“Wow, is that ever a dumb present for you,” Tim said. “Like you need stupid tricks! Who gave it to you?”
“What did the note say, honey?” Beth asked.
Lisa unstuck the note from the gift and handed it to her. “Use this to build your reputation as a magician,” Beth read aloud. “Signed, Elf.”
“I get it,” I said. “I think I get it. You practice doing tricks from this box, Lisa. They’ll look like other magicians’ tricks. Everybody knows those are just tricks. You tell people you’re studying magic, and show them some tricks, and then if they see you do other things they can’t explain—”
“Oh, yeah,” said Beth. “I love that elf!” She beamed.
“I tell people I’m a magician?” Lisa said slowly. “I tell people I’m a magician. But I’m not supposed to tell anybody anything.”
“This would be okay to tell,” I said. We’d had to change Lisa’s school several times to cover up mistakes she’d made. These days I drove her six miles across town to Hillside Elementary, where she hadn’t messed up yet. She’d only been going there since mid-October. If she decided to be a magician now, maybe she could stay all the way through sixth grade. “You have to teach yourself the tricks the hard way, though. No real magic, just imitation magic.”
“That’s weird, Daddy,” she said.
“Can I try?” Tim asked.
“No!” Lisa said. She hugged the box.
“Why not? You don’t want it.”
“Yes, I do.” She stared at the floor, her arms tight around the magic kit, then looked up at Tim and relaxed. “Okay. You can try. We’ll both learn it.”
“Yahoo!”
She opened the clasp and raised the lid. Inside was a manual with a magician on the cover. She lifted it out. Beneath it was a compartmentalized box with all kinds of tricks—a deck of cards, shell game shells, red and yellow juggling balls, steel rings, a traditional magic wand—black, with a steel cap at either end, a bouquet of feather flowers, a collapsing top hat.
“I get to try them first. It’s my kit,” Lisa said.
“Well, try something, then, so I can try it next,” said Tim.
Beth and I rose, finished cleanup without any more scoring, and retreated to the kitchen.
“What was your elf present?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I showed her the candy tin and note. “What was yours?”
She got out the yellow jewelry box, handed me the note. “This ring’s name is Bendshift. Love, Elf.” She opened the box to display a slender silvery band nesting in yellow velvet. She took out the ring and slid it onto her ring finger, where it dropped into place above her wedding ring without being noticeable. “Bendshift,” she said.
“Sounds promising.” If she could bend Lisa’s shift power, the way Tim could now turn it back—
We’d spent all of Lisa’s life trying to get her to respect other people enough to leave them alone. If she wasn’t such a good kid to start with, one of us would probably be dead by now. With the new ring powers, maybe everybody could relax.
“I love that elf,” Beth said again. She gave me a kiss.
“I’m not—it wasn’t—I didn’t—I don’t remember putting these gifts together,” I said.
“Well, I love you more, Will, but I love the elf anyway. This is going to change things for all of us.”
“I wonder if you can bend a shift that’s already taken place,” I said.
“Which one? Lisa’s been so good today.”
I took Beth’s hand and led her to the kitchen table, where we sat facing each other. “I don’t know about the kitten, Beth. He’s not originally a kitten.”
“She loves him. We can’t take away something she loves.” Her eyes looked hollow. We’d had some very difficult fights with Lisa in the past about things she loved that were bad for her. Lisa was better about such things now; she listened instead of throwing tantrums, and we didn’t end up in the hospital after the fights. There were other kinds of scars, though.
“Not take him away,” I said. “Understand him. She gave me the power to understand him; I wonder if you could extend that to you.”
She consulted the note from her present, frowned. “It didn’t come with instructions. I thought it would work like Tim’s, protect me when she was shifting me. Let me see. Where did you feel the shift?”
“Face and the top of my head.”
Beth laid her hands on my face; they felt warm. I smelled Christmas perfume I’d bought her on her wrists, something by Givenchy I’d noticed her trying more than once when we went to the department store. It carried a different kind of warmth, full-bodied and enticing. I wondered how soon we’d be able to get some real time alone. Probably not until after the kids went to bed.
“Oh,” she said. “There’s kind of a—” She moved her hands over my face, across my scalp. My skin prickled in the wake of her touch. “—a tingling. Ring, bend this shift so it touches me, too.”
My face and scalp went pins and needles. Beth gasped. She sat back, her hands dropping from my head. Her face turned red; the color faded.
“Are you all right?” I grabbed her hands.
She took a deep breath, let it out, nodded. “That was just—so strange. Will. I did magic. I did magic. Oh, my, god.”
“Let’s see if it worked.” We stood together and went back to the living room.
“Alakazam,” Lisa said, and tapped the wand on one of the three yellow shells she had set on a table. “Your penny!” She lifted the shell and showed Tim a penny.
“Hey, how did you do that? It wasn’t there a minute ago.”
Lisa laughed and handed him the manual. He studied it, then turned the shell over, discovered the fake inside shell. “What a gyp!”
Singer was curled up on the couch beside Lisa, purring.
“Singer?” I said.
The kitten stretched, rolled over, looked up with half-lidded eyes. “Will?” he said.
“This is Beth.”
“I know.”
I checked with Beth, who nodded, her smile small. “He’s kind of snotty,” I told her.
“Oh,” said Singer. “That was a formal introduction? Excuse me.” He stood up and walked over to us, his fluffy tail hooked at the end. Beth stooped and held out a hand, and Singer smelled it. “I don’t know why I feel compelled to do that. You smell very nice.”
“Thanks,” said Beth. She stroked his head, and he purred.
“Mom?” Lisa jumped up, scattering plate-sized steel rings and rubber balls. “Can you understand him? I didn’t shift you, honest I didn’t.”
“I know, honey. I got a spell for Christmas, too. I can bend the shifts now. I bent Daddy’s Singer-talk spell to me.”
“Wow. Everybody got magic for Christmas? Wow! Daddy, what did you get?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Everybody can understand the kitten but me?” Tim said. “That’s not fair. Lisa, shift me too.”
She looked at us. “May I?”
“You remember what you did last time?” I asked.
“Of course, Daddy.”
I exchanged glances with Beth, something we did a lot of. “Well, Tim gave you permission, and we do too,” Beth said.
Lisa closed her eyes and concentrated, then sent a shift at Tim. His ring flared blue and the shift bounced back, enveloping Lisa, who blinked in confusion.
“Oh, I forgot,” Tim said. He pulled off his ring and set it on the table. “Do it again, Lisa. Please.”
She rubbed her eyes, wrinkled her forehead, and focused again. She sent the shift.
“Ouch,” said Tim. “Oh. Kitty, do you really talk?”
“Sure,” said Singer. “Do you understand me now?”
“Oh. Yeah. Wild. Thanks, Lisa. Hey, can I try a card trick next?”
They started squabbling about things in the magic kit again. Beth nudged me toward the door. “Go try one of your elf presents,” she whispered. “Find out what they do. I’ll keep track
of the kids.”
I slipped out of the living room and went up to the master bedroom, shut the door, locked it—not that a lock would keep Lisa out. It added to my feeling of being alone, though, per my instructions.
I sat on the bed and opened my tin of Christmas candies. They were small—I counted, and there were thirty of them. Maybe I should save them for emergencies. But heck, if I didn’t even know what they did, how would I know which emergencies to use them for?
I took one out and put it in my mouth.
Flavor exploded across my tongue, peppermint, cinnamon, sugar, ozone. Heat gathered around me, wrapped me up. I felt again the flowing inrush of energy and the contraction of my muscles and bones. My ears pinched and pulled, and my beard and mustache grew. Hair pushed out of my head to tumble in dark curls around my shoulders.
I wasn’t wearing the costume this time. My bathrobe didn’t shrink; I was lost in its folds by the time the transformation finished with me. I fought my way free and did what I had been too busy to do the night before. I looked carefully at this alternate self in a mirror.
Stocky. Muscular. Small. My head was big in proportion to the rest of my body; my face looked nothing like the clean-shaven, taller Will. If I didn’t know it was me inside, what would I think of this person?
I turned my head, pushed hair aside, revealed my ears. Foxy points. I leaned forward, stared into my eyes. When I was tall Will, my eyes were dark brown; as Elf, I had tawny eyes under heavy brow ridges.
“Why did I give myself this gift?” I asked out loud, my voice gruff.
I felt tides of power shift under my skin. “Remem ber,” said my new voice.
We had always wondered where Lisa’s powers came from, once we got over the shock of their appearance. At first Beth and I had not been able to believe what was happening. We moved from denial to unconscious acceptance. So stuffed animals and cookies flew across the nursery to the crib. Deal with it. Lock up anything Lisa shouldn’t have, and if she shifted one of us through the air toward her, try to land without cracking a shin-bone or breaking a finger. The awareness snuck up on us in increments, even as we learned all kinds of defenses (only show her off to the relatives when she was asleep, for instance. Daycare was impossible, so Beth and I adjusted our jobs so one of us would always be home with the baby). We didn’t get around to asking why us until Lisa was two years old, and we never got any answers.
“Remember,” I said again.
I’d seen a face like the elf’s before. Old Uncle Darius, a short-statured man, who had lived in the attic of the house where I grew up. He had his own staircase to the outside world, and kept to himself most of the time, but once in a while I climbed up on the roof and he came out too, and we watched the stars together, he smoking some fragrant tobacco in a small pipe. He wasn’t a very conversational person. “There’s hope for you, young Will,” he told me once, “though the rest of the family has gone water weak.” I never did figure out what he meant.
Uncle Darius died when I was fifteen; he had grown more taciturn as time went on. Now I couldn’t ask him my questions.
My sister Vicki had seventeen volumes of our grandmother’s journals from the nineteen-twenties and thirties. She liked them because Grandmother had a taste for expensive gilded Florentine leather book bindings. I wondered if there were any family secrets inside. Maybe Grandmother wrote about the family before it went water weak. I didn’t think Vicki had ever read them.
“Remember.”
I closed my eyes and tapped into the power flowing through me. Help me remember, I thought, and then the answers came.
Not so long ago, powers ran through my family—not as strong as Lisa’s, but a little in everyone. Something about the twentieth century had driven them all underground, as though someone had set a mimic curse on us to help us blend with everyone around us. I remembered, though I didn’t know how, that Beth’s great-grandmother was from a different lineage of power, healers or harmers depending on their natures; shifters. Though neither Beth nor I had manifested any powers, they lay latent deep inside us. Lisa’s elf-shift had finally forged a link from her invading power to my own source, opening gates that had been closed all my life.
“Do I have to shrink to use this knowledge?” I asked, and I laughed, then realized that being short did put me closer to the source. Once I grew again, my powers would retreat to somewhere I couldn’t touch them.
The elf had given me magic candy. How long did one hit last? I had fallen asleep last night before the shift ended, so it might be hours. On the other hand, with the powers I had in this form, I could shift myself back to tall Will right now. I would lose my powers, though.
A knock sounded on the door. “Will?” Beth called.
I was going to ask if she was alone, but my voice had changed. I didn’t want the kids seeing me like this. I grabbed the robe and shrank it to fit me with a thought. I put my stubby, short-fingered hand against the door and felt outward through the house. The kids were in their rooms, getting dressed to go to Vicki’s.
Vicki’s. Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t she get a kick out of seeing me like this?
I opened the door to Beth.
“Oh,” she said. She smiled, knelt, hugged me, drew me into a long, exquisite kiss. Man, she smelled good, and tasted better.
Beth kicked the door shut behind her. “So this is what happens when you eat those candies?” she asked. “What would happen if I ate one?”
“Whoa,” I said.
“Can I try it tonight after the kids go to bed?”
I considered this with all the skills at my disposal, figured it couldn’t hurt, or if it did, I could fix it, provided I ate a candy first. “Sure.”
“Can you give magic presents now?”
“Do you need something?”
“No, I was just wondering.”
“I get the feeling I could whip up a lot of mischief, yes.”
Beth grinned. Then frowned. “Can you explain the cat to me?”
“Where did that cat come from?“ I asked myself.
“He’s a helpful spirit,” the elf voice answered.
“What?” asked Beth.
“Lisa needs some extra help,” said the elf. “That was everybody’s Christmas wish. I brought my friend here—Singer—he’s probably laughing about that name—to watch out for her. If Bendshift and Turnback don’t work, Singer can help.”
“But who is he?” asked Beth.
I waited for an answer. We both did. Finally I said, “I guess we’ll find out by talking to him. Just now, though, I guess we need to get ready to see Vicki and Clive.” I looked down at my elf self and frowned.
“You could go like that and say Lisa did it.”
“Lisa thinks I’m a Christmas elf. Besides, I don’t think Vicki and Clive need anything else to be scared of.”
“Maybe you better hide until this wears off. I’ll tell Vicki you’re sick.”
“It’s all right. I can shift myself back from here.” I slipped the tin out of my pocket, though, opened it, conjured a candy to replace the one I had eaten. I wanted the power to become this self. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Does it have to be now? We better get ready for the visit. Let’s take a quick shower,” Beth said. She took my hand and led me to the bathroom. I didn’t shift back to my taller self until after we dried off.
Things were different at Vicki and Clive’s.
They always received us in their living room on Christmas. Maybe it was because the tree was there, but I thought it was because they didn’t want to let Lisa any farther into the house than that. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the rec room, all the rooms where they did their actual living, were too precious to allow an invasion by such an unpredictable force. I could understand that.
It still made me mad.
The living room was, as usual, magnificent in its decorations and decorum. Vicki and Clive sat on the couch, with their children, Art and Nellie, to either side of them. All of them looked posed
and polished in really nice clothes, unlike us; Tim’s socks didn’t match, his hair was still wet, his shirt buttoned wrong, and Lisa had chosen a red dress and a chartreuse jacket.
We all said Merry Christmas and sat in our usual chairs, chairs that saw our asses only this time each year.
“Children,” Beth said as Tim grabbed a plate, “ten cookies each. I mean that. Choose carefully.”
“Oh, Bethie,” said Vicki, “don’t be so strict. I love to give your children cookies. They seem so appreciative.”
Beth heard implied criticism in anything my family said to her, and usually I feared she was right.
Beth shifted her rings and straightened. “Vicki, you make great cookies, so the children always eat too many. Today we’re starting some new rules. Ten each, kids.”
Lisa opened her mouth, closed it. She looked at me, and I smiled at her. Tim picked all the biggest cookies with chocolate in them, stacking them high on the tiny plate.
Lisa picked ten cookies and sat back. She lifted one and took some tiny nibbles.
“Punch?” said Vicki brightly.
We got the cookies, punch, and coffee portion of the visit out of the way in ten minutes. Art and Nellie had two cookies each. I had never noticed, but I suspected they always had two cookies each. Then we had the gift exchange, which was painful. None of us knew what to get for Vicki’s family, so we settled for knickknacks, which didn’t go with anything they had. Their gifts to us were just as pitiful. I got my third tie of the day, in colors so neutral I couldn’t tell if they were gray or blue. Beth got a cookie cookbook. Lisa and Tim got educational toys that would teach them to read below their grade level.
We were out of there in half an hour.
“Oh, boy!” Tim said as we drove away. “Oh, boy! You mean, we didn’t have to stay there hours and hours every year, trying to play with those awful, boring toys?”
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Beth said. “It’s good to take less food. You pay less in time.”
“Art asked me if I was sick,” Lisa said.
“He did? When?” I asked.
“While you and Mom were telling Aunt Vicki about Christmas Eve at Grandma’s.”
“He say why he asked?”
Children of Magic Page 26
