Spells of Blood and Kin (33 page)

Maksim inhaled sharply.

“Cut,” Lissa rasped. “You don't need much.”

He said nothing, only sighed out. Lissa heard the blood splash into the ink. She let Maksim go, and she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Then she reached into the bowl with both hands, turning the egg, coating it.

When she drew it from the ink, her gloves were black up to the knuckles. She found the tripod—her eyes had begun to adjust to the lack of light—and set the egg to dry.

“Now we wait,” she whispered.

On her words, the candle flared back to life.

It showed her Maksim, cradling his cut hand against his chest; he'd cut deeper than she meant him to, for blood had run into his palm and down his wrist.

It showed her the familiar kitchen made stark and strange by looming shadows. It showed her the hairs pricked upright on her own arms.

For a moment, unheralded dread stopped her mouth.

She swallowed, swallowed again, gestured to Maksim to pass her the water glass.

He did not seem to see her, sunk deep within himself. Lissa got up eventually and went to the tap. She peeled her gloves off, binned them, washed her hands twice over, and drank straight from the running stream, letting it splash her chin and hair.

When she lifted her head again, Maksim had wrapped his hand into the hem of his shirt. He met her eyes.

“I felt it,” he said. “I felt it take.” His voice sounded rusty too. He waited until Lissa had finished at the sink, and he held his thumb under the cold tap and then slipped off his shirt to rinse it.

“Thank God,” Lissa said, almost light-headed with the lifting of a worry she hadn't even known was so heavy.

“Rest your voice,” Maksim said.

Lissa took his place on the stool and drank another glass of water, while Maksim went carefully about her kitchen, pouring out the mess of ink and fluids from the bowl, washing it with plenty of soap. He hung his wet shirt over the back of a chair and went without, though he shivered occasionally. Lissa could see on his skin what the last few weeks had cost him: new livid scars, scour marks, starkly knotted muscles.

“Your sister,” Maksim said. “Is she well?”

“She's working late,” Lissa said. “It's convocation week for the universities.” Elsewhere in the city, people were laughing. Celebrating their achievements. Getting ready for their new lives.

Maksim sat down beside her. “And you?”

“I have to do the last thing,” Lissa said. She slid off the stool.

She'd hidden it in her bedroom, in the closet that still smelled of mothballs and Baba's clothing. She brought it out slowly, almost ceremoniously: a steel urn, designed for the ashes of a beloved cat or dog. She'd already stuffed it with a nest of green plastic Easter grass.

In the kitchen, Maksim sat with his face in his hands. He lifted his head when Lissa returned. He did not bother to wipe his swollen eyes; he turned away a little only when Lissa looked at him.

“Why did the candle light again?” he asked as Lissa slid it closer to her.

She shook her head and shrugged. The egg had dried. She wrapped it in a rag and held it gingerly, close to the flame. Nearest the heat, the waxen Cyrillic characters warmed and slid. Lissa wiped away the melted wax with her rag, exposing the bare shell the wax had kept free of ink.

Bit by bit, she revealed the design. Maksim watched. The letters looked uneven, childish; but when the shell was quite smooth and free of wax, Maksim shivered again and looked to Lissa.

She placed it gently within the urn and packed more Easter grass around it.

“Would you like to seal it?”

Maksim shook his head, twisting his hands together on the countertop. Lissa sealed the urn herself, first screwing the lid into place and then dripping hot wax all around the seam. She burned her fingers a little, but she could be sure the urn would not take in any groundwater.

“I'll bury this in the yard,” she told Maksim.

“Now,” he said.

He followed a few paces behind, out to the garden shed. He dug the hole, two feet deep, between the roots of her grandmother's favorite tree. He would not touch the urn. He stood back while Lissa leaned down to set it in the ground.

He shoveled earth over it as quickly as he could, breathing hard. He filled the hole and stamped it down with his boots.

Only then did he rest, leaning on the shovel and smearing sweat over his forehead with the back of his hand.

“My God,” he said. “I am hungry.”

Lissa restored power to the house. They took turns in the shower. Maksim fried a pound of bacon while Lissa toasted rye bread and chopped mangoes, bananas, and strawberries.

Just before dawn, Stella came in. She stood in the kitchen doorway and frowned. “Lord, you're weird,” she said.

“I am better,” Maksim said. “I am sorry I behaved badly before.”

“Actually, I meant you were weird for having breakfast in the middle of the night,” Stella said and helped herself to bacon.

JUNE 9

  
WAXING CRESCENT

The food tasted right, as food had not done for so long. Blueberry jam, crusty toast, ripe buttery mango. He ate almost all the bacon himself, some of it right from the pan, hot enough to burn his fingers and his tongue.

Stella made a pot of tea, but she and Lissa were both drooping over the table by the time it had finished steeping.

“Go and rest,” Maksim said. “I will tidy up. Thank you for breakfast.”

Lissa whispered, “You're welcome.” Her hair lay in a wet tangle over her shoulders where she had not bothered to comb it all out. That, and the fragile little voice, would make her seem childlike if Maksim was not what he was and could not smell the heavy thunder on the air.

It made the hair rise on him, even now, with the thing safely sealed up and buried.

He watched Lissa stifle a yawn and pad toward the stairs and turn to wave good night, and he flashed back to the memory of her soft hands gloved and black with ink, a few hours ago, maybe, the memory cloudy and dreadful. The night had gone blurred, everything before the moment when the spell had taken and he'd come to himself, with his own blood pooling in the palm of his hand from a gash in his thumb he did not recall receiving.

He had a pink Band-Aid over it now, and it still hurt: a proper, sharp hurt. A lot of things hurt. Bruised ribs and scabbed-over skin and the knitting bone in his wrist, which had begun to ache when he was digging under the tree.

He relished it. Too many days of smeared-out numbness, burying himself down deep so that he could not do harm, could not do anything at all.

“So,” said Stella.

Maksim spun. He'd forgotten her; the new, darker thunder scent covered everything else. And he was tired.

“She didn't want me to see it,” Stella said. “It was a bit of a pain, really, not being able to come home. I had to go to an after-hours club with a couple of the girls from the pub and dance to house music. Which I hate.”

Maksim raised his eyebrows.

“Well?” said Stella. “Aren't you going to fill me in?”

“If she did not want you to see it…”

“Someone's got to look out for her while she looks out for you,” Stella said. “Or are you just fine with letting everyone else take the heat for your mistakes? Because I know you've made some, and so far, it looks to me like Lissa's the one who's been cleaning up after you.”

“Her grandmother made a promise,” Maksim felt compelled to point out.

“Her grandmother was a horrible old hag who kept her away from the rest of the family,” Stella said.

Maksim remembered Iadviga, young: all pride and temper, almost like one of the
kin
. He had shepherded her across half of Europe, because
kolduny
were rare and his home was long gone. He'd been glad when he realized she was with child, thinking there was a husband somewhere to whom he could restore her; but she only said fiercely that there was not and kept her head up, glaring.

Sometimes it was hard to remember it had been more than fifty years since he'd found Iadviga in the grip of the Gulag and thirty since he'd asked her to repay that debt. And perhaps the things he admired in Iadviga, the fury that had kept her alive in war and the honor that had urged her to help Maksim, had not made for an easy legacy.

“Her grandmother gave her the spell,” Maksim said now, “to give to me. I do not know more than that.”

“You know it worked? For sure?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling the truth of it: his nature leashed, with a choke leash, barbed enough to hurt if he strained against it.

“Her voice was all shot.”

“She prayed for a long time,” Maksim said; he was not sure how long, but he had a recollection of the husking whisper continuing in a long broken stream while he sat, struggling slowly and dumbly with himself, at the bottom of a sticky well.

Stella frowned. “I just don't know enough about this yet. But it seemed like the other ones only took a moment.”

“The other eggs were only to give sleep for a few hours. This one was to bind a piece of my soul.”

He'd meant it figuratively, but it sounded right, now that he said it. The dark piece of his soul matched with the black-stained egg.

“That sounds a bit sinister,” Stella said, shivering a little. “Lord, why's it cold in here? It's going to be ninety degrees again by noon.”

“You are tired,” Maksim said. “You waited up all night. Go, rest. It is enough for now.”

He spoke to her as he would to a fellow soldier, and she must have taken the tone correctly, for she straightened and nodded and rose easily.

She stopped and leaned toward the window, though.

“Gus,” she said, and both of them stepped quietly to the front door.

Gus stood on the front walk. She had taken a bit of care with herself, Maksim saw: clean, damp hair curling in the warming dawn, two layers of white tank top, bare shoulders dotted with freckles and old scars. He could see her nostrils pinching. If she'd been an animal, her ears would have been laid flat. He realized she did not want to approach any closer to the house.

“Come out to me,” she said, voice pitched low.

Maksim did. The sun warmed his bare skin; dew lay heavy on the grass. Gus stood very still until he was within reach, and then she embraced him tight, strong arms about his shoulders, cheek against his.

He felt her look up over his shoulder after a minute and draw breath to speak, but she said nothing.

She let him go then. “Are you ready to come home?”

“I promised to tidy the kitchen. Come inside.”

She glanced at Stella on the porch.

“Come,” said Stella. “I think there's still tea.”

Gus came, though Maksim could see how much it bothered her. She took her tea black and stood in a corner while Maksim balled up his soaked and stained T-shirt and put it in the trash and wiped the bacon pan.

Stella tidied away the fruit peels and toast crumbs and stacked the dishes beside the sink. She kept looking at Gus, quick flashes of her long-lashed eyes. Finally, she said, “You're his sister. Right?”

Gus barked out a laugh. “Close enough.” She grinned at Maksim, daring him to offer a different word.

He did not. He was the elder by a century, give or take, but not by enough to gainsay her, not any longer.

JUNE 9

  
WAXING CRESCENT

The night after the new moon, Lissa went to bed very early.

She'd fallen asleep in front of the television with a glass of water in her hand and only realized when it slipped to the floor and spilled. She left it there.

With Stella out at work, she hadn't bothered to make dinner. Her stomach felt tight and hollow; she only gulped more water and crawled between her sheets.

She dreamed of a mass grave in Greenland. She'd seen it in
National Geographic,
maybe, when she was a child.