Danny nodded.
“If there’s a door that leads through to any of them, I’d be as lost as I was here.”
“Do you think there are?”
“What?”
“Other doors that connect cities.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I guess so. Why would there be only one?” Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that there would be more than one. How stupid was that? I wondered if the old man had come to New York from some other faraway city through a door like the one at the back of my grandmother’s house. Maybe if we kept following his trails, we’d find other doors?
Again I wondered how old man Cansino had lived for so long. Was he stealing magic? He’d made no attempt to steal mine.
“What’s it like being magic? It must be amazing.”
One of the waitresses came over, taking teeny-tiny steps because the skirt of her Japanese dress was so tight. She put down a card that listed desserts and then cleared our plates.
“Green tea ice cream. Like the tea we had? That must taste foul.”
“Actually, it’s good. You want to try some?”
I nodded. “New things are good.”
Danny signalled to the waitress and ordered. He did it easily, lifting his hand, raising an eyebrow—I’d never signalled to a waitress in my life.
“So, magic. What’s it like?” He leaned forward, staring at me as if he could see the magic inside me.
“I’m not really sure yet. I only just found out I was magic.”
“Really? How could you not know?”
Good question. How had I not known? “It’s kind of hard to explain. Until I stepped through the door, I didn’t know. And to be honest, even going from Sydney to New York City like that, well, I didn’t figure it out straightaway. I was kind of slow.”
“Huh. Jay-Tee says she’s always known. What about that kid Tom?”
“He’s only known for a year. Esmeralda says it’s possible to be magic your whole life and never know.”
“No way. How could you not know?”
“What’s Jay-Tee told you?” I was starting to think not much.
“Not a lot, really. That she’s magic and our parents were, too.”
“Magic isn’t as amazing as you’d think. It’s not like any of us can fly or anything.” I wondered if that was true. I wondered if I could fly if I tried. Except that it would use up so much magic I’d be dead on the spot. “It’s mostly small things, like being able to tell when people are telling the truth or not. And the door working for us, but not for you. It’s pretty easy not to know, really. Esmeralda says almost everyone has a certain amount of magic. You know that feeling you get that someone’s looking at you? Even when you have your back to them?”
“Nope.” Danny’s eyes were wide. He seemed confused by the question.
“What do you mean, ‘Nope’?” I thought of Esmeralda’s other example. “How about when you go to pick up the phone just before it rings, and it’s as if you knew it was going to ring?”
“That happens?”
“Esmeralda says it does. You’ve never felt deja vu? Or dreamed something that came true?”
“No, never.”
“Wow, you must be a magic dead zone. Huh.” No wonder the old man hadn’t used magic against Danny. He couldn’t.
“I guess. So you’re saying that most people have some kind of magic, but some of it’s really small. Like deja vu or whatever? So most people have lame, not-very-useful magic.” He was smiling. I liked his smile.
I laughed. “Trust me, they’re better off with only that much.”
“Why?”
That put me on the spot. Jay-Tee mustn’t have told him about the less good side of magic.
“It’s not as much fun as you’d think.”
“Why not?”
“Well, um, it kind of tires you out.”
“So does playing basketball. Doesn’t make me love the game any less.”
“I guess not. Jay-Tee hasn’t told you anything about…” I trailed off, not knowing how to say it or whether I even should. How would Jay-Tee feel if I told him the truth? Not that she’d been great at telling me the truth. Still, wasn’t it up to Jay-Tee to decide whether she wanted to tell him or not?
“About the downside of magic? No, she hasn’t, but I get the feeling there is one.”
Downside! I almost laughed out loud. That was one way of putting it. I’m fifteen and I might not make it to sixteen. Some downside. “Maybe she should tell you.”
“I’m asking you.” He was looking straight at me with his huge brown eyes. His face was so close I could hear him breathing. If I leaned in a little, I could kiss him. I wanted to tell him everything he wanted to know. I knew exactly how it felt to be kept in the dark, to have other people decide what you should and shouldn’t know. My mother, my grandmother writing me letters and then stealing them back before I could read them. Jay-Tee and Jason Blake. And now old man Cansino. He hadn’t asked my permission to hurl a piece of himself at me, to alter my sense of smell and who-knew-what-else.
“How old was your mother when she died?” I asked him.
“Eighteen.”
“And your father?”
“Thirty-seven. They were very young when they had me and Jay-Tee.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “Most magic people don’t live very long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, according to my grandmother, your father was an old, old man by magic standards. Not many of us make it into our twenties. That’s your downside.”
The waitress placed two bowls of green ice cream on the table. Danny stared at me, and I lowered my gaze to stare at the ice cream.
19
Dead
Esmeralda let go of Jay-Tee. That hurt, too.
“What did you do to me?” Jay-Tee asked. She could feel whatever it was pushing deep into her body. It didn’t feel right. It unbalanced her, wrecked her rhythm. The web shattered all around her. She felt hot. Not from the outside, from the inside. There were spikes inside her, twisting around, burning her. They didn’t belong inside her. She could see a thin thread running between her and Esmeralda, but the thread wasn’t right either: it was jagged and frayed.
“I’m sorry,” Esmeralda said. “I don’t think it works for you.”
“What? What isn’t? What didn’t? I don’t understand.” Jay-Tee started to shake. The kitchen moved. She swayed on her knees, then leaned back. The floor slid from under her, pulled her down. Her cheekbone hit the tiled floor. It hurt, but not as much as the things impaling her from the inside. Besides, the floor was cool. Green and black tiles arranged like a checkerboard. “I hurt. What did you do to me?”
Esmeralda put something cold and wet on her forehead, but seconds later it was hot again. Her body would not be still. The spikes jiggled at her.
“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t realise. Will you let me try to get it out?”
Jay-Tee started to shake harder. “It hurts!”
Esmeralda put her hand on Jay-Tee’s arm. It didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. Jay-Tee shook harder.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.” But Esmeralda’s hand stayed locked on her, sucking at her, pulling something out.
Jay-Tee shook so hard her head banged back into the tiles. There was a smacking sound. Jay-Tee wondered if she was bleeding. Probably. She couldn’t see any threads between her and Esmeralda. The something inside was trying to crawl out, something hard and sharp and angled. It would rip her to pieces. Esmeralda was calling the thing towards her. She fought as hard as she could to get away from it, away from Esmeralda. She tried to scratch Esmeralda’s face, but Esmeralda held her hands down. She was stronger than a man, stronger than Jason Blake.
The world narrowed to Esmeralda’s head bent over her, the woman’s eyes closed, concentrating. She’s stealing all my magic, Jay-Tee thought. She’s killing me.
She convulsed again, head and legs and arms smacking har
d onto the tiles. The pain burst inside her like a rotten tomato. The narrow slit that was the world shaded into nothing.
Jay-Tee was unconscious, she was gone, she floated. She wondered if she was dead.
20
So Little Time
“You’re telling me that Julieta’s going to die young?”
I nodded. Neither one of us had touched our ice cream. It was starting to melt into green puddles.
“And you, too?”
“Yes.”
“How young?”
“I don’t know.” I especially didn’t know now. What old man Cansino had done to me must have eaten away even more of my magic. Had I lost minutes, days, months? I wished I could look inside myself, see my own rust. “It depends on how much of your magic you’ve used. I don’t know the precise formula. I don’t think anyone does.”
A string of tinny notes bleated from inside Danny’s coat. His phone again, I realised after a confused half second. He made no move to answer it. “So why use your magic at all?”
I sighed. “That’s the other downside. If you don’t use your magic, you go insane. My mother, and Tom’s, too—they’re in a loony bin in Sydney.”
“Wow. That is messed up.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s like a disease.”
I burst into tears.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know I was going to. It exploded out of me. Tears poured out of my eyes, snot from my nose, and choking sobs from my chest. I cried so loud, Danny looked around nervously. One of the waitresses brought tissues and patted me on the back.
“Family troubles,” Danny said, which almost made me laugh.
The waitress nodded. “Ah, yes.” She cleared away the melted green ice cream. “I bring you more. Colder.”
Danny pulled out one of the tissues, pushed my hair out of the way, and held it to my nose. I took it from him and blew. More tears and snot came flowing out of me. Danny pushed the box closer. Half blind through my tears, I groped for another tissue, blew my nose again, even though it felt like I’d have to blow it a thousand times before all the snot would be gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally getting some words out. Then I started sobbing even harder. “I don’t want this.”
Danny reached under the table to hold my hand. “Who would? It sucks.”
I was crying so hard my chest and throat ached. I thought of Sarafina, empty and numb at Kalder Park. Of Jay-Tee dying one day soon. Of Tom. Of what the old man had done. I cried and cried and cried.
Danny moved beside me, put his arms around me. His phone rang again. He must have thousands of friends, I thought. And I have only four. He ignored the insistent snatch of song, pulled my head to rest on his shoulder, stroked my hair.
“I’ll look after you,” he told me. “We’ll fix it. If it’s a disease, then we’ll just have to find the cure. For Julieta and for you.”
8
Danny took me back to his flat, insisting that there was nothing more we could do that night, that I was tired, but I wasn’t. Midnight in New York City; four in the afternoon in Sydney. I lay in Jay-Tee’s bed wearing one of her old T-shirts, staring at the ceiling. The outside streetlights made shadows stretch out across it like claws. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the hand was reaching down at me. The old man’s hand.
I could hear cars and trucks still thundering along the highway. Occasionally car horns and sirens. Was this city ever quiet? I had been overwhelmed by Sydney, but it was orders of magnitude calmer than this place. All those noises outside made me feel even more alone. Sarafina was far away, and even if she’d been right there with me, she wasn’t able to help me anymore.
I missed her. I missed how she’d been before. Whenever I’d been scared in the past, she always reassured me, talked me out of it. “There are worse things,” she’d always say. But now I was caught in the midst of those worse things.
I tried to think of something else. How would Jay-Tee feel when Danny told her that he knew about magic, all about magic. That I had told him what lay ahead for his sister. Would she be angry?
My mind veered back to the old man, to the grey-brown stuff lodged inside me. I got up, went into the dunny, peed, washed my hands, stared at my face in the mirror.
I didn’t look any different. My skin didn’t have a tinge of grey added to its brownness. Nothing scary bubbled out of my pores. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it wasn’t there. I could feel it inside me, though. I wasn’t the same. I wished fervently I could blur my eyes, see inside myself, see what he’d done, and, more importantly, undo it.
I didn’t go back to bed. I couldn’t. I opened the door quietly and peeked outside. All the lights were out, but there was so much light streaming in from outside that I could see well enough. Cities, I decided, were never dark.
I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. There was nothing in there to eat, just endless cans of beer. I shut it again. I wished Danny was up. I needed to talk to someone.
There wasn’t any light coming from underneath Danny’s door. That probably meant he was asleep. I crept over and put my ear against the door and listened. I couldn’t hear anything.
I opened his door slowly, my heart beating fast, and slid inside. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I just knew I couldn’t be alone with old man Casino’s golem thing chewing away inside me, changing me.
His room was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I took another step forward and stood there listening, waiting to hear something other than the loud thumping of my heart.
My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the blackness. Maybe he had heavy curtains. I heard a siren outside. Then another. They rushed by, fading into the distance, and there was silence again.
Then I heard Danny breathing. The light, even breath of sleep. I should go.
“Danny?” I asked instead. “You awake?”
Nothing. I thought about going back to bed, lying there and feeling the old man’s creature crawling about inside me.
I took another step into the room. “Danny?” I repeated a little louder. “Danny?”
His sheets shifted. I took a step towards the sound.
“Danny!” I called, louder still.
“What? Huh?”
I heard him sitting up, his skin sliding against the sheets. I moved towards his voice. “It’s me, Reason.”
“What is it? Is something wrong? Is that old man here?” All of a sudden he sounded a lot less sleepy.
“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I, ah, I couldn’t sleep.”
“You what?”
I took another step forward and bumped into his bed. I sat down, put my hands on my lap. They were shaking.
“It’s still early in Sydney, so I’m wide awake.”
“Huh.”
“So I was hoping you were awake—”
Danny snorted. “I wasn’t.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m awake now.”
“Sorry.”
I shifted further up the bed, closer to his voice. “I, I wondered if…”
“What?”
“Do you have any video games? I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never played any and I wondered what it was like.”
“You what?” Danny burst out laughing. “Sure. Sure thing. What the hell—I got the TV all set up.”
8
We played a game full of dark alleys and underground passages and cellars. It was a world of grey and brown and black and white, so that the explosions of red blood were shocking. We were attacked by zombies who we had to kill by cutting off their heads (Danny was horrified that I hadn’t known how to kill zombies properly) and vampires who we killed by banging thick wooden sticks through their hearts. He was even more disgusted by my vampire ignorance, groaning aloud when I asked what the garlic was for. We had to shoot werewolves with silver bullets (which was annoying, because our guns had plenty of normal bullets, but we had to go find the special silver ones) and mad people with guns, who died in all t
he ways that normal people do. Not from lack of magic.
I wasn’t very good, but it was fun, and I could die as many times as I wanted and always come back. I got lost in the strange world on his huge TV screen, which vaguely resembled New York City but was darker and gloomier, with no gleaming white snow or dazzling neon lights. I became so absorbed in trying to stay alive and out of Danny’s way so we could blow up our enemies (those that could be killed that way) that I forgot there was anything else in the world outside the television screen. I could understand why people spent so many hours shooting and running in imaginary worlds.
Danny sat next to me, controls balanced on his knees, eyes intent on the screen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just pyjama bottoms. In those seconds in between my deaths and resurrections, it was hard not to look at his smooth, brown skin. The lights of the game flashed across him. I wanted to kiss him.
“Come on, Ree! Pay attention. You got killed again. Sheesh!” He turned to me, grinning. “You gotta be faster than that.”
I swallowed and leaned forward. He looked at me oddly. “There’s something on your chin,” I told him, brushing the imaginary something away. His chin was a little scratchy, like sandpaper.
He rubbed his chin where I had touched him. “Need a shave. Want another game?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t, I wanted to kiss him. “No, I want to…” I swallowed again. “I want to…” I leaned forward fast. My mouth bounced into his, teeth clashed against teeth, and yet it made me shiver. “Oh, sorry.” I looked down, feeling like an idiot.
“Reason?”
“Yep.” I didn’t look up.
“You’re my sister’s friend. You’re fifteen.”
“You’re only eighteen. That’s only three years older.”
“But you’re way young for fifteen even. When I picked you up today, you had jewellery pinned to your pyj—”
“That brooch is magic! Like the ammon—”
“Reason. You’re really pretty and everything, but Julieta—”
Magic Lessons Page 14