Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  But the trail of scent stopped at the Lansdowne subway station.

  Maksim, enraged, overturned a newspaper box and kicked the glass in. Gus had to punch him in the ear to get his attention. A bystander shouted that he was calling the police, and the two of them ran away together, Gus laughing breathlessly and Maksim almost sobbing.

  “Five more days until I may stop rationing eggs,” he said to himself aloud when they slowed in a laneway a kilometer or two on.

  “You sure you can make it that long?” Gus asked.

  “No.”

  He sat down against the door of a garage, covering his face. Gus slid down beside him and gently touched his hair. He let her leave her hand there, but the pressure made his scalp crawl as if with lice until his whole body wanted to twitch miserably away; and still he sat unmoving, clenching his teeth.

  “Let me take this for you,” Gus said.

  “If I do not have something to do…” Maksim said.

  “What are you afraid of? You’ll trash some of your stuff?”

  Maksim shook off her hand then, shuddering. “Look to yourself, Augusta. Have a care.”

  She leaned in and scrubbed a rough hand over Maksim’s scalp. “You raised me right,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.”

  Maksim slapped her hand away and replaced it with his own, tugging on the short hair at his nape. “God help me, I will agree,” he said. “Take it for me. See me home and go hunting without me. I cannot.”

  “It’s okay. It will be okay. Truly, Maks.”

  He could only shake his head. “God help me.”

  MAY 24

  WAXING GIBBOUS

  Hannah was visiting her parents. Jonathan arrived at Nick’s place with a guilt gift: two-thirds of a bottle of wine and a tiny foil-wrapped lump of hash.

  “That smells amazing,” Nick said, turning from the sink.

  “You’re doing dishes,” Jonathan said. “Why are you doing dishes?”

  “They were dirty.”

  “That’s new. Not that I’m complaining. I was just wondering if your head injury had more of an effect than we first realized.”

  “Ass-kisser.” Nick angled his face toward the lamp over the stove. “All good. Look. Hardly any scar, even. Pour me something, will you? I’m almost done.” He fastidiously rinsed the sink of soapsuds and dried his hands on his cargo shorts. “Tell me you want to go to Parkdale tonight.”

  “I’m not in the mood for a dive bar, honestly. Maybe one of the new hipster places there.”

  “I fucking hate hipsters.”

  “The Cammie, then. Whatever.”

  “We can start there,” Nick said, smiling with teeth.

  “Oh, no. It’s not going to be one of those nights. I’m too bagged,” Jonathan said, thinking of the next morning’s classes.

  “Sure, the Cammie, then. We’ll just have a pint or two on the patio and head back here for a bit. But first … you brought me a present.”

  “I was feeling bad about letting you smoke me up all the time, and then I happened to run into that guy who used to live next to me in the Annex, and look what he was carrying.” Jonathan was already crumbling the hash into pellets the size and consistency of mouse droppings. He mingled them with some shreds of tobacco and filled the bowl of Nick’s bong.

  “Fantastic,” Nick said through a held breath, tendrils of smoke escaping from his lips and nose.

  “It’s kind of strong. Go easy on it.”

  “I,” said Nick, “am not in the mood for going easy.”

  Jonathan, in the bathroom twenty minutes later, splashed cool water on his face and sipped some from his cupped palms. He was higher than he’d meant to be, high enough that he didn’t want to deal with Nick’s weirdness, and thought he’d suggest that they stay here and play video games.

  He came out to find Nick waiting for him on the other side of the door with a shot glass.

  “Take your medicine,” Nick said.

  Jonathan sipped. “Wild Turkey?”

  “Bulleit, idiot. Clearly, it’s wasted on you.” Nick reached for the glass, so Jonathan dodged him and swallowed the contents.

  The taste of it, the burn of it, tripped an old reflex. He had a half-conscious sensation of dropping the reins. “Wouldn’t that be nicer with a beer chaser?” he said.

  “The Cammie has beer. Get your shit together. I want some air now.”

  Nick nearly dragged him out of the apartment, while Jonathan dithered and stumbled. “I’m high,” he muttered. “Go easy on me.”

  “I’m not,” Nick said. “Not high enough, anyway. Come on.”

  At the Cameron, the patio was crowded. Nick and Jonathan found a seat by the railing, sandwiched between a table of guys in polo shirts and a table of young women in tube tops.

  “I had a great fight,” Nick said.

  Jonathan hid his face in his nice chilly pint and didn’t meet Nick’s eyes.

  “Some guys were beating on another guy. I stopped them. I felt like a superhero.”

  “Why were they beating on him?”

  Nick shrugged. “Didn’t stop to ask.”

  “Why’s it your business, then?”

  Nick slammed his palms on the table, causing his pint to rock and splash. “What is it with you? Nothing I do is right for you anymore.” His words sounded too loud in the sudden silence that followed the impact of his hands. The girls in tube tops looked over anxiously.

  “Dude…” said Jonathan.

  Nick smacked him playfully on the side of the head. “Give it a rest. For tonight, at least.”

  “Ow.”

  “I mean it. We’ll talk about something else. Something you can’t judge. So. You and Hannah. When are you moving in together?”

  “End of summer,” Jonathan said after a heroic gulp of pale ale. He signaled the waitress for another round. “She thought it was romantic, actually. How I hadn’t asked her, and then it came out in that—never mind. Anyway, we were thinking about how to break it to Hannah’s parents, because you know they’re kind of a bit conservative.”

  “Holy Christ. Oh my God, dude. You’re going to propose now?”

  “Not yet. I think we need to live together first. I was going to take her mom and dad out for dinner, though. You know. Show them I’m the kind of guy that won’t do anything awful to their daughter.”

  “Except, like, have premarital sex with her.”

  “Right.”

  The waitress came with pints and bourbons.

  “I thought you wanted a quiet night,” Nick said after she’d gone. He leaned over the table and let his eyes fall half-closed, inhaling the aroma of the bourbon.

  “I do want a quiet night,” Jonathan said. “And I’m clearly only going to get one if I make you drink yourself stupid. So those are both for you.”

  Jonathan ended up having one himself, though, of course, and then another. He came back from the bathroom to find Nick had introduced himself to the tube-top girls and bought them a round of some kind of nasty-looking layered shots.

  “When was the last time we even had shots? This is stupid,” Jonathan said, but he took it, anyway, and shared in the high fives of the girls, who were celebrating a bachelorette.

  Then at some point, the girls were gone, and he leaned on the wrought iron patio railing and tried to light the wrong end of his cigarette, which he should not have been smoking in the first place. The guy who’d given it to him seemed to be talking about psychotherapy or something. Jonathan turned his cigarette around and got it to burn properly.

  “There you are,” Nick said from the other side of the railing. “God! Put that out.” He snatched the cigarette from Jonathan’s lips. “What a stink.”

  “You used to like them.”

  “Only when I was drunk.”

  “I’m drunk. Right now,” Jonathan said, raising his hand. Nick came around the railing and led him away. “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace more interesting.”

  “Don’t we have to pay
and stuff?”

  “I took care of it.”

  “Are you, like, mad about something?”

  “You sound like a girl,” Nick said, slowing. He turned to face Jonathan. Under the streetlights, his face looked open and wild.

  “I just can’t … I can’t figure you out right now,” Jonathan said.

  “Nothing to figure. I’m just me. And I’m really, really, really tired of getting shit from you.”

  “Not giving you shit,” Jonathan said, spreading his hands. “Really. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

  Nick wrapped his fist in the collar of Jonathan’s T-shirt. “No.”

  Jonathan flailed at Nick’s hand. “Let go. What the fuck are you—”

  “Trying to get you to shut up,” Nick said. His eyes were narrow and dark and too close for Jonathan to focus.

  And then they were far away, and the ground was much closer.

  Six

  MAY 24

  WAXING GIBBOUS

  Lissa didn’t tell Stella about the date until Stella caught her prepping for it, winding her hair up into a crown of braids and dabbing gloss on her lips.

  “That’s … new,” Stella said, leaning around Lissa’s shoulder to pout in the mirror.

  Lissa didn’t say anything. In the mirror, she watched the color rise in her face, hot pink and patchy.

  “And it’s Rafe’s night off,” Stella said. “Hmm.”

  “Don’t say anything else. Or I’m going to cancel it.”

  “And punish an innocent man for my nosiness?” Stella said, grinning. She tapped her comb on the careful coil of Lissa’s hair. “D’you think that’s a bit tightly wound? You don’t want to make him think you’re tightly wound.”

  “But I am.”

  “Okay, I guess you are, a bit. But—”

  “Seriously!” Lissa said. “Just be quiet. Quiet!”

  Stella doubled over laughing and flung her hair back and skipped out, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

  Lissa had no idea what Stella would or wouldn’t do on a date. What was normal on dates, anyway? What was normal in love? How did anyone figure this stuff out?

  The last time Lissa remembered having a clue was back in high school, and so many of the things she’d believed then had turned out to be incomplete or untrue or just hopelessly naïve. She believed Crystal Brink had given blow jobs to the entire football team in a single night; she believed true love meant roses and diamonds and waiting until marriage. She believed her mother was a bad wife who hadn’t been able to make Dad stay.

  None of it gave her any idea of how to get what she wanted from another person or how to figure out what he wanted in return.

  She opened by saying as much to Rafe while she twisted her unbound hair around her hand as they sat on the patio at an Italian place on College.

  He laughed and shrugged one shoulder. Everything about him was asymmetrical: his body language, one eyebrow higher than the other, that one crooked tooth. “I think it’s like that for everyone,” he said. “No, really. If we’re being honest.”

  “I just wanted to warn you.”

  “Warn me,” Rafe said. “Huh. Fair enough. I guess I’d better bring my A game.”

  “‘A game’? What does that even mean?”

  Rafe spread his hands. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s just … I guess you don’t know this, but honestly, everyone pretty much has to start at square one every time. That’s part of the fun. Finding out what the other person likes and whether you’ll, you know, fit together.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Well, then you go your separate ways. No hard feelings.”

  “That sounds really … not as bad as I was expecting.”

  “Oh, there’s hard stuff, sometimes,” Rafe said, a bit of the cheer dimming in his face. “Let’s not do it that way, though. Okay? Deal?”

  “Deal, I guess.” They toasted: Lissa had a very pale pinot grigio, and Rafe had something called barbera, meaty red, tinting the glass.

  “So what goes on in the world of printing?” Rafe said. “Stella tells me that’s what you do.”

  “It’s a job,” Lissa said. “It’s a paying-the-bills kind of job. It’s not what I do.”

  “Bartending’s what I do,” Rafe said. “I guess I’d better get that right out there. I like it, and it likes me. I’m not saving to go back to school or anything. I’m a lifer at this.”

  Lissa thought of how he looked behind the bar—that cheery quirk to his face, the easy movement from tap to cash to refrigerator—and felt an answering cheer come to her own expression. “I could tell,” she said. “You’re a natural, right?”

  “If only you could tell that to my da,” Rafe said. “Wanted a surgeon. Would’ve settled for something else as long as it came with a Bentley and a really nice flat.”

  So this was what people did on dates, Lissa thought—talked about their families and the things they were and weren’t and the things they knew and didn’t know. She didn’t think she’d ever had a conversation quite like this. With Stella, a bit, but she’d thought Stella was one of those people who would talk about everything. Before that, Lissa’s normal was a lifetime of Baba and her meditative silences and the long evenings she spent reading her grimoires while Lissa did homework or wrote letters to Dad, which would rarely be answered.

  Talk. She soaked it up. Rafe’s voice, a bit hoarse; his accent, which she was beginning to realize was upper class, veering into broader dialect for effect. Once in a while, he started to wind down and she had to ask him a question, and then he’d wind up again, his hands rising, touching his glass or his toque. Or her hand.

  She agreed to a second glass of wine and then a cup of tea, and the tea was what she tasted on his mouth, under the black walnut tree at her front walk, where they said good night.

  MAY 25

  FULL MOON

  Nick got all the way up the steps of the Greyhound before realizing what a terrible idea he’d had.

  The smells of people and air freshener throttled him, the smells of McDonald’s fries and Cheetos and the prickly upholstery on all the seats. Blindly, he turned and shouldered his way back down past the other people trying to board the bus. He stumbled through the line and out onto Elizabeth Street, where he found a piss-stained wall to lean against while he squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over them for a minute.

  Three million people in this sprawling city, and just now they felt like three million bricks in a very high wall. He could not travel in this state or ride a bus or a train. And he couldn’t fly.

  He could drive, maybe, but he did not have enough cash at hand to rent a car, especially now that he’d bought the bus ticket. If he used his line of credit or his Visa, they’d be able to find him.

  The police. The police would be able to find him. No point in refusing to think of the word, like a child afraid of monsters. Police.

  Jerkily, Nick shouldered his pack and began walking south.

  The morning grew brighter and hotter. A cop car passed him on Yonge, and he ducked his head a little so that his cap would shade his face. The cap was of the John Deere trucker variety, with the synthetic mesh and the plastic snap band at the back. He’d found it in an alley last night while he was running. It was not very clean, but at least it had been rained upon.

  He could not walk through Nathan Phillips Square. Instead, he went into the alleys again, this time on the south side of Queen. He knew where he was going now: the place in Parkdale. He had beaten two men there, and no one had noticed or cared.

  Parkdale had had a bad name for a long time, though lately it had begun to gentrify. Jonathan used to like to flirt with the badness, back when he still had his edge, the way some of Nick’s high school buddies had been into butterfly knives. Until lately, Nick hadn’t quite believed there was anything to it. Until a month ago, when the place had somehow possessed him. Did places have spirits? Evil, violent, craving spirits? How did other people live there? Ni
ck had seen mothers there, nice people, pushing babies in strollers, buying coconut juice, checking out romances from the library.

  Maybe they were not nice. Maybe they didn’t return the romances by the due date. Maybe they shook their babies.

  Maybe it was just Nick.

  Just Nick, alone now, on the crazy train.

  He bit down on his knuckles until his teeth parted the flesh; he told himself to stop, but his hand kept rising back to his mouth, and his tongue kept worrying at the gash there and liking the taste of the blood.

  Something was different, new and nightmarish, rising up through the broken rind of Nick’s old self. Like those ants on the nature show with David Attenborough, the husks of them standing still, hollowed out, transfixed by massive fungal eruptions from the centers of their skulls. If ants had skulls.

  If Parkdale was infected, where was the chancre? Where was the cholera-tainted well? Was it the sports bar? The alley behind it?

  Was it the man in the low-brimmed cap, all solicitous until he pressed his tongue into Nick’s open cut?

  Was it Nick himself, or even Jonathan, coming back around, buying shots, looking for a fight?

  When had the world gone so weird? Why hadn’t he noticed before now?

  MAY 25

  FULL MOON

  Someone was holding Jonathan’s hand. Hannah. Hannah was holding his hand.

  “Do you want to get married?” he asked her. His voice came out a bit funny.

  Hannah made a sobbing sound. “It’s good to see you too.”

  “I think I have a hangover,” he said.

  “You have a concussion,” Hannah said. “You’re in the hospital. Do you remember what happened?”

  Jonathan propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. The hospital: he was surprised he hadn’t noticed before, but here it was, all white and baby blue, with curtains around his bed and the smell of latex and the noise of monitors and other people beyond.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me that.”

  “Nope.”

  “You were out with Nick. Do you remember that?”