Something tightened his face until I saw the bones beneath the skin. I usually didn’t wonder how old Great-Uncle 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 Great-Great-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.
Four
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, deepset 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?
“Good,” said Tobias.
I swallowed spit. My stomach growled. Fire sang through me, then faded away, and I felt normal again. “She had really cool gloves,” I said. “Wish I had some like that.”
Something fluttered in my chest.
My hands and forearms grew another skin, black, smooth leather so thin I barely felt it. I stared at my gloved hands, my mouth open, then I looked up at Tobias. “This is my power? This is a curse?”
“You’re
going to have to watch your words.”
“But I just did something magical.” My own magic, for the very first time. “I didn’t even rhyme. I didn’t even plan. I made a wish, and it came true.” I flexed my fingers; the gloves moved with them. I almost couldn’t tell they were there except to look at. I lifted a hand and sniffed it. Faint smell of leather. I rubbed the back of my gloved hand against my cheek, and felt soft smooth skin more velvety than my own. “Uncle?”
“Beware of wishes, Gyp. Beware of saying anything with a wish in it.”
“But look!” I held up my hands. They looked elegant, classy, so not mine.
Jasper frowned. “Yeah. How is that a curse, Uncle?”
“Do the gloves come off?”
They encased my arms in black leather up to my elbows. I picked at the edge of one with the fingertips of the other. No. There was no dividing line between the glove and my skin.
I swallowed again. “How long do they last?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
I smoothed my gloved fingers across my lips. So my hands would be black. Somehow I couldn’t see that as a curse. Wasn’t a curse supposed to bother you? I liked this.
It would be hard to explain at work, though. And in class. Nobody took notes with gloves on. Nobody wore gloves in any context I could remember, except to fancy dress-up events I saw in movies, or when it was really cold. I imagined raising my hand to answer a question in class, everybody turning to look.
I hunched my shoulders. Well, heck. Class was over until mid-January, and I only had one more shift at work, two days from now. Maybe the gloves would be gone by then. If not, well, maybe I could start some kind of trend—if anybody actually came to the center the Friday before break started, which seemed unlikely.
Black gloves.
When Opal and Jasper first did workings after transition, the effects were short-term. Beryl’s works, on the other hand, had lingered for a week or longer, and with Flint it had varied depending on what he did. Maybe the gloves would be gone by tomorrow. Maybe they’d last a month.
I frowned and looked at Tobias. Everybody else had been through transition and knew the basics. I had let go of them when I thought I wouldn’t need them anymore. I knew I had to use my power or it would twist up inside and hurt me, but I couldn’t remember details. Tobias had given up teaching. Maybe he’d come out of retirement. I hoped. “So I used my power. How soon do I have to use it again?”
“How do you feel?”
I put my black-gloved hand against my stomach. With these black hands, I look like a skunk in a comic strip. It made me smile. My stomach was quiet for the first time in a week. “Pretty good,” I said. I drank milk.
“You’ll need to do something again when you feel worse. Different people experience it in different ways, the sense that there’s something you need to do to feel better again. Sometimes it’s a thickening in the back of the throat, or a sense of something binding your arms or your guts. Beryl?”
“My eyes got hot, like I was about to cry. If I used power, the feeling went away.”
“Jasper?”
Jasper hunched his shoulders. “I felt like I ate too much. Sort of like I had to throw up.” He wrinkled his nose. “I’m glad that’s over.”
“You’ll have to learn to listen to your own signals, Gyp,” Tobias told me.
“I start feeling tense, I have to curse something?”
“Yes.”
“Next time you can give me gloves,” Beryl said. “Those look so cool.”
“I don’t know, kid. Maybe there are more problems with these than that they don’t come off. Let’s wait and see.” I turned to Tobias. “Do I have to curse a person?”
“I don’t know.”
Maybe I could curse rocks! Maybe I could use all my power cursing rocks and see what happened to them. Maybe I didn’t have to hurt anyone.
Naw. If it had been that easy, Aunt Meta would have done it.
“Do I have to wait until I feel my . . . signal before I can use my power?”
Tobias smiled. “What did you have in mind?”
“I could curse a rock next time, see what happens.”
“What would a rock perceive as a curse?” Tobias went to his tool cupboard and got out a rock. I never knew what he had in there. This rock looked ordinary, something local, bread-brown sandstone. I wondered what he had planned to do with it.
He set it on the table in front of me, and glanced at me, eyebrows up.
I didn’t feel like I was going to cry or throw up. I felt like I’d had something to eat, and I was tired.
I felt ordinary. Normal.
I frowned at my black gloves. No, I had proof that I had changed.
To give a spell power, rhyme helped, and so did rhythm and cadence, Tobias had taught us. Something about how sounds worked together generated energy. Spell crafting had never been my strongest suit, though I loved to read. Trying to write proper spells was one of the few things about power that I had been glad to give up. Jasper was so good at it. I knew I’d never be as good as he was.
I’d have to try again, though. All I needed to do was figure out something clever to say, and see what happened.
I put my hand on the rock. I couldn’t feel its sandy grit through the glove, which surprised me: the gloves felt so thin and invisible. I thought, then said, “Rock. Be chalk.”
Heat stirred in my chest. A cascade of pings and clinks rang out as the rock changed into a couple hundred pieces of sidewalk chalk, all colors, and collapsed across the table and floor.
Somehow this impressed me more than the gloves had. I had planned something, and it had happened. Me. On purpose. Unless—
“Did you do that?” I asked Jasper.
He shook his head and smiled.
Beryl laughed and picked up a few pieces of chalk, green, red, orange, blue. “Let’s go draw on the front walk.”
“Jasper’s got a club to go to,” I said. Was I still invited? Hey, I’d just kissed my power, and now I didn’t know what I was doing. I should stick close to home until I figured it out. Probably I should cancel my shift at the Center on Friday and tell my boss he needed to call some other tutor to fill in for me; I didn’t want to take chances with my students.
Gloves. Chalk. Ooh, scary.
Jasper said, “Forget it. I already told Trina I’d be late and might not make it. I’ll catch the band later. Uncle, do you have something we can put the chalk in?”
Tobias got a shoebox from a lower shelf and handed it to Jasper, who grabbed handfuls of chalk and dumped them in. Tobias picked up a piece of chalk from the floor. His hand jerked, and he dropped it. His eyebrows rose. “If I might offer a suggestion? Draw on the back walk instead. Be careful what you draw.”
Beryl’s smile faded. A tiny worry wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows.
“Sorry to be so ominous,” Tobias said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”
“But it’s just Gyp.”
Just Gyp. Good old Gyp. Never hurt anybody, never scared anybody, never threatened anybody, no matter what you did to her.
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Tobias repeated.
I stooped and collected chalk from the floor. I sat with chalk in my hands, trying to figure out what Tobias had felt. Shock? What? I got nothing from the chalk. Then again, I was wearing gloves. Multicolored chalk dust patterned my palms. I dumped the chalk in Jasper’s box and slapped my hands together as though they were blackboard erasers. The chalk didn’t come off.
Huh. I wasn’t so worried about appearing everywhere with black hands, but black hands dusted with chalk? Maybe it would wash off. Could you wash leather in the bathroom sink? I guessed I’d find out.
“I think that’s all of it,” Jasper said. He dropped a last piece into the box. “Turquoise! So cool. We never had these colors before.”
“Let’s go,” said Beryl.
Tobias yawned against the back of his hand. “Let me know if you n
eed me. If you don’t, I’m going back to bed.”
“Thanks, Uncle,” I said, and went to him.
He suffered a hug from me. He’d never been very touchy-feely. This time, though, he closed his arms around me. He smelled like incense and black tea. “Interesting times ahead,” he murmured into my hair. “I’ll help as much as I can.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
Jasper, Beryl, and I clattered down the stairs. The tower door locked behind us.
As we trooped past Flint’s room, he opened the door. “What is this, a parade?”
“Gyp made cursed chalk. We’re going to go try it.”
“What?” Flint came out into the hall.
“Gyp went through transition while we were in L.A. meeting Gerry,” Jasper said. “Only, she got a dark power instead of a fun one. She made this chalk.” Jasper showed Flint the open shoebox.
“What?”
Beryl tugged Jasper’s sleeve. “Come on.”
We headed down the hall, Flint trailing after. “What happened to your hands?”
“I cursed them with gloves.”
“That’s flat-out weird.” He didn’t say anything else, just followed us down the staircase, but at the bottom he grabbed my arm. “You went through transition? You went through transition! Wow, that’s great! At last! I thought it wasn’t going to happen.” He hugged me. “But hey! Who’s going to make the cake? You shouldn’t have to make your own cake.”
I felt a melting in my chest. Tobias had mentioned a celebration, but in almost the same breath he had talked about how dangerous I was going to be. Jasper and Beryl had been pretty quiet, not surprising since Tobias was trying to scare us all. Finally somebody was happy for me, the way people were supposed to be when you survived transition. I hugged my younger brother.
He got embarrassed and pushed me away. “I could try to do it,” he said.
Jasper, Beryl, and I all said “No!”
Flint clapped a hand to his chest. “You wound me!” He said that a lot.
“We’ll figure out the cake tomorrow,” Jasper said. “Right now we have to test this chalk. Tobias thinks it will do weird things because Gyp’s power is unkind. He told us to practice out back.”
A Fistful Of Sky Page 7
