The Blood Keeper

  “You’re talking fantasy, Will.”

  “No, that’s not it.” My agitation made Havoc prick her ears back. I tried again. “Mab talks about patterns, connections in the world that most people don’t see. Things happening for a reason, because they were caused by something. And we might not understand that cause, but it’s still real. It was still the cause. That’s what Mab’s magic is.”

  Ben’s arms relaxed, and he clasped his hands in his lap. Stared down at them. “I’m pretty sure that isn’t the generally accepted definition.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I don’t believe that things happen for a reason. Not a supernatural one. At all.”

  “Why?”

  He turned his head just enough to nail me with his eyes. “Because I’ve killed people.”

  I tried to hold on to his gaze but couldn’t. I looked away. Off at Mom and Dad still chatting quietly at the picnic table. At Havoc’s worried ears. How did I argue with that? It made everything I’d been through seem kind of useless and petty.

  Ben drummed his fingers on his legs. “That wasn’t fair.”

  “I don’t think fair and killing people are usually anywhere near each other.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  We sat there against the house in silence for a bit. Just us and Val’s occasional snorting as Ben rubbed down her belly. I listened to the traffic from out on the main street. The crickets. Mom and Dad. Finally, I said, “Remember that girl you told me about? Your reporter?”

  “Yeah. Lauren.”

  “That’s magic.”

  Ben’s eyes tightened.

  “You said you didn’t understand it, but you just knew it was right. It was going to happen with her.”

  “I did say that,” he muttered.

  “That’s how I feel. I don’t get this. But Mab—and her magic—I know it’s real. You just have to take my word for it. Trust me.” I thought of Mab, falling out of that tree. Knowing I’d catch her. That’s what I wanted from Ben.

  He studied me for a long moment. “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  I watched him carefully. Waiting for a sign that he was blowing smoke. “You believe me.”

  Tilting his head back, Ben stared up at the indigo sky. “I think I’ll try to.”

  MAB

  Halfway through setting the mosquito wards, the crows chuckled loudly at me, landing in a wide, perfect circle, and I realized it was more than time for me to talk to Silla.

  Dropping my fleam and rushing back up the porch into the house, I found Donna leaning in the hallway with the phone cord wrapped around her forefinger. She straightened fast. “Mab, are you all right?”

  Paused, trapped in a moment of uncertainty, I very slowly nodded. “I’d like to talk to Silla when you’re finished, please.”

  Watching me with concern pressing down her lips, she relayed my request. I backed into the kitchen to wait, putting the kettle on to boil, but it wasn’t more than a minute before Donna called me.

  I drew myself up and walked steadily to the phone, thinking of Will and the lost look in his eyes when he said he didn’t know who he was. He was so correct that I did know, in detail, who I was and who I wanted to be. That person, the blood keeper, as Lukas called me, would never have shied away from the difficulty of balancing her responsibility to the crows and her need to care for her whole extended family. I took the phone from Donna, who quickly untangled her hand from the cord and withdrew.

  “Silla?” I said into the mouthpiece.

  There was a crackling pause, then her voice answered me. “Hello, Mab.”

  I slid down the wall, curling my knees up to my chest. “I wanted to apologize,” I said softly, then imagined that perfectly cool expression Silla got any time my mother came up. The still, stony frown and lofty eyebrows. “I shouldn’t have said what I said about Reese.”

  She didn’t answer for the longest time, and while I waited I stared through the archway into the sitting room, tracing with my eyes the long lines of rusty pink and orange vines on the antique rug before the fireplace. Finally, she said, “He chose.”

  “He wasn’t choosing against you.”

  “I did—I do—want him back. That will never go away.” Her voice wavered, making me sit up straighter. “But he gets to pick what his life is, even if it isn’t … if he isn’t the same Reese I loved.”

  “Everyone changes.”

  Silla laughed, but only once, and quietly.

  I didn’t know what to say that could remove the grief from her heart. To me, transformation was very much better than death, but it might not have made a difference to her.

  “Thanks, Mab,” she said after a moment. “I know you’re better than her. Arthur raised you, not Josephine.”

  She couldn’t even say Mother’s name without a quiver of anger, after so long, but I didn’t blame her. “I hope you’ll come back with Donna after graduation. I’m going to have a summer party, my first as Deacon, and it would—would mean a lot if you could attend.” I closed my eyes at the stilted, too-formal words.

  “We will,” Silla answered right away. “If I have to drag Nick by his—um, ears.”

  I smiled to myself, thinking of Nick and Donna together for days on end. “Donna will need plenty of tea to cope.”

  “Send it with her. We mostly have coffee and vodka left over from my thesis writing,” she admitted, the answering smile perfectly apparent in her voice.

  The shared moment worked nearly as well as any blood magic, reuniting us through the phone lines.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I went to Gabriel, heart fluttering, and asked if he’d seen anything like my illness before. He smiled softly and nodded. “I know exactly what to do,” he told me, taking my hands. “You go sit in the parlor. I’ll get everything ready.”

  I waited an hour, eyes closed, praying. There was no way for me to contact you; I couldn’t fly across states and mountains, I couldn’t walk into your dreams the way Gabriel could. I had to rely on him, trust that he would purge this sickness from me.

  We went together out to the garden, “where you’ll be comfortable,” he said. He’d dug a circle into the earth just beside the roses. Big enough for me to lie down in and for him to sit at my side. He took off my shoes and hat, the armored ring you’d made for me so that no one could possess me again the way Josephine had, the pearls from my ears that I’d put on because it was Sunday. My dress was simple and the color of spring leaves, with short sleeves and buttons all the way down the front. Gabriel spilled his own blood into a bowl of ink, whispered words into it, and set it over a tiny flame. He put his hand on my forehead and told me to close my eyes. It was a cleansing, he promised, a spell to draw out all the illness inside of me.

  I relaxed against the earth. Overhead, the clouds gathered nearer, preparing to storm later that evening. Wind blew hard through the trees, as if to protest his magic. My roses bobbed their tightly knotted buds, and I closed my eyes. Gabriel’s circle was warm and safe. I trusted him.

  He used a tiny paintbrush and began tracing lines onto my arms with his bloody ink. From both my palms up to my shoulders. He rolled up the sleeves of my dress and unbuttoned the top so that he could paint across my collarbone and down to my heart. The warm ink tingled on my skin, and I remember smiling as he connected all the lines, as he sang a very quiet song in French. It lulled me—more than it should have, I know now. He stole away my awareness, teasing me with magic and song into a light sleep so that I did not know all that he did.

  I dragged open my eyes once, when he paused in his tracing. The dark clouds made the sky like dusk, and I lifted a hand to brush hair off my mouth. But I saw the runes he’d put there, in my palm and encircling my wrist. They were familiar. I blinked heavily, slowly understanding that my dress was unbuttoned to my waist, and the tingle of magic curled down my breasts and ribs, crawling along my belly.

  They were the same marks tattooed into Gabriel’s ski
n. The tattoos you told me hold him into his body. And there Gabriel was, mixing more ink in his charmed wooden bowl.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered, feeling like the words were dragged out of hell.

  He looked down at me, shirtless, his tattoos glowing against his body like embers. “Transforming,” he said, and then, regretfully, “I do like you, Evelyn.”

  “Gabriel.” I struggled to sit, but my bones weighed like lead, holding me against the earth. “Gabriel.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And he sounded wistful. “But you’ll only go to sleep, without pain, and your body will be mine.”

  FORTY-NINE

  MAB

  Friday was a rest day.

  Donna packed her things while Lukas and I read the first half of A Wrinkle in Time out in the garden. I eyed the roses between chapters, growing slightly bored and distracted from the book as I wondered how deep I’d have to dig in order to root them completely out, but Lukas was so enamored of Charles Wallace I couldn’t bring myself to stop reading.

  In the afternoon we went into town for a rare meal out and so that Donna could purchase a graduation gift for Silla. We chose a small necklace from a local artist, made from blown glass that matched the deep red of her favorite cowboy boots.

  And that night, for the first time in what felt like months, I went to bed happy.

  First I set a silver bracelet that my mother had given me on the windowsill, to soak in blessed water infused with anise and white clover. The moonlight would spill onto the water for three hours, and in the morning it would be fresh and open and ready for me to reach in and draw out her blood to the surface. To make it sing.

  It was going to be a protection amulet for Lukas, something to give him comfort and to spread soothing magical shields around him so that it would be even more difficult for his father to reassert any control. I planned to give it to him tomorrow, after we dropped Donna at the bus station. We’d finish our book, have a picnic, and I was going to ask him to help me purify the bracelet with a tiny bit of fire, to walk him through it.

  But as I lay with my cheek on the pillow, listening to the frogs outside and the wind jingle the leaves, I was thinking about Will’s laughter. The way he expressed so much with it. Other people had many faces, or ways of talking or gesturing. But Will had shades of laughter. I fell asleep imagining the various parts of his face sliding around a laugh. Pretending I could catch the noise in my hand and transform it into bells.

  My dreams, though, were not happy.

  I dreamed of the roses sucking me down, dragging my feet into the roots, twisting hard around my ankles and knees until the bones cracked. I screamed, and leaves dove down my throat. Vines tangled in my hair, my arms were pulled apart, my muscles tore, and my joints snapped. Mud flowed up my thighs and hardened around my belly. It slicked up my ribs one by one, and I was encased. I couldn’t breathe! Lungs clogged with cracking leaves, and my chest squeezed tight. The forest pulled and pulled. My back arched, and my heart broke into a dozen chunks. Everything tore free in a shower of blood and dirt: arms, hands, legs, and eyes flying out in an explosion. The forest gathered the pieces and consumed them.

  I died in my dream.

  WILL

  I had a normal day at school on Friday. Took crap from Matt and the others. Met with a counselor about deferring college and whether I should still plan to take the ACT in the fall. Caught up with a few teachers about reviews I’d missed. Even went to soccer practice, because Ben had argued my side. He showed up halfway through, and the guys made him join us. We kicked the ball around, and he watched me carefully, but seemed to decide I was good. Better than good. I thought about calling Mab, to ask her out. But surely she needed some breathing room. Of at least a day.

  I didn’t get to bed until late, because Ben and I hooked up the computer to the TV and streamed some old Nickelodeon cartoons. Then early Saturday morning, a full thirty-six hours since the cleansing, I woke up cracking with pain.

  It was a jolt that arced through my chest. I clenched my jaw—which hurt—and sat up. Blinking, I tried to force my eyes to adjust faster. There was enough light from the street lamps outside to let me easily see the faded green numbers on my alarm clock. Five a.m. Begin morning nautical twilight.

  Silhouettes came into focus: the computer, the chair rolled into the middle of the room, my soccer bag. I slowly climbed out of bed, feeling a hundred years old, or like I’d been hit by a steamroller. My chest had turned to fire. The ache bit through to my spine, and I ground my teeth harder. I shambled down the hallway like a zombie. It felt like my skin was expanding, like my muscles were twisting all around. Braiding into knots. My knees shook, and I clutched at the bathroom door. I managed to swing it shut behind me and flipped on the light.

  I threw up a hand to block the sharp glare, wincing. My head pounded, and I leaned it against the cold tile wall. After a moment I opened my eyes, squinting at myself in the mirror.

  Shock knocked me back against the wall, as far from the mirror as I could get.

  Lines of dark brown and red scoured my chest, shooting out from my heart. In patterns I recognized from my dreams. They were like detailed tattoos, but pushed up from my veins. Twisting out from a center point on my chest, spinning down my arms and stomach. I shoved forward, gripped the sink. My eyes were pure red.

  As red as Crayola markers.

  I felt faint. Too much time in the sun, too little water. A hit to the head, a concussion. A fall from an airplane. The floor swirled around beneath my feet.

  I dug into one of the drawers for a razor. My fingers shook as I snatched it up, and I tried to breathe deeply and calmly but couldn’t. I was gasping. Choking. I put the razor against one of the tattoos on my forearm and sliced.

  Blood slipped out instantly, hot red. Instead of dripping onto the porcelain, it wove itself darker and wound around my wrist again and again in tinier strings. Soaked back into the tattoos.

  The razor clattered to the floor.

  What could I do? I thought of Ben first, but he’d probably try to shoot me. And Dad and Mom … What would I say? I’m not a monster, I just have evil tattoos? What if they tried to take me to a hospital, where they’d only try surgery or some crazy chemo—it would cost thousands of bucks we didn’t have, and I’d be ruined for soccer and miss all my finals and probably be screwed for life because this psycho disease would always be on my record.

  And doctors and expensive tests couldn’t help me anyway. I had to go to Mab, right now. Crazy pain doubled me over, and I pushed my fists into my gut, crouched low to the bathroom tiles. This would kill Mom. Me disappearing, with no word—what would she do? Or think?

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Will?”

  It was Ben. Voice muffled through the wood of the door.

  “No,” I said, leaning into it so that he couldn’t open it. He couldn’t come in.

  “Will. Are you sick?”

  I managed to climb up the wall and grab a robe from the hook next to the shower. I got it around me just as Ben pushed in. But I couldn’t stop hunching over. Couldn’t raise my eyes, because then he’d see the blood in them.

  Ben grabbed my shoulders. “Jesus, Will, what’s wrong?”

  “Just … puked,” I said. Head down. Pain rocketed out from my chest again. I shuddered. Eyes tightly shut.

  Putting his arm around me, Ben helped me out into the hall. The light was off, so I looked at him. “Ben, don’t wake Mom and Dad. I just need …”

  “You need to get to the hospital,” he hissed. “What’s wrong with you?” His frown pulled his whole face down. “Drugs? A reaction to those antibiotics?”

  Nausea twisted up my throat. My knees shook. I had to lean on Ben.

  “Sit down, I’m getting Mom.”

  “No.” I gripped his wrist tight. I tugged him onto his knees with me. We faced each other in the dim, narrow hallway. The only light came out of his open bedroom, a yellow line pointing at me. I said, “I know what I nee
d, and it isn’t doctors. I need to get to Mab.”

  “She did this to you?” He angled his head, staring at my eyes. “I thought you were fine; you said—”

  “You can’t do anything. Only she can.”

  “What did she do to you?” Ben’s voice rose.

  “Quiet,” I begged. “Please don’t wake them. Just let me go. It’s not that bad.”

  “Are you insane?” His fingers bit into my forearms. I felt my hard heartbeat where he touched me. Pounding in my head. I really was gonna puke now.

  “Ben, please.”

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  I shut them. I took a long, deep breath. “Ben. It’s the magic. You have to trust me. You said you would.”

  Silence. His hands didn’t loosen at all. I held on to him, too, as my head swam and I fought swaying there in the hallway. “Trust you,” he said, voice low.

  “Yes. Let me go.”

  “That is never going to happen, you stupid ass. Get up.” He struggled to his feet, dragging me with him.

  “Ben, I won’t—”

  He jerked me up and said straight into my face, “I’m driving.”

  FIFTY

  Gabriel explained as he painted how in three hundred years he’d had five bodies, possessing them completely, stealing them, according to his own fancy, or sometimes, yours.

  I cried, fearing you’d known all along, that you’d let me think you loved me when it was only this shell you wanted, this body of mine, but with Gabriel in it.

  The tears burned down my temples, and the ground shivered under me. All I knew was that I had to get away. I wouldn’t die like this, becoming a marionette for Gabriel to play with. But I’d only get one chance to escape, I knew. Gabriel was old and strong. If I didn’t surprise him, I was doomed.

  I focused on moving one hand in tiny increments, nearer and nearer to his bowl of ink as he painted around my ankle, tickling with his brush against the sole of my foot. I breathed slowly, gathering my little strength, and curled my fingers around the bowl. “Gabriel,” I whispered, and the moment he turned I flung the ink into his face.