“That would be great, if I had been thinking when I did it. If I had been thinking, I wouldn’t have done it, though.”
“How much oomph did you put into it?”
Flint and I exchanged glances. “I was pretty mad. But I didn’t rhyme,” I said.
“Good observation. Maybe without the reinforcement of rhyme, the curse will be weaker. All these things factor in. Flint, keep track of when the curse wears off, will you? Gyp can add that information to her curse journal.”
Flint held his thumb up, waved it.
“You cursed Jasper, too?” Opal asked. She sounded surprised.
“Yep.”
Tobias said, “That might be a factor, too. You spread the curse between two people, which might make the individual curses less powerful or shorter.”
“You cursed Jasper,” Opal muttered. “You made it so he can’t talk?” She gave me a brilliant smile. “I’m going to find him.”
Just then the phone rang. Opal was closest, so she picked up. “Afternoon. LaZelles,” she said. “No, this isn’t Gypsum. This is her sister. No, not Beryl. Opal.” She glanced at me, mouthed B-O-Y. “She didn’t tell you she had a sister Opal? Well, I just got home half an hour ago after a year away. You’re fascinated, right? Gypsum’s home. She’s fine. She’s right here. I’m just torturing you both. Hey, Gyp, it’s for you.”
I took the handset from her, heat in my face, and turned away from my family. “Hello?”
“Hi. Are you all right?” Ian asked.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“Great! I just wondered if you recovered from last night.”
“I am so mortified. I’ve never fallen asleep in front of company before.”
“Stress makes people do weird things.”
“Did you survive all right after I conked out? I guess I should warn you I’m talking in the kitchen, and a bunch of my family are listening. So you can say whatever you like, because they can’t hear you, but I won’t be able to ask you the questions I really want to ask. If you can just imagine what I want to know and fill me in, that would be great.”
“Hah! Everyone was really nice.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I like your dad.”
“Me, too.”
“Your mom is very . . . impressive.”
“Hmm.”
“The brownies were great.”
“Good.”
“Beryl was hilarious. What does she normally look like?”
“Very cute.”
“Anyway, it made me nostalgic for my own family.”
“Beryl said Mama invited you over for Christmas Day?”
“Is that okay with you?”
“Oh, yeah, great with me. I’m making a turkey. You like turkey?”
“I love turkey. What I called about, though, other than to find out if you’re okay, is, Claire’s having a party tomorrow night. Want to go?”
Claire was having a party and she hadn’t invited me herself? I wondered if she was mad at me. Usually she told me when she was having parties, even if she didn’t have room for me to come, so I wouldn’t find out later from somebody else and be mad that I didn’t know. “Is it okay with her?”
“She asked me to ask you.”
“No kidding?”
“She said she sent you an e-mail about it on Wednesday but she hasn’t heard back yet. So I said I was going to call you anyway, so—”
“Jeeze, I haven’t checked my e-mail in a week. I forgot all about it.” Too busy cursing things. “Anyway, yeah, I’d love to go. What are we supposed to bring?”
“Snacks. Want me to pick you up?”
“That would be great.”
“About five okay?”
“Yeah.” I wondered where I would be in my curse cycle at that point. I should curse something at 4:45 just to be on the safe side. “If I have to leave suddenly, are you okay with that?”
“That’s fine with me.”
“Kewl. See you tomorrow.”
“Right.” He hung up.
Doubts assailed me. I wondered if Ian would have asked me to the party if Claire hadn’t asked him to. D’oh! Was he really okay with all the things that had happened last night? If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have called me, right? Was he interested in me because he liked me? Or was he just interested in what I could do? Remember all those non-dates, though. He had invited me to go lots of places with him before I grew into my power. He hadn’t minded when I asked him not to bring other friends this time. That was before I cursed anything where he could see, too. Maybe he did like me.
If he was interested in me, was there something wrong with him? Nobody else had ever been interested in me that way. It wasn’t like I was beautiful, or shaped like people on TV, or anything.
Well, whatever happened, I was getting some experience now, I guessed. Even if it didn’t work out, it was experience.
I hung up the handset and turned around. Opal was grinning.
“Shut up,” I said, with no heat behind it.
She laughed and left to look for Jasper, maybe.
A couple hours later Tobias had done a whole batch of cookies by himself, without cheating. I had made two more kinds of cookies and mixed up the pfeffernüsse dough. I should have made the pfeffernüsse a couple weeks earlier and stored them so they could get just the right kind of stale, but I always forgot that until cookie baking day. People just had to eat them fresh.
My right hand was glowing red again.
“I’m ready to try something with a time limit on it,” I told Tobias.
“What did you have in mind?” Tobias asked.
“I could curse you.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I know the most about unweaving spells. If you do something dangerous, I want to be up to capacity to deal with it.”
That made sense. It had certainly come in handy with Mama. I could go find someone else in my family to curse, or curse something around the house. Or—
“I’m going to the orchard for an hour. Tell people to stay away if you see them.” I put the dough in the fridge, went up to my room to get my curse journal and protection stone, and headed to the orchard.
I settled near the shielded tree and made plans.
I wrote down my idea before I said my curse aloud, because I wasn’t sure how it would work, or even whether I would be able to write afterward. Then I sat for a while and thought about it.
I had made promises: promised Flint a steak dinner tonight, and I hadn’t even bought the steaks yet. Promised Flint I’d help him with the lights. Promised Ian I’d go to Claire’s party with him tomorrow.
Part of me wanted to play with fire, though. I was tired of being careful. Even when I was careful, horrible things happened. What would happen if I wasn’t careful?
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the protection stone. I held it in cupped hands. It felt warm, though not with curse energy. I spoke to it. “Altria, for an hour, do what you want to me with my power.”
Heat flowed from my chest down my arm, out of my hand; all of it I had went into the stone. Then my twin sat beside me in the dirt, dressed the same as I was: a black T-shirt with a Tlingit design of a raven in red and white surrounded by white painted-on buttons, jeans, black socks, and black ankle-high Reeboks. “That’s a lovely invitation,” she said. “So many fun possibilities. I’ve missed you.” She trailed her fingertips over my shoulder, then nudged me. “I’ve been watching you, too. I like your boy.”
“You’re not going to mess with him, are you?”
“I couldn’t do it directly under this particular spell, but I could make you do it.”
She could make me do anything. Just the edges of the ideas that swept through my mind sent fear prickling through me.
“However, how smart would that be?” she asked, after letting me think and grow cold. “An hour’s not very long. You are my sweet thing, my love, my goose, and if I upset you too much, you m
ay not call on me or make offerings to me again.” She stroked my hair. I remembered what she had said about our differing definitions of kindness, how she thought pain could be helpful. Why hadn’t I remembered that before I crafted this curse? “So let’s do something we both want.” She swept her open hand up, and I rose in response like a marionette, floated a few inches above the earth. For a second I windmilled, confused, but then I realized I wasn’t going to fall—I couldn’t even get back in touch with the ground. Altria rose beside me, took my hand. “Let’s go flying.”
We shot up into the sparkling afternoon sky, so quickly I felt like I left my stomach and my breath behind. Then we stopped, higher than any building in earthquake-conscious Santa Tekla or the suburb of Bosquecito, but not so high we couldn’t see details. I gasped and tried to quiet my terror at being up in the air without a plane.
“I won’t let you fall,” Altria said. Then she dropped my hand, and I fell like a stone. The ground rushed up at me. I had time to envision crashing down feet first and breaking both my legs, and then she swooped down and captured me again, dragged me up. “Or only a little bit,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry!” Adrenaline pumped through me. I gripped her hand as hard as I could, hoping I’d give her bruises.
She pulled me close, fitted herself to my back, and clasped her arms around my waist. I closed my hands over hers, tried to lock myself into her embrace. “All right,” she said, her breath warm in my ear. “Just a little wakeup call to remind you I’m not nice. Now let’s go do something interesting.”
We flew. With her arms tight around me and my hands over hers, I was no longer afraid she would drop me. Afternoon air rushed past us, cold because of our motion, until Altria stroked my stomach and red flame rose at her touch and wrapped us in warmth. I had given her permission to use my power on me for whatever she wanted. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could use it like a heater. I liked it.
We flew out over the freeway, over the cemetery, above the bird sanctuary and the zoo and the broad beaches where people played volleyball when the weather was right, over the high-priced beachview hotels and convention centers, and along the beach boulevard toward the pier. Sábado y Domingo, the weekend open-air market under the line of palm trees beside the boulevard, was in full swing below us, artists and jewelers and potters and others selling wares. Christmas shoppers thronged the booths in search of gifts. It flashed by, and so did the pier, the harbor, and the breakwater where Ian and I had been last night. We flew across the boulevard and the Speare Beach parking lot, over the STCC campus and right to the Learning Center.
Campus was deserted for the holidays. Altria dropped us down next to the bench where I had waited for Ian the night before. No one was around to notice our descent.
She let go of me. I swayed and staggered. I had never flown like that before, and didn’t know if any of my siblings had. I had loved the view, but feared the fall; the whole distance I had been terrified and elated, and now I just felt shaky as hell.
Altria, distracted, flapped a hand at me. A short tongue of orange flame flew from her fingers into my face, and I breathed it in without meaning to. It slid down my throat, hot and sweet and smooth, settled in my stomach, and warmed and steadied me.
Altria leaned over and sniffed at the bench.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going to find that man,” she said, “and decide what to do about him.”
Suddenly I felt excited. Who was Dennis Ralston, if that was even his name? What did he want? Did he really threaten people, or was that just my paranoia talking? With Altria on the case, I felt like we could actually find out about him, and resolve my own unease.
She stroked the bench, then sniffed at her fingers. I wandered over to look at the hole in the row of cement stanchions where the one I had atomized used to be. A moment later she came up behind me and slid her arm around my waist. “Oh,” she said, following my gaze, “that.” She touched my chest. “Have you got something more for me, my sweet? Ah, yes.” She drew her hand away, and a trail of red power followed. “We’ll fix that first, just to be nice.” She flicked her fingers three times, and a new cement stanchion, identical to all the others, spun up on the stump of the old one.
“How can that be?” I asked. “I used up a whole load of curse energy to destroy the other one. You can make a new one with just a little?”
“A fraction. You’re wasteful, but you don’t know better yet. I know how to use this gift. If you call me back again, I’ll teach you. I’ll feed you knowledge a fragment at a time. Are you happy now?”
The pillar was repaired. “Yes,” I admitted.
“Good. Let’s go.” She dropped her arm to hold my hand again, and led me over the bridge above the road to the east side of campus. “He walks,” she said, “mostly at night, but he comes here sometimes during the day, too. He has secret places.”
We crossed most of campus, walked to the opposite side, which looked down over the edge of a cliff at a city park below, its baseball diamond and tennis courts and swing-sets. Clumps of trees dotted the park, and there was a band-shell and a concrete amphitheatre for concerts, too. Altria went with the confidence of someone familiar with the area to a place at the edge of one of the walking paths, then pushed off the path through some bushes, following a faint trail or none at all.
Dennis had a little carved-out earthen nook three feet below the top of the cliff, where he could sit in comfort with his binoculars and watch things happening in the park below.
Altria pulled me to the edge just above his head, tugged me down beside her. We squatted there, watching Dennis as he watched other people. He was riveted. I stood, trying to see what he was looking at. Altria gripped my ankle so I wouldn’t slip.
Below, sheltered, or so they thought, by a thick screen of eucalyptus trees between them and the park, and the cliff between them and the rest of the world, a boy and a girl were hard at it. She lay on her back on top of her dress. He still wore his shirt. Her head thrashed from side to side. Her small short gasps were almost swallowed by traffic sound and the cries of children chasing each other on the nearby lawn.
I ducked down. Altria smiled. I sat back and raised my eyebrows.
She leaned forward. “So,” she said in a low whisper. “You like to watch.”
Dennis jerked, would have dropped the binoculars, except they hung from a strap around his neck. He turned to stare up at us, then teetered in surprise.
Altria leaned over and grabbed a handful of shirt, steadied him.
“Get back,” he whispered.
We went back through the bushes to the path. He followed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked when we were far enough from the cliff that nobody below could possibly hear us.
“Checking you out.”
“Why?” He looked at me, then at Altria, then back at me. “Cripes, you’re twins? I didn’t know that about you. I mean, I’ve watched you before—one of you, anyway.” He stroked his mustache. His eyes narrowed. “You. Gypsum.” He nodded to me. “I had no idea there was another one. I was just trying to help you last night.”
Altria put out her hand.
Dennis ignored it. “What can I do for you?” he asked me.
I checked the campus. It was broad daylight. It was Christmas Break. There was no one on the mesa but us.
“Look, you came to me,” Dennis said. “One might almost say you stalked me. Something wrong with your boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What is it you want, then?”
“Are you the campus rapist?”
“I already told you I wasn’t.” He frowned. “What if I said I was?”
“Well, I—” I turned to Altria. What were we doing?
She stepped behind me, fitted herself to my back, her arms around my waist, her chin on my right shoulder. She was warm against my back.
“Two of you,” Dennis said. He glanced around too, then focused on us. “
That’s more interesting, even though you’re still not my type. You want to come home with me?”
“Is that a line that works?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“So suppose we say no.”
“You still have your keys to the Learning Center?”
“Sorry, didn’t bring them.”
“That’s all right. I’ve got the keys to one of the portables.” There were several prefabricated buildings on campus that had started as temporary classrooms and were now permanent, though they were still called portables. Dennis dug a key ring out of his pocket and jingled it. “Want to check it out?”
I glanced at Altria’s profile. She smiled. “Okay,” I said.
“Now, look. Are you seriously interested in me, or are you just teasing me?”
“I’m serious,” Altria said. “My sister is scared.”
Dennis pursed his lips, then turned and walked toward the nearest portable. Altria moved to my side, grabbed my hand, and followed. “Guard walked past here about ten minutes ago,” Dennis said as he unlocked the door. “He won’t be back for another half hour. Time enough?”
“For what I want,” said Altria.
Dennis gave her a wicked smile. We walked in past him, and he closed and locked the door behind us. He set his binoculars on the teacher’s desk by the blackboard, then dug his hands into his jacket pockets and pulled out some nylons. “Restraints?”
“No,” Altria said.
He shrugged and stuffed them back in his pockets. “What is it you want?”
“I want to know if you hurt people.”
“Is that what you like?”
“Sometimes. Right now I want to know if I can use you to teach my sister a lesson.”
“Kinky, but okay.”
“Lie down.”
He took off his jacket, folded it, and lay on the floor with the jacket under his head. Altria stood over him, her feet planted on either side of his waist. She lowered herself to sit on his stomach.
“Not comfortable,” Dennis said. “You weigh a ton.”
She put her knees down at his sides and raised herself off of him a little. “Gyp. Come here.”
“What are you doing?” My voice quavered.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 27