Altria hugged me, and that, too, was strange. I had hugged her before, and she had hugged me, but I hadn’t been so conscious of hugging someone my own soft, solid shape.
Love us as I do.
I guessed I loved myself in addition to everybody else in my family. Sometimes. Hoped that would hold true for the duration of the spell.
“Never mind,” Altria said. “I’ll handle that part on my own.”
I pulled myself together and stood up. “So how do we work this? You want to come downstairs with me in visible mode?” We were both still wearing our party clothes. Might be strange if they couldn’t tell which of us was which.
“Let me think.” She stood in the center of my floor and stretched her arms toward the ceiling. She took shape as Mama, smiled, flowed into Dad’s shape, Jasper’s, Flint’s, Opal’s, Tobias’s, Hermina’s, Beryl’s. Then she turned her back on me, hunched her shoulders. A moment later she faced me. Now she was someone else: my hazel eyes, Beryl’s slender teenaged shape, Jasper’s nose, Opal’s mouth, hands like Flint’s, but heavy long red hair like none of ours. She wore a tight melon-green dress with a short, many-layered, scarf-pointed skirt, tights with narrow horizontal black and white stripes, and black cowboy boots like the ones we had worn to Claire’s party.
For a moment I saw her as a collection of parts, and then something clicked and she looked like another member of our family—a cousin we hadn’t met yet.
“Okay.” I picked up my pen and curse journal and unlocked the door.
Beryl and Opal were standing in the sitting room outside.
“I told you it smelled like strange magic,” Opal said to Beryl. “Gyp, what are you doing? Who’s your friend?”
“This is my curse child, Altria,” I said. “She’s been helping me sort things out.” Had Beryl met Altria before? I tried to remember and couldn’t. I was pretty sure Opal hadn’t seen her.
“Hello, sweet things,” said Altria.
“You look familiar,” Beryl said.
“I am familiar.” Altria smiled. She glanced toward Tobias’s tower as a key sounded in the lock. Tobias emerged, stared at her.
“Uncle,” she said.
“Shade.”
Jasper came out of his room, rubbing his eyes. He saw Altria and straightened, gave her half a smile.
“Jasper,” she said. “Oh. Jasper.” Love them as I do. She knew he was my favorite; if my spell had worked, she felt the same way about him as I did, in addition to whatever she had felt about him before. She darted over and gave him a hug, kissed his cheek. He looked surprised and worried. He hugged her back.
“Like the new look,” he told her when she let go.
She laughed. Then she said, “Gyp put a spell on me so I won’t hurt anybody.” She glanced at Tobias.
He blew out a breath, nodded.
We went downstairs.
Across the living room, the tree glowed in its lace of lights.
Flint had set out tins of cookies and brownies on the coffee tables in front of the living room couches, and even fixed a coffee tray. Or, with any luck, Mama had fixed it.
Mama and Dad sat on the love seat in the square of four couches that faced each other in a conversational grouping to the right as one came into the living room through the double pocket doors. Flint was in the middle of the big couch facing the love seat, the one that could seat four, and often did during parties.
All three looked up when we came in.
Mama jumped to her feet. “You brought that thing here?” she asked me, glaring at Altria.
“Anise,” said Dad.
Usually when Dad said that, in that tone of voice, Mama stopped what she was doing and took a moment for reflection. Dad was the only one who could slow her down, even stop her, when she was about to tirade. This time Mama stayed agitated. “Miles, this is something you can’t understand. Gyp has made—contact with that—creature, an amoral creature, who, while it may not wish us ill, hardly wishes us good. In fact, it may only want to play with us, and its powers—” She ran out of words, something that almost never happened, and resorted to arm waving. I wondered what she was trying to say—some kind of warning—and whether it was true.
“Really.” Dad stood. He studied Altria. “Hello,” he said, then looked confused. “But you look—” He glanced at the rest of us, then back at Altria.
She went to him. “I’m a shapeshifter,” she said. “The perceived connection is illusion.”
“Purposeful illusion?”
“Of course.”
“Not a lot of Bendixen there.” Bendixen was Dad’s last name before he married into the LaZelles. It’s a rule; anyone who wants to marry one of us has to take our last name.
“Yes. I’m sorry.” She held out her hand, and he clasped it.
“Miles! You shouldn’t let it touch you,” Mama said, but she sounded resigned.
He watched Altria’s face. A moment later he laughed. She turned to me, and I saw that she now had a cleft like Dad’s in her chin. Her eyes danced.
“Did you meet Flint yet?” I asked her. She had taken the shapes of all my siblings, but I could only remember her meeting Jasper before. Then again, she had been shadowing me all day today, and maybe yesterday, too. She had had time and opportunity to observe everybody.
And she could visit people in their dreams.
She turned. “Flint.” She smiled.
“Huh—hi,” said my brother.
“This is Altria,” I said.
Altria and my brother shook hands.
Mama pulled herself together. “Altria.” She held out her hand. “Oh, well. Might as well meet you, since we seem to be going this road.”
“Anise.” Altria held Mama’s hand a moment. Neither of them smiled.
“You’re here because . . . ?”
“Gyp asked me to come.”
“You said we’re going to discuss the problem of me,” I said as the family settled onto the couches in the conversation square. “Altria’s helped me in lots of ways since I came into my power. I hope she keeps helping me. Whatever we decide about me, it’ll probably involve her, too.” I dropped my curse journal on the coffee table. Altria snuggled against me on the gray couch, which made me feel strange, as though we had declared something momentous to the family. “Today, for instance, she’s been storing my power so I can access it later instead of having to curse things every two hours.”
“So you could go Christmas shopping,” Beryl said. “Oh! And to the party.”
“Right,” I said.
“Store your powers in a person? How does that work?” said Opal.
“Don’t even ask,” Tobias said. He and Jasper sat on the couch across from Altria and me. Opal, Flint, and Beryl chose the big couch in front of the window that overlooked the pool yard to my right, and Mama and Dad returned to the love seat.
“Why not?” Opal asked Tobias.
“It’s ridiculously risky.”
“Why did you teach it to Gyp, then?”
“I didn’t. Gyp has been teaching herself.”
“Altria’s been teaching me,” I said.
“No. Uncle is right. You’ve been teaching yourself,” Altria said.
Was that one of those loaded statements where she was really admitting that she was part of me, despite the fact that her personality was different from mine and so was her handwriting?
“No,” she said, and thumped my head. “Get over it.”
“You’ve been teaching yourself,” Mama repeated. “You’ve been struggling with all kinds of things while the rest of us have been preoccupied.”
“That’s not true. Everybody’s helped me.” Jasper had rescued me from school, and had tried to rescue me from Altria, and had definitely rescued me from the computer, with Altria’s help. Beryl had encouraged me to curse her. Flint had shared his power with me. Tobias gave me pointers and broke some of the worst spells. Hermina forgave me after I screwed up. Dad accepted me, and Mama left me alone.
I grabbed my curse journal and a pen, opened the journal to a blank page. “And I could use some more help. Have you guys thought of curses I can do?”
“Am I too late?” Aunt Hermina came in through the pocket doors and looked around the circle. She sat down beside Tobias, across from me and Altria. When she noticed Altria, she sat up straighter. “Gyp?”
“This is my friend Altria,” I said.
“A nightmare is your friend?”
“Yep.”
“A better friend than enemy,” she muttered. “Maybe.” She grabbed a couple cookies.
“Have you ever thought about cursing people who need it?” asked Flint.
“Who needs it?”
He shrugged. “People who did something wrong. You could go to jail and curse people who killed other people.”
“How can I be sure they’re guilty?” I asked. “All those DNA tests turning up innocent people in prison. I could never be sure.”
“We tried that kind of thing. It’s hard for her,” Altria said. She held out a hand, and a cookie jumped into it. She took a bite. “She closed the door on the self who knows how to be mean. Opening that door makes her miserable.”
“You could stick with the playful curses,” Beryl said. “Turn us into toads. Children. Dogs. Furniture. Strangers.”
“Strangers?” I said.
“Gyp?” Dad said.
I turned to him.
“We are strangers now,” he said slowly. “Something happened, and you sent me away. I left, because I didn’t want to make things harder for you. Curse me with knowledge of what happened after I left.”
Altria sat up straighter. Her red hair grew redder—glowing. My fire coming out of her. “Knowledge is a curse,” she said. “That’s right.” She took my hand. “Give them your memories, Gyp.” She stroked her fingers across my palm. Red fire danced from her hand to mine. She spiraled an index finger, drew up a scrap of flame—baby Beryl, sobbing and sobbing without sound—and flicked it at Mama.
Mama straightened, her eyes wide, then slumped back against the couch. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. “No. I didn’t. No. I couldn’t.” She stared across at Beryl, and Beryl looked at me and Altria, her eyebrows up. Mama pulled her legs up to her chest, hugged them. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“Miles,” said Altria, rubbing her fingers against her thumb and drawing up another spiral of flame. She blew it toward him, and he frowned as it melted into his eyes.
“Oh.” He sounded more interested than upset.
I closed my hand into a fist and stared at Altria. She touched my lips so that I tasted the memory she had sent to Dad. It was me walking into Hermina’s house Friday morning, to find her trapped in a welter of plants and computer. Just what Dad had asked for.
“What’s she doing?” Jasper asked.
“Want to see? Open up, Gyp.” Altria teased my fist open and stirred fire on my palm again, flicked a shred toward Jasper—the time he sneaked a girlfriend home when he wasn’t supposed to, and I was on the couch and saw him before he saw me, and he sent me silence and invisibility and froze me until he was ready to leave again. He left me tongue-tied so I could never tell anybody. Not that I would have. He could have just asked.
“Oh,” Jasper said, his tone dismayed.
“Stop it,” I said to Altria.
“This won’t get us very far,” Altria said. “It’s too incremental. Knowledge. Hmm.”
“What is she doing?” asked Flint.
“Just what she said,” Jasper answered. “Gyp’s memories. Not the happy ones. Sorry, Gyp.”
Beryl leaned forward. “You could curse yourself with the knowledge of what to do with your curses.”
Altria turned to me, her eyes wide and glowing, her hair a flaming halo around her head and shoulders, her hands raised to shoulder height, each hand swallowed in a red cloud of light, my power, rendered untwisted and less limited by its passage through her. “Gyp . . .”
“Personality bending,” Tobias said. “It could change you beyond recognition.”
Altria’s hair lifted, alight with a wind and power she was generating from material I had given her.
I heard the footsteps of my heart in my ears. All along, what had bothered me most about my power was not knowing what to do with it. Maybe—
“Come on,” I said to Altria. “Let’s do it.”
She leaned into me, gripped my head in her glowing hands, pressed her forehead to mine. Her hair wrapped around us, snaky and full of static and heat. All I could see were her eyes, glowing golden now, and all I could taste was her breath, so close to mine, chocolate chip cookie and woodsmoke. Something grew like a mushroom inside my head, swelling, pulsing, rising like bread dough, and all the while we were wrapped in robes of red heat together.
The mushroom burst, a thousand thousand spores of spinning facts and speculations, a shuffle and fall of stacks of images, a supple squirm of memories and imaginings, only a few of them mine. Altria released me and I sagged back against the couch, my eyes tight shut, as things snapped and snorted and sorted in my brain. Too much of everything.
So much. Was that what Mama had been like when she was fourteen? Had her older sisters really done all those mean things to her? And her mother—that wasn’t Grandmère. Who was it who had left the house when Mama was only six and never come back? Who had left a hole in Mama’s heart so big that she never wanted to let anyone else leave her that way? Left fears that stirred her sleep with terror every night? Left a hurt that lasted so long Mama had spelled us all to stay home, not to leave her?
Was this really Dad at eighteen? Standing in the front hall of a house I had never seen, talking to two cold-faced people I had never met, saying if that was how they felt, he would say good-bye now. If they ever wanted to see him again, they would have to call him. The door closed behind him with a sound like the crack of a continent falling into an ocean.
This must be Tobias, in his twenties, hiding on an adobe rooftop with a brother, spying on the hated father in the courtyard below, the father who had protected himself against all forms of spellcasting applied directly, and with reason, so many of his children hated him; Tobias, thinking of shifting stones beneath his father’s feet—
A young and beautiful Hermina, standing in family council beside a stork-awkward young man, watching as one after another of her parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, shook their heads no, denying her petition to marry, the youngest of her elders holding out a cup of forgetfulness to the prospective bridegroom—
A shuffle and fall of humiliating, disturbing memories from my brothers and sisters: Opal at fifteen, pre-transition, smiling at someone who misread her, caught her, trapped her, tore off her shirt, grabbed at her breasts; Jasper turning away from the hopeless love in his best friend’s eyes; Flint staring down at a dead, spellmarked squirrel in his hands; Beryl covering her ears so she wouldn’t hear something she had hidden to listen to—
And this, a strange oily memory full of hunger, the slide of coil on coil, unblinking golden eyes, a long forked tongue that slid out, tasting and testing for the wine of fear, the nectar of terror, which could be pressed out of almost any moment, induced if not already present, the finest taste there was, and never enough of it—
The sea song, below everything, still whispering that all things came from it, all things could return to it, changed and unchanging—
A strange matrix spun in darkness before me, lines visible and invisible, colored threads of light weaving through it, a diagram of kinds of power and how they acted on each other. If I could focus long enough to learn it, I could change everything.
“Gyp? You okay?” asked Opal. I felt her near me, her energy, her heat, her scent.
“Wait,” said Tobias.
I lost the grid, though I had printed some of it on my memory. I frowned and opened my eyes, stared up toward the ceiling. Altria’s face eclipsed it, her eyes still golden, her mouth sad, her hair hanging in my face. She touched my cheek.
; I lifted a finger, aimed it at her. Her hair twisted around itself, retreated from her front to lie against her back. She smiled: dimples in both cheeks. I thought of the ancient hungry serpent I had seen, alert for terror, tried to fit it into my image of her, could not make them match. She touched foreheads with me again, and then there were layers over layers, shifting and shining, wider than I had known, and older, darker, yet with tasty red rivers running through them, touch points and desires and connections, new and ancient currents flowing, mixing, washing some things in and some things away.
Here was the spell we had said before we came down to the meeting, restraining some of her appetites and changing the course of others, suffusing her with feelings she had never known before. Here were all kinds of new marks on her, each contact she had had with me, cuts and colors, shocks to the system one after another, new desires—
Altria sat back, her face troubled.
“Gyp?” said Opal.
I blinked and rubbed my forehead. I pushed up from the back of the couch. Altria gripped my shoulder and helped me sit up. Her touch had echoes and magnifications. I clutched her hand, afraid she would slip away before I could find out who she was now.
The world looked different. Strange, ghostly colored cobwebs draped everything. “Do you see that?” I asked Altria.
She stared at my face, then toward where I was looking—at Mama, actually, because so many of these cobwebs had strings that led to her. Altria lifted an eyebrow.
“What did the nightmare do to you, Gypsum?” Hermina asked.
“Bent my personality, probably.” I touched the nearest web, a green string that led from Mama to me. It melted. I felt a click in my head, and realized there was nothing to stop me from moving out of the house.
Well, except sense, love, lack of money, and fear of the unknown.
I reached out for a green string that ran from Mama to Jasper. My fingertips glowed red as I touched it. It snapped. I glanced at my big brother. “What?” he said.
I checked Mama.
“What are you doing, Gypsum?” Her voice was midway between fear and anger.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 31