The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (26 page)

“Let’s go get the dogs and bring them around for some fetch.” Ben set his soda can on the step with a clang and stood.

“Oh no, I’m—uh …” I didn’t know what to lie about. I pushed to my feet. “I’m not really up for it, but you should take them for a walk or something if you want. They could use the exercise.”

Ben planted his hands on his hips. “What the hell is wrong with you? Not up for fetch? That involves about two points of effort.”

We were the exact same height, but I stood up on the step and he was in the yard. He looked one part annoyed, three parts baffled. I avoided his eyes. Couldn’t take chances in the sun. I glanced at him and away, sure it was making me seem even more guilty.

“I knew it,” he said. “Tell me now what you’re into. Drugs?”

“Jesus, no!”

“Then what?” he stepped up so our glares were level. “You’re not yourself. Avoiding eye contact? Fevers? Running off like last night? You used to have ambition! Drive! You’re acting so different, Will, and I don’t like it.”

“What would you know about how I act?” I wrapped my arms around my chest, fingers pressing into my ribs. “You’ve only seen me twice in two years. One of which was a
funeral
, and you were only here for three days before they packed you back off again. You haven’t been here.”

“I know that.” He jabbed a finger down in the air.

“For a whole long year, it’s just been me and Mom and Dad.”

His lips flexed and he shook his head. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

I laughed so I wouldn’t sneer. He’d only be here until the Marines snapped their fingers. “You can’t just fix things because you want to.”

“Tell me what’s broken so I can try.”

“No.” I shook my head. Bent to pick up my mug and go back inside. “You don’t get it.”

“You’re my only brother, and I’m not going to just walk away.”

“Again, you mean.”

“I was fighting a war, Will, not off on a pleasure cruise drinking martinis and ignoring my family. I was doing my duty.”

“Not to us.”

“Will.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Is this about that girl? This secret girlfriend of yours? She’s getting you into whatever it is?”

I never should have even mentioned Mab. Everything was a weapon to Ben. I shoved away and spun to go back in. But he caught my elbow.

His fingers tightened. “Remember that last time, right before I shipped out. Remember? Down at El Dorado.”

I didn’t want to, but it was plastered in my memory with superglue. Me, Aaron, Ben, with a cooler full of beer and soda and sandwiches, out camping at the big old reservoir in southern Kansas. We’d only just moved to the Midwest after a two-year tour in Japan. I was prepping for my sophomore year—my first at a regular high school instead of DODS—Aaron was about to be a senior, and Ben had his marching orders and was only a few months out from his first major action as a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. I barely knew Ben then, either. But at least he’d been my supercool oldest brother, off learning how to shoot rifles and jump out of planes.

That night he and Aaron had even let me have a beer while we built up the fire for hot dogs and s’mores. There’d been so much laughing and joking around, and all my clothes were wet from me being dumped into the lake. They steamed when I got close enough to the fire. I remembered telling Ben that I was gonna be just like him, and Aaron would, too. And even though they’d never let us all serve in the same platoon, it would be like we were superheroes secretly working together across the world. Ben would come up with the crazy world-saving plans, Aaron would MacGyver some used car parts into a special weapon, and I’d deliver it with perfect, last-minute timing.

There’d been bright stars, howling coyotes, and the crackling
fire. I’d smeared melted marshmallow on Aaron’s face in revenge for him throwing me in the lake. Ben taught us an awesome bingo game involving little pocket-cards with sex acts drawn on them with stick figures.

I stared at Ben now. He’d probably thrown those cards away a long time ago. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re all different now.”

Both.

I should have said we were both different, since Aaron didn’t get to change anymore. I jerked my elbow out of his grip.

The sun came out from behind a cloud and made Ben squint at me. He said, “Different doesn’t have to mean separate.”

Wasn’t I supposed to be the one coaxing him back toward brotherhood? He was the one who’d been to war, who should have post-traumatic stress. I shrugged unevenly. The center of my chest itched like something was alive under my skin. “Sometimes it does.”

He stepped up onto the top step, close to me with his hand on my shoulder. “Mom and Dad need us, Will. If you won’t tell me what’s wrong for yourself, talk to me for them. They’re worried. Mom is worried.”

“I’m fine,” I whispered.

My brother’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. “I don’t believe you.”

“You said I have to trust this thing, and I’m trying. Can you trust me, too?”

He sucked in air through his teeth. “Will, do you remember what we said that night? Around the fire?”

I lowered my head in a nod. My chin nearly touched my chest.

“Don’t forget it,” Ben said quietly, before jogging off toward the garage.

I escaped upstairs, but watched from my bedroom window as he romped around with Havoc and Valkyrie. Everything was squeezing me out. Out of my body, out of my place. I used to know. I used to know everything. What I wanted to be,
who
I wanted to be. Who my family was and what they’d do for me. What I’d do for them.

I rubbed the pink scar on my wrist where Mab had cut me, bled me, and healed me again.

At El Dorado reservoir, Ben, Aaron, and I had all three cut our hands and bled together into the fire. A dumb kids’ trick. Ben had said “Always faithful.” It was the Marine Corps motto.
Semper Fidelis
. We’d repeated it over and over again while drops of Sanger blood splattered into the flames.

It was a cool reprieve in the middle of August, the hottest month. I’d been eighteen for three weeks, though you didn’t know my birthday in those days
.

I’d gone down to the meadow near your favorite oak tree with a basket to gather flowers for drying into tea. The meadow spilled violet with verbena and phlox, and I settled down in the sunlight, where the wind ruffled the prairie grass and the blossoms bobbed. The beauty of the afternoon distracted me, and I unpinned my hair, leaned back on my hands, and watched the clouds roll by
.

You couldn’t have been watching for more than a few minutes before I noticed you, leaning as you always did with your shoulder against a tree. Cradled in one arm was a pad of sketching paper, and you delicately held a thin lead pencil. Your eyes darted to me and down, back and forth, as lazy as the wings of the monarch butterflies spinning around the phlox
.

Slowly, you set down your drawing and came to me through the tall grasses. They whispered against your knees, and I shivered, though the sun filled the glade with golden warmth. Just before me you knelt, and you took my face in your hands. You said, “Evelyn Sonnenschein, may I kiss you?”

I turned my head and kissed the ball of your hand, then gently took your wrists and led your fingers into my hair. The motion pulled you closer, and I said, “Please.”

The gathering storms lent the air a quality of anticipation. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I chalked a complex rune of stalwart action into the grass atop our hill. At every point I placed a black candle to absorb the aftershocks of the cutting I planned. And in its open center, I drew a black candle rune to match the one on Lukas’s back.

Donna watched from the porch, holding Lukas’s hand. Her chin was up, and she would help because I’d explained to both of them and Lukas had agreed. It was going to hurt, but in the end, his father would have no more power over him. The rune would still be there, and there would continue to be danger, but the immediacy of his suffering would be gone.

I was dressed in a long white skirt and a shirt Lukas had chosen from my closet—his favorite color of green, he said, and it was for him to focus on. To remember me for the long moment when I ripped apart the black candle rune’s connection to his father and fed it into the earth instead.

First we all three stood at the edges of my ten-foot rune, and together each cut our wrists to drip blood and ground the magic. “We feed you, Earth,” I said, and Donna finished it with me, “that our magic may come full circle.”

Immediately I staged Lukas in the center, walking him over the lines of my rune so that none of it was disturbed. I put him on his hands and knees, and pushed up his shirt. “Are you ready?”

His back quivered, and I saw his fingers dig into the grass on either side of the black candle rune there. “Yes,” he said, and I touched his spine gently. Proudly.

With a thick but sharp dagger, I rebroke the skin of my wrist and quickly drew a blood circle all the way around his black candle rune. I crouched, finding a strong stance, and took a deep breath. I dripped my blood onto the rune of stalwart action marking the grass, and the earth shivered. Wind picked up, tossing my curls around my face.

Donna said, “I’ll catch what falls,” and reached into the circle to hand me the blood-sight glasses.

I smeared my blood up and down the blade of the dagger, whispering that the blade should slip between worlds, be sharp against skin and air and magic, too.

Then I took it in my fist and, with no warning, slashed down Lukas’s ribs, cutting through my day-old binding and waking his power.

Lukas cried out, but did not fall.

The braided ribbon slipped away from his waist, and through the blood-sight glasses I saw my day-old binding break. The sickly red tendrils of his father’s magic flailed like tentacles, and I sliced through them with my dagger. Each was cut apart but stuck to the blade, twisting and burning up the steel and into my hand. I gritted my teeth and hissed, my breath as sharp as the knife.

Lukas whimpered. His fingers dug into the earth.

Dropping the blade, I quickly clapped my bloody hands together and activated the tiny runes of entrapment I’d drawn on each of my fingers and my palms with a marker. I reached out and gathered the swinging tendrils of magic in the basket of my fingers. If we didn’t do this fast, the magic would only reconnect to his father.

“Now, Lukas,” I said, and he rolled down and onto his back. I moved with him, stretching the tendrils and slamming their ends into the ground. Into the earth.

The rune of stalwart action flared into a red so brilliant I winced away, wishing I could throw off the blood-sight glasses.

Lukas groaned, and I whispered his name, and I yelled a blessing to the earth, a song to link them together. He sang it with me, tuneless and hard, and the wind tore over us.

The glare of magic faded.

I shivered and said, “So it is done, and Lukas is familiar to the blood land.”

Overhead, thunder cracked. Rain poured down and I lifted my head, tossing aside the blood-sight glasses. Warm water slipped down my face, streaming down my neck and plastering my clothes to me.

Donna joined us, and we helped Lukas sit. He hugged me, and leaned in to Donna. The three of us remained, exhausted, in the open yard as the rain washed us pure, the sky blessing our magic.