WANING GIBBOUS
Maksim walked because he did not trust his balance quite enough for running. The rye on its own would only have been enough to loosen him up, but the witch’s spelled eggs were something else: a heavy drag on his limbs, a haze on his thoughts. He kept the egg carton cradled in one hand and let the other hand reach out to touch things: fences, lilacs, brick walls, walls covered in shingle. Once, his head blurred enough that he found himself leaning upon one of these walls, and he stayed there a moment, breathing thickly.
He walked past the mouth of the alley without seeing it and found himself on King Street already, about to walk into a crowd of black-clothed teenagers at a streetcar stop; he turned himself around again and went back north, murmuring a curse.
Was this where he had found the young man? Was this where he had begun to go wrong—this sodium-lit aisle of broken pavement? It held a shopping cart and a jumble of gas cans; he could smell the gas, cloying, confusing the other scents. He held his breath and went farther in. A Dumpster. That could be right. Stale beer, rancid grease, cat piss, mice. When he went to crouch beside the Dumpster, he fell to one knee, dizzy again.
He could smell blood, though, a bit, faint and tantalizing below the other smells. He got right down and snuffled at the ground.
Here: a fat drop, smeared by a shoe. Dry now, but there’d been no rain, and the scent of it was still true.
Under the blanket of the witch’s magic, his other nature roused sleepily, sullenly. He drew the scent in. That made it better.
The young man had been just what his nature loved most: graceful body slowed by pain and shock, bruises just starting beneath the silky skin. Blood like liquor, and Maksim suddenly as thirsty as a sailor on leave. He’d let himself get closer, closer, never thinking his will would fail him so completely. Never thinking his nature would slip the collar of Iadviga Rozhnata’s spell.
After what he’d done, Maksim had run off west. The young man would not have followed; he had been frightened, confused. He would be more frightened now, more confused, with Maksim’s nature taking root in him. He would be all kin soon, and he would not know what it meant, and if Maksim did not find him in time …
Maksim dragged his mind from hazy, dire forebodings and back to what had happened, what evidence might be left to him.
The young man had been drunk. His sweat had tasted of it—his breath, his blood. Maksim wondered if this had made him even more appealing, because it reminded him of Augusta: drink and blood and the sweat of a healthy, athletic body.
The second young man had been drunk too, even worse off. They would have had to help each other or ask for help from some other person. East was downtown, heavier traffic, more taxis.
East was the way he’d entered the alley, and Maksim had not smelled the young man’s scent on the way in. But he backtracked, anyway, slow and thickheaded, tracing and retracing, and sure enough, there was a hint of it, a trace of blood on a wall where he might have rested his hand.
So Maksim had managed to track the two young men a whole fifty feet. What next? He sat down on the hood of a parked car to think about it. Queen Street? Where there were streetcars and taxis and—wait, yes. He had already thought about this part. Surely Queen Street would be correct. He would just stroll down that way and keep scenting.
In a moment.
He started violently awake to a brush of warmth over his hand. He reached, snatched, caught nothing. Peered about, breathing hard.
On the roof of the car, behind him: a yearling cat, thin and hunched, peering back. When he stood up, it skittered away, paused, jumped down, and vanished into the alley.
Maksim braced against the drowsy slackening of his limbs. He did not sit back down on the car. He pushed off toward Queen Street.
A few steps down the sidewalk, he realized his hands were empty. That was wrong.
He turned around and saw his eggs, abandoned on the hood of the car. The little cat had come back and was sniffing at the carton.
He lunged at it, but he was just slow enough that his fingers only closed on a tuft of fine black fur. The cat darted under a nearby fence. Its wide-pupiled eyes gazed at him quite calmly as he took up the eggs again.
It should fear him more. His nature would have had him snap its neck before he could think. The eggs would wear off eventually, and he would be a danger to whatever, whoever, was near him.
He sighed. His eyes stung. He did not want to be a danger to small cats. He would sit down for a moment before resuming his search. Just a moment to rest his eyes before going on.
Smoke billowed up from the burning tents. The ataman was laughing, one side of his moustache singed to curling char.
The ataman’s chest was bare, running with sweat, and his long cherkesska flapped open, buttons slashed off and one lapel scored with a ragged tear. He shook his saber in the air, and blood flew from the blade.
“A fine night!” he said. “A fine night, Maksim!”
Maksim heard the words as if through a waterfall, did not see the man’s face at all, only the weapon and the blood scattering. He ran at the ataman and tried to slash his throat.
The ataman blocked him, still laughing. “You are very slow, and your saber is dull,” he said. “You have been fighting-mad for many hours. Our foes are dead or have fled, and it is time for you to put your saber down.”
Maksim tried to raise his saber again, but one of the nicks in the edge caught against the ataman’s blade, and he could not seem to free it.
“Maksim,” the ataman was saying. “Be calm now. The fighting is over for this day.”
Maksim still had fight in his arms, but the ataman repeated himself until at last Maksim dropped his saber.
“It was a very good madness,” said the ataman. “Come back from it now.”
Maksim, at the touch of the ataman’s hand on his shoulder, startled and began to tremble.
The ataman soothed him like a beast, petting his arm. “Your brothers are over at the fire. Have you any hurts that need tending?”
But Maksim did not have his voice yet. He recognized the ataman now—a man he’d been following since last summer, through a long and messy campaign—and he was able to follow him dumbly toward the cooking fires, but when Maksim drew near the others, some of whom were wounded, the smell of blood and gunpowder made his lips draw back from his teeth. He covered his eyes with his hands so the ataman would not see the madness returning in them.
The ataman looked at Maksim’s face and shook his head. “I will have someone come to you. But perhaps I should make sure you cannot forget that the fighting is over for now.” The ataman took off his sash and used it to bind Maksim’s hands together.
Maksim pulled mindlessly at his bonds until he hurt himself, and then he was still, mostly.
After some time, a woman came to help him strip off his scorched and slashed cherkesska and douse his injuries with vodka. He was still too much in his madness to answer questions, but he was able to make himself submit to her touch. After she stitched the worst of his injuries, he went to sleep there on the ground, still bound, wrapped in his battle-filthy coat.
When he awoke and freed himself, he found he was one of the heroes of last night’s action. He drank with his brothers; he rutted with the woman who had cleaned him up. His injuries healed very quickly.
But the madness did not quite leave him. He fell into it again each time they fought, and each time took longer to return to himself. And when they were not fighting, he was quicker to anger, flush with energy that had to be wrestled out. He thought he had not always been this way.
He began to notice people flinching from him a little. He heard rumors about himself: that he was a shape-changer who became a beast at the full moon, that he was possessed by an evil spirit. None of the rumors he heard were true, but he began to understand there was something at the heart of them.
Finally, he sought out a koldun. The koldun was frail, stooped, blind in one eye; Maksim was a Cossack in the prime of his youth, and yet he feared the koldun so much that he trembled with it as he stood in the hut to ask his question.
The koldun demanded the price of a deer, which Maksim chased down on foot.
When Maksim returned with the animal slung over his shoulders, still steaming, the koldun said, “You have only to look to that hunt for the secrets of your nature.”
“What do you mean?” Maksim said, growling a little, for the heated blood of the deer still stained his hands.
“You follow blood. You shed blood. You are kin to the others who share your blood. Blood is the only end,” the koldun said as if that was all Maksim needed to know.
The koldun waited, smiling, his sighted eye bright in a web of wrinkles, while Maksim clenched his hands on the fine-boned limbs of the deer and fought down both the desire to run at him and the desire to run away.
“I can take it from you,” the koldun said finally. “You will grow worse with age. I can make you as other men.”
Maksim shuddered all down his spine. He thought it sounded like a threat, and he did not doubt the koldun would see it through.
He was losing his voice again, as he sometimes did when his madness rode him. But he made himself shake his head, and he laid the deer down at the koldun’s feet and backed away.
The koldun said nothing; he only turned away into the dimness of his hut and left Maksim standing there with deer’s blood on his hands.
Maksim went away still believing the madness was a gift. Among the Cossacks, a violent man was a useful man. Battle was his natural inclination. His fellows learned to launch him in the right direction and then stay out of his way; his ataman learned how to command him, at least some of the time. When there was no fighting to quell his thirst, he could wrestle his brothers, he could fuck with abandon, or, failing all else, ride or run or drink until he dropped in exhaustion.
Maksim began to understand that he would live a very long life. He’d thought for quite a while that he would live all of it as a Cossack.
History happened, though. He did not change, or not quickly, but things around him did, and as his madness grew in him—and grew less welcome—he thought again of the koldun.
When he reached the place where the koldun had lived, he found that the man had died and left no successor. Maksim did not mind so much; he had already had another good idea. He left the Cossacks to their newfound gentleness and went looking for a war.
He did not have to look far. Not that year, and not for many years after.
Lissa dropped off the fertility spell early the following day. She dressed carefully for it in a black shirtdress with long sleeves: ugly and unsuitable for the weather, but correct.
Stella had come back sometime in the late hours; Lissa could see her tousled hair hanging over the arm of the sofa. She tiptoed past and did not slam the door.
She couldn’t help a thread of worry under her manufactured calm. The sleep eggs hadn’t been as effective as she’d thought they should have been—what if she was off her game? What if the fertility eggs proved ineffective too?
Izabela Dmitreeva was staying with her mother-in-law and a gaggle of other relatives. When Lissa arrived, sweating in her heavy dress, two old men were watching television in the den; one made the sign against evil, and the other merely looked at her, his rheumy eyes level and cold. The mother-in-law had a familiar face; Lissa could not recall her name but thought she’d taken eggs for kidney stones the year before. Izabela Dmitreeva ushered Lissa into the kitchen and thanked her very graciously for taking the time in the midst of her own troubles.
The apartment smelled of boiled vegetables; when Lissa had finished explaining how to take the eggs, Izabela Dmitreeva pressed upon her a Tupperware container of cabbage rolls, calling her koldun’ia again.
Izabela Dmitreeva did not seem to have any doubt that the eggs would work. She had already begun knitting a baby blanket, Lissa saw; it lay in a basket on the windowsill, a jumble of knitting needles and pale-yellow yarn.
The old men weren’t so sanguine. On her way out, she saw the sign again, and one of the men cleared his throat and hawked horribly into a Kleenex.
Lissa took the subway home and found Stella in the kitchen, making coffee. Making coffee for her, apparently.
“I didn’t even hear you go out,” Stella said, eyeing the ugly dress. “There’s fruit salad. And muffins.”
“I didn’t know we had muffins.”
“I made them,” Stella said. “To say sorry.”
“Hold that thought,” Lissa said and jogged upstairs to change into a lightweight T-shirt and a denim skirt. Bare-legged, she came back down to find Stella setting out plates and cups in the kitchen.
The muffins turned out to be lemon cranberry and delicious. Stella picked at hers, and every time Lissa glanced at her, she glanced away.
“Look,” Lissa said. “It was nice of you to bake for me.”
“I want to stay,” Stella said.
“With me? But—”
“There’s so much I could do to help. This house … it isn’t really yours yet, you know? And you shouldn’t have to do it all by yourself. I was thinking you might be able to use some rent money. And—”
“But that’s all about me,” Lissa said. “I don’t need all that.”
“Oh,” Stella said. “Okay.” And her great dark eyes began to well.
“Hey … look, I’m sorry. It was nice of you to come, and…” And what else did you say to a stepsister you didn’t know, anyway? Lissa filled her mouth with coffee.
Stella jumped into the gap. “That’s just it; I don’t think it’s right that your only family is all on the other side of the ocean and never visits. And I can’t change Dad, and Mum doesn’t really count as your family, I guess, but there’s me, and I want to know you better. You’re … you’re so quiet, and maybe you could use some fun sometimes. Or cry on my shoulder, if that would help. Or, you know—”
“I don’t want to cry on anyone’s shoulder.”
“I do!” Stella said, dissolving.
Lissa, after a frozen moment of awkwardness, handed her a napkin.
“I can’t go back,” Stella sobbed. “I can’t deal with it there. You know how many messages Erick’s left on my phone in the last three days? Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! He’s scaring me.”
“Erick?”
“Boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He just won’t leave me alone.”
“So you ran all the way to Canada?”
“I’ll find a flat if you don’t want me,” Stella said. “I have everything I need. I have a job already.”
“A … what?”
“Last night,” Stella said, wiping smeared mascara from beneath her eye. “Everyone needs servers, right? And I don’t have to worry about paperwork, because Dad got my Canadian citizenship set up ages ago. So I made the rounds of your neighborhood. And I found the Duke of Lancashire. You know, up near Bloor.”
Lissa shook her head.
“The girls wear little kilts,” Stella said. “They hired me on the spot.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” Lissa managed.
Stella tucked her head down. “Please let me stay until I find my own place. Please say I can.”
“That’s … wow,” Lissa said. “Um. I have to think about that.”
She thought she was being pretty awesome, not saying no right off the bat, but Stella’s face went all crushed.
Lissa had no idea what to do with that. If Stella stuck around, she was either going to cave to emotional blackmail or kick her sister right out the door.
It was an hour too early to leave for work, but she did anyway. Behind her, the house felt smaller than usual, with Stella still sitting in it, drying her eyes at the kitchen table. Not hers. Not right.
At the print shop, Lissa’s boss, Mustafa, welcomed her back, patted her on the shoulder, and told her he’d stocked the fridge with her favorite iced green tea. He didn’t tell her the corporate orders were behind schedule, but she found that out quickly enough.
She’d have to put in some extra time to get everything caught up, but that was okay. She had to pay off the funeral somehow, and Baba had left her, in addition to the house, the property tax bill; the heating system, which still ran on oil; the new sofa, charged to the Sears card.
And if she worked late, she would not have to face Stella again just yet or the strangeness of the house or the people wanting eggs; she would not have to speak to anyone at all, only move quietly back and forth amid the scent of warm paper and the white noise of ink upon it.
Maksim forgot where he was going on his way to Augusta’s apartment. The hazy sunshine lulled him even as he walked. He stopped to watch two boys sparring in a backyard, and he leaned upon the fence and stared unabashed until a woman came out of the house and brandished a phone at him.
He shrugged at her. “No English,” he said and wandered away. He took a nap on a bench for a half hour. He woke sweating and off-kilter, half-glad his egg was wearing off and half-desperate for another already. While he thought it all through, he knotted one hand in the other until his bones creaked and came to the remembrance that he’d meant to see Augusta. He rose from the bench and trudged off toward her street.
Her street was a shabby one, seen in daylight: rows of old Victorian rooming houses with sheets hung at the windows, and newer buildings with cheap brick frontages and cinder-block sides, all close-built right up to the edges of the lots so that the alleys were shoulder width and dark. People squatted in them sometimes in the summers. Many of Augusta’s neighbors didn’t seem to know how to wash. Some of them smelled ill. Maksim usually made Augusta come to visit him.
On this day, she must have seen or scented him coming; she stormed up the sidewalk, glowering, her boots heavy on the pavement. She had been choosing the same kind for decades now, plain black army boots with steel toes, and she would wear them until the leather wore down and the steel shone through. “You went to the witch,” Augusta said. “And you didn’t come back.”
“I am here now.”
“She couldn’t help you properly. Could she? You need me, after all.”
“She is dead,” Maksim said, and he watched Augusta’s eyes flinch. “Her granddaughter, fortunately for me, is also a witch.”
“That explains the stink.”
“What stink?”
Augusta flicked his scalp with her blunt fingertip. “You don’t smell right, and you’re all slow.”
Maksim shrugged. “I have taken to the bottle also, and I have a piece of news to tell you, and I think you would prefer to hear it over a drink.”
The look she gave him was wide-eyed and unhappy, but she led him to a dusty pub a few streets away. It was the kind of place where no one washed the windows or the floors, and the tabletops were sticky. The TV showed a soccer game; the announcer spoke in excited Portuguese, of which Maksim recognized a few words from his time in the Peninsula. Augusta ordered them each a glass of stout.
“I’m a bit short in the pocket this week,” she said, flushing faintly over her nose and cheekbones.
Maksim groped in his pocket and found a crumple of bills. He dropped them on the floor, gathered them up, set them on the table; a breeze from the open door nearly scattered them again, and Augusta cursed and slammed the saltshaker down upon the bills.
“I don’t like you like this. I hope you’ll make this short so that I can go back to making some blunt.”
“I can compensate you for your time,” Maksim said. “Or not, if that gives offense. Really, Augusta—”
She bared her teeth at him. “Gus. Asshole. I’ve only been reminding you for a hundred years.”
“Gus. Fine. The thing is … I may have made you a brother.”
The pint glass shattered in her hand.
By the time the sighing bartender had brought damp towels and a fresh glass, Gus had recovered herself enough to laugh, if a bit breathlessly. “All these years … it’s been just the two of us.”
“The devil in it is, I do not know where to find him,” Maksim admitted, covering his face with his hands. He emerged a moment later to add, “And I am out of practice. At managing myself. I do not feel it coming in time to rein myself in, as you do. If I go about unleashed, I am afraid of what else I might do.”
“Come on. I do stupid shit all the time, at least when I’m sober. And I’m half your age, anyway; it hasn’t hit me as much yet. But leaving that aside…” Gus said. “I want to know why you finally broke your streak. Why now. Why him, this fellow, and why can’t you find him?”
“Koldun’ia Iadviga died, and her enchantment was undone,” Maksim said. “Ill fate came upon me immediately. I think it has been waiting for me, ever since—”
“Ever since the thing you never talk about,” Gus said, crossing her arms over her chest and squeezing her elbows.
“Yes.” And for a moment, the memory roared over Maksim as it had not done in years: the red of it, the heat, the taste of gunmetal. He nearly gagged.
Gus laid her hands carefully on the tabletop, where Maksim could see them. He wondered if he’d made a motion or a sound.
“Take a sip,” she said. “Good. Another. Don’t worry, I won’t press you. We’ve gone this long without talking about it, haven’t we?”
Maksim shook his head, pressed his lips against the glass.
“Whatever it was,” Gus said, “it drove you to take the spell. Didn’t it? By the time I caught up with you that year, you were different. You were all bottled up. And now you’re not, and that should be good, only you don’t think so. Am I warm?”
Maksim nodded.
“Take another drink,” Gus said. “This would be so much easier if it were last century, wouldn’t it? We’d just get on a boat and go somewhere else for a while.”
“No boats,” Maksim said, hand tightening on his pint.
“Easy. Easy. I already used up our glass quota here. No boats.”
Maksim gulped back the contents of the glass and set it down hard. Gus slid it out of reach across the table. “This is weird for me,” she said. “You’re always the one who knows what to do.”
Maksim shrugged one shoulder, hand twisting at the collar of his T-shirt.
Gus blew out a breath and shrugged in turn. “One thing at a time, okay? Tell me about my brother.”
Maksim drew a breath, felt it catch in his tight throat. He began, “I was running…”
But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t the beginning. He had been running when he came across the young man, but he’d been running for a while by then, ceaseless and demanding. When had he left the house?
He picked his way further through the slow backwash of his thoughts and said, “I was at my gym. Slavo—one of my students … we were working on his footwork. I thought he hit me. In the face. Lights flickered behind my eyes.” Maksim paused. Even as he said the words, he thought they were not right. Not lights but a burst of brilliant darkness. It had been similar to getting hit, but he had been hit many times in his long life, and he should have known the difference. He shook his head and went on, “I was angry with Slavo. My own fault, but I wanted to punish him. I sent him away instead. Made him leave without his shower. I went some rounds on the bag, but … I needed air. You remember how I used to run?”
Gus nodded. She had seen him head out into the early mornings of three different continents and come back hours later, sweat-soaked and limping, all his temper bled right out of him. She had helped him bind his blistered feet now and then or ice his burning calves.
Since coming to Toronto, Maksim had not needed it the same way, but he had kept it up nevertheless, if not as desperate or driven as before. He usually ran as if he were training for a marathon, varying his distances and elevation, cycling through a series of favorite routes. But that was not the kind of running he wanted, the day he was trying to describe.
“I think I did not even lock up the gym,” he said. “I went out and went far, and I went for hours. And instead of running it off, it got worse—the urge. I had not felt it so hard in years, and I was too drowned in it to think about why.”
“You can’t,” Gus said. “I mean, I can’t. Not when it’s like that.”
“It was late at night when I came on them,” Maksim went on. “Two young men in an alley behind a bar. Very drunk. They had been set upon, and one of them was bleeding.”
Gus laughed without humor.
“You know what I did next,” Maksim said. He was looking down at his hands on the tabletop, and he saw how tightly they were knotted together.
Gus followed his gaze and said, “I’ll get us another round.”
She brought back whiskey this time, in tough little shot glasses. Maksim drank his in a single long swallow; it eased the constriction in his voice somehow.
He said, “I ran away again right after. I did not think to stay. I went swimming.”
“In a pool?” Gus said, shuddering. “But the chlorine—and even though it’s so strong, it never quite covers up the smells of all the other people—”
“In the lake,” Maksim said, remembering the deep chill of it, the myriad scents of waterweeds and shore weeds, the birds welcoming the dawn.
“So when you came to me and broke my door, that was the next day?”
“I was not sure you would remember,” Maksim admitted.
“You left me a souvenir or two,” Gus said, gesturing wryly at her face. “I wondered what was up with you.”
“So did I,” Maksim said. “And then I went to see the witch, and it came clear.”
“So we have to find this guy, and we have to do it now.”
Maksim shrugged. Nodded.
“And you don’t have anyone else but me,” Gus said. Not a question. She looked a bit horrified for a moment, but then she took a breath, patted Maksim’s clenched hands, and said, “Go and relax or something. We’ll find him.”
She walked out without saying anything more, but she was whistling “Spanish Ladies,” so Maksim didn’t think she was angry.
Relax, she’d directed, and though he was not in the habit of taking advice from Augusta, Maksim took this as license to go back to his apartment and swallow down four eggs in quick succession. What came over him was not exactly sleep, but it was dark and blind, and it broke the tension in him like a blow from a sledgehammer. He slid down onto the floor before his refrigerator and let himself lie.
“Spanish Ladies”: Gus had always liked it. Maksim had heard it sung by sailors a hundred times, no matter whether they were leaving Spain or headed toward it.
The day he boarded the Honoria, for instance, bound for Cadiz. The sailors were shouting it back and forth to each other, tuneless and rough, as they rowed Maksim from the pier out to the ship. Maksim was riding the rough edge of two days without sleep, running from a Mayfair flat to a hidey-hole in Southwark to the port and the first berth he could command. He’d committed a murder: the kind of murder he always ended up committing, a moment’s unbridling of his nature and no turning back. He did not regret the murder—a young man losing at piquet and furious with it, who’d followed Maksim out of the card room to argue and ended in a sad huddle of limbs under a tree in Hyde Park—but he regretted being seen playing with the fellow and then leaving with him, and he regretted the new mare he’d had to leave behind in his rush to disappear.
The regret kept him on edge, despite the fatigue of his quick exit. He was unforgivably impolite to the captain, without realizing they would have to dine together; he wanted to drink heavily, but the drink was a Madeira, which he detested. He found the ship’s motion made him almost ill, which was a thing his kind rarely suffered.
By the end of the five-day voyage to Cadiz, his neckcloths were all crumpled from constant tugging, he had opened his knuckles on the paneling of his tiny cabin, and between the missed dinners and the never-ending pacing, he’d lost enough weight to make his breeches begin to droop at the waist. He surged ashore, barely remembering his belongings.
He ran, first, away from the people and the bustling port, over the tumbled rocks along what was left of the ancient city wall and up a sun-scoured hillside. His legs itched with the time spent confined. He dumped his things under a patch of scrub, his coat and his neckcloth and even his boots, and he ran until his feet bled slick.
He limped back down toward the town in the evening to find that an animal had mauled his belongings about, and his coat lay spread in the dust. It smelled of herbs and dried shit. He put it to rights as best he could and went to find meat, drink, and the latest news of the war.
What he found instead was a dying woman.
She lay in a narrow cul-de-sac where a house butted up near to a high section of the fortification. Maksim had heard the city had been shelled in many places during last year’s siege, but here the wall was as sturdy as ever. The woman was a faint, pale splash in the twilight of its shadow: white underskirts tumbled up over a torn spring-green gown. She whined very quietly.
She was bleeding. The smell came to Maksim like liquor, threading through the scents of frying fish and horse dung and ocean breeze. He was across the street in an instant, forgetting the more mundane needs that had driven him down from the hills. His mouth sprang with saliva.
Here was blood, and once blood had been spilled, more would always follow, and Maksim would be in the thick of it, one way or another. He did not stop to think that the war had moved on from here, that if this woman had been injured by a soldier it had been one of the allied soldiers stationed here or passing through, that any violence he would be drawn into on her behalf would only see him exile himself from yet another city. He did not think at all, just knelt on the dusty cobbles outside the spreading pool and reached to touch her throat. Her skin and hair were fair and fine. Her heart beat like a jeweler’s hammer.
“Ven aquí, cobarde,” she murmured.
“I speak no Spanish,” Maksim said in Russian. He looked at her eyes: one blue, one nearly all black where the pupil was blown. He looked at the injury to her head, but it was obscured by clots of blood dried messily into the curls of her hair.
He brought his face close to hers and sniffed along her brow, where the red ran freely, and he touched the tip of his tongue there, just for a moment.
“Muere conmigo,” the woman said, and she stabbed Maksim in the stomach.
Maksim swore. He rocked back on his heels.
The knife slipped free and blunted its tip on the cobbles. Maksim poked a fingertip into his injury and found it deep enough to bleed, but not at all vital.
“Would you care to try again?” he said to the woman, in English this time. He felt like laughing, the pain a bright bubble just below his rib cage: surprise was already becoming so rare a thing in his life.
“Yes,” the woman snarled, almost soundless.
“Even though I have not hurt you?”
“You would,” she said, and with that, Maksim could not disagree.
Moved by something he hardly recognized, he placed the knife in her hand and folded her trembling fingers about it. One of her palms was opened to the bone.
She could not raise herself enough to strike at his body again. Gasping, she lashed the blade across his forearm and then dropped it again.
“I have not the strength,” she whispered. Maksim could barely hear her over the pleasant buzz of evening in Cadiz, gulls crying over the rooftops, hooves and wheels on the cobbles, the distant chime of bells from the ships shifting on the harbor waves.
“And if you had the strength, that is what you would do? Spend it on stabbing me?”
Her chin dipped in a nod. There were other people passing the mouth of the cul-de-sac, children playing with a hoop, bright saffron and poppy frocks catching the sunset light, and this woman had no thought of calling for help. She only clenched her blood-slick fingers closer around the hilt of her knife.
Maksim said, “You have a fine spirit for a woman.”
The woman’s eyes looked strange and flat; he wondered if she was still awake, really, and if she was afraid. Her heart was not beating so fast now. It skipped and started, the way a sparrow closes its wings in flight and then flutters them hard again.
The blood scent was too much; Maksim had kept himself on a leash all week at sea. He stopped considering and bent down to taste the freshest rivulet at her temple.
She twisted like a snake and bit him.
“I think you are meant to live,” Maksim said. “Here.” And he laid his opened arm to her lips and let her taste what it meant to be kin.
She spat and fought him for a moment, but he bore down, free hand tight on her jaw. Then she bit him again, right on the fresh cut, making him jerk and laugh and lap at her face. She was shivering now, heartbeat picking up again, stronger under the grip of Maksim’s thumb.
“Easy,” he crooned to her. “Easy.” And her shivering abated until he could barely feel it, only a hint of it traveling through his frame as he lay with his head pressed close to her sternum and licked the dried blood from over her throat.
After a while, the woman’s breath slowed to long, shallow sighs, and her eyes fell nearly shut, and her hand cupped lax over Maksim’s elbow, almost cradling his arm to her slack open lips. Maksim sat up and spat on a handkerchief and wiped his face clean. He made bandages for the woman’s gored hand and breast, as well as he knew how; the loss of blood would maybe have killed her if Maksim had not happened by, but more likely, it would have been a long death by fever, infection, her humors unbalancing themselves while she lay abed. That would not happen now. He felt almost as if he had done a good deed.
Maksim pillowed her head on his folded coat and went back out into the street. He felt lovely now, blood-drunk and exhausted and surging with life, all the tension of the last week spent. His head nearly spun with it, as with the best liquor, and he had to school his face to sobriety before he met someone.
Two women, Spaniards, came his way, carrying bolts of cloth. He called out to them in English, “There’s been a crime. A lady is hurt.” He pointed back toward the wall.
His own disarray, his unsteadiness, the blood on his clothing must have spoken for him. The women led him to sit against a salmon-colored wall at the edge of the cul-de-sac, and one of them gave him a drink from a wineskin while the other sought whatever passed for the law here. The siege might have left the city battered, but in the half year since it seemed to have rebounded thoroughly—the street and the nearby plaza buzzed with people, sailors and soldiers of all the allied armies, fisherfolk and blacksmiths, priests and clerks, and, once they were aware of the incident, every one of them seemed to have a reason to come over and look at Maksim and the lady he’d found.
In no very long time, Maksim was following quite a procession uphill farther into the town: a litter carrying the injured woman, a pair of young men in official-looking uniforms, and a rabble of attendants, including the two women Maksim had approached and several young children, all of them chattering in Spanish.
They seemed to know where the injured woman lived; they brought her right to a townhouse door and made a hubbub there. Maksim followed everyone inside.
An elderly man ran into the parlor, wheezing with dismay. “Augusta! I did not even know she had left the house. Where is her servant? Has someone fetched the surgeon?” He collected himself and seemed to be repeating the same things in Spanish. A number of people ran out again; someone gave the old man a drink; others carried Augusta into another room.
Maksim went to follow.
The old man fixed upon him then. “Sir? You are?”
Maksim had not thought at all about who he might be, in this city, in this house.
He fell back upon a favorite subterfuge: stumbled forward, leaned upon the back of a chair, and pulled it down with him as he let himself drop.
As he lay boneless on the old gentleman’s parlor matting, he thought how much he liked Cadiz already, with its sunny plazas and steep streets and its ships endlessly coming and going; and unless he very much missed his mark, he’d have a place here for a few days, at least.
Someone came to lift him to a settee, and he feigned awakening and weakly accepted a glass of what turned out to be canario. A sympathetic maiden held it to his lips for him, even.
When the surgeon had finished with Augusta, he came to Maksim, sleeves tied up and arms bloody to the elbow.
He carried a curved needle and a fine length of gut. He cut away Maksim’s slashed shirt and sponged gore from the surrounding skin.
Maksim swallowed down some excellent whiskey and lay back with his eyes half-lidded as the surgeon placed his stitches, tiny piercing pains that spread into the duller flare of his injury, and though it was pain, it was also pleasure.
He slept in a narrow bed spread with a starched coverlet, and in the morning, he awoke to the sympathetic maid, who brought him black coffee and bread and told him that Miss Hillyard had survived the night, and she thanked him tearfully for saving the woman’s life.
The maid had a romantic notion; Maksim could see it. She thought him a hero and a gentleman and probably had him as good as married to Augusta and herself elevated to a grander position. The maid would be disabused of it all soon enough: when Miss Hillyard began to feel the effects of Maksim’s blood, she would cause a scandal one way or another. Maksim found himself eager to see where the madness would take her: he had never made a woman kin before, and he wondered if she would feel it as men did. She had not been raised to the sword as Maksim had—or any of the other kin he had encountered. She had probably been trained to sweetness all her short life, though Maksim thought, from her rage in the alley, that it had not quite taken.
For the time being, Maksim accepted the coffee, smiled bravely, and allowed that he was well enough to sit up and speak with Mr. Hillyard this morning. Two weeks, he gave it, and then Mr. Hillyard could hang, while Maksim took his daughter to the devil.
Two weeks turned out to be too generous: barely a single one had passed before Augusta was well enough for trouble.
Maksim had formed a habit of looking in on her in the mornings, after breakfasting with her father. The first few days, she’d scarcely been well enough to greet him before sleeping again, but her new nature sprang strong in her, and before long, she was sitting up in bed, eyes bright below the new scars at her hairline and prevailing upon the sympathetic maid to very improperly wait outside the door while Maksim visited.
“I do not know precisely what you did to me, Mr. Volkov,” she said, “but I fancy it was something un-Christian.”
Maksim blinked. He had not been expecting such directness, though now that he thought of it, he should have: was this not the woman who’d tried to stab him even as her own life ebbed away?
“Un-Christian,” he said. “That is true. What do you remember?”
Augusta flushed pink across the bridge of her nose. “Not much after the men left,” she said and shut her lips tight.
“Tell me of these men, then. Were they strangers to you?”
Augusta nodded. “Soldiers,” she said. “Spanish.”
“Did they…” Maksim paused for a moment, but Augusta was already continuing.
“They wanted to despoil me,” she said, looking at Maksim very straight as if shaming him for his delicacy in avoiding the question. “One of them tried, but he was dead drunk, and I scolded him, and he wilted like a cut lily, and it made him angry. Then they both beat me until I fell, and then they spat upon me and left me there to die. And I thought at first you were like them, but … you were not.”
“I did not force my attention on you?”
“If you did, I do not recall it,” Augusta said, eyes going distant and dreamy. “You gentled me and gave me something to drink and I felt … I felt…”
“I shared my nature with you,” Maksim said. “It brings healing; you must have felt it straightaway. You will want to be careful to avoid questions.”
“I am already monstrous tired of playing invalid,” Augusta admitted.
“You must keep at it,” Maksim said, “but if you are good, I will squire you out after the house is abed.”
“I will be ready for a bacchanal at this rate,” Augusta said moodily, fidgeting with her coverlet.
“It takes us all so,” Maksim said. “But I had not expected it to come over you this early. Hold tight, and have your maid send for me if you have need.”
Augusta made it through the day without issue, or so Maksim inferred from the absence of any message, but that very evening, as soon as her father’s lamp was snuffed, she was scratching at Maksim’s bedchamber door, already dressed and bearing a flask of her father’s finest.
She knew Cadiz scarcely better than Maksim did; she and her father had come from London only after the siege had ended, pursuing some business. Augusta waved her hand impatiently at Maksim’s questions and said, “Does it matter? You promised me a bacchanal, not a polite conversation. I expect you to deliver.”
As it turned out, Augusta made a splendid maenad: fire-eyed, flushed with whiskey and exercise. Maksim watched her from the corner of the public house he’d chosen.
She led another girl down the floor, a dusky girl with wild curls tumbled from her scarf. Both of them were laughing, their skirts kilted up to display immodest ankles.
Around them, a circle of men applauded, clapped, and stamped. Maksim scanned the faces: enthusiastic, lascivious, drunk, keen. Rough men, the kind of men he assumed Augusta had not had cause to meet before now.
Her father seemed to have kept her on the shelf, dressed in white, pouring tea for his associates. Maksim thought it a great waste.
The fiddler in the corner struck a triumphant finish. Augusta and her partner spun apart to curtsy to the room and back together to salute each other. Augusta kissed the girl’s hand, laughing up at her with mocking eyes, and they parted—the girl to pour wine and wipe the bar, Augusta to stand beside Maksim, chest heaving, hand pressed to the spot where the knife had nearly gored her heart.
She fixed a pale curl behind her ear and looked expectantly to Maksim. “Well? Are you going to stand here like a great looby all night?”
“I do not dance.”
“That much is apparent.”
“I do not mind watching you dance, however.”
“No one does,” Augusta said. “I had an excellent dancing master. It seems a bit passive for you, though. I do not believe you to be possessed of a passive character.”
“No, I am not.” He covered a smile and poured her a tot of whiskey.
“My, this stuff is delicious,” she said, knocking it back. “I often help myself to my father’s, you know. It’s fine, but I like it rougher.”
Maksim bit his lip on the crude thing he could have said.
“I think it is time you told me what you’re about,” Augusta said. “I know you are healed, as am I, and you needn’t linger. Yet here you are.”
Maksim found himself bending close, the better to hear her; Augusta’s voice was low and cultured, and the room loud with the voices of fishermen and soldiers.
“I would follow you,” she said. “I know you will not stay in Cadiz forever, and I would follow you when you go.”
“Of course,” he said. “The world has much to show us.”
“You’ve already seen a great deal of it, I know. I hope you will not mind a protégée.”
“On the contrary.”
“I fear I have already made myself the subject of a bit of talk here. It would be best for my father if I did not stay to make more.”
“He will miss you sadly,” Maksim said.
“He cannot miss me, for he does not know me.”
“I would know you, Augusta.”
She smiled, wide and bright. The fiddler had struck up again, and Augusta unconsciously rocked her foot in time and looked away. She was blushing, or maybe it was only the whiskey; she smelled heated and honeyed, and in her smell was a thread of Maksim’s own, her blood tuned to his now and forevermore.
She filled him with wonder, this thing he had saved. He touched a fingertip to her cheek.
She leaned into the touch a little, but her gaze was elsewhere, on the girl with whom she had been dancing.
“Look at her,” Augusta said, just above a whisper. “Have you ever seen anything so fine? Look at the way her skin blooms in the light.”
“Oh,” said Maksim, understanding.
He took Augusta by the elbow with one hand, the whiskey bottle in the other, and shouldered his way to the door.
“I want to stay,” Augusta said.
“Not now.”
She tugged at his hand and then wrenched at it. “But Mónica said she would dance again.”
“I am sorry,” said Maksim. And he was. “I am sorry, but she is not for you.”
“What do you mean? I thought you understood. I thought you were like me.” Her eyes were black in the moonlight, all pupil, as she stumbled with him down toward the harbor.
“I am. Or you are like me now.”
“Mr. Volkov,” she said, throwing her weight back to slow him down. “Perhaps you do not take my meaning. I hope I have not led you to think I would accept a kind of companionship from you which I … which would be … indelicate.”
Maksim stopped in the street and loosened his grasp, gentling her, smoothing her sleeve where his hand had creased it. “I do understand,” he said.
His hopes, he did not mention. They had not been strong hopes, in any case. He had known for many years what it was to be alone, and now he had a friend.
He would endure. He knew what life held for him.
What he had done to her was another matter.
“I am sorry,” he said again, very softly. “Come down to the water with me, and we will sit where we cannot be overheard. I have many more things to tell you.”
Hannah wrapped her hand around Nick’s wrist, fingertips hooked over the tendon to count his pulse.
“Gold,” she said, shifting back on the love seat and patting Nick on the cheek.
“So you’ll get off my fucking case now?”
She sighed. “You’re so healthy it’s freaking me out. I’d kill to have your blood pressure. Your cut’s healing beautifully. I’m still mad you didn’t tell me about your ribs, but I’m almost over it. You got up early to run 10K, and you left Jonathan in the dust. Your resting heart rate is half what mine is. Half. That’s practically pro-level fitness, Nick. And what do you want to do with it? Get hammered with my boyfriend.”
“What? We’re just going to the Cammie. I said we wouldn’t go back to that other place again.”
“Admirable restraint.” She flicked Nick on the forehead. “Just, seriously, Nick, you’re not going to have this forever. I hate to see you piss it away.”
“You sound like my mom. Wait, is that it? Are you, like, practicing?” said Nick, arrested. He looked around the room: it was Jonathan’s name on the lease, but there was plenty of evidence of Hannah’s taste, given the couple of nights a week she spent there. An Audubon print over the nook table. Cushions on the armchair, printed with stenciled birds. Did people put birds on things when they were nesting? Was that a thing?
“Sure, I guess,” Hannah said, completely comfortably. Did that mean it wasn’t a thing or that she didn’t care if it was a thing? “Don’t you want to be a dad someday?”
“Jesus,” Nick said, taking refuge in humor. “This is sudden, but I guess we’ll just have to tell Jonathan—”
Hannah fished an ice cube from her water glass and threw it at him. “Seriously, you’ll be a fine dad, Nick. If you ever stop being a kid.”
“Jonathan!” Nick called. “Your girlfriend’s being all grown up again. Make her stop.”
Jonathan didn’t answer. Nick, suddenly unable to sit still, jumped up from the couch and hammered on the bathroom door. “Want to jog over there?” he called.
From inside, Jonathan groaned. “We already jogged. My legs are still sore. And I just got out of the shower, asshole.”
“Walk, then? It’s too hot for the streetcar.”
“Doesn’t that mean it’s too hot to walk?” Jonathan said, coming out in a fresh shirt, combing his damp hair with his fingertips.
“I don’t feel like sitting still,” Nick said, pacing. He felt like running another 10K and then jerking off again, but a walk sounded okay too, if it was followed by about ten drinks. He jittered back and forth by the door until Jonathan had located his wallet and keys.
“Bye, Hannah,” Nick said, waving his fingers.
“Bring him back in one piece,” Hannah said.
She was muttering something to herself as she got up and stuck her head in the refrigerator, but Nick didn’t want to hear it.
Jonathan had to stop and kiss her, though, and then he kissed her again.
“Bye, Hannah.” Nick pulled Jonathan away by his shirt collar.
“Bye,” Jonathan said softly. “Hang out here as long as you want. I won’t be late.”
“Yes, he will,” Nick called, already dragging Jonathan down the hall.
Augusta left him for the first time as soon as they docked in Cape Town. She sat quietly enough in the cutter, though Maksim could feel her heel tapping the carpetbag beneath his seat. Once they had said their farewells to the captain, though, she began walking, fast and jerky, hands jammed in the pockets of her waistcoat.
“You have been warning me of this forever, and I am bound to say you were right,” she said furiously, not looking at him, kicking at the cobbles.
“Handsome of you,” Maksim said, laughing rather, though he too was affected with restlessness and appetite after the tedium of a sea voyage.
“It is not,” Augusta said. “It is very grudging, and having said it, I feel even more as if I would like to throttle you and leave your body right here in the middle of the street.”
“You may try,” Maksim said.
She whirled on him. “Do not joke!”
“I do not. You will not win over me, not yet, but you’ll find few other opponents to give you satisfaction.”
“But I don’t want to hurt you. You’re my friend,” Augusta said, wrenching at her own hair.
“That is why we may trust each other with this,” Maksim said as gently as he could.
“You don’t understand! I need to wreck someone—with my hands—”
“Run it out,” Maksim said. “Tire yourself until you collapse. And if you must hurt someone, make it someone who heals—or someone who will not be noticed.”
“How do you do this? How do you do this?” Augusta said, fingers tearing at her cuffs.
Maksim sighed and groped in his pocket and handed her the money he found there. “Go figure it out. I will take a room at the Two Sisters for some weeks,” he said. “Find me there when you are ready.”
She closed her fist over the money and ran from him.
Maksim found, at the Two Sisters, a clean bed, a stock of half-decent wine, and a young man whose skin bruised deliciously. He kept himself busy for a few days in this way until the young man began to complain of his roughness, and Maksim sent him off. Without company, the Two Sisters did not hold his interest; the mountain overlooking the town, however, proved a worthwhile excursion to occupy Maksim for a couple of days.
When he came down from the mountain, footsore and filthy and as satisfied as one of the kin could be, he still found no Augusta awaiting him, and he discovered his temper was not as quelled as he had wished.
The young man, bruised afresh, brought him bread and cheese and hot water to wash in, and he kept his eyes down. Maksim thanked him guiltily and promised not to break anything else, a promise he broke the next day.
Two full weeks, and finally Augusta returned. She had messily shorn what remained of her hair, and the inch-long crop looked bleached with sun and salt, shockingly pale against her newly browned face.
She would have looked savagely healthy, in fact, were her eyes open and her limbs properly arranged, but some boys brought her laid out on an old door and told Maksim she was not ill but only dead drunk and that she had promised them a British guinea if they would deliver her to Maksim Volkov at the Two Sisters.
Augusta did not so much as murmur when Maksim shook her. He paid the boys and carried Augusta up to his room, where she cast up her accounts all over his pillow.
She did not wake until after midday, and even then, she was stupid and sick for some hours; but she told Maksim she had done with her fit of temper and would like to explore the country with him now if he would be so good as to lay in a supply of victuals and drink.
“And the money I gave you?”
“Gone,” she said. “Was I meant to husband it? I am sorry.”
She looked sorry, all sallow and sore-eyed and thinner than she had been, tucked up in Maksim’s dressing gown, sitting next to his window with the sun across her lap.
Maksim struck her, anyway, because he had not yet done so, and she was come into her own strength now and must learn the way of things.
“I apologized,” Augusta said, blocking his fist with her raised forearms, cowering back. “I apologized.”
“I am not punishing you,” Maksim said, slapping Augusta’s arms aside and grabbing at her throat.
“Yes, you are,” she gasped, clutching his wrist. “Stop it; I said I was sorry.”
“I have no one else,” Maksim said, and he punched her in the side of the head. “Hit me back. Hit me back.”
She shook her head, tears flying from her eye on the side where she’d taken the blow, but it wasn’t a denial. She gave up trying to pry Maksim’s hand off her and instead hammered him in the floating rib in an untutored but sturdy attempt.
Maksim chuckled low and tossed her bodily onto the floor. “Again. You can do it. Get up and hit me again.”
And she did, and she did, and she did, and Maksim thought there was a smile starting on her swelling lip.
Stella seemed to be trying. She wasn’t around in the evenings—working, Lissa assumed. Her suitcase was neatly stowed behind the sofa, her clothes folded on top of it.
Lissa could only tell she was eating in the house at all by the occasional misplacement of a clean salad plate or cereal bowl; the reappearance of a fat, thorny brown pottery mug that Baba hadn’t used in years; and the lowering level of milk in the carton. Stella replaced what she used too; the new milk was a different brand, but still 1 percent.
Stella left a little envelope of her tip money beside the grocery list. She cleaned the bathroom, right down to the grout. She didn’t touch Baba’s room or any of Baba’s things; she might have dusted the shelves in the kitchen and living room, but she did it without changing the arrangement of the objects on them, so that Lissa was not even sure it had happened.
Lissa heard her in the shower late at night and smelled her shower gel and her expensive scent. Found a couple of her long hairs on her towel or in the sink. Saw her spare shoes neatly side by side on the mat.
Barely saw the girl herself, though. If Stella was just washing up her tea mug when Lissa came in to make coffee, she ducked her head and hurried out. One night when she wasn’t working and Lissa had been out, Stella was still awake when Lissa came in: curled on the sofa under a light blanket, with her face scrubbed clean and her hair tied up for sleep. She had a magazine and a pencil, and Lissa thought maybe she was doing crosswords. She saw Lissa in the hallway and smiled shyly and waved good night.
Lissa couldn’t remember whether she’d waved back.
The problem wasn’t in anything Stella was doing or not doing. She seemed sweet. Well raised. More than Lissa would’ve expected, considering it was Dad doing half of the raising.
The problem wasn’t in the idea of having a roommate, either. Lord knew she could use a bit of help with the household and the bills. Having to keep her rituals secret would be a pain, but she could invent something—a church meeting to pretend to host, something like that.
The problem was that Stella was family. Stepfamily, sure. Still too close for Lissa to pretend she was just some friendly but distant connection sharing a financial arrangement and alternating turns with the washing machine.
Family went one of two ways. They ruled you, or you ruled them. You couldn’t be equal; you couldn’t be neutral. If you didn’t want to play, you had to go. Dad went: first overseas, then into a whole new marriage. Mama went too; exhausted and irritable at the end, she didn’t seem sorry to be going. One of the last things Lissa remembered hearing from her mouth was a vindictive comment to Baba, that now she’d have Lissa all to herself, just like she wanted.
And Baba had wanted. As soon as Mama died, she began training Lissa in earnest. She put away all the photos of Mama and Dad with Lissa and had one taken of just the two of them at the portrait studio at Sears: Baba in her best gray dress, with her hair coiled around her head, and Lissa in a purple skirt and a blouse with purple kittens on it, hair in two long braids. She was nearly ten, and the other girls in her class were starting to pay attention to fashion and steer away from things that looked too childish, but Baba did not hold with fashion and thought children should be children.
That photo was still on Baba’s dresser.
After a few days of tiptoeing, Lissa left Stella a note on the refrigerator.
They met at an organic-food café on Queen Street, which Lissa had picked because it was affordable but sounded trendy enough for Stella to appreciate. Stella was a few minutes late, which gave Lissa time to find a seat on the patio with a wall at her back. The air was humid and smoggy, but with the sun down behind the buildings, the heat was starting to lift; the smell of toner still lingered in Lissa’s hair, and she unbraided it and shook it out, inhaling, instead, the fragrance of the blooms in a nearby garden and the café’s aroma of toasting cumin.
She ordered a juice made from beet, ginger, carrot, apple, cayenne, and lemon, which arrived, capped with brilliant pink foam, just as Stella slid into the opposite seat.
“One of those,” Stella said to the waitress, round-eyed. “Hey, Lissa.” She made a motion that might have been an impulse to hug Lissa hello, but she checked it, instead slinging her purse over the back of her chair.
“Hey,” Lissa said, and her mouth went dry and thick, and she blinked across the table at this stranger who was her stepsister, and the things she’d thought to say were gone.
Stella’s juice came. They both sipped and raised their eyebrows and licked pink foam from their lips.
“Stay for now,” Lissa said. “I don’t want to make promises.”
“Are you sure?” Stella said. “You don’t seem very sure.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lissa said. “I haven’t done any of this before. I’m not going to lie to you; I don’t think I’m going to be easy to live with.”
Stella paused and thought. “If you think it’s not working, can you give me two weeks’ notice? Because I don’t think I can take it if I come home to find my stuff on the lawn and have to get a hotel like a cheating hubby.” She grinned as she said it, but it wasn’t a happy grin.
“Two weeks’ notice,” Lissa said. “Got it.” She held out her hand across the table, and Stella took it.
Lissa had been expecting a handshake, but Stella put her other hand over top and squeezed.
“Thanks,” Stella said, and she bit her lip, and damned if that didn’t make Lissa tear up a bit too. With her free hand, she took a gulp of her juice so that she could blame the watering eyes on the cayenne.
Maksim, snarling, slammed his fist into brick.
“Ouch,” said Gus.
“There is nothing,” Maksim said. They stood at the corner of Queen and Bathurst. A streetcar rumbled heavily past, followed by a string of cars and a rickshaw. The wall Maksim had punched was painted purple, and now flecks of that paint decorated the bloody scrapes on Maksim’s knuckles. He brought his fist to his mouth and licked the injury clean.
“Maybe if we make a wider circle,” Gus said.
“We already have. I cannot find it. Too many scents.”
Understatement. Even Gus, used to Parkdale, had said she found this stretch of Queen Street difficult in the warmth of May—rotten fruit, pigeon droppings, Indian food, hot metal, motor oil, sweat, spunk, ammonia, liquor, coffee. People and all their mess.
“Maybe if we go back to Palmerston again,” she continued. “Maybe if you weren’t fucking yourself up with the witch’s business—”
Maksim caught her gesturing hand in his own, roughly. He did not speak, but he let her lead him up to the alley, the capillary north of Queen. The people they passed did not look, absorbed in private business: urinating, making out, sharing joints or bottle tokes. Maksim kept his head lifted, searching for that elusive scent.
Gus stepped in too close beside him once, and he whirled on her, baring his teeth.
“You’re stalking,” she whispered. “You’ll find no prey here.”
Maksim watched his hand wrap itself around Gus’s forearm and squeeze, bruising the pale skin.
She scowled and raised her other hand. “Does that mean it’s time to hit you?”
“You promised,” Maksim said. “You promised you would not let me hurt someone.”
“Someone else,” Gus said.
Maksim lunged at her, knocking her against a garage door, but not in an attack. He slid down until he was crouched against her legs and let go of her to wrap his arms tight about himself.
“I know,” Maksim said. “I know, I know. I cannot remain among people like this.”
Gus shook her head. “Okay. My place. We can fight some more, tire ourselves out.”
“Give me something now,” Maksim said. “I will go mad otherwise.”
Gus hauled him up by his ear and punched him in the mouth. “I’m sober,” she hissed. “And you’re not.”
Maksim licked blood off his teeth. “Keep going,” he said.
Gus kicked him in the kneecap, and he fell, twisting.
“It’s no fun if you aren’t fighting back,” she said. “Get up!”
Farther down the alley, a trio of heads turned, and a conversation ceased.
“I have already marked your face for you,” Maksim said. “Mark mine.”
A hammering blow across his cheek. “Well done,” he said; it did not feel split, but the instant heat of a bruise rose below the skin.
The next one caught him almost by surprise a half second later, rocking his head into the garage door. He had sprung up and tapped Gus in the chin before he recollected his purpose.
Gus danced back. “That’s it,” she said. “Keep it up.” And she darted in under his half-formed guard with a straight to his ribs and a second, random blow that caught him under the arm.
Maksim coughed. He dropped his hands and lifted his face, wide open to Gus’s next punch, and it took him in the forehead and made him see gold-shot black.
When his eyes refocused, he saw that she was standing back, frowning fiercely and waiting for him to recover.
“I needed to know you would do it,” he explained, although she had not asked. “I am ready to go home and sleep now,” he said. When he tried to move away from the support of the garage door, he wavered.
Gus seized his arm and held him upright. “My turn to bully you,” she said. “You’re coming to my place, where I can keep an eye on you, and if you do decide to break something, it won’t be something you love.”
“What about,” Maksim said and spat blood. “What about the things you love?”
“None left but you,” Gus said.
