Spells of Blood and Kin (41 page)

Gus was still wearing her sport top and road-filthy jeans. The motel key and roll of bills were still in her pockets. She kicked through the tangle of clothes on the floor until she found her boots. Half of the stuff there was Nick's dirty laundry, but his day pack was gone.

And his tent. That meant at least a chance he'd picked the woods.

She stepped quietly down the iron stairs from the motel balcony. Whiskey still slopped around in her head. It made her feel loose and warm despite the night chill on her bare arms. But she'd only had a few shots' head start before Nick came into the bar, and she hadn't been alive this long without learning to handle her drink.

If he'd meant to put her under the table, he hadn't done a very effective job of it. No, she thought, he'd just been seized with the desire that overtook them all sometimes, and a few drinks behind, he hadn't been able to sleep it off.

She shoved her hands in her pockets and strolled around the perimeter of the motel parking lot, breathing deeply. No need for haste, was there? She didn't want to risk missing the scent.

On the second round, she caught it, elusive but unmistakable.

The woods.

Under the trees, pupils jacked open uselessly, she saw texture in the blackness where there was none and nothing at all where there were branches to scratch at her hair and face. She slowed down and shut her eyes and groped forward along the thread of scent. Behind her, the sound of the highway faded and faded and was gone.

The scent was obscured now and then in the heavy overlay of ash, but she was going upwind, and she was very good at this, and she always found it again. And after a long, slow time of it, the sun began to rise, red and evil, and she saw she was going east.

It took her hours, but finally she ran Nick to ground at the edge of the burn. Less cover here: black, ragged spikes of tree trunks with all their branches and bark fired off, and the ground smoothed with drifts of ash.

She could see Nick now, plodding forward, misshapen by the pack on his back, his legs gray to the knee.

The fire itself was close enough that she could see towers of fresh smoke above the trees, northeast. She could hear it too, a dull crackling rush; or maybe that was only the hangover piling up at the base of her skull.

No ground crews, though; maybe the burn they had reached was a firebreak, and the crews fought on another front.

She did not want to shout, her throat and chest tight and aching. She quickened her pace and closed the gap between them, ash puffing around her boots.

He turned when he heard her coming. She saw the resignation on his face.

“Should've known I couldn't get out from under Big Sister's eye,” he said, his voice raw with smoke and fatigue. “Come to take me back? Did you bring any water?”

“Nope,” Gus said. She slowed, bent to set her hands to her knees, and coughed.

“Jeez,” Nick said. “Next time I run away, I'll make sure to take along a care package for whichever warden comes to put me back.”

Gus fell in beside him and nudged his shoulder to direct him a bit farther north.

“Where are we going?” Nick said through a yawn. “Not straight back?”

“To the fire,” Gus said.

“Knew you wanted to see a water bomber in action,” Nick said, smiling, teeth white in ash-smudged, dark-tanned skin.

“Let's not talk,” Gus said.

Her eyes stung. Her mouth tasted like bourbon and smoke.

Closer to the fire line, step by aching step. And then she heard it coming, a ripping bellow of engine noise. She held Nick still with a hand on his wrist. They looked up.

There came the water bomber, belly full, streaking directly over them toward the thickest smoke. Gus's eyes teared up. The plane vanished over the trees before she could see it drop the payload.

She looked down just in time to catch Nick's fist swinging around into her ribs. She tucked her arm in and tightened her core, took the blow harmlessly on her bicep, pivoted for a punishing counterpunch.

“Gotcha!” Nick crowed.

Gus pulled the counterpunch, instead smacking him lightly in his solar plexus. Nick coughed out a laugh and dropped his pack. “Never too tired to spar, huh? I'll let you try my Wu-Tang style!”

He made some kind of bullshit hand-chopping motions. Against her will, Gus felt herself grinning. She did some theatrical shadowboxing and charged in.

Damn, it felt good to fight, even so tired. Fists, flesh, the thump of bone. Weight against weight. Breaking apart and closing again, each laughing when the other scored.

Maybe she could keep this. She caught Nick in a headlock. He nearly threw her over. She kicked his feet out and got her grip again.

“Surrender!” she said. “It's a long way back to town, and I want breakfast.”

Nick snorted air through his nose. “Guess it would be a waste of time to offer you whatever's left of my cash advance to just let me skip out.”

He made it sound like surrender, but it wasn't. Nick was always joking and never joking.

Gus felt the fun evaporate right out of her and blow away with the smoke.

She braced her feet, felt Nick react to the minute shift of weight with a shift of his own.

She wanted to say something, but she was too tired to start it all up again.

She set her free hand to the side of Nick's face, let the gesture be comforting for a fraction of a second, and then gripped tight.

From there, it was the work of a moment to snap his neck.

JULY 16

  
FIRST QUARTER

“
Skol'ko volka ne kormi, on vsyo v les smotrit,
” Lissa whispered to Stella. “My grandmother used to say it. It means, ‘No matter how well you feed the wolf, he still looks to the woods.'”

Stella giggled. “You'd think he'd be more at home here, after all the time he's spent on your sofa.”

Maksim prowled between the windows, looking both menacing and uncomfortable. He had worried the knot in his tie low enough to expose the unbuttoned collar. The last month had been easier on him, the new-moon spell allowing him to live as normally as he ever had, but Lissa was still conscious of his other nature, chained.

He was supposed to be pouring tea, but Lissa had given up reminding him of that. He did remember to serve out vodka for the men.

A few of them had spoken to him in Russian, quietly, when they thought no one was near. Lissa watched them do it but couldn't get close enough to hear.

The ladies crowded her, patted her hair, pinched her cheek. Yelena Ivanova's rugelach were eaten up in no time, and Stella refilled the plate with shortbreads. She had asked Lissa to braid her hair for the occasion, and she'd dressed soberly in a silver blouse and gray skirt, but she still looked ridiculously young and English. She sat like a secretary, notebook balanced upon her knee, and wrote down the orders.

Izabela Dmitreeva took over the tea service. She whispered to Lissa, “Mr. Volkov used to come sometimes, when your grandmother was still with us. We wondered if he was all right.”

“He is very well,” Lissa said.

It had been his idea to come, in fact; he had even, amazingly, helped her vacuum the house.

He had done the most important thing of all: when the ladies were filing in, he'd stood with the sisters, shaking hands, as Lissa introduced Stella.

“Stella Moore,” some of them had repeated. “From England, are you, dear?”

And Maksim had glowered, without saying a word, until the ladies more properly said, “
Koldun'ia,
it is a pleasure to meet your sister.”

The men who'd come—few, as always, and only the elderly ones—nodded to him, their eyes dark and grave, and bowed their heads over Lissa's hand and then over Stella's.

By the end of the afternoon, they'd taken a page and a half of orders; they'd gone through six pots of tea and three dozen cookies; and Maksim had broken the brown teapot with the sudden pressure of his fingers.

“I am very sorry,
koldun'ia,
” he muttered. “Very sorry. It is only that I sometimes forget myself.”

He did not seem in a mood to break anything else, so Lissa merely handed him a rag and a dustpan and asked him to clean up the mess.

She and Stella saw everyone out into the halcyon summer evening. The house smelled pleasantly of tea and furniture polish.

Stella went up to change out of her nice clothes, and Lissa sat with Maksim in the front room.

“Thank you,” she said. “We will have a much easier time of it now, even if you don't wish to come again.”

“You would have made an easy time of it for yourself without my help,
koldun'ia,
” Maksim said. “You do very well.”

“I try,” Lissa said, abashed.

“I have not forgotten,” Maksim said. “The nightmares, do they still trouble you?”

She shrugged. They did, but she had no intention of rubbing Maksim's face in it.

He understood, anyway, by the tension in his posture; he looked away from her, out the window again, and shifted restlessly.

“You want to go out running or something, don't you? It's such a gorgeous evening,” she said. “I'm glad you're well enough again.”

He was more than well enough, really. He'd regained much of his lost weight, eating well and training, and his skin shone brown with sun, except for streaks of pale scarring on the right side. He no longer limped at all.

“Go,” Lissa said. “We'll finish the cleaning ourselves. Thanks again.”

He brought his attention back to her with an effort and smiled. “Next month,
koldun'ia
. Or anytime I can be of service.”

Once out the door, she saw him walk away swiftly, yanking at his tie, shoving his sleeves up his forearms.

Stella came down in a halter top, hair still damp and kinked from the braids. “We should bring him to the pub with us,” she said.

Lissa bit her lip.

Stella swatted her. “Joking. I'm not an idiot,” she said. “Though it
would
be funny, watching Rafe wonder … still joking, still joking! Want to get a falafel?”

JULY 16

  
FIRST QUARTER

Maksim reached the park, almost running now. He dropped his tie in a waste bin and then tore at the buttons on his shirt and let it flap open.

He stopped under an old oak and spread his arms wide, opening his chest, flaring his nostrils.

“Hey,” Gus said, edging up behind him.

Maksim turned and embraced her.

Gus stood stoically; just as Maksim began to release her, she hugged back, hard, and butted her head against Maksim's for a second.

She was thinner and darker-skinned, hair bleached sun-gold. She looked boyish and wiry, the way she had when they'd traveled by sea, only even dirtier: army pants mottled gray, shirt nearly worn through, showing a salt-bleached sport top underneath. Fingernails worn to the quick, with dirt rammed up beneath them. A dozen bracelets of woven embroidery floss about her wrist. She reeked of smoke.

She was also alone.

“Shh,” she said, though Maksim had not spoken. “I said I'd take it on, and I did.”

Maksim wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face against her unwashed hair.

“I'm going to skip out for a while,” she said. “Someone's going to notice he's gone.”

“Maybe I should come with you,” Maksim said. “His friends might be able to tie him to me.”

Gus was shaking her head, hard. “Fuck that,” she said. “You're staying. This is what you wanted. This is what you built.”

Maksim waited and held on until the fierce tremor in Gus's body stilled and she stood away, holding her breath.

“I will stay,” he said. “I will be here when you are ready.”

Gus exhaled.

“And I think you might make the time for dinner before you leave,” Maksim said.

Gus looked down at her hands, all the knuckles dark with scars.