The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals) (41 page)

Behind me, Ben shook his cage. “Think about this.”

But I suspected the crows already had, all night even, and just as I’d given Ben my trust by opening the cage, I needed to prove to the crows the same. So I knelt, pinching the lancet in my fingers, until the blood from my shoulder slipped all the way down and smeared into the metal. “As you wish,” I said.

The crow’s wings shook, and I could hear the roar of blood in my ears. I didn’t know what they were doing or why they were asking this of me, but I trusted them, and did not hesitate as I jabbed the lancet into the crow’s breast.

All nine cried out as one.

I pulled out the lancet and backed away as the crows leapt together. They brushed their wings across the bleeding chest of their fellow, dipped beaks into it until they were a teeming mass of black feathers, making small sounds of anguish, little barks and purrs, and then they all cried out again. A shiver stole down my back, lifting the hairs along my arms.

The crows seethed together, and I wasn’t certain what I was seeing, until they weren’t nine crows any longer but a single large body covered in feathers and wings and beaks and claws.

My hands pressed against my mouth, and I heard Ben’s strangled grunt. The crows were transforming! I smeared my bloody shoulder and flicked tiny drops of my powerful blood over them in benediction. I said, “Take my power, friends, become what you dream, bone to bone, feather to flesh.”

The body of feathers rolled like boiling water, and behind me Ben whispered a stream of the worst words I’d ever heard.

And then a man’s body lay there, dark as the bones of the earth, with feathers for hair and fingernails as black as a crow’s claw. Not fully human, but with arms and legs, lips, rounded ears, Adam’s apple, chest and shoulders, hips, and everything in between.

I fell to my knees at his head, my hand hovering just over the delicate-looking feathers that sprouted from his temple. “Reese?”

His eyes snapped open, bright blue turquoise like the stones I’d chosen for my homunculus, and a hand grasped at mine.

The image-memory looped in the back of my mind like a scratchy old radio signal or SOS.

The air under my wings was thick with summer. Her hair shone like a piece of the sun had broken off and fallen to earth. The crow part of me forgot everything else for a moment and zeroed in on it. Shining. Glowing. I fanned out and surrounded her with all my bodies. Landed in the tree at the top of her tower. She turned up her face and spoke. I opened all my mouths and spoke back
.

When she offered me a strand of that hair, I was hers
.

I was hers I was hers I was hers
.

My body hurt all over. Hit by a car and left on the side of the road hurt. I should’ve been used to it.

The last thing I remembered clearly was the quiet in Mab’s bedroom. Only then I’d seen my body on the floor, crumpled up to be tossed out with the trash.

I was hers
.

Images flashed one after another: the ground far below, a graveyard, Mab looking up into the branches of a tree, me kissing her—only not
me
—a white farmhouse with a tree out front, a teal truck, the graveyard again. On and on until I was dizzy with them. A girl with blue eyeliner, an old man in a baseball cap, my body—my body—
my body with bloodred tattoos I knew from my dreams
. Mab’s yellow hair. Pulling me down.

Mab said, “Reese.”

I opened my eyes.

She leaned over me, joy spread across her face and her hair falling everywhere. Normal. Her touch on my forehead was tentative. As if she thought I might break. “Mab,” I managed to say, but my tongue stuck.

Her smile sweetened even more. “You need fuel. That transformation must have taken everything out of you.”

I tried to sit up as she stood. The rafters overhead told me we were in her barn. My vision went out of focus, and I saw the barn from, like, ten different angles simultaneously. The ground spun and I closed my eyes.

“He’s my familiar; this will make everything better,” Mab was saying to someone else.

Before I realized who she was talking to, I managed to sit, and saw my legs. Shock slammed the breath out of me. My legs were black. And not a natural, human brown that looked black, but like I’d been roasted alive and come out shiny and black as coal. My hands, too—I held them out, and they immediately began to shake. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t my body. Where light caught my skin, it glinted purple and blue and gold like spilled oil.

Dazed, I touched my thigh. My forearms were streaked with tiny soft feathers instead of hair. I was fascinated. Then it turned over in my stomach and became horror and nausea. Feathers trailed down my chest a little, too, and along my belly.

I was naked.

Only it wasn’t
me
. It wasn’t right.

Mab knelt next to me with a plate of food. I drew up my knees and tried to make my nakedness as inconspicuous as
possible. I stared at her, wide-eyed. Why wasn’t she horrified, too? Why wasn’t she afraid or even concerned? Instead something like happiness pressed out of her smile. There were a million questions beating each other up to be asked first, but I couldn’t get them out.

Mab was holding out the plate. The smell of meat hit me, and I was starving. My stomach growled louder than I’d ever heard it.

“Here, Reese,” she said. “Eat.”

I was hers
.

“Oh my God,” I choked out. “Mab.”

Someone from my left called, “It talks.”

I knew that tone of voice. I pushed the plate of food away and was on my feet in an instant. I swayed, but found my balance, and stumbled to my brother. “Ben! What are you doing in there?”

The rough wooden bars of a cage separated us. Ben drew away before I could touch his hands.

“Ben?”

His lips curled back, and I recognized the expression of about-to-fire anger. “Whoa, back off.”

I gripped the bars of the cage and stared at my brother. Flashes of memory punched me: Ben catching me in the hallway, driving the car, Ben pulled to the ground by vines. I shook my head as if I could rattle the images out.

“Reese?” Mab’s voice was soft. Her fingers dug into my arm.

I turned to her. “Why did you put my brother in a cage?”

Her hand fell away, and she stared up at me. Dirt was smudged under one big blue eye. “Will?”

“Will,” Ben repeated.

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

Mab’s face split into shock, and she flung herself at me.

I staggered back, arms flailing for balance. She held on, pushed her face into my neck, arms wrapped what felt like five times around me. Her hair scratched my cheek and chin. And her feet knocked loosely against my shins as she dangled. I put my arms around her, slowly. I was stronger than I should have been. Mab felt as hefty as a paper bag.

Mab leaned back and grasped my face. “Will,” she said again.

I tightened my arms around her. “What happened to me, Mab?” I whispered. “What happened to my body?”

But Ben shook the bars of the cage and yelled, “Let me out of here.”

Both Mab and I turned our heads to him. I didn’t let go of her. “Ben,” I said, not knowing where to begin.

She wiggled to get down. I stepped toward the cage and heard Mab scrambling behind me. Wrapping one of my large black hands around a bar, I tugged. It bent, but no more than a thick tree branch would’ve. Ben stared at me, eyes wrinkling. I didn’t know if I looked like me but with black skin and feathers, or if I was totally unrecognizable. Ben shook his head, a hand coming up as if he would brush me away.

And Mab was there, pricking her finger with a tiny metal thing. She skimmed blood against the cage and shut her eyes briefly. The bar shivered and bowed out. Ben climbed free, moving his body to completely avoid the possibility of touching mine. He stood next to Mab, facing me. Said to her, “What is it?”

She reached out and touched my stomach. “It’s Will.”

I remembered I was naked. Jerked away from her. “Do you have some of those pants?” I asked in a stupid high voice, just as Ben said, “Bullshit it’s Will.”

“Yes,” she said to both of us. Spinning on one foot, she dashed over to a crate. Left me staring at Ben.

“Ben,” I said.

“You’re …” He shook his head. “No way.” Old sweat and mud streaked down half his forehead, and his eyes were tight. It was the expression he’d worn the whole weekend of Aaron’s funeral. “I’m not dead,” I said.

“You aren’t Will, either.”

Out of habit, I wiped my palms on my thighs as if they were sweaty. The feathers instead of hair were too weird. But I couldn’t let myself freak out about this new body thing. I was me. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes and tried to think of something to convince him. I said, “I am. I’m your brother.” I looked at him. “Remember in sixth grade we had this assignment to write a story about somebody we admired, and I wrote about you? Called it ‘American Hero.’ Mom mailed it to you, didn’t she?”

I waited. The barn was so quiet I could hear the whine of an airplane flying over some field far away. Mab stood behind him with clothes in hand, not moving. I really wanted those pants. But didn’t move, either.

Ben ran his hands up over his face and back through his regulation-short hair. “I still have it.”

“Really?”

He looked like he’d eaten lemon peel. But it wasn’t hostile anymore. “It tucks real nice into my boot,” he admitted.

“Ben.” I moved as close as I could until he leaned away. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Turning into whatever the hell you are? Or for letting me think you were doing drugs? Pretending I was the douche bag when you really were into some heavy shit?”

Shrugging uncomfortably, since I couldn’t really deny any of the charges, I said hopefully, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

His expression darkened again. “You gonna kiss her with that one?”

I looked at my hands, so totally not mine. My mouth hung open, and Mab tossed the pants at me. They smacked into my chest and I grabbed them. Turned around for no good reason to pull them on. The drawstring barely tied around this newer, broader waist. Irritably, I thought,
I finally have a body more like Ben’s
.

“How did this happen?” Ben asked.

As I turned, I realized he was asking Mab. Looking at her with something a lot like trust. She pointed behind her at a plate of chicken. “Will, you eat that, and I’ll explain what I think. And how we’re going to get out of this.”

I shoveled the chicken in, sitting knee-to-knee on the floor of the barn with Mab and Ben.

Mab gave me an abridged version of what had gone on since Saturday morning. Then, studying me with a half-calculating,
half-awed look, she said, “This body was my crows’ doing. They’re my familiar, the way Gabriel is using Lukas as his, though more voluntary—we have no runes linking us. Only intention.” She sucked in a deep breath and skimmed her hand down the line of feathers on my forearm. “They knew what I needed, knew I needed them more than ever—a familiar to balance out Gabriel’s power. And not one that’s scattered as they were, as a flock of crows, but one as strong as a human familiar.” Her eyes shut, and she put her clasped hands against her heart. “So they transformed themselves.”

“But I thought Will,” Ben frowned at me, “was overwhelmed in his own body.”

She looked at me again. “The crows caught you when Gabriel took your body, didn’t they? They were right there, and they caught you, pulled you up into them the way they’d escaped their own death. Do you remember?”

Uncomfortable, I thought about what I remembered. Flying. Mab’s hair. Disjointed images. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” I agreed. They weren’t all from yesterday, or my life. I’d seen things from his old life, too. Reese’s. “What happened to him?” I stabbed my fingers into my forehead. “Reese. Is he here?”

Mab paused with her mouth slightly open. Her lips were pale around the edges. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Do you feel anything?”

“Like what? What would it feel like?”

“A buzzing in the back of your mind, a song stuck in a loop. Something like that. Niggling and strange.”

“Everything about this is strange,” I said, spreading my
hands, and looked down at this dark body. Nothing in my head made me think of Reese anymore. It was just me in here. “I don’t think so.”

She nodded, but I noticed her hands pressing hard into her thighs. I reached out and took one fist. Pulled the fingers out one at a time and wove our hands together.

Ben grunted. “So. What are we doing next? To get Will his body back. And save your kid? And plant this jackass into the ground.”

I was impressed how well Ben was taking all this. I said, “You’re being so compliant.”

He half smiled at me, which looked a lot like a threat. “It’s willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t take it personally.”

Mab squeezed my hand and climbed to her feet. “Come to the worktable; I’ll sketch out my idea so your brother can poke holes in it.” She shot a wry smile at Ben, who bared his teeth.

I’d missed a lot.

Just as we were getting up with her, I heard
my voice
call her name outside.