Spells of Blood and Kin (8 page)

Lissa shook her head.

“The girls wear little kilts,” Stella said. “They hired me on the spot.”

“I wasn't expecting this,” Lissa managed.

Stella tucked her head down. “Please let me stay until I find my own place. Please say I can.”

“That's … wow,” Lissa said. “Um. I have to think about that.”

She thought she was being pretty awesome, not saying no right off the bat, but Stella's face went all crushed.

Lissa had no idea what to do with that. If Stella stuck around, she was either going to cave to emotional blackmail or kick her sister right out the door.

It was an hour too early to leave for work, but she did anyway. Behind her, the house felt smaller than usual, with Stella still sitting in it, drying her eyes at the kitchen table. Not hers. Not right.

At the print shop, Lissa's boss, Mustafa, welcomed her back, patted her on the shoulder, and told her he'd stocked the fridge with her favorite iced green tea. He didn't tell her the corporate orders were behind schedule, but she found that out quickly enough.

She'd have to put in some extra time to get everything caught up, but that was okay. She had to pay off the funeral somehow, and Baba had left her, in addition to the house, the property tax bill; the heating system, which still ran on oil; the new sofa, charged to the Sears card.

And if she worked late, she would not have to face Stella again just yet or the strangeness of the house or the people wanting eggs; she would not have to speak to anyone at all, only move quietly back and forth amid the scent of warm paper and the white noise of ink upon it.

APRIL 30

  
WANING GIBBOUS

Maksim forgot where he was going on his way to Augusta's apartment. The hazy sunshine lulled him even as he walked. He stopped to watch two boys sparring in a backyard, and he leaned upon the fence and stared unabashed until a woman came out of the house and brandished a phone at him.

He shrugged at her. “No English,” he said and wandered away. He took a nap on a bench for a half hour. He woke sweating and off-kilter, half-glad his egg was wearing off and half-desperate for another already. While he thought it all through, he knotted one hand in the other until his bones creaked and came to the remembrance that he'd meant to see Augusta. He rose from the bench and trudged off toward her street.

Her street was a shabby one, seen in daylight: rows of old Victorian rooming houses with sheets hung at the windows, and newer buildings with cheap brick frontages and cinder-block sides, all close-built right up to the edges of the lots so that the alleys were shoulder width and dark. People squatted in them sometimes in the summers. Many of Augusta's neighbors didn't seem to know how to wash. Some of them smelled ill. Maksim usually made Augusta come to visit him.

On this day, she must have seen or scented him coming; she stormed up the sidewalk, glowering, her boots heavy on the pavement. She had been choosing the same kind for decades now, plain black army boots with steel toes, and she would wear them until the leather wore down and the steel shone through. “You went to the witch,” Augusta said. “And you didn't come back.”

“I am here now.”

“She couldn't help you properly. Could she? You need me, after all.”

“She is dead,” Maksim said, and he watched Augusta's eyes flinch. “Her granddaughter, fortunately for me, is also a witch.”

“That explains the stink.”

“What stink?”

Augusta flicked his scalp with her blunt fingertip. “You don't smell right, and you're all slow.”

Maksim shrugged. “I have taken to the bottle also, and I have a piece of news to tell you, and I think you would prefer to hear it over a drink.”

The look she gave him was wide-eyed and unhappy, but she led him to a dusty pub a few streets away. It was the kind of place where no one washed the windows or the floors, and the tabletops were sticky. The TV showed a soccer game; the announcer spoke in excited Portuguese, of which Maksim recognized a few words from his time in the Peninsula. Augusta ordered them each a glass of stout.

“I'm a bit short in the pocket this week,” she said, flushing faintly over her nose and cheekbones.

Maksim groped in his pocket and found a crumple of bills. He dropped them on the floor, gathered them up, set them on the table; a breeze from the open door nearly scattered them again, and Augusta cursed and slammed the saltshaker down upon the bills.

“I don't like you like this. I hope you'll make this short so that I can go back to making some blunt.”

“I can compensate you for your time,” Maksim said. “Or not, if that gives offense. Really, Augusta—”

She bared her teeth at him. “Gus. Asshole. I've only been reminding you for a hundred years.”

“Gus. Fine. The thing is … I may have made you a brother.”

The pint glass shattered in her hand.

By the time the sighing bartender had brought damp towels and a fresh glass, Gus had recovered herself enough to laugh, if a bit breathlessly. “All these years … it's been just the two of us.”

“The devil in it is, I do not know where to find him,” Maksim admitted, covering his face with his hands. He emerged a moment later to add, “And I am out of practice. At managing myself. I do not feel it coming in time to rein myself in, as you do. If I go about unleashed, I am afraid of what else I might do.”

“Come on. I do stupid shit all the time, at least when I'm sober. And I'm half your age, anyway; it hasn't hit me as much yet. But leaving that aside…” Gus said. “I want to know why you finally broke your streak. Why now. Why him, this fellow, and why can't you find him?”

“
Koldun'ia
Iadviga died, and her enchantment was undone,” Maksim said. “Ill fate came upon me immediately. I think it has been waiting for me, ever since—”

“Ever since the thing you never talk about,” Gus said, crossing her arms over her chest and squeezing her elbows.

“Yes.” And for a moment, the memory roared over Maksim as it had not done in years: the red of it, the heat, the taste of gunmetal. He nearly gagged.

Gus laid her hands carefully on the tabletop, where Maksim could see them. He wondered if he'd made a motion or a sound.

“Take a sip,” she said. “Good. Another. Don't worry, I won't press you. We've gone this long without talking about it, haven't we?”

Maksim shook his head, pressed his lips against the glass.

“Whatever it was,” Gus said, “it drove you to take the spell. Didn't it? By the time I caught up with you that year, you were different. You were all bottled up. And now you're not, and that should be good, only you don't think so. Am I warm?”

Maksim nodded.

“Take another drink,” Gus said. “This would be so much easier if it were last century, wouldn't it? We'd just get on a boat and go somewhere else for a while.”

“No boats,” Maksim said, hand tightening on his pint.

“Easy. Easy. I already used up our glass quota here. No boats.”

Maksim gulped back the contents of the glass and set it down hard. Gus slid it out of reach across the table. “This is weird for me,” she said. “You're always the one who knows what to do.”

Maksim shrugged one shoulder, hand twisting at the collar of his T-shirt.

Gus blew out a breath and shrugged in turn. “One thing at a time, okay? Tell me about my brother.”

Maksim drew a breath, felt it catch in his tight throat. He began, “I was running…”

But that wasn't right. That wasn't the beginning. He had been running when he came across the young man, but he'd been running for a while by then, ceaseless and demanding. When had he left the house?

He picked his way further through the slow backwash of his thoughts and said, “I was at my gym. Slavo—one of my students … we were working on his footwork. I thought he hit me. In the face. Lights flickered behind my eyes.” Maksim paused. Even as he said the words, he thought they were not right. Not lights but a burst of brilliant darkness. It had been similar to getting hit, but he had been hit many times in his long life, and he should have known the difference. He shook his head and went on, “I was angry with Slavo. My own fault, but I wanted to punish him. I sent him away instead. Made him leave without his shower. I went some rounds on the bag, but … I needed air. You remember how I used to run?”

Gus nodded. She had seen him head out into the early mornings of three different continents and come back hours later, sweat-soaked and limping, all his temper bled right out of him. She had helped him bind his blistered feet now and then or ice his burning calves.

Since coming to Toronto, Maksim had not needed it the same way, but he had kept it up nevertheless, if not as desperate or driven as before. He usually ran as if he were training for a marathon, varying his distances and elevation, cycling through a series of favorite routes. But that was not the kind of running he wanted, the day he was trying to describe.

“I think I did not even lock up the gym,” he said. “I went out and went far, and I went for hours. And instead of running it off, it got worse—the urge. I had not felt it so hard in years, and I was too drowned in it to think about why.”

“You can't,” Gus said. “I mean, I can't. Not when it's like that.”

“It was late at night when I came on them,” Maksim went on. “Two young men in an alley behind a bar. Very drunk. They had been set upon, and one of them was bleeding.”

Gus laughed without humor.

“You know what I did next,” Maksim said. He was looking down at his hands on the tabletop, and he saw how tightly they were knotted together.

Gus followed his gaze and said, “I'll get us another round.”

She brought back whiskey this time, in tough little shot glasses. Maksim drank his in a single long swallow; it eased the constriction in his voice somehow.

He said, “I ran away again right after. I did not think to stay. I went swimming.”

“In a pool?” Gus said, shuddering. “But the chlorine—and even though it's so strong, it never quite covers up the smells of all the other people—”

“In the lake,” Maksim said, remembering the deep chill of it, the myriad scents of waterweeds and shore weeds, the birds welcoming the dawn.

“So when you came to me and broke my door, that was the next day?”

“I was not sure you would remember,” Maksim admitted.

“You left me a souvenir or two,” Gus said, gesturing wryly at her face. “I wondered what was up with you.”

“So did I,” Maksim said. “And then I went to see the witch, and it came clear.”

“So we have to find this guy, and we have to do it now.”

Maksim shrugged. Nodded.

“And you don't have anyone else but me,” Gus said. Not a question. She looked a bit horrified for a moment, but then she took a breath, patted Maksim's clenched hands, and said, “Go and relax or something. We'll find him.”

She walked out without saying anything more, but she was whistling “Spanish Ladies,” so Maksim didn't think she was angry.

Relax, she'd directed, and though he was not in the habit of taking advice from Augusta, Maksim took this as license to go back to his apartment and swallow down four eggs in quick succession. What came over him was not exactly sleep, but it was dark and blind, and it broke the tension in him like a blow from a sledgehammer. He slid down onto the floor before his refrigerator and let himself lie.

CADIZ, SPAIN: 1813

“Spanish Ladies”: Gus had always liked it. Maksim had heard it sung by sailors a hundred times, no matter whether they were leaving Spain or headed toward it.

The day he boarded the
Honoria,
for instance, bound for Cadiz. The sailors were shouting it back and forth to each other, tuneless and rough, as they rowed Maksim from the pier out to the ship. Maksim was riding the rough edge of two days without sleep, running from a Mayfair flat to a hidey-hole in Southwark to the port and the first berth he could command. He'd committed a murder: the kind of murder he always ended up committing, a moment's unbridling of his nature and no turning back. He did not regret the murder—a young man losing at piquet and furious with it, who'd followed Maksim out of the card room to argue and ended in a sad huddle of limbs under a tree in Hyde Park—but he regretted being seen playing with the fellow and then leaving with him, and he regretted the new mare he'd had to leave behind in his rush to disappear.

The regret kept him on edge, despite the fatigue of his quick exit. He was unforgivably impolite to the captain, without realizing they would have to dine together; he wanted to drink heavily, but the drink was a Madeira, which he detested. He found the ship's motion made him almost ill, which was a thing his kind rarely suffered.

By the end of the five-day voyage to Cadiz, his neckcloths were all crumpled from constant tugging, he had opened his knuckles on the paneling of his tiny cabin, and between the missed dinners and the never-ending pacing, he'd lost enough weight to make his breeches begin to droop at the waist. He surged ashore, barely remembering his belongings.