Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  She had already waited too long.

  “So it’s not organized crime,” Stella said. “But it’s something old country, definitely. Wait—let me think. Dad used to rant a bit about your grandmother and her superstitions and how it wasn’t right to bring up a child that way. Is it something to do with that?”

  Lissa nodded.

  “So I’m warm. When did your grandmother come over to Canada?”

  “She escaped from the Gulag,” Lissa said. “I can’t remember what year exactly.”

  “So he can’t have known her then. There’s no way he’s more than forty, right? Whatever … that’s all beside the point, isn’t it? What I really want to know is why is he here now.”

  “He’s dangerous,” Lissa said. “I mean it. I don’t want you Googling him, I don’t want you thinking about him, I don’t even want you to answer the door if he shows up when I’m not here.”

  “And yet you let him stay overnight,” Stella said, brows high. “Forgive me, dear sister, but you are completely full of shit.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I can see from your face that you are,” Stella said. “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Of course I don’t, since you won’t tell me. I’m going to let him in,” she said. “I’m going to invite him in, and I’m going to give him the third degree until I figure out what’s going on here.”

  “Two weeks’ notice,” Lissa blurted.

  “No fair. That’s the nuclear option.”

  Lissa deflated.

  “Coward,” Stella said, perfectly calm. “You know where to find me when you’re ready to chat. Until then, I’m going for a pedicure.”

  “Again?”

  “They don’t last forever. I’m on my feet all day, you know.”

  And she left the house in a haughty swirl of scent, and Lissa moved slowly to clean up the kitchen, as tired as she could remember being in her life.

  MAY 26

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Maksim limped homeward, two egg cartons under his arm. The sun felt uncomfortably hot on his shoulders; after a long, blinking moment of thought, he understood that it was because he had no shirt.

  He didn’t remember where he had left his shirt. At the witch’s house, no doubt. He did not want to go back there. That house was so oppressively still. Though he thought he remembered it being even more so when koldun’ia Iadviga had been alive.

  The first time he’d visited it had been in the early eighties. He’d come straight from Afghanistan. Traces of blood still under his fingernails. Three days awake, trying not to dream about the thing he’d done. Three days of travel among crowds of civilians. He wore a sore into his inner cheek with his teeth.

  He hadn’t seen Canada before; didn’t see it now. He took a taxi from the airport, because he didn’t know the way and it would be faster; he made the driver roll down all the windows, and he sat quite still with the harsh air beating on him, and he pressed his fingers to his eyes until the driver stopped the car.

  Maksim did not see the house right away. What he saw was Iadviga Rozhnata on the front steps. Iadviga Rozhnata, no longer young.

  She smelled familiar: a smell like thunderstorms, which he knew was the smell of witchcraft. But the bright hair was all gone gray, and the limber carriage slumped and rigid under the burden of nearly thirty years. She folded her arms and did not smile.

  Maksim stood at a safe distance on the walk, twisting his fists into the canvas of his kit bag. “You made me a promise.”

  “There is no place for you here,” she said.

  “You made me a promise,” he repeated.

  “I did not think you would come.”

  Maksim felt the winter cold then as he had not in years. He missed his gun very much; he had thrown it away before leaving Afghanistan, and in the rush to get here, he had not yet tried to find another.

  “Koldun’ia…” he said and paused. Even if he had his gun, he could not shoot himself right here, in front of a person who’d been kind to him once. And there was the matter of how to keep people away from his blood.

  He would have to go somewhere else and get money and buy a new gun and then find an empty field.

  The thought was so exhausting that he dropped his kit bag and wept. He stood on Iadviga’s front walk with tears dripping from his nose and chin.

  The taxi driver shouted in English, and Maksim had forgotten the words to respond. He only stood and watched, and finally Iadviga paid the man and took Maksim by the arm into the house.

  “My daughter and her husband live here too. I will send them away,” she said. “It will be three days. You are right: I made you a promise.”

  She sent him to rest in the garden shed while she made her arrangements. He did sleep a little, but his nightmares woke him; mostly he sat in the dim, cold mustiness and ran the point of a rusted screw around his cuticles to scrape away the blood traces. When the daughter and son-in-law were no longer present, he was allowed to come inside and shower and finally, properly, wash his hands.

  Two days later, he received the enchantment. Iadviga, fatigued, hair slipping in strings from her crown of braids, said words over a black-shelled egg. She set the egg in a stone bowl and had Maksim spit upon it and smear it with a drop of his blood.

  Maksim didn’t know what it meant, but it worked. He felt the restless fury of the kin spirit subdued, as smoothly as a gas flame shrinks when the stove is turned down. It was still there, burning, but low and blue and not the searing thing it had been. It would not goad him into doing things like he’d done in Afghanistan.

  It would let him walk among people again, people who were not soldiers. It would let him swallow down the desire to hurt, to hunt, to rend.

  Without that desire, he was not a person, yet, exactly; he did not know what he liked or what he could do, apart from violence. He would have some time to find out, though.

  Now, nearly thirty years later, Maksim paused on a street corner, remembering the recently departed weight of Iadviga’s spell. Not as heavy or slow or horrible as these eggs. Under it, he had been able to read books and enjoy food and spar with DeShaun. Yet he had often thought of himself as a golem of clay. Cold and inhuman and slower than he should have been.

  And this was what he would be asking koldun’ia Lissa to do to him once again.

  He would miss the molten heat of his nature.

  He sighed, tucked the egg cartons closer to his chest, and began limping across the street.

  From his left, a sense of bright motion, a flash of sun on glass.

  He half turned. Something lifted him up and threw him down again, far and hard.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. Shells and yolks everywhere. And blood. He trailed a hand through the mess, tried to sit up, and went to sleep.

  Seven

  MAY 26

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Nick smelled the woman coming: she wore the essence of Parkdale distilled. Meat and sweat and blood and bourbon, old cloth and curry, and a whiff of gasoline.

  “I haven’t got any change,” he said, not looking up.

  “Welcome to the life,” she said: crisp and wry, a bit foreign-sounding. “You don’t look as if you’re enjoying it so far.”

  Now he did look. The woman was older than Nick but not quite middle-aged. Kind of butch-looking, with a fading black eye. She was clearly the kind of person who had lived in the area awhile.

  “I can help you,” she said, and then she laughed. “That’s an outright lie. I can’t even help myself, mostly. But I can take you to someone who can.”

  “I’m not…” A homeless person, he was going to say. But he was a homeless person, unless he wanted to go back to his apartment to wait for the cops.

  “Don’t you want to know what you are?” the woman asked.

  “Crazy. I think I’m crazy. To be honest.”

  She squatted down beside him and nudged him companionably with her shoulder. �
��You’re not normal anymore. That’s right. But your life isn’t over. Not for a long time yet.”

  When Nick said nothing, the woman stood up again. “The way forward is with me. And I don’t much care if you don’t want to come. You’ll come regardless.”

  Nick raised his eyebrows.

  The woman picked him up by his hair and shoved his face into the wall. “I’m bigger than you, and I’m a bit of a bully.”

  Nick started to struggle away, and the woman shoved his face into the wall again, harder this time. It sent a starburst through Nick’s head, so that he slumped from her grip like a kitten in its mother’s mouth.

  “What have you figured out so far?” the woman asked.

  “Ow,” Nick said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Fuck.”

  “About yourself,” she said. “What have you observed?”

  “You sound like a drill sergeant,” Nick said.

  “You’ve clearly never joined an army,” said the woman, and she mashed him into the wall again.

  “Okay, okay, okay. I’m … this is going to sound really stupid.”

  “I’ve heard it all,” the woman said, and the utter flatness of her voice made Nick believe her.

  “I have superstrength,” Nick said and waited for another blow.

  Nothing happened.

  “I…” Nick said. “I told you I think I’m going crazy, right?”

  The woman nodded.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Nick admitted. “Oh, and I can smell better.”

  “What can you smell right now?”

  “Booze,” Nick said.

  The woman laughed a little. “How’s your head feeling? Ready to walk?”

  “You haven’t told me anything.”

  “Fair enough,” the woman said. “You’re right about all that, and also, you’re going to have a very long life. Me? Couple of hundred years and counting. And since you’re not going to die of age, you’re going to die by violence.”

  “But … not right away, right?” Nick said, flinching.

  “Depends on how smart you are.”

  “Not as smart as I should be,” Nick said. “Can you, like, let me up now?”

  The woman stood him on his feet again and brushed grit off his cheek. “Don’t worry. You’ll be much tougher in a few more weeks, once it’s had a chance to sink in. I think I took a full year to hit my stride.”

  “So you’re crazy too?” Nick said.

  “I’m Gus,” said the woman. “I’m one of the nicest people you’re going to know from now on.”

  “I’m not nice,” Nick blurted. “I think I’m a bad kind of crazy. I hurt someone. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  Gus sighed. “You loved him, didn’t you? That never goes well.”

  “No! I mean … he’s my friend. My best friend.”

  “We don’t get to have friends,” Gus said, unsmiling. “We don’t get to have family. We get to have each other, once in a while, although it’s hard to spend much time together. I hope you’re the kind of kid who doesn’t like your mother much.”

  “I don’t know. She’s okay. Oh my God, what am I going to say to her?”

  “Nothing,” Gus said. “Not now. In a few more weeks, you’ll start to figure out what comes next.”

  “Jail,” Nick said. “If they find me.”

  “I don’t recommend it,” Gus said.

  She led him up out of Parkdale and over toward Bellwoods.

  “I like walking and everything,” Nick said, “but how far are we going?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Gus said. “What matters is whether you can conduct yourself properly on a streetcar.”

  Nick shook his head. “I tried the bus. It wasn’t good.”

  “Would you believe I still have problems with transit?”

  “No one likes transit,” Nick said. “That’s not that crazy.”

  Gus rolled her eyes. Nick couldn’t even see her face, following slightly behind her, but he could see the eye roll in the set of her shoulders and head.

  He followed, anyway, up through the park and onto Dundas and into the entryway of a converted Victorian, while Gus told him some unbelievable shit about Maksim Volkov and herself and what they’d done, what they were.

  “You wait here,” Gus said, stiff-arming Nick into the wall. “We don’t enter each other’s places without a very sincere invitation.”

  He dumped his pack on the floor and sat upon it. Gus climbed the stairs. She moved like a young woman, he thought, energetic and sturdy—and caught himself, because by her own account, Augusta Hillyard was two centuries old.

  Crazy. No two ways about it.

  He knew it, and at the same time, he could do nothing but play along with her, with himself, with the day as it unfolded. This level of craziness was so complete and well knit that he didn’t have any idea how to begin unraveling it, short of checking himself into the hospital, which never seemed to go well for anyone.

  For the tenth time that day, Nick thumbed his phone open without turning it on and then snapped it shut again and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  He could smell himself: sweat and booze, the dirt of two nights outdoors without a change of clothes. He could smell Gus and the reek of Parkdale. He could smell someone else, the person who lived upstairs: familiar and somehow good. He’d put things together enough to figure out that it was probably the guy who had put his mouth on him the night he was mugged.

  He couldn’t hear much, though; no more than before. Apparently, it was only smell that got superpowered. And strength. And temper.

  Nick shot to his feet, turned about, paced the cramped hallway. Being told to stay like a dog. Why did she think that was okay?

  She wasn’t in any hurry to come back, either. He couldn’t hear anything at all from upstairs—no footsteps, no voices.

  He sat down and kicked the opposite wall a few times, getting comfortable only to thrust himself up again.

  At last he swore under his breath and jogged up the stairs and through the open door of the apartment.

  It was a nice apartment. Not what he’d have expected, except for the weapons on the walls.

  Then he saw the bedroom.

  “Did someone break in?” he called to Gus, who knelt beside the bed.

  “Nah. He did this himself,” she said.

  “Oh. All his books.” Nick came in and stood in the litter of torn paper and broken spines.

  “He’s going to be really sorry about that when he gets back,” Gus said. She turned away from Nick and rubbed her face. “And he’s going to be even sorrier that he gave me a key, if I don’t get the hell out of here. Come on.”

  She wrapped a fist around Nick’s wrist and pulled him from the apartment and back downstairs. “Leave your shit there. No one will bother it. Got any money?”

  “Thirty bucks?” Nick guessed.

  “That’s a start. We’ve got some drinking to do.”

  She didn’t lead him to a bar. Instead, she headed for the liquor store farther down Dundas, where she loaded a basket with as much cheap whiskey as Nick’s money would cover.

  “I think he thought we were street people,” Nick muttered as he followed her out of the store.

  “I kind of am,” Gus said. “So are you, now, right? You get used to it. I have an apartment, but I like being outdoors better.”

  “We could go there.”

  “No, we couldn’t. I’d kill you in a couple of hours if I have to share my four walls with you.”

  “Have you ever killed someone?” Nick said, swallowing.

  Gus glanced over her shoulder at him, expressionless. “Yes.”

  She took him to Trinity Bellwoods. They sat on a bench under a great spreading tree. Gus uncapped the first of the bottles, and Nick could see her throat working as she drank very deeply.

  He edged away a little.

  Gus passed him the bottle, wiping the mouth of it on her sleeve, which did not make Nick feel any better about
its sanitary qualities.

  He drank anyway, though, shuddering. “Does this really help? Or are you an alcoholic?”

  “Both,” she said with a wide, mirthless smile. “It keeps me calm. Calmer. As long as I don’t let myself get too sober.”

  “Will I have to be an alcoholic too?”

  “Aren’t you already?”

  Nick shrugged. “I figured I’d slow down when I got older.”

  “We don’t,” Gus said. “Slow down, I mean. It’s as bad as ever. We just learn tricks to keep ourselves amused.”

  “Eternal life as a rubbie,” Nick said. “Doesn’t sound like a great deal. This other guy, though—Maksim Volkov—he seems like he has his shit together. His place seemed nice, except for what he did to the books. How’d he manage that if he’s like you—us?”

  “A witch,” Gus said. “It’s unnatural.”

  “Coming from the two-hundred-year-old person, that’s kind of funny.”

  “You won’t think it’s so funny when you meet Maksim. You’ll see why I’ve not made his bargain.”

  “Why did he, then, if it’s not a good bargain?”

  She would not answer that. When Nick pressed her, she turned to him with her gray eyes intent in her weathered face, and said, very low, “I’m not drunk yet, and you’re not kin enough to fight me. So be quiet. Please.”

  Nick opened his mouth.

  Gus shoved the bottle in it and poured whiskey into Nick while he spluttered. She held him down as if she were bathing a cat.

  When she let him up, Nick coughed and gagged and somehow managed to keep from spewing whiskey all over his shirt.

  “I wonder why he did not just kill you,” Gus said quite seriously.

  Nick shrank against the bench seat, wiped his streaming eyes, and thought about bolting.

  But Gus smiled and slapped him on the arm and said, “You’re Greek, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I was in Greece during the first Balkan War,” she said and laughed. “I was on the Turkish side, though.”