Spells of Blood and Kin (31 page)

“But you want him to go back to doing things for himself. I know. It's frightened you, hasn't it, seeing him like this?”

“God help me, yes,” Gus said, taking a drink, her mouth twisting at the taste. “All he does is sleep. And the dreams he's having…”

“You can see inside his head?” Stella said, wide-eyed.

Gus shook her head. “Wouldn't want to. What's on the outside is bad enough.”

“And you left him on the floor because…” Lissa prodded, ignoring Stella's glare.

“Every time I turn my back, he fucking lies down there!” Gus spat.

Maksim roused a little, opening one eye. “She made me take a pillow.”

Gus scrubbed a fist over her mouth. “He doesn't want to be comfortable.” She watched Maksim until his eye shut again, and she leaned forward, beckoning Lissa and Stella close. “He did something. I don't know what it was. After it, he went to your grandmother,” she whispered, breathing rye fumes. “He won't tell me. But he's afraid he'll do it again.”

“And he thinks I can stop him,” Lissa said.

Both Stella and Gus looked at her, waiting.

“There's something I can do.”

Gus shuddered, a full-body reaction. “I won't like it, will I?”

“I doubt it.”

Gus took a deep breath and shut her eyes for a second. “I'll go to my place until it's over. You can send Nick to get me.”

“Wait. Just wait. I can't do it right this minute. There are rules.” The most important rule she was going to break, but maybe Gus didn't need to know that. “It has to be done on the new moon. That's a full week out.”

Gus winced.

“You can manage to look after him until then,” Lissa said. “What with none of you having a job or anything. Where the hell is Nick, anyway? He's not missing again, is he?”

Gus pointed at the open door of the bedroom. Lissa could just see an unmoving lump lying diagonally across the bed.

“Your sister egged him,” Gus said, her drawn face lighting. She clapped Stella on the shoulder. “I'm going to be laughing about that for ages.”

“Hey,” said Lissa, returning to kneel beside Maksim. “I'll see you in a week, okay?”

She watched his eyes drag open, dazed and wet.

“A week.
Koldun'ia,
are you certain?”

She nodded.

He wrapped both hands around her arm and pressed his forehead against them, breathing in short little gasps. Not quite sobbing.

Lissa pulled her hand away as gently as she could. “Hey,” she said again. “My grandmother wanted it. Okay? Just hang in there until it's time. And stop sleeping on the floor.”

Maksim fisted his hands to his mouth and nodded.

“Jesus,” said Stella once she and Lissa were outside, walking south through Bellwoods Park. The air felt wide and fresh after Maksim's apartment.

“Yeah,” Lissa said.

“He needs psychological help,” Stella said.

“Well, he's got us.”

“And Nick. And Gus,” Stella said. “Poor bastard.”

 

Ten

JUNE 3

  
WANING CRESCENT

“I was hoping you'd be in yesterday,” Rafe said. “Headache stayed bad, did it?”

“It's fine today,” Lissa said, sliding onto what was becoming her favorite barstool, at the end away from the door. She hung her bag from one of the convenient hooks underneath the bar and looked up again at Rafe's smile: the private one she was coming to know, not the one he used for customers, even regulars. “I went to work and everything.”

“They make you dress up at the print shop?”

Lissa felt herself blush. The black dress. She'd actually forgotten she was wearing it, in her haste to shake off the foreboding quiet of Izabela Dmitreeva's mother-in-law's house. The fertility eggs had not worked yet—no surprise, if her first batch of sleep eggs had been anything to go by—and while Izabela coolly kept right on knitting baby blankets, her mother-in-law had given Lissa a truly grim look.

“I had to visit a friend of my grandmother's,” Lissa said now, thinking it felt like another lie even though it was not.

Rafe's face warmed. “And you didn't show up with blue hair and multiple piercings? You're a better person than I am.”

“Blue? Really?”

“Why d'you think I shaved it off?”

Lissa laughed aloud at that. Rafe bowed with a flourish of his hands. “Stella tells me that's hard to do.”

“What is?”

“Making you laugh.”

“It's not fair, you getting dirt on me from my sister. Who am I supposed to ask if I want to know things about you?”

“Me,” Rafe said. “I'll just tell you. No secrets at all. I'm silly that way.”

“Really? What's your worst fear?”

“I love that your mind went straight there,” he said, rolling his eyes a bit. “Blood. Can't stand it. I pass out.”

“Where did you get your toque?”

“Board shop on Queen Street. Best twenty bucks I've spent all year. Why would I keep that a secret, though?”

“It was the next thing that came into my head,” Lissa protested. “Ever broken the law?”

“Smoked quite a bit of pot in uni,” he said right away. “Stole twenty bucks off my da to buy it once too. Let's see … climbed over a few fences in my time, climbed up the downspout of a cathedral onto the roof—and then fell off, no bones broken thanks to all the lager I'd had—oh, and I stole a stuffed stag's head from a pub once too. No idea why.”

“But those are all funny. Just pranks,” Lissa said. “And most of them involve climbing.”

“I was skinnier then,” Rafe said, shrugging. “I don't know. What were you looking for? Really serious lawbreaking? I've got nothing. Never locked myself to any construction equipment or threw any Molotov cocktails. Wasn't thinking ahead to when I'd have to impress you, obviously.”

She let it go and took the pint of organic he slid across the bar to her. And when she was ready to leave, Rafe went on break and met her in the alley out back and gave her a much more serious kiss than he'd given her before. The most serious kiss she'd ever had, really. Black dress and all.

She gave it back to him, and that was breaking a rule too, and so it seemed he had very useful advice on the topic, after all.

JUNE 5

  
WANING CRESCENT

Nick ran around the track at the high school near his old apartment. He had forgotten his running shoes, but it turned out not to matter.

He ran for three hours, maybe four. At sunset, he slowed to a walk and left the track. Sweat dried in his hair. He strolled north from the school grounds, hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts.

Jonathan's street. He passed the corner and turned down the alley. The same graffiti marked the garage doors. The same Labrador puppy came to a rear fence to watch him pass.

He leaned on a cinder block wall beside a froth of blossoming vines, and he looked up.

At first, the fading sunset glared off Jonathan's window too brightly to let him see anything; not that he expected to see anything.

He wondered if he was holding a wake and wished he'd brought something to drink, after all.

Dark came on slowly, with the scent of frying onions. Above him, windows brightened, here and there and there.

And there.

He saw a hand—whose hand?—turn on the old wicker lamp at Jonathan's window and then pull the cord of the blind.

Nick left the alley, circled around to the fire door, and tugged. Locked.

He bit his lip and went to the front entrance. Suicidally dumb, he told himself.

He didn't listen.

A woman approached with an armload of groceries. Nick said, “Be right up,” toward the intercom speaker as the woman opened the outer door.

She paid him no attention, flashed her keycard to the inner door, and smiled distractedly at Nick as he held the door for her and followed her in.

Too easy. He rode the elevator to a random floor and took the stairs to Jonathan's so he could approach from the far end of the hall.

Even from there, once the stairway fire door was open, he could tease out the unique smells of Jonathan's apartment: sandalwood soap from Chinatown; microwaved popcorn; stale beer; Aussie shampoo; a fading underlay of pot smoke.

Nick crept almost up to the door, listening. If only his hearing would do what his sense of smell had done.

It wouldn't, but the apartment building was not new and the soundproofing was imperfect.

From within the apartment he could hear a woman's voice—Hannah?—very faintly, and then, from right by the door, “Got it. You sure?”

Jonathan.

Footsteps receded. More speech from farther in, too quiet for him to make out.

Nick leaned right against the door, straining. Jonathan was in there. Alive, together with Hannah, doing normal things. Making dinner.

He thought he heard them laughing. Scraping chairs, sitting down to eat.

He could have been there with them. Had been a few weeks ago. They'd teased him about getting a better haircut, finishing his degree on time, getting a girlfriend, a whole bunch of the normal things he hadn't managed to figure out yet.

Would never manage now.

It was a long time before he could tear himself away.

JUNE 6

  
WANING CRESCENT

The pub was full, and someone was sitting in Lissa's usual spot, and though Rafe was glad to see her, he didn't have time to chat, moving briskly up and down the bar, pulling pints and slapping down coasters and hip-checking the cash drawer shut.

Lissa was only having the one pint, anyway, to kill the rest of the time until dark. She fed coins into the jukebox and put on, for kicks, all the songs she could find with “moon” in the title. She had already eaten at the roti shop after work, and she had all the information she needed on the ritual, and she'd been to check on Maksim.

He'd been mostly asleep, again, but on the sofa this time. And he'd showered, although he was wearing a wrinkled U of T Athletics T-shirt that probably belonged to Nick. And Gus had gone back to protective glowering, which Lissa thought indicated that she was sober, or at least less drunk, which she'd count as a win.

For this step, she didn't need them. She explained as much and watched Gus shudder whenever Lissa got too close, watched Nick pace in and out of the room, watched Maksim lace his fingers together over his knees, the injured ones still swollen and dark. He didn't seem to feel them, and that was creepy. No one looked sorry when she said good-bye.

Through the window at the Duke of Lancashire, she saw the sky dim down: orange to bruise purple to the dull dark red that passed for night in a city of this size. She tried to get a good-night kiss from Rafe, but someone was pounding a glass on the bar, and someone else was brandishing a twenty, and she gave up and only waved.

The walk home, through heavy, bloom-scented air, did nothing to ease her nerves. Inside her bag, her fingers twined themselves into the hair of the doll.