A Fistful of Sky (8 page)

“A really big batch? Two kinds? Snickerdoodles and Tollhouse.”

“You got it.” I checked the crisper drawer and found some green and red peppers, red onion, mushrooms, and broccoli. Also we had feta crumbles and eggs. Enough interesting stuff for an omelet. “Should I actually fix dinner?” I checked the clock. Nine-thirty. I wasn’t ready to leave the house again, not if that thing was outside waiting for me. “Maybe you should go on ahead to the club? I don’t think I want to go after all.”

“First things first. Forget dinner. Grab whatever else you want to eat, and let’s go talk to Tobias,” Jasper said. “I have to call Trina and tell her 111 probably be late if I make it at all.”

“What happened at the college?” Beryl asked.

“Nobody there when I got there,” Jasper said.

“Nobody there? But I thought—I mean, even right at the end when we said good-bye, I felt something—” She bit her lip and stared at me. “There’s still something.” She shook her head. “The house masks it.”

Jasper said, “All I found when I got there was Gyp. All quivering!”

“Shut up,” I said.

“The thing showed up when we went to Gyp’s car, though. It was scary. Is Tobias still up?”

We all glanced up and toward the right, where Tobias’s tower was, its third-story room higher than the rest of the house, the secret fourth story higher still.

“I don’t know,” said Beryl. Tobias had made new rules since everybody had graduated from basic training. He had his own life, he said, and nobody should bother him after nine at night unless it was an emergency.

“I think we have an emergency,” Jasper said.

I found a bag of baby carrots, a banana, and some saltines. I put them all on a plate and poured myself a glass of milk while Jasper made a phone call to his girlfriend.

All three of us went up the stairs. On the way, we passed the TV alcove in the great hall again, and I still didn’t stop to greet my parents. Why hadn’t I told them about the Follower? From the start I had asked my siblings for help, and hadn’t even thought about my parents. There

wasn’t much Dad could do in supernatural matters, but Mama was strong in every direction.

Strong, but she gave you hell if you asked for help and didn’t really need it. I was pretty well trained not to ask her if I only suspected I had a problem. Well, I was home, and safe, and I only owed Jasper some cookies, and maybe a dinner sometime. Problem somewhat solved.

I munched crackers as we went. We reached the top of the stairs, turned right, went down the hall, traversed the sitting room outside our bedrooms. I knocked on the narrow black door that opened onto the spiral staircase that led up to Tobias’s tower. I heard muttering and thumping. A couple minutes later Tobias opened the door. His thick hair stood up in a ruffle on his head, and he wore a blue terry bathrobe and slippers. I’d never seen him in such informal dress before.

“Something important?” he asked in a dry voice.

“Something followed me.”

His eyes narrowed. He fished some half-glasses out of his robe’s pocket and put them on, studied me. Three times his tongue ticked against the roof of his mouth. “Come up,” he said at last. He turned and led the way upstairs.

Jasper and Beryl and I followed. I was mesmerized by the sight of Tobias’s bare legs, which were pale and muscular and forested with white hair. I had never even seen my great-great-uncle in a bathing suit; somehow I had imagined that he spent his life inside of clothes. I wasn’t sure I was ready to learn that he had hair on his legs.

In the lower tower room was the school room, with a round table in its center where we had had our lessons before Tobias graduated us, and where Tobias now studied and did workings. The air smelled faintly of nag champa incense and book dust. Tobias’s bedroom was in the room above, right under the pointed tower roof. None of us had ever seen it.

He turned on his hotplate and put a tea kettle on. “Go on.”

We went to our usual places at the table and sat. I set my plate and milk on the black velvet tablecloth. “It waited outside my work at school. I was afraid to leave. Jasper came to get me, and it disappeared, but it came back down by my car.”

“Jasper?”

“I was prepared for it to be some creepy stalker guy. I don’t know what

it was.”

“Any intuitions?”

“It’s supernatural,” Jasper said.

Beryl said, “There’s atmospherics, even now.”

Tobias smiled at her. “Good observation.”

“Do you know what it is, Uncle?” she asked.

He stared over my head at the west tower window and the night outside. “I have ideas.” His gaze lowered to my face; the pupils of his eyes widened. “You’ve been sick.”

“Sure, I had the flu last weekend. You knew that. You got me Gerry pictures.”

“You were sick while we were all gone. Was it very bad?”

I shrugged.

Tobias leaned closer, staring into my face. “Was it very bad?” he asked again.

“I don’t know.” I leaned back. His gaze was so intent I felt it. I shrugged again and looked away.

“Gypsum.”

Jasper and Beryl stared at me, too. I picked at a scuff in the tablecloth, then glanced up. “Sure, I was really sick.”

“All alone.” Tobias’s voice was a whisper.

“I called July, and she stayed with me.”

“July!”

“You were all gone. She came right over. She was great! She’s always great.”

“You had July watch over you while you went through transition?”

“Transition!” My stomach dropped down into a bottomless pit, and my hands iced over. “What do you mean, transition? I’m too old for transition.” I checked my brother and sister. They looked as shocked as I felt. Transition! I’d never heard of anybody going through transition at twenty. Maybe everything would change now. Maybe I’d finally be a real member of the family. Tiny tendrils of hope unfurled in my mind.

Tobias didn’t look happy, though. “What did she say? Did she tell you

how sick you were?”

“Transition,” I whispered.

“Gypsum.”

“She almost called an ambulance, but then my fever broke and I got better.”

“She didn’t say anything about … accidents?”

I shook my head. “Transition, Uncle?”

“Late transition.”

His voice sounded so cold and dark I waited for what he was going to say next. All my life I had longed for some kind of power. Wasn’t that what transition was? Growing into some kind of power? What did late transition mean?

“Do you feel your power, Gyp?”

I took a couple deep breaths and tried to see If I felt different from the way I had last week, before I got sick. How horrible would it be to go through transition and not even get anything out of it? My stomach rolled over. It had been doing that since the weekend. I hadn’t thrown up, though, just felt a little sick off and on. Was that what power felt like?

“Does power make you sick?” I asked.

Something tightened his face until I saw the bones beneath the skin. I usually didn’t wonder how old GreatUncle Tobias was. He didn’t look old, but I knew he had lived a long time. He could remember things that had happened before there were cars, telephones, movies, though he didn’t talk about that much unless it came up in the context of something else. Now I thought, he’s more than a hundred years old. I can see it for the first time.

“I understand transition makes you sick, but it seemed like everybody else felt much better afterward,” I said. I hoped that If I talked fast enough, he’d turn back into his regular self. “I felt much better afterward. Except I’m still kind of sick to my stomach every once in a while. I mean, not that I think that was transition. How could it be? You never told us it could happen this late.”

“Sometimes it happens late in the interests of mercy.”

“Mercy!”

“If, afterward, you have one of the unkind powers.”

I sucked in a big breath and forgot how to let it out again.

Jasper and Beryl stared at me.

Tobias put a hand on my head. “Breathe,” he said.

Breath rushed out of me. In a moment, I managed to breathe in again, and out. Calm flowed into me from Tobias’s hand.

“We haven’t done any of the right things for you, child. We should have noticed this coming on. We should have watched over you, helped you through. Now we should celebrate.”

“Celebrate an unkind power?”

“Every transition is some kind of gift.”

“But I—” If transition was a gift, what had it given me? I hadn’t noticed any spurts or glories or anything else. I had no sense that there was power inside me and I could use It. I laughed. “No. I was just sick. Boring, normal sick. There’s no—what makes you think—?” I stared up at him. His eyes looked dark and ancient. A moment later, though, he smiled. I coughed. “What’s an unkind power? The power of curses, like GreatGreat-Aunt Meta died of?”

“Probably.” He stroked my hair. “There are several kinds: backwards power, souring power, others we don’t need to speak of unless it turns out you have them. We can do a diagnostic if you like.”

Bewildered, I looked at Jasper. “But when he—but when Opal—right away, they could do things.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Not yet. You had better start, or you’ll get sicker.”

“Start … start cursing things?”

“Yes, if that’s your power. The sooner the better.”

“Uncle? What does this have to do with the stalker?” Beryl asked.

“Look.” He nodded toward the window.

A face peered in, pale against the darkness. I screamed and jumped up, backed to the wall across the room from the window. My heart struck hard inside my ribs.

JASPER rose to his feet. “How did it get here? Why don’t the wards

drive it away? Uncle!”

Beryl licked her lip and walked to the window. “But—” She glanced at Tobias, then reached for the latch. He nodded, and she opened the window.

The figure paused on the windowsill. It stared at me. Then it stepped into the room. It was all swathed in black, its hair dark, only its face pale. It stood silent.

“But Gyp,” Jasper said. “It’s you.”

I held my hand against my chest. Slowly I came away from the wall and walked toward the stranger. Was that what I looked like? Oval, pale face, chubby, rosy cheeks, deep-set hazel eyes below dark brows, clever mouth. Hair a dark froth of curls. Body so hidden in black that I couldn’t make it out, not size nor shape.

I would never have seen myself in that face, but now that Jasper mentioned it, I looked harder. It was not the mirror me, but it looked a little like the photographed me. I usually didn’t look very hard at pictures of myself.

“Uncle,” I said.

The stalker stood quiet.

“It appears you did something pretty sophisticated. You split off the power part of yourself and sent it away. This usually takes training in techniques I haven’t taught any of you; it’s not a good thing to do. Untrained as you are, you didn’t completely sever your bond to it, which is a good thing; if you had cut it off, I’m not sure what would have happened. You would have been diminished, probably in horrible ways, that much I know. But look: it has found you, and now it wants to come home.”

She took a step toward me, held out dark-gloved hands.

I gulped and backed up. “She’s an unkind power?” I squeaked.

Tobias went to his tool cupboard and took out a wire loop as big as a head. He held it up and stared through it at the stranger. “Let me see in the language I know,” he murmured. Something flashed across the space inside the loop. “Thank you.” He lowered the loop. “Yes,” he said. “She is the power of curses.”

“But I don’t want the power of curses!”

“She’s part of you now. If you don’t accept her, you’ll most likely both sicken and die.”

“But—” I looked at Jasper, and at Beryl.

“Go on, Gyp. You can curse me,” Beryl said. She smiled at me, but she looked scared.

Curse my beloved little sister? My comfort, my friend? How could I? “But I don’t—”

“Come on,” Jasper said. “What’s a curse, anyway? We can ward against them.”

I looked into the stranger’s face. She looked sad, and somehow, strangely, beautiful. So unlike me.

“Please. Accept her,” said Tobias.

She was a power of curses.

She was a power.

She was part of me. How had I sent her away? I couldn’t remember doing anything powerful, not in my whole life, except when I borrowed or stole tools somebody else had put magic into. I had sat through so many lessons, though, printing instructions for dealing with power on my brain. Somehow I had cast her out, without even knowing she was there.

I held out a hand to her, and she took it. Her gloves were smooth butter leather, her hand warm as summer sun. I felt something stir under my skin, the slow brushing of a thousand butterfly wings. She spread my hand flat, with the palm up, and wrote something with her index finger on the heart of my hand. Then she held out her other hand to me.

I didn’t know what she wrote on my hand. I tried to remember magic signs Tobias had drilled into us years before, the ones that everybody with power used to ward and protect or dispel or summon, but they had blurred with time and disuse. I took her black-gloved hand and spelled COME HOME on it in English.

She stepped closer and hugged me. Why had I thought she was tall when she stood outside the center under the orange light? She was my exact height. She kissed my cheek. Her lips were hot, almost brand-hot. She pressed her lips to mine. I struggled and tried to pull away from her, because this seemed so strange and wrong, but she was stronger than I was. She wouldn’t let me go. The heat of her kiss spread through me. I felt strange, uncomfortable, excited.

Finally I had to breathe. I sucked in a deep breath, and somehow sucked her inside. My stomach roiled and turned over, and I felt burning everywhere under my skin.

I licked the roof of my mouth, then tasted my lips. They still burned.

Where was she, my power of curses? Had I just eaten a person? And all her leather clothes? What did that taste like?

Cinnamon and sugar.

I touched my lips. More intense heat spread across my cheeks. My brother and my sister and my uncle had watched me get my first kiss, and I had kissed—myself?