“Want more?” I asked. She took two more and I closed the box. “How are you doing?”
“I’m floating.” She smiled. “You know what we could do with all this power? Anything we want. I had to develop a new way to store it so I wasn’t just drifting around out of my mind with joy.” She stroked my shoulder, drew another ribbon of power out of me.
“Are you going to loophole your way out of our bargain tonight?” I asked.
“No. I’ll be very interested to see what you do.”
Ian’s car pulled into the driveway just as the sky darkened enough for the house and hedge lights to go on. Altria vanished.
Ian parked in front of me and jumped out of the car. He was wearing dark pants and a gray-green sweater with no holes in it. “Wow,” he said. “You look great.”
“Thanks. You do, too.”
“Wow,” he said, turning around to study the lights, “the house looks great, too.”
“Thanks again.”
“You did that?”
“Flint and I collaborated.”
“Hey! Ian!”
We both looked toward the house. Beryl was leaning out my bedroom window. “Hi!” she yelled.
“Hello?”
“I’m Beryl! This is what I look like uncursed!”
“Nice to meet you again.”
“What are you doing in my room?” I yelled.
“Leaning out the window, what does it look like? Hey, this is Opal, she’s our other sister. She told me you were coming over and we should spy on you!” Beryl dragged Opal out of the shadows and made her lean out the window, too.
“Hi, Ian!” Opal called.
“Hi, there. We spoke earlier.”
“Yeah! You’re as cute as your voice!”
My face burned.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Opal did my makeup,” I said, even though I was embarrassed. “She’s a pro.”
“Uh,” Ian said, then yelled, “Nice makeup!”
“Cute and complimentary,” Opal said. “Nice combination!”
“Let’s get out of here,” I muttered.
Ian walked me around the car and opened the passenger door. I climbed into the car.
“Ooh, polite, too,” Opal said.
“See you later!” Beryl yelled. “We’re going to the Griddle House for dinner!”
“We had pancakes for breakfast,” I said. The Griddle House was a restaurant, the first of a chain of pancake houses that had been popular in the sixties and seventies, and the last of the chain, too. All the others had been chased out of business by IHOP. The original Griddle House hadn’t changed. We had been going there since we were too young to talk. It was a very silly restaurant, designed for families with young children, and it felt kind of weird for us to go there when we all looked like grownups, except we knew everyone on the staff, and they still talked to us as though we were kids.
“It’s a long time until next Sunday,” Beryl said.
“Have fun.”
“You, too.”
Ian closed my door, went around the car, got in, started the engine.
“I am so sorry about that,” I said.
Ian laughed. “I don’t know. Makes me wish I had more than one sister.”
“You’re welcome to mine.”
He glanced at me and smiled. “Might take you up on that.”
At Claire’s, people whistled at me. Mainly Claire and July and Orion. At first I was startled. Then I held out my arms and posed.
“You look so much better!” July said.
“Opal did my makeup. But I feel a lot better, too. Thanks again for rescuing me last week. You saved my life.”
“Oh, Gyp.” She hugged me.
“What’s this? Mom saved your life? Opal’s back?” Claire asked. “Hey, are those the annual Gyp Christmas cookies?”
I handed her the cookie tin, then glanced around to see who else was here. “Is this a family party?”
There were five other people, only one of whom I had met before—Claire and Orion’s older brother Tim, who hadn’t lived with July while we were growing up; he’d stayed with his father in the mountains to study communal witchcraft after the divorce. I had met him maybe three times before. He might actually be a decent witch, in which case he could sense stuff about us that we hadn’t told other people, so LaZelle family policy was to stay away from the Rhodes’s when Tim was visiting. Policy hadn’t embraced me, because there was nothing magical he could sense from me, until now. So I’d had more contact with him than anybody else in my family. Still, that didn’t amount to much.
If I had known he was going to be here, would I have come to the party now that I had changed? Maybe not.
“It’s not specifically a family party. It’s a solstice party,” Claire said. “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been checking. Things have gotten totally weird for me lately.”
“Ooh. Tell me later.” She took the cookies into the kitchenette, then introduced me around.
Ian knew a couple of them already.
“This is Lenora, one of my roommates from Idaho.” He introduced me to a very pale girl with black hair and clothes and nice black eyeliner around her eyes.
“From the Goth days,” I said.
“Lucky guess,” said Lenora. She smiled.
“Hey, Gypsum. You’ve changed,” Tim told me.
“Thank you,” I said to be confusing.
“You have a doppelgänger,” he said, maybe to confuse me back.
“What does that mean?” The word sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember ever using it. I knew I’d read it, but I hadn’t looked it up.
“A double walker. A shadow self.”
“Tim,” Claire said, her tone scolding.
“What? Wouldn’t you want to know if you had such a thing?” Tim spent a lot of time immersed in his occult studies up in the mountains, and not much time with regular people. Claire corrected him when she thought he was being too weird in company, and he was usually a good sport about hearing from her.
“I know about her,” I said. “She’s a friend.”
His gaze flicked past me, fixed on something just behind me. “Are you sure?”
I glanced back. Nobody visible there. Cool fingers touched the back of my neck, though, let me know that Altria was behind me even if I couldn’t see her. Maybe she had followed me invisibly all day, only popping into view when she needed to draw power from me. “I’m pretty sure,” I said.
Ian studied me, eyebrows up.
“Long story.”
Claire looked frustrated. “Take your coat?” she asked.
I wasn’t wearing a coat, though I should have brought one, since the nights were chilly. Claire took my arm and led me across the living room/kitchenette past the other guests into her bedroom, where she closed the door.
I glanced at the pile of coats on the bed. Then at my hostess.
“Tim isn’t just being weird?” Claire asked.
I held my hand out behind me, and Altria slid hers into it. She stepped up beside me, visible now.
Claire paled. “How did you do that?”
“Magic. It’s in my family, Claire. I didn’t inherit it until Wednesday, though, so it wasn’t an issue before. Now I’ve got a lot of things to work on. Altria, this is Claire, my best friend. Claire, this is Altria. I don’t know what she is, but she’s been helping me.”
“Hello,” Claire said in a shaky voice.
Altria smiled. She set her hand on my chest, lifted it, drew a swoosh of red light from me. For a moment it formed a glowing ball above her open hand. Then it melted into her palm. “Hi, Claire,” she said. “Later, Gyp.” She vanished.
“What? What? What!” Claire said.
“We need to talk.”
“You bet we do.”
“Now?” I asked.
“Um—well, I’ve got this party to run.”
“Later,” I said.
“Right.” She
opened the door and we rejoined the others.
It was a party like many of Claire’s parties, friendly and funny, with good food. Everyone was interesting, and they had great anecdotes. There were few enough people that we could all listen to the same thing at once if we wanted to, and enough people so that we could break into small groups to talk about other things. Most of the time Ian and I sat next to each other on the couch. Occasionally our thighs bumped into each other, and I would smile at him, and he would smile back.
He got up to get us drinks, and Tim dropped onto the couch beside me. “Seriously,” Tim said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Your aura is totally different now.”
“Okay.” I felt ready to share more with Claire, but I didn’t even know Tim.
“And there’s the doppelgänger.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
“That’s kind of personal.”
He studied me for a long moment, then smiled. “That’s right. If Claire was listening, she’d tell me I was doing something wrong, wouldn’t she?”
I smiled at him.
“But this change in you was sudden, right? It’s hard to handle something like that alone. I guess what I mean is, if you need some help, you know where to find us. We’ll do whatever we can.”
“Thanks,” I said, touched. If I were alone in the wide world and went through transition with no Uncle Tobias, no family to help me figure out what was going on and to forgive me when I messed up, this would be a much more difficult thing. I would probably be relieved to find some people who called themselves witches.
Around eight-thirty, I touched Ian’s shoulder. The family would be home from dinner by now; it was almost time for the family meeting; and I’d been getting more and more restless and distracted, worrying about what Altria and I were going to do with a whole day’s curse energy.
“Gotta go curse something,” I whispered to Ian.
“Oh. Okay.”
We made our good-byes and he drove me home. “Thanks,” I said, my hand on the doorhandle of the car. “That was nice.”
“We could try something with fewer people next time,” he said.
There might be a next time.
He took my hand. I sat feeling the warmth of his hand on mine, the strength in his grip, even though it was gentle. I stared out at our yard, draped in fairy lights, and listened to the palm of my hand as it told me about connection with someone else.
I looked at Ian in the darkness of the car, and he looked at me. He leaned forward and kissed me, a brief touch of lips on lips.
Oh no! Now what? Was I supposed to do something else? What did I say? Wait, where were all those feelings people always had in books and movies when this happened? His lips had been warm and not wet. Before I had time to experience anything else, he sat back. His fingers tangled with mine.
Should I ask him to try it again?
Too pushy!
Now we had to have another date so I could try this again. Maybe next time I’d realize it was happening before it happened and I could hold his head or something, make the kiss last a little longer, see what it really felt like.
“Okay,” I said, breathless and confused, “Thank you. Good night.” I slipped out of the car before anything else could happen.
I was already unlocking the front door when Ian called, “See you Christmas afternoon around three, right?”
“Right!” There would be lots of people at the Christmas party, not an optimum time to try kissing again, but we’d be at my house, so if we really wanted to talk or experiment, we could go down to the orchard, hide in one of the basements, sneak up to the widow’s walk or even the roof. Or we could go to my room.
I should clean up my room before Christmas, just in case.
I waved to Ian and went inside to find my family.
I heard people noises in the house—TV talking in the great hall, conversation in the kitchen, footsteps from upstairs. Warmth and comfort. Sunday evening at the LaZelles’s. Home.
I walked in. Flint sat on the big easy chair in the TV alcove of the great hall with the remote control on the chair arm, watching Fox TV. “Is it time?” he asked.
“Almost.”
He flicked the TV off.
“I want to get my curse journal. I’ll be right back.” I went toward the staircase.
“I’ll tell Mama and Dad you’re home.” He headed for the kitchen.
Twenty-two
I went upstairs to my room. I closed my door and locked it, then sat on the bed, holding the protection stone. I set it on the bedspread.
“Altria?”
She sat on my bed facing me. “Is it time to figure out tonight’s big curse?”
“First there’s a family meeting.”
“We could do it there.”
“Oh, no!” I shook my head. “I don’t want to curse my family.”
“You do. You just won’t admit it.”
I leaned forward, checked to see if she was serious. She smiled. I couldn’t tell.
She put her palm on my forehead. “Take a look.”
Something ripped open in my head, and rage came roaring out. Rage at years of being weak in the face of their power.
“Your legs don’t work. You can only walk on your hands,” Flint told me.
“But I can’t walk on my hands.”
“Then you can’t walk,” he said, and strolled away.
True, I had just pounded him so hard I left bruises. His power was new, and I had forgot he had it. But a beating had a beginning and an end. Not like being left on the living room floor for hours, and needing to go to the bathroom without being able to get there. I was a mess by the time Opal found me hours later.
Or the time I chanced to enter the kitchen while Jasper and Flint were having a spell fight, and they decided to challenge each other to turn me into the strangest thing possible. That fight went on for way too long, and most of the time I was things that couldn’t protest.
The fights I always lost. The only time I got to sit in the front seat of the van was when it was just Mama or Dad and me going somewhere. The only time I got to choose the TV show was when I was home alone. Even if I knew I wanted to see something else, a couple minutes after I sat down I’d be convinced I wanted to watch what whoever was strongest at the moment wanted to watch. I suspected that I lost track of my own tastes more often than I knew.
We always included me, whether I wanted it to or not.
The special things the rest of them got to do because they had transitioned. The sense that I was always going to be second-class.
All the things Mama had done to us down the years without thinking twice. I remembered being five years old. I was on the back porch floor, sitting next to Beryl, who was two. She was strapped into a rocking seat. She was crying and sobbing. Tears ran down her face. Nothing she did made a noise; Mama, playing cards with some other adults at the table, had been irritated by it, and silenced her. I kept patting Beryl’s cheek, but it didn’t help. She screamed her face red, and no one heard. I didn’t know what to do. It took me way too long to realize I should find Opal.
I did want to cast curses on my family for every careless or mean thing they had ever done to me. I wanted to fill my hands with red light and send it everywhere.
Altria lifted her hand from my forehead. She still smiled.
“I don’t want to curse my family,” I repeated.
Altria sat back and waited.
“One part of me would love to curse them. But I don’t want to.” Well, that wasn’t as clear as I had thought it would be. “What good would it do me to hurt them for things that happened a long time ago? Things they might not even have known bothered me? It’s over.”
“It gives you a focus for your power. If they don’t know why you’re mad, make them know.”
I sighed.
I picked up my curse journal and flipped to a back page, where I’d been working on a
spell during my spare time all day. “I’d like you to come with me to the meeting. I want them to know you.” I confused myself. Why was this important? Because she was important. She was helping me figure out how to handle my new life, even if I couldn’t always tell it was help. I wanted her to stay my friend, if that was what she was. “But if you do come, I need to put a spell on you first.”
“You want to put a spell on me?” She grinned. “Why didn’t we think of that? You could have been cursing me all this time.”
“What?”
“Maybe I’d like it. Whatever it is, I could probably survive it. What kind of spell?”
I showed Altria my spell for her. She narrowed her eyes, frowned, then added a line and showed it to me.
Her handwriting looked nothing like mine. It was spiky and wild and somehow old-fashioned. I was more interested in that than in what she had written.
Focus, Gyp.
I looked at her line, “For the length of this meeting,” and nodded.
We set the curse journal sideways between us. I held out my hands, and she put her hands in mine. Heat roared into me through our connection, flared like wildfire through my chest. Too much! I thought, and then I thought, get used to it. It’s all from me. I need to own it and use it.
Be my aid and my filter so this comes out clean, I thought to Altria. Then I said my spell.
“Altria:
For the length of this meeting,
Care for us as I do.
Love us as I do.
Protect us as I would.
Help us as I would.”
Altria shivered and shook, closed her eyes and turned her head. Finally she let out a loud breath. “Eww.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You love them. You actually love them, no matter what they do or say to you.”
“Family.”
She let go of my hands, scratched her nose, stretched. “Yes. I didn’t understand before. I’ve never been this close to one. It’s interesting.”
“Besides, it’s not all awful. Most of it’s wonderful, don’t you see?” I thought of Flint and me holding hands, crafting lights to embrace our house, our yard, and the tree. Leaning into Jasper’s leather-clad back as we rode his motorcycle. Holding my hand still as Beryl painted red sparkle nail-polish on my fingernails, the brush flickery and cool, her hand warm under mine. Mama’s voice reading us the Mowgli stories. Dad teaching us chess. Opal brushing my hair.
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