“It’s 917—”
“Huh,” Jay-Tee said, “sounds like a cell phone. Why didn’t you say so?” A cell phone meant it was Danny’s number, less chance of her dad answering.
“’Cause I didn’t know it was a mobile.” Reason rolled her eyes.
“Mobile,” Jay-Tee muttered. She had forgotten in the midst of Reason’s current take-charge mood that she didn’t know jack about shit. She’d sure gotten a lot more feisty since Jason had laid it all on her tonight, or rather, last night.
How long was it since they’d slept? Jay-Tee could definitely use some sleep soon. A lot. “Okay, give me the rest.”
She reeled off the number. “See? Fib (33).”
“What? You’re keeping count?”
Reason looked puzzled. “I always keep count.”
Jay-Tee dialed, then held the receiver between them. They both listened as it rang. She hoped it would just keep ringing, or go to voice mail, or something. A deep male voice answered, sounding just like her dad. She slammed the phone down.
“What are you doing?” Reason asked. “What did you do that for? That was Danny.”
“Really? He sounded just like Dad. He’s only seventeen. Eighteen.” She corrected herself, realizing he’d just had his birthday. “When did he start sounding like Dad?”
“Call him back. It’s freezing,” Reason said, bouncing back and forth on her feet. “I swear my nose is going to fall off. The sooner you do this, the sooner it’ll be done.”
“You sound like a grandma.”
“Just call him, Julieta.”
Jay-Tee glared at Reason, then decided it was too cold to call her out for using her given name and fed more coins in, entering the digits as Reason recited them.
“Hello,” said Danny. Jay-Tee froze again at the sound of his voice, but she didn’t hang up again. “Hello?” he said again.
“Hi, Danny,” Reason said, butting in. Jay-Tee would’ve loved to slap her. “It’s Reason and Jay-Tee.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Jay-Tee said. She imagined she sounded as hesitant as she felt.
“Julieta? Reason?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Reason’s just listening.”
“I’m so glad.” His voice sounded choked, like he might cry. Jay-Tee felt her throat constricting too. She forced herself to breathe. “It’s really you?”
“Yeah.”
“Will you meet me? I have to see you. Things have changed—”
“How?” she said, her voice scraping in her throat. “How have they changed?”
“I wanted to tell you in—”
“Tell me. Now. I won’t meet you unless you tell me. I can’t see Dad again. You understand? I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to see Dad.”
“How can you promise that? What if he follows you?”
There was a silence at the other end of the line, then she heard her brother taking a deep breath. “He can’t follow me, Julieta. He’s dead.”
Jay-Tee hung up the phone. She felt sick. She could feel the mess in her stomach moving. “We have to go,” she said, amazed that the words came out. “It’s cold. I have to sleep.”
Reason looked like she was going to say something, but Jay-Tee’s glare shut her up.
Jay-Tee stepped out onto the road, hardly able to see. She felt hot and cold and her nerve endings stung as if her skin had been reduced to a single layer. There was nothing to protect her. A black gypsy cab appeared at once. Now, that was magic.
Jay-Tee called her brother again from the apartment, doing as much as she could through her fatigue to shield the conversation from him but wasn’t too confident of her success. His snares lay all over the apartment.
They arranged to meet at 1 PM for lunch just around the corner. Reason had insisted they meet somewhere close. It was nine-thirty in the morning and Jay-Tee could see that Reason was as close to keeling over from lack of sleep as she was. She hoped four hours would be enough to keep them going.
When Jay-Tee’s head hit the pillow, she closed her eyes and slipped into oblivion, not thinking of her dead father, dreaming of nothing.
26
Snot
“Twenty-four hours?” Tom couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice. “What time is it?”
“More like twenty-six,” said Cath’s male flatmate, the one who worried about his bathroom products. Based on that, Tom had been expecting interesting clothes, but he was wearing a yellow T-shirt with crooked seams and badly cut jeans. Seemed odd to Tom to care about your skin, but not what you put over it.
“You know,” daggy jeans continued, “this chair sucks for watching TV. What you’ve been sleeping on for twenty-six hours—it’s a couch, not a bed.”
“You know,” Cath said, imitating her flatmate’s tone, “my brother’s been sick. He really needed to sleep.”
“Yeah, well, you and all your friends and boyfriends and relatives aren’t the only ones who live here.” The guy’s eyes were bugging out and one of the veins on his neck had suddenly become visible. “Is your brother going to pay rent? Put in for the utilities?”
“ ’Ken hell, Andrew! Give him a break. He just woke up. Let’s talk about this later.”
The flatmate stood up, shot a poisonous glance at Cath, didn’t bother to look at Tom, and stomped out, slamming the door of his bedroom, which made more of a squeak than a bang. Tom imagined the lack of a satisfyingly loud slam would make him even more ropeable.
“What time is it?”
Cath looked at her watch. “Eight at night.”
“Bugger. Twenty-six hours! Sorry,” Tom said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”
“Not your fault. You needed it. You looked bloody awful when you got in. I’m just glad you woke up. Mere said I wasn’t to worry, but honest, you looked dead.” She shuddered.
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying that! Anyway, this is just a reminder that I’ve got to find somewhere else to live. Andrew’s such a dropkick.” She sighed. “You look heaps better. How do you feel?”
“Not too foul. Good, even, I think. Definitely hungry.”
“I’ll get you a couple of muffins and then after you wash, we can go out and get something more substantial. If you’re up to it?”
Tom nodded vigorously to indicate that he was more than up to it.
Cath went into the kitchen and returned with two terrifyingly healthy-looking muffins. Whole grain, he imagined, shuddering inside. He picked one up. It weighed more than a cricket ball. Oh, well, he told himself, at least it was food.
“So, what’s really going on?” Cath asked. She’d made a concession to Tom’s desire to eat normal food and taken him to a pizzeria. While he hoed into a huge pizza with the lot on it (only here they said “with everything”), she ate a salad without dressing, the only thing she deemed safe in such a place.
“Why are you really here?” she continued. “I talked to Dad on the phone and he sounded really weird. Is everything okay with Mum?”
“She’s not doing great. But Cath, she hasn’t been doing great since we were kids.”
“Nothing new?”
Tom shook his head, wishing that he could tell Cath the truth. Dad knew and he wasn’t magic; why couldn’t Cath? Tom hated secrets, especially from Cath. Except for things that had to do with magic, he told her everything. Always had. “Nah. Nothing new. Dad gets down, but I reckon he’s doing better than he has in ages. He’s finally figured out she’s never coming home.”
“Then what’s going on?” Cath was leaning forward, giving him her high-voltage interrogation stare. Probably the main reason he told her everything in the first place. Tom couldn’t lie when she hit him with it. “Mere said you’d been sick. When? Why didn’t you lot tell me? And why the hell would she bring you to New York in the depths of winter if you’d been sick? ’Ken hell, Tom! It makes no sense at all. And how come on your one day out you didn’t come home with fabric samples and sketches of clothes o
r any of the things the Tom Yarbro I know would do? And why have you been looking so worried? Hmmm?”
“Been sick, you know . . .”
“What kind of sick?”
“Flu,” Tom said, because it was the only thing he could think of. He wasn’t sick very often; for the life of him he couldn’t remember the last time.
“Dad said it was glandular fever.”
“Same thing,” Tom said, hoping it was. He’d never heard of glandular fever. “Feels like flu.”
“Tom, you’re a piss-weak liar. And Dad’s just as crap. You’re going to tell me what’s going on. Come on, when have I ever kept a secret from you?”
“How about Poncey the Eighties Boyfriend?” Tom asked, relieved to have a response.
“Who?”
“What’s-his-name? Dillon.”
“Oh.”
“How come you didn’t mention him in any of your e-mails, eh?” Tom tried to turn her interrogation look back on her, but she was oblivious. Cath had actual eyebrows, whereas his were as pale as his skin and, though thick, pretty much invisible. Tom bet the success of Cath’s stare lay with her eyebrows. He could raise each of his independent of the other, but as no one could actually see them, it wasn’t very effective. One day he would dye them, his hair too, put an end to being an indistinguishable blur of white and pink. Not till he finished high school, though.
“Only just met him,” Cath said, not meeting his eyes. A sure sign that she wasn’t telling the truth. “Don’t know how serious it is, you know? I wouldn’t actually call him my boyfriend yet.”
“But you did when you introduced us! How long have you been going out?”
“Well, I guess it’s been, um, three months.”
“Three months! And you reckon I keep secrets! That’s your longest relationship ever.”
“Nuh, Steve was longer. We were going out for almost five months.”
“Ugh, Steve the tattooed wonder.” Tom screwed up his face. “He was disgusting.”
“He wasn’t that bad.”
“Yeah, he was. I caught him picking his nose and then scraping the snot off underneath our kitchen table.”
“Yuck. He didn’t!”
“He did,” Tom said, not flinching under her stare, because it was the absolute truth. The memory was trapped in his brain for all time, though he’d be thrilled to forget. It had been a lot of snot, in a scary variety of colours.
“Okay,” Cath said, “he was kind of gross, but I was only fifteen.”
“I’m fifteen,” Tom said with all the dignity he could muster, “and I don’t wipe my snot on other people’s furniture, and I wouldn’t go out with anyone who did.”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Sophistication, when have you ever gone out with anyone?”
“Well, I haven’t, exactly, not technically, but I have kissed a girl.”
“Woo-hoo! My baby brother’s kissed a girl!” She said it loud enough that the people at the next table turned around to look at them. One of the girls smiled.
Tom could feel his face get hot; he mock-punched Cath’s shoulder, not nearly as hard as he’d’ve liked. Sometimes he hated his skin. Cath never blushed. How come he got all the dodgy genes? “There’ll be time for girls later when I’m a world-famous fashion designer.”
“Kind of a long time to wait for a second kiss, don’t you reckon?” Tom punched her again. “Lay off,” she said, punching him back. “Come on, then, who was the lucky girl?”
“I’ll tell you if it happens again. Promise.”
“Nup, you got to tell me now.” The laser beam stare revved up.
“Jessica Chan. She kissed me ’cause she loved the dress I made her so much.”
“Tongues?”
Tom’s skin got hot again. He knew it was scarlet: the colour he’d meant Jessica’s dress to be. Cath giggled. “Okay. Tommy, I’ll ask no more. So will you tell me what else’s going on?”
Tom shook his head slowly. “Can’t. I’m not allowed.” Cath leaned closer. “Cath! I can’t. If it were up to me, I’d tell you—you know that, right?”
“Yeah, I do. Will you try to persuade Dad and Mere to let me in on the big secret?”
Tom nodded. “I promise.”
“Thanks. I mean, I know it has to do with Mum and why Mere’s been so amazing helping us out and I know—”
“Cath! Can we talk about something else?”
She sighed. “Wanna go see a movie, then?”
“Yeah, I would. That’s exactly what I feel like.” Cath was religious about not talking during movies. He’d be safe for a while. “One with good clothes.”
“Sure.”
Tom sat through the movie, an old one from the fifties. He felt too weird to really follow the story-line, but there were lots of big-skirted New Look clothes swishing in and out of rooms. He’d’ve bet money they were by Bill Thomas, not Edith Head.
He wished he could talk to Cath about Ree, about how scared he was they weren’t going to find her. He desperately wanted to tell her about magic, about how terrifying it was.
He looked at his sister, her mouth slightly open, staring at the screen, the moving images reflected in her eyes. She was dead lucky she hadn’t inherited the curse. Tom did not want to die young. He did not want to go mad. Every time he visited his mother, he saw what he could become. Tom shuddered.
Cath giggled and then shocked Tom by speaking. “Her dress isn’t that bad, is it?”
“Puce, darling,” Tom said in his most Oxford Street tones, “with ruffles and a gold trim, I mean to say.” The only other person in the cinema hissed at them to shhh. They both giggled and shut up.
After midnight, Tom crawled into the sleeping bag on the couch and dreamed that he had to make Mere a suit out of an Italian parchment linen that could not be cut or sewn.
27
Out the Door
Even before I opened my eyelids, I could feel Jason Blake staring at me. My stomach went cold. Had he put his hands on me while I slept? Had I said yes as I lay dreaming? I still felt bone tired but not as exhausted as I had before I slept. I didn’t think he’d taken any more. I hoped not.
“I know you’re awake,” he said.
I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked at him as if he wasn’t freaking me out at all. Was he really my grandfather? “You don’t knock in New York City? What are you doing in my room?”
“Actually,” said Blake, “given that I own this apartment, I’d say this bedroom was mine.”
I couldn’t think of an answer. I sat there with a smile on my face not much more convincing than his, willing him to go away. I wondered how long Jay-Tee had been with him. How could she stand it? Her father must’ve been a monster.
“I thought I might take you girls out for lunch. Seems to me we need to discuss our new arrangement in more detail. Things were left rather unsettled last night.” He turned to the door. “I’ll give you half an hour to get dressed. Casual is fine.”
He gave me one last glance; his smile seemed to say he was doing me a favour, that I should be pleased by the prospect of another meal with Jason Blake, then he closed the door behind him.
I closed my eyes again. I could feel it, very faintly, but there—my ammonite in Danny’s pocket. Though it was only twelve-thirty, he was already at the restaurant waiting for us. Good. My impulse was just to go. But there were bars on the window and Jay-Tee was in the other room.
I was not going to panic. I’d been in this situation before. I’d been trapped before and I’d always escaped. Yes, that had been with Sarafina, and we’d been running from police and investigators who, as far as I’d known, weren’t magic. But this was not entirely new; I could do this.
And this time I knew I was magic; that had to help, surely? Except that I had no idea how to use that magic to get through the bars or how to call to Jay-Tee without Blake knowing. I still knew next to nothing. Why had he suddenly decided to take us out to lunch? He’d said he’d see us in a few days. Obviously, he knew something was up. Why el
se would he be here? I hoped he didn’t know what it was exactly.
I got dressed fast, not bothering with a shower, shoving scarf, hat, and gloves into the big pockets of the coat. I wished I had talked in more detail about escape last night, discussed what to do if Blake showed up again, but we’d both been too tired even before Jay-Tee had learned about her father.
I saw the layout of the flat in my mind. Two exits: front door in the living room, fire escape in the kitchen, which was on the other side of a large window that had a metal grate across it. Both had to be unlatched and opened, then me and Jay-Tee’d have to climb out the window and onto the fire escape, which was mostly likely slippery with ice. How to do all that and not attract Blake’s attention? Not possible.
The front door with all its chains and bolts wasn’t much better. What were the odds of Blake deciding to go to the dunny? Pretty much zero.
It would probably be best to simply go with Blake down to the street and then make our break. I tried to imagine giving him the slip on the icy streets and failed. I had no idea how fast Jay-Tee could run, but I wasn’t fast, especially not on ice and snow. I could barely walk on that stuff.
I had nothing I could use as a weapon. And besides, he was at least thirty centimetres taller than me, not to mention double my weight and way stronger.
They were sitting in the living room. Jay-Tee’s coat lay across her knees. When I walked in, she was looking down at the floor, and Blake was staring intently at her. She looked up and gave me a sad smile. The silence was so heavy, it was as if all sound had been sucked away. You’d’ve thought no one had ever spoken before.
Blake didn’t smile. He stood up and beckoned to me as if I were his dog.
“No,” I heard myself say. “Jay-Tee and I do not care to lunch with you today.” I had no idea where those words came from. I sounded like someone from the olden days.
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