WANING CRESCENT
“I was hoping you’d be in yesterday,” Rafe said. “Headache stayed bad, did it?”
“It’s fine today,” Lissa said, sliding onto what was becoming her favorite barstool, at the end away from the door. She hung her bag from one of the convenient hooks underneath the bar and looked up again at Rafe’s smile: the private one she was coming to know, not the one he used for customers, even regulars. “I went to work and everything.”
“They make you dress up at the print shop?”
Lissa felt herself blush. The black dress. She’d actually forgotten she was wearing it, in her haste to shake off the foreboding quiet of Izabela Dmitreeva’s mother-in-law’s house. The fertility eggs had not worked yet—no surprise, if her first batch of sleep eggs had been anything to go by—and while Izabela coolly kept right on knitting baby blankets, her mother-in-law had given Lissa a truly grim look.
“I had to visit a friend of my grandmother’s,” Lissa said now, thinking it felt like another lie even though it was not.
Rafe’s face warmed. “And you didn’t show up with blue hair and multiple piercings? You’re a better person than I am.”
“Blue? Really?”
“Why d’you think I shaved it off?”
Lissa laughed aloud at that. Rafe bowed with a flourish of his hands. “Stella tells me that’s hard to do.”
“What is?”
“Making you laugh.”
“It’s not fair, you getting dirt on me from my sister. Who am I supposed to ask if I want to know things about you?”
“Me,” Rafe said. “I’ll just tell you. No secrets at all. I’m silly that way.”
“Really? What’s your worst fear?”
“I love that your mind went straight there,” he said, rolling his eyes a bit. “Blood. Can’t stand it. I pass out.”
“Where did you get your toque?”
“Board shop on Queen Street. Best twenty bucks I’ve spent all year. Why would I keep that a secret, though?”
“It was the next thing that came into my head,” Lissa protested. “Ever broken the law?”
“Smoked quite a bit of pot in uni,” he said right away. “Stole twenty bucks off my da to buy it once too. Let’s see … climbed over a few fences in my time, climbed up the downspout of a cathedral onto the roof—and then fell off, no bones broken thanks to all the lager I’d had—oh, and I stole a stuffed stag’s head from a pub once too. No idea why.”
“But those are all funny. Just pranks,” Lissa said. “And most of them involve climbing.”
“I was skinnier then,” Rafe said, shrugging. “I don’t know. What were you looking for? Really serious lawbreaking? I’ve got nothing. Never locked myself to any construction equipment or threw any Molotov cocktails. Wasn’t thinking ahead to when I’d have to impress you, obviously.”
She let it go and took the pint of organic he slid across the bar to her. And when she was ready to leave, Rafe went on break and met her in the alley out back and gave her a much more serious kiss than he’d given her before. The most serious kiss she’d ever had, really. Black dress and all.
She gave it back to him, and that was breaking a rule too, and so it seemed he had very useful advice on the topic, after all.
Nick ran around the track at the high school near his old apartment. He had forgotten his running shoes, but it turned out not to matter.
He ran for three hours, maybe four. At sunset, he slowed to a walk and left the track. Sweat dried in his hair. He strolled north from the school grounds, hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts.
Jonathan’s street. He passed the corner and turned down the alley. The same graffiti marked the garage doors. The same Labrador puppy came to a rear fence to watch him pass.
He leaned on a cinder block wall beside a froth of blossoming vines, and he looked up.
At first, the fading sunset glared off Jonathan’s window too brightly to let him see anything; not that he expected to see anything.
He wondered if he was holding a wake and wished he’d brought something to drink, after all.
Dark came on slowly, with the scent of frying onions. Above him, windows brightened, here and there and there.
And there.
He saw a hand—whose hand?—turn on the old wicker lamp at Jonathan’s window and then pull the cord of the blind.
Nick left the alley, circled around to the fire door, and tugged. Locked.
He bit his lip and went to the front entrance. Suicidally dumb, he told himself.
He didn’t listen.
A woman approached with an armload of groceries. Nick said, “Be right up,” toward the intercom speaker as the woman opened the outer door.
She paid him no attention, flashed her keycard to the inner door, and smiled distractedly at Nick as he held the door for her and followed her in.
Too easy. He rode the elevator to a random floor and took the stairs to Jonathan’s so he could approach from the far end of the hall.
Even from there, once the stairway fire door was open, he could tease out the unique smells of Jonathan’s apartment: sandalwood soap from Chinatown; microwaved popcorn; stale beer; Aussie shampoo; a fading underlay of pot smoke.
Nick crept almost up to the door, listening. If only his hearing would do what his sense of smell had done.
It wouldn’t, but the apartment building was not new and the soundproofing was imperfect.
From within the apartment he could hear a woman’s voice—Hannah?—very faintly, and then, from right by the door, “Got it. You sure?”
Jonathan.
Footsteps receded. More speech from farther in, too quiet for him to make out.
Nick leaned right against the door, straining. Jonathan was in there. Alive, together with Hannah, doing normal things. Making dinner.
He thought he heard them laughing. Scraping chairs, sitting down to eat.
He could have been there with them. Had been a few weeks ago. They’d teased him about getting a better haircut, finishing his degree on time, getting a girlfriend, a whole bunch of the normal things he hadn’t managed to figure out yet.
Would never manage now.
It was a long time before he could tear himself away.
The pub was full, and someone was sitting in Lissa’s usual spot, and though Rafe was glad to see her, he didn’t have time to chat, moving briskly up and down the bar, pulling pints and slapping down coasters and hip-checking the cash drawer shut.
Lissa was only having the one pint, anyway, to kill the rest of the time until dark. She fed coins into the jukebox and put on, for kicks, all the songs she could find with “moon” in the title. She had already eaten at the roti shop after work, and she had all the information she needed on the ritual, and she’d been to check on Maksim.
He’d been mostly asleep, again, but on the sofa this time. And he’d showered, although he was wearing a wrinkled U of T Athletics T-shirt that probably belonged to Nick. And Gus had gone back to protective glowering, which Lissa thought indicated that she was sober, or at least less drunk, which she’d count as a win.
For this step, she didn’t need them. She explained as much and watched Gus shudder whenever Lissa got too close, watched Nick pace in and out of the room, watched Maksim lace his fingers together over his knees, the injured ones still swollen and dark. He didn’t seem to feel them, and that was creepy. No one looked sorry when she said good-bye.
Through the window at the Duke of Lancashire, she saw the sky dim down: orange to bruise purple to the dull dark red that passed for night in a city of this size. She tried to get a good-night kiss from Rafe, but someone was pounding a glass on the bar, and someone else was brandishing a twenty, and she gave up and only waved.
The walk home, through heavy, bloom-scented air, did nothing to ease her nerves. Inside her bag, her fingers twined themselves into the hair of the doll.
At home, she’d left the windows open all day. The house felt humid. She moved around the kitchen in darkness, unbinding.
The first part of the ritual called for wax. Black wax and a rusty nail. Lissa had found the nail in the gardening shed, lying beside a tomato sauce can full of more of the same. Now she sat close to the candle, tucked her loose hair back behind her ears, dipped the nail in the pool of wax around the wick, and began scribing: rough lines, awkward and uneven, the wax clotting heavily at the beginning of a stroke and then too quickly scraping away to nothing.
It was the first time she’d had to do this: instead of just painting the egg with a paste, making an actual design upon it. The design wasn’t too complicated, fortunately: a black circle that might represent the new moon and a few Cyrillic letters arranged around it. Baba had not told Lissa what they stood for, but at least it was the kind of design she’d been able to describe verbally, while Lissa took notes, back during their last full-moon conversation.
Before Lissa had finished the first section, the point of the nail broke through. Yolk slimed her fingers. She tossed the ruined egg in the compost, washed her hands, and tried again.
The second egg she crushed in her own hand, startling when the house settled and a stair creaked.
Quiet, she told herself, wiping her hands again. You’re not used to the quiet anymore.
She could not put on the stereo with the house powered down, but she hummed to herself a little while she set up again. Whistling in the dark, the spooked part of her brain said, and so she shut up.
Third egg was the charm, of course. She scraped the point of the nail over the shell, thankful there weren’t too many curved lines. Thankful she didn’t know enough Russian to guess what the Cyrillic letters might stand for.
Ridiculous. Spooked again. A full-grown, practicing witch ought to do better. She elbowed her hair back and let her shoulders fall square again, deliberately exposing her back to the kitchen doorway.
When she had finished the design, she propped the egg on a mini-tripod to let the wax harden, poured herself a glass of tap water, and stepped out to the porch.
Light, high clouds covered the sky, red with the reflected lights of Toronto. If they had not been there, she would have been looking at an empty sky or maybe at the dark, covered face of the moon. She was not usually awake on such a night.
The heat wave had broken sometime while she was indoors. Air flowed up from the lakefront, almost chilly. Lissa let her hair fall forward about her neck and crossed her arms.
When she went back indoors, she lifted the drying egg into one of the high cupboards, where she had a faint chance Stella might not look at it.
Lissa had already, in a scant few weeks, introduced Stella to Maksim Volkov, who had to try very hard not to be a monster, and to Gus Hillyard and Nick Kaisaris, who did not seem as if they were trying as hard, and she still did not know what that meant. She did not want to be the one to introduce her stepsister to forbidden new-moon rituals. She was only just getting to know them herself.
Not that she knew Stella so well yet, either; but she did know Stella well enough to wait up.
Stella bounced in after three, just as Lissa had begun to nod off on the sofa. “I’m brilliant!” she said. “Look at all the tips I made. It just keeps getting easier.”
She cast herself down beside Lissa, stretching out her long legs. “It’s true Canadians are polite, you know. Even the rowdy lads.”
“They know you’ll have Rafe chuck them out if they cross the line.”
“The power! The power!” Stella cackled. “I’ve never had any before. I think it’s rather nice.” She rubbed her eyes with both hands and yawned indelicately. “Beddy-bye,” she said. “You too. You look fagged.”
Lissa shuffled upstairs, shivering a little in the late cool. She actually unfolded a blanket from the chest at the end of Baba’s bed and wrapped it close about her neck and shoulders.
She thought she would lie awake, but sleep came down over her as thoroughly as if she’d had one of her own eggs.
The ritual’s second night demanded more.
Lissa drank a cup of coffee as soon as Stella had left for work. She washed her hair and let the damp mass of it hang down her back; the heat had come again, steamy and stifling, and the house smelled damp.
She drank a glass of water and used the toilet as if in preparation for a long car ride.
Lissa stood on the porch to watch the sun setting peachy orange at the end of her street, between a factory converted to lofts and a row of Victorian houses, and breathed in the scent of trees.
In the twilit kitchen, she took the egg down from its hiding place. The design of the spell, drawn upon it in black wax, looked ill done and crooked. She ran her fingertips over the letters.
She took the egg up to her bedroom, where she’d set up the necessary things on top of her dresser, in case Stella came home before she was done. Last night’s candle had only half burned; she lit it again and set another one, unlit, beside it.
She uncapped a bottle of black ink bought in Chinatown: cheap, slightly gritty, and as dark as anything she’d ever seen. She poured it into a stone bowl she had found in the back of one of the lower cupboards. It looked heavier than water, and it reflected the candle flame like an open eye.
Tonight’s charm must be spoken. Baba had given it to Lissa in English, because Lissa’s Russian pronunciation had never been very good, and apparently the rune required a great deal of repetition:
As a horse is curbed to the bit, as a river is bound under ice, so, I ask you, bind this one to stillness. Riders of dawn and day and dusk, I ask you. I, Vasilissa, granddaughter of Iadviga, ask you to bind this one by blood.
Then she said it again, three hundred times.
She lost count, of course; but she figured one repetition per minute, for five hours or thereabouts. Baba had told her to repeat it until the hour of the hag, which she figured out was a particularly unpleasant way of designating three in the morning.
With the clocks unplugged, she could not be too sure of the time, but she felt it, nonetheless. Her voice had almost given out, her throat dry like an old bellows, squeezing air between cracked leather.
The air in the house cooled. The candle began to gutter.
Lissa licked dry lips with a dry tongue and stopped speaking. She had to work her mouth for a moment, but she managed just enough saliva; she leaned over the bowl of ink and spat.
Beside the bowl was a box cutter, with a fresh blade, which she’d dipped in rubbing alcohol at the beginning of the night. She pricked her thumb with it, and squeezed. A single, fat droplet of blood fell into the ink and sank.
Carefully, using both hands, Lissa took the wax-written egg and bathed it in the ink, turning it over and over until the faint greasy marks of her fingerprints had vanished.
She took it out and set it back upon the tripod. The ink dried quickly, first marbling in the currents of air and then turning matte.
Lissa watched it, heavy-lidded. After a while, she blew out the candle and went to fetch a glass of water.
Downstairs, the door creaked open. Stella fumbled about, set down her bag, bumped into something, whispered a curse.
The power in the house was still off. Lissa had not thought.
She stood, breathing silently, at the top of the stairs, while Stella tiptoed into the living room; she heard the flick of a flint, saw a faint bloom of light. She waited until the candle was extinguished again and then counted off ten long minutes before she crept downstairs and reset the breakers.
The hallway light flashed on for a second and then died in a fizzle of overstressed filaments. The refrigerator hummed to life.
Stella murmured in her sleep. She sounded distressed. Lissa stood outside the living-room door, but she was quiet after that, and finally Lissa went up to her own room and tried to sleep.
On Tuesday, Maksim arrived on foot, limping, leaning on Gus.
“You made him walk?” Lissa said.
“He wouldn’t get in the cab,” Gus said. Under the streetlight, her eyes showed white, too wide. “Your sister’s not here, is she?”
Lissa shook her head. “At work.”
“What’s up with your voice? And that smell?” Gus said. She shivered and tossed her hair. “Ah, Christ, I’ve been over and over it, and there’s fuck all I can do on my own. Take him.”
She shoved Maksim at Lissa. He stumbled and caught at Lissa’s shoulder but kept his feet. It helped that he had lost weight.
“I’ll be back for him tomorrow,” Gus said, and she shoved her hands in her pockets and walked away, too quickly, boot heels loud on the sidewalk.
From the corner, she shouted, “Don’t fuck this up!” And then she ran.
Lissa left Maksim sitting on the porch steps while she prepared the house. She brought the black egg down to the kitchen, turned off the power again, took down her hair.
Outside, Maksim seemed to have crawled up and slumped against the door, his weight holding it shut. Lissa kicked it before she realized, and she heard the hollow rap of Maksim’s head against the wood.
A shuffling confusion of noise, and the door was jerked from her hands. Maksim bulled inside, all awake now, all menace. He crowded Lissa into the kitchen, saying nothing, pressing his fist against his forehead.
He took the glass of water she offered him, but he only set it aside. His face looked clay-colored and heavily lined.
“Do you need a sleep egg before I start? I can’t have any interruptions.”
“Your voice, koldun’ia,” Maksim said. “Are you ill?”
“Stayed up all night chanting,” Lissa said. “So? Do you?”
Maksim shrugged. “I had two before I left so that we might walk here. Gus did not like it.”
“She’s not the only one.”
Maksim angled his head oddly. In the candlelight, his pupils were dilated all the way so that his eyes looked black. “I smell witchcraft,” he said.
Lissa brought down the stone bowl, impatient to get this done now that she was committed.
“And something else,” Maksim said.
Lissa opened her notebook to the page where she’d written Baba’s instructions.
“I should not ask this thing,” Maksim said. “I should go.”
“What? Don’t be an idiot. It’s almost done, anyway.”
“I should go,” he said again, folding his arms around his body, shaking his head. His eyes looked spooky, blown open wide like that; maybe because his face was thinner than Lissa was used to seeing it.
“You’ve already made the choice,” she said. “Sit.” She pointed to the stool by the counter.
He sat. The tendons in his arms and neck stood out harshly beneath his skin.
Lissa placed the black egg in the bowl and poured more ink around and over it. She began to say the charm again.
After the first hour, her voice went, scraped down to a husk of sound, but that did not matter. Her mouth, a witch’s mouth, formed the words. Her mind, a witch’s mind, held the intention.
Maksim moved only once, to release his grip on his own forearms and pick up the glass of water. Lissa could see the marks on his flesh where his fingers had pressed. He held the glass too tightly also and lifted it to his lips with a grim care that made Lissa wince; and then she turned her eyes away so that she would not lose the thread of the words.
Finally came the hour of the hag.
Chill swept the house. The candle went out.
In darkness, Lissa took Maksim’s wrist and led him to the stone bowl. She made him spit in the ink. The egg was bound to her from last night’s working; now it must be bound to him, as well.
She held his hand over the bowl, felt for the pad of his thumb, and handed him the blade.
Maksim inhaled sharply.
“Cut,” Lissa rasped. “You don’t need much.”
He said nothing, only sighed out. Lissa heard the blood splash into the ink. She let Maksim go, and she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Then she reached into the bowl with both hands, turning the egg, coating it.
When she drew it from the ink, her gloves were black up to the knuckles. She found the tripod—her eyes had begun to adjust to the lack of light—and set the egg to dry.
“Now we wait,” she whispered.
On her words, the candle flared back to life.
It showed her Maksim, cradling his cut hand against his chest; he’d cut deeper than she meant him to, for blood had run into his palm and down his wrist.
It showed her the familiar kitchen made stark and strange by looming shadows. It showed her the hairs pricked upright on her own arms.
For a moment, unheralded dread stopped her mouth.
She swallowed, swallowed again, gestured to Maksim to pass her the water glass.
He did not seem to see her, sunk deep within himself. Lissa got up eventually and went to the tap. She peeled her gloves off, binned them, washed her hands twice over, and drank straight from the running stream, letting it splash her chin and hair.
When she lifted her head again, Maksim had wrapped his hand into the hem of his shirt. He met her eyes.
“I felt it,” he said. “I felt it take.” His voice sounded rusty too. He waited until Lissa had finished at the sink, and he held his thumb under the cold tap and then slipped off his shirt to rinse it.
“Thank God,” Lissa said, almost light-headed with the lifting of a worry she hadn’t even known was so heavy.
“Rest your voice,” Maksim said.
Lissa took his place on the stool and drank another glass of water, while Maksim went carefully about her kitchen, pouring out the mess of ink and fluids from the bowl, washing it with plenty of soap. He hung his wet shirt over the back of a chair and went without, though he shivered occasionally. Lissa could see on his skin what the last few weeks had cost him: new livid scars, scour marks, starkly knotted muscles.
“Your sister,” Maksim said. “Is she well?”
“She’s working late,” Lissa said. “It’s convocation week for the universities.” Elsewhere in the city, people were laughing. Celebrating their achievements. Getting ready for their new lives.
Maksim sat down beside her. “And you?”
“I have to do the last thing,” Lissa said. She slid off the stool.
She’d hidden it in her bedroom, in the closet that still smelled of mothballs and Baba’s clothing. She brought it out slowly, almost ceremoniously: a steel urn, designed for the ashes of a beloved cat or dog. She’d already stuffed it with a nest of green plastic Easter grass.
In the kitchen, Maksim sat with his face in his hands. He lifted his head when Lissa returned. He did not bother to wipe his swollen eyes; he turned away a little only when Lissa looked at him.
“Why did the candle light again?” he asked as Lissa slid it closer to her.
She shook her head and shrugged. The egg had dried. She wrapped it in a rag and held it gingerly, close to the flame. Nearest the heat, the waxen Cyrillic characters warmed and slid. Lissa wiped away the melted wax with her rag, exposing the bare shell the wax had kept free of ink.
Bit by bit, she revealed the design. Maksim watched. The letters looked uneven, childish; but when the shell was quite smooth and free of wax, Maksim shivered again and looked to Lissa.
She placed it gently within the urn and packed more Easter grass around it.
“Would you like to seal it?”
Maksim shook his head, twisting his hands together on the countertop. Lissa sealed the urn herself, first screwing the lid into place and then dripping hot wax all around the seam. She burned her fingers a little, but she could be sure the urn would not take in any groundwater.
“I’ll bury this in the yard,” she told Maksim.
“Now,” he said.
He followed a few paces behind, out to the garden shed. He dug the hole, two feet deep, between the roots of her grandmother’s favorite tree. He would not touch the urn. He stood back while Lissa leaned down to set it in the ground.
He shoveled earth over it as quickly as he could, breathing hard. He filled the hole and stamped it down with his boots.
Only then did he rest, leaning on the shovel and smearing sweat over his forehead with the back of his hand.
“My God,” he said. “I am hungry.”
Lissa restored power to the house. They took turns in the shower. Maksim fried a pound of bacon while Lissa toasted rye bread and chopped mangoes, bananas, and strawberries.
Just before dawn, Stella came in. She stood in the kitchen doorway and frowned. “Lord, you’re weird,” she said.
“I am better,” Maksim said. “I am sorry I behaved badly before.”
“Actually, I meant you were weird for having breakfast in the middle of the night,” Stella said and helped herself to bacon.
The food tasted right, as food had not done for so long. Blueberry jam, crusty toast, ripe buttery mango. He ate almost all the bacon himself, some of it right from the pan, hot enough to burn his fingers and his tongue.
Stella made a pot of tea, but she and Lissa were both drooping over the table by the time it had finished steeping.
“Go and rest,” Maksim said. “I will tidy up. Thank you for breakfast.”
Lissa whispered, “You’re welcome.” Her hair lay in a wet tangle over her shoulders where she had not bothered to comb it all out. That, and the fragile little voice, would make her seem childlike if Maksim was not what he was and could not smell the heavy thunder on the air.
It made the hair rise on him, even now, with the thing safely sealed up and buried.
He watched Lissa stifle a yawn and pad toward the stairs and turn to wave good night, and he flashed back to the memory of her soft hands gloved and black with ink, a few hours ago, maybe, the memory cloudy and dreadful. The night had gone blurred, everything before the moment when the spell had taken and he’d come to himself, with his own blood pooling in the palm of his hand from a gash in his thumb he did not recall receiving.
He had a pink Band-Aid over it now, and it still hurt: a proper, sharp hurt. A lot of things hurt. Bruised ribs and scabbed-over skin and the knitting bone in his wrist, which had begun to ache when he was digging under the tree.
He relished it. Too many days of smeared-out numbness, burying himself down deep so that he could not do harm, could not do anything at all.
“So,” said Stella.
Maksim spun. He’d forgotten her; the new, darker thunder scent covered everything else. And he was tired.
“She didn’t want me to see it,” Stella said. “It was a bit of a pain, really, not being able to come home. I had to go to an after-hours club with a couple of the girls from the pub and dance to house music. Which I hate.”
Maksim raised his eyebrows.
“Well?” said Stella. “Aren’t you going to fill me in?”
“If she did not want you to see it…”
“Someone’s got to look out for her while she looks out for you,” Stella said. “Or are you just fine with letting everyone else take the heat for your mistakes? Because I know you’ve made some, and so far, it looks to me like Lissa’s the one who’s been cleaning up after you.”
“Her grandmother made a promise,” Maksim felt compelled to point out.
“Her grandmother was a horrible old hag who kept her away from the rest of the family,” Stella said.
Maksim remembered Iadviga, young: all pride and temper, almost like one of the kin. He had shepherded her across half of Europe, because kolduny were rare and his home was long gone. He’d been glad when he realized she was with child, thinking there was a husband somewhere to whom he could restore her; but she only said fiercely that there was not and kept her head up, glaring.
Sometimes it was hard to remember it had been more than fifty years since he’d found Iadviga in the grip of the Gulag and thirty since he’d asked her to repay that debt. And perhaps the things he admired in Iadviga, the fury that had kept her alive in war and the honor that had urged her to help Maksim, had not made for an easy legacy.
“Her grandmother gave her the spell,” Maksim said now, “to give to me. I do not know more than that.”
“You know it worked? For sure?”
“Yes,” he said, feeling the truth of it: his nature leashed, with a choke leash, barbed enough to hurt if he strained against it.
“Her voice was all shot.”
“She prayed for a long time,” Maksim said; he was not sure how long, but he had a recollection of the husking whisper continuing in a long broken stream while he sat, struggling slowly and dumbly with himself, at the bottom of a sticky well.
Stella frowned. “I just don’t know enough about this yet. But it seemed like the other ones only took a moment.”
“The other eggs were only to give sleep for a few hours. This one was to bind a piece of my soul.”
He’d meant it figuratively, but it sounded right, now that he said it. The dark piece of his soul matched with the black-stained egg.
“That sounds a bit sinister,” Stella said, shivering a little. “Lord, why’s it cold in here? It’s going to be ninety degrees again by noon.”
“You are tired,” Maksim said. “You waited up all night. Go, rest. It is enough for now.”
He spoke to her as he would to a fellow soldier, and she must have taken the tone correctly, for she straightened and nodded and rose easily.
She stopped and leaned toward the window, though.
“Gus,” she said, and both of them stepped quietly to the front door.
Gus stood on the front walk. She had taken a bit of care with herself, Maksim saw: clean, damp hair curling in the warming dawn, two layers of white tank top, bare shoulders dotted with freckles and old scars. He could see her nostrils pinching. If she’d been an animal, her ears would have been laid flat. He realized she did not want to approach any closer to the house.
“Come out to me,” she said, voice pitched low.
Maksim did. The sun warmed his bare skin; dew lay heavy on the grass. Gus stood very still until he was within reach, and then she embraced him tight, strong arms about his shoulders, cheek against his.
He felt her look up over his shoulder after a minute and draw breath to speak, but she said nothing.
She let him go then. “Are you ready to come home?”
“I promised to tidy the kitchen. Come inside.”
She glanced at Stella on the porch.
“Come,” said Stella. “I think there’s still tea.”
Gus came, though Maksim could see how much it bothered her. She took her tea black and stood in a corner while Maksim balled up his soaked and stained T-shirt and put it in the trash and wiped the bacon pan.
Stella tidied away the fruit peels and toast crumbs and stacked the dishes beside the sink. She kept looking at Gus, quick flashes of her long-lashed eyes. Finally, she said, “You’re his sister. Right?”
Gus barked out a laugh. “Close enough.” She grinned at Maksim, daring him to offer a different word.
He did not. He was the elder by a century, give or take, but not by enough to gainsay her, not any longer.
The night after the new moon, Lissa went to bed very early.
She’d fallen asleep in front of the television with a glass of water in her hand and only realized when it slipped to the floor and spilled. She left it there.
With Stella out at work, she hadn’t bothered to make dinner. Her stomach felt tight and hollow; she only gulped more water and crawled between her sheets.
She dreamed of a mass grave in Greenland. She’d seen it in National Geographic, maybe, when she was a child.
The grave contained bodies preserved by the ice: several adults and a baby. The baby had been wrapped in a shield of hides, securing it to a carrying frame, as its mother or father would have used to tote it around in life. The baby’s skin and hair, the wool of its swaddling, had all been tanned by the earth to the same palette of browns as the wrapping of hides.
The mouth, gaping open, showed a single brown tooth. The eyes had withered away, leaving empty sockets.
Lissa knew exactly how the baby felt.
She woke with her mouth open on a soundless howl. Her voice had worsened. She could not make a sound at all.
The thin cotton of her sheet rasped her skin as she turned over. The air in her room had gone cold and flat while she slept. She groped for the water glass on her bedside table.
Empty, and her throat ached.
She sat up, knuckling at her eyes. Without her sheet, the cold bit deep. She reached for the switch of her lamp.
No power. The room stayed dark.
It was still on her, the feeling of the dream. Dread and despair. She snatched her hand back from the lightless lamp and huddled as close to the center of her bed as she could get.
In the dimness, the shape of her doll, lying on the bedside chair, reminded her of the mummified baby. And of the chill in Baba’s voice, when she spoke, from wherever she was now.
Wherever she was, Lissa would be there too, eventually. Maybe it was the price. She’d made a binding at the dark of the moon. How had she thought this could ever be forgiven?
Then the clock ticked over.
Outside, a bird called.
Lissa raised her head. Warmer air breathed in through the window.
Beside her, the bedside lamp bloomed to light.
“Holy shit,” Lissa croaked.
Her face was smeared with tears and snot, her hair pasted to it. She put on a light nightgown and went to the bathroom to wash. In the mirror, under the fluorescent light, she looked puffy and too pink; she could not meet her own eyes.
The wrongness had left her, whatever it was; but she felt the bruise of it still. She wished Stella was home and was then violently thankful she was not. Lissa was afraid to go back into her bedroom.
She ended up drawing a bath and fell asleep in the warm water, with her head propped up by an inflatable neck pillow.
She woke up chilly again, but only because the water had cooled around her; and downstairs, she heard Stella’s key in the lock.
“This house smells funny at night,” Stella said when Lissa came down, hair wrapped in a towel.
“Does it?”
“Like a cave,” Stella said. “You know. Stone and cold water.”
Lissa’s skin prickled.
“What are you doing up, anyway? You look like the dog’s breakfast, quite frankly,” Stella continued. “Why don’t I make you some tea?”
