye.

Tonight's charm must be spoken. Baba had given it to Lissa in English, because Lissa's Russian pronunciation had never been very good, and apparently the rune required a great deal of repetition:

As a horse is curbed to the bit, as a river is bound under ice, so, I ask you, bind this one to stillness. Riders of dawn and day and dusk, I ask you. I, Vasilissa, granddaughter of Iadviga, ask you to bind this one by blood.

Then she said it again, three hundred times.

She lost count, of course; but she figured one repetition per minute, for five hours or thereabouts. Baba had told her to repeat it until the hour of the hag, which she figured out was a particularly unpleasant way of designating three in the morning.

With the clocks unplugged, she could not be too sure of the time, but she felt it, nonetheless. Her voice had almost given out, her throat dry like an old bellows, squeezing air between cracked leather.

The air in the house cooled. The candle began to gutter.

Lissa licked dry lips with a dry tongue and stopped speaking. She had to work her mouth for a moment, but she managed just enough saliva; she leaned over the bowl of ink and spat.

Beside the bowl was a box cutter, with a fresh blade, which she'd dipped in rubbing alcohol at the beginning of the night. She pricked her thumb with it, and squeezed. A single, fat droplet of blood fell into the ink and sank.

Carefully, using both hands, Lissa took the wax-written egg and bathed it in the ink, turning it over and over until the faint greasy marks of her fingerprints had vanished.

She took it out and set it back upon the tripod. The ink dried quickly, first marbling in the currents of air and then turning matte.

Lissa watched it, heavy-lidded. After a while, she blew out the candle and went to fetch a glass of water.

Downstairs, the door creaked open. Stella fumbled about, set down her bag, bumped into something, whispered a curse.

The power in the house was still off. Lissa had not thought.

She stood, breathing silently, at the top of the stairs, while Stella tiptoed into the living room; she heard the flick of a flint, saw a faint bloom of light. She waited until the candle was extinguished again and then counted off ten long minutes before she crept downstairs and reset the breakers.

The hallway light flashed on for a second and then died in a fizzle of overstressed filaments. The refrigerator hummed to life.

Stella murmured in her sleep. She sounded distressed. Lissa stood outside the living-room door, but she was quiet after that, and finally Lissa went up to her own room and tried to sleep.

JUNE 8

  
NEW MOON

On Tuesday, Maksim arrived on foot, limping, leaning on Gus.

“You made him walk?” Lissa said.

“He wouldn't get in the cab,” Gus said. Under the streetlight, her eyes showed white, too wide. “Your sister's not here, is she?”

Lissa shook her head. “At work.”

“What's up with your voice? And that smell?” Gus said. She shivered and tossed her hair. “Ah, Christ, I've been over and over it, and there's fuck all I can do on my own. Take him.”

She shoved Maksim at Lissa. He stumbled and caught at Lissa's shoulder but kept his feet. It helped that he had lost weight.

“I'll be back for him tomorrow,” Gus said, and she shoved her hands in her pockets and walked away, too quickly, boot heels loud on the sidewalk.

From the corner, she shouted, “Don't fuck this up!” And then she ran.

Lissa left Maksim sitting on the porch steps while she prepared the house. She brought the black egg down to the kitchen, turned off the power again, took down her hair.

Outside, Maksim seemed to have crawled up and slumped against the door, his weight holding it shut. Lissa kicked it before she realized, and she heard the hollow rap of Maksim's head against the wood.

A shuffling confusion of noise, and the door was jerked from her hands. Maksim bulled inside, all awake now, all menace. He crowded Lissa into the kitchen, saying nothing, pressing his fist against his forehead.

He took the glass of water she offered him, but he only set it aside. His face looked clay-colored and heavily lined.

“Do you need a sleep egg before I start? I can't have any interruptions.”

“Your voice,
koldun'ia,
” Maksim said. “Are you ill?”

“Stayed up all night chanting,” Lissa said. “So? Do you?”

Maksim shrugged. “I had two before I left so that we might walk here. Gus did not like it.”

“She's not the only one.”

Maksim angled his head oddly. In the candlelight, his pupils were dilated all the way so that his eyes looked black. “I smell witchcraft,” he said.

Lissa brought down the stone bowl, impatient to get this done now that she was committed.

“And something else,” Maksim said.

Lissa opened her notebook to the page where she'd written Baba's instructions.

“I should not ask this thing,” Maksim said. “I should go.”

“What? Don't be an idiot. It's almost done, anyway.”

“I should go,” he said again, folding his arms around his body, shaking his head. His eyes looked spooky, blown open wide like that; maybe because his face was thinner than Lissa was used to seeing it.

“You've already made the choice,” she said. “Sit.” She pointed to the stool by the counter.

He sat. The tendons in his arms and neck stood out harshly beneath his skin.

Lissa placed the black egg in the bowl and poured more ink around and over it. She began to say the charm again.

After the first hour, her voice went, scraped down to a husk of sound, but that did not matter. Her mouth, a witch's mouth, formed the words. Her mind, a witch's mind, held the intention.

Maksim moved only once, to release his grip on his own forearms and pick up the glass of water. Lissa could see the marks on his flesh where his fingers had pressed. He held the glass too tightly also and lifted it to his lips with a grim care that made Lissa wince; and then she turned her eyes away so that she would not lose the thread of the words.

Finally came the hour of the hag.

Chill swept the house. The candle went out.

In darkness, Lissa took Maksim's wrist and led him to the stone bowl. She made him spit in the ink. The egg was bound to her from last night's working; now it must be bound to him, as well.

She held his hand over the bowl, felt for the pad of his thumb, and handed him the blade.