Blood Magic (8 page)

“Silla.”

“Let me show you.”

“Bumblebee—”

“No, Reese. Please.” I touched his hands, and he wrapped them around my freezing fingers. He didn’t want to look at the rings. “Let me show you. If you think I’m losing it an hour from now, I’ll do whatever you want. See Ms. Tripp at school every day, or even a real therapist in Cape Girardeau. Anything.”

His jaw remained clenched. I saw the fear in his eyes and wondered what he was thinking. Was he terrified that I was insane? Or that I wasn’t? Slowly, he nodded. “Okay. One hour.” His voice was strained, and his hands tightened on mine.

Relieved, I immediately stood up. “Bring that.” I pointed at the sparrow skeleton he’d painstakingly put together his freshman year of high school, during his zoology phase.

“What? Really?” His eyes scrunched up.

“Yes.” Before he could protest again, I turned away and slipped out the door. On my way downstairs, I imagined a perfect mask. It needed to be fierce and dramatic: a black shimmer with red lips and a thick red slash across the eyes. It fit over my face like a second skin.

“This is ridiculous,” Reese grumbled as we crouched together in front of Mom’s and Dad’s graves. I’d fought for them to be buried together the way Dad had requested in his will, though everyone else thought Dad didn’t deserve it.

“Just wait.” Settling on the cold ground with my legs crossed, I presented the spell book. “Here, open it to the regeneration spell at the end.”

Reese took it and cracked it open. “It’s messed up, Sil. Dad was messed up.”

“Or scared.”

“Like psychotics are scared people are out to get them.”

I shook my head and began setting out candles while Reese skimmed through the book again. The flares of the matches were tiny explosions against the darkness. When we were protected by the circle of flames, I opened the ziplock bag of salt and sprinkled a line of it in a circle all the way around Mom’s and Dad’s graves. The grains sparkled like diamonds against the dark earth.

A thin breeze kicked up suddenly, and I shivered as it snaked down my neck and under my jacket. “Did you read the stuff about sympathetic magic?”

“Yeah, and the elemental properties of the spell components. And the symbolism. Ribbons for binding, wax for transformation, a river-bored stone for easing pain—I’m telling you, it’s just folk magic. There’s no reason for it to work. Dad was probably writing a paper or something.”

“What about the blood? As a catalyst?”

“Ancient. Blood has always been seen as magical by less scientifically advanced people. Even in Christianity, for chrissake.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t magical.”

“It does, Silla. Blood is just proteins and oxygen and hormones and
water
. If blood really had unique properties, we’d know. Somebody would have discovered it.”

“Like Dad. He discovered it.”

Reese shook his head, his face as much a mask as mine in the flickering candlelight. “It’s all symbolism. Unconscious
stuff, psychology. Focusing the will to get what you want—or to think you’re getting what you want.”

“How can you tell that just from flipping through the book a couple of times? You’re only seeing what you want to see in it.”

“And you aren’t?”

I clenched my hands together until my rings pinched, and raised my chin. “I just didn’t know you knew so much about old folk magic.”

He didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw. Even in the poor light I could see the muscles working.

“Reese?”

He glared at me. “Dad had some books on it.” I was quiet.

Wind rushed through the dying leaves in the nearby forest. The one surrounding Nick’s house. The breeze knocked leaves into the headstones around us, and the salt circle shivered but didn’t break.

“Reese,” I said, reaching to touch his hand. The knuckles stood out where he clenched the spell book. “It’s amazing, Reese. Not horrible. It feels like a warm tingle in your blood. Welcoming and … powerful.”

His frown deepened. “Sounds addictive.”

“Maybe.” I tugged his hand off the book and wove our fingers together. “Just come with me on this. For a few moments, let go of your anger at Dad. I know he deserves it, but this … let this be for us. For me. Please. Imagine the possibilities.”

Reese’s eyes lifted to mine and I held his gaze even as it bored into me. I tightened my grip on his hand, which was as cold as mine. “God, you look just like him. That look, right now,” he whispered. I didn’t glance away, but felt nostalgia and sadness taint my expression. “Okay, bumblebee.”

Relieved that the moment was over, I leaned back and briskly said, “Just—just put the bird in the center of the salt circle.”

The skeleton was so delicate, positioned with its wings spread. I’d been wary of the large eye sockets when he’d first constructed it, until Reese had said, “A skull is just like one of your masks. Only, this one lives under the face.”

I set the small blue and gray feathers Reese had also grabbed around the skeleton. They’d belonged to the bird when Reese found it dead on the front steps. Maybe it would remember the feeling of wind ruffling them.
Sympathetic magic
, I hoped.

Moving to sit across the circle from Reese so that we faced each other over the skeleton, I flipped out the blade of my pocketknife and put it to my palm. Since this was no mere leaf, I probably needed more blood than a prick to the thumb could manage. I couldn’t risk its not working for Reese. I bit the inside of my lip, readying myself for the queasy pain to come. This was the worst part. But I understood that you had to sacrifice for the magic to work. And I didn’t want to hesitate in front of my brother.

I slashed.

Reese hissed through his teeth and stared at the blood pooling in my cupped palm.

It was so beautiful, dark and shimmering like the night sky itself oozing out of my hand. I pressed the blade against my skin to make the blood flow faster. Pain cracked up my wrist and curled around my forearm like hot barbed wire.

“Silla, hurry. We have to get that bandaged.”

“It’s okay, Reese.” I took a deep breath, pushing at the pain. Tears stung my eyes. The late October night smelled like burning leaves. I leaned over the bird and let a stream of my blood patter down over the yellowing bones. It splashed like thin paint, dark in the candlelight. I imagined the skeleton growing muscles and tendons and flesh and feathers. Imagined it bursting into life and singing for us. Then I whispered,
“Ago vita iterum.”

Make it live again.

Bending so that my lips were inches from the bones, I breathed the imprecise Latin words over the skeleton again and again.
“Ago vita iterum. Ago vita iterum. Ago vita iterum.”

With each phrase, another bulbous drop of my blood fell off my hand.

I felt the moment the magic began, buzzing through my palm and up my arm like a swarm of tiny bees. Hissing, I pulled my hand away from the skeleton.

“Silla.” Reese took my unwounded hand and squeezed. His voice was reedy and shaking.

The skeleton trembled. Its wings shuddered and extended outward, stretching like it would take off. Feathers suddenly sprouted out of the bones, rangy and thin, and a single eyeball bubbled up in the skull. I couldn’t look away, even as strips of muscle wove onto the bones and the feathers spread, becoming
fuller. Reese’s fingers crushed mine. My heart expanded and I wanted to sing—to laugh and shriek in amazement.

“Ago vita iterum!”
I cried at it. The candles sputtered and went out, and the tiny bird leapt into the air, flapping its wings frenetically. It wailed a song before vanishing up into the dark sky.

We were alone in the cemetery, covered in shadows.

“Whoa,” Reese said, letting go of me. He leaned forward and skimmed his hand over the dirt where the bones had been. The scattered feathers were gone, too.

I shivered, suddenly dizzy, and clutched my hands together. The moon spilled down. My skin was cold in the absence of fire. But I laughed. Quietly, triumphantly.

“Oh my God.” Reese relit one of the candles, then dug into the plastic bag for rags. “Here.”

I only shook my head. Reese grabbed hold of my hand and pressed the cloth against it. “Jesus. You might need stitches,” he said.

My palm tingled with warmth; pain teetered at the edge of magic.

But a dozen feet away, the bird fell from the sky. Its bones shattered, and feathers scattered out, dry as dead leaves.

May 3, 1904

Oh, the magic! This I do want to remember
.

It is like nothing I can say. No words Capture what it feels like when my dark blood smears against a red ribbon, or leaks into the lines of a rune carved into wood. The Thrill of the Blood as the magic burned through me, the way it tickles and teases when I am doing other things, begging me to slice my skin open and let it out!

It hurts, of course, cutting my living flesh to free the blood. I have not conquered the sickening pause before every prick of my needle, every slick cut of Philip’s knife. I hold my breath for the moment, and I feel the world holding its breath with me, awaiting the wash of pain that releases the power. Sacrifice, Philip says, is the key. We give in order to create
.

Oh, but this is Heaven. Philip is my announcing angel—or I am Morgan and he is the wizard teaching me how to rule the world. By candlelight we mix potions, boiling them in an iron cauldron like witches of old. The smoke turns my cheeks pink and I smile at him often, hoping he might notice
.

Philip heals, is obsessed with it, and believes that the gift of our blood is meant to help mankind. Or at least Boston. Most of his
charms are for healing, for headaches and fevers, for easy births and gentle deaths. He wants bigger spells, better spells, to heal great swaths of folk at a time, and so he needs all the blood he steals. But in his book are spells for turning stone into gold and discovering lost items. He’s used them to accumulate his power, but now that he is comfortable, he leaves such things alone. But I do not. I practice transforming air into fire with a snap of my bloody fingers, and I turn water into ice, or boil it with a word
.

Who could imagine such magic in the twist of ribbon or a dried-up duck’s beak? Who could imagine blessed water could cure a cough, if only there were a drop of my blood mingled with it? And the stones! Rough and small, oftentimes sharp. Philip showed me how to hold them in my hand and breathe magic into them with intricate patterns of almost-words. They focus my spells and hold my power. With one tucked into my pocket or down my corset, I feel the tingle all the day, feel it pulsing there with my heart
.

I never want to lose this
.

We can do anything
.

I didn’t make it to school on Thursday.

Reese and I had stayed in the cemetery until after midnight, digging into the spell book together. For Reese’s first attempt at his own magic, he used the regeneration spell to heal the wound on my palm. It was pink and aching still, but closed. No bandages necessary.

After the healing, we regenerated a hundred dead leaves, experimenting with the words and amount of blood and how many leaves we could do at once. It was intoxicating—only a single drop was needed, and if we bled onto the salt circle, we could make them all snap back to life together in a great, blossoming pattern.