“One of those,” Stella said to the waitress, round-eyed. “Hey, Lissa.” She made a motion that might have been an impulse to hug Lissa hello, but she checked it, instead slinging her purse over the back of her chair.
“Hey,” Lissa said, and her mouth went dry and thick, and she blinked across the table at this stranger who was her stepsister, and the things she’d thought to say were gone.
Stella’s juice came. They both sipped and raised their eyebrows and licked pink foam from their lips.
“Stay for now,” Lissa said. “I don’t want to make promises.”
“Are you sure?” Stella said. “You don’t seem very sure.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lissa said. “I haven’t done any of this before. I’m not going to lie to you; I don’t think I’m going to be easy to live with.”
Stella paused and thought. “If you think it’s not working, can you give me two weeks’ notice? Because I don’t think I can take it if I come home to find my stuff on the lawn and have to get a hotel like a cheating hubby.” She grinned as she said it, but it wasn’t a happy grin.
“Two weeks’ notice,” Lissa said. “Got it.” She held out her hand across the table, and Stella took it.
Lissa had been expecting a handshake, but Stella put her other hand over top and squeezed.
“Thanks,” Stella said, and she bit her lip, and damned if that didn’t make Lissa tear up a bit too. With her free hand, she took a gulp of her juice so that she could blame the watering eyes on the cayenne.
MAY 5
WANING CRESCENT
Maksim, snarling, slammed his fist into brick.
“Ouch,” said Gus.
“There is nothing,” Maksim said. They stood at the corner of Queen and Bathurst. A streetcar rumbled heavily past, followed by a string of cars and a rickshaw. The wall Maksim had punched was painted purple, and now flecks of that paint decorated the bloody scrapes on Maksim’s knuckles. He brought his fist to his mouth and licked the injury clean.
“Maybe if we make a wider circle,” Gus said.
“We already have. I cannot find it. Too many scents.”
Understatement. Even Gus, used to Parkdale, had said she found this stretch of Queen Street difficult in the warmth of May—rotten fruit, pigeon droppings, Indian food, hot metal, motor oil, sweat, spunk, ammonia, liquor, coffee. People and all their mess.
“Maybe if we go back to Palmerston again,” she continued. “Maybe if you weren’t fucking yourself up with the witch’s business—”
Maksim caught her gesturing hand in his own, roughly. He did not speak, but he let her lead him up to the alley, the capillary north of Queen. The people they passed did not look, absorbed in private business: urinating, making out, sharing joints or bottle tokes. Maksim kept his head lifted, searching for that elusive scent.
Gus stepped in too close beside him once, and he whirled on her, baring his teeth.
“You’re stalking,” she whispered. “You’ll find no prey here.”
Maksim watched his hand wrap itself around Gus’s forearm and squeeze, bruising the pale skin.
She scowled and raised her other hand. “Does that mean it’s time to hit you?”
“You promised,” Maksim said. “You promised you would not let me hurt someone.”
“Someone else,” Gus said.
Maksim lunged at her, knocking her against a garage door, but not in an attack. He slid down until he was crouched against her legs and let go of her to wrap his arms tight about himself.
“I know,” Maksim said. “I know, I know. I cannot remain among people like this.”
Gus shook her head. “Okay. My place. We can fight some more, tire ourselves out.”
“Give me something now,” Maksim said. “I will go mad otherwise.”
Gus hauled him up by his ear and punched him in the mouth. “I’m sober,” she hissed. “And you’re not.”
Maksim licked blood off his teeth. “Keep going,” he said.
Gus kicked him in the kneecap, and he fell, twisting.
“It’s no fun if you aren’t fighting back,” she said. “Get up!”
Farther down the alley, a trio of heads turned, and a conversation ceased.
“I have already marked your face for you,” Maksim said. “Mark mine.”
A hammering blow across his cheek. “Well done,” he said; it did not feel split, but the instant heat of a bruise rose below the skin.
The next one caught him almost by surprise a half second later, rocking his head into the garage door. He had sprung up and tapped Gus in the chin before he recollected his purpose.
Gus danced back. “That’s it,” she said. “Keep it up.” And she darted in under his half-formed guard with a straight to his ribs and a second, random blow that caught him under the arm.
Maksim coughed. He dropped his hands and lifted his face, wide open to Gus’s next punch, and it took him in the forehead and made him see gold-shot black.
When his eyes refocused, he saw that she was standing back, frowning fiercely and waiting for him to recover.
“I needed to know you would do it,” he explained, although she had not asked. “I am ready to go home and sleep now,” he said. When he tried to move away from the support of the garage door, he wavered.
Gus seized his arm and held him upright. “My turn to bully you,” she said. “You’re coming to my place, where I can keep an eye on you, and if you do decide to break something, it won’t be something you love.”
“What about,” Maksim said and spat blood. “What about the things you love?”
“None left but you,” Gus said.
Three
MAY 8
WANING CRESCENT
Lissa came up her walk to find Maksim lying asleep on the porch steps. She could smell him as she got closer: stale sweat and rye, mixed uneasily with the heated lilacs. He slept heavily, with his face pressed into the crook of his arm.
“Evening,” she said in his ear.
He bolted up and grabbed at her, catching her braid in his fist and pulling her head down.
“Hey—ouch!”
He sucked in a deep breath. “Koldun’ia,” he said, and his grip relaxed fractionally. Lissa yanked her hair back and pulled away, while Maksim blinked and stared and finally unlocked his posture and sank back against the stairs.
“It is not good to surprise me,” he said.
Lissa backed off. “You hurt my neck.”
“I am sorry. Only do not wake me up with a touch. It is best not to step close to me if I am unaware.”
“You plan on crashing on my front steps a lot, then, do you?”
This seemed lost on him; he was rubbing his face with both hands and did not answer.
“Hey,” Lissa said. “I haven’t forgotten what you said last week. I’d like to help you. My grandmother said you needed help. But that means I need to hear the whole story.”
“Your grandmother spoke of this?”
“Some.” Close to the chest: she’d learned very early that being a witch meant mystery, and mystery was best preserved by keeping your ignorance to yourself. Maksim did not need to know that Lissa had no idea how they might be kin to each other or why Baba hadn’t mentioned him earlier. Or that Baba was still able to communicate with Lissa, even if only under constraints.
Maksim asked her for a drink. She led him into the kitchen, where she could see that he was dirty again (still?) and had not shaved, and his face looked puffy and bruised.
She filled a bowl with borscht and made him up a plate of Izabela Dmitreeva’s cabbage rolls and a stack of toast to go alongside, and she opened him a bottle of Stella’s lager.
“You do not need to do this for me,” he said.
“I didn’t. Some other people did it for me. You’re just getting the benefits.”
This seemed to be the right thing to say. Once reassured, Maksim proceeded to eat everything in front of him, plus two more beers and a second helping of borscht.
She hadn’t spent enough time with her extended family to have any idea at all that they were big eaters, but she didn’t care to admit as much to Maksim. “Anyway, don’t stop on my account.”
“The eggs are wearing off. I think you should give me more,” he said.
“Already?” Lissa blurted. She’d definitely got the recipe too weak, then, somehow.
“You are not afraid of me,” Maksim said, looking up at her from his slouch over the plate. “Why is that?”
“My grandmother was not afraid of you,” Lissa said, hoping it was true.
“Ah—I see.” He scraped his bowl clean and sprawled back in his chair. Quite different from the sleepy sprawl on the steps somehow; he looked tighter wound now and ready.
“So,” she said. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I have figured out part for myself now. Why I have gone mad again. I have been many years without the madness, since your grandmother made a spell upon me. I believe the blessing has passed with her, and now I must make shift with my own weak will.”
“My grandmother gave you a cure for … madness?”
“Not a cure—or so I see now. I thought it was one until I felt it slip with this full moon. Before I knew what I was about, I came upon the boy. You know the rest.”
“Pretend I don’t and tell me.”
He knotted his hands together so that the knuckles stood out heavy and white. “He had the marks of violence on him, quite fresh. I think I could have run my madness out if not for that.” He was silent again. Lissa could see his jaw clenching, the way it had the other night.
“So you … licked him,” she prompted.
“I told you it was madness.” He looked up from under sullen brows. “When I am sane, it is a madness I would never wish on another. When I am not sane … I do not rule myself as I ought. And it is a madness that spreads.”
“You think you infected him? With your madness?”
“If I did, it will be some weeks before he is fully consumed. We have a space of time to find him.”
“We?”
“Augusta and I. She is my … she is my family. And you—you said you would help also.” Maksim hunched over and trapped his hands between his knees. “No. That is very forward of me. You have already helped me with your eggs, and if you will let me take more of them with me—”
“Of course. But I thought they were to make it easier for you to sleep.”
“They are to stop me hurting anyone,” he said. “So that I can go among people, to do my work and to find this young man, without my madness overtaking me.”
“It would be better if I could figure out what my grandmother did for you and do it again,” Lissa said.
“Yes.” He sat up again restlessly and worked his hand upon the fabric of his jeans, over and over, kneading the muscle of his thigh.
“Will eggs be enough to tide you over?”
He shook his head and scrubbed a hand through his sweaty hair. “I do not know.” He chuckled, mirthless and low. “I can feel it now,” he said, rising and pacing to the window. “Perhaps I should have another one before I go.”
She gave him two dozen; he cracked one in his hand and slurped it straight from the shell like an oyster. He grimaced, but the line of his shoulders slackened, and some of the tension in his face eased. At least they were doing something for him.
Lissa wrote her number on a blank card from Baba’s recipe keeper. “Keep me posted. If you can’t find him.”
She locked the door behind him and went upstairs to the shelf in the sewing room where Baba kept her grimoires.
MAY 10
NEW MOON
Nick met Jonathan at the coffee shop on Spadina, near the Graduate Students’ Union building. The University of Toronto’s downtown campus had seemed impenetrably huge and forbidding to Nick as a first-year, with its fifty-odd buildings sprawling over multiple city blocks linked by networks of footpaths traversing several different grassy commons. But five years in, the campus had shrunk, or Nick had grown, to the point where it felt like a pinching shoe, blistering him with its closeness.
“We can’t stay here,” he said, glowering, grabbing at Jonathan’s book bag and pulling him back when he tried to choose a table. “It’s only been, like, two weeks. I’m still having PTSD about fucking Boyczuk’s seminar of doom.”
“It’s just convenient,” Jonathan said. “But we can go to the Starbucks on College if you’d rather.”
“It’s too hot for coffee. I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Nick said, but he pulled Jonathan with him, anyway, hustling him through the door.
“There’s such a thing as iced coffee,” Jonathan said.
“Fuck coffee. I want a fucking beer.”
Jonathan looked like he was going to protest for a moment, but then he shrugged. “I could use a break, anyway. Maybe you were right to go with the lighter course load.”
“Summer vacation!” Nick exulted. “You wish you had one!”
“Maybe I would if I had a trust fund,” Jonathan said.
“It’s not a trust fund, and anyway, it’s going to run out in, like…” Nick paused to calculate.
“Is it going to run out before 6:00 P.M.?” Jonathan said. “Because it’s happy hour at the Palmerston tonight, and I think they have Great Lakes guest taps.”
Nick chortled in victory, tugged Jonathan’s bag out of his hand and slung it over his own shoulder, and led the way toward the Palmerston in a quick, jerky stride.
“Slow down,” Jonathan said. “Let me just text Hannah—she gets out in half an hour.”
“No,” Nick blurted and then mentally kicked himself. “I mean, didn’t she say she was having a girls’ night tonight? You know, with Sue Park?”
“Did she?” Jonathan said. “Oh, Sue the violinist. Maybe? I don’t remember.” But he put his phone back in his pocket and followed Nick down the sidewalk. “You still into Sue Park?” Jonathan went on, half-teasing, half-serious. “I remember you calling her on my phone like five times after that music department social.”
“That was years ago,” Nick protested. “And I only called her on your phone because mine was out of minutes.”
“Not because she started blocking your number, stalker?” Jonathan said, shoving him.
Nick laughed easily because it hadn’t been like that at all, at all. He slung his arm around Jonathan’s neck and tugged him in close for a second. “I forgot about Sue Park until today,” he said and added, leering, “But I’ll bet she hasn’t forgotten me.”
“Ugh, dude,” Jonathan said. “Let go of my head and stop being gross about Hannah’s friends.”
“You were the one who said Sue Park had the most amazing rack you’d ever seen on an Asian chick,” Nick said.
Jonathan dragged himself out of Nick’s headlock and shaded his eyes with one hand instead. “This is the problem with knowing someone for, like, ever,” he said. “You’re always there to remind me of the stupid shit I’ve said and done.”
“And get you to do more of it,” Nick said.
“And that,” Jonathan agreed, but he didn’t really look like he minded, so Nick bought the first round.
The Palmerston was only moderately full, happy hour on a Tuesday; they got a table in the corner. Nick stretched out his legs, crooked his arms behind his head, kicked at the legs of Jonathan’s chair. Drained his first pint in a few easy swallows.
He had lapped Jonathan by the end of his second, Jonathan sipping slowly and yawning a little and surreptitiously checking his phone. Nick laid his palm over the screen and said, “Buddy. Jonathan. J. I’m right here, and Hannah’s out, and there’s literally no one else in your life, so put the fucking phone down and—”
“I do have a family,” Jonathan said mildly.
“Me too, but I don’t take selfies at the bar for them,” Nick said. “Turn it off and get the next round.�
��
Jonathan put the phone away and obeyed, out of long habit. Nick watched from his chair as Jonathan ordered: more polite than he would have been a couple of years ago, eyes not straying below the bartender’s chin even though she was wearing a Maple Leafs T-shirt with the neckline cut out to show a hint of royal-blue lace.
Jonathan was working as a teaching assistant now in addition to his own studies, and he seemed to think it required him to be a bit more formal, khakis and oxfords and a short-sleeved button-down, even though Nick knew for a fact he’d seen TAs in shorts and T-shirts before. It made Jonathan look older, or maybe he just was older; Nick didn’t always look at him very closely, seeing instead the familiar blur of a dozen years of friendship, and now he wasn’t sure when Jonathan had tidied up his haircut or when he’d switched his electric-blue steel hoop earring for a quieter silver stud.
Nick kicked out of his chair and joined Jonathan at the bar, scrubbing his fist into Jonathan’s hair.
Jonathan twisted away, annoyed. “Give it a rest; I’m trying to buy you a drink.”
“Arm wrestle,” Nick said, grabbing at Jonathan’s hand. “If you win, I’ll help you mark that fuckton of papers you have in your bag. If I win, you’re doing shots with me.”
“I don’t know what’s with your new arm wrestling thing, but I am not going there. No way.”
Nick ignored him, braced his elbow on the bar, centered his weight.
Jonathan only yawned and paid for their pints. “Nick, you’re being such a freak. All this goddamned energy. Don’t you ever just, like, relax anymore?”
“Not when there’s arm wrestling to be had,” Nick said. He pointed to a beefy guy at the bar and crooked his finger.
“That dude is a foreman,” Jonathan said. “Meaning he’s in charge of a bunch of construction workers. Know how he got to be in charge of them? Because he’s the biggest motherfucker, Nick. They’re like animals, you know: there’s a hierarchy, and they fight their way up it. He’s the king gorilla, Nick. Listen to me: didn’t you practically break your head like two weeks ago? Do you really need a broken arm too?”
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