This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Tessa Gratton
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Hilts
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gratton, Tessa.
The blood keeper / Tessa Gratton. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (The blood journals)
Summary: Teenager Mab Prowd is perfectly content to practice blood magic on the secluded Kansas farm where she’s lived all her life until one of her spells taps into a powerful, long-dormant curse and she finds her magic spinning out of control.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89769-6
[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G77215Blk 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011049532
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
FOR SEAN AND TRAVIS,
THE BROTHERS I GREW UP WITH,
AND ADAM,
THE BROTHER I FOUND.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
This is a love letter.
And a confession.
TWO
MAB
The last thing the Deacon said to me before he died was “Destroy those roses.”
I stood before them at dawn, the sun behind me turning the red petals into fire, and I lifted my knife.
For five weeks I’d tried to kill them. I’d attacked with a trowel, and a heavy shovel, digging at their roots. They’d thrashed with furious life, cutting my skin and flinging drops of my blood against the ground.
Then I’d set them on fire with a flick of my wrist. But the twisting vines refused to burn. My blue and orange flames danced along their leaves and thorns while the wind rushed all around, tossing fire toward the forest. I’d had to extinguish it before the entire hill caught alight.
Next I’d lain down beside them under a full moon and listened to their whispers. All night long the stars wheeled overhead and I felt the earth cracking and shifting underneath me as it turned.
Mab.
Mab, the roses whispered. Free us.
I rolled over and pressed my cheek into the dirt. I grasped one of the rose vines until the thorns pricked through my skin. Pain and magic spilled from my palm and into their roots, and Arthur’s voice echoed in my memory: All the blood is yours now, Mab, all the beauty of the world. Take it.
Shoving off the ground, I backed up toward the edge of the garden until my heels hit the wooden vegetable box where baby tomatoes grew.
The next day I asked Donna if she knew anything about the roses, and she only explained about pruning and mold and fertilizer. I called Faith, who lived in town, and she said one of the reasons she moved her family off the blood land was because Hannah woke crying and blamed her nightmares on the roses. And Granny Lyn, whose garden it had been until she died last autumn, had never allowed any of us to tend it without her.
There had been a secret planted under my bedroom window all my life.
I knew I should have spent my time creating a spell to burn the curse away, to turn the roses into ash and spread the pieces on the wind and on the river.
It’s what Arthur told me to do.
But that isn’t what I chose.
Here, at dawn, with my knife poised over the seven-point-star tattoo protecting my wrist, I stood facing the garden, and beside me lay a man-sized doll created of mud and bone, so that I might ask the roses a question.
A scratching on the window gable behind me drew my attention to the large crow perched there. “Morning,” I whispered. “Is Donna still asleep?”
He ruffled his feathers in an affirmative shrug.
“Where are your brothers?”
He chucked his head back and barked. Eleven more crows leapt out of the forest at the edge of our yard. Their wings flapped in unison as they swooped low overhead, washing me with damp spring air. I could feel hair curling against the back of my neck as they raised the humidity.
The flock landed around me in a semicircle, not too near the roses, their heads cocked at the same angle. One hopped forward and tapped his beak against the jar I’d set on the grass.
Inside was the heart and liver of a deer that would help give life to my doll.
Nine days ago I’d built a trap marked by runes across a well-traveled deer path, and finally, yesterday, there’d been a young buck caught in the circle. He was unable to free himself from the lines of magic weaving through the trees, and his delicate hooves stomped the ground. I stood against a walnut tree, shoulder pressed hard enough into the bark that it tore at my skin through my shirt. The buck’s antlers were just beginning to press up through his head, tiny nubs of velvety bone. He stared at me with his black eyes, snorted, and reared back as if to challenge me.
“Thank you for what you’re giving me,” I told him.
I’d pricked my finger and clapped my hands together. The spell sucked the breath from his lungs.
That had been the cleanest part. I used
Arthur’s old hunting knife to slit the buck’s belly and drag out the bloody insides. They spilled onto the grass as slippery as fish. His blood caught in the creases of my palms, and I rubbed them down on his still-warm neck.
I took the heart and the liver, tucking them gently into an old glass gallon jar. I twisted closed the lid and painted a star rune on top with the deer’s blood. Then I closed his eyes and ran my finger along his short black lashes.
“May you find grace,” I whispered.
And I left him for the vultures and coyotes.
Since then, blood had drained out of the organs to pool in a sticky mass at the base of the jar. The crow tapping it was probably hungry. I tsked at him, and promised frozen berries after the work was finished.
As the crow backed off, flapping nearer his brothers, I pierced my wrist with the tip of my knife and let three drops hit the ground. “I feed you, Earth, that my magic may come full circle,” I told it, and jammed the knife into the dirt. Then I crouched beside the doll I’d made.
It was shaped like a man, with branches for bones, mud and decaying leaves for bulk, and wax to shape the smaller features like hands and mouth and eyes. I’d plucked rose petals to form a pink mouth, to give the flowers voice. If my doll could stand, it would be taller than me, with wide shoulders and room inside the cave of wooden ribs for courage and passion and laughter.
But for now it was only shadows and earth, tucked beside the thicket of roses. A doll without a string to pull.
I swallowed the pounding of my heart and knelt beside it. The scent of wet feathers and muck filled the air. An earthworm struggled to the surface of the doll’s chest, where a tiny puddle had formed during last night’s drizzle. I pinched the worm in my fingers and tossed it over my shoulder.
One of the crows snatched it with a snap of his beak. He ruffled his neck feathers and hunkered back down.
Water soaked into my skirt at my knees. I pushed sticky hair off my face, and I dug my hands into the doll’s chest.
I parted the ribs and scooped out mud as delicately as possible. It plopped into a pile beside me. Unscrewing the lid of the gallon jar, I reached in and withdrew the heavy deer’s heart. Tacky, cool blood smeared between my fingers. Gently, I placed the heart in the center of my doll’s chest. It smelled sweet and raw. “For passion,” I said.
Next came the liver, which I put beneath the heart. “For courage,” I said.
I buried the organs with chunks of black earth and closed the ribs. My hands hovered over the doll as I paused. This was my last chance to stop, to simply follow Arthur’s final instruction and destroy the roses. If only I’d questioned him then, pushed for details, but I’d been so overwhelmed by the thought of losing him, his order had barely filtered through. My loyalty warred with curiosity, and guilt with the knowledge that if I was to be Deacon in truth instead of only name, I had to understand this problem Arthur had handed me, and not just obey blindly. He’d raised me to question, to think for myself and do what I felt was right. I couldn’t make that decision without exploring the magic twisting through the roses.
The crows flapped their wings, and water rained down on me and the doll.
They were in accord.
There was a metal bucket under the downspout running off the Pink House roof, filled with collected rainwater. I scooped some out and rinsed my hands. Three more crows flew up to land on the gutter, and shifted from foot to foot, their claws scratching and feathers ruffled.
With my clean hands, I grabbed a box of sea salt and shook it out in a thin circle all around myself, the doll, and the sprawling rosebushes. The grains of salt spilled through the sparse grass, glittering violet in the spare dawn light.
Kneeling next to the doll’s head, I pulled an old antler out of my magic bag, smooth and polished from years of use, and sharpened to a needle-fine point. I put the tip to my wrist, where moments before I’d cut with the knife. The tattoo was a spiral and seven-point star, a rune of creation. I pressed the antler point into the hollow center with practiced ease, into the already raw wound. The quick strike of pain vanished into a tingle of magic as a thick drop of blood welled on my wrist. Holding it over the line of salt, I whispered three times, “By my blood, bless this circle,” until the single drop fell into the salt crystals and the energy circle snapped into place like a vacuum seal.
My ears popped.
The crows cried out in a chorus. I hoped we wouldn’t wake Donna as I pulled out of my magic bag the remaining ingredients I needed.
First I uncorked the vial of bone dust and spilled it into the palm of my left hand and spat into it. Mixing with my forefinger, I leaned over the doll’s face and drew a line of gray down the wax forehead. “By bone, I summon you,” I said.
I took up a thin strand of my own yellow hair, blessed in sunlight and sage smoke over the past three days. I pressed it crosswise over the gray line of bone mud. “Hair of the living witch, I summon you.”
With a deep breath, I used my antler-needle again, to prick all ten of my fingers.
My hands on fire with energy, I held them up toward the crow perched on the gutter. Blood trailed along my fingers in thin lines, collected briefly in my palms, and scattered in rivulets down my forearms. The crow cocked his head and peered down with one dark eye.
“Come to me now, my friend,” I said. The crows had worked magic with me for nearly five years now, helping to channel and shape my power with their own.
He snapped his wings out to their full width, so that his long primary feathers caught the edge of the morning sun and shone violet and blue.
“Reese,” I said. “Thank you for the sacrifice.”
He spilled off the roof and I caught him. His wings beat softly as his instinct to right himself, to fly away from me, kicked in. The feathers brushed my face like kisses.
I grasped him in my hands. I could feel his heart rushing in his small chest, could feel the burning magic pass through my bleeding fingers and into his feathers. Slowly, he stilled himself. I held him against my chest and stared into his nearest eye. Tiny feathers spiraled around it, tinged brown. They looked so soft I wanted to run my finger along their edges.
His beak parted and he sighed. It wasn’t a crow sound at all.
“By my blood and this sacrifice, I summon you,” I said loudly. In a swift motion, I pushed him against the doll’s chest, swiped up my antler-needle, and drove it through his small crow body. Pinned him into the mud of the doll.
Wind shot up in a column of air. The roses whipped around, and Reese’s eleven remaining crows screamed in a single voice.
Scrambling, I dipped my finger into the fresh blood streaming from the crow. I painted it over my lips in two swipes, and I leaned over the doll’s head. “Be alive,” I said against its rose-petal lips. “Be alive.” I cupped my hands around its head. “Be alive!”
I kissed it, and breathed my air into its mouth.
The earth below me shook. The doll’s mouth moved against mine, tearing at my breath in an endless stream.
I jerked away, pushed up to stand over it. The living crows flew a tight circle around my head, weaving so close their wings tangled my hair.
At my feet, the crow pinned to the doll spread his wings up to the doll’s shoulders. I held out my hands; rose roots and leaves snaked up from the ground, twisting over the doll into a thick, dark skin. Its fingers twitched. Its waxy face moved into an expression of pain.
It opened heavy eyelids to reveal the chunks of turquoise I’d embedded for eyes.
“Hello,” I said. “I am Mab Prowd. Take this gift from me and tell me your name.”
The doll sat up, crow still pinned to its chest with the white antler. His wings drooped. Blood slunk downward into the doll’s lap.
It reached for me with a waxy hand. I allowed it to touch the hem of my skirt, still slightly breathless at the tingle of magic still coursing through my veins and pressing at the tips of my fingers. Laughter tickled in my stomach because of what I’d done.
My doll bent its knees and climbed to its feet. Every moment its skin hardened further, becoming smooth and light. It blinked at me with turquoise eyes. It flexed its hands. Muscles shifted under that skin, and its mouth was red with lips and tongue. Hair sprouted like black grass, and ears blossomed out. Nostrils formed themselves. Nipples. Everything growing and real, exactly as it should.
Here was a real, living man, with my friend’s crow body staked to its heart.
“Tell me your name,” I commanded.
The doll parted its lips; a harsh rattle sounded.
The crows screamed again and dove at it angrily, raking claws against its head. The doll swung with its thick, still-forming arms, knocking away one of the crows. The whole flock cried out, whipping around in a storm of feathers.
I faltered back out of their way.
It reached for me again, walking with a stilted shuffle. Step. Step. Closer to me, its chest and shoulders lifting with breath, in rhythm with my own. It opened its mouth and sighed, causing the soft wings of the dead crow to shake.
Then it said, “Mab.”
I smiled and touched its wrist, curling my fingers around it in welcome. But it leapt forward with shocking speed. Its arm slammed my chest and I fell back, stunned, sliding through the salt circle and breaking its binding power.
The ground twirled under me. I saw the blue morning sky high overhead, shimmering through my dazed eyes.
The doll’s footsteps thundered through the earth as it raced to the north.
THREE
WILL
Five weeks ago I saved Holly Georges’s life when a freak earthquake knocked her out of a tree and into a lake.
This lake.
With the truck door wide open and the radio blaring, there was just enough noise that I didn’t feel stifled by the hugely open sky overhead. It was about two hours past dawn. Clouds the color of orange sherbet scattered up there. Already the air was muggy. And way too quiet.
My German shepherds, Havoc and Valkyrie, bounded through the tall grass at the edge of the muddy beach, yipping and frolicking like the year-old pups they were. The heat didn’t bother them, though it was already making me sweat. I tugged off my T-shirt and wiped it across my face before tossing it to the ground. Next went my running shoes and my socks, until it was just me in my track pants, and the lake.
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