The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (32 page)

“You don’t?” I brought his hand into my lap, held it in both of mine. “You told me you want to travel. To visit beautiful places and fly across the ocean.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, though. It’s just—it’s just running away.” Will stood up, pushed his hands into his eyes. With his back to me, he said, “I only really know what I don’t want. I don’t want to be a Marine. I don’t want to do everything my brothers did and my dad. I don’t want … I don’t
want to be what they think I’m supposed to be. Aaron followed that path, and it killed him. For stupid reasons.” He made a strangled noise. “It was like this wake-up call, you know? Telling me that there were other roads, but when I opened my eyes I didn’t see anything.”

I climbed to my feet, too, and stood on the edge of the step so that my stomach was level with the back of his head. “You saw me,” I said gently.

Will turned and looked up. “I do see you, which is making it worse, somehow. You know. You’re so sure of everything, and it makes me crazy, but it’s also what I want. To be sure.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know exactly what to do all the time!” I laughed helplessly, thinking of how I’d only come up with a temporary patch to help Lukas. “I’m still learning.”

“But you know who you are,” he whispered.

The despair layering in his voice tugged at me, and I reached out. I pulled him against me until his face was buried in my stomach. His arms went around my hips. “I know who you are, too, Will,” I whispered back. I’d seen and tasted and transformed his blood. It was impossible not to know someone after that. I curled my body down over his, as if I could protect him from the world.

Will pushed away from me to crane his head up, though his hands stayed firm on my hips, the grip burning through my dress. “Who am I, then?”

“I can’t just tell you. That would ruin the magic of you discovering it yourself.” I said it with a quirk of my mouth, to show him I only teased.

He laughed. A soft, high-pitched laugh that sounded more
sad than happy. “I can’t believe I’m talking about this. It isn’t something real people talk about, you know?”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“That’s probably why it’s happening.” Will tugged me down onto his level, and I slid against him, our bodies pressing completely together. I gasped, catching the breath under my heart.

“Hey, Will!” yelled someone.

Will jumped back from me, turning and throwing a hand up to block the sun. “Matt!” he called back.

I wrapped my fingers into the hem of Will’s T-shirt, in the small of his back. The crows took flight, soaring up to find higher vantages.

The other boy—Matt—took the bleachers in flying leaps, so that his backpack thumped against him and his flopping hair fell into his face, and every other step he shoved it away.

“I thought it was you,” he said as he joined us halfway up the side of the stadium, “though supposedly you’ve been
grounded
.”

Will grimaced. “Mab sprung me.”

“Damn,” Matt eyed me with mingled suspicion and respect, and once again brushed his hair out of his face. “You must have some kind of magic charm to get past his dad.”

It startled me, but Will immediately laughed and pulled my hand away from his shirt, though he kept it tucked into his own. “She does. She really does,” he said. Turning the smile on me, he introduced Matt as the captain of his soccer team. “And Matt, this, obviously, is Mab Prowd.”

Wishing there was a thing softer and more natural than concrete under my sandals, I removed my hand from Will’s to
offer it for a shake. Matt took it, and I kept my gaze firm, my expression as calm as I could, until it occurred to me that Will would smile. I tried it, and Matt instantly responded, shaking his head slightly as he did. “Nice to meet you finally,” he said.

“Finally?” I glanced questioningly between the two of them. “It’s hardly been as long as all that we’ve known each other.”

“Yeah, but”—Matt leaned into me so that our shoulders nearly touched, and turned to face Will, effectively putting him and me on one side and Will on the other—“this jackass got himself in trouble twice over you. So it might not have been long, but obviously it’s been real.”

“I wasn’t sure, for a while, if it was,” Will admitted, and I felt a little bit lost between them. And so I merely nodded. If only there were wilderness here to bolster me instead of this sterile stadium!

“Wait,” Will added suddenly. “Twice? What?”

Matt widened his eyes but failed to appear remotely innocent because of the crooked tilt of his lips. “Shanti only mentioned something about you abandoning them at the farmers’ market.”

Will’s face scrunched up. “They didn’t even want me there.”

“Oh, well.” Matt shrugged similarly to the way I’d seen my cousin Justin gesture before, always when talking about women.

“I should be getting home soon,” I said, unwilling to share my time with this boy, and not just a little sad Will and I had been interrupted.

Sighing, Will said, “Me too. I’m not totally free.”

“That’s incredibly stupid.” Matt stepped back from both
of us. “You guys should come get dinner. We’ll swing around to grab Shanti.” He nodded to Will. “Like we talked about. I know for a fact she’s dying to hang out with Mab.”

It filled me with discomfort, around my stomach like hot water, to imagine other people my age, out here in the civilized world, talking about me or thinking about me at all. I wasn’t for them or their world.

Will paused, but then he saw me and read the uncertainty I’m sure painted my face. “I can’t. But,” he flicked his eyes at me and back to Matt. “We should. Like, after finals.” The last was said with a tiny uptilt to it and directed mostly at me.

I firmed my resolve and said yes.

It hadn’t been a lie when I’d said I wasn’t free. I’d texted Mom, but it was good Matt had given us an excuse to head home.

I directed Mab how to drive to my house. She concentrated on the road. After a couple minutes of silence except for the chug of the engine, I said, “Thanks. For being cool with Matt.”

A smile flashed on and off her face. “Of course. He’s your friend.”

“I just don’t want to push you into, ah, anything you don’t want.”

Mab didn’t say anything until we rolled to a red light. Then she looked at me, and if I wasn’t crazy, she looked shy. “I don’t mind going out with you and your friends.”

Out the window behind her, the sun was setting. The particular orange light reflected in through the windows and somehow found just her lips.

All I could do while I watched them was nod.

She smiled and kept driving. I relaxed back into the cracked bench. Warm air poured in through the slightly open window.

Mab said, “I was thinking about what you said earlier. About not knowing who you are. And I was wondering who you want to be.”

I sucked a deep breath. “I don’t know. I should, though. Everybody else does. Doctors or lawyers or marine biologists. Soldiers, writers, accountants. Everybody I know has a plan.”

“All right. Tell me what you don’t want.”

To let you drop me off at home and go days without seeing you again
. I cleared my throat. “I don’t want to join the military. I don’t want to do anything just because I’m supposed to or it’s expected of me.”

“Okay,” she said. “Start with that.”

“It isn’t much. It’s a nonanswer.”

She glanced quickly at me before looking back at the street. “Sometimes when I don’t know what choice to make, I think about what my mother would have done, and then I do the opposite.”

I winced. “Was she that bad?”

“She killed Reese. She killed his parents.”

The way Mab said it, almost casually, made it more horrible and less at the same time. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t know the worst of what she did until she was gone. To me, she was powerful and beautiful and sharp. I loved her, even though she was always leaving.” She sighed, and blinked several times. “I used to think I wanted to be like her. Before I knew she broke everything she touched. She forgot about
connections. About how our magic isn’t about ourselves but the world. I don’t ever want to forget that. To act on purely selfish impulses. My magic is for the good of the world.”

“You’re trying to fix what she broke.”

“Yes, I suppose. But more than that.”

“You can. I know you can.”

“And you can find your own destiny, Will.” Mab smiled.

I smiled back. This was definitely the most wild, embarrassing conversation I’d ever had. But Mab turned everything a little wild, even this old clunker of a car.

A few minutes later, she pulled into my driveway. With a jerk, she put the car into park. Turned to me. “Here you go.”

Instead of making a move to get out, I stared at her. I’d never admired somebody my own age before, but Mab, she wasn’t just gorgeous and weird, she was confident. And knew herself. I wanted that.

I leaned across the bench. It creaked under my hand, but Mab met me halfway. We kissed. It was just like before. She smelled like fire and herbs, and her hair scratched the hand I slid behind her neck.

It was only a few seconds, but my ears roared. I smiled into the kiss, and Mab pulled back just a bit. Her animation eyes were so huge and blue, right there. Her cheeks were flushed. If we hadn’t been in my driveway, I’d have grabbed her again. Kissed her as hard as I was dying to.

She curled her fingers against my chest.

“I’ll call you, okay?” I whispered.

Mab only nodded. Her lips closed tight, and she nodded
a second time. Put both her hands on the steering wheel and gripped.

The tightness of her fingers whited the knuckles out, and made me think she was as desperate as me. I grinned. Was able to push out of the car and slam the door. Happy, I stood there while her station wagon backed away.

Before she vanished, she pressed her palm against the window. As she drove off, the flock of crows shot swiftly after her.

The poison Gabriel fed me was not a fast one, or one to kill me. He was putting his own magic into it, drops of his blood to invade my own, to slowly, slowly creep inside my veins and transform me
.

For two days I shook with a fever, sweating and whimpering, caught tight in my own blankets. The magic made my bones ache, my head throb, my fingers tremble. I thought it was influenza, and as I seemed to get better with Gabriel’s ministrations, what else could I have suspected? He did everything for me, and I blessed him. I remember taking his hand the morning I finally pulled myself out of bed to kiss his cheek with thanks. He put his arm around me and was so, so gentle. Oh, Arthur, how could I have known?

I was weak, but capable of going about my business, and it was not until I was dressing to go into town on Sunday, pinning my hat into place in the mirror, that I saw the glint of red in my eyes
.

Music played in my head as I threw open the front door and strode into my house. It was eight in the evening, and I’d just been dropped off by the craziest, most beautiful girl in the universe. I put my hands on my hips, leaned back, and yelled, “Hello, Dad, Mom, Ben! I need to call a family meeting!”

Mom was the first to respond, gliding in from the kitchen. “Will?” She smiled curiously. A flowered apron tied her waist in tight, and she had a towel in her hands.

“Hey, Mama. Do you have a few minutes?”

She nodded. “I just finished filling up the dishwasher.”

I walked forward and kissed her cheek. “Are Dad and Ben here? I saw the cars.”

“In the back, sharing the sunset.”

“Great, this won’t take long. Come out back?”

“I’ll just get the washer started.”

I went out through the sliding screen door. The yard was dim, thanks to the sun having fallen down past the neighbors’ roof. Dad and Ben lounged in two beat-up camp chairs, soda bottles dangling from their hands. “Evening, kiddo,” Dad said. He had on his favorite T-shirt: a knock-off Hard Rock Café Bahrain one a buddy had sent him from the first Iraq war.

“How’d the grafting go?” Ben asked.

“Huh?” I was too busy scanning the yard for my dogs to process his question.