A Fistful Of Sky

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  But that was ridiculous.

  I moved up beside him. “Did you notice anybody hanging around the center?”

  He glanced at me, then shook his head.

  I stared at the ground as I walked. “Sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “I got you out here for no reason.”

  He shook his head again. “Maybe I scared him away. Better safe, you know?”

  “You had other plans for tonight, I’m sure.”

  “Not until ten. I can still make it. Celtic Knot’s playing at the Bismarck. You want to come?”

  He hadn’t invited me to listen to live music with him in a long time. He had this girl he was seeing, Trina, the latest in a string of girls he’d been seeing; he did lots of things with her, and left the family out of his plans these days. Mama said having a girlfriend was a natural step in his development, and we should quit bothering him about it.

  Sometimes I was really conscious of how odd my family was. Most people our age moved out of the house, went away to college, got their own apartments. Opal lived in L.A. But Jasper still lived at home, and so did I, even though we were old enough to leave. Mama said not to worry about it. LaZelles didn’t have to live like anybody else; it was customary for us to cluster. She said it was okay with her if I never moved out.

  I was heading for my twenty-first birthday in the spring. I didn’t know what to think about Mama’s offer. Sometimes I talked it over with Claire.

  Claire had gone through a rebel-against-everything-July-does phase where she utterly rejected her witch upbringing. She had moved to an apartment across town when she was eighteen. She got a job waitressing and took a year off from school, then went to college at UCST, where her mom was a cultural anthropology professor.

  Since she had moved out, though, she’d been exploring the craft again. She could finally look at it as something separate from family, something she might want to use. After all, she knew all about it already. Now that she had a little distance, she could appreciate it.

  Sometimes I went to Claire’s place to study. We went to movies together. Her apartment was tiny; you did almost everything in one big room except cook or go to the bathroom or shower. The kitchen was so small that you could stand in one place and open the refrigerator and the oven and every cupboard she had, plus you could wash dishes without doing anything but turn around. The bathroom was like that, too. A rug a foot square covered all the ground there was; you stood on it to brush your teeth, your feet rested on it when you used the toilet, and it was where you stepped when you got out of the shower.

  It was very cute. Sometimes, though, when Claire really wanted to, she came to our house and took a four-hour bath.

  “Why should you move out?” Claire had asked. “You get along with your folks, you’ve got those cute brothers and Beryl, there’s a big old pool and a hot tub in your backyard, you can walk to the beach, you guys have a giant TV, and you’re not going to be able to afford an apartment with a kitchen like that. Besides, as long as you live at home, you don’t have to pay rent.”

  “Daddy says I should start paying rent if I’m still living at home when I’m thirty.”

  “See? Free ride for another ten years! No rent, no utilities, no phone or cable bills. Hey, can I move into your house?”

  “Opal’s room is up for grabs.”

  We had grinned at each other, then went back to eating microwave popcorn and watching Men in Black.

  “What’s Celtic Knot?” I asked Jasper.

  “It’s a band.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “Celtic technopop. I’ve never heard them live. They got the gig at the Bismarck. We auditioned there, but they didn’t hire us, you know?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Jasper’s band, River Run, was still in the formative stages. They did instrumental Celtic and contra dance music, but they hadn’t rehearsed enough to be solid yet. “I need to make myself some dinner.”

  “Make enough for two and I’ll definitely take you to the show.”

  “You’ll fix my I.D.?”

  “ ’Course.” He’d been fogging ages on driver’s licenses for years so he could get into places to see bands before he was old enough to drink. Now he was legal, and I was going to be soon. How weird was that?

  At his Honda motorcycle, he unlocked the two helmets and handed me the blue one. He rolled the bike off its kickstand, kicked down on the starter, and turned it toward the exit, and then I climbed on behind him and held on. This, too, reminded me of old times, when he was sixteen and got his license and I was fourteen and still, potentially, a full member of our family, despite Jasper’s predicter mystery on my behalf. We burned up a lot of back roads in the mountains above town back then, and found many strange people and places.

  It was a short ride from the upper parking lot down to the lot at the beach. Through the fog, Christmas lights glowed on the palm trees by the Pelican’s entrance, and rock versions of Christmas carols sounded on the damp air. The night was cold even through my jacket, and Jasper’s jacket was cold too. I didn’t care. I felt safe.

  Jasper pulled up to the entrance to the Speare Beach lot. To get in, you had to take a ticket, although the ticket booth wasn’t manned this late at night. My lime-green Mazda Protegé was one of six cars in the lot.

  He pulled the motorcycle over by the divider where adolescent palm trees grew and dropped the kickstand. “Want me to walk you to the car?”

  “I’ll be all right. Thanks. In case I didn’t already tell you. Thanks.”

  “You told me.” He smiled.

  “I’m so glad you’re my brother.”

  He yawned. “Let’s go home and you fix dinner!”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I took off the helmet and handed it to him, then headed across the lot. My car was at the far end, barely visible through the orange-stained fog.

  Maybe I should come to school earlier and find better parking spots. On the other hand, this was the only exercise I got.

  Halfway there, my neck prickled. I glanced sideways.

  Was someone standing under that palm tree? Watching me?

  I clutched my pack and ran toward my car.

  The dark figure paced me, traveling along the curb.

  My footsteps slapped loud on the asphalt, but I didn’t hear a sound from my pursuer.

  I glanced back. Had Jasper already left?

  No. He was running across the lot toward me, but he was twice as far away as the person under the trees.

  I put on a burst of adrenaline-fueled speed, and bumped into my car. Scrabbling through my pockets, I found my keys at last, opened the driver-side door, and collapsed into the car. I slammed and locked the door.

  The chasing figure evaporated.

  Jasper dropped from the air to the ground right beside my car, spun to look. His head turned as he surveyed the parking lot.

  I tried to catch my breath. It took me a while.

  Eventually Jasper knocked on my window, and I lowered it. “Did you see it?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.” He sounded ragged too. “I don’t know what that was, Gyp. I don’t even know if it was a person.”

  Freezing marbles rolled around in my stomach. “What else could it be?”

  He shook his head. “We better talk to Tobias.”

  I drove straight home, with Jasper following on his motorcycle.

  It was strange to go home, the house looked so everyday. So many places on the route were shining with lights, and the businesses along the Old Coast Highway had holiday scenes painted on their windows. Usually by the week before Christmas, Mama had assigned us our holiday chores, and everybody had worked to decorate the house. You could expect to see the house’s lights from down the street, competing with the displays of our neighbors, some of whom turned their lawns into shrines to reindeer and choristers and even Mother and Child.

  This year Mama hadn’t said anything yet. Not that we expected surprises. I was pretty sure my job was to make cookies again, so I planned a
big bake on Saturday.

  Mama hated it when I parked the car in the turnaround out front. I was supposed to go to my assigned spot under the giant Morton Bay fig tree by the side of the house, where my car would be hidden from the view of all but a couple of guest house windows. Hermina lived in the guest house, and didn’t complain about what she saw. Beryl and I parked there; Flint hadn’t managed to get and keep a car yet; when Opal came home for a visit, she was supposed to park in the street. Jasper was supposed to lock his motorcycle in the garage where Dad had his shop set up. Tonight we both ignored the rules and parked by the front door.

  The house was huge, square, and ochre yellow, with lights on in the windows behind all the curtains, and lights that shone up on the front of the house from the shrubs. Cliff swallows nested under the eaves all along the front of the house. Mama didn’t like the mess they made, but Dad asked for special dispensation because he liked the baby birds, the constant come-and-go of the parents in their smooth swoops, and she relented and let the birds build there.

  The house was woven around with protect spells. It looked like a vision of paradise. Inside I knew I’d be safe.

  I climbed out of the car and almost forgot my pack in my hurry to get inside. I unlocked the front door, went through the foyer past Dad’s study on the left and the immense structure of the three-section staircase on the right to the great hall. I heard television sounds from behind the TV divider to the left in the great hall. Serious voices and classy music with no laugh track made me suspect PBS, with Mama and Dad watching. They liked to unwind with heavy TV after dinner and work.

  I turned right past the staircase, away from the TV alcove into the hallway that led between the kitchen and the dining room. I was starving.

  Jasper caught up to me in the kitchen, where I headed for the fridge, the breadbox, and various tins in search of something to eat.

  “I looked,” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Oh, God! Do you think it could have followed us? I never even thought—” If the follower were supernatural, of course it could have followed us.

  Why?

  “Gotta talk to Uncle, but I have to eat first,” I mumbled.

  “You made it!” Beryl rushed up and hugged me.

  “Yeah. Thanks for staying on the phone with me.” I found a package of Oreos, broke it open, and stuffed one in my mouth. “Thanks for finding Jasper for me,” I mumbled through a mouthful of black crumbs and frosting.

  “No problem.”

  “That’s not cooking,” Jasper said.

  “Too hungry to wait.” I held the package out to him, and he grabbed some cookies.

  “Not as good as homemade,” he said after he ate two. I ate three. The hunger pangs in my stomach stopped gnawing.

  “All right, all right. I’ll make you a batch of whatever kind of cookies you want on Saturday. I’m doing the big Christmas bake then anyway.”

  “A really big batch? Two kinds? Snickerdoodles and Tollhouse.”

  “You got it.” I checked the crisper drawer and found some green and red peppers, red onion, mushrooms, and broccoli. Also we had feta crumbles and eggs. Enough interesting stuff for an omelet. “Should I actually fix dinner?” I checked the clock. Nine-thirty. I wasn’t ready to leave the house again, not if that thing was outside waiting for me. “Maybe you should go on ahead to the club? I don’t think I want to go after all.”

  “First things first. Forget dinner. Grab whatever else you want to eat, and let’s go talk to Tobias,” Jasper said. “I have to call Trina and tell her I’ll probably be late if I make it at all.”

  “What happened at the college?” Beryl asked.

  “Nobody there when I got there,” Jasper said.

  “Nobody there? But I thought—I mean, even right at the end when we said good-bye, I felt something—” She bit her lip and stared at me. “There’s still something.” She shook her head. “The house masks it.”

  Jasper said, “All I found when I got there was Gyp. All quivering!”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “The thing showed up when we went to Gyp’s car, though. It was scary. Is Tobias still up?”

  We all glanced up and toward the right, where Tobias’s tower was, its third-story room higher than the rest of the house, the secret fourth story higher still.

  “I don’t know,” said Beryl. Tobias had made new rules since everybody had graduated from basic training. He had his own life, he said, and nobody should bother him after nine at night unless it was an emergency.

  “I think we have an emergency,” Jasper said.

  I found a bag of baby carrots, a banana, and some saltines. I put them all on a plate and poured myself a glass of milk while Jasper made a phone call to his girlfriend.

  All three of us went up the stairs. On the way, we passed the TV alcove in the great hall again, and I still didn’t stop to greet my parents.

  Why hadn’t I told them about the Follower? From the start I had asked my siblings for help, and hadn’t even thought about my parents. There wasn’t much Dad could do in supernatural matters, but Mama was strong in every direction.

  Strong, but she gave you hell if you asked for help and didn’t really need it. I was pretty well trained not to ask her if I only suspected I had a problem.

  Well, I was home, and safe, and I only owed Jasper some cookies, and maybe a dinner sometime. Problem somewhat solved.

  I munched crackers as we went. We reached the top of the stairs, turned right, went down the hall, traversed the sitting room outside our bedrooms. I knocked on the narrow black door that opened onto the spiral staircase that led up to Tobias’s tower. I heard muttering and thumping. A couple minutes later Tobias opened the door. His thick white hair stood up in a ruffle on his head, and he wore a blue terry bathrobe and slippers. I’d never seen him in such informal dress before.

  “Something important?” he asked in a dry voice.

  “Something followed me.”

  His eyes narrowed. He fished some half-glasses out of his robe’s pocket and put them on, studied me. Three times his tongue ticked against the roof of his mouth. “Come up,” he said at last. He turned and led the way upstairs.

  Jasper and Beryl and I followed. I was mesmerized by the sight of Tobias’s bare legs, which were pale and muscular and forested with white hair. I had never even seen my great-great-uncle in a bathing suit; somehow I had imagined that he spent his life inside of clothes. I wasn’t sure I was ready to learn that he had hair on his legs.

  In the lower tower room was the school room, with a round table in its center where we had had our lessons before Tobias graduated us, and where Tobias now studied and did workings. The air smelled faintly of nag champa incense and book dust. Tobias’s bedroom was in the room above, right under the pointed tower roof. None of us had ever seen it.

  He turned on his hotplate and put a tea kettle on. “Go on.”

  We went to our usual places at the table and sat. I set my plate and milk on the black velvet tablecloth. “It waited outside my work at school. I was afraid to leave. Jasper came to get me, and it disappeared, but it came back down by my car.”

  “Jasper?”

  “I was prepared for it to be some creepy stalker guy. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Any intuitions?”

  “It’s supernatural,” Jasper said.

  Beryl said, “There’s atmospherics, even now.”

  Tobias smiled at her. “Good observation.”

  “Do you know what it is, Uncle?” she asked.

  He stared over my head at the west tower window and the night outside. “I have ideas.” His gaze lowered to my face; the pupils of his eyes widened. “You’ve been sick.”

  “Sure, I had the flu last weekend. You knew that. You got me Gerry pictures.”

  “You were sick while we were all gone. Was it very bad?”

  I shrugged.

  Tobias leaned closer, staring into my face. “Was it very bad?” he asked again.
>
  “I don’t know.” I leaned back. His gaze was so intent I felt it. I shrugged again and looked away.

  “Gypsum.”

  Jasper and Beryl stared at me, too. I picked at a scuff in the tablecloth, then glanced up. “Sure, I was really sick.”

  “All alone.” Tobias’s voice was a whisper.

  “I called July, and she stayed with me.”

  “July!”

  “You were all gone. She came right over. She was great! She’s always great.”

  “You had July watch over you while you went through transition?”

  “Transition!” My stomach dropped down into a bottomless pit, and my hands iced over. “What do you mean, transition? I’m too old for transition.” I checked my brother and sister. They looked as shocked as I felt. Transition! I’d never heard of anybody going through transition at twenty.

  Maybe everything would change now. Maybe I’d finally be a real member of the family. Tiny tendrils of hope unfurled in my mind.

  Tobias didn’t look happy, though. “What did she say? Did she tell you how sick you were?”

  “Transition,” I whispered.

  “Gypsum.”

  “She almost called an ambulance, but then my fever broke and I got better.”

  “She didn’t say anything about . . . accidents?”

  I shook my head. “Transition, Uncle?”

  “Late transition.”

  His voice sounded so cold and dark I waited for what he was going to say next. All my life I had longed for some kind of power. Wasn’t that what transition was? Growing into some kind of power? What did late transition mean?

  “Do you feel your power, Gyp?”

  I took a couple deep breaths and tried to see if I felt different from the way I had last week, before I got sick. How horrible would it be to go through transition and not even get anything out of it? My stomach rolled over. It had been doing that since the weekend. I hadn’t thrown up, though, just felt a little sick off and on. Was that what power felt like?

  “Does power make you sick?” I asked.