The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (42 page)

Mab froze for a split second, then shoved at me. “Hide,” she hissed. “Don’t come out no matter what.”

I whirled. Ben already was jumping back into the cage. Just as I dove behind an old overturned rowboat, the barn door shoved open.

I was a whirlwind of hot and cold emotions, panic flapping hard as a crow’s wing in my chest as I forced the cage closed around Ben. He glared out at the doors, and I turned my back,
praying fast and silently that Will was hidden in shadows, just as Gabriel entered.

“Ah, Mab,” he said with a slick smile. “There you are, and your new pet, as well.”

He wandered in, hands clasped behind his back. I’d noticed that yesterday, while I’d talked to Ben for hours, he’d slashed the tires of all our cars and cut through the phone line. He was pretending to give me space, to trust me, but it wasn’t real, and we needed to be more careful now that Reese didn’t have many eyes to look out for him.

I said, “What do you want, Gabriel?”

“To visit, is that not enough?” He smiled at me, a very not-Will smile filled with sarcasm.

“I’m busy.”

Heaving a dramatic sigh, he said, “I thought I felt some magic pulling at the roots of the hill earlier.”

“As I said, I’ve been working.” I swept around him to the worktable, and pushed around the papers I’d used to diagram ideas for Ben yesterday. “I need to focus.”

“Well then. Tell me if you know where Arthur kept his drawings.” He fiddled with one of the old pencils in the coffee can on the table. “I went through his bedroom and found nothing. Nor in the den where he used to keep them in the footstool.”

My back tingled as he neared me, as I imagined him ransacking Arthur’s things. I shuffled through some of the rune-circle sketches I’d made, folding them into piles. “He kept them in an accordion file over there.” I nodded at the crowded shelves. “Take them and go, if you would.”

Gabriel wandered to the shelves and ran his hand over the wooden front of one. It was difficult not to hunch my shoulders against his presence, and I reminded myself to keep my mother in mind. With her easy living, her flamboyance, she’d have adapted quickly to Gabriel, I was certain, flirted and teased until she had him in the palm of her hand. I took a deep breath and imagined myself in a flared red dress, low-cut with thin shoulder straps, and my hair styled, my lips painted.

But the little purring noises he made when he discovered something of interest and his sighs of dismay distracted me. When he glanced at me through the corners of his eyes, my cheeks filled with heat and I glanced down. I was not Mother. I couldn’t flirt with anyone, much less Gabriel looking at me from Will’s body. Especially while Ben observed from the cage with a dark frown.

“Ah!” Gabriel turned abruptly, his hands full of old sheets of parchment he’d pulled out of a stiff accordion file. The portrait on top was of Granny Lyn, when she’d been young and first married, in a field of verbena and prairie phlox. She’d posed for Arthur with only a shawl draped around her bare shoulders. Every pencil stroke was a long caress, and when I was little I’d traced them with my finger as I recognized the shape of her eyebrows and the secret little smile she reserved for him. Her hair had come loose from its bun and fell in soft waves around her cheeks as she held her chin low.

There’d been one of my mother, too, face alive with laughter and hair in a short bob. I’d taken it up to my bedroom and hidden it in a drawer. He’d drawn Donna in the garden, her hat pulled low to cover her identity unless you knew the shape
of her shoulders. Faith in her overalls, Eli folding butter into croissant dough. Justin with his new eyebrow ring, Silla with her face a study in pain as she fed the crows. And me—well, I never would sit still unless I was practicing my runes, so all the sketches of me had my brow low and my lips pressed together in concentration. Arthur always shook his head and told me I didn’t really look like that, but he wasn’t skilled enough after a hundred and fifty years to capture it.

Arthur had collected portraits, the way I marked all the blood kin who passed through our gates with a charm tied to the branches of my redbud tree.

I drew a calming breath as Gabriel put the sheaf of pages down on the corner of the table. “So take them, and go,” I said.

He shrugged one shoulder and walked lazily toward me. “Here.” Gabriel smoothed his hands over the top sketch, then held it up by the edges. It depicted a young man in a long coat. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his hair was braided back with beads and charms. His smile curled up, and he slouched on one cocked hip as though he needn’t be prepared for anything.

I took it, bringing it close. It was a familiar drawing, of course, though I’d never thought much about it before. The edges of the man’s left boot had smeared, and I noticed he held a small bouquet of flowers in one hand. They might have been violets. Overall, it was a crude drawing, and it had to have been old, before Arthur gained skill. Turning the portrait over, I saw the single tiny word in the bottom corner:
Gabriel
. No date, but a tiny preservation rune and a brown blotch of blood.

“Not many of the others are meant to last. He wanted to remember me,” Gabriel said quietly, coming up beside me. He breathed against my neck, and I shivered.

“That’s nice for you,” I whispered. “Keep it. Take it and let me do my work.”

“You don’t need to hate me, Mab.” Gabriel put both his hands on my shoulders, leaning close to my back. “In time, we’ll forgive each other, and think what a home we could fashion here.”

I forced myself to keep breathing, though he smelled spicy like the earth and my lavender soap and sweat. Like Will, but more a part of this land. “Maybe,” I lied. “Maybe you’re right.” Turning in his arms, I touched his chest and firmly pushed him back. “But not yet.”

A scuffling noise had him glancing swiftly behind me. “What was that?”

“Crows,” Ben called. “Picking around in that back corner.”

Gabriel let go of me and strode to the cage. Ben backed up as far as he could, until his shoulders hit the opposite bars.

“Let him alone, Gabriel,” I said. “I don’t need him worked up. It ruins what I’m doing.”

Running a finger down the root bar nearest him, Gabriel smiled. “I think getting him worked up would help the magic quicken.”

“Let me have this place to myself!” I cried, rushing forward and grasping his wrist. I pulled at him. “I need a refuge, Gabriel, or I will lose all my patience to stop fighting you.”

“You can’t fight me.” He pressed close to me, taking my
hands and holding them tight between us. “I will defeat you because I hold all the power of this land behind me, through little Lukas.”

I rose up onto my tiptoes and said, with my mouth a breath from his, “I will hurt you beyond repair even as you destroy me.”

“So like your mother,” he said, then nipped at my lips with his teeth. I shoved away, and he pushed me, too, so that I stumbled back and hit the floor hard on my hip.

Gabriel stepped over me, sneered down. “I always hated that bitch.”

He left the barn then, left me with the shocking memory of such disgust seeping out of Will’s own face.

I was on my feet, running for her, the moment he was gone. “Mab.” I lifted her up. “Are you all right?”

My skin rippled. I squeezed my eyes shut and grit my teeth. I’d had a hard time breathing the moment that guy walked in wearing my body. Now it felt like my chest was falling to pieces.

“Will?” It was Ben. His hand touched my shoulder, fast, like it burned him.

“What’s wrong?” Mab frowned at my chest, ran her hands down it. I shuddered and wrapped my arms around myself.

“I’m coming apart,” I said through my grinding teeth.

Mab pulled me to my knees, put her hands on my face. “Breathe, Will, calm down. You’re too upset.”

My heartbeat was loud as a helicopter. I wanted to fly—no, I wanted to be here. To be. Here.

“What’s wrong with him?” Ben asked. I heard the cage creaking.

Mab kissed me.

She clutched my shoulders and pushed her mouth against mine. Opened up to me.

Everything lasered in on that.

On her lips.

Not moving, just being there.

“Will,” she whispered. “Don’t lose hold of this.”

Cupping her face, I kissed her again, ignoring my brother, ignoring everything but Mab. My chest fit back into place. The terrible fluttering in my skin slowed. Mab slid closer, wrapped her arms all around my head until my cheek was against her neck. Her heartbeat filled my ears, and she ruffled her fingers in my feather-hair. “What happened?” she asked.

“It was—it was my body.” I twisted my fingers in the ends of her yellow hair.
I was hers
, that voice said again. “I want it back.”

“Good,” she soothed.

“No.” I pushed away. Stood up. “Not good. That’s
my body
and I
want it back
.” I bent over, braced my hands on my knees. “I have to get it back. It’s mine.” Every time I shut my eyes, I saw it stalking around Mab. Grabbing her shoulders. Shoving her down. Laughing and frowning with
my face
. I scrubbed these black crow-thing hands over my black crow-thing eyes as if I could block it out.

Mab stood, too. Her hands set firmly on her hips. “It is good, Will. Because I know how to do it.”

It had only taken an hour to explain my plan to Ben and Will, even now that it had been altered to fit both of them into it. Ben had asked a few questions, and I’d had answers for all, until he was satisfied that it was dangerous, but possible.

Everything revolved around the countercurse Arthur and I had used to destroy the black candle rune on that walnut tree last year.

I’d use the same curse on Gabriel, and it would burn all the magic out of Will’s body—Gabriel included.

The spell required two steps: Getting the initial magic into Gabriel in order to open him up to the countercurse. That I would accomplish from the inside: just as Gabriel had poisoned Will’s blood, so would I poison his now. Then, nine hours later, it was a matter of activating the countercurse by delivering the second rune—in our case, by way of an inscribed dagger that would be stabbed directly into him.

Because magic is a dance of balance, there were also two complications. First was breaking Lukas free of Gabriel’s control, and second was preventing the countercurse from tearing loose to destroy everything in its path.

The first I would solve by using a black candle rune of my own. The second had a solution, but not one anybody would like.

The only sound was the scratchy old ballad singing out from Granny’s radio. I’d called for Gabriel, then hitched myself onto the counter with the bottle of charmed wine tucked in my lap.

From my perch I could see through the archway into the main hall and on through to the living room, where Gabriel was settled with Arthur’s books. “Coming,” he called back to me.

I crossed my ankles, held my heels against the cabinets, and folded my hands around the neck of the wine bottle. I’d thrown open the windows to let in the warm night wind, grossly aware of how quiet it seemed without the rough calls of my crows.

All my life had centered in this kitchen. I imagined Donna washing dirt off her hands in the sink. Granny Lyn patting a stool in the corner so that I’d come and let her trim my hair. Mother dancing down the hallway in a two-step, arms up to embrace an imaginary partner. Justin carving letters into the edge of the table with his dinner fork. Faith and Eli huddled over the newspaper, pointing out ads for free kittens because Hannah was begging for one.

Arthur stood across from me, under the arch of the door. Staring back, not doing anything but looking at me. I wanted to smile, to promise him I was holding the land together. He said, “The blood is yours now, Mab, all the beauty of the world. Take it.”

I closed my eyes, and when I looked again through a film of tears, he was gone.

All the beauty of the world
.

In order to stop the countercurse from destroying the blood land, I would have to anchor it to myself as well as Gabriel. Giving it a second point of origin would force the magic to spiral away from both of us, but toward the other. Only we, and everything between us, would fall under the curse.