blood magic by tessa gratton

C H A P T E R S A M P L E R

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E V E R Y W H E R E

S I L L A K E N N I C O T T U R N S ,

S H E S E E S B L O O D .

She can’t stop thinking about her parents’ alleged murder-suicide. Then, a book filled with spells arrives mysteriously in the mail. The spells share one common ingredient: blood.Nick, the new guy at school who makes Silla’spulse race, has a few secrets of his own. Drawntogether by a combination of fate and chemistry,they must discover who knows their secret andprotect their powerful magic.

Keep reading for a sneak peek . . .

READ & DISCUSSRANDOMBUZZERS.COM

POWER.IMMORTALITY.

BLOOD.

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I am Josephine Darly, and I intend to live forever.

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ONE

ek . . .

M

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s i l l a

It is impossible to know who you really are until you spendtime alone in a cemetery.

The headstone was cold against my back, pressing my thinT-shirt into the sweat trickling down my skin. Dusk washedthe cemetery of shadows, lending it a quality of between-ness:neither day nor night, but a gray, teary moment. I sat with mylegs crossed and the book in my lap. Beneath me, scraggly grasshid my parents’ graves.

I brushed dirt oΩ the front cover of the book. It was thesize of a paperback novel, so small and insignificant-seemingbetween my hands. The mahogany leather cover was soft andscuΩed from years of use; the color had worn oΩ the corners.The pages used to be gilded, but that was rubbed oΩ, too.Cracking it open, I read the inscription again, whispering it tomyself, making it more real.

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TWO


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It had been one of Dad’s favorite quotes. From Hamlet. Dadused to recite it whenever Reese or I stormed out of the roomto pout. Said we had nothing to complain about compared tothe prince of Denmark. I remembered his blue eyes narrowingat me over the rims of his glasses.

The book had arrived in the mail this afternoon, wrappedin brown paper with no return address. DRUSILLA KENNICOT

was written in plain block letters, like a summoning. Therewere six stamps in the corner. It smelled like blood.

That particular raw-penny aroma stuck in the back of mythroat, clinging with memory. I closed my eyes and saw a splashof blood streaked across bookshelves.

When I opened my eyes again, I was still alone in thecemetery.

Inside the front cover of the book was a note, folded inthirds and written on thick, unlined paper.

Silla, it began. I shivered every time I saw my name writtenin the old cursive hand. The bottom of the s spiraled into oblivion.

Silla,I feel your loss as my own, child. I

have known your father for most of his life,and he was a dearest friend. I regret Iam unable to present myself for his memorial,though trust that his life is celebrated and hisdeath greatly mourned.

If there can be any small consolation,I hope that this is it. Here in this book are


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the secrets he perfected. Decades of research,a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. He was agloriously talented magician and healer, andhe was proud of you, proud of your strength.I know he would like for you to have thisrecord of his work now.

All my brightest hopes be with you andyour brother.

It was signed only The Deacon. No last name or contact in-formation.

Crows laughed, bursting up through headstones a distanceaway. The black cloud of them cut through the air in a flappingof wings and raucous cawing. I watched them against the graysky as they flew west toward my house. Probably to terrorizethe blue jays that lived in our front-yard maple.

Wind blew my short hair against my cheeks, and I brushedit back. I wondered who this Deacon was. He claimed friend-ship with my dad, but I’d never heard of him. And why hewould suggest such incredible, ridiculous things: that my dadwas a magician and healer, when he’d only been a high schoolLatin teacher. But despite that, I knew without a doubt that I was holding a book my dad had written: I recognized his fine, delicate handwriting, with its tiny loops in every capital Land its perfectly angled Rs. He’d abhorred typing, and used tolecture Reese and me about learning to write longhand legibly. Reese had compromised by printing block letters, butI’d been too enamored of wild, looping cursive to worry aboutreadability.


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No matter where it had come from, this book was Dad’s.As I flipped through it, I saw that every page contained

lines and lines of perfect writing and meticulous diagramssprawling like spiderwebs. The diagrams contained circleswithin circles, Greek letters or strange pictographs and runes.There were triangles and octagons, pentacles, squares, andseven-pointed stars. Dad had made tiny notes at the edges ofthe pages, written descriptive paragraphs in Latin, and madelists of ingredients.

Salt dominated the lists, and recognizable items like ginger,wax, fingernails, mirrors, chicken claws, cat teeth, and coloredribbons. But there were words I didn’t know, like carmot and agrimony and spikenard.

And blood. Every list included a drop of blood.They were magic spells. For locating lost items, for blessing

new babies and deterring curses. For protecting against evil.For seeing over long distances. Predicting the future. For heal-ing all manner of illness and wound.

I flipped through, heart alight with wonder and fear. Icould taste excitement, too, like electricity in the back of mythroat. Could it be real? Dad hadn’t been one to play elaboratetricks, and was the opposite of fanciful, despite his love for oldbooks and heroic tales.

There had to be a spell I could try. To test it. To see.As I thought about it, the smell crawled up the back of my

throat again, blood clinging to my sinuses and trailing likesticky smoke down my esophagus.

I raised the book to my nose and drew in a long, cleansingbreath. And I imagined I could smell him in the book. My dad.


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Not the overwhelming blood that had saturated his shirt andthe carpet beneath his body, but the slightly oiled cigarettes-and-soap when he came to breakfast every morning, after ashower and quick smoke on the back patio. I dropped the bookinto my lap and closed my eyes until Dad was right there, sit-ting in front of me, one hand touching my right knee.

When I was little, he used to come into my bedroom justbefore lights-out and touch my knee as he sank onto the bed.Gravity would pull me closer and closer until I could lean myhead on his shoulder or climb into his lap while he told mecondensed versions of literary classics. My favorites had beenFrankenstein and Twelfth Night, and I asked for them again andagain.

In the cemetery, another crow cawed, a loner flying slowlyafter his cousins.

I held the book up in my two hands and let it fall openwherever it willed. When the fanning pages had chosen theirsides, I lowered it and glanced at the spell: Regeneration.

The diagram was a spiral inside a circle that narrowed tothe center like a snake. I only needed salt, blood, and breath.Easy.

With a stick, I drew a circle in the cemetery dirt, and fromthe plastic bag I’d brought of ingredients readily available in mykitchen, I pulled out a box of kosher salt. The crystals glittered


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between thin blades of grass as I sprinkled them around thecircle. Place the subject in the center of the circle, Dad had written.

I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip. I had no cuts ordead flesh. And it was too far into autumn for flowers.

But a small cluster of dead leaves had collected against thebase of the headstone across from me, and I got up to pick outa good one. Back in my seat, I gently placed the crinkled mapleleaf inside my circle. The edges were black and curled, but Icould still see lines of scarlet tracing the veins. Trees aroundhere weren’t losing many leaves yet, so this was probably leftfrom last winter. It had soaked up a lot of time in the cemetery.

Now came the difficult part. I dug my pocketknife out ofmy jeans and flipped open the blade. Resting the tip against myleft thumb, I paused.

My stomach twisted as I contemplated how much it wasgoing to hurt. What if this spell book was a huge joke? Was Icrazy to even try? It was all impossible. Magic couldn’t be real.

But it was written in Dad’s hand, and he had never been thatkind of mean. And he wasn’t crazy—no matter what anybodysaid. Dad had believed in this, or he wouldn’t have wasted histime with it. And I believed in Dad. I had to.

Either way, it was just a drop of blood.I pushed the knife against my skin, puckering it but not

breaking through. My whole body shivered. I was about to findout if magic was real. The electric thrill of terror was tangy onmy tongue.

I cut deep.A muffled cry escaped my tightly closed lips as blood


welled against my skin, dark as oil. I held out my hand, staringat the thick drop slithering down my thumb. The pain was adull ache that drew all the way up my arm and settled uncom-fortably in my shoulder blade before fading into nothing. Myhand trembled, and I wasn’t afraid anymore.

Quickly, I let one, two, three drops of blood fall and splat-ter onto the leaf. They gathered in the center of it in a smallpool. I leaned over, staring at the blood as if it could stare rightback. I thought of Dad, of how much I missed him. I neededthis to be real.

“Ago vita iterum,” I whispered slowly, letting my breath brushthe leaf and shake the tiny pool of blood.

Nothing happened. Wind fluttered my hair again, and Icupped my hands around the leaf to shield it. I peered down,thinking that the Latin had been bad. Squeezing my woundedthumb, I let more blood gather and drip down. I repeated thephrase.

The leaf shuddered under my breath, and the edges un-furled like growing petals in time-lapse photography. The scar-let center spread out, reaching for the tips and becoming aluscious, bright green. The leaf lay there in the circle, flat andfresh as if new-plucked.

Something rough-sounding against the grass drew my at-tention up sharply.

A boy was watching me, his eyes wide.

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THREE

n i c h o l a s

I’d like to say I came to the graveyard in search of my past, orout of sentiment or nostalgia. But I came to get as far awayfrom my psychotic stepmother as possible.

We’d been at dinner: her, my dad, and me, sitting aroundthe long table in the fancy dining room. I plucked at the whitelinen and wondered whether, if I spilled a few drops of wineonto it, Lilith’s eyes would roll back into her head and she’dstart spouting Bible verses backward.

“Looking forward to school tomorrow, Nick?” Dad asked,raising his own wineglass to his mouth. He believed in intro-ducing me to alcohol gradually and in a controlled fashion, as ifI hadn’t made friends with it in the boys’ bathroom at schoolby the time I was fourteen.

“Like I look forward to sliding down a hill of razor blades.”“It won’t be so bad.” Lilith slid a chunk of steak oΩ her fork

with her teeth: her version of a challenging sneer.“Right. A new school at the beginning of my senior year in

the middle of freaking nowhere. I’m sure it’ll be great.”She pursed her Botox-lips. “Come now, Nick, I doubt

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you’ll have any more trouble alienating yourself and being anoutcast here than you did in Chicago.”

I deliberately set my glass down too hard, sloshing red wineonto the tablecloth.

“Nick!” Dad frowned at me. He still wore his tie, eventhough he’d been at home for hours.

“Dad, didn’t you hear what she—”“You’re nearly eighteen, son, and you’ve got to stop—”“She’s thirty-two! I think if anyone needs to act mature, it’s

her.” I shoved to my feet. “But I guess that’s what you get formarrying someone thirteen years younger than yourself.”

“You are excused,” Dad said calmly. He was always calm.“Great.” I grabbed a spear of asparagus and saluted Lilith

with it. She won that round, clearly. She always did, since shehad Dad wrapped around her finger.

As I strode out into the foyer, I heard Lilith say, “It’s noth-ing to worry about, darling. That’s what bleach is for.”

Grinding my teeth, I swung by the front closet, snatched ahoodie, and slammed out the front door. If I’d been at home, Icould have jogged down the block to Trey’s house and we’dhave headed for a coΩee shop or Mikey’s to shoot some alienson his Xbox. But instead I was alone outside a Missouri farm-house with nothing nearby but a crumbling old graveyard. Ifinished chewing the asparagus spear as I marched over thegravel driveway and zipped up the hoodie.

The sun had set below the woods surrounding the house,so everything was pretty dark. But above, the sky was still pale.Only a handful of stars poked through. Shoving my hands intothe pockets of the hoodie, I headed for the trees. I could see


the cemetery from my bedroom, and now was as good a time asany to see if I could find Grandpa’s grave.

Grandpa had died over the summer, leaving the whole ofhis property to me. Who’d met him once when I was seven andonly remembered being sick most of the time and him yellingat my mom about something I didn’t understand. But I guessage did strange things to a person, and I was his only living rel-ative besides Mom, who didn’t speak to either of us anymore.

Yeah, it was a nice family history.But then Lilith and Dad descended upon what had proba-

bly been a charming farmhouse and tore all the quaint wall -paper oΩ the walls and replaced it with black and white artdeco soullessness. If only their sex life was so bland.

Lilith had spent several days ooohing and aaahing over theland. “What a perfect atmosphere for a writer!” “Oh, darling, Ilove it! Look at that view!” and “I’ll never spend three thousandbucks on a designer coat again!” Okay, she didn’t say the lastpart, but she should have.

The worst part was that Dad was planning to be gone fourdays every week, flying to Chicago to keep up with all his needyclients. So not only was I in a hick town where the most popu-lar gathering spot was the Dairy Queen, but I was trapped herealone with Lilith.

At least I only had to live here for a few months beforegraduation. And at least I’d only missed one month of theschool year, so I’d actually be able to graduate.

I kicked my way through the woods. I don’t know an oakfrom an elm in the best of times, but with the sun down it waspitch-black in the forest and all the trees crowded around me

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like an arboreal downtown for squirrels. And bugs and frogs,which were making so much buzzing and whining noise Iwasn’t sure I’d be able to hear myself talk. The ground was cov-ered in layers of old leaves, and when they tossed up under myfeet, I smelled delightful things like rot and mold. I nearlytripped a couple of times, but flailed my arms and managed tocatch myself on a tree. It was fun smacking through the leavesand low bushes, like it used to be fun to run through piles ofraked leaves in our backyard when I was a kid. Mom used tomake the leaves dance, and they’d float up around my head anddive-bomb me. She said they were little beetle airplanes and—

See, no. That was why I didn’t want to be in Yaleylah.Everything reminded me of Mom, and of all the things I wasn’tsupposed to think about. In the house, I stopped in front ofevery door wondering which had been her bedroom. In thekitchen, I wondered if she’d taught herself to make that awe-some spaghetti sauce or if her own mom had helped. Had shestared oΩ at the cemetery like I caught myself doing before bedlast night? Or had she been totally uninterested in ghosts?These were things I’d never know because she was oΩ in Ari-zona pretending I didn’t exist.

I burst out of the woods really abruptly. I hadn’t even no-ticed the light getting a little better. A road—really just twowheel tracks overgrown with weeds—was between me and thedilapidated cemetery wall. I hiked across to the crumblingstones and climbed over easily. A thin little moon grinned at mebeside a scattering of stars. The sky was purplish and clear. Andthe cemetery spread for at least a quarter mile before ending at ahuge hedge keeping it private from our nearest neighbor’s house.


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It seemed rude to keep kicking through the grass now that Iwas in a cemetery, so I slowed down and walked quietly. Most ofthe headstones were blackened granite or marble, the epitaphsworn down and obscured by darkness. I could read some namesand a few dates gong back to eighteen-something-something.Touching them was irresistible, so I wandered with my hands out,patting one here and just dragging my fingers against another.The stone was cold and rough, also grimy. A few of the head-stones had dying flowers clinging to them. There was no notice-able pattern to the layout of the graves; as soon as I thought I’dfound a row, it bent out into a weird oval or courtyard. It wasn’t asthough I was likely to get lost when I could easily see the blackmass of the woods around my house on one end and the neigh-bors’ on the other. I wondered who lived there, and if the fields tothe south belonged to them, too, or another farmer.

It was all quiet except for the low hum of bugs from thewoods, with the occasional burst from crows yelling at eachother. I watched a flock of them fly away, teasing and pecking ateach other loudly, and I found myself relaxing. At least I couldfind some peace with the dead bodies. They were probably alldecomposed to dust by now. Except maybe Grandpa. I kept myeyes peeled for a bright, new headstone.

I wondered if I would have liked him, if I’d ever come tovisit. I could have. Should have, I guess. But I’d never knownhim, and Dad never brought up anything having to do withMom’s family, so mostly I just lived my life without thinkingabout it. There was no point in stressing about it now.

A statue about ten feet ahead of me moved. I froze, thenducked behind a five-foot-tall obelisk like the Washington


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Monument. Peering around the corner, I realized the statuewas wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and had barrettes in her hairthat glittered purple in the moonlight. I was an idiot.

The girl sat on the ground with her back against a freshheadstone. A book rested open beside her, and a blue plasticgrocery bag flapped against her knee. She was skinny withchoppy short hair that stuck up in this dramatic way I reallyliked. Like I could run my hands through it and she wouldn’tsnap at me for messing it up (like some girls I could mention)because it wouldn’t make a diΩerence. I opened my mouth tosay hi, but stopped when she lifted a pocketknife and put itagainst her thumb.

What the hell?After a hesitation, when her lips pushed together, she cut

herself. No.

The blood dripped down her skin and I thought of mymom with Band-Aids on all her fingers.

I remembered Mom pricking her finger and smearingblood across a mirror to show me the images that came alive init, or dripping it onto a small plastic dinosaur toy and whisper-ing a word to make the stegosaurus wag its spiky tail. I didn’twant to remember it, didn’t want to know that it hadn’t beenonly our shared brand of crazy.

The girl leaned over and whispered to the leaf in front ofher. It shuddered, and then unfurled, turning bright green.

HO-lee shit.She glanced up at me. My mouth was hanging open. There

was no effing way I’d seen that. It wasn’t possible. Not here.Not again.


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As I snapped my mouth shut, she scrambled to her feet,pocketknife thrust behind her back.

I stepped around the headstone, dragging my gaze awayfrom the leaf and up to her face. “Sorry,” I managed to gasp out.“I was just wandering past, and I saw . . .” I glanced back at the leaf.

“Saw what?” she whispered, like there was something in herthroat.

“Nothing . . . nothing. Just you.”Her face remained guarded. “I don’t know you.”“I’m Nicholas Pardee.” I didn’t usually introduce myself

that way, but it was as if in the cemetery I had to tell her my fullname. As if it mattered. “I just moved into the old house nextto the cemetery.” I managed not to wince. Talk about cliché. Hi,

I moved into old man Harleigh’s spooky house and like to wander graveyards.

I usually have a big dog named Scooby with me.

“Oh, yes.” She looked oΩ in the direction of my house. “I’dheard. I’m Silla Kennicot. We live back that way.” She wavedher knife behind her at the nearby house, then seemed to sud-denly remember the knife was in her hand and whipped it be-hind her back again.

I took a long breath. Okay, so she was my neighbor. Andmy age. And hot. And possibly messed in the head. Or I was.Because there was no way this was happening. Me, hot girl, andwhat had looked like . . . no. No. I felt prickly, like I’d sproutedporcupine quills all down my back. I wanted to say somethingobnoxious to make myself feel better, to get my feet back underme, but instead I said something totally lame. “Silla—I’venever heard that name. It’s pretty.”


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She looked away, her face going still as glass. When she spoke,her voice was thin enough to shatter into a thousand pieces.“It’s short for Drusilla. My dad taught Latin at the high school.”

“Oh, Latin, huh.” Taught. Past tense.“It means something like strong.” She said it like it was

ironic.We stared at each other. I was torn between grabbing her

and yelling that I knew exactly what she’d been doing and thatshe had to stop before somebody got hurt . . . and pretendingwe were both normal and didn’t care about blood. Maybe shewas just a dumb cutter, or it was an accident. I didn’t knowenough about her. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with mymom. Maybe I hadn’t really seen anything. I refused to let my-self glance back down at the leaf.

“Have you graduated?” she asked.Startled, I answered a bit too loudly. “Oh, no. I’m starting

school tomorrow.” I oΩered my best wry smile. “Can’t wait.”“You must be a senior?”“Yeah.”“We might not have any classes together, then. I’m a junior.”“I suck at history,” I oΩered.“I’m in AP.” She smiled again, and real humor made her

eyes narrow. They didn’t seem so ghostly and huge.I laughed. “Damn.”Silla nodded, and looked down. While we’d been talking,

she’d drawn her foot through the spiral etched into the dirt. Itwas just a mess of lines now, and bits of dry grass and leaves. No sign of anything weird. Relief made me bolder. “Is yourhand okay?”


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“Oh, um.” She brought her hands out, slipping the foldedknife into her jeans pocket. A ring hugged each of her fin-gers. Splaying them wide, she studied her thumb. Blood wassmeared across it.

“Peroxide,” I said abruptly. That’s what Mom had used. Ihated the smell.

“What?”“You should use that to, uh, clean it.”“It isn’t so bad. Just a little prick,” she murmured.Silence surrounded us, except for the distant calling of

those crows.Silla opened her mouth, paused, then sighed softly. “I

should go home and take care of it.”I wished I had something else to say. But I was trapped be-

tween wanting to forget what I might have seen and wanting todemand explanations. All I did know was that I didn’t wanther to leave. “Can I walk you?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s just a little ways.”“Sure.” I bent and picked up the little book for her. It was

plain and ancient-looking, with no title. “Old family heir-loom?” I joked.

Silla froze, lips parted for an instant like she was afraid, butthen laughed. “Yeah, exactly.” She shrugged like we were sharinga grand joke and took the book. “Thanks. See you, Nicholas.”

I held up a hand, waving. She darted oΩ, making almost nonoise. But I continued to hear my name, long and kind of exotic-sounding in her quiet voice, after she’d disappeared intothe shadows.


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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2011 by Tessa GrattonJacket art: photograph of trees © Stephen Carroll Photography/Flickr/Getty Images;

photograph of girl © Sara Haas/Flickr/Getty Images;photograph reference for bird silhouettes by Erik Charlton

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us atwww.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataGratton, Tessa.

Blood magic / Tessa Gratton. — 1st ed.p. cm.

Summary: In Yaleylah, Missouri, teens Silla and Nick, drawn together by loss and ashared family history of blood magic practitioners, are plunged into a world of darkmagic as they try to unravel the mystery of Silla’s parents’ apparent murder suicide.

ISBN 978-0-375-86733-0 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-375-96733-7 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-375-89768-9 (ebook)

[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. Stepmothers—Fiction. 7. Immortality—Fiction.

8. Family life—Missouri—Fiction. 9. Missouri—Fiction.] I. Title.PZ7.G77215Blo 2011

[Fic]—dc22 2010024997

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

ATTENTION READER: THIS IS AN UNCORRECTEDADVANCE EXCERPT


Nat

alie

C. P

arke

r

T ESSA GRAT TON has wantedto be a paleontologist or a wizared since she wasseven. She was too impatient to hunt dinosaurs, butis still searching for someone to teach her magic.After traveling the world with her family, she acquired a BA (and the important parts of an MA)in Gender Studies, then settled down in Kansaswith her partner, her cats, and her mutant dog.Youcan visit Tessa at TessaGratton.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHORABOUT THE AUTHOR


blood magic by tessa gratton

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