Read Online Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey - Free Book Online

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.
    APRIL 30
    Â Â  WANING GIBBOUS
    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.”
    â€œI am here now.”
    â€œShe couldn’t help you properly. Could she? You need me, after all.”
    â€œShe is dead,” Maksim said, and he watched Augusta’s eyes flinch. “Her granddaughter, fortunately for me, is also a witch.”
    â€œThat explains the stink.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI don’t like you like this. I hope you’ll make this short so that I can go back to making some blunt.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œGus. 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.”
    â€œThe devil in it is, I do not know