Blood Magic (4 page)

“You want this to be real?” He stepped forward, brandishing his fist.

“It
is
real.” I took his fist in my hands and pried up his fingers until I could get to the note. My fingers were shaking again.

“It’s crazy. If this was Dad’s, it proves what everyone says. He was crazy and he did it on purpose.”

My tongue dried up and shriveled into the back of my throat. I couldn’t say anything, as usual, against Reese’s horrible certainty.

“Yeah, Sil. On purpose. Planning to shoot her.” His voice wavered. His fingers curled as if he might punch the wall again.

“No.” I scuttled back to the table and grabbed the spell book. “I tried it. The magic works. I—”

“Bull.”

The sharp tone cracked through my joyful mask, and it slid off my face.

Reese crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t bullshit me, Silla. I’m tired and not in the mood.”

“I’m not.” My voice was reasonable, smooth. “It worked. I transformed a dead leaf, Reese, and if the magic is real, then Dad wasn’t crazy. He didn’t do what they say he did.”

“Say it, Silla. Killed Mom. That’s what they say because that’s what happened.”

I shook my head and set the book deliberately on the table. “Look at it. Really look at it. Then I’ll show you.” I had to get outside.

Threading through the hallway, I went out the back of the house and ran down the patio stairs onto the grass. Crickets and cicadas screamed through the darkness. I closed my eyes and saw Mom and Dad, limbs twined together in a great splatter of blood. The rivulets reached for my shoes, but I couldn’t move, could only stare and stare and suck in air sticky with blood and death. Would it have helped to tear at my eyes until the memory of them sprawled in the study was scratched away forever?

“Silla.” Reese came out of the house. He had the book.

“Why don’t you believe in him?” I begged.

“I saw”—Reese grabbed for me, caught my arm—“I saw them, just like you did. Why don’t you see it now?”

I jerked away. “I do.”

“You see what you want to see, Silla. Have you ever heard of this Deacon person? No. We don’t know anything about him, or if he’s real or what. At best this is a sick joke, and at worst it’s something Dad really believed in and that doesn’t prove he’s innocent, it proves he was psycho.”

The magic is real, Reese. The world is different tonight
. I let out a long, slow sigh. He couldn’t know without seeing. Couldn’t have faith. “He was our dad. I know he didn’t do it.”

Throwing the book to the grass, Reese said, “He did—the police proved it, for chrissake. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind. It doesn’t matter if some crazy spells work. He pulled that damned trigger. Sheriff Todd was Dad’s friend. Don’t you think he’d do everything he could to …” He trailed off, shaking his head with frustration. We’d had this conversation before.

“He didn’t do it. The magic—”

He cut me off with a slash of his hand through the air. But then his anger crumpled. “Bumblebee,” he said, and when he stepped forward again, I didn’t move away. “It’s been three months. You have to accept it.”

“Like you have?”

He put his arms around me, and I leaned into his chest. Hay dust tickled my nose, and behind it sweat and tractor oil. Familiar and solid, like Reese had always been. What was it like to be so sure the way he was? To be confident and strong, to pound your anger out against a wall, to work it out in the fields?

“Yeah,” he answered. The word was tinged with bitterness, and I was relieved that Reese didn’t like it, even if he believed Dad had killed her. It didn’t make sense to him, either.

After a moment, he said, “I need a beer. Want one?”

“No.” I was numb enough.

“Where’s Gram?”

“Bilking Mrs. Margaret and Patty Grander for all they have.”

“Oh, yeah. Bunko night.” For a moment, he tilted his face and I thought he’d apologize for yelling. But then I’d have to apologize, too. Instead Reese sighed. “I’ll make sandwiches, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll—I’ll stay out here for a while.”

Nodding, Reese went back inside. My sneakers gradually sank into the grass. I waited for the earth to grow up over my ankles and shins and knees, trapping me until I turned into stone.

March 18, 1904

Philip insists that I write what I remember. It is ridiculous and a waste of my time, because I do not wish to remember where I came from. But the Awful Beast will not teach me more unless I do!

And so, against my Will, this is the tale of how I came to meet Dr. Philip Osborn (the Beast)
.

It was last year, when I was fourteen years old, and I remember the smell of the mill and how I hated it so very much that when the dizziness came to me, I was thrilled. Influenza would send me to St. James! I was the oldest, and dreadful Mrs. Wheelock was furious to lose me because of how fast I could thread the warp. I laughed at her even as the fever shook my bones. I was piled with the others in a narrow infirmary room at the back of St. James, quartered off from the rest of the world. I expected them to burn the hall when we died, and never bother to give us a proper burial
.

The little girl shaking in the bed next to me was certain we were Doomed, the gutless creature. She clutched at me and her prayers rattled in my ears, as useless as rats. I was not going to die
.

When I saw Philip’s face for the first time, I knew that the girl at my side had prayed to the wrong person. Philip’s eyes had a thickness
to them, and his copper hair and long-fingered surgeon’s hands Awoke something in me that has never Slept again. He had come to help us, to make the sick children comfortable if he couldn’t make us well. I stared at the corner of his mouth as he concentrated, at the way it twitched when he tried to hide the Truth as he listened to the little girl beside me breathe. I stared and stared, and when he turned to me, he said, “You aren’t going to die, are you?” and I said, “No, sir.”

A week later, I was the only one left. Philip took me out of St. James and to his tall house in Town. He let them think I was dead, and it was no trouble for me! I had always hated it with Mrs. Wheelock, and escape was worth the risk of going with a stranger like him. Philip cleaned me up, gave me my own bedroom and a cast-iron bathtub with a bar of soap he cooked himself. It smelled of flowers! But even with the soap and scalding water, I could not get the tangles out of my hair. I remember being terrified for one brief moment that he would throw me back to the mill. But when he found me crying on the floor, he cut it all off with a skinny little dagger and said, “All problems have a solution, Josephine Darly. Learn that and you will do well here. I will teach you to read and write, and if you apply yourself, perhaps other things.” I thought he meant man and woman things, which I already knew but did not tell him because I wished him to think me Innocent. Besides, I liked the idea of learning to read and write. With an Education, I’d never have to go back to the mill, and I would impress him so very much with my wits and spirit and prettiness that he would love me above all other things!

How could I have known that what he would teach me is ever so much greater than Love?

Yaleylah High School was two buildings: a three-story academic hall and a gym. Between those yellow brick disappointments was a parking lot, and to the south a field of grass that I guessed was a field for football, soccer, track, and baseball rolled into one, depending on the season. You’d think with all the open spaces and farms they could find a place for each sport. Even in Chicago, the baseball team had only had to share with the softball team.

My natural inclination to irritability was totally made worse by the fact that I hadn’t slept well thanks to nightlong dreams about being trapped in a dog’s body. (Don’t get me started on that favorite recurring nightmare. I don’t know the Freudian explanation, and I don’t want to.) Plus, I was the new kid and from the Big City and had a totally different fashion sense (I’d say the only fashion sense) and taste in music, food, and culture. I talked differently, for chrissake, and at lunch a cheerleader asked me to repeat what I’d just said. I flipped her off.

The girl in the cemetery distracted me, too. I hadn’t seen
her again, though I’d wandered out to the graves last night. Hoping because I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and fearing because I really didn’t want her to be doing what I thought I’d seen her doing.

As I walked between classrooms, I kept my eyes out for her. I was used to dashing, and occasionally sprinting, between classes, but most senior rooms here were on the first floor, all clustered together. I estimated that there were only about four hundred kids total at the school, and they all clearly knew each other’s names and family histories and et cetera. The herd of cowboy boots made me want to puke.

On Wednesday, in my calculus class, Mrs. Trenchess told us to pair up and go over homework. I didn’t have any homework, but this guy in the desk next to me snaked his hand across the aisle. “Hey, I’m Eric.”

I looked up from the dirty haiku I was writing between notes on logarithmic functions.
And?
I asked with my eyebrows.

He smacked his hand on the desktop, grinning. “You really are an asshole. That’s what they’re saying.”

I still didn’t answer.

Eric dug a silver Zippo out of his jeans and flicked it open, then shut, slouching down in his desk to conceal it from Mrs. Trenchess. “It’s okay, I already know your name, Nick.” He fisted his hand around the lighter, leaned way across the aisle—so precariously I expected him to fall—and read the poem in the margin of my textbook. “ ‘Cramped without recourse / Mrs. Trenchess is against / student survival.’ ” He paused. “Haiku?”

I couldn’t be totally rude to somebody who knew his poetry. “I thought about etching it into the desk next to
ONLY MOFOS PLAY CHESS
but wasn’t sure it was clever enough.”

His laugh was a high-pitched bark. “Do you have any others?”

I debated for a second, then thought, what the hell. Flipping my notebook over, I found the last poems.

And:

“That sounds like Sarah Turner,” Eric mused.

“It was Western Civ this morning. She was pissed I wouldn’t talk to her. I didn’t even try to catch her name.”

“So you want to be a poet?”

“No.”

Leaning back into his desk, he waited for me to continue. When I didn’t, Eric shook his head. “I hear poets get themselves a lot of tail.”

We shared a grin. “Hey,” I said. “You know Silla Kennicot?”

His face stilled, then the skin around his mouth tightened like he was trying not to frown. “Yeah. Why?”

“She’s just my neighbor.” I shrugged, as if it didn’t matter.

What the hell?

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You meet her?”

“Yeah. She seemed a bit odd.”

He paused, flicking his lighter open again. “No kidding. Ever since her parents died, she’s been messed up.” Eric stopped. “Can’t blame her.”

I was clearly supposed to ask for details. Instead I asked if he needed help with his homework. He replied that if he’d done it, he would.

After class, Eric walked with me to my free period. As we passed a bulletin board, he paused and pointed at a neon orange flyer.
MACBETH
, it read, and
WE NEED CREW! ALL THE GLORY, NONE OF THE MEMORIZATION!
“You should come join up,” Eric said. “You don’t have to be liked to be on stage crew.”

The river of students pressed me closer to the orange paper. At the very bottom, it said in tiny letters,
SPONSORED BY THE RAZORBACK DRAMA CLUB. ERIC LEILENTHAL, ACTING PRESIDENT
. “Acting president? You’re just pretending?” Frankly, Eric didn’t look the part. I’d put him in the home-fried baseball category.