Blood Magic (43 page)

“We could bring him back,” I whispered.

“Sil.”

“With the regeneration spell. Just like with the leaf.”

Nick dragged himself next to me and took my hand. “Silla,” he whispered. “Think.”

Excitement raged through me like white light, buzzing in my ears. “I am! Bring back his body, and his spirit is right here. All around us in the crows.” I flung my hands out at them, outrageous laughter spilling upward from my guts, shaking my backbone and ringing in my ears. “We can heal his body, regenerate it, and then he’ll be able to jump back in. Reese!” I called to them, to all the flapping, agitated crows. “Reese, I can fix your body, you can have it back!”

The crows—
Reese
—cawed at me. My head swam and I gripped my knees, pushing my nails into them until it hurt. The idea—the promise of having my brother back—was almost too much. I turned to Nick. He would help me.

Nick was watching me, not the crows. His expression was drawn and tired, hard to read. “Nick,” I said.

“I’ll help you, babe, if this is what you really want.”

I grinned wildly, even as the world spun around me. I knelt so that I didn’t fall over, beside the corpse. I could do it. I had enough left in me. Soon it would be my brother.

I couldn’t look at her eyes. I couldn’t.

She held her shaking hands over Reese’s chest. There was no need for more blood—we were both covered in it already. Neither of us moved. I wanted to knock her aside, push her down, yell at her that this was wrong. He was dead—the body was dead—and bringing it back wasn’t any better than Josephine had been, or my mom had been. We couldn’t give life. We weren’t God.

The bloody mask was smeared almost completely off her face, in streaks that made her terrifying. She stared down at her brother. My chest constricted. Blood flowed so slowly through my veins, dragging me down. Turning me to stone while I watched my girlfriend prepare to resurrect the dead.

But she didn’t move. Her breath wheezed in and out. The hazy air stung my eyes.

A crow cawed. It landed on Reese’s forehead, claws breaking into his loose flesh. I drew back. Silla didn’t move. The crow cawed again, and I stared at its eyes. It—he—tilted his head and glared at Silla. He raised his wings and stood there, posed.

Silla’s face crumpled. “Reese,” she whispered.

Oh, Silla, babe
. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make this decision for her, no matter how much I wanted to. No matter how wrong it was, she had to decide. I couldn’t take this away from her.

A choking cry exploded out of her mouth.

I reached out and our hands gripped together, squeezing. She wrapped her bleeding hand around her stomach. “Reese,” she said.

The crows took flight, spinning and singing, against the orange and smoky sky.

She collapsed to the side, against me. I circled my arms around her, stroked her hair, pushed my lips against her head. Her shaking vibrated through my whole body.

The heat of the fire dried the sweat off my face. Its crackles and roaring ripped through the air. I could barely breathe.

Silla whispered something, and I lifted her chin so I could hear. “Reese, Nick. We have to—have to hide the body.”

My hands tightened on her. She was right. With this fire, we’d be swarmed with cops and locals anytime. Silla got to her feet, swayed in place. I joined her, and my own weariness almost swallowed me up. Too much blood loss, too much adrenaline and energy wasted. But we had work to do.

We dragged Reese’s body into the forest, hacking on smoke. I grabbed a blazing branch and set it at his feet so that we knew he’d burn. Tears tracked down Silla’s cheeks the whole time, but when it was finished, she rubbed her hands on the grass and lay down, rather serene. I worried she’d lost it for a moment, but then she reached out for my hand and said, “It’s not a bad way to go. A funeral pyre like this.”

I squeezed her fingers and said, “Like old Viking kings.”

“You really do know weird stuff.” There was a smile in her voice.

We lay down together, near the cemetery wall. Silla put her head on my shoulder, and I closed my eyes. The world spun slowly under me, like I was being flushed down a toilet.

My memory was fuzzy still, even at the hospital. Apparently, blood loss will do that to you. I barely know how we got there. I just remember standing in the checkered hallway as they wheeled a barely conscious Silla away. Dad sort of caught me when I started to pass out again, and then I was blinking up at a dingy popcorn ceiling. Through the thin mattress, I could feel the bar under the small of my back, where the top half of the bed would angle up if I pushed the right button. There was no noise except a ringing in my left ear. When I used my hands to lean up, I realized there was a needle in my arm attached to one of those long plastic tubes, which was in turn attached to a bag of clear liquid. Saline or something.

It was a small but private room, with an old TV on an arm attached to the wall and a window with heavy blue curtains drawn across it. I was light-headed, but otherwise okay. Nothing ached or burned or pinched besides a general malaise that clung to my skin like I’d been awake for way too long. Only I’d just woken up.

From outside the closed door, I began to hear the muffled sounds of a hospital at work.

I studied the needle in my arm, wondering if it was okay to just pull it out. Surely I wouldn’t bleed all over everything. Or die. Briefly, I imagined all my insides squeezing out through the tiny needle hole, in party shades of green and violet and pink.

The door opened.

It was Lilith, wearing an orange dress trimmed with rows of black fur.
Fur
. Like she’d come from the freaking opera. Which, I guess, she kind of had. Her hair was falling out of its perfect coif. Which I’d never seen, not even at six in the morning before her coffee. But she pressed her lips together, which were perfectly painted this awful, shiny red, and said, “Nick, don’t you even think about getting out of that bed.”

I gripped the edges of the thin mattress. “Where’s Dad?”

“Talking with the doctors. And the sheriff.”

“And Silla?”

“Unconscious but … fine.” Lilith’s eyes shone with something not quite evil. “Your friend said the fire was an accident.”

I rubbed my eyes to stall. “Um. Friend?”

“Yes. The boy who called us. Eric. He has a few injuries. Broken ankle, quite a bit of blood loss. He says you and Silla saved his life.”

There was a strange undercurrent to the information. As though what Lilith was saying was urgent. What was I missing? Some weird code?

She continued, “He said you were going to build a fire in
the backyard, to burn a few of Reese’s things. Your own little memorial, as it were.”

I stared. Lilith was feeding me my story. So that when the sheriff came and asked me, I’d say the same thing Eric had. She was freaking helping me.

“The only damage was to our property, Nick. Your property, which your father holds in your name, of course, until you’re of age.”

God, I was slow. I licked my lips and said, “So—Dad could hold us responsible. Press charges. For the fire.”

Lilith nodded, crossing her arms under her breasts. She tapped the orange fingernails of her right hand against her left elbow. One at a time. “I believe I can talk him out of it.”

“Why?” The word burst out before I could stop it. I should have asked what she wanted in return, or just accepted her help and promised my forever gratitude.

She spread her hands wide and plastered an innocent expression over her face. “Why not? It was a tragic accident, but you survived, and certainly your father has plenty of money and properties, Nicholas.”

“God, don’t call me that,” I whispered.

“I’ll go speak with your father about putting this all behind us.” She turned and put a hand on the door handle.

“Wait.”

Lilith paused with her back toward me, knowing what I was going to ask.

“What do you want in return?”
My firstborn child? Ten years indentured servitude?

Spinning on her heel, Lilith offered me her brilliant shark’s smile, the one that caught Dad every time. She looked about ten years younger. “Ah, Nick. All I want is the truth. I want the real story. The one with all the magic, the one with murder and jealousy and history. The one with that cemetery at its center.”

I gaped at her.

“Ta, Nick. Think quickly.” Lilith flashed her smile again, and was out the door.

Turned out, they believed the ridiculous story. Believed we’d been stupid enough to set fire to the forest accidentally.

And I told Lilith the truth the next morning. I think she believed me. The crows that hung around the hospital, and that followed our car several miles out of town, certainly helped. Maybe it was about time to purge her nickname from my brain and stick to Mary.

My eyelashes stuck together, and it was almost impossible to force them apart when I woke up.

“Silla!”

Wendy leaned over my bed. My own bed. I’d woken up in the hospital that morning, terrified that everyone was dead. But Judy had been there, and given me a story for the sheriff. Said she’d talked to Nick, and had gone out to the cemetery to fill in Reese’s grave with the backhoe.

The doctors said I was only exhausted from the adrenaline and trauma, and to get rest. Which had been easy. I’d barely made it up to my room, I was so tired.

Behind Wendy, all my theater masks watched like a private audience. I moved my tongue, which was dry, and started to sit up. There was no nausea. No dizziness. Just the sleepy need for caffeine to wake up my bones.

“Silla!” She sat back on my desk chair. “We’ve been so worried. You’ve been asleep for twenty hours!”

“Water?” I said hoarsely. My throat burned. I couldn’t believe I’d been asleep for a whole day and still felt like crap.

“Oh, yes!” Wendy twirled around and grabbed a bottle of water off the nightstand. She looked good. A breeze from the open window teased at her hair. My eyes strained to see out the window, searching for crows.

Wendy touched my arm, then helped me sit up to drink. After downing half the bottle, I only felt a little better. “How is—is everyone?”
Have there been crows? Where’s Reese? Did I imagine they were him?

“Eric’s fine. His ankle is broken, from running out of the fire, he said. He also said you saved his life.” She pursed her glittery pink lips, and I remembered that Josephine was gone.

“Yeah, something like that,” I murmured, wanting her to leave so that I could lie back down. Or run outside to look for Reese.

She quieted. “I can hardly believe what everybody is saying about you and the cemetery and the fire. Mrs. Margaret and Mrs. Pensimonry have been plaguing Judy with questions about you and the fire, about your whole family, and whether you’re … well, crazy.” Wendy winced apologetically.

“It’s okay, I think I am.”

Grabbing my hands, she squeezed them until I yelped. The doctors had stitched up my palm. “Sorry,” she said, letting my hands go like they were poison. But she stared at the bandages. “You really are … hurting yourself, aren’t you?”