Holiday Magick (14 page)

Fox sighed dramatically. “I really can't take any more shopping today. That was the fourteenth store we've been to and that's my limit for the decade.”

“I just have one question.” Crow took Raven's arm as they strolled along the busy sidewalks, people passing around them like water parting for rocks in a stream.

“Ask away.” Fox pulled four black balls and one pearlescent one out of her pants pockets. She tossed them into the air.

“Is Mei your daughter?”

The balls changed direction, weaving a five-ball shower. “I suppose I may have enjoyed the company of a musician named Michi at one time.” She smiled enigmatically.

Crow and Raven exchanged a smile, realizing that was about as straight an answer as one could get from Fox.

That evening, Raven assumed his priest persona and knocked on the door of Mei's house. When Grandmother answered, Raven bowed and held out a package. “A gift for the young one, from the priest who fished her out of the river.”

“How did you know where we live?” she asked suspiciously.

“The newspaper people were kind enough to tell us,” improvised Raven.

“Ah.” She took the package from him. “Thank you.”

Raven turned and walked away without another word. When the door closed, Fox peeked out from a bush. “Well?”

“She took it.”

Once he was around the corner, he twisted reality and took to wing. He landed on the balcony next to Crow. They looked into the living room where Mei was curled up reading her favorite book about a fish that swam to the moon. Her doll was dangling off the side of the couch.

“I wanna build a rocket ship!” Mei declared.

“Not today, dear,” her grandmother said absently as she came into the living room, reading the return address on the package. “This just arrived. I think it's from that priest.”

Mei jumped up, knocking Fish onto the floor. “Can I open it?”

Grandmother set the package down on the table and read the attached note.
“Dear Mei, Please be more careful with your dolls in the future. I may not be there to fish you out of the water next time. Enclosed is something for your doll shrine. May they keep you safe.”
She carefully inspected the paper then said, “I suppose that would be all right.”

Mei unwrapped the cedar box. The lid was carved with cherry blossoms; a small fox paw was hidden among them. She lifted the lid and found two white fox statues.

From March 15–19th, Valencia, Spain holds
Las Fallas
. The five days of the festival are a party of parades, street vendors, dancing, and drinking. Every day has elaborate pyrotechnic shows, and everyone—from children to the elderly—sets off some type of firecracker. Throughout the event, beautiful floats and sculptures, called
ninots
, are created by the neighborhoods of Valencia, paraded around, and placed throughout the city. In the grand finale, each of the
ninots
is set ablaze.

The celebration is said to have started in the Middle Ages. Just before the equinox, people burned their junk or their wooden lantern-holders—not needed after the winter—to celebrate the return of longer days. The church adopted the festival and attached Saint Joseph to the holiday, reasoning that the use of wooden scaffolding fit with his work as a carpenter.

A few people know better, of course.

I swear this isn't going to be some dorky “How I Spent My Spring Break” essay that students write to show that they've truly matured and have not just gone on a long drinking binge. In fact, I really tried not to drink; my birth mom ended up pregnant with me thanks to such a spring break. Besides, my AP scores got me out of any English class that would require such an assignment. However, this is a story that just has to be shared.

Callie had the idea of going to Valencia, Spain, for our spring break after she saw photos from my Spanish project on the festival of Las Fallas: fireworks, burning floats, and parties. She was a closet pyromaniac—ok, so was I, but
I
never did anything that convinced my roommates that we needed three separate fire extinguishers in our suite. It only took a Google image search of the holiday, which showed sexy guys and Mardi Gras-esque parties, to convince Andrea, Callie's best friend from high school, and Jillian, our oldest roommate, that this was a good idea, especially since it coincided with our spring break.

My only problem was that it was way out of my price range. My parents didn't make a lot, and my birth mom made even less
and
was trying to go back to school for nursing. I was attending UMass on an academic scholarship and a pile of loans I dreaded having to look at. Then, things started to get strange.
Something
wanted me there. Callie's mom, who is some airline mucky-muck, scored us free tickets. My honors advisor and Spanish professor pointed me in the direction of a travel grant. And then my birth mom, during our monthly lunch, handed me an envelope.

“What's this?” I'd asked.

“A gift. Go on that trip with your roommates.”

Upon opening the envelope, I'd gasped. “Cristina! No, I—”

“Take it.” She'd pushed it to me as I'd tried to hand it back. “My dad was from there. We've got family.”

“Why don't
you
go, then?”

“I don't have plane tickets and a grant.” She'd given me a wink.

“You think I could actually meet…our family? I mean, there's thousands of people…”

“I found you, didn't I?”

Silence. Finally, I was able to find my voice. “What was he like, your dad?”

She looked at her lap. “He was very kind, from what I remember. We…connected, right away.”

“And then what?”

“He disappeared. My mom told me he'd died, but I was pretty sure she'd sent him away. He never visited me again. I was about your age.”

So, with the blessing of my birth mom, I left for Valencia. Things didn't get really weird, though, until the last day. And the last day of the Las Fallas is weird by any standards.

They all but set the whole town on fire.

Callie was whining over something else she found particularly weird—my skin. “Marietta, how can you have been outside all day and not be burnt?”

“You hardly even tanned,” Andrea sniped, as she tried to avoid scratching her own burn. Jillian handed them a bottle of vitamin E lotion from her massive shoulder bag with a sigh.

“I've never really tanned or burned.” I shrugged nonchalantly, trying not to
feel
weird, despite how they mothered me as the seventeen-year-old “baby” of the suite. The more I thought about it, Cristina didn't burn or tan either. I look a lot like her, actually, down to our auburn hair and greenish-gold eyes. We also both look wicked young. She still gets carded for lottery tickets…and, well, obviously I still get carded, but I hardly even look old enough to be in high school, much less college.

The scent of savory spices cut through the haze of sulfur and sunscreen, drawing us farther down the street toward a seething wall of people—where the food would be, of course. “I could go for some
paella.
”

“So long as it doesn't have shrimp that are looking at me,” Callie muttered. “I can't deal with food that
looks
at me.”

After we ate, I closed my eyes, listening to the songs of different musicians on every corner and the beat of thousands of feet on cobblestones. It felt like walking through magic or something. As lost and dreamy as I was, and not exactly the most coordinated person in the world, I couldn't stop Andrea as she speared a shrimp head from my carton of
paella
and chased Callie with it.

“Oh good grief.” Jillian took off after them. “How old
are
you two?”

As I turned to keep up, I managed to hook one of my ankles around the other. Moving in a downward direction instead of following my roommates, panic leapt up. What would I do if I lost my roommates in the crowd?

A pair of strong, bare arms attached to a very nice bare chest caught me. A set of green-gold eyes stared at me for a moment. A voice asked in English, “Are you—”

“Disculpáme, por favor. Lo siento. ¡Necesito seguir a mis amigas!”
I said, apologizing and excusing myself to find my friends. Fortunately, Jillian is tall, so it was easy to follow her perfect black, beaded cornrows as she dodged down an alley after the other two. We were all stopped by yet another immovable wall of people.

“Oooooh.” Callie stared upward, the shrimp head forgotten.

Towering over our heads was a gorgeous float with molded caricatures of Hollywood stars and scenes from movies, like a cartoonish Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet leaning over the front of the
Titanic
and a big-headed Tom Cruise looking about ready to jump onto a third-story fire escape.

“Wow,” Callie breathed. “That's pretty damned cool. They must really like movies.”

“They're making fun of the fakeness of Hollywood,” I answered. “Most of the
ninots
, the float-statue things, are meant to be satirical. And the burning is supposed to signify the desire to change and transform the topic into something better.”

Andrea, of course, had to pipe in, “What? Are you writing some extra-credit paper on our spring break or something?”

Embarrassed, I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “It's part of my grant for Dr. Massano, remember?”

“I love how you can write about drinking binges in Spanish, and he gets you a grant.” Andrea snarked, “The old guy
so
has a crush on you!
¡Tú estás su cariñita!
”

“Yeah, that's it, Andrea.” My sneer was half-joking. Only half.
“Esperanzas a hablar tan bueno como yo. ¿Ya tienes un accento Americano despues cuantos años estudiar?”
I knew damn well she was jealous that I was scoring at the top of the Spanish class she was repeating for the second semester just to meet her foreign language requirement. And that she probably only understood half of what I said.