WANING CRESCENT
Lissa came up her walk to find Maksim lying asleep on the porch steps. She could smell him as she got closer: stale sweat and rye, mixed uneasily with the heated lilacs. He slept heavily, with his face pressed into the crook of his arm.
“Evening,” she said in his ear.
He bolted up and grabbed at her, catching her braid in his fist and pulling her head down.
“Hey—ouch!”
He sucked in a deep breath. “Koldun’ia,” he said, and his grip relaxed fractionally. Lissa yanked her hair back and pulled away, while Maksim blinked and stared and finally unlocked his posture and sank back against the stairs.
“It is not good to surprise me,” he said.
Lissa backed off. “You hurt my neck.”
“I am sorry. Only do not wake me up with a touch. It is best not to step close to me if I am unaware.”
“You plan on crashing on my front steps a lot, then, do you?”
This seemed lost on him; he was rubbing his face with both hands and did not answer.
“Hey,” Lissa said. “I haven’t forgotten what you said last week. I’d like to help you. My grandmother said you needed help. But that means I need to hear the whole story.”
“Your grandmother spoke of this?”
“Some.” Close to the chest: she’d learned very early that being a witch meant mystery, and mystery was best preserved by keeping your ignorance to yourself. Maksim did not need to know that Lissa had no idea how they might be kin to each other or why Baba hadn’t mentioned him earlier. Or that Baba was still able to communicate with Lissa, even if only under constraints.
Maksim asked her for a drink. She led him into the kitchen, where she could see that he was dirty again (still?) and had not shaved, and his face looked puffy and bruised.
She filled a bowl with borscht and made him up a plate of Izabela Dmitreeva’s cabbage rolls and a stack of toast to go alongside, and she opened him a bottle of Stella’s lager.
“You do not need to do this for me,” he said.
“I didn’t. Some other people did it for me. You’re just getting the benefits.”
This seemed to be the right thing to say. Once reassured, Maksim proceeded to eat everything in front of him, plus two more beers and a second helping of borscht.
“We all eat like this when we can. I thought you knew,” he said when Lissa raised her eyebrows.
She hadn’t spent enough time with her extended family to have any idea at all that they were big eaters, but she didn’t care to admit as much to Maksim. “Anyway, don’t stop on my account.”
“The eggs are wearing off. I think you should give me more,” he said.
“Already?” Lissa blurted. She’d definitely got the recipe too weak, then, somehow.
“You are not afraid of me,” Maksim said, looking up at her from his slouch over the plate. “Why is that?”
“My grandmother was not afraid of you,” Lissa said, hoping it was true.
“Ah—I see.” He scraped his bowl clean and sprawled back in his chair. Quite different from the sleepy sprawl on the steps somehow; he looked tighter wound now and ready.
“So,” she said. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I have figured out part for myself now. Why I have gone mad again. I have been many years without the madness, since your grandmother made a spell upon me. I believe the blessing has passed with her, and now I must make shift with my own weak will.”
“My grandmother gave you a cure for … madness?”
“Not a cure—or so I see now. I thought it was one until I felt it slip with this full moon. Before I knew what I was about, I came upon the boy. You know the rest.”
“Pretend I don’t and tell me.”
He knotted his hands together so that the knuckles stood out heavy and white. “He had the marks of violence on him, quite fresh. I think I could have run my madness out if not for that.” He was silent again. Lissa could see his jaw clenching, the way it had the other night.
“So you … licked him,” she prompted.
“I told you it was madness.” He looked up from under sullen brows. “When I am sane, it is a madness I would never wish on another. When I am not sane … I do not rule myself as I ought. And it is a madness that spreads.”
“You think you infected him? With your madness?”
“If I did, it will be some weeks before he is fully consumed. We have a space of time to find him.”
“We?”
“Augusta and I. She is my … she is my family. And you—you said you would help also.” Maksim hunched over and trapped his hands between his knees. “No. That is very forward of me. You have already helped me with your eggs, and if you will let me take more of them with me—”
“Of course. But I thought they were to make it easier for you to sleep.”
“They are to stop me hurting anyone,” he said. “So that I can go among people, to do my work and to find this young man, without my madness overtaking me.”
“It would be better if I could figure out what my grandmother did for you and do it again,” Lissa said.
“Yes.” He sat up again restlessly and worked his hand upon the fabric of his jeans, over and over, kneading the muscle of his thigh.
“Will eggs be enough to tide you over?”
He shook his head and scrubbed a hand through his sweaty hair. “I do not know.” He chuckled, mirthless and low. “I can feel it now,” he said, rising and pacing to the window. “Perhaps I should have another one before I go.”
She gave him two dozen; he cracked one in his hand and slurped it straight from the shell like an oyster. He grimaced, but the line of his shoulders slackened, and some of the tension in his face eased. At least they were doing something for him.
Lissa wrote her number on a blank card from Baba’s recipe keeper. “Keep me posted. If you can’t find him.”
She locked the door behind him and went upstairs to the shelf in the sewing room where Baba kept her grimoires.
Nick met Jonathan at the coffee shop on Spadina, near the Graduate Students’ Union building. The University of Toronto’s downtown campus had seemed impenetrably huge and forbidding to Nick as a first-year, with its fifty-odd buildings sprawling over multiple city blocks linked by networks of footpaths traversing several different grassy commons. But five years in, the campus had shrunk, or Nick had grown, to the point where it felt like a pinching shoe, blistering him with its closeness.
“We can’t stay here,” he said, glowering, grabbing at Jonathan’s book bag and pulling him back when he tried to choose a table. “It’s only been, like, two weeks. I’m still having PTSD about fucking Boyczuk’s seminar of doom.”
“It’s just convenient,” Jonathan said. “But we can go to the Starbucks on College if you’d rather.”
“It’s too hot for coffee. I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Nick said, but he pulled Jonathan with him, anyway, hustling him through the door.
“There’s such a thing as iced coffee,” Jonathan said.
“Fuck coffee. I want a fucking beer.”
Jonathan looked like he was going to protest for a moment, but then he shrugged. “I could use a break, anyway. Maybe you were right to go with the lighter course load.”
“Summer vacation!” Nick exulted. “You wish you had one!”
“Maybe I would if I had a trust fund,” Jonathan said.
“It’s not a trust fund, and anyway, it’s going to run out in, like…” Nick paused to calculate.
“Is it going to run out before 6:00 P.M.?” Jonathan said. “Because it’s happy hour at the Palmerston tonight, and I think they have Great Lakes guest taps.”
Nick chortled in victory, tugged Jonathan’s bag out of his hand and slung it over his own shoulder, and led the way toward the Palmerston in a quick, jerky stride.
“Slow down,” Jonathan said. “Let me just text Hannah—she gets out in half an hour.”
“No,” Nick blurted and then mentally kicked himself. “I mean, didn’t she say she was having a girls’ night tonight? You know, with Sue Park?”
“Did she?” Jonathan said. “Oh, Sue the violinist. Maybe? I don’t remember.” But he put his phone back in his pocket and followed Nick down the sidewalk. “You still into Sue Park?” Jonathan went on, half-teasing, half-serious. “I remember you calling her on my phone like five times after that music department social.”
“That was years ago,” Nick protested. “And I only called her on your phone because mine was out of minutes.”
“Not because she started blocking your number, stalker?” Jonathan said, shoving him.
Nick laughed easily because it hadn’t been like that at all, at all. He slung his arm around Jonathan’s neck and tugged him in close for a second. “I forgot about Sue Park until today,” he said and added, leering, “But I’ll bet she hasn’t forgotten me.”
“Ugh, dude,” Jonathan said. “Let go of my head and stop being gross about Hannah’s friends.”
“You were the one who said Sue Park had the most amazing rack you’d ever seen on an Asian chick,” Nick said.
Jonathan dragged himself out of Nick’s headlock and shaded his eyes with one hand instead. “This is the problem with knowing someone for, like, ever,” he said. “You’re always there to remind me of the stupid shit I’ve said and done.”
“And get you to do more of it,” Nick said.
“And that,” Jonathan agreed, but he didn’t really look like he minded, so Nick bought the first round.
The Palmerston was only moderately full, happy hour on a Tuesday; they got a table in the corner. Nick stretched out his legs, crooked his arms behind his head, kicked at the legs of Jonathan’s chair. Drained his first pint in a few easy swallows.
He had lapped Jonathan by the end of his second, Jonathan sipping slowly and yawning a little and surreptitiously checking his phone. Nick laid his palm over the screen and said, “Buddy. Jonathan. J. I’m right here, and Hannah’s out, and there’s literally no one else in your life, so put the fucking phone down and—”
“I do have a family,” Jonathan said mildly.
“Me too, but I don’t take selfies at the bar for them,” Nick said. “Turn it off and get the next round.”
Jonathan put the phone away and obeyed, out of long habit. Nick watched from his chair as Jonathan ordered: more polite than he would have been a couple of years ago, eyes not straying below the bartender’s chin even though she was wearing a Maple Leafs T-shirt with the neckline cut out to show a hint of royal-blue lace.
Jonathan was working as a teaching assistant now in addition to his own studies, and he seemed to think it required him to be a bit more formal, khakis and oxfords and a short-sleeved button-down, even though Nick knew for a fact he’d seen TAs in shorts and T-shirts before. It made Jonathan look older, or maybe he just was older; Nick didn’t always look at him very closely, seeing instead the familiar blur of a dozen years of friendship, and now he wasn’t sure when Jonathan had tidied up his haircut or when he’d switched his electric-blue steel hoop earring for a quieter silver stud.
Nick kicked out of his chair and joined Jonathan at the bar, scrubbing his fist into Jonathan’s hair.
Jonathan twisted away, annoyed. “Give it a rest; I’m trying to buy you a drink.”
“Arm wrestle,” Nick said, grabbing at Jonathan’s hand. “If you win, I’ll help you mark that fuckton of papers you have in your bag. If I win, you’re doing shots with me.”
“I don’t know what’s with your new arm wrestling thing, but I am not going there. No way.”
Nick ignored him, braced his elbow on the bar, centered his weight.
Jonathan only yawned and paid for their pints. “Nick, you’re being such a freak. All this goddamned energy. Don’t you ever just, like, relax anymore?”
“Not when there’s arm wrestling to be had,” Nick said. He pointed to a beefy guy at the bar and crooked his finger.
“That dude is a foreman,” Jonathan said. “Meaning he’s in charge of a bunch of construction workers. Know how he got to be in charge of them? Because he’s the biggest motherfucker, Nick. They’re like animals, you know: there’s a hierarchy, and they fight their way up it. He’s the king gorilla, Nick. Listen to me: didn’t you practically break your head like two weeks ago? Do you really need a broken arm too?”
Nick stood up and crossed the bar. Jonathan followed a moment later, carrying both of their pints.
The foreman looked at Nick with pity and humor. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got something to prove. I get it.”
“Go easy on him,” Jonathan mouthed, beside Nick.
“I saw that, asshole,” Nick said to him. “Just shut up and hold my drink.”
He placed his elbow on the bar, clasped hands with the foreman.
“Count,” he said to Jonathan.
“I thought I was supposed to shut up and hold your drink. Never mind. Fine. One … two … three.”
The foreman’s powerful wrist cocked forward, veins standing out along the tendon. Nick’s much slimmer arm, in the same posture, held ground. Both men clenched their teeth and sweated for a half minute or so.
“Jesus,” said the foreman. “Not bad for a little guy.”
“Not bad yourself. Everyone else I’ve been up against lately has gone down by now.”
“I pump a lot of iron,” said the foreman. “Sorry, guy.” He stepped up the pressure, forcing Nick’s arm back, five degrees, ten degrees.
“No, I’m sorry.” Nick paused. What kind of a confession could he make? I think I’m turning into a superhero. I think I’m possessed.
“I know kung fu,” he said. He shrugged his other shoulder and cranked down until the back of the foreman’s hand touched the bar.
“You know kung fu?” Jonathan said, baffled. “Since when?”
“It was a joke,” Nick said. “Never mind. Hand me my pint back, okay? Let’s get one for this guy too; he looks like he could use one. Or a rematch?”
The foreman said flatly, “No, thanks; I think I’m done here.” And he walked out.
Nick said to Jonathan, “Is it just me, or was that guy kind of a sore loser?”
Jonathan was still staring. “That was kind of incredible, dude. I’ve never seen you do that before.”
Nick shrugged and took the pint Jonathan passed back to him. He couldn’t think of another wisecrack just yet, and right now, it felt like the gaps between jokes were deep and dark, and he needed Jonathan to fill them with something normal, something comfortable and familiar.
Jonathan waited for a long moment, though, and then he turned away, back to their table, leaving Nick standing by the bar with the sweat still running on him and condensation dripping from the pint in his hand.
Nick wiped his face on the hem of his T-shirt and drained the glass and ordered another. He would follow Jonathan back to their seats; he would have a great, normal night out with his best friend. He would. He just needed a bit of help to get his head back in it.
Lissa spent an evening at Yelena Ivanova’s house, drinking tea poured out of a Brown Betty with a crocheted ruff around the spout.
The ladies of Baba’s generation were mostly dead or too frail to go about, but their daughters and granddaughters still convened a couple of times a month. This was the first night Lissa had attended without Baba. Tonight, Olga Rechkina sat in the good armchair, which was still covered in its clear plastic sleeve; her two canes stood propped against one arm, tripping all passersby. Her daughter passed around a plate of rugelach. Yelena Ivanova had filled another plate with store-bought almond shortbreads.
Lissa dressed in what she was beginning to think of as her witch clothes: conservative, dark, too heavy for the weather. She braided her hair and twisted it into a fat knot. The ladies were always winding their hair into high tiers of braid work, stuck full of pins. In the mirror in Yelena Ivanova’s hallway, Lissa thought she could see how she’d look in another sixty years.
Everyone addressed her with respect. Some called her koldun’ia, as Maksim did. But anything spoken in English was circuitous, avoiding irreligious and difficult words like witch and magic. Lissa was treated like something between an alternative health practitioner and a Tupperware salesperson. The men she did not see, except for a brief glimpse of Yelena Ivanova’s husband passing through the kitchen on his way to the garage.
They sometimes forgot that any of the kolduny had ever been male, she thought. Their respect for Baba had always been tinged with suspicion. Lissa would have it worse, being young.
But although the men would not meet her, some of them had given their wives requests, or else the wives were taking liberties, for Lissa departed with a full roster of orders, promising them after the next full moon. Eggs to draw pain, eggs for sleeping or waking, eggs to bring luck, eggs that were the magical equivalent of Viagra. Baba had rarely taken so many orders in a single evening. Lissa thought she was being tested.
Tonight, the sky was thick with red-lit cloud, as it usually was over a city of three million people in smoggy late spring. She descended into the subway tunnels, where the cooler air smelled of mold.
A hundred other people waited on the platform. An elderly West Indian gentleman with a portfolio; two redheaded girls playing a clapping game; a tall woman and a taller man in shiny black PVC skirts and studded collars; a Portuguese couple arguing; a lovely young man with a rainbow of rubber bracelets, and another with a Union Jack on his denim vest. Young dark-haired men her own age, Italian or Greek: a dozen, at least, and most of them wore the kind of clothes Maksim had described, cargo shorts and plain T-shirts and Converse. Even with the cut on his forehead, the guy they were looking for would have a thousand ringers in this city.
Lissa sighed and shifted her weight in her uncomfortable shoes. She wanted to be alone in the quiet of her house—too many strangers, too many church ladies, too many eyes upon her, waiting for her to do something wrong.
When she arrived home, though, and let herself in, the house was muggy and stale. Stella must be at work. The light over the stove had drawn a single fat moth, whose wings beat back and forth over the bulb. In the sink, a centipede ran in circles until she washed it down the drain.
She went upstairs, stripped off her heavy clothes in favor of a cotton tank top and a wraparound skirt, and let her crimped hair down.
Then she went out again. The Duke of Lancashire was an easy ten-minute walk, and it had air-conditioning and the Smiths on the jukebox.
It also had Stella in a ridiculously short kilt, flirting with a table of grad students.
Lissa sat at the bar and waited to be noticed.
The bartender got to her first and tossed a coaster down. “What’ll it be?”
“You’re British,” Lissa said. “That makes sense.”
“British blokes do tend to be found in British pubs,” he said. “We also serve British beers.” He was pulling a pint for someone; she watched the muscles of his forearm shift under the skin as his fingers closed over the tap. He looked strong but comfortable, like he would give good bear hugs.
“You hired my British stepsister,” Lissa said.
“Oh, you’re family, then!” he said. “Rafe Green.” He stuck out his hand.
“Lissa Nevsky.”
“But Stella’s a Moore, isn’t she?”
And before Lissa could get started on the awkward explanation of how she’d taken Mama’s surname instead of keeping her father’s after he’d left, Rafe went on, “Oh, right, you said stepsister. Steel trap.” He tapped his head: topped with a brown toque, maybe shaved underneath. “Half a sec.”
He slid the pint down the bar to another customer and came back to pour a pint for Lissa. He smiled as he passed it to her: one crooked tooth made his smile look roguish and sweet. “Organic lager. Everyone loves it. On me,” he said. “Ever been in before?”
Lissa shook her head.
“Didn’t think so. I’d remember,” Rafe said, smiling a little and looking down at the bar. Then he took a deep breath and howled, “Stella! God, that’s never going to get old.”
Stella tossed her ponytail, waved good-bye to the table of grad students, and sauntered to the bar.
“I was wondering if you’d get thirsty eventually,” she said to Lissa with a tentative smile quite unlike the bold cheer she’d worn for the customers.
“I had to make sure they were treating you right,” Lissa said.
“Everyone’s lovely,” Stella assured her, and this time, her eyes smiled too, so it seemed to be true. “Rafe’s great. The food’s even okay.” She dodged the damp towel Rafe threw at her head.
Lissa leaned down to retrieve it. So did Stella.
“And he’s hot,” Stella mouthed beneath the bar before standing up and shaking out her hair. “Are you sticking around for dinner?”
Lissa ducked her chin, feeling heat across her cheeks. “I can’t.”
“Come on—the special’s good tonight. And I can chat when we’re not busy.”
“Should have plenty of time for that,” Rafe agreed. “It’s looking like a quiet one.” He took the towel back and wandered away for a fresh one.
“Come on,” Stella murmured. “You have to admit.”
“I don’t…” Lissa said. She followed Stella’s look: Rafe’s broad shoulders under a gray T-shirt, a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps. “I just—I have some reading to do.”
“I didn’t know you were studying anything,” Stella said.
“I’m—”
“Oh my God, you’re going to go secretly read Harry Potter under your blankets or something. Aren’t you? I knew you had to have some kind of vice.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” Lissa said, digging in her bag, face downturned. She found her wallet, fumbled out a ten, and laid it on the bar. “See you later.”
She slid off the stool and hurried toward the door. Behind her, Rafe’s voice with that beguiling accent: “Where’s she off to? I said it was on the house.”
Lissa didn’t hear what Stella replied. She walked back home too quickly in the humid night, feeling limp with sweat, the very air a weight on her eyes.
DeShaun was schooling two young women in the ring when Maksim arrived at the gym. Maksim sat on the edge of his old steel desk and watched, twisting paper clips between his fingers. He had put himself on an enforced leave since the night of the full moon, but today, suffused with the calming haze of a couple of eggs, he had missed his regular life too much to hold himself back from visiting. The gym had been his for nearly a decade now, a decade of daily workouts, familiar smells, and people among whom he could feel nearly at home. He was not enough of a businessman to make it thrive, but he was more than enough of a fighter to keep attracting a rotation of students: contenders, sometimes, but people had many reasons to learn to fight, and winning was often the least of them.
The younger of the girls—Concepción, he thought—was developing a powerful straight; she loved to hammer it into the heavy bag, and she would cheerfully spend round after round doing nothing else if Maksim or DeShaun left her alone. Now she was trying to land it on the older girl, without much luck.
The older girl was new, and Maksim didn’t even know her name. Whippet thin, with collarbones and sharp sinews standing out beneath Somali-brown skin. She dodged instead of blocking. Concepción lumbered after her, throwing her hard right again and again into empty air.
Both girls were grinning; DeShaun, instead of advising, stood with folded arms and let them have at it. The key sometimes was to give them their mistakes. Maksim had told him so often enough. When the bell sounded, DeShaun said, “Neither of you is hitting the other. Why is that?”
“I’m slow,” Concepción said.
“I’m afraid,” said the other girl. “If I want to hit her, I have to let her get close, and I’m worried I won’t be able to block her ’cause she’s too strong.”
“Let’s start there,” said DeShaun, and he strapped on a pair of practice pads and began walking them through exercises.
He didn’t acknowledge Maksim, so the girls didn’t, either; it wasn’t until one of their mothers arrived to pick them up that Concepción waved to him shyly and then saluted him with her fist.
“Shit,” said DeShaun when the girls had gone. “No wonder you haven’t been around.”
“I did not wish to frighten off the students,” Maksim said.
“One look at your face and half of them would swear off the ring for good,” DeShaun agreed. “So why’d you come in today? Things are going fine, you know.”
“I missed you.” It was simple truth; Maksim did not have many friends.
Or many sparring partners.
He’d always have to hold back with DeShaun; it wouldn’t be the kind of joyous brawl he could have with Augusta. But he could make it last longer, and neither he nor DeShaun would come away with broken bones.
DeShaun started by holding back too. Maksim laughed at him when he realized this. DeShaun shrugged and stepped it up.
A full twelve rounds. Halfway through, DeShaun stripped off his soaked shirt and slapped it over the ropes. He’d been building muscle lately, Maksim saw; he’d been in the gym every day of the last couple of weeks, with Maksim unavailable.
He’d be more than capable to take over permanently.
Maksim did not want to leave this life. He shook sweat from his eyes and stepped in with a combination of hard, mean uppercuts. DeShaun blocked most of it, tucking to take the impacts on his arms.
Maksim got through, though, and flung DeShaun back against the ropes.
DeShaun wheezed. “Christ!”
Maksim pulled a punch he hadn’t meant to throw. He tapped DeShaun on the ear, almost gently, and said, “You do very well.”
Then he turned away and pulled his shirt over his head to hide the face he thought he might be making.
Behind him, DeShaun groaned and stretched out his weight on the ropes. “I thought I was.”
“I might be away for a while longer,” Maksim said. “The classes are yours. I will give you a raise.”
“Thanks! You think I’m ready to take on the contenders’ training?”
Maksim said something; he did not know what. Yes, DeShaun was ready; he would be fine—it would all be fine.
Maksim would not be fine, not until he got out of doors again and ran for a while; not until he could hammer his fists into something unyielding, something he could wreck, something he did not love.
Lissa was nearly home from work when the rain began. She held both hands over her head as great fat drops soaked her hair and coursed down her face and neck. The gutters turned into streams and the roofs into sheets of sliding water. Lissa ran up the sidewalk, her sandals slapping flatly.
Lightning rent the sky in the south, over the lake, and in the flash, she saw Maksim’s face carved white, eyes closed, nostrils wide, his hat a sharp shadow over the bridge of his nose. He was standing beside her lilac tree again, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, ignoring the downpour.
“Good Lord, are you out of eggs again already?” Lissa said.
“Nearly so. And I have something else to ask.”
“Want to come in?”
He shook his head. “Thank you, no. Fetch the eggs and walk with me.”
Lissa ducked inside, found the carton; she did not bother with her umbrella since she was already drenched, and the rain was as warm as the air.
She came back outside to find Maksim awaiting her stoically. Under the beating water, the tension in him was banked but visible; Lissa found herself unwilling to turn her back to him—not out of fear, exactly, but out of concern that he might do something sudden.
They walked together northward along a street of narrow-roofed Toronto Victorians. Lissa’s braided hair clung to her back in heavy ropes.
“So if you didn’t only come for eggs…” she said.
“I wished to ask you about the spell Iadviga made for me,” Maksim said.
“I haven’t found it in her grimoires. I was thinking maybe her journals.”
“She left you everything?”
“Everything she could. But she didn’t have time…” Lissa bit down on a sudden hot rush of sorrow.
“Be easy, koldun’ia. I am sure she would be very pleased with what you are doing. One cannot go from apprentice to master overnight.”
If he only knew. “It’s just—I miss her, that’s all.”
Maksim paced, silent, while Lissa wiped rain and tears from her eyes.
“I’m sorry. I’m just tired, I think.” And, she thought, in need of someone to talk to about Baba: someone who was more than an acquaintance, someone who was apparently family of a sort, although she still did not understand exactly how. “Do you think you can make it like this until the full moon? That’s the soonest I’d be able to fix anything for you, even if I can figure it all out earlier—it’s kind of an important rule for us.”
Maksim knit his eyebrows. “I did not know. Of course I will make do with the eggs as long as I must.”
It wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but it sounded good enough to go on with. Soaking wet, hair plastered to his neck below his cap, tank top skinned to his body, Maksim did not look very dangerous; he looked like a roofer or a landscaper caught in the bad weather, the menace in him drowned to ordinary sullenness.
When she looked closer, though, she could see a muscle twitching below his eye.
“Do you need one now?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not so long as you walk with me. My home is not far.” He hastened his steps, though, as they went north.
Maksim turned out to live on Dundas, in one of the old Victorians near Bellwoods, above a Portuguese hairdresser. He fumbled for the key, kicked the door open, and tore at his bootlaces.
Lissa put away the fresh batch of eggs in his refrigerator, which contained a case of Czech beer, an orderly assortment of mustards, and several butcher-paper packages. When she returned to the main room, she could see through the bedroom door Maksim stripping off his wet shirt, and she turned away hastily.
She looked at the walls, hung with a sword of some kind and a couple of antique guns. A map, with characters in Cyrillic. A signed photograph of George Chuvalo. The sofa and coffee table were elderly and graceful. A bookshelf held military histories in English, Russian, and French.
“Koldun’ia,” Maksim said, his voice gone hoarse again. “Where?” He had his hand at his bare throat, fingers dug into the muscle above his collarbone.
“I put them in the refrigerator.”
“I must go out,” he choked, pushing past Lissa toward the door.
“Wait! I thought you wanted me to walk you here so that you wouldn’t do anything stupid.”
“You are right,” he said, turning again and wrapping his arms about his chest; he was bruised there, a mottling of red and purple over one side of his rib cage, and, beneath the bruising, older scars. “Bring me an egg, koldun’ia, and speak to me while you do.”
“I’m bringing you an egg. Um. Two eggs? I’m at the fridge already, and I’m—what are you doing?”
Maksim had one fist pressed to his forehead and the other hand blindly extended; she set an egg in it. Maksim punched the shell with his thumb and sucked it noisily, spitting out a fragment of shell into his palm. He held out his hand again, imperious, and Lissa gave him another.
On finishing it, Maksim cast the broken shells carelessly on the floor, tipped his head back, and let out a long sigh.
“You may go now,” he said.
“You won’t go on some kind of a rampage, without your shirt?”
Maksim glanced down at himself, mouth twisting. He did not answer, only shuffled away toward the bedroom.
Lissa waited. Finally, she went to the bedroom door and cautiously peered in—saw Maksim sprawled, naked, facedown and snoring into his pillow.
She turned out the light and left him.
Lissa took Baba’s notebooks with her to the Duke of Lancashire, telling herself she needed a change of pace—and anyway, Stella kept saying that shyness could only be conquered with practice. Lissa did not think of herself as shy, exactly, but when she followed Stella into the air-conditioned dimness, she did find herself dropping back, touching her face, hugging the stack of notebooks, not quite looking behind the bar at Rafe.
He smiled sunnily and brought her the organic lager before she could ask and said only, “Hitting the books, I see. I’ll keep out of your way.” And he bustled back down the bar. He was not wearing his toque today, and she had been right earlier: His head was shaved—lightly stubbled so that the tiny dark hairs lowlighted the contours of his skull. A pale, jagged scar stood out, as if he’d been hit over the head with a bottle; he looked like the kind of man who might have a few fights in his past—but only a few and only for boisterous fun, not like the scars she’d seen on Maksim.
That thought chilled her a bit: scars were a language, and she’d been reading without understanding the meaning. Now it began to come clear. A man like Rafe, a normal guy, might wear the signature of a couple of brawls or a car accident or some extreme sports. Maksim had a whole book traced on his skin, and Lissa had not really been conscious of seeing it the other day, but now her mind served up the picture of him shirtless, wealed with white or red keloid, several long, cruel lines, and one knot that surely must be a bullet scar.
Soldier: he had to have been. It went with the military books and the maps and the collection of weapons. And with the kind of muscle he had, hard and lean and functional.
It also spoke to her of what Maksim might be like when he did not have a witch to calm him down.
She found she was gazing at Rafe again as he leaned on the cash register twirling a pencil behind his ear. Just then, he turned her way, caught her gaze, held it a moment, and then smiled—not the goofy crooked smile he gave everyone but a smaller, sweeter one.
Lissa ducked her head, sipped from her pint, and flipped open the first of the notebooks.
Taken together, they formed a journal of sorts, recording trials of the spells Baba had later perfected and noted in her own grimoire. Sometimes the recipient of the spell was mentioned, sometimes the ailment to heal, sometimes even the due date for a much-desired child. Lissa found a spell against colic, created for use on herself in infancy. She wondered what her father had said about that: old-country superstition, dangerous nonsense. She knew Baba’s influence had been one of the points of strain in her parents’ marriage, but by the time Lissa had been old enough to pick up any of the finer points, the marriage was long over, Dad had relocated to London, and Mama was dying.
She turned another page. Baba had always preferred to write in pencil, heavily, every line and both sides of the page, embossing the cheap paper of her notebooks. The words formed an incomprehensible Braille to Lissa’s fingertip.
They were nearly as incomprehensible to her eye; Baba switched between Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets and dotted the pages with drawings and symbols, some arcane but recognizable, others possibly nothing more than doodles.
This page, for instance, bore four circles—white, black, and halved each way: clearly the phases of the moon, drawn as on a calendar. Beside the moons, Baba had made a series of tally lines: one for the full moon, three for the first quarter, five for the new moon, and two for the last quarter. Tracking the frequency of something: requests for spells? The church ladies mostly knew that the full moon was the time for that, and so it was possible they would make their requests in advance. What else could Baba have been tracking?
Lissa flipped open her phone and called Maksim. Ten rings, no answer, and nothing to leave a message on. Annoying; maybe she’d bully him into getting a proper phone and voice mail if this situation was going to continue.
Just as she was about to pull the phone away from her ear, he picked up.
“Hey. Maksim. Question about the … your thing. Any relation to the phases of the moon?”
He made a sound like a stifled yawn. “Koldun’ia?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Did I wake you up?”
“One moment.” The phone clattered onto a hard surface. In the background, a momentary sound of water. “Repeat your question.”
“Phases of the moon. Any relation to your madness?”
“A witch should not need to ask.”
Lissa snorted. “You asked me for help, you get to deal with a few questions. I have a page here with some notes about moon phases, and I was wondering if it could be—”
“No. Witches are the only ones who traffic in such things.” His voice was rough again.
“I did wake you up. Jesus, Maksim, it’s six in the evening.”
“I was not sleeping. Only thinking,” he said. “You should make more eggs.”
“I can’t do that until the moon is full again.”
“You told me; I remember now. I will try to make the others last, then.”
Lissa flipped the phone closed, frowning. She’d figured on a maximum dosage of four eggs a day at most; for a regular person, two ought to be sufficient. Though that was based on eggs that actually worked the way they should, and these were clearly subpar strength. God only knew how often he was taking them. She thought about calling him back and asking how many were left.
“Let me guess,” said Rafe, wiping a spill from the varnished wood, setting a fresh coaster before her and upon it, a pint of water with a slice of lemon. “Study buddy is one of those people who expects you to do all the work?”
“Sort of,” Lissa said, flashing back again to Maksim’s extended hand, imperious and yet desperate.
“What’s your major, anyway? Stella didn’t tell me.”
“It’s not a formal program,” Lissa said.
“Oh. I’m being nosy again. Professional hazard,” Rafe said, touching her elbow in apology and grinning.
Lissa would have answered that smile. She really would. She could not think of anything to say, though.
After a moment, Rafe’s face went a bit rueful, and he raised his eyebrows and backed away with his hands held up, empty.
Stella danced over to pick up a tray of pints. “It works better when you smile back,” she whispered.
“What works better?”
“Flirting, silly,” Stella said and slid away again, leaving Lissa pinned against the wall, fighting the urge to hide her hot face in her hands.
Maksim’s door stood an inch open. Lissa knocked, and it swung wider, showing her that the elegant coffee table was strewn with dirty mugs. Beside the telephone, a pressback chair lay on its side, one of its legs broken.
“Maksim?”
“Out here.”
She followed his voice through the bedroom—unmade bed, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor. A sliding glass door led out to the balcony.
Maksim sat with his back against the brick wall, one leg outstretched and the other pulled up. As Lissa approached, he raised his head from his knee and held out his hand in a silent demand.
“You’re like a toddler,” she started to say, and then she saw his face. Older bruises had bloomed to livid color, and newer ones overlaid them, redder and bloodier.
“Oh my God. Maksim, what happened?”
“Eggs,” he said.
She set down her bag and pulled out the cartons: all that remained of the sleep spell, plus the leftovers of two kinds of painkillers, made the full moon before Baba died.
She thanked whatever instinct had told her to bring the painkillers. She gave him one of those first, hoping it was still good. The spells lasted only as long as the eggs did, and the expiration date on these was drawing near.
He slurped it from the shell. One corner of his upper lip was split and puffy, and so was his eyebrow on the same side. He tossed the shell shards to the corner of the balcony, and Lissa, following the motion, saw a pile of other discarded shells there.
She waited for a moment until Maksim gestured again, and she gave him one of the sleep spells.
“Another,” he said once he’d taken it, wiping a string of albumen from his lip.
“No. You have to make them last.”
“I did not husband them earlier. I am sorry.”
“I can see that. Are you going to tell me what happened?”
He tilted his head back against the brick and shut his eyes. Lissa opened her mouth to chide him, but she saw his jaw working and set herself to wait.
“I do not visit with my own kind often,” he said. “I have been living apart, because of the spell.”
“Right, the thing Baba did for you.”
“The kin do not love witches. Many of them think it perverse to tamper with our nature.”
“No one loves witches.”
“I do,” Maksim said, smiling faintly. He showed her his left hand: knuckles bloodied and mottled with bruising, two fingers swollen stiff that could not join the rest in a fist. “See? I thought I had broken the bones there, but now it does not hurt at all.” He rolled his head on his neck and stretched his arms gingerly. “I would not tell many of the kin of you; we all have our ways and secrets. This one is … a friend. I asked her for help in finding the boy.”
“I take it she said no.”
“Oh, no. She agreed. We fought only because it is in our nature to fight.”
“I guess you lost.”
“I was not myself.” Maksim gave her a haughty flick of a glance. “And it made Augusta happy to best me for once. She is capable: she knows the area where it happened. She will ask questions of people who may have seen him.”
“I wish you’d told me about this earlier.”
“I wish your grandmother had made better provision for me, koldun’ia. I wish your eggs would let me sleep straight through until the full moon. I wish I was careless and could let this boy go his way and never think of him again.” Maksim rose stiffly and limped to the edge of the balcony, where he knotted his good hand on the railing.
“Why can’t you forget about him? What will he do?”
“Die, most likely,” Maksim said, leaning out and sniffing at the air. “He will do something rash, and someone will kill him, because he is too young to know his own strength. And if it should come to that, it is still better than watching himself go mad and hurt the people he used to love.”
Lissa rose herself and set the egg cartons aside, watching Maksim shift his weight from foot to foot, testing. “How bad is it going to be, having this … Augusta on the warpath?”
“She will not hurt you. I have asked her to respect you, and she will not disobey me.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. What if she hurts someone else?”
Maksim lunged away from the railing, with a section of it still clutched in his hand. He shoved past Lissa and into the apartment.
She heard a crash and ran after him. Maksim hefted the length of railing like a club and swung it down onto the wreckage of the broken chair until both splintered. He set the chair seat on his knee and hammered his fist through it so that the splinters raked his arm. He snapped the railing between his hands and cracked the longer half in two again.
Lissa watched, flinching, from the dubious safety of the bedroom, with her arms hugging the cartoned eggs.
At last Maksim spun about, short, jagged kindling in each hand. The abrupt motion sent a spatter of blood from his arm arcing across the floor.
Lissa jerked back.
Maksim stood rooted, panting, staring at the mess. “Do not touch. You must take care with my blood,” he said. “That is how the infection passes.…”
He sat down slowly, and his knee buckled halfway so that he sprawled to one side. “I believe that should have hurt,” he muttered, easing his leg out straight. “No more easing of pain. I must have something to warn me to stop.”
“It’s getting worse,” Lissa said. “Your madness. Isn’t it?”
Maksim’s lips skinned back from his teeth, and he would not look at her.
“Jesus. I don’t know what to do with you.” She put the eggs in the refrigerator, except for one more of the painkilling ones, and sat on the other side of the room from Maksim while he washed up his arm.
He shuffled about slowly, sweeping the broken chair pieces into a corner and wiping the droplets of blood from the floor. Finally, he let himself down onto the sofa and covered his face. He said something in Russian into his hands.
“Maybe I could go out for you, pick up some groceries and first-aid stuff,” Lissa said.
“I am not hungry—and for medicine, there is no need to worry; we are all quick healers. All too soon, I will be running again.” He smiled, but there was no mirth in it; or maybe it was just the crooked cast of his bruised mouth.
Lissa woke up in Baba’s bed, and for no reason at all, she knew that today was the day to make it her own bed.
Baba’s bedroom was the biggest room in the house. The window looked out into willow branches. Although the floor slanted, it was beautiful age-darkened hardwood. Over the last few years, as Baba’s knees increasingly pained her, even with the eggs she made for herself, it had become Lissa’s job to do the floors. She’d spent many hours first washing them with Murphy Oil Soap and then rubbing in cinnamon-scented beeswax. The scent mellowed into the rest of the old house, mingling with dust and books and wool, sun on aged paint, mothballs, and cedar.
Lissa tied her hair up and dressed in old denim shorts. She was halfway through her coffee and Special K when Stella found her at the table.
“You look … casual?” Stella said. “What’s the plan?”
So Lissa filled her in. “I’m not, you know, handy. I don’t want to renovate or something. Yet. I just want to clean out some things. Get some fresh air in.”
Stella nodded. “A good spring cleaning,” she said. “Mummy does one every year. I mean, the cleaning service takes care of all the mopping and stuff, but Mummy and I sort the things and put everything in its place.”
“I don’t have a cleaning service,” Lissa said, hearing the bite to her tone a moment too late. “I mean, it’s just me.”
“It’s not just you,” Stella said. “I can help. I’d like to help.”
Lissa started to shake her head and stopped herself. What would it hurt? So Stella’s mother had a cleaning service—Stella had been the one with the bucket, cleaning the spot in the kitchen when Lissa couldn’t even look at it.
Lissa bit down on her reflexes and told herself to say yes. And when they were finished with their coffee and Special K, she and Stella marched back upstairs to tackle the room.
Lissa had already moved Baba’s grimoires to the shelf that held her own in the kitchen sideboard. It was the personal things that remained: Baba’s dresser was scattered with powder compacts and a thousand hairpins and the photo of herself with Lissa in its tarnished silver frame. The drawers were full of brassieres and nylon undergarments. The wardrobe held Baba’s dresses, gray and navy and hunter green, and her faded eggplant coat. Far at the back, about where you’d expect to enter Narnia, was a shelf of sweaters wrapped in plastic against moths and a jumble of handbags and hatboxes.
Stella took down the curtains to give them a wash. Lissa began with the dresser drawers, sorting out the useful stuff from the things that even thrifty Baba would have thrown away if she’d thought about them anytime in the last five years. The bad went straight into a garbage bag. The good, Lissa folded into a very elderly blue suitcase to take to Goodwill.
“What about the things for you?” Stella said over her shoulder.
Lissa spread her hands flat on the bare wood at the bottom of the last drawer. “Oh.”
“You don’t have to. I just wondered.”
“No, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She stood up then and looked at the things on top of the dresser in front of Baba’s mirror. The jewelry case folded open to display a tangle of necklaces. Lissa lifted out a rhinestone collar and found the settings and clasp gummed over with human dirt. One ring box, on inspection, proved empty; that was probably the one Baba had worn most often, which was still in the manila envelope from the hospital. Another box held a ring of clustered garnets set in what might have been white gold. Lissa slipped it onto her finger; it was too big and wanted to twist askew.
All at once, it struck her that Baba had not even been gone a month, and here was Lissa chucking out her things without even asking.
It would be another week and a half before she could speak with Baba again, and she’d have only three questions to spend. She did not want any of those questions to be about the disposal of Baba’s belongings.
“She never said, did she?” Stella said, looking over her shoulder. “That probably means she didn’t mind, you know. She trusted that whatever you did would be right.”
Sighing, Lissa left the jewelry case where it was and went instead to the closet.
Stella talked her into keeping the two silk scarves and a whimsical feathered hat; the rest they hauled downstairs and set by the front door. Remaining in the bedroom were a hatbox of old photos, the framed one, the jewelry, and a little chest that seemed to contain Baba’s personal papers. And the urn containing Baba’s ashes. Lissa took it in her hands a moment, met Stella’s helpless gaze; but Stella couldn’t offer much help on that. Lissa tucked the urn behind the bedroom door, which got her a raised eyebrow, but no commentary.
Stella helped move Lissa’s clothes into the dresser and the closet and her shoes into the shoe bag on the inside of the closet door. They dried the curtains and hung them again. They set Lissa’s comb and bracelets and necklaces and face cream before the mirror.
After Stella left for work, Lissa took the little chest down to the kitchen, where she could go through it in the bright light of her study lamp.
She’d been hoping for private diaries, something that would illuminate the question of what Baba had done for Maksim—or something personal and strange that might illuminate Baba herself, something to tide Lissa over these in-between days until she could speak with her grandmother again.
What she found was her grandfather Pavel Nevsky’s passport. He’d been born in Canada, unlike Baba, whose passport must have been stashed somewhere else, if she even still had one. Pavel Nevsky had been a member of the church from birth; Father Manoilov remembered him a little and had said to Lissa once that he was a great bear of a man and had been a builder.
Below the passport, a photo of Pavel himself, a smaller and sharper image of the one Lissa knew from Baba’s album.
Below that, a small chaos that included a vaccination document for Lissa herself; an old address book in flaking leather, in which most of the names were inked out and in which Maksim’s did not appear; the birth certificate of Lissa’s mother; a brass button; the business cards of two carpenters, a plumber and a mason; a handful of old rubles and kopecks.
Lissa tugged at her hair in frustration.
Whatever Baba had done for Maksim was either something so obvious that it had not needed to be written down or something so secret that—
Not secret; not quite. Lissa looked again at the tarnish-dark faces of the coins at the bottom of the box.
Whatever Baba had done, it had been done at the new moon.
