The Blood Keeper

  I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing, but—

  MAB

  There I was, prone on the earthen floor of the barn, my hair as wild as always and my blue dress ruffled higher on my thighs than was probably decent.

  And here I was, looking down upon myself through Will’s eyes, my mind spinning, sweat itching in my scalp and down my spine, and this horrible rope of magic around my ribs.

  I closed his eyes and stood up in Will’s body, noting every sore joint and the tightness of muscles. Oh, did his heart beat hard, and the balance of his body was jarred by dizziness, yet I felt myself settle in his chest. A higher center of gravity than I was accustomed to tilted me as I stepped forward, around my own unconscious body.

  At the worktable, I laid his hands flat and stared at them. Darker than mine, with thicker fingers, but also his nails weren’t as dirty. I stripped off his T-shirt, dropping it onto the table, and studied the bruise.

  From the center of his chest, over his heart, the great yellow rose of a bruise blossomed. Where petals would be, curves of hematoma arched outward, then rays of red and purple stretched toward his shoulders and down his stomach in ever smaller branches. As I breathed, his ribs heaved in and out and I could feel the bruise pulsing in time with his heart.

  I crouched uncomfortably and reached under the table for a tin can full of blades. Fishing around, I grasped a lancet. With it, I cut open my own body’s wrist at the tattoo, and drained a few ounces of my blood into a small ceramic bowl from one of the shelves. Bringing the bowl to the table, I used the lancet to prick a tiny hole into the center of Will’s bruise, then drew a rune of clear shadows around it with my blood. The blood from the tiny puncture dripped out slowly, falling in a line down his skin. It hit the rune mark, and in a flash I felt a pulse of magic ripple through his body.

  The pulse left behind a tingling sensation that spread out from his heart in tendrils much like a tree’s roots. The pattern of his bruise was repeated inside his chest, and only from inside his body could I feel the paths it took.

  Something had infected Will, and here, possessing his body, I felt exactly where in his blood it lay.

  It was my doll’s curse, spreading out from his heart like wild rose vines.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was three days.

  Three days before you came home with Josephine’s hand in yours.

  I saw it from my bedroom window as I braided my hair for the night, her white dress mussed by so many hours doing God knows what, but still glowing in the moonlight. All her hair was down and wild around her face. Your fingers laced with hers, casually, intimately. My heart was breaking, and I slid the curtain across the window glass, as if I could pretend it hadn’t happened.

  In the morning I arrived in the kitchen, tying on my apron, and she was there, lounging at the table with thick-smelling coffee and a slim cigarette. “Morning, Evelyn,” she said and, of all things, offered me a drag. I frowned and shook my head, going to get some bacon started, and maybe some oven-cakes. Your favorite, and even after what I’d seen, I still wanted to make them for you.

  “Want some coffee, then?” Josephine drawled, and I nodded, thinking I’d better get used to her.

  She stood and poured at the counter. I had no idea when she’d brought in luggage, but she had on a new dress, gray-and-pink-checked, all flounce around the hips and knees, with a halter top that tied behind her neck and left her back and shoulders bare to the world. Her lips were painted fabulous red. Up close, I decided she looked only about eighteen, and I wondered if she’d been alive for centuries, too.

  “How’s your visit been so far?” I asked her, concentrating on cutting slices of bacon.

  “Delightful!” She handed me a mug of coffee and then took my wrist. “Don’t let’s get off on the wrong foot, but come sit with me. The Deacon is still in bed and won’t need your slave labor for a while yet.”

  I pursed my lips and began to tell her I was making breakfast for myself, too. But instead I joined her at the table, sitting tall and smelling the coffee while she began questioning me about my entire history. She hadn’t been here in about a year, she said, her eyes darting around guiltily, and obviously a lot had changed! There was no reason to think you hadn’t already spilled all my secrets, as close as I thought you two were, so I told her in quiet words about my family and coming here, about the land and garden. She leaned forward on her elbows and asked piercing things about my magic, about Gabriel and you. I tried my best to remain calm and detached, but at the end of that single mug of coffee, she sat back with a triumphant smile and declared, “You’re in love with him.”

  I gripped the mug, then stood as if to refill it, in order to turn my back to her as my whole body warmed and I thought of how happy you’d been when you saw her. Her. But I couldn’t bring myself to deny it. I wouldn’t betray myself like that, even if you could never know.

  She was there, directly behind me, looming over my shoulder in her heels, with all that stature and elegance even in my little warm kitchen. Her breath was on my neck, and I shivered, suddenly sensing danger.

  “You should tell him, pet,” she murmured.

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll never get what you want if you don’t.”

  “I want a home, Miss Darly. I want to be safe here and continue on. I won’t mess that up.”

  Josephine laughed. “Men are utter fools, Evelyn. Especially men like Arthur.”

  I spun around and tilted my face up to glare at her. “Arthur’s no fool.”

  Her smile curled wickedly. “He is if he hasn’t taken what you’d give. Trust me, I understand what it’s like to love and long and want a man. This magic makes it better and worse, because they think they know everything, feel everything. They think it makes us the same, but they’re still men, and still thinking of themselves first. If you want him, you gotta take him.”

  I leaned into the counter, afraid of the sly accent creeping into her words, afraid of the intensity in her face. My head shook of its own accord, denying her. “I thought,” I said, “I thought you and he …”

  Shock parted her lips, and Josephine reared back to laugh. Loud enough I’m sure it’s what woke you. “Oh no,” she said gleefully, “though I’m sure it’s crossed my mind once or twice.”

  I didn’t know what to think. I believed her, but yet, I’d seen your face. She brought you something that no one else did, that I didn’t know how to identify. The way Gabriel filled up some part of you, too, and I felt again the weight of all your years, all your friendships and loves that I could never compete with.

  The ceiling creaked, indicating you were up, and so Josephine said, “Go on back to your bacon, pet, and think about telling him.”

  I shook my head again, knowing I couldn’t, and felt her gaze tingling into my back until you came downstairs and joined us.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WILL

  It was like waking up after having been only half asleep. Nothing had changed except that Mab was in the process of sitting up. And a dull burn wormed around in my chest.

  She knelt on the ground and put her hands on my knees. “Will?” Her head was tipped up, and I had this sudden double vision of looking down at my hands against the worktable. “What happened?” I asked, rubbing my sore chest. My T-shirt was gone. “What?” I said again, looking down. There was some symbol drawn in blood over the bruise, and a tiny hole right in the center. Had I blacked out?

  “I tested your body,” Mab said, inexplicably. “And I think I have unfortunate news.”

  “Wait.” I stood up, forcing her back. There my shirt was, in a pile over on the worktable. I went for it. Ignored the spinning in my skull. When I had it, I pulled it over my head and flattened it over the blood mark before I looked up at her again. “Tell me what just happened, Mab.” My throat felt clogged up. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  She faced me from the crate, with about ten feet between us. “I used a rune of clear shadows to
show me what was going on inside you, under that bruise and around your heart. To discover why your eyes are changing and why your bones hurt.”

  Instead of rubbing my chest again, I raised both my hands and clasped the back of my head. “Did I black out? You did all that—you took off my shirt—alone? And runes? What the hell is a rune? Is this blood on me? Mab, I remember …” I didn’t want to say. But I was remembering something. It was like I’d dreamed doing all that myself: standing up, walking over her, cutting my chest. Feeling the bruise expand like a slow fire. I shook my head.

  “You remember?” Mab closed the space between us fast. She put both hands on my chest, peered at me. “You remember what happened? It wasn’t just one moment we were talking, and the next we were talking again?”

  I shut my mouth tight and nodded.

  She squinted at me, shaking her head in surprise. “That’s so strange. You aren’t blood kin, and you shouldn’t maintain consciousness like that during a possession.”

  “What?” The word burst out on the tail end of a choke.

  “Hmm,” was all she said. She massaged her temple absently.

  “Mab.” I grabbed her shoulders. “What.” I hunched over to put my eyes right level with hers. “Are.” I pulled her closer. “You—talking—about?”

  Mab smiled with her teeth. “Magic.”

  “Magic,” I repeated. I didn’t let her go. I was too stuck.

  Her grin faded until it was only a pretty smile. Mab cupped her hands between us. “Magic,” she said again. And a ball of fire sparked to life in her palms.

  I threw myself back, hit the table hard with my hip.

  Mab clapped out the fire and said, “That’s about all I can manage at the moment.”

  I gripped the edge of the table, and I believed her.

  Hand in hand, we trekked slowly up the hill to Mab’s house. She said she needed food and that I did, too. And that there was good tea to make my headache go away.

  As we walked, she told me what it was like to possess someone. Or something. She went on about flying, about the slow dance of trees in the wind and running on four feet instead of two. But I just held her hand. Barely heard her, because I couldn’t get past Mab was inside my body.

  There were barely names for what I was feeling. Awe, maybe. Fear. Nausea.

  Also this warmth beyond the fever. It was like something inside me expanded a little bit more every time I looked at her.

  Crazy. That was a word for it.

  It was an Aaron word. Something he’d said to describe the things he wanted. I thought of the last time. At the picnic table in our backyard. His hair still long enough to tuck behind his ears. He’d been poring over a set of maps weighed down against the wind with full soda cans. I’d leaned over his shoulder as he penciled weird places he’d found on the Internet in to the route he and his buddies were taking to the Naval Academy. “Check this out, Will.” He poked a spot in Illinois. “There’s a huge monument here dedicated to the hippies of the world. Some dude made it, and it’s like sixty feet long.”

  “So you’re swinging a hundred miles off course to go see it?”

  He clucked his tongue at me in mock disappointment. “Will, Will, Will—what’s the point of driving from here to the Atlantic if you aren’t going to stop at all the crazy stuff? That’s where life happens, man.”

  And then there was Ben, standing in his dress uniform. Holding open the door to the funeral home. “He shouldn’t have driven all around creation. He should have gone straight there.”

  Ben never did anything crazy.

  “This is the Pink House,” Mab said as we broke through the circle of trees.

  The house was two stories and looked a lot like a giant pink cupcake with chocolate frosting. I couldn’t imagine actually living inside it. Flowers spilled from window boxes and hung along the roof of the porch. The grass between me and it needed a mow, but was so thick I thought maybe a chainsaw would work better. There was a garden off to the right that looked like it had come from a catalog, it was so colorful.

  “Wow,” I said. The crows perched on the roof in a clump. I was starting to think of them as pigeons. Just everywhere. Following you around because you had food.

  Mab tilted her head to one side. All her massive hair swung like a curtain. While we’d walked, it had occasionally snagged on a twig, and she’d just kept on going as if it didn’t matter. “When we get inside, let’s be quiet. Lukas is sleeping.”

  I reached out and picked a leaf that clung to a curl. “Who’s Lukas?”

  “A boy who’s come to stay with us for a while.”

  She pulled on my hand and led me inside. It was exactly what you’d expect from a farmhouse. Old wallpaper with tiny flowers, scuffed furniture, family portraits, and lacy tablecloths. Full of light from big windows flung open to the afternoon.

  And it smelled like fresh bread. Mab directed me to sit at the round kitchen table while she poured water into the kettle and turned on the stove. Which had probably been in use since the sixties. I studied the scratches on the table. Someone had taken a fork or knife and cut little nicks and letters into the edge. Almost like claw marks. I thought of Havoc throwing herself at the kennel door and stopped breathing. My chest hurt.

  Mab came to sit at the table and tied her hair into a knot. Without a band or barrette or anything.

  I leaned back in my chair. Watched her. Imagined her getting up and coming over, then sitting down in my lap. Imagined her sinking into my body and possessing me like some ghost. “Mab.”

  “Will?”

  I flattened my hands on my thighs, wiping them as if they were dirty. “Next time, ask.”

  “Ask?”

  “Before you possess somebody.” My voice was harsh, because I still couldn’t quite get over what I was saying.

  “I did ask,” she said. Surprise lit her face.

  “No you didn’t.”

  Mab reached out her hands, palms up. “I asked if you trusted me. You said yes.”

  Her hands were there, waiting. Fingers curled up slightly. Her eyes wide open and not hiding anything. “Mab,” I said again.

  “What is it?”

  “It was just so …” I forced air all the way out of my lungs. “Intimate.”

  She softened her mouth. “Oh.” It was a tiny sound. Her eyes swept down my face and my chest, looking at all of me. She leaned onto her elbows. “I wish I could let you inside me.”

  “Jesus.” I covered my face with my hands.

  “You’d be able to feel it then, how strange it is in some other person. It’s unbalanced and different, like … walking on loose stepping stones.”

  I looked at her through my fingers. Couldn’t decide if sitting there was better, or if maybe I should stand up and pace.

  Her expression was tender. “I would only learn your body that way if I took time to practice.”

  Practice. Learning my body. I pushed my chair back and got up. “We should talk about something else.”

  Just then the kettle whistle began to shriek. Mab snatched it from the stove. Whispered for it to hush.

  I took the opportunity to try and steady my breathing. The sloppy way her hair fell wasn’t helping. Neither was the way she stood up on her tiptoes to pull mugs down from a cabinet. It made her thin little dress slide up over her body.

  I stared hard out the window. Until Mab had poured boiling water into a teapot. She brought it and two little mugs to the table. “It has to steep,” she said.

  “Great.” I returned to my chair. “So. You possessed me to figure out what’s wrong. And you did. Lay it on me.”

  Folding her hands together, Mab said, “There was a curse in that doll. In the homunculus, I mean. That I transferred there from where it had been bound in the roses. I believe some of that magic infected you when you destroyed the doll.”

  “A curse? Are you joking?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s going to happen? What’s it doing to me?” I pre
ssed my fist into my chest.

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I know how to help.”

  “How?”

  “A cleansing. It’s a ritual, and it will drive the curse out of you.”

  “How do we start? What can I do?”

  Mab pulled the teapot nearer to her and lifted the clay lid. She smelled the steam and set the lid back down.

  “Mab!”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t do it tonight.” Her mouth twisted into a sorry frown.

  “Why?”

  “There’s an ointment I need to make and then bless under the moon.”

  “I don’t understand all this.” I folded my arms on the table and put my forehead against them. I pressed down. The headache behind my eyes wasn’t horrible. But it was easier to think when I wasn’t looking at Mab. Not that there was much to think about. It was either believe her or get up and leave.

  I didn’t hear her stand. Her hand just landed on my back, rubbing cool circles against my spine. “I promise you’ll be well. I felt exactly what the curse was doing. I felt where it is, how it’s twisting around your heart. You have a little bit of time before it does permanent damage.”

  One weak laugh escaped.

  “Will.” She said it firmly. I sat up. Mab took my hands and turned me in the chair so that she could face me. Her chin tilted down, and her hair fell free of the knot. Fear shook through me. I hated that. I wanted to pull on a brave cloak. Desert camo like Ben’s.

  Mab put her hands on my face. “Listen to me, Will Sanger. I will help you. This is what I do.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You came here because you thought I could help. Me. Out of everyone you know, you came here. You found this place, because you were meant to.” She brushed her thumbs under my eyes. “That red in your eyes is like rubies, Will. It is beautiful, because even when this magic is dangerous or dark, it is also beautiful. And I understand it.” Mab took a deep breath, and I suddenly wondered if she was afraid like me.