Blood Magic

  I did it all, there on my attic floor. The water circle, then a seven-point star of blood. Water dripped down to dilute the blood, giving my star weak pink edges. It still tickled, but I didn’t laugh now. The laughter was trapped in my throat and sharp like a chunk of rock. I pressed fingerprints onto all my torn-up, ragged shapes and said, “Paper shapes fly free, dance high, watch over me.”

  For a second, it was all bullshit. The memories of Mom were these broken bones poking up through my skin. She’d deluded me, tricked me, made me believe in magic that didn’t exist.

  But then I thought of her delighted smile, and the paper shapes trembled against my carpet as if a light draft teased at them. They shook harder, several of them jumping up to dance a foot in the air.

  I scrambled back. My palm smeared across the floor, breaking the spell, and the paper fluttered back down.

  I jammed the holy water back into the box and slammed it shut, shoving the whole thing back under the bed. Gathering the shreds of paper, I tried not to think of being a little boy and going to sleep with dozens of rainbow-colored paper stars shaking over my head as they clung near the ceiling. They’d been better than any night-light, better than a blankie or stuffed bear or Power Ranger toy. Because nothing had kept them up there but the power of my mom’s love, she said. As long as they hung up there, her blood and mine were connected. Nothing could hurt me.

  Now I crumpled my aborted paper spell in my fist and threw the pieces into the plastic bag I’d been using for trash.

  Because I’d only been eight when the first bright-yellow star, shrouded with dust, had slowly fallen to the carpet.

  March 27, 1904

  This is how I found out about the Magic:

  I had been with him for nine months, and all he had me do was read and read and read, and write and write and write. I copied pages from Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romances and Mr. Twain’s silly book, and at night Philip would read Whitman or Poe, and I would write down what I heard as he read, until I could write as quickly as he spoke. I preferred the rhyming, because it was easier to predict the direction in which the words would flow. Philip’s Library is small and cramped, but the books pile on top of each other until I feel their Weight will bring down the very house around our heads. One entire wall is these creaking old books with pictures in them of Dead bodies and body parts! There is a shelf of Shakespeare, which he told me I was not sophisticated enough for, so I grabbed up a play named The Tempest, and I read a speech by a creature named Ariel again and again, until it was trapped in my mind. After dinner I stood and recited it for Philip. He slowly clapped his hands and called me his little air sprite. His face became sad, and he asked if I understood what Ariel said. “He has made a storm and destroyed men, for love of Prospero!” I said.

  “For love of Prospero,” he said, and he laughed quietly. “Little sprite, tomorrow will you come with me, to assist with my Work?”

  Of course I did agree.

  I began to help him gather the Blood the very next day.

  It comes from his patients. He bleeds them as physicians did Long Ago, but not to drain the Illness away. That is old superstition with no Truth in it. Philip says this with disgust. But his patients do not know better than to let him do it, and if they did, no one would listen to such people as he helps. I do not know WHY he helps them, people who will not or cannot go to hospital, who are poor and dark and dirty.

  I did not want to go back into those places, but I am clean and fine now, and they would never Know me. The smells did not disgust me before, but now everything is horrible. Philip does not care! He kneels at their beds and does not notice when a woman is black with dirt or a child has vomit crusted in the corners of his mouth! I stare and stand beside him holding the ceramic cup as the blood flows in, trying to pretend I was never on a bed like that, all Lumpy and Infested, that I was never ugly and that my hands have always been so soft from Philip’s oils. I close my eyes and pretend that I do not recall the repetition of the shuttle and the heat when I had to touch the thread to untangle it before Mrs. Wheelock noticed. I do not think about the smell of boiled onions coming from the patients’ fire and that once such things were all I had to eat.

  I hate this! I hate him for making me remember what I was. What I swear on my immortal soul I shall never, ever be again.

  I close myself off to the memories, and we are suddenly players on a dark stage, my Prospero and I, gathering the Blood for our midnight secrets. Although it is only a small amount that we take from each patient, I imagine the cup growing heavy in my hands until my arms tremble with the effort. I measure it into flasks from his leather bag and label them with different-colored inks and different letters. The colors for stages of health and the letters for which ailment affects them. When I arrive home, I take the flasks into the laboratory and lay them out in groups and rows where they belong.

  One afternoon, I stood in the shadowy corner of the laboratory, holding a flask up to stare at the way the Blood separated. It was so strange, and I remember I was curious why it did not do that inside my skin.

  Philip came in with sweat on his forehead, and did not notice me there. He yawned until his jaw cracked, and collapsed behind his desk. The windows were drawn tightly shut, and only two gas lamps were lit, because I prefer the dimness. He leaned back into his chair and whispered, “I will never find it.”

  I was unable to resist walking behind him. I rubbed his shoulders as Mrs. Wheelock rubbed Mr. Wheelock’s when he came to the mill on Fridays.

  “Josephine,” Philip said, reaching up to touch my hands. “I did not see you, child.”

  I bent and kissed his fingers. I am not a child. I am his airy sprite.

  With my hand in his, he drew me around and turned his chair so we faced one another. “It truly does not bother you to be here, with the lights so low and surrounded by blood?”

  I laughed.

  “No, not you.” He shook his head. “Come here.” He stood with my hand in his. His fingers were cold. I followed him to one of the long tables, the one bare of phials and flasks. A circle was etched into it, and dark stains smeared through the line, soaking the grain of the wood. Philip took a piece of chalk and drew a circle inside the circle. He connected the two with more lines and then drew a strange letter in the center. “Give me your kerchief.”

  I drew the square of linen from my skirt’s pocket. He gave it to me my first week here. It is embroidered with a tiny butterfly, blue and yellow, in the corner.

  “Thank you.” Philip took it and folded it over his strange chalk letter, with the butterfly facing up. He whispered something in another language, two words repeated again and again. Then he held out his hand for mine. I gave it.

  With his other, he lifted the same tiny knife with which he’d cut my hair. I sucked in a sharp breath, but he said, “Do not fear me, Josephine. I am about to show you your power.”

  I clenched my jaw and ignored the burning in my stomach. I spread my fingers wide to stop them from shaking. Philip put the knife against my longest finger, and I whimpered. Stopping, he looked to me with a patient expression. I shook my head and whispered, “Please. Please, I want you to show me.”

  When he pricked my finger, I bit the tip of my tongue as the sharp pain dragged at my spirit. A drop of blood welled up like a tear. It slowly stretched until it dripped off of my skin and fell onto the kerchief, staining the butterfly red.

  Into my ear, Philip whispered, “Lean over and say to it: ‘I give you life.’ ”

  I tilted my face to him. We were as close as we had ever been. His dark eyes drew in all the light. My breath shook and I needed to be here, needed this closeness more than anything in the world. And so I stared down at the blood soaking into the embroidery thread and said, “I give you life, little butterfly.”

  It leapt off the linen, alive and frisky. I fell back, only keeping my feet because Philip had his arm around me. My heart beat as fast as the butterfly’s wings, and I flew, too, trapped in my Prospero’s ar
ms, as landscapes of possibility unfurled below me.

  “All blood is life and energy, Josephine,” he said as I stared at the fluttering creature. “But some, like mine and yours, holds the power of God and his angels.”

  The butterfly’s wings flashed blue and gold and scarlet in the gaslight.

  SILLA

  After dinner, I retired up to my room to wait for Gram Judy to go to bed. Reese had gone for a run, and once he was back and Judy was asleep, I’d be able to tiptoe down the hall and drag him outside to prove the magic was real.

  I waited, rereading the regeneration spell and reciting the instructions to myself while pacing in a circle under the watchful eyes of the theater masks hanging on my walls. My own secret audience.

  Reese came home, slamming the front door. He clomped up to shower, and at 8:37 p.m. Judy called up the stairs, “Night, kids!”

  “Night!” I yelled back, and heard Reese’s muffled goodnight through the coursing water. He finished, and I listened to him move down to his bedroom.

  At my window, I pushed my forehead against the cool glass, blinking out at the dark front yard. Yellow light from the porch revealed our bare maple tree. Most of its leaves had fallen into scarlet piles. I imagined breathing life into them all, making them dance up like butterflies to reattach to the branches. A fiery maple lasting until the springtime. It would be a bloody glow against the whites and grays of winter.

  Waiting fifteen more minutes was like watching the moon rise.

  Finally I pulled on my boots and sweater and gathered up salt, a half-dozen candles, and the spell book, and put them in a plastic sack. Safe in the back pocket of my jeans was the pocketknife.

  Down the hall, I knocked quietly on Reese’s door before pushing it open. The knock was worthless, though, given that he was stretched out on his bed with headphones totally covering his ears.

  Before Mom and Dad died, I’d probably have found him hunched over a puzzle that sprawled in five thousand pieces across his desk. Something impossible, like the night sky or a beach with nothing on it. He’d have been playing games online with his friends in St. Louis, or reading a huge old science fiction paperback and grumbling at the bad physics.

  Instead his face was drawn and still, eyes closed, and only his index finger moved, tapping out a frenetic drumbeat.

  He’d torn all his posters down after the funeral, and every time I came in here I felt as empty as the walls. The only thing breaking up their vastness was the crater a foot from the doorjamb, where Reese had punched through. I’d tried to help bandage his knuckles, and Gram Judy had nearly fainted at the huge noise. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his hand, that he hadn’t hit a post.

  Tonight, I had to make him believe in the magic. It would give him something new to sink his teeth into. A problem to solve. He’d chew on it and dissect it until we understood it from every angle, inside and out.

  “Hey,” I said, touching his forehead.

  Reese’s eyes snapped open. For a moment, we just looked at each other. My practiced confidence fell away under his dark scrutiny until I flicked my gaze down to the iPod resting on his chest.

  He swung his legs off the bed and sat. “What’s wrong, bumblebee?”

  “Nothing. I just want a favor.” I met his eyes again. His eyebrows rose, and I rushed on. “Come out to the cemetery and let me show you the magic.”

  “I thought you’d given that crap up, Silla.” His frown reminded me of Dad.

  I shook my head. “I’ve been studying it. I want to show you.”

  “It’s bullshit. Didn’t we go through this?”

  “It isn’t!”

  “This Deacon guy is just messing with you. With us. Probably a joker from school, or that asshole Fenley at the sheriff’s station. He always hated me.”

  “Then how’d he get Dad’s handwriting so good?”

  “He stole something, I don’t know.”

  “It works, though, the magic.”

  Reese pressed his lips into a line.

  I raised my chin a little, daring him to call me crazy.

  “Silla.”

  “Let me show you.”

  “Bumblebee—”

  “No, Reese. Please.” I touched his hands, and he wrapped them around my freezing fingers. He didn’t want to look at the rings. “Let me show you. If you think I’m losing it an hour from now, I’ll do whatever you want. See Ms. Tripp at school every day, or even a real therapist in Cape Girardeau. Anything.”

  His jaw remained clenched. I saw the fear in his eyes and wondered what he was thinking. Was he terrified that I was insane? Or that I wasn’t? Slowly, he nodded. “Okay. One hour.” His voice was strained, and his hands tightened on mine.

  Relieved, I immediately stood up. “Bring that.” I pointed at the sparrow skeleton he’d painstakingly put together his freshman year of high school, during his zoology phase.

  “What? Really?” His eyes scrunched up.

  “Yes.” Before he could protest again, I turned away and slipped out the door. On my way downstairs, I imagined a perfect mask. It needed to be fierce and dramatic: a black shimmer with red lips and a thick red slash across the eyes. It fit over my face like a second skin.

  “This is ridiculous,” Reese grumbled as we crouched together in front of Mom’s and Dad’s graves. I’d fought for them to be buried together the way Dad had requested in his will, though everyone else thought Dad didn’t deserve it.

  “Just wait.” Settling on the cold ground with my legs crossed, I presented the spell book. “Here, open it to the regeneration spell at the end.”

  Reese took it and cracked it open. “It’s messed up, Sil. Dad was messed up.”

  “Or scared.”

  “Like psychotics are scared people are out to get them.”

  I shook my head and began setting out candles while Reese skimmed through the book again. The flares of the matches were tiny explosions against the darkness. When we were protected by the circle of flames, I opened the ziplock bag of salt and sprinkled a line of it in a circle all the way around Mom’s and Dad’s graves. The grains sparkled like diamonds against the dark earth.

  A thin breeze kicked up suddenly, and I shivered as it snaked down my neck and under my jacket. “Did you read the stuff about sympathetic magic?”

  “Yeah, and the elemental properties of the spell components. And the symbolism. Ribbons for binding, wax for transformation, a river-bored stone for easing pain—I’m telling you, it’s just folk magic. There’s no reason for it to work. Dad was probably writing a paper or something.”

  “What about the blood? As a catalyst?”

  “Ancient. Blood has always been seen as magical by less scientifically advanced people. Even in Christianity, for chrissake.”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t magical.”

  “It does, Silla. Blood is just proteins and oxygen and hormones and water. If blood really had unique properties, we’d know. Somebody would have discovered it.”

  “Like Dad. He discovered it.”

  Reese shook his head, his face as much a mask as mine in the flickering candlelight. “It’s all symbolism. Unconscious stuff, psychology. Focusing the will to get what you want—or to think you’re getting what you want.”

  “How can you tell that just from flipping through the book a couple of times? You’re only seeing what you want to see in it.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  I clenched my hands together until my rings pinched, and raised my chin. “I just didn’t know you knew so much about old folk magic.”

  He didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw. Even in the poor light I could see the muscles working.

  “Reese?”

  He glared at me. “Dad had some books on it.” I was quiet.

  Wind rushed through the dying leaves in the nearby forest. The one surrounding Nick’s house. The breeze knocked leaves into the headstones around us, and the salt circle shivered but didn’t break.

  “Reese,” I said, re
aching to touch his hand. The knuckles stood out where he clenched the spell book. “It’s amazing, Reese. Not horrible. It feels like a warm tingle in your blood. Welcoming and … powerful.”

  His frown deepened. “Sounds addictive.”

  “Maybe.” I tugged his hand off the book and wove our fingers together. “Just come with me on this. For a few moments, let go of your anger at Dad. I know he deserves it, but this … let this be for us. For me. Please. Imagine the possibilities.”

  Reese’s eyes lifted to mine and I held his gaze even as it bored into me. I tightened my grip on his hand, which was as cold as mine. “God, you look just like him. That look, right now,” he whispered. I didn’t glance away, but felt nostalgia and sadness taint my expression. “Okay, bumblebee.”

  Relieved that the moment was over, I leaned back and briskly said, “Just—just put the bird in the center of the salt circle.”

  The skeleton was so delicate, positioned with its wings spread. I’d been wary of the large eye sockets when he’d first constructed it, until Reese had said, “A skull is just like one of your masks. Only, this one lives under the face.”

  I set the small blue and gray feathers Reese had also grabbed around the skeleton. They’d belonged to the bird when Reese found it dead on the front steps. Maybe it would remember the feeling of wind ruffling them. Sympathetic magic, I hoped.

  Moving to sit across the circle from Reese so that we faced each other over the skeleton, I flipped out the blade of my pocketknife and put it to my palm. Since this was no mere leaf, I probably needed more blood than a prick to the thumb could manage. I couldn’t risk its not working for Reese. I bit the inside of my lip, readying myself for the queasy pain to come. This was the worst part. But I understood that you had to sacrifice for the magic to work. And I didn’t want to hesitate in front of my brother.

  I slashed.

  Reese hissed through his teeth and stared at the blood pooling in my cupped palm.