“Please. Leave him alone,” I said.
“I dropped my shield,” Jasper said, his voice surprised.
“I wasn’t even working on you,” she said. “I’m having too much fun with her. But now that I’ve got you, hmm.”
“I can’t believe how stupid I was. Well, go ahead.”
She cocked her head and studied him. I looked at him too, my golden brother. I had always thought he was handsome, but lately he had grown into his face and looked better than ever. He had tilted opalescent green eyes set far apart, and dark eyebrows that quirked at the outer ends; his nose was straight and handsome, his upper lip short and his lower lip full, and his jaw was fine, a clean line from pointed chin back to below his ears. Right now his dark hair was long on top and down the back and short on the sides. He was wiry rather than muscular, and he walked loose, comfortable inside himself.
She sucked in a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks like a chipmunk’s. Jasper doubled in width. Buttons popped off his shirt. He unzipped his jeans and dropped them in a hurry. He made a couple of passes and came up with a garment like a judge’s robe, which he slipped into.
His face lost its fine edges and blurred. His throat thickened and his chin doubled. His belly stuck out.
I felt strange. If my curse child was my own image in miniature, I thought I looked—enormous, but somehow wonderful. Jasper did not wear fat at all well. He slumped on the stair, all his lines sloped and defeated.
“Pitiful,” she said.
“How can you stand it?” His voice sounded garbled and full of despair.
“That’s why you should try it.”
He shuddered.
She turned her moon face to stare up at me. She patted my cheek and smiled. “This has been more fun than I ever imagined,” she said. “But I’ve used up almost all the energy you put into me. You really want to stay this way?”
If she was a curse, wouldn’t she want to leave me in trouble? If I said I wanted to stay huge, would she think I was telling the truth, and shrink me? Or listen to me, leave me like this? If I said I didn’t want to stay huge, would she think I was telling the truth, and leave me like this? “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Are you handing me the choice again? Gypsum, you should stop doing that. You can’t trust me.”
“Are you sure?”
She stared into my eyes for a long, long moment, and then she rose to her knees on my stomach, facing me, and kissed my cheek. “Call me if you want to mess around some more. I’d love to come back.”
“Call you what?”
“Altria.” She hugged me around the neck. She stood on my stomach, sighed, and melted from a lively flesh-colored form into a green stone that thumped down on my stomach. I caught it in shrinking hands.
Diminishing felt very, very strange.
I had almost gotten used to taking up a lot more space, feeling my own heaviness and how parts of me settled onto other parts. I had liked having enough muscles to support myself. It all whittled away, not instantly, but a layer at a time so that I felt myself shrink. Maybe it was more like deflating. Skin that had stretched wide to encompass all that new me slowly pulled in as new me melted, finally snapped tight to what was left. I held the blanket open and looked down at myself. I still had a bulge of belly, breasts bigger than I was comfortable with, thick thighs and hanging upper arms, and yet, it was all so much less than it had been. For the first time in my life I felt small.
I wrapped up in the blanket, now miles too big for me, then reached up to my head and felt my hair. Short again, and curly; I wasn’t sure how short, or what color; shorter than it had been before I conjured her, though.
I looked at my brother. He was still twice his size, and looked lumpy and miserable. That was no good. He should be able to fight this. Couldn’t he shrug off curses? Hadn’t he said so last night when he urged me to accept my other self?
He stood up. He took five steps away from me, turned and came back. “Oh, God! How do you stand it?”
“But Jasper, you’re only as big as I am now. Not like I was before.”
“Yes,” he said. “How do you stand it?”
“Stand it?” I rose to my feet. I was myself again. I felt so light I could float away. I knew I had a closet full of clothes that fit me, that my car seat would hold me comfortably, and that my students would see me as the same person I was yesterday, even though I had changed. I was outside the normal accepted size range, but not too far outside. I laughed. “This is great!”
He frowned. He shook himself, and blew out breath, and stood up straight. “You mean that.”
“Sure. Specially now that I’ve had a chance to try it another way.”
He walked around. “My legs rub against each other when I walk.”
“Well, sure. That’s why I wear pants more often than dresses.”
“My stomach moves.”
“Yeah.”
He walked back and forth. He slapped his hands against his chest, his stomach, his thighs, his rear. He frowned. “It’s all . . . so heavy.”
“You can get used to it.”
He sighed. “Guess you can get used to anything.”
“Or you can change it, right?”
“I don’t—Yikes!” He staggered and sat down. Everything extra about him evaporated; his judge’s robe collapsed in a welter of folds over him. He lay flat on the ground, back to Jasper normal, and stared at the sky. “Oh. Okay. Whew.”
He frowned and sat up. “Whew.”
“Did you do that?” I asked.
“No. Guess she left planned obsolescence in it. Thank God. So what was she?”
I shook my head. “I really don’t know.”
“How did you make her?”
I showed him the stone. “I said some words to this, and it turned into her.”
He frowned. I held the stone out to him. It was cool now, clean of curse energy. He stroked his fingers over it and looked up at me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I know it’s not charged right now, but I thought it might be safer than anything else.”
He sketched a sign on it, shook his head, smiled. “It’s empty, Gyp. There’s a faint frame of habit in it, protection and love, but no real charge. Nothing there to moderate your power.”
“So it was all me, I guess.” I held out my hand, and he put the stone in it.
“What words did you say?”
What words? “I tried to get my notebook without going to the house so I could write everything down, but I screwed it up. I don’t think I can do power things directly without messing them up. So I don’t have a record of what I said, and I don’t want to say the same thing outloud again.” Besides, my shoulders felt loose and relaxed. Altria had been a really great curse. “Maybe if I go to my room now, I can write down what I remember. It should be safe for me to go in the house now, at least for a little while. I don’t think I’ve got any power left.”
“Good.” He jumped to his feet.
We went up the stairs and across the lawn together. He bumped his shoulder into mine. “That was really something, Gyp.”
I shook my head. “I’m glad I don’t have to go back to school today. I don’t think I’m safe to be around.”
“The learning curve is high right after transition. I bet you’ll get some of this down real soon.”
“Thank God it’s almost Christmas Break. I don’t want to inflict this on my friends.” Well, sooner or later I’d be facing my friends with this power intact if I didn’t want to die of it, but maybe if I waited and worked, I’d know how to control it enough not to threaten everybody by my ignorance.
What was I going to do about work tomorrow? It was bound to be a light shift, but maybe I should call in sick anyway. Yeah. That would be a good idea. I wondered what curse power would do to the equipment at the Center, but I didn’t really want to find out.
“What’s the deal with you guys? Costume party?” Flint asked as we came in off the porch. He was sitt
ing in a chair in the great hall with his feet on the table, reading a comic book.
I glanced down. Jasper was wearing his sizes-too-big judge’s robe, and I was wrapped in a big green blanket.
“Curses,” said Jasper.
“Cool! What’d I miss?”
Jasper slanted me a look, his eyebrows up.
“It was spectacular,” I said.
“Dang! Beryl told us not to go in the orchard. I knew I shouldn’t have listened.”
“You wouldn’t have liked the side effects,” Jasper told him.
“There were side effects?” Flint dropped the comic book and jumped up. “What? What? What? Tell me!”
I rolled my eyes. “Give me half an hour.” I needed another shower and some actual clothes, and I needed to locate another blank notebook so I could start my power record over. “Then I’ll tell Tobias about it.” My stomach growled. “Oh, yeah, that too. It’s been a while since those granola bars Beryl gave me.” I pushed past Flint and headed for the kitchen. I didn’t feel like cooking, but I could sure slap together a sandwich in three minutes and take it upstairs.
“But Gyp—” Flint said.
The kitchen door was still banded with black. I leaned toward the door, my eyes closed, and listened to my skin. No heat. The curse was over. “It’s safe to go in now.”
“How can you tell? Anyway, you can’t get in while that black stuff is on the door,” Flint said. “Tobias has to take it off.”
I reached past the wards and turned the kitchen doorknob. The black bands snapped against the door and held it shut. “Damn,” I muttered.
Sparks jumped from my fingertips to the black bands and dissolved them.
Nine
I clapped my hand over my mouth. I wasn’t going to forget! But I had forgotten. And despite the power I had spent on the Altria curse, I still had enough left to do damn damage.
Jasper reached past me and opened the door.
The kitchen was dented, top and bottom, by the grapefruit; the ceiling had a dome in it, and the floor had a dip. The grapefruit, once again grapefruit-sized, sat in the middle of the dip looking incredibly silly. All the furniture was still shoved up against the counters and the walls. I sighed. In cases of post-transition blunders, if you caused a problem, you were supposed to clean up after yourself. I could move the furniture back in place, and check my bank account to see if I could afford to replace whatever was broken, but I wasn’t sure what to do about the ceiling and the floor. Maybe I could get one of the others to fix it for me.
But first, I wanted some lunch.
The cake platter sat on the table. It still had three pieces of cake on it.
Flint and I eyed each other. “Dibs the side piece,” I yelled.
“Dibs the big piece!”
We glanced back at Jasper, who shrugged. “Knock yourself out. Don’t know when I’ll be hungry again. Maybe never.”
“He hasn’t tasted it yet,” I said. Flint and I chortled, got plates and forks, and divided the rest of the cake. I took mine upstairs in lieu of sandwich. I set the stone on my desk, ate the cake, and went in to take a shower.
My reflection startled me. My hair was still dark brown, but shorter, curlier, and with golden highlights, and the tan—somehow it changed the color of my eyes, made the hazel green paler and more startling. I looked more fit, maybe just because I was more tan, maybe because Altria had left me an extra layer of muscle. I flexed my arm. Yeah. A little more.
I looked a little like someone else. But not too scary.
HALF an hour, a shower, a change of clothes, and some writing later, I left my room. Tension was already seeping into my shoulders again. Oh, well. I’d worry about that in a bit. Right now, I had to talk to the others.
Beryl’s bedroom door was open. She saw me and jumped up from her bed, where she had been reading. “Gyp! What happened to your hair?”
“I’ll explain, but I want to tell everybody at once so I don’t have to repeat myself. Want to come?”
“Oh, yeah.”
I tapped Jasper’s and Flint’s doors, and they followed me.
We knocked at Tobias’s tower door.
Tobias opened the door after a while. This time he had clothes on.
We climbed up to the school room and took our places around the table. I set my new notebook and two pens in front of me. “I’ve figured out a few things,” I said.
“Go on,” said Tobias.
I fished a couple pieces of wadded-up paper out of my pocket. I’d filched them from the trashcan in the bathroom. “First, this.” I pointed to the pieces of paper and muttered “damn,” and they flamed into ash. “D-word spells don’t take any energy. I can do them even when I think I’m depleted. I say the word. Whoosh. Stuff disappears or melts.”
He glanced toward his wastebasket, then back at me. “How useful.”
“What if I said it to a person?” I asked, anguish naked in my voice.
“How likely is that? I’ve never heard you curse.”
“Mainly because I do it in my car when I’m driving around and don’t like the way other people are driving. I don’t think I should drive anywhere until I figure out what to do about this.”
“Dear me. Conceded.”
I told him that I could sense my own curse energy in things, and could tell when it was gone. He nodded. “Excellent.”
“Here’s the part I can’t figure out,” I said. I told him about turning a stone into my curse child, and how she had been able to do anything she liked to me, and later to Jasper.
“Like what?” Flint asked.
I swallowed. I hesitated, then decided what the heck. “First she changed my hair, all different colors and lengths. Then she made me hugely fat.”
Flint frowned.
I stretched my arms out in front of me as far as I could reach. “This big.”
“You lie!”
“Not by much,” Jasper said.
“You saw that?” Flint slapped the table. “Dang! I miss all the good stuff!”
“But what I don’t understand is, who or what is she? She was a person, not just somebody I made up. She had her own name and her own notions. Did I curse a whole new person into being, or what?”
“Was she perhaps a hidden facet of yourself?” Tobias asked.
“What?” I leaned back and crossed my arms. Would I do those things to myself and to Jasper? I wouldn’t know how. Still, I’d experienced a lot of magic in recent years, including all kinds of transformations. Maybe some part of me had absorbed techniques. Maybe I had actually learned them from Tobias, and they had lain dormant until now.
Did some part of me want to make my self fatter? “She looked just like me,” I said slowly.
Jasper shook his head. “She was a separate person.”
I searched my memory. She had said something early on that spooked me. “She told me that maybe I made her body, but people couldn’t make spirits.”
Tobias sucked in breath between his teeth. “You created a vessel, and something jumped into it? Oh, Gyp. Terrifying work. They’re all around us, waiting for chances like that. You don’t ever want to do an open summoning. You don’t want to trust your luck. Statistics are against you. So many of them are nasty!”
“Who?”
“Spirits.”
“Dead people?”
“Oh, no, it’s a much broader category than that. It can be ghosts; it can be those called demons and angels by some; it can be the nonphysical forms of sleepers, or even people from other worlds. They drift and sleep all around us. Sometimes, though, if a vessel is offered, they wake and dive in. Depending on their intent, they can do a world of harm. Did she tell you her name?”
“Eventually.”
“Hmm.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What was it?”
“Altria.”
He drummed harder, looking into the air. “No. Not a known name. I wonder what class of being she was.”
“She said she was having a great time and wo
uld come back anytime,” Jasper said. “She told Gyp to call her.”
Tobias shook his head. “This is all new to me. Did you write the experience down?”
“I started. I need more time to write.”
“Do you remember the words you used in the original curse?”
I sucked on my lower lip and opened my notebook to the page where I’d tried to reconstruct my curse. I turned the notebook around and showed what I’d written to Tobias.
His face lost color. “You said ‘be kin’?”
“You told me to rhyme.”
He shook his head. “You’ve given her a bridge. You’ve made her a member of the family. That’s a bond that doesn’t end easily. She can come back whenever she likes, and do things to any of us.” He leaned forward and peered at me. “You look different.”
I ran my hand through my hair. It felt thick, crisp, and curly. “She left my hair a different color, and shorter. She gave me a tan.”
“She worked lasting change on you?” He went to the cupboard and got out the loop thing he had used the night before. He studied me through it.
“I don’t know. It hasn’t been eight hours yet. Maybe it’ll fade?”
“No, this is independent of your time contraints.” He put the loop away. “It isn’t something you did to yourself. She left you changed.”
“It could have been worse,” I whispered. Still, much as the idea had disturbed me, there was also something inviting about being so huge. Fee, fi, fo, fum!
Jasper nodded. He shuddered. Beryl gazed at him, her eyes sharp.
Tobias glanced away. His fingers drummed. “Anything can happen,” he said at last. “Please, Gyp. Please keep notes of everything you do. We might need to reconstruct it later, if things go—”
I gulped and said, “I will.”
“Anything else?”
Jasper and I exchanged glances. He frowned, then said, “She changed me, too.”
“Against your will?”
“I made mistakes. I dropped my shield. I touched her. After she changed me, I lost my will. I was demoralized and couldn’t figure out how to change back. But the change disappeared a little while after she left.”
I said, “Uncle? Is this how curses work? She did scary things to us, but she didn’t make them last. Can curses be nice?”
A Fistful Of Sky Page 13
