Spells Of Blood And Kin Part 33

In the house next door, someone played piano: long arpeggios, an exercise, marred here and there with hesitations. Lissa felt the weight of her sleepless nights.

"I can't," she said.

"Because they have not agreed?" Maksim said, a rough edge in his voice.

"I just can't." Lissa's turn to hide her face with a too-large sip of wine. "You were a mess for a while there. Do you remember me telling you about the ritual? About how it was against the rules?"

Maksim shook his head.

"Yeah. We're not supposed to do anything at the new moon. And when I asked Baba about it, what she'd done for you, I didn't ask all the right questions."

Maksim frowned, the lines in his face deepening. "That smell," he said. "I thought the magic smelled wrong."

"Yeah. I don't really want to discuss it in detail, but it's not something I can do again. Not now. Maybe not ever."

"Your sister?"

"h.e.l.l no," Lissa said. "You're not listening. There was a price, and I'm paying it. And it kind of sucks, and there's no way I'm going to let Stella do that for Gus or Nick or anyone else."

"Break the egg, then," he said, laying his hands flat on the table. "Dig it up and break it."

"No. No, Maksim. I know what you were thinking of doing when you offered to leave before the ritual."

She could see from the look on his face that she'd been right. He didn't have to speak.

"Were you suicidal before, when you first came to my grandmother?"

He made a motion with his head that might have been a nod.

"That's why she did it for you, then."

"She owed me a very great debt, koldun'ia."

"She never told me about it." And Maksim did not look likely to tell her either, Lissa saw.

He pressed his hands to his eyes. "All I knew was what she owed me; I did not know what I asked of her or of you."

"My grandmother was willing to pay the price. She asked me to do this. She must've known it wouldn't be easy, but she thought you were worth it."

"I will try to find a way to thank you, koldun'ia," Maksim said, unsmiling. "And I will not ask again."

He left then, leaving his wine half-finished.

Lissa flipped through a grimoire and set it aside. She'd been through it all earlier, looking for the ritual in the first place; she wouldn't find answers here or in any of Baba's full-moon books. She'd have to wait and ask Baba herself.

How to stop the nightmares or live through them, of course. And what Maksim had done for her, whenever he had done it.

Lissa did not think she would ask anyone what Maksim had done later to make him fear himself so much. It had been bad enough that he'd rather die than do it again, and that was all she wanted to know.

JUNE 11.

WAXING CRESCENT.

Nick's sense of smell worked even better now. He was learning. And he had, also, the memory of Maksim's address book, which had listed an apartment on Dunn Avenue.

Who even used an address book anymore? People who were hundreds of years old and hadn't really got used to computers, apparently; but he guessed there was the factor that other people who were hundreds of years old had s.h.i.+tty subsistence-level lives and weren't on Facebook, and so you had to remember it somehow. At least Maksim hadn't written it in Russian or something.

He'd forgotten the street number, but it didn't matter. All of Dunn Avenue smelled faintly of Gus, as if she'd been walking up and down it for decades. Maybe she had.

Nick stood in the middle of the street. A taxi honked at him. He gave the driver the finger and turned in a slow circle.

South, toward the lake, stronger scent beckoned. Not far.

He followed the thread down an alley between two old Victorians. They'd been beautiful once. Dead vines dangled from the walls; gingerbread trim rotted below leaking rain gutters.

Of course Gus would live here. Nick climbed the fire escape on the outside of her building and knocked upon the boarded window of her door.

She threw a bottle, by the sound of it. It didn't make it through the plywood barrier, but Nick heard it burst and shower shards onto a tiled floor.

"Are you done?" he called.

"f.u.c.k off!" Gus shouted from within. "I told you. We don't enter each other's houses."

"We both spent the last week in Maksim's," Nick said with syrupy reason, hoping it would p.i.s.s her off even more.

She banged the door open. "I'm going to Durban," she said.

"Why? Oh, wait, I know. To visit your old girlfriend or something. Right?"

"She wasn't my girlfriend," Gus said, hanging on to the door frame.

"How drunk are you?" asked Nick.

Gus laughed and backed down; Nick cautiously stepped into the apartment.

"What a s.h.i.+t hole," he said, without thinking. The window over the fire escape wasn't the only broken one. The fire door led into a cramped main room furnished with a sofa and one wooden chair. The door into the kitchen had been torn from its hinges and left propped against the nearby wall.

The kitchen barely rated the name: it held a laundry sink with the tap wound about in duct tape, a bar refrigerator, and a hot plate mounded with a mess of melted plastic and scorched food.

Gus saw where he was looking. "I forgot I was cooking," she said. "It could happen to anyone."

"Anyone drunk," Nick said.

Gus sprawled on the sofa. "Did you come to fight?"

Nick shrugged.

"You know you're not up to my weight yet," Gus scolded him.

"Maybe not. But no one else is up to mine, really, so I don't have much choice. I'd rather get my a.s.s handed to me than completely mangle some random s.h.i.+thead who happens to be in the wrong alley."

"That's a lie," Gus said. "You'd love to mangle a random s.h.i.+thead." She tongued over the words mockingly, nearly missing a few of the consonants.

Nick shrugged again and helped himself to the open bottle of rye, making a face at the taste.

"If you don't like it, you could have brought me something else."

"I did," Nick said, remembering. He dug through his duffel bag and brought out an unopened bottle of Jameson's, half a mickey of rum, and two airline-sized bottles of vermouth. "The leftovers from my place," he explained.

"Raising anchor?" Gus said and began singing "Spanish Ladies."

"What is it with you and that song? Don't you know anything from this century?"

"It reminds me of the first girl I kissed. In Cadiz. A long time ago."

"I think I'm going to have girls all over the world too," Nick said. He felt a smile spreading over his face as the rye sank in. "I'm going to start with Stella Moore."

Gus went quiet and looked at him.

"She likes me," Nick said. "I know she does."

"She hit you with an egg."

"That's because she has a lot of self-respect."

Gus covered her eyes with her forearm and reached out her other hand for the bottle, which was nowhere nearby; Nick uncapped the rum and guided her fingers around it.

"I think I'll take her with me on a trip," he went on. "Her sister would never let me hang around their place; and anyway, Stella's not the kind of girl who will stay in one town for long. Maybe we'll go to Greece."

"Nick," said Gus.

Nick blinked.

"You came to my home," Gus said. "Against my wishes. You have about five more minutes before I finish drinking your rum and start doing violence. I suggest you say what you came to say."

Nick bit his lip and inhaled. "You aren't really going to Durban, are you?"

Gus laughed. "How would you know?"

He was right; he could tell by the flat look on her face, but she seemed to want him to show his work.

"You're here drinking," he said, "instead of at the airport or on a train. You don't have any things to pack. You know Maksim is okay now. You could be out of town in about ten seconds if you meant to go."

She nodded.

"Why?" Nick said.

"Why do you think?"

"You know she wouldn't take you back," he guessed. "She's your ex for a good reason. Right? You've been here in Toronto for a long time, years, and you wouldn't have been if you could have gone back to this girl anytime."

"She isn't a girl anymore," Gus said, but she didn't disagree with any of what Nick had said. "I haven't seen her in a decade, at least."

"What did you do? Cheat on her? Act crazy? She didn't like your drinking?"

Gus shrugged. "All of the above. Also, I hit her."

Nick whistled.

Gus narrowed yellow-gray eyes at him and lifted off the sofa. "So would you have."

"I'd never..." Nick paused.

"Hit a woman? Tell that to the bruise on my ribs," Gus said. "A person weaker than you? Didn't you skip out of your flat because you think you killed your best friend?"

"He's okay," Nick said, hands out, warding her off.

She kept advancing. "Maybe you got off easy this time," she said, "but you won't always."

"I can control myself."

"You have to want to. That's the thing that keeps f.u.c.king us up," Gus said. She turned away, wiping at her face.

"Why do you even give a s.h.i.+t?"

"Because you're my kid brother," she said, and she whipped around, catching him in a headlock, and she scrubbed his hair with her fist.

Nick twisted his shoulder into her gut and tried to throw her.

Gus's apartment didn't contain many breakable things, but they managed to crack an arm of the sofa and decorate the kitchen floor with vermouth and broken gla.s.s before the pounding of the neighbors below began to register.

Nick spat a strand of Gus's hair out of his mouth and sat up. "f.u.c.k," he said, falling back again, picking a gla.s.s shard from the ball of his thumb.

"You did better this time," Gus mumbled through swollen lips.

Nick grinned. "I feel better."

"Don't get comfortable."

"Not much danger of that." His knuckles ached, and his cheekbone began to swell; his scalp stung where Gus had thrown him into the corner of the refrigerator; the little toe on his left foot felt broken, and maybe the one beside it too. But all of that paled beside the weirdness that had been creeping up on him unnoticed during the fight. "Is it magic? Something's really seriously making me want to get out of here."