Spells of Blood and Kin (35 page)

Now he ruffled his fingers through the paper, smelling the adhesive of stamps. He picked up the bowl and dumped out the mail on the tabletop. The ceramic felt chrome-smooth and faintly cool.

Nick raised it and brought it down hard on the table's edge. The bowl split into five asymmetrical wedges, sharded with fractured glaze.

As a gesture, he thought it was perfect.

He wasn't done smashing things, though, so he retrieved all the condiment jars from the refrigerator and broke them like eggs into the mess. He opened all the windows and tore out the screens to let the flies in. Then he shouldered his duffel and left.

JUNE 11

  
WAXING CRESCENT

“Does midsummer mean anything to us?” Stella asked.

“Us?” Lissa echoed.

“Witches.” Stella pointed to a page in the book she was reading. Lissa looked more closely.
Witchcraft and Sorcery,
it was called, and it looked to have come from the library.

“I don't think so,” she said. “Not our kind, anyway.”

“It might help with my research if you told me what kind we were,” Stella said.

“What kind I am,” Lissa said. “Not you.”

She stood there looking at Stella's face and hearing the echo of her own words in the heavy air.

“What I mean is—” she said.

“You're right,” Stella said, snapping the book shut. “Thanks for reminding me you don't actually want me around.”

She set the book very gently on the coffee table, picked up her bag, and walked out the front door.

Lissa waited. After a long time, she went out to the front porch, but Stella was not there. She could not remember whether Stella was working tonight, and she thought in any case it would be a bad idea to barge in on her at the Duke if she was upset.

And why should Stella be upset? She
was
pushing in. She and Lissa weren't real sisters.

And who was a real sister if not a person who'd stay up with you, braiding your hair, while you tried to avoid nightmares?

They'd even started to fight like sisters, Lissa thought—at least she had—fixing on the thing she suspected would hurt Stella most.

She settled for leaving a message on Stella's cell phone. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm being a jerk. It has nothing to do with you, and I'm sorry. I'll try to do better.” She hesitated. “Love you.” And hung up.

Lissa cleaned the bathroom in penance, very thoroughly, taking a brush to the grout in the shower.

When the doorbell rang, she struggled up, dried her hands hurriedly, and ran downstairs to answer.

Maksim stood there under the porch light: clean-shaven, dressed in khakis and a T-shirt with the logo of his gym on it.

He looked rather shy as he held out a bundle of carmine-red alstroemeria.
“Koldun'ia,”
he said. “I did not thank you properly the other day.”

“That's very sweet,” Lissa said.

He followed her inside, politely accepting her offer of a glass of wine.

“I suppose I am still not thanking you properly,” Maksim said, looking into his glass, “because I have come with a question. Can it be worked upon someone unwilling?”

Lissa blinked. “I don't get it,” she said. “I thought you didn't like it, what it does to you.”

“No,” he said simply. He shook his head and took a deep swallow of his wine, looking for a moment almost the way Lissa remembered from before.

Maksim set down the glass and looked at his hands. “It is not pleasant. It is a shackle, or a weight, and beneath it, I struggle sometimes.”

He looked up again, eyes catching the light. “You do not know what it is to fear your own self,” he said. “To know that if you fail in your vigilance, you will destroy whatever it is you care about.”

“Sure I do,” Lissa said. “Everyone does. People hurt their loved ones all the time.” She thought of Stella's eyes and the careful way she'd set the book down.

Maksim gazed at her, steady and cold. “Most of your mistakes do not end in murder.”

Lissa did not have an answer for that.

“My mistakes,” Maksim said, “are visited upon my progeny. If I wish to protect them from harm, I must protect them from doing harm.”

“You want me to do the ritual for Gus and Nick too? I thought they both hated the idea.”

“They do.”

In the house next door, someone played piano: long arpeggios, an exercise, marred here and there with hesitations. Lissa felt the weight of her sleepless nights.

“I can't,” she said.

“Because they have not agreed?” Maksim said, a rough edge in his voice.

“I just can't.” Lissa's turn to hide her face with a too-large sip of wine. “You were a mess for a while there. Do you remember me telling you about the ritual? About how it was against the rules?”

Maksim shook his head.

“Yeah. We're not supposed to do anything at the new moon. And when I asked Baba about it, what she'd done for you, I didn't ask all the right questions.”

Maksim frowned, the lines in his face deepening. “That smell,” he said. “I thought the magic smelled wrong.”

“Yeah. I don't really want to discuss it in detail, but it's not something I can do again. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Your sister?”

“Hell no,” Lissa said. “You're not listening. There was a price, and I'm paying it. And it kind of sucks, and there's no way I'm going to let Stella do that for Gus or Nick or anyone else.”

“Break the egg, then,” he said, laying his hands flat on the table. “Dig it up and break it.”

“No. No, Maksim. I know what you were thinking of doing when you offered to leave before the ritual.”

She could see from the look on his face that she'd been right. He didn't have to speak.

“Were you suicidal before, when you first came to my grandmother?”

He made a motion with his head that might have been a nod.

“That's why she did it for you, then.”

“She owed me a very great debt,
koldun'ia
.”

“She never told me about it.” And Maksim did not look likely to tell her either, Lissa saw.

He pressed his hands to his eyes. “All I knew was what she owed me; I did not know what I asked of her or of you.”

“My grandmother was willing to pay the price. She asked me to do this. She must've known it wouldn't be easy, but she thought you were worth it.”

“I will try to find a way to thank you,
koldun'ia,
” Maksim said, unsmiling. “And I will not ask again.”

He left then, leaving his wine half-finished.

Lissa flipped through a grimoire and set it aside. She'd been through it all earlier, looking for the ritual in the first place; she wouldn't find answers here or in any of Baba's full-moon books. She'd have to wait and ask Baba herself.

How to stop the nightmares or live through them, of course. And what Maksim had done for her, whenever he had done it.

Lissa did not think she would ask anyone what Maksim had done later to make him fear himself so much. It had been bad enough that he'd rather die than do it again, and that was all she wanted to know.

JUNE 11

  
WAXING CRESCENT

Nick's sense of smell worked even better now. He was learning. And he had, also, the memory of Maksim's address book, which had listed an apartment on Dunn Avenue.

Who even used an address book anymore? People who were hundreds of years old and hadn't really got used to computers, apparently; but he guessed there was the factor that
other
people who were hundreds of years old had shitty subsistence-level lives and weren't on Facebook, and so you had to remember it somehow. At least Maksim hadn't written it in Russian or something.

He'd forgotten the street number, but it didn't matter. All of Dunn Avenue smelled faintly of Gus, as if she'd been walking up and down it for decades. Maybe she had.

Nick stood in the middle of the street. A taxi honked at him. He gave the driver the finger and turned in a slow circle.

South, toward the lake, stronger scent beckoned. Not far.

He followed the thread down an alley between two old Victorians. They'd been beautiful once. Dead vines dangled from the walls; gingerbread trim rotted below leaking rain gutters.

Of course Gus would live here. Nick climbed the fire escape on the outside of her building and knocked upon the boarded window of her door.

She threw a bottle, by the sound of it. It didn't make it through the plywood barrier, but Nick heard it burst and shower shards onto a tiled floor.

“Are you done?” he called.

“Fuck off!” Gus shouted from within. “I told you. We don't enter each other's houses.”

“We both spent the last week in Maksim's,” Nick said with syrupy reason, hoping it would piss her off even more.

She banged the door open. “I'm going to Durban,” she said.

“Why? Oh, wait, I know. To visit your old girlfriend or something. Right?”

“She wasn't my girlfriend,” Gus said, hanging on to the door frame.

“How drunk are you?” asked Nick.

Gus laughed and backed down; Nick cautiously stepped into the apartment.

“What a shit hole,” he said, without thinking. The window over the fire escape wasn't the only broken one. The fire door led into a cramped main room furnished with a sofa and one wooden chair. The door into the kitchen had been torn from its hinges and left propped against the nearby wall.

The kitchen barely rated the name: it held a laundry sink with the tap wound about in duct tape, a bar refrigerator, and a hot plate mounded with a mess of melted plastic and scorched food.

Gus saw where he was looking. “I forgot I was cooking,” she said. “It could happen to anyone.”

“Anyone drunk,” Nick said.

Gus sprawled on the sofa. “Did you come to fight?”

Nick shrugged.

“You know you're not up to my weight yet,” Gus scolded him.

“Maybe not. But no one else is up to mine, really, so I don't have much choice. I'd rather get my ass handed to me than completely mangle some random shithead who happens to be in the wrong alley.”

“That's a lie,” Gus said. “You'd love to mangle a random shithead.” She tongued over the words mockingly, nearly missing a few of the consonants.

Nick shrugged again and helped himself to the open bottle of rye, making a face at the taste.

“If you don't like it, you could have brought me something else.”

“I did,” Nick said, remembering. He dug through his duffel bag and brought out an unopened bottle of Jameson's, half a mickey of rum, and two airline-sized bottles of vermouth. “The leftovers from my place,” he explained.

“Raising anchor?” Gus said and began singing “Spanish Ladies.”

“What is it with you and that song? Don't you know anything from this century?”

“It reminds me of the first girl I kissed. In Cadiz. A long time ago.”

“I think I'm going to have girls all over the world too,” Nick said. He felt a smile spreading over his face as the rye sank in. “I'm going to start with Stella Moore.”

Gus went quiet and looked at him.

“She likes me,” Nick said. “I know she does.”

“She hit you with an egg.”

“That's because she has a lot of self-respect.”

Gus covered her eyes with her forearm and reached out her other hand for the bottle, which was nowhere nearby; Nick uncapped the rum and guided her fingers around it.

“I think I'll take her with me on a trip,” he went on. “Her sister would never let me hang around their place; and anyway, Stella's not the kind of girl who will stay in one town for long. Maybe we'll go to Greece.”

“Nick,” said Gus.

Nick blinked.

“You came to my home,” Gus said. “Against my wishes. You have about five more minutes before I finish drinking your rum and start doing violence. I suggest you say what you came to say.”