The Blood Keeper Page 8

  I watched his shoulders, the way his chest aimed, as he dribbled in. He wasn’t too great and totally projected his shot. I caught the ball with a hard slap and held it up over my head. Ben acknowledged defeat in a single tight nod.

  Clutching the ball to my side under one arm, I said, “Okay, Ben. You’re so into the Marines, you’re so sure I’ll love it. Why? Why do you love it?”

  His face scrunched for a brief moment, then he said, “Being part of something bigger than myself.”

  “Bullshit, you sound like a commercial.” I stepped in. “Honest, remember? What’s so great about being in it? Why is it better than anything else I could do?”

  Ben sighed. He glanced off, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. Everything about him went still, and I wondered where he was in his head, what he was thinking. When he looked back at me, I saw something in his face I never had before. It made me feel like a coward, just like he said.

  “Trust, Will. I can’t even explain what it feels like to be in this alien place and all you have is yourself and the man at your back. You’re not thinking about it, because you don’t have to. It just is. It’s so strong there’s nothing to say.”

  My brother’s whole face was quiet and intense. I shook my head, because I didn’t understand. But I believed him.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he snapped, and pulled away.

  He marched for the back door. I wanted to say I believed him even though I didn’t understand, couldn’t he do the same for me?

  But my mouth wouldn’t open, and the screen door slapped shut behind him.

  TWELVE

  It was rare for me to be alone with you. We both had enough to do while the sun shone, and by evening, Gabriel would be there, too.

  I did not mind him, and found him entertaining and useful and kind. I never doubted he would keep me from harm if anything threatened. He was usually the one to find me, to seek me out and ask how I was adjusting, how I fared on the prairie. “Well,” I always told him, and “I love the drama and colors here.”

  It was true, and his laughter approved, but what I loved most were the moments you decided to smile. Before it appeared on your mouth, it sparked in your eyes, where the corners tightened, and slowly the amusement seeped down your cheeks and over the tip of your nose to find a home on your lips.

  When you were weary from a long day in your barn, or covered in dirt and dust from the hay meadow, I heated water for your bath, and made tea that often Gabriel drank before you were ready. All the tiny things I did for you, he thought I did for him. How could I have known then? I was too focused on you.

  One evening I baked a roast from beef you’d traded with another farmer for, and tuned the radio so that it played low, delicious jazz. You were upstairs cleaning, and I hadn’t seen Gabriel since the afternoon, when he’d announced he was running into town because it was surely going to snow us in overnight.

  The kitchen smelled of cloves and onions, and I was warm and happy, alone in a chamber of light, while outside it was dark and dangerous. I turned the dial of the radio as one of my favorite songs began: “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

  With myself, I danced slowly around the kitchen, eyes closed, one hand against my stomach and the other held out for my invisible partner. I hummed, filling my head with gentle vibrations, singing random words when I knew them.

  And then there was heat at my back, and a hand over mine, sliding around my stomach. You danced with me, smooth and soft, from behind. Your breath against my temple, smelling of lavender soap and fresh wool. My voice hitched and I couldn’t even hum after that, but only sway and step as your body suggested, your hips against mine, your chest on my back, your hand in the air with mine, nudging and drawing me to and fro.

  Then Gabriel clapping from the entryway shocked us both out of the song—a different song, for the first had passed on I don’t know how much earlier.

  “Bravo, my darlings,” he said, clapping lazily still, as he came in from the cold, letting his bag thump onto the kitchen floor. “Don’t stop on my account.”

  Gabriel moved to the sink and washed his hands, but you and I remained like statues beside the table, your hand on my stomach, my fingers tight around yours.

  He opened his mouth and began to sing, looking at us over his shoulder in a teasing way, eyebrows up to egg us on. Daring, almost, and for a slight moment I wondered if he was jealous.

  You stepped away from me, and I smoothed my dress. “Roast is nearly done,” I murmured, going straight for the oven. It was hot standing beside it, but I was glad it might hide my blush.

  Immediately, you began to ask Gabriel if his drive to Topeka had been uneventful, and if he’d found the right piece for the well pump. His answers were slow and lingering, and as I dressed the plates and watched through the corners of my eyes, I sensed you were speaking another language, buried in everyday talk. You were having an entirely different conversation than the one I was privy to, and it sounded like you’d been having it for ages.

  Everyone would judge you to be nineteen or twenty, and Gabriel maybe twenty-five. But your heavy looks, his layered words, the tone of how you spoke, and the way he touched your shoulder spoke of so much more. Not only age, but experience and depth of emotions.

  The thought that you were lovers skittered through me, and I rejected it, not out of reason but out of selfishness and fear. There had to be something else, I insisted, and I reached into my memory for stories my grandmother had told me of men of our blood who used the magic like the angels, never to grow old.

  I clung to that, to the dream that you did not love Gabriel but had only known him for lifetimes. That the reason I’d expected an aged Arthur Prowd was because you were old, you simply didn’t look it.

  That was far more palatable to me than any other thing.

  Oh, Arthur, I was young, which led me to be so right, and still so wrong.

  THIRTEEN

  MAB

  The path to cleansing Lukas of the curse his father had set upon him was a slow one. Because he was young, because I had never worked with a human being as my subject before, we both were more comfortable with a careful pace.

  I explained everything as I went, telling Lukas stories of other curses I’d seen, set into mammoth tooth fossils or bound into the foundation of a house. Most of them Arthur had understood, and showed me piece by piece the methods for binding them or dismantling them—all of which included destroying the thing itself or binding it in its entirety. Neither of those options were available to us, and of course we couldn’t simply strip the black candle rune from his flesh.

  Thursday all I did was study it. Lukas lay in the sun in a circle of salt, shirtless. The black candle rune ran across the small of his back, a sprawling spider with intricate curls and precise angles. His father must have bound him down with ropes, or knocked him unconscious. I did not ask, and Lukas gave me almost no information about the person of his father. But he promised there were no marks lower than his hips, which made me grateful his father may have been evil but perhaps not perverted.

  Donna hid in the house, and I wondered if seeing a young boy who’d been abused by the magic made her remember things about herself and Nick she’d rather have left forgotten.

  I made an exact sketch of the rune, detailing how Lukas said it felt when I touched it, or when I cast the protective salt circle around us and he grimaced. It helped if I pricked his finger and we grounded his blood into the earth first.

  Though we hardly did anything, that evening he was exhausted. And so Friday, we left off his blood, instead focusing on the less intense but more immediately rewarding task of kitchen work.

  Lukas turned out to be an excellent assistant, rolling crusts well and paying strict attention to the heat of the oven. He helped Donna make tarts, little meat pies for the crows, and two trays of cinnamon rolls. It softened her, and she obviously enjoyed telling him about the natural magic in cooking. “Transformations occur without the need for blood or incantatio
ns,” she confided, shooting me a smile.

  I wasn’t too proud to agree, though I used blood in my baking. But I was baking charms, not food. I cooked little wheat cakes with lavender and rue that would give sweet dreams as well as stave off allergies; boiled milkweed down into a tincture that I mixed into honey for a lozenge against coughing; soaked wild echinacea root for tea; prepared boneset for oil infusion against aches and fevers. I added drops of blood to all of it, quickening the power. My home remedies were guaranteed.

  Timers weren’t involved in mine, for the sweet smell of perfectly boiled milkweed, the crackle of properly dried oak leaves, and a tiny dash of honey on my tongue were all I needed to know when my work was done.

  I’d been aiding Arthur and Granny in charm-making for as long as I’d been alive, and the smell of flour and mingled blood and herbs made me go to Granny’s old radio and turn it to a station that played old-time jazz. I didn’t sing, but the rhythm of the music helped me keep away my missing them.

  Lukas bit into one of the raspberry tarts, and the filling dripped down his chin. I had a sudden sharp memory of my mother drawing her finger along my chin, wiping away a sticky line of honey that she then popped into her own mouth to lick up with a grin. “Let’s get out of here, pet,” she’d said, brushing away Granny’s protests as she dragged me upstairs to my bedroom. Her suitcase spilled open from the foot of the bed, for she always stayed with me when she was here, curled around me at night like a turtle’s shell.

  Mother had pulled the shutters closed and the curtains, too, tucking away every bit of sunlight until the bedroom was gray, and the scarves on the ceiling dull shadows of their usual color. She lit the fat candle on my bedside table, then sank onto the rag rug, curling her feet beneath her, and patted the floor. “Come here, Mab, I have something for you.”

  As I joined her, curious and tense because she rarely gave me gifts, she drew a narrow box out from under the bed. Polished dark wood, it was plain and elegant, and sealed all around with a line of wax. I breathed in quickly, the only sign of my surprise. That box had not been under my bed three nights ago when I shoved a bundle of nettles in the far corner for protection from ghosts.

  Mother caressed the lid, scratching her nails against the smooth wood. “I made this for you, and it’s to be our secret.” She reached for me and tucked hair behind my ear. Her own blond curls were trimmed just under her chin, always behaving the way she told them to with oil and spray.

  “A secret?” I’d never kept secrets from Arthur.

  Her smile was knowing. “Arthur wouldn’t mind, but that wife of his …” Something I didn’t understand flickered through her eyes. “She would be appalled, Mab, and take it away, blame me for corrupting you.” Mother laughed. “But you’re old enough now for trouble. Not here, of course, with Arthur. But off his land, there are monsters that wear masks of men, and they will want you—you’re my daughter, and women like us attract it.” Her eyes unfocused and she looked through me, to some distant past or memory I couldn’t reach. “Power in our veins, the will to use it. They’ll always find us and try to take advantage.”

  I touched her cheek, and she blinked out of her memory. “So, here are weapons for you.” With her thumbnail she broke the wax seal. The lid opened with a puff of cinnamon-smelling air, and I leaned into it, shivering. Tiny vials lined half of it in rainbow colors, there were braided ribbons, and a thin silver dagger.

  To me it seemed nothing more than a simple beginner’s kit, but Mother explained to me what the vials contained—they were no basic ingredients, like salt or ground quartz. No, there was purifying vesta powder, the poisonous yew crystals, and blinding sand. A clear bottle of belladonna. Rust-red carmot, which Arthur had told me of but I’d never seen before—the delicate potion made from blood witches’ bones that would let us live young forever. Mother had braided the ribbons with bits of her own hair to make them strong as steel, and with the silver dagger she cut off strands of my hair. Together we braided it into the ribbons, and into pieces of her hair. She pricked my middle finger and told me to squeeze painful drops onto each of the cork stoppers so that my blood would diffuse into the potions and powders.

  We huddled on the floor of my bedroom, me and my mother, tying all the dangerous spells inside that box to my power, to my spirit, until they could never be used against me, but only toward my protection. I remembered how Mother’s breath fell soft and warm on my cheek, and the smell of her magic as she kissed my finger to heal it. In the dim light, with a single flickering candle, my bedroom became a secret underworld for that afternoon hour, filled with dark and delicious magic.

  It was everything opposite of this bright kitchen, where Donna and Lukas and I made bread and charms, where Granny Lyn had danced and Arthur had lifted me once onto the table to hang Christmas streamers.

  My mother was gone, and I better understood now that she’d been one of those monsters.

  But even she had never used me the way Lukas’s father had used him. She wouldn’t have spent time contemplating how to break the black candle rune, or studying it. My mother would have gone straight to Lukas’s father and cut out his heart to break the curse.

  I almost regretted that wasn’t an option for me.

  WILL

  Friday after school, I crashed out onto the soccer field.

  I’d been warming up on the track when something light and soft hit the top of my head and fell behind me. A red practice jersey.

  “Hey, Hero, up for a scrimmage?” Matt jogged up alongside me.

  I scowled at him but slowed down, feet beating steady on the soft rubber track. “Yeah, sure.”

  Matt flipped his head to get his mop of brown hair out of his eyes. He was constantly jerking like that, and it reminded me of a nervous horse. We all told him to cut the hair off, but he liked the way it flew back when he ran, and claimed the ladies did, too. “You sure? You look kinda spent.”

  “I’m good.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, given that the blood taste had faded over the last few days and the headache I’d sported all Wednesday was just a dull, normal thing. I hadn’t been sleeping too well, with mud monsters prowling in my dreams, but that was nothing new, and nothing I was going to talk to Matt about. I was fine. To prove it, I jogged back to the fallen shirt and grabbed it up. I stripped off my T-shirt and replaced it with the sleeveless jersey. Matt was wearing a blue one. I eyed it and said, “You think your side’ll kick my ass?”

  He nodded, then had to flip his hair out of his face again. “That’s the plan.”

  We headed off the track for the far end of the school grounds. The soccer field needed to be mowed, and a few places had been worn down to dirt in both the goal boxes. About ten guys were waiting, kicking balls and yelling back and forth. It wasn’t our season, but most of the team didn’t play other sports. We spent the whole year practicing—unofficially when we had to. Soccer was a fall sport, and in a month or so Coach Bryson would be on us for real, every day, for hours. It was gonna be tough finding a summer job that I could ditch by three every afternoon. Hopefully, that landscaping thing one of our strikers had going with his neighbor would pan out.

  Matt and I quickly chose our teams, and we divided up to either end of the field. My fellow Reds clapped my shoulders and asked what strategy I wanted to try. Since we only had six men to a team, I decided we’d forgo a keeper and play purely offensive. Matt was the team’s keeper, so we’d have to attack hard and focus on getting the ball past him. I’d stay back to sweep and put everybody else forward. It was a risk, but with Matt as their captain, they’d be sure to hold heavy on the defense.

  Since I’d dressed for running on the track, I hadn’t bothered with cleats. It was only a scrimmage, though, and it hardly put me at a disadvantage. The sun beat down on us. Sweat plastered the mesh jersey to me. I was laughing and yelling in equal parts, focused on the wider movement of the field instead of just the ball, since I had to strategize when to push forward and when to hang back or give up my center p
osition momentarily.

  Although winning the game would mean glory and not having to take the dirty jerseys home to wash, I was mostly just happy we seemed balanced. It was gonna be an awesome team next year. By the end of twenty minutes, we’d only managed to slip one goal past Matt, and my Reds hadn’t let the Blues get near enough ours to score. I noticed a few of the cheerleaders, headed up by Matt’s girlfriend, Shanti, stretching out near enough that they were mostly watching us. No wonder Matt took a huge diving leap to block a goal that landed him hard on his left shoulder. He bounced up and tossed the ball at Dylan, his winger, who’d been hanging way right and managed a clean break up the side of the field. I ran at him, met him straight on, and tried to swipe the ball away. He spun and his shoulder knocked into me. I slammed to a stop, foot on the ball, and momentum twisted us up and we both went down.

  I hit the ground totally unprepared, all my breath jarred out of me. My ears rang, and I put my arms out to my sides as if I could stop the earth from spinning if I held it down. Dylan was laughing next to me, and rolled to his side to stand. He held a hand down for me. I shook my head, which was a mistake.

  A second later the whole team was crowded around me. I gasped, “Fine. I’m fine. Just dizzy.”

  “Sanger, shit!” Matt shoved through. “What happened? Your lips are, like, blue.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, man.” Dylan crouched next to me.

  “No, no.” I pushed up to sit, swallowing bile that burned its way back to my stomach. My throat felt raw, and I could taste blood again. “Probably just the heat.” That was bullshit, though. I’d lived in Okinawa, which is a tropical island. This was nothing.

  Matt took my arm and helped me up to my feet. I swayed to one side. “Why don’t you guys run some drills while I get him to the side.”

  A few hands patted my shoulders, and I started moving with Matt. Something thin and hot drained out of my nose before I could snort it back up. I coughed, and felt the drip hit my chest.