The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (19 page)

The crow’s heart was a burned husk.

I peered at all the little organs, at the shriveled, blackened insides. This crow had died from fire. I would have guessed electricity, except that I remembered Lukas’s burning hands and the heat of the black candle rune.

A sad smile tugged at my lips, and I caressed one of the crow’s long primary feathers, reveling in the sleek blackness.

I sprinkled salt onto the crow, whispering a song of thanks and rest, then harvested the best of the feathers before wrapping the small body in a red cotton shroud. He would be burned, and perhaps Lukas would like to help me scatter the ashes.

Afterward, I absently drew spirals against the table with my finger, over and over again, as I thought. The wood of the worktable was polished and smooth from years of use. Some bits were stained dark from spilled blood, but mostly it shone as rich as amber.

There had to be a way to remove Lukas’s rune safely. Up at the Pink House were books with magical theory, mostly written by Philip Osborn, one of Arthur’s very first students. He’d been predominantly a healer, and so perhaps I might find insights in the pages of his rune journals and experiments. The thought drew a sigh out of my belly: I never
enjoyed studying, most especially when I didn’t know where to begin, and when there was no one for me to discuss the possibilities with. It would be tedious work, but I had to, for Lukas’s sake.

Except, I suddenly remembered, Silla had them. She’d asked to borrow all of Osborn’s journals last year, before she began writing some kind of thesis.

Sinking to the packed-earth floor, I stretched out on my back. The rafters overhead glowed gently where sunlight found dust motes through the partially cracked southern edge of the roof. A trio of mourning doves nestled together, no doubt grateful I hadn’t brought the crows down with me to chase them away.

I shut my eyes and imagined Arthur stood over me, sketching something onto one of his drawing pads. I’d used to sometimes lie here while he worked and ask him questions, staring at the easy slump of his shoulders, the sure way he moved his arms and hands. The scratch of pencil against paper would lull me to sleep, where I’d dream about drawings lifting up to life and flying around me like tiny fairies.

What would Arthur do? I played through everything I knew about the black candle rune, everything I could remember about how they were created. It was a bond between a specific spell or witch and the marked thing. How to get rid of it without hurting Lukas? I could keep him bound, and maybe someday the rune would fade. Or I could change the rune itself, perhaps reinterpret the intention. But burning it away clearly hadn’t worked for Lukas.

That single time I’d helped Arthur destroy such a rune, to
protect Eli’s friend, we’d gone back after a year and a day had passed to the twisted, dead walnut tree.

Frost had cracked beneath our feet as we stood beside the tree, and the sky was a sheet of thin gray clouds. The tips of my fingers grew numb from the cold as I clutched a bundle of beeswax candles in one hand, a lancet in the other. Arthur faced the tree, where the black candle rune crawled angrily across the bark. Just above, the hilt of a dagger thrust out: we’d stabbed it in the night before, and begun the cleansing spell with a song and the runes etched into the tip of the blade. Though the sky was overcast now, all night the full moon had shone down, and the dagger had leeched its power.

For nine hours, the delicate magic had curled into the heartwood. We were here now to set the final bit in motion.

Arthur said, “I feel it humming inside the tree.”

Together we set out the candles in a circle around the tree. Nine of them, spaced equally, and each surrounded by an intricate rune of starlight that we drew with lines of salt.

When the circle was set, we stood across from each other. Holding out our left hands, we cut our tattooed wrists and let blood fall. Pacing one another, we walked sunwise, dripping blood onto the earth in the center of each of the starlight runes. Power slid through my veins, splashing to the ground. The magic rushed together by the time we’d both gone halfway around the circle to replace each other on either side. I smiled at the cutting wind that lifted up pieces of my hair and rattled the dead leaves on the branches above us. Arthur stepped inside and gripped the dagger with a bloody hand. “By my blood,” he said, “cleanse this curse.”

The surge of magic flared to life deep inside the tree and echoed in my chest. I held out my hands with my palms facing the earth. Arthur held tight to the dagger, and I watched his pale hair whip against his face in the wind.

Fire spat out of the black candle rune in quick, sharp tongues, and then went silent. The tree shook as its branches curled downward. I breathed in long intervals, and watched as the spell tore out from the rune, blackening the tree up and down, turning the leaves into ashes and making the roots quiver.

Arthur released the dagger, and the starlight runes flashed silver. For a brief moment I relaxed, but then I saw Arthur poised beside the tree trunk, fingers tense and his eyes on the ground.

Looking, too, I saw it. The frost melted in a ring around the tree, as if the brown grass cooked from below. Arthur stepped back, but the ring widened, spiraling out slowly and steadily. The dagger spell must have soaked not only into the tree but through the roots and out into the earth. Arthur met me at the edge of our nine-point circle, and we watched together.

Steam rose, thickening the air.

I had assumed the cleansing would only pass through the tree, but this spell crawled through roots and rocks, under the frozen mud.

It slithered under our circle, blackening the ground in its wake, destroying—no, cleansing—everything. If it escaped us, it might travel over the whole blood land, burning away all the magic!

Arthur frowned the same moment I yelled in surprise. I spun around, searching for a way to widen the circle ahead of it, to cast a firm and solid barrier. “Arthur?” My mind whirled furiously. “How do we get our blood around it?”

He watched me calmly. “What would you do if I was not here?”

“We don’t have time! We have to save the trees!” I flung my hand toward the living forest, just yards away, where squirrels huddled in their winter nests and a red-tailed hawk gazed at us from the top of a pine, entirely unconcerned.

“Think,” was all the Deacon told me.

As the cleansing crawled nearer and nearer to my feet, I slashed my palm with the lancet and pressed the blood over my heart. I whispered, “My familiar,” and then “Reese.” My blood flashed hot and sharp on my chest, and I flung out my hand so that flecks of the blood arced out into the air.

And he came—all twelve crows exploding over the forest so suddenly and silently the red-tailed hawk startled into the sky, too. It screamed its displeasure, but my crows only barked back and kept winging toward me.

Falling to my knees, I dug a binding rune into the earth with the lancet in quick, slashing motions. Arthur backed away, and the crows landed around me. My breathing was too fast as I pushed again at the edges of the wound on my palm, spilling blood and power into the rune. “Come!” I said, and the crows crowded near me, dipping beaks and the tips of their wings in the pool of blood cupping in my hands.

“Mab,” Arthur said quietly.

I glanced up to see the blackening ground edging even
nearer, the steam from melting frost lifting up thinly and delicately.

“Bind the earth, with my blood,” I commanded, “bind the sky, with my blood!” The crows cried out in a single voice, and I yelled, “Fly!”

They leapt into the air, the beat of their wings shoving wind at me. I knelt at my rune, pressed both hands down into the earth, and whispered my spell again and again while the crows flew hard and high, spreading into a wide circle. I chanted, and they flew sunwise, around and around. Arthur put his hands on my back and joined my spell, his hands sticky and hot with blood. His power rushed into me and his words echoed mine, over and over and over, a round with no beginning and no end.

The string of my power thrummed between me and all the crows, pulsing with my heart and with their wing beats.

And the binding circle held.

The cleansing curse hit the edge of my magic and died.

I’d crumpled to the side, exhausted, and Arthur caught me, dragging me half onto his lap. He kissed my palm and the cut healed. He brushed a thumb over my wrist and I was whole.

The crows returned one at a time, making hard, tired landings.

“Well done, little queen,” Arthur said, with one finger lifting my chin so that I looked. The circle of black earth was contained, but at its center the walnut tree slowly crumbled into chunks of charcoal and ash.

The black candle rune was gone and burned away but had taken everything in a twenty-foot circle with it.

I drove back and forth along the half-mile stretch of county road I estimated was two miles south of Matt’s uncle’s lake. But I couldn’t find the turnoff to Mab’s land.

On my third pass I yanked the wheel. The tires threw gravel off the shoulder as I stopped. I cut my music.

Slowly, the oppressive silence melted into individual sounds. Wind, leaves clapping together, birds chirping—a lot of birds chirping—and … nothing else. No highway noise, no distant radio, no conversation or yelling kids or anything.

No dogs breathing down my neck.

My chest felt hollow. I wanted Havoc behind me, dripping drool onto my shoulder as she tried to see out the windshield.

I shut my eyes and imagined flying up into the sky, for that bird’s-eye view of the area. In my head, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. There was the lake, and here the slow rolling hills. Dense tree cover, sudden wide-open field gone all prairie and fallow. This road snaking southeast, back toward the interstate.

It should be here.

I jumped out of the car and slammed the door behind me. The bang it made soothed me for a moment, and before the echo died completely I started off. The regular crunch-shuffle of my steps on the gravel was a relief, too.

The trees pushed against each other in a huge mess. No order, no pattern. Just thick trees and thin ones, tall trees with spreading branches, and short, squat little bush things. Fallen logs. Lots of piles of dead leaves from last year. I could only see about ten feet into the woods, too. The trees were so close together, and the canopy kept out so much sunlight. But there was definitely, certainly, no break in them big enough for a person, much less a car.

I tromped on. My girls would’ve found the path in no time.

About fifteen minutes later, I turned back the way I’d come. After only a few feet, I faced the forest and called, “Mab?”

My voice cracked out like a bullet.

“Mab?”

Nothing. Just the wind in the trees and a lessening of the birdsong. But it picked back up quickly.

“I need your help,” I said, but too softly for anyone to hear even if they’d been standing just inside the line of trees.

A crow called. I jerked to attention.

I scanned the trees. It called again, and I saw it. A large black crow perched on a branch about ten feet off the ground. A dozen yards north of my location.

And right beside its tree, the forest parted to make room for a gravel road. It was impossible I hadn’t seen it. I’d walked right past it. And driven past it three times.

The crow cawed twice in quick succession. I lifted a hand and jogged toward it, off the gravel and into the knee-high grass. “Thanks,” I said, and saluted it. It flapped its wings and took off. I started to yell after it, but it only flew to the next tree, a few more steps into the woods.

It was drawing me inside.

The crow led me for several minutes straight through the dense underbrush. There wasn’t any path, and I had to climb over logs and shove through bushes, using branches sometimes for leverage. But the forest barely noticed me. Branches snapped back into place when I passed, birds sang, squirrels ran overhead, leaping from tree to tree. I began to wish I had on long sleeves and boots. My sneakers did okay, but my forearms were scratched up in no time.

Eventually, the trees spread out just a bit. I was on a deer path. The crow overhead was joined by a second and then a third. They darted across the space in front of me, egging me on. The deer path was, like, six inches wide, and my pants brushed up against lush green plants with every step. As I walked, I kept an eye out for poison ivy. I was gonna have to do a serious tick check when I got home.

Sweat dripped down over my eyebrow, and I paused to wipe it away with the hem of my T-shirt. When I raised my head, I saw color flash ahead.

I jogged on, pushing past the crows, and emerged from the trees into a small grove. The grass was as tall as my knees, and totally wild. Little pink and white flowers bloomed in the center where the sun hit, and just past them was a barn.

It had been hard to see through the trees because it was painted gray, but a thick line of red striped the side horizontally, and over the double doors somebody had painted a huge, multicolored pattern. Some sort of star and circle and triangle thing. Bold and fresh—much newer than the rest of the barn. It looked layered, too, like it was repainted every year or so.

One of the doors was ajar, and two crows flew inside. The third waited for me on the ground.

That crow hopped through and vanished into the darkness. I gripped the door and pulled it back another inch or two. “Hello?” I said. No response. “Mab?”

But the crows clearly wanted me inside. I stopped after a foot to let my eyes adjust. It wasn’t dark, just dim. Scraps of sunlight shone through the hole in the south corner of the barn’s roof. A few little white birds scattered as the crows flew up to the rafters. There was a lightbulb dangling from the center, adding a bit of yellow to the dusty gloom.

Half the barn was full of old crap. Crates, pieces of a rusted tractor, empty gallon jars, feed sacks, and that sort of thing. The other half was more organized, but barely. A long wooden table dominated it, and rows and rows of shelves held boxes, vials, buckets, and I was pretty sure that was a cast-iron cauldron brimming with seashells. The table itself was almost bare. A block of kitchen knives perched at one end. A trunk was tucked under the table, and it was etched with weird old symbols like you’d see in a horror flick.