The Blood Keeper

by Tessa Gratton

  “I called the police,” Ben said, edging nearer to the window.

  “I cut the phone cord two days ago. Stand still, or I’ll turn you into topiary.” But Gabriel didn’t sound at all concerned.

  It was impossible to move. That was my body. My skin. I clenched the dagger in my hand that I was supposed to drive into it. My mind whirled. I tried to recite the magic words to myself. Tried to use them to force my feet forward.

  “If you’re gonna do anything,” Ben said to Gabriel, but his eyes flicked back to me, “then do it, damn it.”

  I leapt forward and drove the dagger into my own shoulder.

  MAB

  The shock of Will’s spell burned in the center of the black candle rune over my spine. I sliced open both of my palms and placed them at either end of the broken line of salt, completing the circuit with my body. “Unmake,” I said, “your power severed. Your blood unbound. The mark of his strength on your flesh, shattered. The mirror cracked, this reflection sundered. The mark of his strength on your flesh, shattered.”

  The words were the reverse of the black candle binding.

  Beneath me the earth trembled.

  WILL

  Gabriel jerked and cried out. He staggered, but caught himself on the back of an armchair. Turning, he tried to reach around to pull out the dagger. But he faltered as his knees gave out. He fell hard, and blood streamed down his back in a fresh assault. From his knees, he glanced up at me, horror dawning on his face. My face. “The bird boy,” he whispered.

  I stepped close again. Reached to touch his blood, to start the spell. But he grabbed my wrist. “Don’t. I’ll make you so much more powerful than she has.”

  Ben clocked Gabriel in the head with his elbow. He toppled to the side, and I jumped with him. Landed on my knees, and as Gabriel groaned I smeared the blood from the dagger into a circle and said, “By his blood, cleanse this curse.”

  “Mab!” Gabriel screeched. The tattoos on his skin flared as red-hot as fire. He dove forward and hit me with both hands. We collapsed back. My body slammed on top of me. Its blood dripped hot onto my chest.

  The rune on my back exploded in power.

  A strangled cry burst out of my mouth. Gabriel gritted his teeth—my teeth!—and said, “She can take Lukas from me, but this body is mine now.”

  “No, it’s mine,” I managed. It was like looking up into a mirror, only with no expression I’d ever make.

  “William!” He laughed, hard and ugly. My hands slid in the blood as I pushed at him. All his muscles trembled and shook, and the skin was on fire. His face flushed, his lips almost purple.

  He rolled off me. My chest was falling to pieces again. All the skin sloughing around, the feathers shaking. I couldn’t breathe. I was dying.

  Ben stood over us both, and he used his foot to knock Gabriel back onto the floor as he tried to get up. Gabriel coughed, and I straddled him, pinned him down.

  The ground bucked under us.

  Gabriel choked on his own cries, writhing. I held on to his shoulders, spread my weight down onto him. “Stop!” he screamed. “Stop, I don’t deserve this!”

  “It’s my body.”

  “This curse will destroy you, too!”

  “I know.” I ground my fingers into his shoulders. Felt my own blood slick under my hands. And the burning magic breaking me down. Tearing through this crow body. Spinning in a ball of fire, a supernova, in my heart. I closed my eyes and thought of myself. Gabriel screamed, and I screamed, too.

  Ben yelled my name.

  I refused to let go, even as his blood tattoos turned to acid, even as the body around me tore apart.

  This was mine. Mine. My body. My life.

  Mine.

  MAB

  My familiar exploded in a flare of magic so bright my vision whited out and it was all I could do to channel it into this unbinding.

  Fire tore through the black candle rune, burning my throat, shaking my bones so high and fast it felt like they shattered into a million pieces. I dug my fingers into the circle, focused, focused, focused while I burned from the inside out.

  The inferno raged, louder than anything, roaring until I couldn’t hear my own screams.

  And it vanished, sucking into the earth as the salt circle held.

  The roses had turned to ash, and Lukas lay prone in a bed of it, everything burned away but his body.

  Struggling, I crawled forward, shook him. His skin burned me, but I shook harder. “Lukas!”

  He opened his eyes and sat up. “Mab.” His voice sounded weak and dry.

  I smiled, my lips cracking painfully. “Go. Get out of this circle,” I ordered.

  “But Mab.” His eyes were sunken into his face, his cheeks hollow. But he lived.

  “No, go. I am … not finished.”

  The earth had not stopped trembling.

  “Get out of the circle, Lukas!”

  He tripped to his feet, falling over himself, but managed it. The burn of the countercurse tingled my feet as I stood, too—I had to, or this magic would tear everywhere, destroy everything, including Lukas, including the whole blood ground. Everything.

  Grasping my knife, I held out my hand and put the dagger’s tip to the tattoo on my wrist. I pricked it deeply, letting the pain become a sound on my tongue, and I walked to the nearest of the nine spirals. “By my blood, cleanse this curse!”

  WILL

  I was nothing but fire.

  And my name. Will.

  Wind tore through my feathers, I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t fly. I was falling. I was—

  Will.

  MAB

  The first drop of blood fell. I felt the ripple as it awakened my rune.

  The second drop at the second spiral sent a shiver of pleasure up from my toes. Ah, magic!

  The third tore at my heart.

  I dug the point of the dagger back into my wrist. The fourth and fifth drops of blood weakened my knees. The sixth clogged my throat, and the seventh brought tears to my eyes.

  The eighth cracked my bones.

  The ninth hit the rune, and the immediate magic flung me to the ground.

  I landed on my hip and bleeding wrist, cried out at the snap of pain that whipped up my arm. “Cleanse this curse,” I commanded. “By my blood, from his blood. Cleanse this curse. Cleanse this curse.”

  Wind screamed, whipping the circle of oak trees, tearing at the roof of the Pink House. Lukas yelled something but kept back.

  The nine spirals glowed, and I stepped into the center of them.

  Sudden, eerie silence permeated the hill. Sunspots danced in my vision as for one moment the wind froze, and everything was still.

  WILL

  I opened my eyes. My head pounded, my heartbeat slamming my ribs. Ben bent over me. “Will?”

  Slowly sitting up, I spread my hands on my chest—my chest! Even my bones hurt.

  Black feathers floated everywhere, dancing in the wild wind that shot in through the window.

  “Ben!”

  He grabbed my hands, and said, “Will?”

  “Semper freaking fi,” I said and he dragged me to my feet.

  Together we stumbled outside into a storm of leaves and ashes.

  I held up my arm to shield my face. There was Mab, standing where the center of the rose garden had been. And Lukas crouched next to a box of some flowers that snapped hard in the wind. He was totally naked, but his eyes were wide and alert.

  Mab screamed.

  She stood there, in a glowing circle, the nine points flaring silver and shooting out light straight up to the sky, and straight into the center. Into Mab.

  I ran for her.

  MAB

  It began in my fingers and toes, but quickly swirled into my palms and the soles of my feet, spinning, burning, sucking at my magic. I ground my teeth and let my head fall back, spreading my arms out, welcoming the sweep of magic for the last time.

  A shock of fire hit my middle, doubling me over. I screamed, clutching my stom
ach, and my knees hit the ground.

  Oh, the fire! It gnawed at my liver and chewed through my intestines and lungs, turning my breath to jagged needles.

  Then someone wrapped around me, saying my name again and again.

  As the magic was flayed from my bones and boiled from my blood, he huddled over my curled, shaking body as if he could protect me from the pieces of the falling sky.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Arthur. I am so sorry.

  I killed him, the man you’d known and loved for centuries. And then I went inside and waited for two weeks until you came home. I thought of running, but I waited. I had to know if you knew. If you’d expected to return to find him inside of me.

  It was a devastating, sticky afternoon, when the leaves hung limp on the oak trees and even the sparrows were too hot to sing. You drove up in that old Pontiac, and I stood on the top step of the porch in my favorite dress. It was peach colored with small oranges embroidered at the hem, do you remember?

  You hopped out of the Pontiac, and there were two folks with you, Jessica and Dietrich, both dripping from the unaccustomed heat. You bounded across to me, smiling, and even though I said nothing, made no gesture of welcome, you kissed me and held my hands. You put the whole length of your body up against mine, and you breathed my name into my ear.

  “Evelyn.”

  And I knew. I knew he hadn’t told you anything. I knew you expected me to be well, knew you wanted me here and wanted to marry me and wanted to spend our lives together. I knew you loved me.

  And I knew I could never, ever tell you what Gabriel had done.

  SIXTY-TWO

  MAB

  It was the day of my summer party.

  I straddled a branch of the tall sycamore just to the north of the Pink House, tying long purple ribbons and crow feathers into the leaves. Silla sat below me, braiding the feathers individually with silver bells and little blue beads the color of Reese’s eyes. She finished one and glanced up, shading her eyes from the ripples of sunlight. The rings on all her fingers glinted bright. “Ready?” she called.

  “Always.”

  With a gentle kiss, Silla sent the feather floating up to me. It trailed ribbons and tinkling bells. I caught it gently, and stretched up to tie it over my head.

  We’d gathered the feathers in the aftermath, and now more than three hundred feathered charms circled the house and yard. Everywhere I looked, Reese’s wings fluttered in the wind.

  Laughter poured out of the house, where Faith oversaw Lukas and Nick as they angled chairs carefully out the front door to set up around the long picnic tables spread across the front yard. Donna was in charge of the meat, over with Eli at the grill. Hannah and Caleb played with chalk against the garage doors. They’d drawn a huge pink and red tree full of stick figures and what might have been dogs.

  Over the past two weeks, most of our extended blood family had come home. Some stayed to help rebind the curses that I could not, or to strengthen the magic of the trees. Others stopped in for a few hours, to pay homage to Arthur, and occasionally to Granny’s linden tree, as well.

  Mostly, though, they came to see me.

  The new Deacon.

  They didn’t know my magic was not everything it had been. Even I didn’t know if it would ever be the same. It had been Silla who’d turned over my arm, inspecting the smooth, unmarked skin where my tattoos had been, and suggested my magic hadn’t vanished completely. That in time it might replenish itself the way our blood was constantly reborn.

  She and Nick had returned with Donna the day after I’d burned up my magic and freed Lukas, in a pickup truck full of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Nick had helped Donna level rose ashes, and then gone into town for truckloads of volcanic stone and slate to spread out into a multihued rock garden. Silla and I had gathered up all the crow feathers, and I spent most of the first days holding them for her as she set them with preservation spells. She took me to town for a manicure and haircut, and for the first time in our acquaintance told me stories about Reese when he’d been her brother.

  That night I had stood up and walked down the porch steps so that I could see the stars. Thick summer wind lifted my hair, and I listened to the quiet. Frogs chirped, and the million cicadas screamed their songs of desire, but the trees no longer whispered to me. I’d burned their voices out of them, destroyed the man at their heart.

  I’d looked back at the remains of my family sitting on the porch, Lukas using the tip of a small dagger to carve his name into the railing, Silla writing slowly in a leather journal, Nick flipping playing cards against the porch boards, trying to convince Donna that she really did want to play a hand with him and bet a flight to Oregon on the outcome.

  I had thought of those kin slowly trickling back, and of Arthur and all his violet flowers. Of Gabriel and how passionately he’d loved and hated. Of Granny cupping my hands to pray. I’d thought of my dozen lost crows, and I’d thought of Will. I had so very much wanted him there, with me on the land, when there was nothing to fear and nothing to keep us from laughing.

  Despite losing my magic, despite perhaps not being a very powerful Deacon, I decided to throw my summer party.

  And here we were, expecting all sorts of people we knew, most of whom had never been to the land. The house had been scrubbed bare, most obvious magical paraphernalia tucked away, until it was only a farmhouse my family had owned for a handful of generations.

  Ostensibly, the party was for Nick and Silla, who’d be driving out to Oregon in three days. But I knew, and they knew, that we were inviting life back into our forest. That we wanted to cover up the scars with new patterns of friendship and goodwill.

  I climbed down from the trees after hanging the final crow charm, and Silla and I stood together as the wind lifted them, spinning the feathers in tiny spirals.

  Silla whispered, “Fare thee well, great heart. This earth that bears thee dead bears not alive so stout a gentleman.”

  “Is that a prayer?” I asked, taking her hand.

  She eyed me. “It’s Shakespeare, you heathen.”

  With a laugh, I pulled away and went inside to bathe.

  I took my time in water steeped with violets, pinned my hair away from my face, and slipped into a bloodred dress we’d found in Mother’s things. It fell from my shoulders in diaphanous layers, and everyone agreed it made me appear older even without any shoes, which I refused to consider.

  With nothing else against my body, no rings or barrettes, no makeup or bra or necklace, I went into the kitchen for a silver cup. I filled it with cold water I’d infused with anise and honey, and carried it onto the porch.

  Lanterns had been strung overhead, and torches set out for when the sun set. I smelled burning wood and greenery, saw squat vases of pink and white coneflowers set out on all the tables.

  Donna came over, and I offered her the cup. She sipped, and kissed my cheek. I went to everyone, offering water and blessings. Little Caleb spilled it down his chin, and Lukas dipped in a finger and flicked some back at me. Nick suggested a nip from his flask might improve the flavor—and the magic. Faith and Eli drank together.

  When all my family had imbibed, I waited at the edge of the driveway, and every guest who came was given my cup from which to drink. The butcher, our neighbors from the farmers’ market, the old couple who sold us sweet wine. Everyone who helped us survive, helped the magic survive even if they didn’t know it, had been invited. And I presented them with my cup. Most were surprised, and laughed it away, but no one refused. They made their offerings in return: we had music and plenty for the grill, colorful pasta salads and fruit Jell-O.

  Our lands were admired, the pink color of the house exclaimed upon. Kids danced through the rock garden and played games in the azalea bushes. All of us caught up in conversation, about Arthur and Lyn, about old memories and the goings-on out in the world. A perfect cadence of chatter, enough to hide the silence of the trees.

  I had long since retired my cup to the porch when Wi
ll and Ben and their parents arrived. I didn’t even see them at first, but Silla found me and whispered in my ear. I grabbed Donna and pulled her through the crowd of new and old friends. We met the Sangers at the edge of the crowd. I barely refrained from throwing my arms around Will, but he grinned at me all the same. His parents knew me, of course, but I introduced them to Donna, and I dragged them around to see where the food was, the coolers, and point directions into the house if they needed the toilet. All the while I stole glances at Will, my breath speeding up when I caught him looking back. My stomach twisted, and I feared suddenly that there would be distance between us.

  But he was polite and as charming as I imagined a boy could be to so many strangers. He wore jeans and a green T-shirt that hugged his shoulders in a way that tightened my stomach. Silla came over to us, and he seemed at a loss for words until she smiled sadly at him. He said, “I saw you in his memories,” and she rescued him by asking after his dogs, who she’d heard so much about, and then we were surrounded by others.

  Lukas came to drag Will off and I almost died, but there were so many people, and I kept myself smiling and talking, remembering this party was a spell of its own, and just as important as any. I ate and I drank, I danced with Caleb on my hip.

  The mosquitoes appeared, and there was much slapping and annoyed laughter, until the torches were lit and I saw Nick surreptitiously casting antibug wards all around the yard with Hannah’s help. The air tingled when they popped into effect, and the mosquitoes forgot about our guests’ blood.

  It was sunset, and I desperately hunted around for Will. I found him at the front of the house, against the porch rail, talking with Eli and Ben and a man named Winchester who worked the stall beside ours at the farmers’ market. They were arguing through smiles about professional soccer teams. I leaned over the rail from behind and whispered into his ear, “Knock, knock.”