A Fistful of Sky (7 page)

I held the phone away from my ear and listened to the ticking silence of the center after hours. Beryl said there was still something menacing around. I had no sense of it anymore. I just felt stupid. I edged over and peeked across the top of Linda’s desk. No silhouette in the window.

A knock sounded on the door. I jerked and fell forward, the phone tumbling from my lap. “Gyp?” Jasper called through the wood.

“Gyp?” Beryl yelled from the phone. “What happened? You okay?”

I struggled to catch my breath. My heart staggered and hit me hard. I managed to say, “It’s all right. Jasper.” My words were half breath, half sound.

“Whoa!” Beryl said. “Okay. Good.”

“Gyp? You there?”

“Gotta go.” I hung up the phone. My hands shook as I put it back on the desk. Then I swayed to my feet and stumbled to the door.

“Gyp?” Jasper pounded on the door.

I unlocked it and let him in.

“What happened?”

“You scared me.”

He looked exasperated. “Well, what was I supposed to do?”

“No. No. It’s all right. Not your fault.” I pulled him into the building and hugged him. He stood stiff in my embrace. “Thanks for coming,” I whispered before I let him go. He patted my shoulder. “Okay. There’s no one out here.

Let’s go home.”

I got my backpack. I took a last look around the center to see if I had left everything the way it was supposed to be, and decided it was okay enough.

“Hey?” said a hearty male voice from outside.

I jumped again. Then settled. I had Jasper with me now. Nothing could get me.

“Anybody in there? Why’s this door open?” A dark face appeared in the doorway. “Oh, hi.” He stepped in through the door. He wore a blue uniform.

“Mr. Perez!” He was one of the school security guards.

“Hey, Gypsy. What are you doing here so late?”

“I lost track of time.”

“Who’s your boyfriend? You guys messing around in here?” “This is my brother, Jasper. He came to take me home. Jasper, this is Mr. Perez.”

“Howdy,” said Mr. Perez. He shook hands with Jasper.

“Hi.”

“We were just leaving.”

“Okay. Have a good night. Gypsy, don’t leave the door open after dark if you’re all alone, okay? Bad things happen sometimes.”

“I know. Thanks.” I tugged Jasper’s hand, and we went outside. Mr. Perez watched as I locked up, then waved and walked on into the fog.

Jeeze! Santa Tekla City College had security! Why hadn’t I just called the campus cops? That would have been faster. Less trouble for the family. The sane response.

Feeling like an idiot, I turned to my brother. “I could have called him. I didn’t even think of it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He worked his hand, and I dropped it. “You want to ride home on the back of the motorcycle? I brought the extra helmet.”

“If you could just walk me to my car… .”

“Where is it?”

“In the Speare Beach lot.”

“Jeeze, that’s half a mile away!”

“I always park there. When I get here in the morning, all the close places are taken.”

I’m in the visitor’s lot at the top of the hill. Let’s get the bike and I’ll drive you down.”

” ‘Kay.”

Fog drifted across the nighttime campus from the nearby ocean, glowed under the orange lights. The air was cool and damp. I followed my

brother’s broad leather-jacketed back. A feeling of contentment settled over me. I felt like I was a kid again, with Jasper leading me into another adventure.

But that was ridiculous.

I moved up beside him. “Did you notice anybody hanging around the center?”

He glanced at me, then shook his head.

I stared at the ground as I walked. “Sorry.”

“Why?”

“I got you out here for no reason.”

He shook his head again. “Maybe I scared him away. Better safe, you know?”

“You had other plans for tonight, I’m sure.”

“Not until ten. I can still make it. Celtic Knot’s playing at the Bismarck. You want to come?”

He hadn’t invited me to listen to live music with him in a long time. He had this girl he was seeing, Trina, the latest in a string of girls he’d been seeing; he did lots of things with her, and left the family out of his plans these days. Mama said having a girlfriend was a natural step in his development, and we should quit bothering him about it.

Sometimes I was really conscious of how odd my family was. Most people our age moved out of the house, went away to college, got their own apartments. Opal lived in L.A. But Jasper still lived at home, and so did I, even though we were old enough to leave. Mama said not to worry about it. LaZelles didn’t have to live like anybody else; it was customary for us to cluster. She said it was okay with her if I never moved out.

I was heading for my twenty-first birthday in the spring. I didn’t know what to think about Mama’s offer. Sometimes I talked it over with Claire.

Claire had gone through a rebel-against-every thing-July-does phase where she utterly rejected her witch upbringing. She had moved to an apartment across town when she was eighteen. She got a job waitressing and took a year off from school, then went to college at UCST, where her mom was a cultural anthropology professor.

Since she had moved out, though, she’d been exploring the craft again. She could finally look at it as something separate from family, something she might want to use. After all, she knew all about it already. Now that she had a little distance, she could appreciate it.

Sometimes I went to Claire’s place to study. We went to movies together. Her apartment was tiny; you did almost everything in one big room except cook or go to the bathroom or shower. The kitchen was so small that you could stand in one place and open the refrigerator and the oven and every cupboard she had, plus you could wash dishes without doing anything but turn around. The bathroom was like that, too. A rug a foot square covered all the ground there was; you stood on it to brush your teeth, your feet rested on it when you used the toilet, and it was where you stepped when you got out of the shower.

It was very cute. Sometimes, though, when Claire really Wanted to, she came to our house and took a four-hour bath.

“Why should you move out?” Claire had asked. “You get along with your folks, you’ve got those cute brothers ^d Beryl, there’s a big old pool and a hot tub in your backyard, you can walk to the beach, you guys have a giant * v, and you’re not going to be able to afford an apartment w ith a kitchen like that. Besides, as long as you live at home, you don’t have to pay rent.”

‘Daddy says I should start paying rent if I’m still living at home when I’m thirty.”

See? Free ride for another ten years! No rent, no utilities, no phone or cable bills. Hey, can I move into your house?”

“Opal’s room is up for grabs.”

We had grinned at each other, then went back to eating microwave popcorn and watching Men in Black.

“What’s Celtic Knot?” I asked Jasper.

“It’s a band.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“Celtic technopop. I’ve never heard them live. They got the gig at the Bismarck. We auditioned there, but they didn’t hire us, you know?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Jasper’s band, River Run, was still in the formative stages. They did instrumental Celtic and contra dance music, but they hadn’t rehearsed enough to be solid yet. “I need to make myself some dinner.”

“Make enough for two and I’ll definitely take you to the show.”

“You’ll fix my I.D.?”

” ‘Course.” He’d been fogging ages on driver’s licenses for years so he could get into places to see bands before he was old enough to drink. Now he was legal, and I was going to be soon. How weird was that?

At his Honda motorcycle, he unlocked the two helmets and handed me the blue one. He rolled the bike off its kickstand, kicked down on the starter, and turned it toward the exit, and then I climbed on behind him and held on. This, too, reminded me of old times, when he was sixteen and got his license and I was fourteen and still, potentially, a full member of our family, despite Jasper’s predicter mystery on my behalf. We burned up a lot of back roads in the mountains above town back then, and found many strange people and places.

It was a short ride from the upper parking lot down to the lot at the beach. Through the fog, Christmas lights glowed on the palm trees by the Pelican’s entrance, and rock versions of Christmas carols sounded on the damp air.

The night was cold even through my jacket, and Jasper’s jacket was cold too. I didn’t care. I felt safe.

Jasper pulled up to the entrance to the Speare Beach lot. To get in, you had to take a ticket, although the ticket booth wasn’t manned this late at night. My lime-green Mazda Protege was one of six cars in the lot.

He pulled the motorcycle over by the divider where adolescent palm trees grew and dropped the kickstand. “Want me to walk you to the car?”

“I’ll be all right. Thanks. In case I didn’t already tell you. Thanks.”

“You told me.” He smiled.

“I’m so glad you’re my brother.”

He yawned. “Let’s go home and you fix dinner!”

“Yeah, yeah.” I took off the helmet and handed it to him, then headed across the lot. My car was at the far end, barely visible through the orange-stained fog.

Maybe I should come to school earlier and find better parking spots. On the other hand, this was the only exercise I got.

Halfway there, my neck prickled. I glanced sideways.

Was someone standing under that palm tree? Watching me?

I clutched my pack and ran toward my car.

The dark figure paced me, traveling along the curb.

My footsteps slapped loud on the asphalt, but I didn’t hear a sound from my pursuer.

I glanced back. Had Jasper already left?

No. He was running across the lot toward me, but he was twice as far away as the person under the trees.

I put on a burst of adrenaline-fueled speed, and bumped into my car. Scrabbling through my pockets, I found my keys at last, opened the driver-side door, and collapsed into the car, I slammed and locked the door.

The chasing figure evaporated.

Jasper dropped from the air to the ground right beside my car, spun to look. His head turned as he surveyed the parking lot.

I tried to catch my breath. It took me a while.

Eventually Jasper knocked on my window, and I lowered it. “Did you see it?” I asked him.

“Yeah.” He sounded ragged too. “I don’t know what that was, Gyp. I don’t even know if it was a person.”

Freezing marbles rolled around in my stomach. “What else could it be?”

He shook his head. “We better talk to Tobias.”

I drove straight home, with Jasper following on his motorcycle.

It was strange to go home, the house looked so everyday. So many places on the route were shining with lights, and the businesses along the Old Coast Highway had holiday scenes painted on their windows. Usually by the week before Christmas, Mama had assigned us our holiday chores, and everybody had worked to decorate the house. You could expect to see the house’s lights from down the street, competing with the displays of our neighbors, some of whom turned their lawns into shrines to reindeer and choristers and even Mother and Child.

This year Mama hadn’t said anything yet. Not that we expected surprises. I was pretty sure my job was to make cookies again, so I planned a big bake on Saturday.

Mama hated it when I parked the car in the turnaround out front. I was supposed to go to my assigned spot under the giant Morton Bay fig tree by the side of the house, where my car would be hidden from the view of all but a couple of guest house windows. Hermina lived in the guest house, and didn’t complain about what she saw. Beryl and I parked there; Flint hadn’t managed to get and keep a car yet; when Opal came home for a visit, she was supposed to park in the street. Jasper was supposed to lock his motorcycle in the garage where Dad had his shop set up.

Tonight we both ignored the rules and parked by the front door.

The house was huge, square, and ochre yellow, with lights on in the windows behind all the curtains, and lights that shone up on the front of the house from the shrubs. Cliff swallows nested under the eaves all along the front of the house. Mama didn’t like the mess they made, but Dad asked for special dispensation because he liked the baby birds, the constant come-and-go of the parents in their smooth swoops, and she relented and let the birds build there.

The house was woven around with protect spells. It looked like a vision of paradise. Inside I knew I’d be safe.

I climbed out of the car and almost forgot my pack in my hurry to get inside. I unlocked the front door, went through the foyer past Dad’s study on the left and the immense structure of the three-section staircase on the right to the great hall. I heard television sounds from behind the TV divider to the left in the great hall. Serious voices and classy music with no laugh track made me suspect PBS, with Mama and Dad watching. They liked to unwind with heavy TV after dinner and work.

I turned right past the staircase, away from the TV alcove into the hallway that led between the kitchen and the dining room. I was starving.

Jasper caught up to me in the kitchen, where I headed for the fridge, the breadbox, and various tins in search of something to eat.

“I looked,” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

“Oh, God! Do you think it could have followed us? I never even thought—” If the follower were supernatural, of course it could have followed us.

Why?

“Gotta talk to Uncle, but I have to eat first,” I mumbled.

‘You made it!” Beryl rushed up and hugged me.

“Yeah. Thanks for staying on the phone with me.” I found a package of Oreos, broke it open, and stuffed one in my mouth. “Thanks for finding Jasper for me,” I mumbled through a mouthful of black crumbs and frosting.

“No problem.”

“That’s not cooking,” Jasper said.

“Too hungry to wait.” I held the package out to him, and he grabbed some cookies.

“Not as good as homemade,” he said after he ate two. I ate three. The hunger pangs in my stomach stopped gnawing.

“All right, all right. I’ll make you a batch of whatever kind of cookies you want on Saturday. I’m doing the big Christmas bake then anyway.”