“What does it do?” Matt asked into the flame. No heat came from it. As she spoke, it flickered.
“Is it safe for you to stay in the house?”
“Yes,” she said. A thin streak of yellow shot through the flame.
“Are you speaking for yourself?”
“I think so,” she said, and this time the flame stayed blue.
“Will what the house gave you hurt you?”
“No. It will protect me.” Blue flame, no other color.
He frowned, then murmured. “Thank you, flame. Thank you, spirit.” The flame flickered out.
“So was it me talking?” Matt asked.
“Yeah.”
“The yellow meant what?”
“You don’t know the answer to that question. Doubts come into it.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the answer either.”
Matt plucked a blade of grass. She tore it across, and across, and across, until she had a handful of green grass bits. “Being safe isn’t as important as knowing I’m making the choices for myself.”
“I agree.”
“I think I’m ready to go back now.”
He took her hand, rose, and pulled her to her feet. “Suki made tea. You want some? There’s cookies.”
More free food! Matt sighed. “I have to get a job.” They headed toward the house.
“Right now?” he asked.
She knew he was laughing at her. “No, not right now,” she said.
They went through the kitchen and the dining room, and into the living room, where Suki and the twins drank tea and talked, and Nathan just talked.
“What’s the next step in the big plan?” Terry asked, as Matt and Edmund came into the room. “There is a big plan, right?”
Terry and Tasha sat beside each other on a fainting couch, Terry leaning against the part that curved up, Tasha upright and energetic. They didn’t look at all alike.
“I don’t—” Matt began, and then found herself saying, “Find Julio.” She sat in one of the wing chairs. Suki gave her a cup of tea, a napkin, and a plate with assorted cookies on it. “Thanks,” Matt said.
“You’re welcome.” Suki poured a cup of tea for Edmund, assembled a plate of cookies and napkin, handed them to him, and sat down on the chair next to Matt’s.
Nathan crossed his arms and leaned against the mantel.
“Do you know any seek spells, Terry?” asked Edmund. He settled in a chair to Matt’s other side. “My basic one doesn’t work on Julio.”
“I have a whole bunch,” Terry said. “Want to get started now?”
“Right now I want some tea,” said Edmund.
“Do we actually need Julio for whatever it is we’re doing here?” asked Tasha. “What is it we’re doing here?” She glanced from Matt to Nathan.
Nathan shook his head.
“You don’t know? If you don’t know, who does? Matt?”
“I don’t know either. At first we were just going to find Edmund’s friends so he could see them again after being out of touch for so long, but the house has some other thing it wants.”
“The house wants something?” Terry said.
The sound of a car in the street came faintly to them. Matt could feel the house’s excitement through her feet, and knew the car had parked by the fence. A car door slammed. The gate creaked open.
Matt put her plate and cup on one of the parlor tables and ran to the front door. Something hummed in her chest, excitement or anticipation. She went out on the porch and saw Deirdre walking toward her through the blackberry bushes.
“Hi!”
“Hey, Matt.”
Nathan stood beside Matt, and the others came out of the house too.
“Dee,” said Suki. She jumped off the porch and ran to Deirdre. “Hey, Dee!” She wrapped her arms around Deirdre, who leaned into it.
“Hey, Susan,” she murmured. She pushed away, stared at Suki’s face. “God, you look great!”
“Well, thanks! So do you!”
Deirdre looked over Suki’s shoulder, then nodded and came to stand below the porch. She met Nathan’s steady gaze.
“Hey, Nathan,” she said in her low, gruff voice after they had stared at each other for a while.
“Hi.” Nathan smiled. “It’s great to see you.”
“You look good,” said Deirdre.
“You look wonderful,” he said. “I look the same as I always do, don’t I?”
“Nope. More solid. Your checks—kind of rosy, you look almost alive. Hey, twins. God, we all grew up, didn’t we?”
Tasha laughed, walked down the steps, and went to Deirdre. “May I touch you?” she asked.
“What the hell kind of weird question is that?”
“A yes or no question. It’s part of the way I’m a witch.”
“Hey. Knock yourself out,” Deirdre said, amused.
Tasha touched Deirdre’s cheek, chin, forehead, lips. Deirdre looked puzzled, but she stood still for it. “Oh, my,” said Tasha at last. “Coyote.”
“Whoa. How’d you know?”
“My way of being a witch.” Wind touched Tasha’s hair, lifted her curls, washed across the hem of the pale green shirt she wore. “It followed you here. Interesting.”
Deirdre turned to look behind her.
“Not in that form. Want some tea?”
“Tea? Well, hell, why not?” Deirdre followed Tasha up onto the porch. “Hey, other twin. Hey, House!”
“Hey, Deirdre,” said the house. “Glad you could come.”
“Thanks.” Deirdre patted the doorframe as she walked into the house.
When everyone had settled in the living room and everyone had tea, Terry said to Matt, “So, you were saying the house wants something. House, what do you want?”
“I cannot tell you yet.”
“What are we supposed to do, hang around till you’re ready to talk?” Terry sounded irritated. “How long will that take?”
The house didn’t answer. Suki said, “Well, there’s plenty of room, anyway. Dee, your room is still open; Terry and Tasha put their things in the attic. Can you all spend at least one night?”
“I guess,” said Terry.
“I’m going down to the beach,” Tasha said, “and taste the wind here. Want to come, Sis?”
“What about those seek spells Edmund asked for?” asked Terry.
“Let’s do them after supper. Hey, Suki, do you know if that really good seafood place on the highway is still open? Hesperos?”
“It moved to a bigger building a couple blocks down the street, but yes, it’s still open. I haven’t tried it since I came back, but I’ve heard people talking about it. They say it’s still good.”
“That place gets my vote for dinner,” said Tasha. “I haven’t had good seafood in months. Anybody else want to go to the beach now?”
“I’ll go,” Deirdre said. “I haven’t been to the beach in years.”
“I’d like to go too,” Suki said. “I don’t think I’ve really walked on the beach since I came back. Looked at it from car windows and restaurant windows, but not walked or gotten my feet wet. Is it warm enough to wade?”
“We’ll find out when we get there. Sometimes in spring the water’s really cold,” Tasha said.
“If you wait a minute, I’ll go too,” Terry said. “I just need to get some containers. I could use some sand and seawater.” She ran up the stairs.
Matt drank tea and watched them run around as they got ready for their expedition. Well, maybe this was a vacation trip for them. Why not? If the house wasn’t going to tell them what it wanted …
A few minutes later, Tasha, Terry, Deirdre, and Suki had left the house. Nathan had faded sometime during all the running around, which made Matt wonder if he was all right. All these old friends had come to visit, and Matt couldn’t tell whether Nathan was glad to see them.
Edmund looked at Matt.
She said, “I had a thought.”
“Yes?”
“If seek spells don’t
work, we could act like regular people and try to track Julio down without magic. Like, check a phone book, see if he’s listed, or his mom, I bet she knows where he is, so if we could find her … Go to his old apartment house and ask the people there if they know where he went. Maybe I could ask the building if it knows where he is. Maybe we could find that Mr. Noah guy and ask him. What do you think?”
“I think that’s a great idea. Do you want to go looking now?”
Matt glanced toward the window. Bright sunlight shone on blackberry bushes outside. It was another beautiful, almost-spring day.
All she wanted to do was sleep. She yawned.
Edmund smiled. “I’ll go find a phone book and check, see if Julio or Juanita or Mr. Noah is still listed. If you’re awake when I get back, we can visit the apartment building, okay?”
Matt yawned again. “Can you get a paper too? We could check the want ads for jobs.” It was a strange idea. Already she had a home, and now she was thinking about job-hunting. A job would stick you down to a place like flypaper.
She wanted to reclaim her independence, though, even if she did it this new way. A job meant money, and money meant she could buy groceries like a regular person and not be a total mooch. She could find food in Dumpsters and trash cans, but she was pretty sure her friends wouldn’t want to share it, and she wanted to give back to them.
Besides, she could always quit and move on.
The whole idea made her tired.
“Sure,” he said.
“I have to take a nap,” Matt said. “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay.” He gave her a little kiss and took off.
Matt stumbled upstairs. She went into her room, took off her pants, slipped under the covers of the bed, punched the pillow until it took the shape she wanted, and lay down. “Nathan? Are you all right?” she asked.
Nathan appeared by her bed. “I’m fine,” he said. He looked strange and gloomy, though.
“Are you mad that we went and invited those people here?”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “It’s great to see them. Thank you for finding them.”
“Do you know what’s going on with the house?”
“Only some of it.”
Matt yawned again. “I’ll ask you again later. Sorry about this.”
“It’s all right, Matt. Sleep well.” He smiled and vanished.
Matt closed her eyes. Then she reached out to the wall and thought,—No more dreams!—
—All right.—
Chapter Twelve
There was a lunchtime jam/dance/potluck at a grange in the country, with music continuing all afternoon: one of the local fiddlers had invited Lia and Harry to it after he met them at a folk festival at the University Student Union Building in town.
Lia set the thing that looked like a tape recorder on the podium and pushed the “record” button. She smiled and nodded to the ninety-two-year-old man, and he lifted the bow of his fiddle and started “Earl’s Waltz,” a song he had written himself. The backup musicians joined in: three guitar players strumming with picks and without finesse, a string bass player who plucked the strings with his fingers instead of bowing, a woman with a mandolin, and three other fiddle players, sawing along quietly toward the back of the group. One of them was just a boy, thirteen, fourteen. He had already won state fiddle contests in the peewee and junior divisions.
People who sat on the benches along the walls listened to the first few bars of the tune for beat, for recognition. When they figured out that it was something they could dance to, they rose, found partners, and waltzed across the floor.
Lia had brought her violin with her, but it was still in its furlined case. She sat on a chair near the front of the grange hall, only a few feet from the musicians, and opened to the music.
The song flowed into her. She saw images: flowers on a branch, opening their petals a little, furling them tight, opening again, a little wider, then closing. Teasing each other. Also she saw a Busby Berkeley picture, as though she floated below a roof, of women dancing in wide skirts, moving just like the flowers: twirl, and the skirts spread out a little, countertwirl and they tightened again, twirl this way and they spread wider.
That was just the A part of the tune. In the B part, men in black pants danced around the wide-skirted women; the flowers leapt off their branches and floated, dancing, through the air.
Earl played his waltz through five times, accompanied by shuffling footsteps and the smiles of happy dancers. By the end, Lia had graven it into her memory and could have played it on any instrument there.
As people clapped, she went to her recorder and turned it off. “Thank you,” she told Earl.
“Any time, cutie,” he said. “Play you a fast one next.”
She smiled and put the recorder in her coat pocket; her coat was draped over her chair. Earl struck up “Stones Rag,” which she had already learned. A small gnome with grease-tamed silver-black hair, thick black-framed glasses and crabbed arthritic hands introduced himself as Stan and asked her to dance, and she took one of his hands in hers and rested her other hand at his waist, while he rested his other hand on her shoulder. They waited, looking toward the musicians, until Earl got the tune under way, then danced. Stan was a fine dancer. Lia let herself sink into music and movement, a combination she loved best of everything in the world.
They had just finished, and she was breathless and laughing as she thanked her partner, when she heard a song in her head.
She straightened. It was a summoning song, one she had trouble resisting. “Thank you again,” she said. “I’ve got to go.” She ran to collect her coat and violin, then went into the dining hall and touched Harry’s shoulder. He was playing Uno with some of the musicians’ wives. He looked strange this afternoon in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, out of his element, but not too uncomfortable. He glanced up, knew from her face that they had to leave, rose, put down his cards, and apologized to the women for not finishing the hand. They went outside.
“Someone’s calling me,” she told him as they approached his Mercedes. He opened the trunk. She put her coat and violin into it.
“Which kind of song is it?”
“Not the imperative one, but it’s probably important.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She kissed him. “Be ready. If it’s trouble, I might summon you.”
“So I shouldn’t drive home?”
“I’ll give you thirty seconds’ warning.”
“Got it.” He kissed her.
She clung to him a moment, then stepped away, let the song fill her, and went through little fire to where she was wanted.
terry knelt beside a tide pool and stared down into the water. Green-blue anemone tentacles waved gently. A tiny fish darted through the small space, and a hermit crab hauled its shell across underwater sand.
Terry plunged her hand down into the water and brought up a walnut-sized, dripping agate, pale, translucent, clouded. She held it up to let the sun through it. It shone apricot. The thrill of the hunt shot through her. When she stayed here in Guthrie with her aunt, she always came down to the beach at low tide and searched for agates, which lay broadcast like careless treasure in tidal pools and along the waterline. Big storms washed agates out of cliffs, and the ocean polished their edges with sand and brought them back here.
Someone stooped beside her. “Nice one.” His voice sounded flat.
She glanced up and saw the boy from the bar, his shaggy black hair fluttering in the breeze, his eyes golden in the sunlight. Underground-pale skin—he was going to burn if he wasn’t wearing sunscreen—and the same baggy worsted trousers, the cuffs rolled up, and blue work shirt, sleeves rolled up too. Slim black belt. Bare feet. He looked sixteen, and the last time she had seen him, he had talked as though he were sixty. Was he a ghost? She looked harder. She knew him from somewhere, somewhen, before she had seen him in the bar. Who was he?
“May I see?” he asked in his dull voice, hold
ing out a hand.
Terry handed him her agate. His hand curved around it, gentle as a nest around an egg, and he smiled: still a flat, affectless smile.
Then Terry remembered.
The silent boy who had helped the wicked witch the day Julio had been possessed, fifteen years before. The boy had stood in the shadows while Terry and the other friends from the haunted house were there, and he had cast only one spell that she had seen, a quick protect spell crafted with gestures while his master let Julio out of the circle of confinement. The spell had guarded against Julio, in the event he went crazy and started attacking, Terry supposed.
“Hey,” she said sharply. “Where did your boss get off attacking my friend?”
The boy blinked and looked at her. “What?”
“I saw you before, didn’t I? In some house up in the mountains? Your boss grabbed my friend Julio and put a demon in his body.”
The boy cocked his head. “Hmm. I didn’t realize you were one of those witches. Of course, you’ve grown and changed since I last saw you.”
“And you haven’t. What are you?”
“A researcher. The wing of immortality brushed over me some time back. I am aging, but very slowly. It’s frustrating. No one takes a boy my apparent age seriously. Fortunately, there’s a lot one can do in e-mail and on the net these days, where my appearance doesn’t distract.”
“A researcher,” Terry repeated. “What does that make your boss?”
“My master is a mystery and a wizard. He’s taught me a lot of magic, but there are more things he keeps secret from me. I don’t know how old he is, but he was old when he chose me to be his apprentice, in 1932.”
“What? That can’t, be right.” Terry stared at the boy’s face, and realized that not only did he have this dull, seen-everything voice, but he had very old eyes.
He smiled at her, and again she felt an unwelcome flutter of interest and sympathy in her chest. “Don’t use glamour on me,” she said in a cross voice.
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