He smiled, and his edges faded. She could see through him. He turned transparent, melting, always melting, into more and more light, until finally there was nothing left of his body, just webs of pulsing light, spread all through the house, touching everywhere, connected to the house’s web and so intermingled she could not tell where one began and the other ended.
Something strummed or streaked across the network, sent light flaring and fading in its wake. Colors shifted, shook. She could almost hear music.
—That’s how he looked to me that night. He gave me a map of his mind.—
—He gave it to you? Or you took it?—
—He gave it to me. We built the roads together. It was his and mine. Now I shared it with you.—
Well, it was certainly in her head now, all of Julio’s thoughts and feelings and experiences for that one eight-or nine-hour period fifteen years ago. She had wanted to know what had happened, and now she knew, deeper than bones, beyond dreams, thinner than thoughts.
Now she had another context for Young Edmund. Now she had seen Shadow Susan, the previous incarnation of her friend Suki; now she had a character sketch for Deirdre, and a big file on Julio.
And—wait a sec. Tasha and Terry Dane?
She lifted her hand from the wall and turned to Edmund. “You know Terry Dane?”
“Used to,” he said.
“Me too.”
“You did? When? Where?”
“About ten years ago, I guess, over in Spores. In the valley. She put a spell on me and made me live with her for a while. Pissed me off. Made me decide to stay away from witches.” She grinned at him and he smiled back.
“She was about fourteen last time I saw her,” he said. “Kind of a brat, but a very crafty witch.” He sat up and pulled on a T-shirt. “You woke up yelling at the house. You know I know Terry. What happened?”
“House gave me dreams again. I dreamed Julio and the demon-guy. What happened after that? Did the wicked witch come back? Did you guys track him down? What did you do to him?”
He got out of bed and crossed the room. She moved over and patted the spot beside her, and he sat down next to her, took her hand. “You’re talking shorthand. I’m not there yet. What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“The last part with you in it was when the evil witch came to Julio and Juanita’s apartment, and Juanita called you on the phone, but Julio made the bad guy go away. Then you guys sat around the kitchen table and talked for a little while. Boy, you were really suspicious back then, huh?”
“Look at it from my point of view. Here’s my best friend, with witchcraft worked on him, evil done to him. I sure didn’t know how any of that stuff worked, but I had seen The Exorcist; heck, Julio and I rented it and watched it together.” He leaned against the wall and stared far away. “First he’s this column of light—did you see that? It was amazing. So beautiful. It could have been anything, though. An alien or an angel or something, who knows? Nathan told us it was Julio. It could talk, and it sounded like Julio. And Nathan never lied to us, so, okay, it must be Julio, but not in any way I could understand at the time.
“We traveled skyways to where Julio’s body was, and it was possessed by something else. It sounded like a really mean version of Julio. Nathan did something that made my skin prickle all over, and then told us Julio was back inside his body and the demon was gone, but the house didn’t recognize Julio when we get back. Does this sound right?”
“Yep. Same story.”
“Then Julio did things he could never do before. He used craft. He wasn’t back to his old self. Maybe he was someone else after all. Maybe the real Julio was still waiting for someone to rescue him. Back then I didn’t have enough craft to know anything for certain. I worried about him. I stayed with him. I hoped he’d give me a sign if he still needed help, but he seemed okay.
“Then Juanita called me to their apartment, and I saw Julio’s hands.” He lifted her hand and looked at it, then glanced up.
“The fire hands,” she said.
“The fire hands. Who was this stranger wearing my best friend’s face?”
She waited.
“I didn’t have much of my own craft then. I didn’t know how to listen for spirit. I was scared, but then I thought, trust Nathan. He says it’s okay.” He shook his head. “If Julio hadn’t—I don’t know what he did, exactly. I left that night thinking I better figure out how to make sure Julio was Julio, but then I forgot about it. Spaced it.” He frowned. “How could I space that? Maybe Julio convinced me somehow without me knowing.”
“So what happened? Did you have your planning meeting on Saturday to find those witch guys?”
“We did have a meeting. Deirdre, Nathan, the twins, and I—Susan couldn’t get away for it. It was weird, because Julio didn’t even show up at first.”
“They had a catering job.”
His eyebrows rose. “Oh, yes, that’s right. I remember now. He’d learned how to burn things by touching them, and he had to go set out snacks at some girl’s birthday party.” He smiled and shook his head. Then his smile dissolved into a puzzled frown. “That’s when he started doing it. That’s how he slid out from under. I wonder if he did that deliberately.”
“Slid out from under what?”
“Slid out from under anybody noticing that he’d changed. He acted as if everything else he was doing was more important. All the real-world stuff. That was his top priority. Edmund frowned harder. “Not like me or the twins. We had tons of questions about magic. We sought out teachers. The twins had their Gran—did you meet her? A real witch, who gave them lessons. And I had Nathan, who knows lots of esoteric things, and later I had spirit. Julio didn’t ask any questions at all. He acted like nothing had changed.”
Matt thought of her final image of Julio: confused, troubled, and then whoosh! he did something he didn’t even know he knew how to do. Traveled, using fire to pull himself from one place to another. He must have never done that in front of the others.
But the house knew.
He had Tabasco, a teacher right there inside his head, and his mother, who understood, and the house, which had its own agenda.
Matt sighed and leaned back against the wall. This boy she had never met, an intensely private person, well, now she had a map of him, fair or not. She really liked him. She wondered whether he would like her, if she and Edmund ever caught up to him. She hoped so.
Edmund continued, “So we met at the house the next morning. At the meeting, we tried to plan all kinds of defenses. We didn’t know what we were up against. Nathan had seen parts of the magic system before, but he didn’t know a lot about it.”
“So then what happened?”
“Well, nothing, actually. We set up wards and armor. Nathan taught us some new protections. Julio showed up late. Nobody attacked us. We got tense, waiting around for something to happen. That was a bad afternoon.
“Eventually I borrowed Mom’s car and we drove up into the mountains, looking for the house. We couldn’t remember how to get there skyways without having Julio’s life thread to follow, so we didn’t find the house until the next day. We snuck up on it, but it was empty. Looked like nobody had ever been there. No furniture, the fireplace was empty and damp, it was all spiderwebs and mildew.”
Edmund narrowed his eyes and glanced around the room. He lifted his free hand and flickered his fingers for a couple of seconds. A green glow lit the room, faded. “House. The wards are still here?”
“Yes,” said the house. “Terry renews them for me once a year.”
“So you still see her?”
“Yes.”
Matt wondered if Edmund wanted to track down the twins. He hadn’t mentioned them when she first started the journey with him to find his old friends.
When Matt had said good-bye to Terry ten years earlier, she said she would be Terry’s friend, but she had never gone back. Maybe now she could. Terry was a witch, but so was Edmund. Edmund would protect Matt.
> She smiled at him, and he smiled back, but he was thinking about something else.
“Has anything ever challenged the wards?” he asked the house.
“We have weathered three attacks since you left. Nothing got through. None of the attacks came from the one who hurt Julio.”
“That guy seemed so focused,” Matt said, “and he really wanted something. Why would he turn around and disappear without trying again?”
“We’ve never figured that out,” said Edmund. “Unless Nathan scared him, or Julio did. But that doesn’t feel right. I never got the impression that he was scared.
“That whole event was strange. It changed Julio, and it taught us something. Before that, we had no sense that we were part of anything bigger, or that anybody would notice us. Afterward we knew there were other magic-users out there, and not all of them were nice.”
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” said Matt, while Edmund said, “Just a sec,” and went to his bed, where his pants were. The doorknob rattled, but the door didn’t open until he had pulled on his jeans and zipped them, “Thanks, House,” Edmund muttered.
The door opened. “You guys ready for breakfast?” Suki asked. She wore black flats, black slacks, and a pink shirt, and she had done something complicated and effective with her long blond hair.
Breakfast? Matt had a sudden vision of six or seven grilled cheese sandwiches, toast, rice, pastries. A mountain of food to feed Julio’s huge hunger. “Wow,” she said. “Did he get a bunch more jobs? Did he ever fix the broken fiddle?”
“He who? What are you talking about?” Suki asked.
“Julio.”
“What about Julio? What’s this about a broken fiddle and a bunch of jobs? He always had work.” Suki frowned. “God. I hadn’t thought about that. But he was always working, wasn’t he? Since he was about twelve. First for his mom, then for anybody else who needed something done. I never even noticed. What a dope I was.”
Matt stood up. She was wearing her favorite sleep clothes, a waffle-weave long-underwear shirt and a pair of briefs. She grabbed a change of clothes. “You had other things to worry about back then,” she said. “’Scuse me. I want to take a bath before we leave.”
By the time she got to the bathroom, the tub was half full of steaming water.
suki slid into a dark blazer against the morning cool. Matt wore a sweatshirt, and Edmund pulled on his green sweater.
Suki pressed her palm to the front door as they stepped out into the morning, and for the first time Matt knew exactly what she was doing: hooking into the house’s network, saying hello or see you later, as though the house wasn’t aware of every movement they made. Sliding under the house’s skin to touch its deep blue heart.
It wasn’t quite the same as the relationship Matt had established with the house, but it was a lot like an abbreviated version of Julio’s. Matt wondered if the house had ever swallowed Suki up the way it had Julio, but decided probably not. Suki’s connection came from a different source.
“Where is Nathan this morning?” Matt asked.
Suki cocked her head and half smiled. “He’s not up yet.”
“How can he not be up?” What am I asking? Matt wondered. She had been very careful not to find out more than she felt was fair about how Suki and Nathan spent time alone. Suki had used up almost all of her golden magic when she first arrived at the house, making Nathan solid; it wasn’t a spell that lasted very long, and it took lots of power. Nathan had cautioned Suki not to use every bit of gold; she needed some as starter if she wanted to collect more. She still had gold bands of magic on both wrists. Matt didn’t know what she did with them.
They left the house, cut through the backyard over to Fourteenth Street, and from there headed downhill to the ocean. They walked two blocks in companionable silence. The High Tide Inn lay at the bottom of Fourteenth Street, boasting all-room ocean views and fireplaces, and over-the-waves dining in the Catch of the Day Restaurant.
They’d been having breakfast here every second or third day. Maris, the day manager, greeted them and led them to their regular table by one of the windows. She handed out menus, poured fragrant coffee for Suki and Matt, left the pot on the table, and called for Cindy to bring Edmund hot tea. “Enjoy,” she said.
“Thanks, Maris,” said Matt. Edmund smiled at Maris, and she walked away, shaking her head and grinning.
Out the window, waves rolled in to the beach, a constant, soothing huffing and shuffling sound. Gulls hovered against crisp blue early-spring sky. Bundled-up people wandered along the waterline, occasionally stooping to pick up rocks. It was a good beach for agates and broken pieces of sand dollars.
Suki drank half a cup of black coffee. “It’s so strange being in town. Everywhere I look, I see things I used to be afraid of or used to wish I could do, places I wished I could go. Now I can. Walk on the beach whenever I want to, get my feet wet, my clothes dirty, go in all the stores and buy whatever I want, say anything I want whenever I want to. Heck, just talk out loud.” She glanced around the restaurant. “And say really stupid things.”
“You have to try harder if you want to be stupid,” Matt said.
“What?” Suki smiled, and it was like dawn breaking.
“You’re out of practice. You could start working on it now.”
“Where do I start?”
“Uh.” Matt put lots of cream and sugar in her coffee, then stirred, her spoon clinking against the sides of the coffee cup, and thought. “It’s not so easy. I don’t know if there’s some kind of formula. I bet there is, like put two things that aren’t connected in the same sentence, but that seems like a lot of work.”
“When you figure it out, tell me. Meantime, could you tell me about the broken fiddle?”
“House gave me a dream about Julio last night. The time he got possessed. The bad guy made him fall on this fiddle he borrowed from Mr. Noah.”
“Mr. Noah,” Edmund said. “I forgot about Mr. Noah.”
Cindy the waitress brought a pot of hot water over to the table with a selection of herbal teas for Edmund to mix and match. She had been working at the restaurant for more than twenty years, and she liked it. Matt had talked to her about it their first morning. “You want your usual?” Cindy asked them.
“Sounds good to me,” Matt said. Breakfast was her favorite meal. She liked lots of everything: eggs over medium, bacon, sausages, pancakes, and a large orange juice.
“Can I try a different omelet? The one with goat cheese and chives in it.” Suki pointed to her choice on the menu. “Is that one good?”
Cindy grinned and shook her head. “I never eat anything that comes out of a goat. You’re on your own, kid.”
“Oh, well. I’ll try it.” Suki was still working out what kind of tastes she liked, now that she could actually taste things.
Cindy made a note on her order pad, and checked with Edmund, who smiled and nodded. She headed for the kitchen.
“Julio fell on a fiddle?” Suki said.
“You missed a lot of that. I forgot,” said Matt.
“I missed that part too,” Edmund said. “I knew he was carrying something broken when we left the house in the mountains, but I didn’t know the whole story.”
“The bad guy was bossing Julio around. He made Julio leave the high school before Julio could put the fiddle away. At the house, Julio tried to get away. He was still carrying that fiddle, trying to keep it safe, but the guy ordered him to stop. Julio fell right on the fiddle and broke it. It made him madder than anything else.”
“It would,” said Suki.
“It was a special fiddle. Really expensive. Did he ever manage to pay for it?”
“He never mentioned it to me,” Edmund said. He gazed up, consulting memories. “He worked hard after that, but he had always worked hard.”
“Which reminds me.” Suki checked her watch.
“You have a job interview this morning?” Matt asked. “What is it this time?”
“Typist-receptionist at a dentist’s office.”
Cindy came and put food in front of them, Edmund got a plate of hash browns, some cottage cheese, and fresh fruit. The guy definitely didn’t know how to eat.
“Typist, huh? Not exactly the job you studied for at Stanford,” Edmund said.
“I didn’t study for a job. Taking classes gave me an excuse to pay attention to a lot of things that weren’t about me.” Suki took a bite of her omelet and sat back to taste it for a while.
Matt ate eggs and bacon and watched Suki, whose taste buds had just started working again after years of being shut down. Matt loved watching Suki taste things. It was almost like eating everything for the first time herself.
Suki finally smiled. “Yep,” she said. “This is a good one. That’s five good ones I know about now, and two really bad ones. I wish coffee tasted better.
“Put lots of stuff in it, like I do,” Matt suggested.
Suki frowned. She poured cream into her coffee, added two packets of sugar, stirred, and tasted. “Hey. That is better. More like the ice cream.” Suki smiled and tasted coffee again, then tried another bite of omelet.
“Gloria? Is that you?”
Color drained from Suki’s face. She looked up. They all did.
“It can’t be, can it?” said the woman. She was a large woman.
She wore a stylish shiny batik-print top in turquoise and silver, and black slacks. Her gray hair was short and spiky. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Excuse me.” She turned away.
Suki licked her upper lip. “Mrs. Owen?”
The woman turned back, her eyebrows high, her dark eyes apprehensive. “Do I know you?” she asked in a low, tight voice.
“It’s me. Susan. Gloria’s daughter.”
The woman blinked. Then blinked again. “Susan? Oh, Susan!” She came to the table and grasped Suki’s hands. “How amazing to see you! Are you doing well?”
“Actually, I am.” Suki smiled.
“I’m so glad you got—oh dear.” She frowned, glanced at Matt and Edmund.
Matt tried her friendliest smile, and the woman’s frown lessened.
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