Sleight: Book One of the AVRA-K

by Jennifer Sommersby

  sleight

  Book One of the AVRA-K

  Jennifer Sommersby

  This is a work of fiction. Al of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons (living or dead), is entirely coincidental.

  Al rights reserved. No part of this publication, in any format, can be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express written permission from the author and/or publisher.

  SLEIGHT: BOOK ONE OF THE AVRA-K . Words and cover copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Sommersby Young Smashwords Edition: March 2011

  To learn more about the author, visit www.jennifersommersby.com.

  Contents

  Dedication

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  Acknowledgments

  For Blake, Yaunna, Brennan, and Kendon.

  And Gary, too.

  :1:

  December 31

  May my soul ascend aloft after death; may it descend only after it has perished.

  — Chapter 154, Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Book of Going Forth By Day

  The last funeral I went to was for a lion. Sarah. She was mauled to death by her lover. There was no casket. Just a canvas tarp and some very thick plastic.

  The open grave I stood before this afternoon did have a casket.

  Wood and brass, a human inside laying atop satin and cotton. My mother. And she wasn’t mauled to death by anything except her psychosis.

  The idea of leaving Delia in the ground, al by herself, with nothing but a rosary to keep her company made me sick to my stomach. She never had a rosary in her awake life. The douche bag at the funeral home must’ve thought she would need one for her eternal sleep. Presumptuous dick with his combover and his sweat-stained shirt. I should’ve insisted on packing a wool blanket or her favorite red sweater. The Egyptians loaded tombs with food, jewelry, even combs and dishes. They had the right idea. North Americans were cruel with their burials, leaving their dead to fend for themselves with nothing but useless beads.

  The generic one-size-fits-al eulogy proved that the on-cal pastor knew nothing about my mother. He was just filing his shift, doing his job. “Aunt” Marlene and my “uncles,” Ted and his brother Irwin, my legal guardians and the only real caregivers I’d ever known, took turns placing their pink carnations atop the casket, folowed by a steady stream of people who were the only family I had left—felow circus company members, none of us bound by blood or genes but al of us related forever. Wire walkers, acrobats, trapeze flyers, animal wranglers, sword swalowers, a psychic, the tattooed guy. Normal people, or, normal to me.

  I stood to the side, twirling the stem of my own flower between my fingers. I didn’t want the arms of condolence wrapped around my shoulders, these wel-meaning humans whispering words into my ear to try and make me feel better. Nothing was going to make me feel better, not now. Maybe not ever.

  “Gemma, do you want to say a few words?” Aunt Marlene asked me through the wrinkled, wet handkerchief under her nose.

  The smal crowd was silent, watching me, their eyes pained, cheeks wet.

  “What, like, hey, Mom, happy new year?” I looked away. I knew Mar was hurting, too, but I didn’t care. I had some leeway when it came to being an obnoxious punk. It was my mother who was dead, my mother who’d left me in the care of others while she unraveled in any number of mental institutions, my mother who said she loved me but loved herself more. I could be the biggest ass in the world, if I wanted to. I’d earned that.

  Standing around the periphery of the yard hovered a colection of ethereal bodies lacking the density to obscure the frosted greenery behind them. The shades. Delia wasn’t among them. Did that mean she was in heaven? Hel? Somewhere in between? If she were in-between, she’d have been standing among them, watching me from the eastern tree line, stuck between this life and the next.

  Where do people go after they’ve swalowed enough pils to kil a stable ful of horses?

  It was too much. Too much misery. Too much sadness. I surveyed the assemblage of forgotten souls—men, women, a few children, some dressed in period clothing, some more recent. The old dead mingling with the new. Seeing the kids was the hardest.

  Little kids weren’t supposed to die. And they sure as hel weren’t supposed to be shades. What kind of god does that?

  I didn’t dare let my eyes linger too long for fear of drawing the attention of felow funeral-goers. The shades never spoke to me, nor I to them. And I wondered if so many were present because they knew I could see them, or if they came out for every new addition to their halowed ground. Like a welcome to the neighborhood sorta thing.

  A little girl waved at me. I waved back but felt a hand on my opposite shoulder. As I met Marlene’s gaze, she gave me a weak, questioning smile, one I’d seen dozens of times before: Are they there? Are the people there? She knew what I could see. She, Ted, and Irwin were the only ones who knew I could see, except for Delia. Delia saw them, too, but her shades were mean, prone to endless torment. Not quiet and unobtrusive like mine.

  I nodded and looked down at my feet.

  The casket shuddered on the metal framework when the guy pressed the black button to engage the lift motor that would lower my dead mother into the freezing ground.

  “…We commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

  The last of the flowers were lobbed into the pit. “You want to ride back with us, Gems?” Junie. My best friend and lifelong companion, her face blotchy and swolen from crying. She hadn’t known my mom very wel, but she’d seen the damage Delia’s mania had inflicted upon me. It was safe to assume that Junie’s tears were more for me than for my mom.

  “No, thanks, Junie. I’m going to wait here for a while. Feel sorry for myself a little longer.”

  She hugged me and walked toward the car, trailing her twin brother Ash and their parents. She stil had her carnation in hand, as though she’d forgotten to drop it into the grave. Knowing Junie, she wanted to press the flower between two bricks and save it in one of her endless scrapbooks. She’d glue it right next to Delia’s obituary, the one the hospital filed as a matter of public record. Boring, lacking sentiment. “Loving mother and loyal friend.” Again, whoever was in charge of filing in the blanks of the obit worksheet knew little to nothing about the true Delia Flannery. No one wants to read

  “haunted by unseen demons” and “prone to sudden outbursts of psychotic behavior.” Not quite as romantic.

  Marlene and Ted shook hands with a few of the other company members while I waited, leaned against a tree. I could smel Irwin’s pipe smoke wafting acros
s the grounds. He was already planted in the front seat of Ted’s truck, waiting for us to finish up. Since his accident, he didn’t tolerate the cold very wel.

  “Let’s go, honey,” Marlene said, offering me her gloved hand.

  “I’m going to wait, Mar. I’l walk back to the hotel in a bit.”

  “Gemma, it’s too far and too damned cold to walk,” Ted said.

  “We can come back next weekend if you want.”

  “Ted, why don’t you and Irwin head on out, grab something to eat, and Gemma and I wil get a cab in a little while, when she’s ready to leave.”

  Ted was silent for a beat, chewing on a fresh toothpick. He couldn’t smoke in the graveyard, so toothpicks had to suffice. “Al right. Whatever you think.” He puled out his walet and folded some bils into Marlene’s hand before kissing the top of my head and heading to the truck.

  The branches of a stately oak would serve as umbrela to protect my mother from the elements, or they would once spring arrived and the arms and fingers exploded with fresh leaves. Right now, they were sparse and straggly. Almost scary, like witch hands.

  I separated myself from Marlene and slid to the ground, my back against the girth of the tree’s old trunk. I folded my long wool coat tight around my lower half and wrapped my arms around my knees to keep the chil from sneaking up my pant legs. The ground was hard, cold, but not wet. At least not where I was sitting. No snow under the tree, too cold to be wet.

  The crowd dispersed with relative speed, the cars weaving their way out of the cemetery and back onto the main highway toward the hotel. I watched Ted’s beat-up truck as it inched forward in the queue of vehicles, the distant profile of his brother in the passenger seat wobbling as they went over the speed bumps a little too quickly in a rig with lousy suspension. The right rear brake light was out.

  Marlene didn’t impose herself on me by taking a seat next to the tree. Instead, she tightened the black wrap around her shoulders and took a quiet walk through the gravestones, pausing now and again to read the epitaphs, glancing back at me to make sure I was stil sitting where she’d left me. An elderly shade folowed her, a woman with a hunched back and a kind face, a dirty, threadbare shawl draped around her. The granny stood near Marlene whenever she stopped, like an invisible tour guide.

  I wiled myself to cry, to squeeze out the tears everyone expected me to shed. My eyes were parched, itchy, uncompromising in their anti-tear position. I plucked the petals off my carnation, creating my own snowstorm of pink on the earth around me.

  What am I supposed to do now, Mom? Tell me that.

  I stared across the yard. The shades hadn’t moved much, though a few of the children were chasing one another around the more impressive grave markers. It made me smile a little to think that even in death, children could stil play.

  A flash caught my attention, the reflection of winter sun off the passenger door window of a black car. There was a split-second delay between the man shutting the door and the actual sound reaching my ear, evidence of how far away he was from where I was seated. His movements were catlike, quick and quiet. Dressed in a black suit and long black overcoat, the only splash of color was a red pocket square in his left breast pocket. In his hands he carried a sizable bouquet of pink flowers—roses, I think. His head was down, his face obscured by the rim of his black fedora.

  He walked up the slight incline and stopped just a few feet short of the mouth of Delia’s as-yet open grave. If he saw me sitting off to the side, he didn’t let on, just bent down, dropped the flowers into the pit, and muttered something in a language I couldn’t understand.

  He pivoted on his heel, head stil down, and moved with equivalent stealth back to his car. So quiet were his approach and departure that I wouldn’t have even noticed his presence had my eyes been closed.

  The only thing that confirmed that I had seen an anonymous visitor was the sudden, strange disappearance of the shades.

  Something—or someone—had scared them off.

  :2:

  All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

  —Anatole France

  After my mother’s untimely exit from my life on Christmas Eve, we’d lingered in Portland for a few weeks, Ted busy with meetings and bank appointments and act auditions, the usual stuff he did in the off-season. He traveled back and forth to Seattle to meet with some potential new investor, but I was kept very much in the dark.

  I think they were afraid to talk to me too much, afraid I’d crumble into a pile of broken chunks. The Girl Formerly Known as Gemma.

  I didn’t mind the silence, the cautious glances and sympathetic half smiles. I preferred being left on my own. And Junie hadn’t changed.

  She was stil the wacky, energetic nutbal who took it upon herself to make me giggle at least once a day.

  My mother’s lack of participation in my life was something I’d grown used to through the years of her hospitalizations, so even though her absence was now, like, forever, I wasn’t as sad as I thought I should be. And that made me feel realy guilty. She hadn’t shown up as a shade—yet—but there were those days when I expected to walk around a corner or come out of the bathroom and see her standing there. I kept an eye out, just in case.

  When Ted and Marlene took me out to dinner our last night in Oregon, the restaurant was nicer than our usual hangouts.

  Overlooking the Wilamette River. Candles on the tables. Staff wearing bowties, towels draped over their forearms. Ted in a jacket and tie, his salt-and-pepper hair slicked back and his bushy moustache gone, Marlene’s fluffy bottle-blonde hair curled and sprayed to the point of being a fire hazard, her long red nails lethal weapons. Ted ordered a huge steak, Marlene the lobster. Crème brûlée and sparkling wine for dessert. I knew then that something was up. Something big.

  The Cinzio Traveling Players Company was leaving the road.

  “For how long?”

  “Four months, maybe longer, through the summer,” Ted said, sawing through the medium-rare slab of cow on his plate.

  “Where?”

  “Eaglefern, Washington.” We were due to land there the folowing day. Guess it would be for longer than our usual one-week, in-and-out stopover.

  “I thought we were doing Atlanta and New Orleans this spring.” I was realy looking forward to going back to New Orleans. I loved that city.

  “Not this year, Gems,” he said. He stabbed at his baked potato.

  Four months was an eternity for someone who’d slept in forty-eight states by her fifteenth birthday. But my guardians had saved the best news for last.

  “And, Gemma, your uncles and I, wel, we think it would be good for you to go to…wel, public school, just until the end of the year,” Aunt Marlene said. She gulped her wine after dropping that little bomb. The kids in the company had always been home-schooled by awesome tutors, a few of them retired university professors. Our tutors were so good, three of us had taken the SAT as freshman and scored in the top 20 percent in the country.

  Me included.

  Public school? This sucked.

  “Why? Why are we stopping for so long?”

  “We’re evolving. Cirque du Soleil has done it, planting themselves for longer stints in venues close to major cities. You know what they say, Gemma. Evolve or die,” Ted said. “Besides, we’ve had an offer from an investor, an old friend, Lucian Dmitri—

  Dmitri Holdings is his company. That’s what I’ve been doing these last few weeks. His money wil breathe new life into the show, give us the resources to realy strengthen the acts.”

  “Lucian is the one who taught Uncle Ted to be such a master magician. Isn’t that interesting, Gems?” Marlene, trying to make me care.

  While they explained the details of the residential agreement that night in the restaurant (Marlene tried to sweeten things by promising lots of retail therapy, lost on me as I wasn’t much for shopping), I waited for
them to finish, nodding my head and smiling when necessary. Then I presented them with my own news: early acceptance emails from two different universities, one in California, another in New York. I’d folded the letters into my purse, saving them as a sort-of surprise, knowing that they might not be too excited about my school choices. Marlene wanted me to go to Washington State University, her alma mater, but I didn’t have any interest in living in the middle of wheat fields and cow poop.

  In hindsight, teling them at a different time might have been better, but it seemed the perfect strategy to suck a little of the wind out of Ted’s sails. I wanted them to know that while I would play along like a good girl with this stupid new life, it didn’t much matter in the bigger picture. I only had seven months until dorm check-in, anyway. Then I’d be off on my own real-life, big-girl adventure.

  Ted waited to make the company-wide announcement until we’d already landed in Eaglefern. Most of the adults, I later learned, were already in on it. They just weren’t teling the kids for fear of a rebelion. The reactions varied, as anticipated: elation from the animal wranglers and trainers and the wire/trapeze artists who grappled with il-tempered creatures and faulty riggings that came with frequent location changes, and groans from (most of) the under-eighteen crowd who loved the excitement of discovering new turf and new faces every other week. No groans from adorable, trapeze-flying, daredevil Junie, though. What a surprise.

  “Isn’t this awesome, Gems? REAL school, for, like, four months! We can go to our first real parties, a real dance, meet some cool people, maybe some new guys…mmm…,” she said, dreamy-eyed. Easy words for a girl who can befriend a tree. “Trust me, Gems, it’s gonna be sweet.”

  Marlene did her best to be encouraging. “Ah, Gemma, think of the friends you’l make! And what about joining the track and field team? I know how much you like to run, and I’m sure any coach would be glad to have you. Besides, formal graduation is in June—

  that’s just four months away. How much damage can be done in a few measly months?”

  Throughout my days as a circus kid, I’d stood three stories above the ground to hold riggings in place during set-up, no net yet strung, only the strong arms and luck of a technician to catch me should I misstep and plummet toward sawdust. I’d hand-fed massive, chop-licking lions and napped alongside baby elephants.