The Blood Keeper

  “Let’s go, Reese, come home with me,” Silla said, turning away and walking smoothly toward Nick’s SUV. “Nick,” she snapped, and I saw him grimace at Donna and dash around to the driver’s side. He only glanced at me, a look that was half apology, half irritation, as he turned the engine over and slammed shut his door.

  Silla climbed up so that she stood halfway into the tall car, one hand gripping the silver bars on the roof for leverage. “Reese!” she called.

  One crow called back, a single, echoing cry.

  We all waited. I only watched, my heart racing so fast I thought the blood might pop out of my fingertips. The crows perched behind me, and I felt their strength tingle against my back.

  “Reese.” Silla’s voice was quieter now, though firm.

  I heard the wind in the leaves and the solemn sound of crows settling in. They were not jumping into flight. They remained. At my back.

  And it broke Silla’s heart.

  It was no wonder she hadn’t called to invite us to her graduation. And no wonder Nick wasn’t too happy with me.

  And now the crows flew overhead in a sunwise circle, sharp black silhouettes against the sky. I felt my spirit lift in my chest as I watched them; despite my dark thoughts, I was lighter and wished to step off the edge and float with them, to fly joyous circles and laugh rough and raw.

  As the world darkened into shades of gray and purple, I crouched and pulled out my sharp bone blood-letter. The crows landed in the redbud, shaking the bells and wind chimes into merry, discordant song.

  It was as much the Deacon’s responsibility to tend the blood family as it was to protect the land. My charms, one for every person marked by our magic, were here to remind me of that. Arthur had been loved by everyone, and so easily gained trust and respect. I had to try much harder not to say the wrong thing, or to put people off by my wild nature. I forgot to wipe blood off my mouth before going to the library, or left squirrel bones tied in my hair for the farmers’ market. I allowed a doll of earth and roses to run rampant, and left muddy, bloody handprints on the chest of the boy who stopped it.

  I forgot that most people value human life over a crow’s.

  The hardest thing I had to do as Deacon was to remember I was part of a family.

  As always, I turned to magic for help. Under the shadows of my redbud tree, I pricked my tattooed wrist: the shock of pain shuddered through me, and I welcomed the rush of power that tingled just behind it, filling my body and raising goose bumps on my arms.

  With my blood, I marked my forehead, my heart, my palms, and the soles of my feet. I spread out on my back, making a five-point star with my head at the top. “I bind myself,” I said, blowing the words up to the first stars that glimmered through the curtain of purple sky.

  “To the land I bind my heart,” I said. Above me all my charms dangled, dancing in the breeze. They were my family, tied to my tree, and my tree rooted deep in the land.

  “To the land I bind my head.” I thought of Arthur, enveloped in a hundred purple flowers, part of the land forever. Of Granny buried under her linden tree.

  “I bind my hands, that I may work for the magic and for the land.” I thought of Donna and Nick, wishing I could bind their hearts as a mother and son. And I thought of Silla, who was as much a part of this family as me but always thought she was alone.

  “I bind my feet, that my every step be for the blood land, my every dance weave life between the earth and myself.” Now there was Pan, to be shown the patterns of magic. To be healed.

  “Finally, I bind my dreams.” The crows flapped their wings, pushing warm, sticky wind down onto me.

  With the blood-letter, I broke the skin over my womb, where the roots of my magic grew. I took a finger and drew lines spilling out from it, a star of blood over my belly.

  I said, “I bind myself.”

  I was the center.

  EIGHT

  You’d built the farmhouse yourself, just after the First World War: a two-story wood and brick home with an attic and storm cellar, at the top of a wild hill. I settled quickly into the bedroom in the northwest corner, and from my window I could see the whole of the front yard, stretching untamed from the porch to the ring of oak trees crowning the hill. There was plenty of space for a garden. Vegetables and herbs, I thought. Perhaps some roses.

  The three of us ate dinner that evening, a meal I insisted on cooking. You already kept the kitchen tidy, and plenty of butter in the larder. I whipped up a goulash with the last of the paprika from my grandmother’s hoard, wrapped in an old handkerchief she’d had straight from her own mother. Both you and Gabriel ate until you nearly popped your buttons, and I remember thinking it was kind of you, regardless of how well you truly liked my food.

  We gathered in the parlor with hot applesauce and cream, me on the delicate sofa and you and Gabriel lounging on rugs near the fire. The space filled with warmth, and although I felt the sorrow and loneliness of losing my family still crouched in my heart, your gentle eyes and Gabriel’s crackling energy soothed it.

  “What do you want here, Evie?” Gabriel asked as he set aside his bowl and leaned back onto both his hands. In the firelight his slick hair glinted like oil.

  You touched his wrist with just a flick of your fingers, and he shrugged one shoulder. “She isn’t offended, Arthur,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.” I took in his relaxed posture, and the way you, too, seemed to have softened into the room, with your boots off and your back reclined against the arm of the sofa. “It’s your home, and of course you should know what I want.” I bent and unbuttoned the ankles of my shoes, slipping my feet out and tucking them up under me. You followed the motion with your eyes, and Gabriel grinned as he stretched like a cat.

  “He never told me what you wrote in your letter,” you said, finally.

  I spoke directly to you: “My older brother died in France, and my mother of a weak heart last year. Father vanished a month ago, and the authorities suspect he was robbed and murdered. I performed what magic I could to find him, and he is not to be found.” I sighed as prettily as possible. “There was nothing for me to do but pay his debts, which were few to my fortune, and seek work. I remembered Gabriel from a visit just after the war, that he’d mentioned living here in Kansas where there is always work for a strong man and land all around. A city, perhaps, would be better suited to a young girl needing a place, but he spoke of the prairie with such”—here my eyes strayed to Gabriel—“such hunger and pride, it invoked the first desire I’d felt since Father disappeared.”

  Gabriel’s smile curled deeper and he leaned forward. “Creating desire is a particular skill of mine.”

  His insinuation made my eyelashes flutter, and I focused on keeping my hands relaxed in my lap. I raised my chin and said, “My girlfriends and the headmistress of my school warned me of coming to two men, no matter how I insisted we were related. I indicated the relation was much closer than it is.” I had no idea if our mutually powerful blood suggested there was any truth in the claim, but it had worked with my would-be protectors in Chicago.

  You said with quiet assurance, “It was well done, and no lie. In the eyes of God, certainly, our blood is connected.”

  I was able to meet your glance, glad to hear you voice the connection I felt already. “I did allow,” I admitted, shakily, “that if they do not have news of me within the month, to send the authorities here to you, to say you had no doubt done horrible things to me.”

  Gabriel laughed again and got to his feet. “I like you, Evie. You have the courage of a blue jay—yelling and beating away birds five times your size to protect what’s yours.”

  “And you do not need protection from us,” you added. “You’re safe, Miss Sonnenschein, here.”

  I allowed myself a smile. “That is what I need, and all I want in addition is to be busy. To build a garden, perhaps, and cook and sew and learn the land. For now.”

  All during the train ride from Chicago, I’d held dear the hope
that you would offer me a home, knowing it was temporary. While I grew and learned, while I found my happiness again. After a few years I would take the train to Kansas City for college, would find a calling beyond the garden, then find a good man and raise my own family.

  But already those imaginings were breaking into little pieces. Every time you looked at me, a shard of my old dreams fell away.

  You would not let me clean the kitchen because it was my first night, instead dragging Gabriel in to help you. As the two of you banged around, as Gabriel lifted his voice in an old French song I could not understand, I walked outside into the darkness with the handkerchief of ground paprika.

  Cold wind brushed the trees together, making me shiver in the thin blue dress I’d worn under my coat all the way from Chicago. It was darker than any night I’d ever seen, and the stars sprinkled across the sky like spilled salt. I rolled off my stockings and shuffled through the high, wild grass to the southwest corner of the house, which I thought would be best for my garden. Here there would be both shade and sun, where the hill cut down steeply enough that the trees didn’t grow too near the house.

  Kneeling, I dug into the cool earth with my fingers, sifting through the loamy soil. There I set down my grandmother’s mother’s handkerchief, with its little bits of paprika dust. I spilt three drops of blood over it and buried it all with a short prayer that it would settle my spirit and make roots for my heart.

  NINE

  WILL

  I dreamed about crazy-sharp rose thorns and struggles in the dark. When I woke up, sweat stuck the sheets to me. My mouth was a wasteland, and my chest ached. I stumbled to the bathroom. I rinsed and brushed and swished Listerine—twice. I was rewarded with a few minutes free of it, but by the time I finished my shower it was creeping back with a hint of blood. So was the quick memory of a rose petal falling out of my mouth onto the messed-up face of a mud monster.

  I tried not to think about that. Couldn’t have been real. It was only dreams. A new twist to my Holly nightmares. But I barely bothered drying off before pulling my lips back to check my tongue and gums for cuts. Maybe I’d actually been bleeding just slightly since yesterday morning? But there was nothing cut that I could see, and no tender spots as I poked around.

  Maybe it was a head injury.

  What if I had a tumor or something and it was making me taste blood and imagine crazy girls fighting off mud monsters? I turned away from the mirror and took deep breaths.

  Back in my bedroom, I powered up the computer while I pulled on clothes. The Internet wouldn’t be the most accurate place to find medical info, but it could give me an idea.

  I started on one of those symptom tracker sites and put in “metallic taste” and “furry tongue,” which felt true. The site told me I might be constipated. I laughed, because that definitely wasn’t the case. Other options: medical reaction (no kidding), antibiotic use (not that I knew of), or poisoning.

  I scrubbed at my face with my hands. It was just a dumb Internet doctor site, so I shouldn’t let myself get worked up. But I stuck in one more potential symptom: “hallucinations.”

  That was the scary one. More potential conditions popped up on my screen. Drug abuse. Three different kinds of epilepsy. Schizophrenia.

  I shoved away from the computer and rolled my shoulders. “Don’t get worked up,” I ordered myself, and clicked on my stereo. A heavy-metal mash-up blasted through my bedroom. It shook its way through my skull and overpowered the fear, making it hard to breathe.

  Forcing myself to sort of sing along, I hurried through the rest of my morning routine, ignoring the taste of blood poking at my tongue.

  MAB

  First thing in the morning, I found Nick feeding the crows bits of burned bacon on the front porch. The sunrise was well under way, the morning air surprisingly cool on my bare arms. He fed them from his fingers, one piece, one bird, at a time.

  His bag leaned against the front tire of the SUV; Nick had only been waiting to say goodbye before heading out.

  “Morning, Mab,” he said, holding out the plate of bacon. I sat beside him on the steps and tied my hair into a knot at the back of my neck.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “As I ever do on that sofa.” When I’d retired last night, Nick had stretched out in the parlor with his hat over his face. No wonder he was the first person up, when I remembered him sleeping until noon in the past.

  “No bad dreams?”

  “No dreams at all.”

  I glanced toward the garden, where the roses curled in tight knots. It had been a full day now since I’d released the curse from their roots, since it had gone careening away in my doll. Today, I supposed, I should go gather the pieces of it and give the perished curse a proper binding. It was certainly what Arthur had meant when he told me to destroy the roses: not the plants themselves, but the curse. Once the curse was dealt with entirely, the roses themselves would be only harmless flowers. I glanced around the house to where the garden sprawled in all its lush glory. The multicolored buds and the tangle of leaves made me think of Granny Lyn crouched beside them for hours, digging into the ground with her sharp trowel, plucking individual leaves and dotting others with her blood to keep away blight and bugs.

  “Are Donna and the kid still sleeping?” Nick asked, tossing the final crumbs of bacon into the grass.

  “Yes.” We’d been up late after I came home from the silo, watching an old Disney movie about a living car. Pan had fallen asleep in a mess of old quilts, and Nick had carried him up into Arthur’s bedroom. I’d peeked in this morning to find him curled into a ball at the very foot of the bed, pillows entirely abandoned. “Where did you find him?”

  “Arkansas. I was driving up from New Orleans—you know, the Perrys?”

  I nodded. The blood kin scattered all over the country, in small pockets and family strings, and the Perrys were my cousins.

  “I’d gone down to pick up some stuff they had for Silla and was eating lunch at this antique market full of deer heads and porcelain raccoons, just off the highway, and that charm Silla made for warding against curses got hot in my pocket.” He paused, started to add something with a playful lift to his mouth, but stopped and sighed as if he was disappointed. “I asked around, found out there were lots of stories about witch-fire in the woods nearby and birds falling dead out of the sky. The usual stuff. I picked a spot, dove into the woods, and basically made a beeline for the kid, like I just knew where to find him. He was alone, holding fire in his hands, waiting for me. Said the trees told him I was coming and that I’d take him to his sister.” Nick eyed me. “Your mom have any other kids you know about?”

  The idea tightened my intestines but expanded my heart at the same time. “No,” I said. “But the Deacon is everybody’s family. Did he have anyone at all?”

  Nick edged closer to me. “I asked him, and he said his father lived in a cabin next to the river but that we should please just leave. I didn’t like it, but when I tried to go for his dad, the kid lifted up his shirt and …” He wiped his hands on his jeans and then got off the porch. He walked through the gathered crows, causing them to flap and bark at him, to hunker down in the pebbled driveway. “Here, Mab.”

  I joined him, enjoying the massage of the tiny smooth stones on my bare feet. Nick used his finger to draw a complicated symbol into the pebbles. “This was carved into the small of his back.”

  “A black candle rune.”

  “Whatever you call it. I know what it’s for.”

  I could tell Nick wished he didn’t know. Two years ago, Faith’s husband, Eli, had known a woman being stalked in Kansas City, and so Arthur and I had spun together a powerful charm to turn the man away, to bend his desires off of Eli’s friend. We’d used a black candle rune on an old walnut tree, tying the charm to its life instead of our own, and within nine days the leaves had fallen dark and twisted and dead.

  Tracing my finger over Nick’s rune, I said softly, “His father did it?”

&nb
sp; “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never heard of a witch using another person for a familiar like that.”

  “Glad to hear it, because I was a little afraid you’d say it was no big deal.”

  I glanced sharply at him, the words pinching. “You were?”

  Nick winced. “Just a little. Sorry.”

  “It’s good you brought him,” I said, standing up and walking farther out into the yard, where the morning sun was high enough over the caps of the trees that it hit me full and warm in the face.

  “It’s what you do.” He joined me, tipping his hat to shade his eyes.

  “What we do,” I corrected. “And we won’t stop even if we’re in Oregon, will we?”

  Nick laughed, sharp and loud. “No, I guess not.”

  “Good.” I faced him and put a hand flat on his T-shirt, just over his heart. “Our family spreads all across the continent, Nick. Donna might think distance changes that, but I know better.”

  He squinted down at me, brow furrowed under the brim of the porkpie. Once, he had told me, You’re nothing like your mother, and even though I knew he was completely wrong, his saying it made me love him. “Okay, Mab.” He took my hand off his chest but held it as he pulled me back inside to avoid further sensitive talk. “Maybe we should go make some bacon fit for human consumption before they wake up.”

  As we went, I glanced up at the window over the kitchen, where Pan slept, and sent up a silent prayer that the magic of the black candle rune was already broken.

  TEN

  The first days I lived with you, I helped prepare for winter. You and Gabriel repaired the fence around the horse pasture, though you had no horses, and took turns summoning winds to blow through the barn in order to find and plug all the leaks. There was plenty of cleaning in the house, and I mended several blankets as well as marking out the boundaries of what would be my garden in the spring. I chipped away at the cold earth to plant a few winter bulbs, and helped you clean the chimney.