Blood Magic (42 page)

“Little bit.” His face spasmed, and he coughed.

“I have to go—to get Nick. We should move you out of the forest. The animals are, um, possessed.”

Swallowing, he opened his eyes and turned his head. A string of mice had joined the raccoon. “Jesus, your face,” he muttered.

I gritted my teeth together. I had to go, but I couldn’t just leave him.

“I’ll be okay.” Eric’s voice sounded raw. “I can get out. I’ll get to my car.”

“I’ll be back when I can.”

“Wait.” He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a lighter. “Fire.”

I scuttled around for an appropriate torch.

Chunks of dirt pelted me, but I clawed through them. I dragged myself up out of the grave, finally, and lay down across a line of blood. The smell was thick in the air. Rot, sulfur, burning hair, fresh earth, tangy blood. With the arm of the backhoe, I heaved myself up. I had to get back, before anything happened to Silla. Before Josephine possessed me again.

Without the armor, it probably didn’t matter, but I used the last bit of blood on my finger to paint the protection rune over my heart.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since they left, but there was no sign of the corpse. I thought of last week, of being alone and blind, not with Silla when she needed me. I had to find her now.

I ran.

I ran.

The trees were too tight together, cutting off the last of the fading sunlight. And a handful of crows darted ahead of me, pressing me in a direction that would lead me out of the forest at the wrong angle to get to the cemetery quickly. But they screamed again and again until I wanted to flatten my hands over my ears to block it out. Instead I swung my torch at them, yelling. They banked away, but kept coming around in front of me to drive me left.

A dark form darted into my way, and I skidded to a halt as the deer’s head swung around to knock me over. I landed in a bush, barely keeping hold of my torch. The deer bared its teeth and whined like a child. I stood up, fire in hand. “Back off!” I screamed, flailing my arms. Crows dive-bombed it, but it swung its antlers around, and they were forced away, bawling their displeasure.

The deer hopped back, whined again, a long, squeaking bleat. I slashed at it with the torch and tried to dodge around
it. It kicked out with a hoof, catching my thigh. I yelled, swung the torch again, and it darted back.

The rest of the crows herded me on, no matter which direction I tried to go. How was I supposed to search for Josephine’s body when they kept pushing me and pushing me?

One darted down and screamed in my face. I fell back, my hand landing in soft mud. Warm mud. The torch sputtered and I grabbed it up again. The mud was tinged red.

Crows cawed and I saw it. A golden curl poking from between two roots. Her body had literally been swallowed by the forest. I stuck the end of the torch into the ground and dug the spell components out of my sweatshirt pocket. With the scissors, I cut the curl away from the mud, and I pressed it into the wax, which I held close to the fire so that it softened enough for me to mold it into a tight ball, with the hair worked deeply in.

As I worked, the crows kept talking. I couldn’t think about them, as long as they didn’t attack. I opened the card case and stuck the wax inside, pushing it into the corners and flattening it out so that I could snap the case shut. Finally I wound the red thread around the box again and again, whispering “Be bound” with every beat of my heart.

I sealed it with a drop of blood. Then I stuffed the torch into the base of the tree. Dry grass lit with a whoosh of air.

I stood up and pushed on. The crows flew with me now, not against me.

The edge of the forest came into sight—a flat, dark expanse of fallow field before the crumbling wall of the cemetery. Squinting and tightening my fists, I pumped harder.

And I erupted out of the trees.

Directly in front of my brother.

I lurched back. His eyes were pale, whited-out like with cataracts, and the skin sort of hung off his bones. Blood smeared across his face and dripped down onto his chest, splattering the tie he’d been buried in. His clavicle punched up at his skin as though waiting to sprout through at any moment.

“Sister,” Josephine said through his dead lips, and I recognized his voice. It was harsh and rattled, but it was his.

“Get away from me!”

“Come, Silla, it’s your brother.” His lips smiled, the skin cracking like they were seriously chapped. Clear fluid oozed out.

“Help me, Silla, and we’ll live forever together. All we need is the powder from his bones.”

“No, never.” I stared at his face, at the hanging skin. I was empty; I was hollow.
Reese
.

He held up the spell book. “Back up, and we’ll go heal my body. It’s almost all over, darling.”

I slapped my hand against his chest. “I banish thee from this body!”

The corpse twisted and shuddered, and bile choked me, coating my tongue with acid.

The crumbling cemetery wall gouged my hands as I vaulted over, then raced for Silla where she struggled with the Reese corpse on the track of gravel road.

He lifted the spell book and slammed it into Silla’s face.

She collapsed backward, and I flung myself at him. I hit
with a wet
thunk
, and we crashed to the ground. The rotten smell gagged me, and then the corpse was back on its feet, dragging me up off the ground. I punched back with my elbows, kicked with my legs. But it didn’t feel pain, hardly seemed to notice my efforts. Like kicking and punching Play-Doh. I couldn’t get away.

Crows circled overhead, faster and faster.

I forced my eyes open as Reese’s arm came around my neck. “I’ll enjoy spilling your blood,” Josephine spat through Reese’s dead lips. “All I want is to live again—how difficult is that?”

The arm tightened, and I couldn’t breathe. Orange light flashed in my peripheral vision.

“You—just—don’t—understand!”

I flung my head around, only then hearing the crackle of flames. The forest was on fire. “Fire,” I whispered harshly.

The arm around my neck loosened as Josephine flung us both around to face the forest.

“No,” she yelled, “my body!” Crows dive-bombed us, their wings brushing my face. She released me, raising Reese’s arms to smack them away. But they drove her at the trees.

Two crows snagged their claws in his hair. Reese’s body folded abruptly, and he crumpled to the ground.

I panted for a moment, staring at the leaping flames. She was in there. Her body was. It had to be anchored in there somewhere, and if it burned, so did Josephine.

I crawled to Silla. Her head lolled to one side, and her entire face was painted with blood. From a gash in her temple, fresh blood trickled quickly into her hair. She wasn’t moving. Barely breathing.

The crows that had hounded Josephine darted around me now. Hopping frantically.

Closing my eyes, I whispered, “Blood and earth, hear my appeal: through skin and flesh, readily heal.” Again I said it, but louder, and then again. The heat built up, and I begged her to stay, begged the blood and magic to work.

My heart churned over and over, aching, and I leaned down to kiss Silla’s lips. They were hot—as hot as mine. “Silla,” I whispered.

She gasped for breath.

Everything was black.

My whole body ached, tingling painfully like when your foot falls asleep and then all the blood rushes back in. I couldn’t move, but felt tears film over my eyes and spill down my nose. I heard a scream, and smelled smoke. And blood. So much blood. My throat was raw, my tongue heavy. I tried to move my arms, and I think my finger twitched. My heart resonated hollowly inside me.

I sucked in a long breath, and cold air rushed in along with a mouthful of smoke and sticky blood. I could taste it running down the back of my throat.

Wind cut into me, and I coughed.

“Silla?”

Nick
. I turned to him, burying my bloody face against his filthy shirt. I fisted my hands behind his back.

“Babe. Silla.” He sounded like he was going to laugh. “Oh my God!”

“Reese.” I remembered Reese’s body with the flesh dripping off. Pink muscle. Yellow bones.

“Come on, babe.” Nick struggled to get us both standing up. “We have to get away from here. The forest is burning.”

“But.” I stumbled to put weight on my feet. “But Josephine.”

“She’s dying in the forest.”

I pushed away from him, tilted my face. His half smile was the best thing I’d ever seen. But I shook my head. It rolled with nausea—brain nausea, like my whole body wanted to vomit. “We have to bind her in there so that she’ll burn—or she’ll only escape again.” Digging the card case out of my pocket, I held it up. “It’s ready to go. Remember the rune.” I leaned over and drew it in the sticky mud with my finger.

A cacophony of crying animals and cracking wood blared from the woods, and wind rose up, blowing toward the trees. My eyes ached like I’d been staring into the sun. “Help me, Nick.” I stood up. The fire glared between the black trees. A dozen crows leapt into the sky and flew around the forest like a crown, wheeling and cawing and chasing any little jays or robins that tried to flee. A crow dove at the ground, shrieking at a fox, chasing it back. More and more crows arrived, winging over us, encircling the woods as a living barrier.

I dragged Nick to one of the trees. “Make the rune. We do it with blood, at the four corners of the woods, starting here, running clockwise.”

“It’s too far.”

“We can do it. We have to.” It was almost over.

Nick tightened his jaw but nodded.

The only thing that kept me going was Silla’s hand in mine.

Every step meant being closer to destroying the thing that had killed my mother, my father, my brother. Maybe Eric. Every step meant closing the circle, completing the trap.

The forest screamed as it burned. Cries from animal throats ripped together, winding around to create this one, awesome shriek. Heat tightened the skin on the left side of my face as we rushed around the perimeter. Step after step, through tall grass, over the road, stopping three times to paint a blood rune on a tree.

A cluster of crows fell from the sky, trailing flames. The rest cried and flew, like black glinting sparks rising off the huge bonfire the forest had become. Their wails were lost in the snarling fire, in the column of eye-searing smoke.

We fell to our knees when we returned to the beginning. As I painted the rune onto a tree, Silla dug at the earth and buried the card case. We clutched our hands together, dripping our mingled blood onto the final rune, and Silla screamed, “Be bound, Josephine. Be forever bound!”

A snap of heat exploded. My ears popped. Silla and I were knocked backward. I didn’t try to stand but just stared up as the stars vanished behind billowing smoke, and wrapped my fingers around Silla’s.

The forest howled.

I lay with my head tilted to one side. I could see orange glow against black grass; I could see my brother’s profile. His body was surrounded by crows. They hopped around, heads cocked and wings ruffled. Touching their beaks to his hair, his hand, his pants.

The crows
. They’d stalked me but never attacked me. Warned us when Eric was possessed. Led me to Josephine’s body. Held all the animals in the woods so that she couldn’t escape the binding.

And Reese had been so good at flying with them.

I sat up.

“Silla?” Nick’s voice trembled. I knew he was tired—I could barely move myself. So much blood lost, so much running and desperation. But Reese—Reese was here. He was alive. The knowledge cracked through me with a surge of adrenaline.

“The crows, Nick. They’re … it’s Reese.” I crawled on my hands and knees into the center of them. “Oh, God, Reese!”

The crows exploded into the air, flapping around me. I
stared at Reese’s dead face, imagining it sunny with life again. Imagining his laugh. The creases at the corners of his eyes when he smiled.