Spells of Blood and Kin (19 page)

Drinking alone sucked. He didn't like being one of the people alone in this bar. When he'd been here with Jonathan, he had felt protected, exceptional; they were travelers from someplace better, observing the locals like they were a different species. Now Nick felt a bit too much like he belonged here.

He kept catching people looking at him, though. Maybe they didn't agree that he belonged. Maybe they all knew one another, and the silence in the place was just because they didn't have anything to say to one another. Maybe Nick was the only stranger.

Having a best friend meant you weren't a stranger anywhere you went—you were one of the citizens of a two-man country. Only Nick's country was undergoing some kind of annexation right now, and how was he supposed to deal with that? Half of him knew that marriage—if that was really where Jonathan and Hannah were heading—was a two-person country too, only maybe even richer and better than friendship, and of course it was normal and sweet to want that and to take it when the world graced you with it. And the other half of Nick wanted to nuke that country right off the map and keep Jonathan for himself.

Nick didn't think he could be a country all by himself.

The logical thing to do would be to find a girlfriend of his own: as Jonathan kept pointing out, that was a normal thing for people their age to do. And it wasn't like Nick wasn't hot, he thought, preening a little. He had great abs and a tan and cool-looking eyes. Girls gave him the once-over all the time.

He hadn't dated anyone since Sue Park, though, and if he was honest with himself, it had only been a few dates before she'd stopped returning his calls.

Maybe it would be different now. Nick was different now. Maybe he would call Sue Park later and see if she picked up.

He'd come here to Parkdale for a reason, though: a vague reason, sure, but since he was here, he might as well explore. He paid up and went outside, around back.

The place looked seedier in daylight. Nick observed the Dumpster and the security light and the gravel and the sparkle of broken glass.

He didn't see anyone in the alley. Hadn't expected to, really. Now that he was here, he didn't know why he'd thought seeing the place again would mean anything. It was only that things had changed for him that night, in a way he hadn't yet comprehended. He felt a bit like someone visiting the grave of an old friend.

He followed the alley west, aimlessly kicking at beer cans and chunks of broken paving. Weeds grew lush here, massive dandelions and other bitter things, leaves weighed down with a patina of dust and soot. Nick found an old mattress, springs rusting through; an assortment of gas cans; a discarded sweatshirt that his nose, even from ten feet away, told him was stained with come. He didn't think he'd always been able to identify stains by smell, and he was not sure he enjoyed having this particular ability.

Nick found a homeless man sleeping on an opened-out cardboard box. He found a trio of black kittens playing beneath a flat-tired Topaz; the car's windows were all open, and in the backseat, the kittens had made a nest of rags. He found a small baggie of pot, also by smell, which was cool.

He found a fight.

Two guys were beating up another guy. The victim was on the ground, wheezing through bloody lips. The two attackers circled him, kicking and cursing.

When they saw Nick coming, they stood still and turned their heads to him like jackals. “Stay cool,” one of them said. “You're cool, right?”

Nick ran at him, swinging. Everything he didn't know about fighting felt flooded out by the sheer strength in his body. He broke the first guy's nose on the third try. The second guy jumped him from behind and tried to trap his arms. Nick threw him off, twisted around, and kicked him in the stomach.

The one with the broken nose grabbed a bottle and swung at Nick with it. Nick slid away, faked right, and punched left and hit the guy in the broken nose all over again. When the guy fell down, Nick stamped on the hand that held the bottle. More breakage. The sound of it was like meat between his teeth. He stamped on the guy's other hand, for good measure.

The one he'd kicked in the stomach was still on the ground, moaning.

“You suck at this,” Nick said. “You shouldn't be in this business.” He knelt down and took the man's earlobe between his fingertips. He put his lips to the ear and shouted, “Got me? You can't go around beating people up!”

He stood up, light-headed with adrenaline, and looked around. The third guy, the victim, was limping up the alley as fast as he could, looking over his shoulder; he rounded the corner and was gone.

“You're boring,” Nick said to the two on the ground. “Next time, fight back a bit.”

He walked on, shaking. Tasting the air through his nose and his open mouth, the smells on it of blood and food and drink and heat.

He'd had a plan, earlier, hadn't he? Yes: to call Sue Park and make her his girlfriend or something. Something stupid. He didn't care about that anymore, not with his blood up like this. He didn't think quiet, musical Sue Park could even handle who Nick was becoming.

Nick might be living in a country of one, but right now he felt like the king.

AFGHANISTAN: 1981

It was the second time Maksim had joined the Red Army. He saw right away that he was not going to have as much fun this time around.

For one thing, the Red Army was bigger than ever, and its web of allegiances ever more tangled. Its opponents, the
mujahideen,
were made up of several factions nominally united by their faith, but as far as Maksim could tell, it was the same faith practiced by most of the Afghans who were Soviet allies. Maksim saw that he would not be able to take much satisfaction in the idea of fighting for his homeland, which was not under threat from the
mujahideen
at all. He would have to fight for his comrades, which meant he would have to get to know them. And in turn, they would get to know him, something he did not always wish to chance.

For another thing, he was not issued his own
Afghanka
. Supply of the heavy winter uniforms was limited to two per squad, said his commanding officer,
Starshina
Petrov. They would go to whoever pulled night duty or was posted in the windiest spot.

In Maksim's long experience of soldiering, complaining was one of the things every soldier enjoyed and a quick way for him to form bonds with the rest of the squad, among whom Maksim was the newcomer. So he complained about the
Afghanka
shortage to one of the other men in his squad over mess one night.

The man gave him a long look. “We are fortunate to have
Afghankas
to share,” he said. “
Zampolit
Ogorodnik would not order us to share if it were not for the best.” He moved away from Maksim and sat by himself near the tent flap.

Later in the evening, Maksim heard someone else toasting
Zampolit
Ogorodnik, wishing the political commissar long life and excellent health, wishing him the pick of the loveliest brides, wishing him fortune in battle and untroubled sleep.

Sarcasm. It had to be. No one loved an officer that much. The rank of
Zampolit
was a new one since Maksim's last campaign, and he began to see it meant something unfamiliar to him.

Maksim did not find out much more until he met Ogorodnik himself, coming from the hastily dug latrines a few days after their deployment into the Panjshir. Ogorodnik said to him, “You seem like a sensible fellow. Quiet.”

“Sir.”

“People like to talk to those who'll listen,” Ogorodnik said.

“Not to me. Sir.”

“No? I find that … surprising.”

Maksim inclined his head.

“If you ever feel a need to talk to someone … share confidences … you may talk to me—Volkov, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Maksim thought for a moment that he had been propositioned.

Then he understood that he had been asked to report on his comrades.

Maksim could not go running—not here, in a hostile valley, with orders not to stray beyond the pickets—but he stormed back to his squad's tent and sat stabbing his bayonet into the dirt until
Starshina
Petrov ordered him to stop.

He made more of an effort not to be separate after that.

His squad numbered eight, including himself; they and two other squads made up the platoon, led by
Starshina
Petrov and Junior Lieutenant Ushakov. His squad slept together and messed together; in addition to sharing a duty roster, they shared a single light machine gun.

“Lady Wasp,” they called it; no one told Maksim who had stenciled the name on the gun's dark, lean cheek, but there it was, in slightly crooked Cyrillic. They took turns carrying Lady Wasp. Maksim's turn came more often than not, because whoever had the gun could not have one of the
Afghankas
, and Maksim was one of the ones who minded the cold less.

They all—even Maksim—had thought Afghanistan would be warm.

They met the
mujahideen
two weeks after deployment—or rather, the
mujahideen
met them.

Maksim's platoon was in convoy, his squad walking beside one of the tanks. Maksim was paired with the radio operator, Netevich, who was sweating under the weight of his extra gear. The road ran down the dry cleft of the valley, where a river must have run once. Maksim was not the only man scanning the ascents; scrubby trees and stone outcroppings offered too much cover for anyone's comfort.

When the first of the
mujahideen
sniper bullets winged in, he felt it as a comfort: action at last. Maksim relaxed into the
Starshina
's orders. His binoculars spotted a muzzle flash, and if he didn't manage to mark the sniper right off, he at least sent the man scuttling to different cover, and Lady Wasp took him down on the way there.

The gunners were few, though, and the skirmish over far too soon. Maksim had to walk on in the convoy, chest tight with unsatisfied blood rage. He thought he would choke.

He had an hour, no more, to simmer and clench and chew upon his lip. Then the
mujahideen
came back in greater force.

The Soviet tank gunner, Trinkovich, tossed a couple of shells out, but the
mujahideen
were thin spread, fast, and not in any kind of order Maksim could see. They spilled down the hillside like pebbles, right into the convoy, yelling in breathless voices. Maksim did not need to know their tongue to understand what kind of thing they said.

He met them laughing.

He did not recall the fight once it was over. It seemed to happen more than ever, recently, that he lost the consciousness of what he did in battle. But he came to himself by degrees, crouched beside the tank, with the blood song subsiding into a delicious comfort that could come from nothing else in the world but this.

He smiled at the nearest man: Aleksei Andreev, he thought.

Aleksei Andreev shouldered Lady Wasp and made a surreptitious face-wiping motion.

Maksim raised his eyebrows. After a moment, he understood what he was being told, and he swiped his sleeve across his mouth, bloodying the khaki.

“That's right. Even wolves lick their jaws clean,” Andreev scolded.

They called him the Wolf after that; it was not the first time he had been nicknamed so, given his patronym. His squad, having given him a pet name, owned him now. They learned, as his Cossack brethren had in times past, that Maksim was good enough in a scrape to make up for his strangeness at other times.

The man who bunked next to him, Sergei Stepanovich, who had no sense of self-preservation, even grew teasing with him, cuffing him in the back of the head sometimes and laughing when Maksim turned on him. The laughter disarmed Maksim somehow; at least he never really hurt Stepanovich, always recovered himself quickly enough. It helped that he had real enemies.

He began to have a friend, too, in Stepanovich. Just as the other men were wary of Maksim's temper, they were often annoyed with Stepanovich's nonstop talk, but Maksim found he could relax into it, as Stepanovich did not truly expect him to respond. Stepanovich talked about anything: birds he had seen, books he had read as a boy, the shapes of clouds, his great-aunt. On the occasions when he talked about something he should not, Maksim would clap a hand over his mouth until he shut it, and Stepanovich would dissolve into snorting giggles once Maksim let him go.

Stepanovich knew how to sew and darn; once Maksim realized this, he began to switch his socks with Stepanovich's every time they grew worn, and it took Stepanovich at least four socks to figure it out. When he did, he kept right on mending in exchange for Maksim washing his mess kit after meals.

Nine months they had together, his squad; nine months in which Maksim could live almost as he was meant to live. He came to like, or at least tolerate, the taste of the bulgur porridge that augmented their rations. When Stepanovich received the news of his great-aunt's passing, Maksim got him drunk. When Maksim got his arm broken, Stepanovich strapped it up for him secretly so that no one would think of invaliding him out, and Stepanovich had the sense to keep quiet a week later when the strapping was back off again.

Maksim nearly had a skirmish with
Zampolit
Ogorodnik once, but they were both drunk when they should not have been, and so nothing was said afterward.

They got to know the Panjshir end to end, or so it felt, although the
mujahideen
kept enough secret places to continue surprising them. The squad finally received enough
Afghankas
to go around.

“Means we'll be staying awhile longer,” Stepanovich said to Maksim as they both sank their faces into the new-smelling quilted collars.

Maksim said, “Good.”

“What, Volkov? Afraid if you go home, your wife will cut off your balls? I knew you were hiding from someone!” Stepanovich did not wait for an answer but laughed uproariously and ran away around the camp perimeter, Maksim in pursuit.