Blood Magic by Tessa Gratton
“Holy shit, Silla.” Reese drew away from me. He blinked slowly, his brain’s version of the egg timer that shows up when the computer needs you to wait while it processes something. Then he said, “That makes sense. There are a lot of stories about witches possessing other animals, and people, too. Witches, and the demons, of course.” His voice was soft, and he looked away. “You mean that someone possessed Dad and made him kill Mom, then shoot himself.”
“Yeah.” I settled back against his shoulder.
“But who, Silla? Who would do that? Who could?”
“I don’t know. Another wizard, maybe.”
“Sil, this isn’t Harry Potter.”
“It’s weird to call Dad a witch.”
“The Deacon calls him a magician.”
“Like Houdini.”
“Maybe.” Reese bonked his head lightly on mine. “Houdini was into the occult.”
I grumbled and tightened my arms around myself. Reese put an arm around my shoulders.
“We have to try the possession spell. To see if it works,” I said.
“That’s too advanced, Sil, we should keep working up to it.”
“There might not be time.”
“Maybe there’s a way to protect against it.”
“Like one of the protection-against-evil charms?”
Reese sighed. “But Dad had to have known all of them. And he was vulnerable.”
The thought made me grab his hand and squeeze. “We have to do something.”
“We should focus on finding out who it is.”
“I wonder if we could alter the spell for finding lost things. Whoever it is is sort of lost. From us.”
“Maybe.” He yawned widely enough to crack his jaw.
It passed to me, and as I yawned, I pressed closer to my brother.
Our house faced northwest, so all the stars were visible, and would be for at least an hour. I picked out the constellations I knew. The Big Dipper. Perseus. The cool dawn air smelled of dank leaves and dry smoke. And perfume. “You smell like perfume.”
“I was with Danielle.”
“Gross.”
“Oh, yeah, after your escapades with Nick Pardee, you don’t get to throw stones.”
“I guess.”
“You really trust him?”
“Gram likes him,” I said in a small voice.
Reese sighed. “We’ll figure it out, Silla. We have to.”
I just kept watching the stars. I wanted to see them move. I always had.
June 14, 1905
I have seen our destiny!
Philip took me out into the forest today and taught me the art of Possession. He cautioned me first, as he tends to do, that while possession is a valuable tool for learning, it is a dangerous and tempting weapon. I adore temptation.
I expected it to be so difficult, because Philip struggles, despite his vast practice, to claim his spirit’s ownership over even a small jaybird. But I—I leap into it as though I had always known how to fly! When I tumbled out of the sky and back into my body that first time, I was laughing and exhilarated. Philip lay beside me, watching as I stood and twirled. “You are not exhausted?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows. I stopped and smiled at him, at the blond hair falling over his forehead, at his unbuttoned vest and the long stretch of his legs. I shook my head. “I am alive,” I said, collapsing beside him and flinging my arms around his neck. I kissed his lips through my smiles.
“Josie,” he protested, pushing me back. I showed him my greatest pout, and had him chuckling as he shook his head and touched my hot cheek. “Josie, you are drunk on the magic.”
“Yes!”
Philip laughed. “I have never been good at possessions. They leave me laid out and ruined for hours. I suspect you could take a person, if you liked, for as long as you liked.”
“A person?” The thought flared through me, faster than lightning. A million ideas for pleasure and mischief battered inside my mind.
But Philip shook his head. “Josephine, it is not a game. In the Deacon’s time, men and women were killed for this—for everything we do.”
“Killed? Why should we be murdered for the magic? For healing and finding charms?”
“We’re witches, little sprite.”
My hands flew to my mouth, and I glanced all around at the shadows in the forest. I had thought it but never spoken the word aloud. “Witches.” I said it again, more calmly. “But our magic is not from the Devil.”
“You don’t think I’m your Devilish familiar? Teaching you dark secrets?”
“I know you’re not—you won’t even kiss me.”
He laughed, and his eyes lowered to my lips. I know he will kiss me soon.
I thought about what he said about our kind being killed, but I am not concerned. I have real power—no one could keep me chained, because my blood can transform iron into water. I could walk through walls if I needed, and now—now I know I can throw my mind into another’s, and how easy, then, would it be to unlock any cage? We are invincible, Philip and I. Like unto God. Or the Devil.
I have forgiven Philip everything, for all that he has shown me. When he closes us into his workroom or takes us out of the city to collect herbs and stones and rich earth, I think perhaps that he will love me as well as I adore him. Our fingers brush and our blood blends together.
NICHOLAS
I slept with my window open, and by the morning I was wrapped up in my sheets like a burrito. That stupid dog dream had woken me up (again), so it was a pain in the ass to drag myself out of bed when my cell phone blared its techno-beat alarm.
By the time I was dressed and downstairs, I only had time to grab a Pop-Tart before running outside to meet the tow truck. I was in such a hurry, I tripped on Lilith’s gardening boots again.
I wished she’d keep the damn things somewhere else, as I picked them up and put them several feet away from the door. It wasn’t like she needed to be gardening right now, anyway. It was practically November, and the ground was freaking cold.
After dealing with the joy of sitting in the tow truck cab with a dude in a flannel shirt, trying to avoid telling him that actually, no, I didn’t give a crap about the St. Louis Rams having a game on Sunday and could he please just ignore me so that I could stare out the window and think about Silla, I met up with Eric at Mercer’s Grocer. It was right next to the mechanic slash gas station. And the Dairy Queen. And the bar with the neon Budweiser frogs in the window. And a hardware store. And a trio of antique stores already throwing open their doors for customers. Okay, pretty convenient to only have to walk a block for anything in town. If you needed old furniture or beer or hammers.
Just inside the sliding glass doors of the grocery was a little coffee cart run by a Mrs. April McGee, and there was a line at 9:45 a.m. on a Saturday.
“Color me shocked,” I said. “The Dairy Queen isn’t the only hangout for the youth of Yaleylah.”
“For that, you’re buying, asshole. I like two packs of sugar in mine.”
Laughing, I did, and joined him across the street in the hardware store a few minutes later. Handing him the cardboard cup, I stood next to him and stared at the wall of tools. “What are you looking for?”
“Hammers.”
I grinned.
“What’s so funny? You don’t have hammers in Chicago? Or you don’t know what one looks like?”
“Nothing, it’s nothing. Did you say hammers, plural?”
“Yeah. For drama club. We—actually, you, oh member of the stage crew—need to make some platforms for the show this week after school.”
“Joy.” I sipped the surprisingly good coffee and stepped forward to inspect the hammers hanging from their little metal hooks. They varied in size from as short as my hand to as long as my forearm. What did you do with a tiny hammer? There were wooden handles and heavy plastic handles. Some painted, some not. It occurred to me that I really didn’t need to know there were so many varieties of hammer. So I spun around and faced Eric
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Did you ever hear strange things about my grandpa?”
“Mr. Harleigh?” Eric flicked his eyes at me, then shrugged again. “Sure. He lived alone next to a cemetery, man. What weird crap didn’t we talk about?”
“So it was all made up.”
The look he gave me said, Seriously?
“Look, I didn’t know him.”
“And you just want some colorful stuff to fill in the blanks.”
“Got it in one.”
“Okay, here was the best one. Ready?” He went all still, so that the only motion was the steam still rising from his coffee. Then he said in a low, half-whispered voice, “They say Mr. Harleigh was two hundred years old when he died. That for a half dozen generations he used the bones out in the cemetery to make a potion of immortality, but gave it up when—” He paused, glancing away guiltily, as if realizing he was about to say something bad about my family.
I stopped holding my breath and shook myself. “When what?”
All the dramatic affectation fell off him. “When your mom lost it.”
“Oh.” Goose bumps screamed down my arms. But I tried to play it off with a wry smile. “Well, she did pretty much go nutso.”
Eric clapped me on the shoulder, looking relieved. “Yeah. We all know. Glad you do, too.”
“It was pretty hard to miss.”
“You should watch out, too.”
“What, like it runs in the family? Don’t worry. My dad is the most boringly sane person on the planet.”
“No, dude.” Eric grinned. “Not genes. The cemetery.”
“The cemetery?”
“It’s like a vortex of evil.” His face lit up. “There’ve been stories about that cemetery forever. My grandma used to talk about the animals avoiding the place—like cows and horses and dogs and stuff—and about seeing strange lights. And think about it. Who lives near the cemetery, and in the last thirty years, who are the only people to have gone crazy and/or been viciously murdered within a hundred miles?”
Coffee turned sour in my stomach. “When you put it that way.”
Eric laughed. “Gives you something else to think about when you’re gazing longingly at Silla.”
I didn’t want him to be, but Eric was right. And he didn’t even know about the magic.
SILLA
Crows flapped lazily a dozen feet from my parents’ graves. Reese and I had tossed an old loaf of bread for them, in several chunks, to keep them around. They seemed content to hop and chatter at each other as they argued over crumbs. Overhead, a solid sheet of blue stretched. All around us, the world rolled away in golden colors, and here we were in the cemetery, surrounded by crumbling headstones and patches of dying grass.
I lay on the ground in the center of a circle of salt and candles.
My blood rushed and throbbed in my fingers and toes, and the grass prickled at my skin. Squeezing my eyes closed, I breathed in and out, concentrating on the motion of my diaphragm. I dug my fingernails into the earth. It smelled cool and fresh. The spell burned through my veins, and my head ached like I’d been hung upside down and shaken.
But the magic wasn’t working.
I let out a sigh and tried to relax, to melt into the ground and let go of myself.
“No luck?” Reese asked.
“Clearly!”
“It isn’t like you’re learning to draw a triangle. This is a whole new language, Sil.”
I opened my eyes. The bright blue sky framed Reese’s head so that I couldn’t see his actual expression to know how serious he was. I guessed not very, and stuck out my tongue.
He laughed.
“I want to do it!” I pushed up to sit. “Everything else has come to me, why not this? I feel—I feel it rushing through me, from the top of my head”—I touched the flaky blood drawn onto my forehead—“to my hands.” I showed him the blood runes he’d drawn on my palms. “It’s pounding with my heartbeat and I want it. God, Reese, I …”
“Maybe you want it too much.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Dad says willpower and belief. Wanting it more should make it easier.”
“So part of you doesn’t believe this should be possible.”
I chewed on the inside of my lip. “It’s … different from everything else. The other spells were about affecting other things, not myself. This is like throwing myself away.”
Reese snorted. “You just like who you are, Silla. You’ve always been like that. Known who you are.”
“I don’t feel that way anymore.”
Reese’s face fell into thoughtfulness. “Are you afraid?”
Was I afraid? The idea made me shift uncomfortably on the cool ground. “Are you?”
“I don’t think so. Think what I could learn by spending time in an animal’s body. Flying, or hunting with a fox …” He turned his face toward the forest.
I gripped his hand. “You could lose yourself. How can a crow hold a whole person? My soul?”
He shook his head and turned back to me. “No, there isn’t a physical manifestation of the soul—not like it has mass. It should be able to rest on the head of a pin, like all the angels.”
Despite the sun, I shivered. The crows jerked and bobbed, oblivious of us.
“I’ll try,” he said. “I’m not worried about losing myself.”
I heaved in a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Trade.” I very slowly got to my feet and stepped out of the circle. My knees wavered, and the cemetery ground tilted.
Reese caught my hand. “Whoa, Sil.”
“I’m totally dizzy.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah. I was trying really hard, and could feel the magic trying to work. Draining me.” Reese steadied me as I knelt and leaned my back against Mom and Dad’s headstone. “God, I’m nauseated, too.”
“Dad has this note about that, did you see it?”
“Yeah.”
Reese read it aloud anyway. “ ‘Recommend ginger or chamomile tea to settle stomach after possession. Can have deleterious effect upon body. Water and sugar for head.’ There’s raisins and cookies in the bag.”
He handed me the backpack and I dug out our water bottle and a plastic bag of raisins. “Ugh.” I wasn’t hungry.
“Drink.”
“I guess my body doesn’t like the idea of being an empty shell.”
“Smart of it.”
“Bleh.” I opened the bag and pulled out a couple of raisins.
“My turn. You have the knife?” Reese leaned back onto his haunches inside the circle. I handed him the pocketknife and watched as he slashed his palm. Wrinkling his lips, he said, “It’s too bad about the rabbit blood.”
The blood had coagulated into a disgusting, lumpy Jell-O. Instead of scraping it out of the Tupperware, I’d tossed the whole thing. Poor, wasted bunny. “Maybe we should stick with our own. To make it a real sacrifice, you know? Like Dad says. But I wish we could ask him.”
Reese cupped his palm. “Yeah, and at least we know where it’s been.”
I reached out and tentatively put my finger in the scarlet pool. It was warm and sticky and gross. I winced, but painted a shaky rune on Reese’s forehead. With his free hand, he pulled down the collar of his sweater. I painted the same rune over his heart and palms. Then Reese moved his bleeding hand out and let his blood drip in a circle around him, reinforcing the ring of salt already in place. It was supposed to let the soul more easily find its way back to the body, according to one of Dad’s arrow points. And those were all the ingredients for this one. Blood, fire for transformation, imagination, and a few little Latin words. I’d noticed that most of the instantaneous spells required less ritual. It was the things meant to last, like warding charms and potions for health and fortune, that took time and planning.
Folding a piece of washcloth, I pressed it against Re
“I read the spell, too, Sil.” Reese closed his eyes. “And you tried quite a bit, so I got to hear the chant several times.”
I smacked his arm. “It was hard, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Reese took a deep, slow breath and folded his hands together in his lap with the bloody towel between them. As he relaxed, his jaw loosened and his eyelashes fluttered. A breeze flicked at his bangs, and my skin lifted into goose pimples. I glanced over to where the crows flapped about, and wished the sun was less bright. The bread was nearly gone. The flock played here all the time, veering toward our house frequently enough that when I’d been little, I’d named them all. Different birds, of course, and I probably couldn’t really tell them apart, but I was six, so no one said otherwise.
Reese’s breath changed suddenly, becoming shallower and faster, like he was trying to match his breathing to the bird’s. Then, without any warning, his whole body relaxed. His head lolled and his fingers loosened. He slumped backward.
The candles went out.
I scrambled closer. He’d done it!
The crows flapped their wings and I swung my head to them. Dizziness swept up from my stomach. Pushing my fists into my belly, I swallowed it back, and looked carefully through narrow eyes. One crow had frozen. As I watched, it shook itself, hopped up onto a headstone, and then slowly blinked its inner eyelids. A cloud passed over the sun, casting us in shade, and the crow suddenly flapped its wings and shuddered. It leapt from the marble and flew out over the cemetery.
The rest of the crows cawed and cackled and chased after it. I stood, using Mom and Dad’s stone for support. Too quickly I lost track of which of the spinning and diving birds was my brother. I walked as close to the salt circle as I could get without disturbing it. Reese’s chest rose and fell slowly, like he was in a deep sleep. I thought again of souls. I’m not worried about losing myself, he’d said. I wondered if that was because he wanted to.
It was nice to see his face calm and peaceful. Some days I thought I wanted to feel more than I did, to break out of my numbness as if it was a shell. But Reese felt everything. My share, too. It made him throw things and drink too much and sleep with ex-girlfriends who he didn’t really like in the first place.