by March, Lucy
“I think there’s something really wrong with your tree, Liv,” she said, her voice shaky. I recognized the feeling, that sense of shock as you tried to reconcile something you just witnessed with everything you know about how the world works.
“Yes, there’s definitely something wrong.” I glanced up and down the street, then gave her my umbrella, which was pockmarked and beaten to a point where I was pretty sure it would never close again. It would get her next door, though, and once she was gone, I could try to figure out what had just happened.
“Why don’t you go on home, Peach? I’m gonna call my tree guy.”
“Sure.” She blinked twice, as if she was still trying to process what had happened, and then flipped the dented umbrella up over her head. “Let me know what you want to do for Confessional on Saturday. I really think we should all … you know … get together.” Her voice shook a little bit, and I patted her shoulder.
“Everything’s okay,” I said, my voice soft and reassuring. “Go on home.”
“Okay.” She nodded like a child, and then held the battered umbrella over her head as she made her way next door, giving my oak tree a wide berth as she walked past it toward her house. A moment later, her front door shut and I heard a strange blurp sound, like a pop played backward on a sound system. I looked back to the walnuts, which were disappearing one by one, into quickly dissipating puffs of gray smoke.
Blurp-blurp-blurp. Gone.
I stood on my porch for a few minutes, breathing in and out, trying to make sense of what had just happened. It was magic, that much was obvious, but it wasn’t the kind of magic Betty and I had. This was malevolent, magic intended to harm, maim, or kill.
Possibly, intended to kill me.
I stood there for a moment, lost in thought, and had just started for the front door when something in the corner of my eye made me tense up. I twirled around, and there in the pool of streetlamp light at the end of our lane, stood a woman in a red dress, her ash-blond curls flowing freely around her face in the light breeze.
“Millie?” I whispered. There was no way she could have heard me, but still, she turned and disappeared from the light as soon as I spoke her name. I darted down my porch steps and ran down the road after her. Either she hadn’t been trying to elude me, or she wasn’t used to the bloodred spike heels she was wearing, but I caught up to her before she’d gone half a block.
“Mill!” I grabbed her arm and turned her to face me. “Mill, what’s…? Wow.”
Her eyes were made up dark and smoky, and the deep red lip stain brought out the fullness of her mouth. Even her nails were perfectly manicured in the same red. I looked at her again, squinting my eyes at her.
“Millie?”
She smiled sweetly, the same old Millie smile, and I recognized her again. “Yes, Liv, it’s me.”
“Oh my god.” I took a step back to survey her. “Holy crap, Mill.”
She gave a little half-twirl, like a shy little girl, and her dress swirled around her legs. “It was time for a change. Do you like it?”
Do I like it? I’d heard stories about women who’d lost a lot of weight and subsequently lost their friends through jealousy, and my mind went to that as I checked out Millie. There was no doubt; she was beautiful. The dress was perfect for her slightly thicker frame, and the little black shrug she wore over her shoulders added an extra sexy element to the outfit. She looked amazing. But did I like it?
No. I wanted to, but something in my gut just wouldn’t let me.
I met her eye and smiled. “You look incredible.”
She nodded, barely able to contain her exuberance. “I do, don’t I?”
“Yeah.” I hesitated a moment, then motioned back toward my street. “Hey, did you just see what I just saw over there?”
She blinked, twice. “What?”
“Um…” I wasn’t sure how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t sound completely insane if she hadn’t seen anything. “Peach, under the tree in front of my house. All the walnuts fell on her at once. It was … really weird.”
She worked her face into a frown, but there was a glint in her eye she couldn’t hide. Millie wasn’t a great liar anyway, but at the moment, she was even worse than usual.
“No,” she said, her voice going high with feigned innocence. “I didn’t see a thing.”
And that’s when it hit me; maybe Davina hadn’t unleashed just my magic. Maybe she was some kind of magic-freeing fairy godmother, going from town to town and loosing whatever magic had been tied up there.
Maybe I’m not alone.
I took a step closer and touched Millie’s shoulder.
“Mill, has anything strange happened to you lately? Like, maybe, a weird, middle-aged black woman throwing a gym sock at you that makes you sneeze? And makes … you know … maybe other things happen?”
Something flashed in her eyes; she knew what I was talking about, or something about it, anyway. I felt the hope rise within me, and then …
“Sorry, Liv.” She gave a mild shake of her head, and a shrug of the shoulder. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t care if it sounds crazy,” I said. “Whatever you want to tell me, I’ll believe you.”
Millie took a moment, eyeing me carefully, and I held my breath, waiting for her to tell me that something strange had happened to her, too. That we were in it together.
That I wasn’t alone.
“All I know, Liv,” she said, “is that the tree in front of your house is an oak, not a walnut.”
I pulled back from her a bit. There was something about the cold enjoyment in her eyes that worried me. This was the same Millie Banning standing before me who I’d known since I was six years old, the same Millie who had helped me stuff my first bra, who had helped me care for my mother, and then bury her, mourning her loss as much as I did. But in a lot of ways, it also wasn’t Millie. It was New Millie, and I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about her.
“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Hey, we’re doing Confessional at my house on Saturday afternoon. Are you coming?”
A deep twinkle shone from her dark eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be there. With bells on.”
8
I got out of bed early after a night of fitful sleep, then ambled downstairs and watched the early-morning cartoons while I ate my breakfast of coffee, an orange, and a strawberry Pop-Tart. The only thing that was different from every other day off was that now, I had company. It was a magically conjured mug bunny, but hey—beggars and choosers and all that.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked the little mug bunny, who tottered around the living room while Wile E. Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff with an anvil in his arms.
“Don’t look down,” I said.
Wile E. looked down, looked back at me with an expression of tragic realization, and then plummeted immediately out of frame.
“He never listens to me.” I took another bite of my Pop-Tart, then picked the bunny up and offered him a bit of it; he didn’t appear interested.
“So, is it that you don’t eat,” I asked him, “or are you maybe a vegan?”
Considering that it had been over twenty-four hours since I’d made him, and he hadn’t eaten anything and seemed no worse for the wear for it, I guessed it was option number one.
“I’m feeling edgy,” I said to him. “I need to get out of here. Wanna go to the falls?”
In Nodaway, “the falls” referenced a little brook in the woods. One part of it sort of jumps down a bit of a decline, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a true waterfall. Apparently, it was bigger when the town was founded, but even so, when you exist within a hundred miles of Niagara Falls, it’s kinda ballsy to add “Falls” onto any town’s name unless there are … you know … falls there. Still, it was a nice walk for shaking out your sanity, and my sanity desperately needed some shaking out.
I tucked an old sweatshirt into the bottom of my worn army-navy mess
enger bag, and set the mug bunny inside. Immediately, it curled up and seemed to go to sleep. I threw on my sneakers, gray sweats, and L’EGGO MY EGGO T-shirt, pulled my hair back into a half-assed ponytail—who was going to see me, anyway?—slid my bag over my shoulder, and went out my front door just as Tobias was turning from the sidewalk onto my walkway.
“Hey,” he said, smiling up at me as I froze where I was at the top of my porch steps.
“Hey,” I said. “I was just about to take a walk. To the falls.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.” I smiled at him, feeling shaky and tense but somewhat comforted just by the sight of him. “I’d like that.”
“Great.” He motioned for me to join him, and I fell into step beside him. As we navigated the sidewalks of the village, then the dirt at the edge of the two-laner that passed for Nodaway’s highway, we spoke on innocuous subjects, town talk mostly. Maurice Greeley had been in the day before showing off his granddaughter, that kind of thing. Then, when we hit the path in the woods, we started talking about the waffles he’d made for me the other night; I asked him for the recipe, and he told me, and I retained none of it. Then, deep in the woods, we talked about nothing, just went silent and walked together. We reached the falls and sat on the big, flat rock overlooking the inconsequential brook. For the first time in a while, I felt peaceful and at ease.
And then, Tobias spoke.
“So,” he said, “I guess your power came in, then?”
I froze, not sure how to respond, and then finally, I said, “My … power? What, you mean, like … my electricity? It wasn’t out.”
He looked at me, his expression frank, and I felt my heart clutch in my chest. “Oh. You mean…”
“Yes.”
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
“About the magic. About the … things I can do.”
“I know about magic, yes.”
I shook my head, trying to absorb this. “You knew.”
“Yes. Day or night?”
“Day. You knew?”
He nodded. “How does it manifest?”
I joke-punched his upper arm. “Bruises. That’s how it manifests. Don’t skip ahead. You knew?”
“Get mad at me later,” he said. “Right now, I need answers. How does it manifest?’
“I’ll be mad at you now if I want to be mad at you now,” I grumbled, but at the same time I reached into my messenger bag and pulled out the mug bunny and handed it to him. “I turn household objects into woodland creatures, household pets, and common vermin.”
He flipped the mug bunny upside down, inspecting the bottom, and the little feet flailed wildly. Then he turned it back upright, and handed it back to me.
“Cute.”
“Yeah. It’s a growth industry.” I tucked the thing, wriggling in objection, back into my messenger bag, and took a moment to breathe and sort out my building fury before turning to look at him again. “So, all that, ‘whatever you want to tell me, I’ll believe you’ stuff. That was about getting me to admit to the magic.”
His expression was impenetrable. “I have a job to do. It’s important to that job that I know what’s going on.”
“It’s important to making waffles that you know about my magic?”
He shook his head. “No. To protecting you.”
“Protecting me? That’s your job?”
“Yes.”
“So all that ‘there’s a good reason why this is a bad idea’ stuff … that was about the job? Of protecting me?”
He met my eye, and for the first time since we started the conversation, I could see some evidence of regret. Not a lot, but it was there. “Don’t sleep with the job. Things get messed up when you get emotionally involved.”
“I’m a job. Great.” I digested that for a minute, then said, “Wait, who hired you?”
“I was hired by your sister to protect you,” he said. “She was worried that someone might come after you.”
A rush of excitement ran through me, and I jumped to my feet. “My sister? You know Holly? Where is she? I need to find her, I need a blood relative to—”
His eyes met mine, steely dark and businesslike as he said, “She’s dead.”
I slumped back to sit on the rock, and it took me a moment to catch my breath. Tobias put his hand on my back and ran it down my spine, then lifted it up to do the same again, but I pulled away from him.
He dropped his hand. “I’m sorry.”
I huffed. “Sorry for what? That my sister’s dead? Or that you lied to me?”
“That your sister’s dead,” he said.
I glared at him. “You son of a bitch.”
“I’m not sorry I lied to you. I did it to keep you safe, and I’d do it again. That’s the job.”
“Stop saying that,” I said. “It’s creepy. I’m not a job, I’m a person, and you…” I dropped it, unable to sort my feelings. All I knew is that they were unpleasant, but packed for the moment in numbing cotton. Eventually, the cotton would dissipate, and I’d have to feel it, but for the moment, I was okay.
“How did you end up working for my sister?”
“I work for a … kind of a security firm, I guess you’d call it. She hired the firm, the firm sent me.”
I looked at him. “You never met her?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Tell me everything you know about her.”
“Her name was Holly Monroe—”
“Wait, I thought her name was Ford.”
He met my eye. “So was yours. When your parents split the family, your mother took the name Kiskey for you and her, and your father took Monroe for him and your sister.”
“Right,” I said. “The hiding.”
He nodded.
“She’s dead?” I could feel the cotton dissipating, and I reached for more. I needed my numbness right now.
“Three months ago,” Tobias said, his voice quiet.
“How?”
“She was found in the woods. The official word is that she died of exposure, but how a healthy thirty-one-year-old woman dies of exposure in April in Tennessee…”
I looked at him. “You think she was killed.”
He shrugged. “She was worried enough to hire us to protect you. And then she died mysteriously, so my guess is, she was right to worry.”
“Wait. She knew about me?”
“Only your first name, and your mother’s first name. She was three when the family split in two, so I guess your father didn’t see the point in lying to her.”
“Oh! My father! Do you know—?”
I stopped off the look on Tobias’s face. He moved a bit toward me, as though considering touching me, but then seemed to think better of the idea.
“Your father’s been missing for ten years. Presumed dead.”
“Of course.” I took in a deep breath, and the understanding came in waves, bringing the hurt along with it. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted my family until that moment. The pain of losing them, even before I’d gotten the chance to know them, promised to cut deep as soon as it got through the cotton. I chose instead to focus on the other pain, and turned my angry gaze on Tobias.
“That’s why you showed so much interest in me, why we hung out so much. I was a job.”
He hesitated, then said, “At first, yeah.”
“And then?”
He looked at me, his eyes dark and intense, and despite the craziness of the whole situation, my heart fluttered with the sudden understanding that my instincts hadn’t been wrong about him. He cared about me. Unfortunately, the realization was of small comfort.
“So it wasn’t just me,” I said. “You did want me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “Objectivity is crucial. It can be the difference between keeping you safe and getting you killed.”
“Well … why didn’t you just have them send someone else?”
“They wouldn’t,” he said. “When a client dies, payments
cease, and when payments cease, so does the job.”
“But you’re still here.”
“I’m on leave,” he said simply.
“Oh.” I stared at the stream, watching the water move gracefully over its bed of stones, wishing it could carry me along with it. “So, you knew this was coming. The magic, I mean.”
He sighed. “I knew you had a sister that had magic, that you might have it, too, and that you might be in danger. That’s all.”
“You knew I had a sister. You knew when she died. And you didn’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Why the hell not?”
He let out a sharp, angry laugh. “Well, for one, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
I had to concede the point. “Maybe not, but—”
“And second, it wasn’t the right thing to do. Knowing more than you need to puts you in danger. I couldn’t tell you, I was right not to tell you, and given the same choice, I’d make it again.”
“Right. I keep forgetting. I’m a job.” I got up, slung my messenger bag over my shoulder, and started on the path back home. I could hear his footsteps crunching the twigs on the ground as he followed me.
“Job’s over, Tobias. Go home, wherever that is. Not that you’d tell me.”
He grabbed my arm, turning me to face him. “We’re not done here.”
“You may not be,” I said, feeling the edges of anger jabbing into me like fiery steel, “but I am.”
I tried to wrench my arm out of his grip, but he held on tighter.
“You’re hurting me,” I said.
He loosened his grip, but didn’t let go entirely. “I need you to tell me everything you know about Davina. She’s not your aunt. Who is she?”
Blind fury fueled my strength and this time, when I pulled my arm away, he let me go.
“I don’t know. A fairy godmother or something. But I can tell you this—out of everyone in my life, she’s the only one who has told me the truth. God!” The anger bolted through me, red and hot, riding the waves of the hurt. “How could you, Tobias? How could you know that I had power, that I had a sister out there somewhere and not tell me?”
“Part of keeping you safe was making sure you didn’t know.”