The Blood Keeper (The Blood Journals)

by Gratton, Tessa

  “Lukas,” I yelled, running toward him, as Ben cussed behind me, running after.

  The scream cut off, and Lukas’s body fell slack.

  Will called my name from the front porch. His voice strong and clear.

  I froze, and Ben said, “Will?”

  Will stood on the porch, shoulders back and head high. His bare chest was smooth and free of the blood roots but marked with dark red tattoos. Pajama pants hung off his hips, and he grinned so widely it was a crack in the world.

  “Mab!” he called again, laughter in his voice.

  Confused, I stepped forward to meet him. He put a hand on the porch rail and, easy as cake, swung over it. His bare feet hit the grass, and he crouched, then stood tall and strong. The change in him was complete, with no sign of sickness or weakness, only power.

  I could not move, and Ben cursed again, standing so close behind me I could feel the pressure of his energy against my own.

  Will jogged to us, ignoring Ben entirely. He crashed into me and gathered me up into an ecstatic embrace. He lifted my feet off the earth. Gasping, I clutched his shoulders, dizzy and stunned, and he set me back down. Before I could do anything but think his name, he tightened his grip on my shoulders and kissed me.

  It was wild and hungry, and I dug my fingers into the muscles of his back to stay afloat. He pushed open my mouth and I shoved him away, falling back against Ben.

  “What the hell?” Ben asked, catching me. “Will, what is your problem? Are you okay?”

  Will continued ignoring his brother and licked his teeth strangely, then tilted his head in thought. “That taste of mint and blood, is it my mouth or yours?” he asked.

  Cold weight settled around my ribs, compressing them until I couldn’t draw in breath. Dappled shadows danced over Will’s face as the oak trees bent in the wind. I clutched my hands to my chest when I realized there was no light reflecting in his ruby-red eyes.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  His smile curved in a way I’d never seen before, because it was not Will. The voice was the same, though, and it cut gouges into my skin as he said, “Your humble servant, little Deacon.”

  “You were in the roses,” I whispered.

  Ben’s hands tightened on my shoulders. “Cut it out,” he said, moving around me. Will snapped something in another language, pulling his hand into a sudden fist, and Ben blanched, doubling over and coughing onto the ground.

  I dropped with him, hands on his face, trying to tell him to breathe, frantically trying to understand how the thing in Will used magic without blood, who he was, what he’d done to Will—but then he was there, shoving Ben and me apart. He flung Ben onto his back with easy strength, and roots burst up through the lawn to wrap around Ben’s arms and legs.

  Lukas screamed again, his pain echoing up through the soles of my feet.

  That was where the power came from. I’d offered the power of Lukas’s black candle rune to the earth where this curse waited!

  I spun and ran for the roses, ran for Lukas. Grabbing rose stems, I pulled, but they broke open my hands and Lukas groaned aloud. I couldn’t tear him free without hurting him more, without ripping my hands to shreds.

  Bending, I began to draw a rune of release into the earth with my bloody finger.

  “None of that, little girl,” Will said from right behind me.

  I did not stop, and he reached down, grabbed my hair, and jerked me back.

  “You should behave yourself,” he said. “You freed me, after all. Everything you’ve done helped me a little bit more.”

  I clutched at his hand, trying to drag it away, and saw the exaggerated pout spread over his face. It was the opposite of everything Will. “No,” I said. “Let him go.”

  And I dropped Will’s wrist, bringing my hands around. I clapped them together and opened my mouth to yell a word that would send him flying back.

  But he hit me across the face.

  My head burst, and heat wrapped around my eyes as I fell back, onto my hip, retching and unable to look, to move. The world was sharp knives, shoving at me and turning in fast circles.

  “None of that,” the thing inside Will said.

  I rolled, crawled away, but my quivering, reeling stomach took charge of the rest of my body and nothing worked, I couldn’t even think past the swirling nausea.

  The last thing I knew was his hand twisting in my hair again, and my helplessness as Lukas’s scream ripped through the hill.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Gabriel died quickly.

  Numb and weak, I got to my feet. Thunder tore across the prairie, and I stood over his body.

  I used the roses to bury him. They twined around him like a shroud and drew him into the earth. I put salt around the whole of them, flicked my blood in benediction, and bound him there forever.

  By the time the rain came, there was no sign of Gabriel, of the thing he’d tried to do. I waited through the thunderstorm, standing in the middle of the yard, and let God do the work of cleansing me.

  FIFTY-THREE

  MAB

  Darkness pressed all around when I opened my eyes. My head throbbed, ears ringing as if surrounded by a thousand tiny bells. When I breathed, pain cut up my side, and tears prickled in my eyes. Through the smear of water, I stared up at the sky: orange and pink at the western edges, making fiery silhouettes of the oak trees. A bright planet poked through the twilight, a single beacon high overhead. I focused on it, smoothing my breath, drawing up cool energy from the hill below my back.

  Wind churned the trees, brushing my face with warmth. I slowly sat up, alone in the yard of the Pink House.

  Yellow light spilled out from all the first-story windows, and jazz piano, slick as syrup, flowed gently on the air. It had to be the thing in Will. But there was no sign of Ben. None of Lukas, either, or his screams.

  But the roses were there. I had to find Lukas first, no matter how I wished to go to Will, to tear that thing out of him. Lukas was my charge, and he needed me.

  I crawled to my feet, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth with every step. Evidence of my attention to the roses spread about: a discarded blue glove, a dirt-caked trowel, a pile of uprooted rose stems. None of the salt circle from two weeks ago, none of the runes I’d gouged into the earth. Rain had taken care of that.

  I knelt before the wild roses and raked the earth with my fingers. “Lukas,” I whispered. The ground tingled with power, burning the tiny cuts on my palms from when I’d torn at the roses earlier.

  “Lukas,” I whispered again.

  The roses trembled.

  A sob shook free and I let it out, gasping at the pain in my ribs, one arm wrapping protectively around myself. I closed my eyes against the throb of blood through the left side of my face. It was hot and swollen.

  And this was all my fault.

  Why didn’t Arthur tell me why? Why I was supposed to destroy them? He should have known me well enough to know I’d choose otherwise—choose to explore! How could he not have known?

  I pushed forward on my knees. My forearms tangled in the rose vines, and I gripped one, tore it free with all the weight of my body. Pain shot up my arms as my palms and wrists were shredded against the tiny thorns.

  I took that pain and fed it back into the roses, my blood connecting us. Long cuts bloomed up my forearms, just like Donna’s scars. Then, dripping blood, I went for the trowel. I stabbed at the base of a rose plant, the blade hacking in, ringing off the hard wood. I cut at it again and again, mindless of the shaking roses. They vibrated and danced, and the more I disturbed them, the harder they thrashed. Their stems whipped my shoulders, gouging me. Every prick like a sharp kiss.

  I bled from a thousand tiny wounds and let it flow into the earth. I forced my will, hissing that the roses should wither and rot.

  Slowly, some blackened. I tore them free. Petals cracked, turned to ash.

  In the center was a cocoon of vines and round red blossoms.

  Peering through
the tightly wound vines, I saw a coppery curl. And his brown skin there—a finger, a brush of his thigh. With my blood, I parted these vines carefully, until I found his face. His lips were cracked, but air moved over them, fluttering the leaves hanging just against his cheeks.

  He was held by the roses, a foot off the earth, and a half dozen vines crawled up and into the black candle rune, sucking power from it, from him.

  “Lukas?” I whispered.

  There was no response. Not a flicker of his eyes under closed lids, not a hint in his breath that he’d heard me.

  Bloody footprints marked my path up the porch stairs and into the Pink House. Pain and anger, all my spirit, seeped out through my skin as blood dribbled from the myriad of cuts on my body. I was left with numbness, as though everything inside had crystalized. Quartz was hard and cold, one of the most abundant minerals on earth. Best for magnifying power and clarity. My vision was clear: rip this thing out of Will’s body, free Lukas. I was the Deacon, I could do it.

  He was in the kitchen, frying a grilled cheese sandwich. His hands moved deftly with the spatula, and he’d cut a tomato and butter with one of the butcher knives. A small smile tilted his mouth as he hummed along with an old record of Granny Lyn’s.

  I sighed loudly enough for him to hear over the sizzle of butter in the frying pan and the jazz.

  Will’s body turned smoothly, a ready smile showing his teeth, and he said, “You know this was her favorite …” His ruby-red eyes widened into circles. “My God, what have you done?”

  Blood dripped off my finger and splashed onto the kitchen tiles. I didn’t answer but only stared. He wore an old shirt of Arthur’s, unbuttoned because his shoulders were that much broader, and a pair of ritual pants like the ones I’d cleansed him in. It was Will’s hands and face and hair but nothing of Will in the carriage and movements. I’d never noticed how uncertain Will had been, until I watched this new creature stride over, calm and confident, a frown of concern aging his face.

  He stopped before me, and I put my bloody hands on his chest. With all my pent-up fury and power, I said, “I banish thee from this body.”

  My magic surged hot as a geyser, pushing into him with all the strength of my heart.

  I saw it flare in his tattoos: the red lines turned orange as melting iron, shimmering with heat.

  But Will closed his eyes and sighed as if my power were a kiss. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You’ll not be rid of me so easily, Mab.”

  I tried again, pushing this time, but nothing happened. My hands slipped against his bare chest, my injured ribs sliced into my breath and I couldn’t speak. The third time I only hissed “Banish …,” and the thing in Will shook his head slowly, gathered up my hands in his, led me to a kitchen chair, and sat me down. My thighs squished against the wood because of all the blood. He knelt before me and drew healing runes onto my knees, into the palms of my hands, and onto my forehead. He muttered to himself, working his mouth as though he tasted something unpleasant. I understood: the blood smell filled my mouth and nose, as well.

  A tremor of magic traveled from the crown of my head to my toes, and he asked me to whisper healing words with him. I did, barely moving my lips, and the flash of power that mended my wounds was so strong and hot I fainted.

  It must have only been a moment, for I came to still in the chair, and he was saying, “You silly, wild thing.”

  I sat up, stared at him. My ribs ached only dully, and my face didn’t hurt when I opened my mouth. “I will destroy you,” I said.

  “You’ll forgive me,” he said, trying to put an earnest expression on Will’s face.

  I laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of that sentiment. I thought of Arthur laughing as rain poured in through a leak in the roof. Of Donna laughing at a TV movie. Of Mother laughing for no reason but being alive. And of Will laughing, giddy on top of my silo.

  All their laughs clogged my throat now, and I covered my face with my sticky, bloody hands.

  “As mad as your mother,” he muttered, pushing away from me to return to the oven. I seethed behind my hands, and all he did was flip over the burned cheese sandwich. The acrid smell drew a smile back to my lips. I stared at his back, at the tight, angry jerks his hands made as he created a new sandwich. The record buzzed between tracks, and I knew this song, too, because Granny used to sing it: “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

  “Tell me who you are,” I said as I smoothed my torn and bloody dress over my thighs.

  He spun smoothly and bowed his head. “I am Gabriel Desmarais, and I have lived in and on this land longer than you can imagine, little Deacon. If you go clean yourself up, and allow, perhaps, a brief truce, I shall tell you quite the story.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  MAB

  I huddled in Arthur’s preferred wing-back armchair in the parlor while Gabriel leaned Will’s body lazily back on the rug beside the fire. The tea went cold in my hands as he spoke, and I searched for signs that Will was still in there, was still aware of me, looking out through his own eyes.

  But there was nothing. I only had faith on my side that Will himself survived.

  I hardly listened to Gabriel tell of generations of his life: from a beginning in Paris nearly four hundred years ago to meeting a boy named Arthur in New York. He spoke of traveling through the Old West, of the Civil War, of the first railroad, and all of it with Arthur. He told me about settling in Missouri together and of children they’d shared, and even through Will’s voice I felt the truth of Gabriel’s love.

  He told me about the first time he met my mother, and about the last time, coyly complimenting me on taking after her in looks. I didn’t give him all my attention until he finally offered his version of how he’d become trapped in the roses.

  Granny had hated him, Gabriel said, for being the focus of Arthur’s love. She’d attacked him, easily bested him because he’d never suspected her of ire, never thought for a moment she was jealous enough to curse him.

  Yet curse him she had. She’d planted him in the roses, and twisted their roots and their magic so firmly he could not even get whispers free to warn Arthur.

  Eventually she died, and her magic began to weaken. Gabriel, who had lived in an endless dream state, knowing but not knowing where or who he was, slowly woke. He could not reach Arthur, who was caught in his own grief, and then I was there.

  “You, Mab,” Gabriel said, his smile as smooth as a purr. “You were there, listening to me, coaxing me up through the roots with your smile and your power and your gentle hands. You tore my magic off the roses for it to work itself into this body. To prepare him for me.”

  He put a hand over Will’s heart.

  “You can’t have him.” I set my cold tea down onto the round sofa table. “His body is not for you, Gabriel. I am sorry for what Evie did to you, no matter how much of what you’re saying is or isn’t true. I am sorry you were cursed, and sorry you lost your life. But.” I stood up. “You cannot have Will. You must let him go. You must free Lukas.”

  Gabriel spread his hands and said, “This body is mine now. There is no returning it. I have transformed him into a vessel of magic, down to the essence of his blood. This”—he stood, brushing his hands down his chest and then gesturing wide with his arms out—“this is Gabriel, not Will. That boy did not want it hard enough to hold on the slightest bit.”

  Stepping nearer to me, Gabriel allowed sympathy to run down Will’s face. “I am sorry for your loss, too, Mab. But you are the one who cannot have Will.”

  He was wrong—I would fight that until I died; there had to be a way. I lowered my eyes, fluttered my lashes, and prayed he would think I fought tears instead of fury. It was not Arthur’s power I needed now, or Granny Lyn’s patience, or Donna’s practicality. I needed my mother.

  And her lies.

  I let my breath shake, which wasn’t difficult, and wrapped my arms around my ribs as if weaker than I was. My mother had done everything in her power to get what she wanted, and I
had that in me, too.

  “You’re tired,” Gabriel said.

  It was oh so true, and I nodded, letting my eyes fall shut completely. There was nothing I could do tonight, not with my energy so low, not without understanding better what Gabriel had done. Those tattoos held him firmly in Will’s body. And so long as he had Lukas and the black candle rune to strengthen himself, I couldn’t simply overpower him.

  “Gabriel,” I whispered, feeling him stand close to me, lean in.

  “Yes?”

  “Let Lukas go. He’s just a little boy who’s been abused his whole life.”

  Gabriel sucked air in through his teeth. I peeked up at him, and saw regret twisting his mouth. “That I cannot do,” he said. “Yet,” he added quickly, when I began to protest. “I will, and I assure you the boy lives, but I need him.” Gabriel carved a smile into Will’s mouth. “I am no fool, Mab. I know how strong your mother was. How strong the Deacon is. If I lost Lukas as my familiar, you might stand a chance against me.”

  I made fists with both my hands, and hit them firmly into his chest just over Will’s heart, where the tattoos swirled together most intricately. Gabriel caught my wrists, and I didn’t struggle. I looked up at him, into those bright, brilliant red eyes that used to be Will’s. That I used to think were beautiful.

  “Don’t make me bind you, little Deacon,” he said. “I don’t want this to be your prison as it was mine. This is a home—our home.”

  “Home.” I stepped back, tugging away. As Gabriel let his hands fall to his sides, I slapped him as hard as I could. My hand burned with the contact, and Gabriel’s head knocked around. He slowly put a hand against the flare of red on his cheek.

  We stood, staring across three feet at each other. I knew he would not leave, because of Lukas, because he thought he belonged here. And I knew I would not leave, because I was the Deacon. Because everything I loved was here.