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

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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œYou can’t,” Gus said. “I mean, I can’t. Not when it’s like that.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œIn 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—”
    â€œIn the lake,” Maksim said, remembering the deep chill of it, the myriad scents of waterweeds and shore weeds, the birds welcoming the dawn.
    â€œSo when you came to me and broke my door, that was the next day?”
    â€œI was not sure you would remember,” Maksim admitted.
    â€œYou left me a souvenir or two,” Gus said, gesturing wryly at her face. “I wondered what was up with you.”
    â€œSo did I,” Maksim said. “And then I went to see the witch, and it came clear.”
    â€œSo we have to find this guy, and we have to do it now.”
    Maksim shrugged. Nodded.
    â€œAnd 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.
    CADIZ, SPAIN: 1813
    â€œSpanish 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