Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  Maksim gulped back the contents of the glass and set it down hard. Gus slid it out of reach across the table. “This is weird for me,” she said. “You’re always the one who knows what to do.”

  Maksim shrugged one shoulder, hand twisting at the collar of his T-shirt.

  Gus blew out a breath and shrugged in turn. “One thing at a time, okay? Tell me about my brother.”

  Maksim drew a breath, felt it catch in his tight throat. He began, “I was running…”

  But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t the beginning. He had been running when he came across the young man, but he’d been running for a while by then, ceaseless and demanding. When had he left the house?

  He picked his way further through the slow backwash of his thoughts and said, “I was at my gym. Slavo—one of my students … we were working on his footwork. I thought he hit me. In the face. Lights flickered behind my eyes.” Maksim paused. Even as he said the words, he thought they were not right. Not lights but a burst of brilliant darkness. It had been similar to getting hit, but he had been hit many times in his long life, and he should have known the difference. He shook his head and went on, “I was angry with Slavo. My own fault, but I wanted to punish him. I sent him away instead. Made him leave without his shower. I went some rounds on the bag, but … I needed air. You remember how I used to run?”

  Gus nodded. She had seen him head out into the early mornings of three different continents and come back hours later, sweat-soaked and limping, all his temper bled right out of him. She had helped him bind his blistered feet now and then or ice his burning calves.

  Since coming to Toronto, Maksim had not needed it the same way, but he had kept it up nevertheless, if not as desperate or driven as before. He usually ran as if he were training for a marathon, varying his distances and elevation, cycling through a series of favorite routes. But that was not the kind of running he wanted, the day he was trying to describe.

  “I think I did not even lock up the gym,” he said. “I went out and went far, and I went for hours. And instead of running it off, it got worse—the urge. I had not felt it so hard in years, and I was too drowned in it to think about why.”

  “You can’t,” Gus said. “I mean, I can’t. Not when it’s like that.”

  “It was late at night when I came on them,” Maksim went on. “Two young men in an alley behind a bar. Very drunk. They had been set upon, and one of them was bleeding.”

  Gus laughed without humor.

  “You know what I did next,” Maksim said. He was looking down at his hands on the tabletop, and he saw how tightly they were knotted together.

  Gus followed his gaze and said, “I’ll get us another round.”

  She brought back whiskey this time, in tough little shot glasses. Maksim drank his in a single long swallow; it eased the constriction in his voice somehow.

  He said, “I ran away again right after. I did not think to stay. I went swimming.”

  “In a pool?” Gus said, shuddering. “But the chlorine—and even though it’s so strong, it never quite covers up the smells of all the other people—”

  “In the lake,” Maksim said, remembering the deep chill of it, the myriad scents of waterweeds and shore weeds, the birds welcoming the dawn.

  “So when you came to me and broke my door, that was the next day?”

  “I was not sure you would remember,” Maksim admitted.

  “You left me a souvenir or two,” Gus said, gesturing wryly at her face. “I wondered what was up with you.”

  “So did I,” Maksim said. “And then I went to see the witch, and it came clear.”

  “So we have to find this guy, and we have to do it now.”

  Maksim shrugged. Nodded.

  “And you don’t have anyone else but me,” Gus said. Not a question. She looked a bit horrified for a moment, but then she took a breath, patted Maksim’s clenched hands, and said, “Go and relax or something. We’ll find him.”

  She walked out without saying anything more, but she was whistling “Spanish Ladies,” so Maksim didn’t think she was angry.

  Relax, she’d directed, and though he was not in the habit of taking advice from Augusta, Maksim took this as license to go back to his apartment and swallow down four eggs in quick succession. What came over him was not exactly sleep, but it was dark and blind, and it broke the tension in him like a blow from a sledgehammer. He slid down onto the floor before his refrigerator and let himself lie.

  CADIZ, SPAIN: 1813

  “Spanish Ladies”: Gus had always liked it. Maksim had heard it sung by sailors a hundred times, no matter whether they were leaving Spain or headed toward it.

  The day he boarded the Honoria, for instance, bound for Cadiz. The sailors were shouting it back and forth to each other, tuneless and rough, as they rowed Maksim from the pier out to the ship. Maksim was riding the rough edge of two days without sleep, running from a Mayfair flat to a hidey-hole in Southwark to the port and the first berth he could command. He’d committed a murder: the kind of murder he always ended up committing, a moment’s unbridling of his nature and no turning back. He did not regret the murder—a young man losing at piquet and furious with it, who’d followed Maksim out of the card room to argue and ended in a sad huddle of limbs under a tree in Hyde Park—but he regretted being seen playing with the fellow and then leaving with him, and he regretted the new mare he’d had to leave behind in his rush to disappear.

  The regret kept him on edge, despite the fatigue of his quick exit. He was unforgivably impolite to the captain, without realizing they would have to dine together; he wanted to drink heavily, but the drink was a Madeira, which he detested. He found the ship’s motion made him almost ill, which was a thing his kind rarely suffered.

  By the end of the five-day voyage to Cadiz, his neckcloths were all crumpled from constant tugging, he had opened his knuckles on the paneling of his tiny cabin, and between the missed dinners and the never-ending pacing, he’d lost enough weight to make his breeches begin to droop at the waist. He surged ashore, barely remembering his belongings.

  He ran, first, away from the people and the bustling port, over the tumbled rocks along what was left of the ancient city wall and up a sun-scoured hillside. His legs itched with the time spent confined. He dumped his things under a patch of scrub, his coat and his neckcloth and even his boots, and he ran until his feet bled slick.

  He limped back down toward the town in the evening to find that an animal had mauled his belongings about, and his coat lay spread in the dust. It smelled of herbs and dried shit. He put it to rights as best he could and went to find meat, drink, and the latest news of the war.

  What he found instead was a dying woman.

  She lay in a narrow cul-de-sac where a house butted up near to a high section of the fortification. Maksim had heard the city had been shelled in many places during last year’s siege, but here the wall was as sturdy as ever. The woman was a faint, pale splash in the twilight of its shadow: white underskirts tumbled up over a torn spring-green gown. She whined very quietly.

  She was bleeding. The smell came to Maksim like liquor, threading through the scents of frying fish and horse dung and ocean breeze. He was across the street in an instant, forgetting the more mundane needs that had driven him down from the hills. His mouth sprang with saliva.

  Here was blood, and once blood had been spilled, more would always follow, and Maksim would be in the thick of it, one way or another. He did not stop to think that the war had moved on from here, that if this woman had been injured by a soldier it had been one of the allied soldiers stationed here or passing through, that any violence he would be drawn into on her behalf would only see him exile himself from yet another city. He did not think at all, just knelt on the dusty cobbles outside the spreading pool and reached to touch her throat. Her skin and hair were fair and fine. Her heart beat like a jeweler’s hammer.

  “Ven aquí, cobarde,” she murmured.

  “I speak no Spanish,” Mak
sim said in Russian. He looked at her eyes: one blue, one nearly all black where the pupil was blown. He looked at the injury to her head, but it was obscured by clots of blood dried messily into the curls of her hair.

  He brought his face close to hers and sniffed along her brow, where the red ran freely, and he touched the tip of his tongue there, just for a moment.

  “Muere conmigo,” the woman said, and she stabbed Maksim in the stomach.

  Maksim swore. He rocked back on his heels.

  The knife slipped free and blunted its tip on the cobbles. Maksim poked a fingertip into his injury and found it deep enough to bleed, but not at all vital.

  “Would you care to try again?” he said to the woman, in English this time. He felt like laughing, the pain a bright bubble just below his rib cage: surprise was already becoming so rare a thing in his life.

  “Yes,” the woman snarled, almost soundless.

  “Even though I have not hurt you?”

  “You would,” she said, and with that, Maksim could not disagree.

  Moved by something he hardly recognized, he placed the knife in her hand and folded her trembling fingers about it. One of her palms was opened to the bone.

  She could not raise herself enough to strike at his body again. Gasping, she lashed the blade across his forearm and then dropped it again.

  “I have not the strength,” she whispered. Maksim could barely hear her over the pleasant buzz of evening in Cadiz, gulls crying over the rooftops, hooves and wheels on the cobbles, the distant chime of bells from the ships shifting on the harbor waves.

  “And if you had the strength, that is what you would do? Spend it on stabbing me?”

  Her chin dipped in a nod. There were other people passing the mouth of the cul-de-sac, children playing with a hoop, bright saffron and poppy frocks catching the sunset light, and this woman had no thought of calling for help. She only clenched her blood-slick fingers closer around the hilt of her knife.

  Maksim said, “You have a fine spirit for a woman.”

  The woman’s eyes looked strange and flat; he wondered if she was still awake, really, and if she was afraid. Her heart was not beating so fast now. It skipped and started, the way a sparrow closes its wings in flight and then flutters them hard again.

  The blood scent was too much; Maksim had kept himself on a leash all week at sea. He stopped considering and bent down to taste the freshest rivulet at her temple.

  She twisted like a snake and bit him.

  “I think you are meant to live,” Maksim said. “Here.” And he laid his opened arm to her lips and let her taste what it meant to be kin.

  She spat and fought him for a moment, but he bore down, free hand tight on her jaw. Then she bit him again, right on the fresh cut, making him jerk and laugh and lap at her face. She was shivering now, heartbeat picking up again, stronger under the grip of Maksim’s thumb.

  “Easy,” he crooned to her. “Easy.” And her shivering abated until he could barely feel it, only a hint of it traveling through his frame as he lay with his head pressed close to her sternum and licked the dried blood from over her throat.

  After a while, the woman’s breath slowed to long, shallow sighs, and her eyes fell nearly shut, and her hand cupped lax over Maksim’s elbow, almost cradling his arm to her slack open lips. Maksim sat up and spat on a handkerchief and wiped his face clean. He made bandages for the woman’s gored hand and breast, as well as he knew how; the loss of blood would maybe have killed her if Maksim had not happened by, but more likely, it would have been a long death by fever, infection, her humors unbalancing themselves while she lay abed. That would not happen now. He felt almost as if he had done a good deed.

  Maksim pillowed her head on his folded coat and went back out into the street. He felt lovely now, blood-drunk and exhausted and surging with life, all the tension of the last week spent. His head nearly spun with it, as with the best liquor, and he had to school his face to sobriety before he met someone.

  Two women, Spaniards, came his way, carrying bolts of cloth. He called out to them in English, “There’s been a crime. A lady is hurt.” He pointed back toward the wall.

  His own disarray, his unsteadiness, the blood on his clothing must have spoken for him. The women led him to sit against a salmon-colored wall at the edge of the cul-de-sac, and one of them gave him a drink from a wineskin while the other sought whatever passed for the law here. The siege might have left the city battered, but in the half year since it seemed to have rebounded thoroughly—the street and the nearby plaza buzzed with people, sailors and soldiers of all the allied armies, fisherfolk and blacksmiths, priests and clerks, and, once they were aware of the incident, every one of them seemed to have a reason to come over and look at Maksim and the lady he’d found.

  In no very long time, Maksim was following quite a procession uphill farther into the town: a litter carrying the injured woman, a pair of young men in official-looking uniforms, and a rabble of attendants, including the two women Maksim had approached and several young children, all of them chattering in Spanish.

  They seemed to know where the injured woman lived; they brought her right to a townhouse door and made a hubbub there. Maksim followed everyone inside.

  An elderly man ran into the parlor, wheezing with dismay. “Augusta! I did not even know she had left the house. Where is her servant? Has someone fetched the surgeon?” He collected himself and seemed to be repeating the same things in Spanish. A number of people ran out again; someone gave the old man a drink; others carried Augusta into another room.

  Maksim went to follow.

  The old man fixed upon him then. “Sir? You are?”

  Maksim had not thought at all about who he might be, in this city, in this house.

  He fell back upon a favorite subterfuge: stumbled forward, leaned upon the back of a chair, and pulled it down with him as he let himself drop.

  As he lay boneless on the old gentleman’s parlor matting, he thought how much he liked Cadiz already, with its sunny plazas and steep streets and its ships endlessly coming and going; and unless he very much missed his mark, he’d have a place here for a few days, at least.

  Someone came to lift him to a settee, and he feigned awakening and weakly accepted a glass of what turned out to be canario. A sympathetic maiden held it to his lips for him, even.

  When the surgeon had finished with Augusta, he came to Maksim, sleeves tied up and arms bloody to the elbow.

  He carried a curved needle and a fine length of gut. He cut away Maksim’s slashed shirt and sponged gore from the surrounding skin.

  Maksim swallowed down some excellent whiskey and lay back with his eyes half-lidded as the surgeon placed his stitches, tiny piercing pains that spread into the duller flare of his injury, and though it was pain, it was also pleasure.

  He slept in a narrow bed spread with a starched coverlet, and in the morning, he awoke to the sympathetic maid, who brought him black coffee and bread and told him that Miss Hillyard had survived the night, and she thanked him tearfully for saving the woman’s life.

  The maid had a romantic notion; Maksim could see it. She thought him a hero and a gentleman and probably had him as good as married to Augusta and herself elevated to a grander position. The maid would be disabused of it all soon enough: when Miss Hillyard began to feel the effects of Maksim’s blood, she would cause a scandal one way or another. Maksim found himself eager to see where the madness would take her: he had never made a woman kin before, and he wondered if she would feel it as men did. She had not been raised to the sword as Maksim had—or any of the other kin he had encountered. She had probably been trained to sweetness all her short life, though Maksim thought, from her rage in the alley, that it had not quite taken.

  For the time being, Maksim accepted the coffee, smiled bravely, and allowed that he was well enough to sit up and speak with Mr. Hillyard this morning. Two weeks, he gave it, and then Mr. Hillyard could hang, while Maksim took his daughter to the devil.
/>   Two weeks turned out to be too generous: barely a single one had passed before Augusta was well enough for trouble.

  Maksim had formed a habit of looking in on her in the mornings, after breakfasting with her father. The first few days, she’d scarcely been well enough to greet him before sleeping again, but her new nature sprang strong in her, and before long, she was sitting up in bed, eyes bright below the new scars at her hairline and prevailing upon the sympathetic maid to very improperly wait outside the door while Maksim visited.

  “I do not know precisely what you did to me, Mr. Volkov,” she said, “but I fancy it was something un-Christian.”

  Maksim blinked. He had not been expecting such directness, though now that he thought of it, he should have: was this not the woman who’d tried to stab him even as her own life ebbed away?

  “Un-Christian,” he said. “That is true. What do you remember?”

  Augusta flushed pink across the bridge of her nose. “Not much after the men left,” she said and shut her lips tight.

  “Tell me of these men, then. Were they strangers to you?”

  Augusta nodded. “Soldiers,” she said. “Spanish.”

  “Did they…” Maksim paused for a moment, but Augusta was already continuing.

  “They wanted to despoil me,” she said, looking at Maksim very straight as if shaming him for his delicacy in avoiding the question. “One of them tried, but he was dead drunk, and I scolded him, and he wilted like a cut lily, and it made him angry. Then they both beat me until I fell, and then they spat upon me and left me there to die. And I thought at first you were like them, but … you were not.”

  “I did not force my attention on you?”

  “If you did, I do not recall it,” Augusta said, eyes going distant and dreamy. “You gentled me and gave me something to drink and I felt … I felt…”

  “I shared my nature with you,” Maksim said. “It brings healing; you must have felt it straightaway. You will want to be careful to avoid questions.”

  “I am already monstrous tired of playing invalid,” Augusta admitted.