The Blood Keeper

by Tessa Gratton

“But you like her.”

  “I, uh. Yeah. She’s easy to be around.” I wasn’t sure if I was making it up or telling the truth. Mab was so different. How could I tell my mom that the first time I met her we’d battled a mud monster, and she’d been half covered in dirt and mud? And wearing giant goggles? She had a magic workshop and a life out of some movie. Mom would be scandalized by what Mab wore—or rather what she didn’t wear. And the tangled mess of her hair.

  “Are you smiling, Will Sanger?” Mom scooted a few inches back to watch me.

  “Aw, Mom.” I scrunched up my face and looked away. “Stop.”

  “You should bring her over so we can meet her.”

  “It isn’t like that! And besides, Dad grounded me.”

  “Ah.”

  I glanced back. Mom was very innocently reaching for her book again. Face clear of expression. Her wrist bones stood out hard against her skin. Poking up so that they looked painful. I thought I should start pushing half-and-half on her for her coffee in the mornings. “What are you reading?” I asked, scooting close enough to loom over her and pretend to be enthralled.

  She told me it was some historical mystery that took place during World War I. I settled in against the headboard while she read a bit from the middle.

  A while later, she woke me up and sent me to snore in my own bed.

  I dreamed all night about monsters and screaming trees. And Mab, caught in a sticky red spiderweb, struggling to get out, to get to me.

  THIRTY

  I knelt beside the salvia, tearing out weeds, as the dawn rose behind heavy clouds the next morning. I heard the door open and your footsteps on the porch but continued with my work even as you passed me, paused, and turned back to watch.

  After a moment, you said, “Evelyn?”

  My first name. I lifted my head and put the sharp bull thistle I’d just torn out of the ground atop the pile of its brothers.

  You came to me and stood, frowning slightly in the pale white morning. I got to my feet. “Arthur? What’s wrong?”

  “Evelyn,” you said again, stepping closer and tilting your head, peering at my face as if you’d look through it into my heart. That made me fold my hands under my ribs. You leaned so close there was no room for light between us, and whispered, “What were you thinking, when you kissed me last night?”

  I flung myself back, hands clapping over my mouth. You reached out, startled, but I jerked away from you. “What? When I what?” I flew through my memories of the past day, and there was nothing—nothing. Panicked that you or I was running mad, I backed up all the way to the porch while the expression drained out of you, while your fingers twitched and your head slowly lifted until you were staring past me at the house.

  Before I could say anything else—I haven’t the faintest idea what I might have managed—you charged past me, harder and faster than I’d ever seen you move, up into the house.

  Moments later there was a crash, and Josephine shrieked. My boots were tied to the ground as you returned, dragging her in her thin nightgown, out the door and down the porch. You threw her into the meadow. Her shrieks were like an angry cat, her hair flouncing everywhere, and she leapt onto her knees, but you pointed to her car. “Go. Now, Josephine. Before I strip the magic from your bones.”

  Your voice was red-hot, and you were everything but calm. I shrank away, awed and terrified and with just the beginning of delight because I understood you were taking my side over hers, throwing her out for some sin against me.

  She said, “Oh, please, it was nothing.”

  “It was everything,” you answered. Your hands were shaking!

  Josephine got to her feet like a queen, despite grass stains and being nearly naked. She glanced at me. “You’ll thank me someday,” she tossed off, turning and going for her little silver car.

  “Ten years, Josephine,” you said. “Don’t come back.”

  She gasped, whirled, and began to protest. But when she saw you, she held it back and instead shrugged. “I’ve been meaning to visit the family in New Orleans,” she said, as if it had always been her plan. Neither you nor I moved as she climbed into her car, twisted her hair back out of her face, and left.

  We two remained in place long after the noise of her vehicle had faded. I was afraid to look at you and instead stared at the pile of broken thistles.

  When you finally approached me, there was sorrow in the hang of your arms. I steeled myself, hoping I could root this out of our home the way I’d rooted the weeds from my garden. “What happened, Arthur? Last night?”

  You pressed your lips together and stopped an arm’s length from me. You were fully dressed in your daily uniform of trousers and shirtsleeves, despite the heat the later day would surely bring. I wanted to brush your hair off your face, where anger had made it stick.

  “You came back downstairs, late, wrapped up in a shawl and your feet bare,” you said breathily, watching my mouth instead of my eyes. “You knelt in front of me. I was just alone there, watching the patterns in the fire. You took my hand, touched my cheek, and said, ‘I’ve been thinking, Arthur.’ Then—then you kissed me.”

  I dragged in a shaking breath.

  “That was all. You smiled and walked straight back upstairs.” Your hands wrapped around your chest now, defensively. “I should have known it wasn’t you, Miss Sonnenschein.”

  “Why?” I said, suddenly furious. “Because you could never imagine me like that? Because I’m not somebody you’d kiss? Somebody worth kissing?” Tears tingled in my eyes like magic in my blood. I wanted to throw a child’s fit, to fling myself at you and pummel your chest. To knock my anger and desire straight into your heart.

  Your mouth dropped, and you held out your hands. “No, no. Because—because it’s easy to tell when somebody’s possessed!”

  “How easy?” I was not mollified.

  “The eyes are all wrong, they’re not—real, there’s no reflection, no spirit.”

  I threw up my hands. “So you didn’t notice my eyes were lacking spirit. Wonderful.”

  You closed your mouth, pressing your lips in again. You reached out and touched my hand, then snatched yours back. “I didn’t notice because I …”

  A long silence stretched between us, and my heart was loud as firecrackers in my ears.

  You said, finally, watching my lips, “Because I wanted so badly for it to be you.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  MAB

  With a shallow bowl under my arm, I carefully climbed out the attic window and onto the flat rectangle of roof where Arthur and I used to watch the stars.

  Clouds spread across the dark sky, layers stretched into rippling sheets, overlapping in patterns difficult to understand. As though wind pushed from seven directions, at seven different heights. Some of that wind grasped at my unbound hair, throwing it around like tentacles. I angled my head up and searched for sky—there, and there, in the southwest. Bright, luminous black, and streaks of silver light from the hidden moon.

  I crouched and set the bowl where it would catch as much moonlight as possible.

  It contained a mixture of Will’s blood, dried-fig powder and rue, my blood for power, and five focus stones: obsidian, amethyst, lace agate, moonstone, and citrine. In the pale moonlight, I sketched a circle with chalk onto the roof, adding a rune of focus and a rune of pure intentions. I hummed a discordant tune as I plucked the stones from the bowl and set them around in their proper places in the circle.

  It was finished and ready, and I hesitated before saying the words to set the spell. This was the first time I’d been up here since Arthur died.

  I remembered late last summer bursting into his workshop with wild magic on my lips. I’d panted in the doorway as he drew a final line onto a piece of red construction paper. When he glanced up, his pale hair swung crazily about his face as though he’d been electrified. I laughed, and he said, “Bit of lightning got loose from its box,” as he flicked his fingers toward his bowing shelves. I hopped over to him, flun
g myself onto the worktable, and whispered my plan. As I spoke, his eyes lit, and he grabbed my hand and together we ran through the forest, leaping like deer, gathering all the excess magic the leaves had to offer.

  We flung ourselves out of the trees and dashed through late-summer meadow. We kicked at the grasses and flowers, flinging seeds everywhere. And we danced into the sunflower field, aiming for the center of the riotous tangle of yellow and white.

  “They’ve gone to seed!” I cried, flinging my arms out and spinning. Arthur plucked a single head, and the round flower fit perfectly cupped in his palm. He spat on it and threw it straight up.

  “Fly,” he told it.

  I pulled a pin from my hair and jabbed my finger. Picking a flower just as Arthur had, I dripped three drops of blood onto its face and tossed it high. “Fly!” I told it.

  Together we wove through the field, touching flower heads and watching them leap up. The air was full of whirring sunflowers. They darted and dipped, and the crows arrived, laughing their bright, coughing laughs. The crows were black shapes dancing among the flowers. Arthur’s fingers wove into mine, and we twirled into a waltz. We tripped on stems and twisting leaves. I called up to the sky, “Shake and shudder! Scatter your seeds! Give back to the garden all that it needs!” Arthur joined me when I repeated the spell, and we sang it again and again.

  Petals fluttered down and seeds came raining, a storm of yellow and white and brown. They caught in our hair and in our hands, on our tongues as we raised our heads to laugh.

  The crows fed well, making a game of it with open beaks. I was dizzy and happy, and Arthur and I fell back, landing in the scratchy stiff field. Blue sky peeked at us through the deflowered stalks, and some crows landed near. The rest chased each other in a continued contest.

  Our heads knocked together, and I sighed as petals fell slowly onto my face.

  That evening we’d dragged ourselves back to the Pink House, where Donna and Granny Lyn waited with iced tea on the porch. Granny shook her head and told us we looked like a pair of ragamuffins dropped off a train and left to wander the countryside. Donna only looked sadly at my filthy dress. When Arthur moved to kiss Granny, she pushed at him with her foot, unwilling to touch his dirt. He made kissing faces at her, and so did I, until she was laughing and smacking his hands lightly. Her smile folded the rest of her face into an accordion of wrinkles, and she told him he was old and wise enough to know better.

  “Too old to be wise, my love,” he said, but winked at me as though to cancel out the silly tone of voice and make the statement true. After our baths we’d climbed up here onto the roof, and I’d asked Arthur what he’d meant.

  Stars wheeled overhead, too numerous without a moon. Arthur said, “I’m wise enough to know that oftentimes the best kind of fruit is the freshest.”

  “Except plums,” I teased, and Arthur laughed. He turned onto his side, and I did, too. He put a hand on my cheek and I studied his face, so young and easy and smooth. “That’s true enough,” he said. “What I mean, plainly, is that wisdom is a habit, and maybe an addiction. We live too long and nothing looks new anymore.”

  “I’m new,” I said, “and you can see everything new again with me.”

  His smile faded, and he said, “I said something very much like that to Gabriel once.”

  “Who’s that? I haven’t met him.”

  “No, and you won’t.” Arthur rolled onto his back again and pointed up at the stars. “See the Big Dipper? And the Little?”

  I nodded. Of course I could see them—he’d shown me constellations by the time I was six.

  “Gabriel used to say he was the bigger, older bear and I was the littler. And now, that is you and me, little queen. Only I am the major, and you the minor.”

  I took his hand and wove our fingers together. My fingers were nearly as long as his, and I held them up until Polaris was just at the tip of our middle fingers. “Us, circling the pole together, forever!”

  Arthur curled his fingers down around mine and said, “For our time, at least.”

  Less than a year later, here I was putting out an ointment to steep in the moonlight, alone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I ran away that day you threw Josephine out, spent it in the western pasture with myself and the flowers and the sun. Gabriel still didn’t return home, and I avoided you for nearly a week. I couldn’t see you without thinking about everything Josephine had said and done, horrified at the thought of my hands under her control, my voice, my lips. What if you’d done more? What if you only weren’t telling me?

  Every day I bathed in the Child Creek, pouring the fresh water over my head again and again, drinking it and welcoming it to run through my body, cleansing me of her influence.

  It was there you found me on the fifth day, in only my shift, soaked to the bone and cold despite the hot sun sparkling off the water.

  I sat up, water streaming down my face and my loose hair stuck to my back, the shift thin and heavy with water. I might as well have been naked. And there you were, leaning your shoulder against a maple tree.

  I gasped so hard I choked, covering myself and pulling up my knees so that I was sitting like a duck in that creek. My dress hung from that same maple tree, and my shoes were tucked beside a rock. I’d planned on baking dry in the sun out in the field, but now I was trapped. “Arthur! Get away!”

  “It’s time,” you said calmly, watching my face and careful not to let your eyes trail anyplace else.

  “Time for what?” My voice rose near to a shriek.

  “For me to show you what I think is most beautiful.”

  I huffed, “Now?”

  You nodded and pushed off the maple. “Come on, quick, or it won’t last.”

  Waiting until your back was turned, I leapt out and tugged my old blue dress on over the shift, even though it stuck everywhere and my hair might as well have been a squirrel’s nest. I left my shoes and followed a few feet behind you, not thinking about touching you, not doing anything but watching where you stepped as you led me around south, toward the old grain silo.

  You led me to a bower of paper birch trees, all white and gray bark and silvery leaves. Under their branches the world fell away, the air somber and heavier somehow. I wondered if I’d crossed a salt circle. You crouched near the base of two birches that had grown together. In the roots lay a coyote, old enough to sport white hairs on his muzzle. You curled around him, stroked his orange and white fur. He twitched with every slow exhalation. I held back, watching sadly. What beauty was going to be here? The beast was dying.

  “May I?” I asked, watching the coyote’s golden eyes.

  “Ask the old man yourself,” you said.

  I crouched and put my fingers to his muzzle, and he creaked open his jaw. Many of his teeth were missing, but his tongue curled out between yellowing fangs, and his nostrils quivered as he smelled me. He sighed heavily, and I put my palm under his jaw to scratch gently.

  You cut your finger with the fleam you always carried in your pocket, and drew a triangle against his forehead. You whispered into his huge ear, and I felt the blanket of magic slip around me, too. What the coyote felt, we felt. Its bones ached, and pulling air into its lungs took too much concentration.

  “Oh, Arthur,” I murmured, glancing up to see the sorrow coating your eyes.

  “Stand back.” You lifted up onto your knees and put your hands on the coyote’s ribs.

  The world shivered and the coyote’s mouth yawned open. Its fur rippled and its paws splayed out. A strong wind rushed over the ground, scattering leaves and strips of fallen birch bark. The wind peeled the fur away from the coyote, tossing it into the air like dandelion seeds! The coyote’s skin sank down, sucking close to bones. The skull and ribs and sharp shoulder blades stood out. His eyes melted, and so did his tongue. Bones crumbled, sounding like tiny hail slapping down through baby leaves. From his eye socket a thin green stem grew, like a pointing finger, and blossomed into a tiny, perfect violet.

&nb
sp; You laughed. It was a soft, happy sound. You said my name, Evelyn, and I couldn’t feel my own body suddenly. My heart had vanished into the earth along with the coyote’s spirit. I was overwhelmed, and tears made my vision waver.

  You stood up and grasped my hands. “Did you see?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Your skin was hot, and I put my hands on your face.

  “That is my most favorite beautiful thing,” you said. “Not the sunrise or flying with the wind. Not any of it but this: death and life, and this moment when they are the exact same thing.”

  It was so quiet in the grove, with your face in my hands. Your voice was low, and the death energy continued to resonate around us, but softly. Gently.

  And I knew you, in that moment. Love seemed too small a word for what I felt, what I understood. I knew you, Arthur. And I’ve never stopped.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MAB

  All night, Lukas screamed with nightmares.

  I crawled into bed beside him, humming and singing all the lullabies I knew from Mother and Granny Lyn. When he was awake I used a pen to connect his burn scars with smiling faces and elephants to make him laugh. In the morning I strengthened my binding and gave him a draught of magic to keep his body relaxed. I asked him to tell me exactly what his father had done, what was the spell he’d needed the black candle rune for.

  Lukas curled his feet onto the sofa, leaning away from me and into the corner, and said, “I don’t wanna say.”

  I crawled nearer, sitting with my legs tucked up, too, un-threatening, kind, young as I could be. “It was not your fault, Lukas, I promise. You couldn’t have stopped him, whatever it was.”

  His fingers made dents in the sofa cushion because he gripped it so hard. Behind him a fire crackled in the hearth, because although it was hot today, Lukas couldn’t get warm. Donna had brought hot chocolate and tea, offered him medicine and soup, suggesting he was only sick from his hard work. But I knew, and he knew, what was keeping his energy and temperature down now.