Magic Lessons

by Justine Larbalestier

  “Have you ever come across anything like this before?” I asked.

  “Only what I’ve read about golems.”

  I wondered where she’d read it. In her library or in fairy books? I didn’t think that thing was a golem. It was alive. It was related to me, to her, and to Jason Blake.

  “What should we do, then?” Tom asked.

  “Guard the door,” Jay-Tee said. “Make sure it doesn’t get through again.”

  “We could sleep in the kitchen,” Tom said.

  “Sleep?” Jay-Tee raised an eyebrow. “Not the best way of keeping an eye on something.”

  Esmeralda laughed and Tom’s expression fell. “Don’t you think it’ll work, Mere?”

  “I think it’s a good idea. Keep an eye on the door. Note any changes. And if the protections look like they’re not going to hold, add more. You three can take it in turns to sleep.”

  “You won’t join us?” Tom asked.

  She shook her head. “I trust you.” She caught my eye and smiled. “Besides, if another golem comes through, I’ll hear. I’ll be downstairs in seconds.”

  “I’ll ask my dad if I can stay over,” Tom said. “I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  8

  The three of us had li-los and pillows and bottles of water. Esmeralda had already gone upstairs to bed, saying she’d sleep with her door open.

  We were positioned so that we couldn’t accidentally disturb any of the feathers or each other when we got up to go to the loo. Tom on my right and Jay-Tee on my left. She’d insisted on being closest to the door. I had Esmeralda’s brooch pinned to the front of my pyjamas. Tom was wearing his chain and Jay-Tee her leather bracelet. Their new magic things—button and tooth—were under their pillows.

  Within easy reach of the door was a tray of small chicken bones ready to be turned into protections.

  I lay back on the bedding, propped up by three fat pillows. Tom and Jay-Tee were under their sheets, but I felt too restless and strange to be constrained by anything other than my pyjamas. As soon as they fell asleep I was going to see if I could find Esmeralda’s keys, sneak next door, and get into the library.

  Moonlight shone in through the branches, making spooky patterns all over the kitchen and across Tom’s and Jay-Tee’s faces.

  “What do you think Jason Blake wants?” Tom asked. “I mean, beyond magic? Why’s he suddenly trying to get through the door? Why now?”

  “Whatcha mean, ‘Why now?’ He’s mad because me and Reason escaped and Esmeralda kicked his butt in their magic battle. He’s pissed, and now he wants revenge.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, “I know, but he’s using magic, isn’t he? Lots of magic. Making the door do all that stuff. That’s way beyond making light. Why’s he using up all that magic?”

  It didn’t make any sense. The golem was a Cansino. Why was it letting Jason Blake use it? I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again. What did being related to it mean? What would they say if I told them the golem was a Cansino? More importantly, what would Esmeralda say? I didn’t trust her enough to tell her yet. And if I told Tom and Jay-Tee, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t tell her. It meant something important. I needed to understand it better before I could tell Esmeralda. I had to get into her library.

  “Seriously,” Tom said, “it doesn’t make any sense.”

  The door, which had been quiet since we set up our vigil, rippled.

  Even in the moonlight I could see Jay-Tee’s face change colour. “Let’s not talk about you-know-who,” she said, pulling her sheet up higher, as if that would protect her from my grandfather. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “When’s the first time you knew you were magic?” Tom asked Jay-Tee.

  “Always,” Jay-Tee said, surprising me by not telling him to stop being a stickybeak. “My mom and dad were both magic. Dad taught me bits and pieces. He didn’t like to talk about it. He’d say, You should know this. And then tell me something quickly, mostly about being careful. He didn’t want me to die as young as my mom. She was only eighteen. He’d only tell me stuff when my brother wasn’t around. Danny’s not magic at all.”

  “Wow. How old was your mum when she had Danny? Isn’t he, like, twenty?”

  “He’s eighteen. Mom was fourteen when she had Danny, and…”

  I didn’t listen to the rest. I was thinking about Danny. Wishing I could see him again. I’d never even kissed a boy. I wanted to kiss Danny before I died.

  “How about you, Tom?” Jay-Tee asked.

  This I wanted to hear. I was very curious to know how Tom had fallen into Esmeralda’s clutches.

  “I didn’t know for sure until I met Mere, you know? But I knew there was something different about me—”

  Jay-Tee snorted. “What? That you like making girlie dresses?”

  “Shut up,” Tom said, but not nastily. “It wasn’t anything spectacular. The clothes I made always seemed to fit people really well. Almost too well. I don’t remember when I first saw the true shape of things. Just that sometimes I’d see things differently to everyone else. Seeing the magic, you know?”

  I nodded and Jay-Tee said, “Yeah.”

  “I feel like I’ve always done it. I just didn’t know what it was.”

  “How did you meet Esmeralda?” I asked.

  “On George Street in town. I’d gone in to see a movie with some of my old Shire mates. We were mucking around, being dropkicks, deliberately bumping into people on the street and then acting like it was an accident. I bumped into Mere. And it was weird. Really weird. She looked at me strange. And I felt that magic tingle, you know?”

  Jay-Tee laughed. “True love!”

  Tom blushed, his pale skin darkening, visible even in the moonlight. “Shut up! Real magic. You know exactly what I mean! She recognised it in me, and I think I did in her, too. She was the first person in my entire life I’d met who was just like me.”

  “Except your mother,” I said softly.

  “I didn’t know about mum, but. She was in the loony bin.”

  “What happened with Esmeralda that day?”

  “She pretended to be angry, said she was going to get the cops. All my friends racked off, so it was just me and her. She said, I know what you are. Just like that. It was freaky.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “Then she took me to get lunch in this café and told me about magic. I knew it was true. Immediately. She asked me lots of questions about my mum and my dad. Explained why mum was mad. That made sense, too.” He took a deep breath and looked at Jay-Tee, as if considering whether he could trust her to hear what he was going to say. “I’d started seeing things, hearing things other people didn’t hear. I’d started going nuts. Mere saved me.”

  “Wow,” Jay-Tee said.

  I nodded.

  “Mere said she’d teach me, make sure I didn’t end up in Kalder Park. Right then and there she taught me how to make light, explained how to use magic. What the true shapes I sometimes saw were. She told me to do a little magic once a week. Then she drove me home, all the way back to the Shire. She talked to my dad for a long time.”

  “You were lucky,” Jay-Tee said. I could almost hear her thinking about Jason Blake.

  “I know,” Tom said.

  I smelled Tom. There was no rust there, not like Jay-Tee or Mere. He had years left. I suddenly realised that it also meant Mere hadn’t drunk magic from him. Why not? Was she saving him up for an emergency?

  Something landed with a clatter on the back porch. We all gasped. I jumped up and ran to the window in time to see a cat disappearing from view.

  “Just a cat.”

  Jay-Tee drew the invisible grid she sometimes drew when she was nervous: a y-axis from her mouth to her chest and an x-axis across her shoulders.

  Tom laughed. “Scared the crap out of me.”

  I got back into bed.

  “Do you miss your friends, Reason?” Tom asked. “Must’ve
been horrible, being taken away from home and made to come live here.”

  “My friends? I’ve never really had any friends. I told you, me and Sarafina, we moved around a lot.”

  “No friends at all?” Jay-Tee asked.

  “Not really. Not for long, anyway. We never stayed anywhere long enough.”

  “But we’re your friends, right?” Tom asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve only just met us. You must have had friends even if it was just for a week or two before you moved on to the next place.”

  “Yeah,” Jay-Tee said. “When I ran away, I tried not to make friends. Getting to know a bunch of people would just make it easier for my dad to find me. But it’s really hard. I ended up knowing the guys at my favourite pizza place and my favourite nightclubs and at the Korean place on the corner and the laundromat. You pass people in the street, and after you start recognising each other, you nod, and then after you’ve nodded a bunch of times, you start talking. Doesn’t take long before you know almost everyone.”

  “We never stayed anywhere there were lots of people,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. Sarafina’s really good at being, um, surface friendly. And we never used our real names. It’s hard to have friends when your name and the colour of your hair and your history are all made up. It was mostly just me and Sarafina.”

  “What about at school?” Tom asked. “You must’ve made friends there.”

  “I only ever went to school once.” I thought of Josh Davidson. “It didn’t work out.”

  “Wow, you’re lucky,” Jay-Tee said. “The best thing about running away was no more school.”

  “I love school,” Tom said. “Usually by this time in the holidays I’m dying to get back.”

  “No way!”

  “School’s great. I get to design and make all the costumes for the school pl—”

  “Please! Spare us. School’s—” Jay-Tee sat up. “What’s that noise?”

  The branches of the fig tree rustled violently, emitting loud squeaks and chitterings. “Just a bat,” Tom and I said at the same time.

  “They’re noisy buggers,” I finished.

  I laughed. “Just a bat chasing after just a cat!”

  “All we need is just a rat!”

  “Very funny.” Jay-Tee ran to the window. “Look! I think they’re fighting. One just flew away. Their wings stretch so wide! Tom, I thought you said they were flying foxes?”

  “They are,” I said. “Fruit bats with faces just like a fox’s.”

  Jay-Tee sat down on her li-lo, climbed under the sheet. “They’re pretty cool.”

  “I ate flying fox once.”

  “Ewww!”

  “What’d it taste like?” Tom asked, screwing up his nose. “They smell foul.”

  “They taste how they smell. Really, really, really horrible.”

  The three of us lay quietly for a moment. I liked having friends. But Jay-Tee wouldn’t be around much longer. She was as riddled with rust as Esmeralda. Most likely I was, too. There had to be a cure for the rust that didn’t involve losing your mind.

  “So what do you want to do when you grow up?” Tom asked.

  Jay-Tee snorted. “I’m not going to grow up, Tom. Remember? I’ve blown through most of my magic feeding him.”

  “And conjuring money out of nothing,” I said, “and—”

  “I was stupid, okay? I started doing it to piss my dad off. When he talked about magic, which was, like, hardly ever, he was all, Don’t use it unless you have to, be careful. So I did the opposite. If he’d told me not to smoke…”

  “But when you were little you must’ve wanted to be something,” Tom said. “I’ve always wanted to make clothes. Be a fashion designer. For as long as I can remember.”

  Jay-Tee laughed. “I wanted to be famous.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  Jay-Tee shrugged. “Didn’t think about what. I just wanted to be famous.”

  “But you have to do something to be famous.”

  Both Tom and Jay-Tee looked at me as if I’d said something completely insane.

  “What about you, then, Reason?” Jay-Tee asked. “What about your plans for the future you don’t have?”

  “We were going to leave Australia. Travel.” Sarafina had always wanted to go to Cambodia and see Angkor Wat. “We’ve travelled all over Australia; we were going to explore the rest of the world.”

  “You and your mom?” Jay-Tee asked, yawning.

  “Yup.”

  “Well,” Tom said, yawning, too, “at least you got to see New York.”

  “True.” I thought about what lay on the other side of the door. The strange thing that was related to me, controlled by my grandfather Jason Blake. Tom was right. What did he want? Why was he using so much magic?

  The bats broke into another squabble, squeaking and rustling in the fig tree outside. Several of them took off, their leather wings displacing the air noisily. It was strange hearing bush noises in the middle of a city.

  “Jay-Tee?” I asked softly. There was no response. “Tom?”

  “Whaa,” Tom answered, half asleep.

  “Nothing. I’ll stay awake. Keep an eye on the door.”

  “Wake me,” Tom said through a yawn, “when you’re too sleepy.”

  “No worries.”

  Soon they were both breathing heavily and evenly. I waited until I was absolutely positive they were asleep; then I sat up. Neither Tom nor Jay-Tee shifted. I stood slowly, not letting the li-lo squeak. Esmeralda’s keys had been in her briefcase, which was probably in her bedroom. This was not going to be easy.

  The door moaned. I froze. The wood had turned liquid again. It was vibrating, rocking, almost as if it was trying to shake the feather protections away from it. Tom grunted, then turned over. They were both still asleep. I took another step.

  The door shrieked, let out a loud, piercing cry that was almost human. I started.

  “What’s happening?” Jay-Tee asked, sitting up.

  Bugger, I thought, now I’ll never get to the library. “The door—” I began.

  A loud explosion, almost a roar, shook it. Painfully loud. We both brought our hands up to cover our ears.

  Tom sat up, blinking, more than half asleep.

  The door shook violently, ripples passing back and forth across its surface. My grandfather wasn’t happy.

  The door bowed fast and sudden, stretching out so far it whacked into me. It was sticky, spreading itself all over me, sucking me back across the room. There was pain. And whiteness and heat and then cold.

  And I was lying on the ground in front of the door. In New York City.

  8

  Dirty Old Snow

  I had a mouthful of wet, cold dirt. I pushed myself up on my elbows. They hurt. My whole body hurt. I spat several times, rolled over, stood up.

  New York City again. Winter. Cold. Daytime.

  I brushed some of the wet dirt from me. The snow. Something smelled horrible. My skin prickled, not from the cold—someone was looking at me.

  It wasn’t Jason Blake.

  At the top of the steps, leaning against the door to Sydney, was a…I wasn’t sure what it was—old, that was certain. A man? A monster? It had eyes and a nose and a mouth, arms and legs. It was human-shaped but it could have been anything: man, woman, black, white. It was so filthy that its clothing and skin seemed to have fused together.

  It was staring right at me.

  Staring at me and reeking of stomach acids, of black rubber tire remains made burning hot by the sun on the side of a highway. Burnt rubber and chunder. It smelled like the thing that had come from under the door into Esmeralda’s house. The thing that was related to me—but this thing, this person, smelt even worse. It made me want to run far, far away.

  Sarafina always said, Never show that you’re scared. I stood and planted my feet firmly in the snow and stared back, trying not to think about my churning stomach, my freezing skin. I put my hand over Esmeralda’
s brooch pinned to my PJ top, feeling its warmth, and blurred my eyes to look all the way inside. I saw that he was a man, or at least, he’d been a man. I saw that he was not Jason Blake in disguise. I saw his Cansinoness. He was related to me, but he was nothing like me.

  Our magic was related, too, but his was much more than mine. It was as though his magic had eaten almost everything else; all that remained were traces of what had been before—his Cansinoness, his humanity, his maleness. His magic shone throughout his body, making up the very marrow of his bones. More thoroughly magic than Esmeralda or Jason Blake, than Tom, Jay-Tee, or me.

  He was old, too, older than all our ages put together. Centuries old.

  The intense smell of him filled me, far stronger than that of the little golem. I pressed my lips firmly together. I would not chunder. There was no hint of unripe lemon. His reek was nothing like the madness in my mother. He was old, but he wasn’t insane.

  He was even worse than Jason Blake. How many people did you have to drink dry of magic to live as long as he had? The thought of it made rage swell up in me like a tumour. Never lose your temper. My vision shot back to the surface, where the world pulsed red. My magic swirled out of Esmeralda’s brooch in a Fibonacci spiral aimed at old man Cansino. I would stop him even if it killed me.

  He flicked his wrist, making a shooing motion.

  My magic rebounded, exploded into me, rendered me blind and deaf, stripped of all my senses.

  In this absolutely silent, scentless darkness, echoes of what I’d seen and heard on the street assailed me. All at once I realised I’d been cold, standing in snow with bare feet wearing cotton pyjamas. The wind had been cutting through me; I’d felt the uneven footpath underneath my feet, old chewing gum, salt, melting snow; I’d been smelling car fumes and steak being burnt, hearing car horns and music blaring, someone yelling out to her friends to “wait up”; I’d seen the greys and browns of a New York winter. Now I felt nothing.

  Then my senses smashed back into me, like a car into a wall. I heard the bile building in the back of my throat. I blinked at a helicopter far overhead, inhaled pounding bass, felt grey and brown, stumbled over the music. What had Esmeralda called this? Synaesthesia.