Spells of Blood and Kin (4 page)

Stella was too tall to look up at Lissa, but with her head ducked down like that she gave a good imitation of it. After a stiff moment, Stella unclenched her hands, took the mop—wordlessly—and the bottle of Mr. Clean, laid her pair of gold rings on the counter, and went to work.

Lissa left her to it, shut herself in the upstairs bathroom, and had a very long shower. When she was as clean as she could get, she still didn't know what to do next.

She dressed and braided her hair. In the mirror, she saw a person who would never be mistaken for anything other than Stella's
step
sister: six inches shorter, heavier chested, lacking Stella's lean grace. Fair-haired but not quite blond. Peasant stock. When Lissa got old, she'd look just like Baba, lumpy and square.

That was half of why Dad had left Mum, she thought; bearing Lissa had used up whatever beauty had attracted Dad. Or maybe as he earned more money he'd felt himself entitled to someone more cultured, with less old-country baggage. He'd met Julie while he was on a business trip.

He hadn't married Julie until well after Mum died. Lissa didn't know why he'd waited.

She wondered if he'd ever talked with Stella about any of it.

Downstairs, Stella was just putting away the mop in the closet under the stairs. She rolled her head on her neck and said, “It's just drying. I was wondering—I'm starved—do you have a favorite takeaway? On me, I mean.”

Lissa, feeling like even more of a jerk, picked her way over the damp spots on the kitchen floor to show Stella the refrigerator stuffed with the casseroles and soups from the church ladies.

“My God,” said Stella. “How many people do they think are living here?”

They ended up eating cold borscht and piroshki, sitting on the porch steps. By the time she'd finished her portion, Stella was yawning every minute. “It's much later at home,” she explained. “I found some sheets in the closet and set up the chesterfield. I was wondering if you have a spare pillow?”

As easy as that, Lissa seemed to have missed her chance to be firm and send Stella to a hotel. For tonight, anyway.

She gave up thinking of it after a minute and helped Stella get settled, locating towels and pillows and toothpaste. Stella went to hug Lissa again when she said good night, and Lissa let her, standing still within the circling arms.

Lissa shut the door and wandered back into the kitchen, where the floor was now clean and she could walk on every part without seeing Baba's face and the dribble of bloody sputum.

She saw it, anyway. She should have expected it, she said to herself, trembling beside the cabinet, unwilling to cross to the sink.

There were recipes to make for the ladies. Tonight was a day off the full moon, and her unexpected houseguest was sleeping. There would not be a better time.

She still could not face the kitchen. She turned away and went to bed.

And then it was the fourth day, and the lawyer called her to come by for Baba's lockbox, which turned out to contain the letter and the doll.

APRIL 27

  
WANING GIBBOUS

Augusta lived in a squalid apartment at the top of a fire escape: iron stairs switchbacking up the side of a pitted cinder-block wall. The motion-sensor light at the top was long dead, but the ambient light of the city was strong enough to show Maksim the way. Some of the stairs were weak with rust. Maksim jogged up them carelessly, feeling the whole assemblage tremble under his weight, daring it to collapse.

“Augusta!” he called as he ascended. He thumped on the door with his fist. “Augusta!”

He couldn't hear anything from within. The narrow pane of safety glass in the door was dark. Midnight was long past, but from elsewhere in the building, Maksim heard percussive music and shouting. Maybe Augusta was there, partying.

He thought he could scent her near, though: warm and unwashed and boozy. Maybe she was sleeping. She should not sleep when he had need of her.

Maksim settled his weight and punched through the safety glass. It didn't break on his first try, so he kept at it. First the glass webbed into pale cracks, and then after a few more hits it fell inward, taking a few splinters of the frame with it. Maksim reached through and unbolted the door and let himself in.

Augusta sprawled facedown on her slumped sofa, head pillowed on one arm, the other flung outward. She was snoring very lightly. An army-surplus T-shirt was rucked up above her waist, exposing the worn waistband of her jeans and a few inches of skin.

Maksim kicked the leg of the sofa. “Augusta,” he said, not quite a shout.

She stirred then, finally, with a sleepy murmur. “Maks?”

“Get up,” he said.

“Mmm, nope.” She buried her face in the crook of her arm.

Maksim took hold of the nearest object and threw it at her.

It turned out to be a glass, and it bounced off Augusta's shoulder and shattered on the floor.

“Asshole!” Augusta growled, sitting up. Her pale hair was crushed flat on one side and matted into a wild tangle on the other. “Stop breaking my shit.”

“I must speak with you.”

“What did I do this time? I don't remember doing anything.” Her voice was rough with sleep and drink; Maksim wondered if she would even remember this conversation later.

“You did nothing. That I know of,” he said.

“Then it can wait until morning.” But Augusta was already sitting up, scrubbing a hand through her hair, tugging her khaki T-shirt roughly into place, groping around for something. She located it tucked within the threadbare cushions of the sofa: a mostly empty bottle of rum. She upended the bottle over her mouth. Most of the rum made it in.

Maksim sat down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the sleepy heat of her. “I wish you were sober just now,” he said. “I need your help.”

“You're being weird. And you're bloody,” Augusta said, blinking sandy eyes in the dimness. She ran a fingertip over the split knuckles of Maksim's right hand.

“I broke your door.”

“Haven't seen you lose your temper in so long, I didn't know if you were capable of it anymore,” Augusta said. “It's kind of a relief. You're not so much better than me, after all.” She raised Maksim's hand to her mouth and licked gently over the raw, broken skin, soothing it with her tongue.

“I have never been better than you,” Maksim murmured. “I have been so, so much worse. You should turn from me. Maybe you will yet.”

Augusta reared away from him. “What the fuck?” she snapped. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” She emphasized it with a sharp smack from the flat of her hand across Maksim's chest.

Maksim felt his mouth snarl. “I need help,” he said again. “Something is wrong. I feel like … something is wrong.”

“You smell different,” Augusta said. She leaned in again and sniffed at his neck. “Better.”

He could smell himself: sweat and blood and rust from the fire escape, and none of that was what Augusta meant.

“What did you do?” she said. “You gave up the curse, didn't you? About fucking time!”

His hand wrapped around her throat, silencing her, before he had even thought. “It is a balm, not a curse, and I did not give it up,” he said. “I cannot. I would not.”

Augusta shoved his hand away. “Then what?”

Maksim was on his feet, turning. “I wish I knew. All I know is that I feel wrong.” Wrong, or all too right. The last couple of days had been too delicious, too much like the old days. The miles he had felt the need to run, the sweet ache in his calves only spurring him on faster. The hot sweat sliding down the hollow of his spine. The way he had not been able to resist that young man. All the pleasures Iadviga's invocation had blunted.

More than any of those, the craving for harm.

He should have thought of it right away, of course; only he had been drunk with it as he had not been in years. He should have known his pleasure for the ill omen it was.

“I must go to the witch,” he said.

Augusta scowled. “No.”

“You may not command me,” Maksim said, fisting both hands in the denim of his jeans to stop himself lashing out.

“I know I can't. But you never fight me anymore,” Augusta said and grinned through a yawn.

Maksim tipped her chin up to see her face in the angle of brightness from the streetlight outside. Her eyes looked puffy, lined, older than the rest of her.

“You are too foxed to fight,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

“You were the one who woke me up, breaking shit,” Augusta said. She tugged free of his hand. “Come on. Let's put some coffee on, and then you can punch my lights out. Just tell me you'll stay away from that unnatural piece of work.”

Maksim hesitated for a second. Didn't he usually want to be kind? But Augusta's tone was too much to swallow when his body thrummed with this urge to move. He slapped her openhanded across the ear.

Augusta laughed and surged to her feet, butting her forehead right into Maksim's chin, knocking his cap off. “Yeah! Let's go. Come on.”

He came back with a messy uppercut, catching her in the ribs and making her grunt. At the gym Maksim owned, he taught students of all levels, but none of them were
kin,
and Maksim was always pulling his punches. Here, and only here, he could let fly with close to his full strength.

“See?” Augusta gasped, ducking to let Maksim's fist overshoot her head and smack into the door frame. “That's it!” And he took her full in the cheek with his other fist, splitting the skin.

But she had been passed out drunk earlier while he was furious and on edge, and he shortly sent Augusta reeling backward into the scatter of broken safety glass.

She hit the wall hard with one shoulder and bit off a curse word.

“I take no pleasure in damaging you,” Maksim said.

“Liar,” Augusta said, without heat, twisting to tug down her torn shirt collar and inspect her shoulder.

Maksim picked up the rum bottle and held it up to the wash of light from the window—a finger left, at most.

“Give me that,” said Augusta, stumbling over to drop to the sofa. “It wasn't my best fight. I'll do better tomorrow.”

“That is what we all say,” Maksim said, gulping the rum and tossing the empty bottle in the direction of the kitchenette.

Augusta cursed him, so he turned his back on her before he succumbed to the want in his fists again. He left her dim, stuffy room, jogged down the iron stairs, and vaulted over the last half story.

Then he went to see the witch.

APRIL 28

  
WANING GIBBOUS

Lissa closed her bedroom door. The air hung still and stuffy. She'd told Stella she wanted a nap. She sat on her bed, back against the headboard, and opened the lockbox.

The doll, unclothed muslin body scalloped with faint brown stains, had eyes that opened and closed. Its porcelain head was capped with carefully sewn curls of auburn hair. Human hair. Baba's hair, it would be, cut when she was young enough that it held no gray. Lissa thought Baba must have made the doll originally for her daughter, Lissa's mother. Lissa tilted it back and forth, watching the clear, glassy gaze, and laid it on her lap.

The letter was on lined paper torn from a Mead notebook and folded small. Baba had written it in pencil, dark, spiky, and sprawling.

The letter reminded her again of the old story for which Lissa had been named: Vasilissa the Beautiful, or Vasilissa the Wise, depending on the version.

Vasilissa, like so many girls in old stories, grew up with a stepmother who hated her. The stepmother sent Vasilissa into the forest one night to ask the witch Baba Yaga for a light. Baba Yaga lived in a house that strutted about on hen's legs, and she rode through the sky in a mortar. Her house stood in a yard ringed with a fence of skulls mounted on spears, and the skulls' eyes burned with fire.

When Vasilissa explained her predicament, Baba Yaga said she might stay and work, and then she assigned her three tasks: cooking enough dinner for ten people, sorting and grinding a sack of millet, and squeezing all the oil from a sack of poppy seeds.