The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (29 page)

Once, you said to me, “I love you because you’re part of the world.”

The trees tried to whisper to me, but I couldn’t understand. I flew through the topmost branches, beating silent white wings, and listened with the owl’s ears, but to no avail. I leapt into a sparrow and rode its tiny mind through the trees until there was a pair of blue jays shrieking at me. Taking them both, I spread out. Reese joined us, and we were a flock of black and blue, spreading a net over the land. As we flew past squirrels and a family of foxes, I snatched them up, too, throwing myself into more and more small minds. I let go of my name and became the forest. I listened, I watched, I felt and sensed and smelled, and all of it rolled into a giant ball of knowledge I could almost parse.

The wind shook branches, and I crawled over roots, I scampered up through twigs, I skimmed wings across the canopy and yet did not understand. Even when I pushed toward the roses, when I felt the energy of them, the message was garbled.

I was the skin of the forest but could not touch its bones.

And so I turned toward my body at the base of the hill, and let go some of my little souls.

First a raccoon and then the sparrow, and soon I released more. The squirrels and the owl, the blue jays, the rabbits racing
from bush to bush. Until I was only a red fox, running headlong through the rain-soaked underbrush. I could smell Will, could feel where he’d passed, for it had left a red-hot mark on the earth. There he was, cradling my body. I let go of the fox’s mind and dove home into myself.

Oh, it was grand to lie there on the warm, wet earth with my eyes closed and feel my heartbeat. I did not move but breathed in a circular pattern my mother had taught me for reconnecting with all the tissues of my body, for helping what I had seen and heard and smelled in different tiny animal minds coalesce in my own mind. It needed a long moment to process, to transform from animal memory to my own. Too fast and it was all a black blur, confusing and maddening. Force it, and it became a blank palette to imprint your own assumptions upon.
You are only a different kind of animal, pet
, my mother had said when I was small.
And you only need give your blood and your power time to convert beastly knowledge into your own
.

Heat flooded me, from Will’s arm. His fingers lined up against my ribs, his thumb over my sternum. I felt pressure where his other hand twisted in my curls. A small smile turned up my mouth as I nestled closer.

“Mab?” Will whispered.

I opened my eyes.

His eyes were right there, big and dark and edged in blood.

“Will,” I said.

“Mab.” His breath puffed over my cheek, and I touched his face just under his eye.

“That red is darker,” I murmured. “And I couldn’t discover what exactly made your curse flare up.”

His lips pressed together, pinching his whole expression. “Are you okay, though?”

“Yes.” I pushed gently off of him and stood. My skirt was muddy and stuck to my thighs. “Let’s get to the barn.”

Although the blood ground seemed the most logical place to cleanse away a curse, the barn would do, not only because it was drier than the rest of the world but because the wards painted around the outside made it into a permanent working circle. The curse could not escape these solid pine walls.

While Will fidgeted over near the family tree, I dragged the basket of purity stones out from under a pile of old rugs and set them onto the dusty floor next to a short cast-iron fire pit. I spread out a thin red cloth for him to lie on, and another for my tools: a fleam, a crow-feather fan, and six little bowls of herbs I’d ground down earlier that afternoon. From outside, I fetched a wide and shallow stone bowl that had collected rainwater overnight, and as I carefully walked it to the fire pit, I noticed Will running his finger along one branch of the family tree.

I’d always loved the mural. Arthur’s name created the darkest lines of the trunk, and we were all there, our names and birth dates penned in blood ink. Every branch led up and away from him, out to the dozens of cousins since his son was born in 1887. There on the left was the unrelated Harleigh line, ending with Nick, and just below him, Donna. And far across from that, a lonely branch named Josephine Darly that stretched up thin and winding to my name. We did not know where our
bloodline came from, and now that she was dead, we never would. Maybe Mother had been an orphan from a known line, lost to time, and maybe that’s what Lukas was, too, for we had no records of family settling in the Ozarks. The nearest were the Yaleylah witches, of Arthur’s own direct line: Silla’s family, where Arthur had drawn Reese’s death date below his name, as well as the silhouette of a flying crow.

That was the branch Will touched, tracing the line of the crow’s wings.

“Will,” I said gently, and he turned to me, his shoulders twisting and his smile in place. “Can you build a fire?” I indicated the fire pit with a slow wave of my hand.

“Of course.” He joined me, and I showed him the old newspaper, bundle of dry logs, and long matches.

He crouched and got to work twisting paper, and I turned my attention to the purity rocks. Each was marked with a strength rune so that it would not crack in the heat, and a rune of holy rain so that it might carry only the clean magic we wished. With the fleam, I pierced my tattoo, letting a single drop splash onto the center of the runes. Lifting each of the nine stones to my mouth, I breathed life into them and set them in a small pile.

The fire danced up from the tent of sticks as Will’s newspapers caught alight. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and he lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe it off.

I gasped when I saw his stomach.

He froze, shirt halfway down again. “What?” His voice rang with alarm.

I reached forward to lift the hem of his black-and-white-striped shirt higher. “Take it off,” I whispered. Lines of angry red cut down from his chest, just under his skin, streaking like blood poison.

“Jesus,” he said, standing and stripping off the shirt. It fluttered to the ground, and he pushed his fingers into his chest. “It was not this bad two hours ago.”

“It must have been when you stepped back onto the blood ground. Here is where the curse originated, so here it is stronger.” I skimmed my fingers along one of the largest blood branches, and Will shuddered. “Take deep breaths. In, count to five, out, count to five.”

His breathing remained shaky, but he got it under control as I traced my finger along the lines. I stepped in close and put both my hands against him, covering the center burst of the bruise gently. It radiated the tingling heat I knew to be magic. Glancing up at him, I said, “It will be all right, Will.”

“Oh yeah?” He was hoarse, and he tilted his chin down. My eyes were only a few inches from his. Even in the shade of the barn, I could see the red around his irises had bled inward, stretching thin fingers toward the black of his pupils.

“I promise,” I said. “Now take off the rest of your clothes.”

He started in surprise, and I hoped I’d calculated right.

It only took a second before Will laughed a little bit. I kept my hands on his chest, and his merriment didn’t last long, but when he covered my hands with his, he wasn’t shaking anymore. He wasn’t holding himself so tightly he might explode.

Turned out, she hadn’t been entirely kidding. Mab dug through a cardboard box of clothes and pulled out a pair of dark blue drawstring pants. Apparently, jeans weren’t going to cut it for the cleansing ritual.

I was glad to grab onto the slight embarrassment of ducking behind a stack of crates to change into some incredibly hippie-looking pants. Embarrassed was better than scared. I rubbed my hand over the bruise. The hard weight pushed into my chest. I remembered looking at it in the mirror this morning, when it had been free of red streaks and just a bruise. And I remembered the sharp compression when we’d driven onto the land, when I’d been dizzy and hurting and felt like somebody had dumped a bucket of hot coals over my head. If it had been like this at Dr. Able’s, he’d have hooked me up to an IV of antibiotics and I’d never have escaped.

This had to work.

I came out, leaving the rest of my clothes in a pile. For a moment I watched Mab kneel and set the last of her rocks in the fire. She seemed calm. Certain.

“Will. Come lie down.” She patted the red cloth beside her.

I obeyed. The floor of the barn was flat enough. Not super comfortable. Mab leaned over me, positioning my hands at my sides, palms down. She’d taken off her cardigan, and her hair was loose. It spilled all around her, falling onto my shoulders and face. I closed my eyes. The fire crackled. Wind blew through the rafters. But there was no other sound. My lungs squeezed. I was supposed to be calm, but the silence was making me crazy.

“Mab,” I said into her hair. It tickled my mouth, sent a buzz down my whole body.

“Oh, sorry.” She gathered it in one hand and tossed it over her shoulder.

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Yes?”

With her face tipped down, it was hidden in shadows. “It’s just so quiet. I relax better with noise.”

Mab sat back onto her heels and folded her hands in her lap. Her hair was like a thick yellow cape. “I’ll hum, and sing a little. Will that be all right?”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

She put her hand on my chest. It was cool compared to me. “Will?”

I took a deep breath, expanding my lungs all the way, and let it out slowly. Mab shifted her hand so it was directly over my heart. “Why don’t you tell me about the quiet, Will.” She kept saying my name, like it would make things better. “You can relax into it a little? And letting it go will be part of the cleansing.”

I curled my hand around hers. Hadn’t ever told anybody about this. It wasn’t the kind of thing Matt would ask. But with the warm fire, the weight on my chest, and Mab’s hand, I realized I wanted to tell her. “It’s just that the quiet makes me think of the night we found out my brother was dead.”

We’d been at dinner. Dad was grilling me on the hours I was working. Mom put in a few words every once in a while, keeping the mood light. I cleared my throat. Squeezed my eyes
shut. “He—Aaron—had been on his road trip for five days and called every night just before our dinnertime, which was precisely nineteen hundred hours. He was late, though, and when the phone finally rang, I just remember wanting to give him a hard time. But Mom shushed me back into my chair, saying I didn’t get to escape so easily. She picked up the phone, and I leaned over my plate, trying to hear. Dad wanted to know how it was going, too, so he didn’t bother talking. It was really quiet.” Except for the ticking ship clock.

“She said, ‘Sanger residence’ like always, and then ‘Yes, this is Mrs. Sanger,’ and ‘Yes, Aaron is my son.’ ” I opened my eyes. Mab was there, bent over me. She didn’t move and kept her gaze on mine. Not making any expression, just witnessing.

I said, “Then the phone fell. It was this incredibly loud plastic crack on the kitchen floor. Dad and I were up and squeezed through the kitchen door at the same time. He went for the phone, and I went for Mom. She’d sunk down onto a chair at the breakfast bar, staring out the window. Dad said some things, while I held Mom’s hands. His voice was low, and I don’t know how long it lasted. All I could hear was Mom’s breath, panting out of her open mouth. Nothing else in the whole world. Like there wouldn’t be noise ever again. Then suddenly Mom stood up, walked to the TV, and turned it on. She put the volume all the way up. I went with her from room to room, turning on all the TVs and the stereo, opening all the windows to let in noise from outside. It was almost enough.”

Tears stuck Mab’s lashes together. She wiped her finger under her eyes, and put it against my chest again. She drew
a simple rune, and it should have been a little gross to have a girl drawing on my skin with her tears. Instead it made me feel better.

She whispered, “I am so sorry about your brother.”

“It was a car accident.” I sighed loudly. “Stupid luck, they said. He hadn’t been drinking or anything. No rain, no bad conditions. Aaron just lost control, and we don’t know why. There were skid marks, so maybe he was avoiding a deer, but …” My throat clogged. I gasped, remembering my dreams of choking on roses.