What you perceive, you can affect.
Even if I didn’t know what it was, apparently. What this had to do with curses, I wasn’t sure.
Mama signed something on her palm, flicked her fingers. Green lines spun from her to me and Jasper. When the line touched me, I felt the faintest flow of soothing, comfort, and even fainter, the persuasions. Don’t leave. Never leave me. Stay young. Stay unsure. Let me take care of you.
I wondered how Opal had gotten away from home. I looked, saw that there was no green line from Mama to Opal, but there was a turquoise line unlike any of the lines she had bound the rest of us with.
“Gypsum,” said Tobias.
“Uncle.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just looking.” I stared at him. He was wrapped in a cocoon of silver and gold lines. Faintly through them I saw a skeleton. I rubbed my eyes, but the vision didn’t go away: I couldn’t see his face any longer. I grabbed Altria’s hand again. “What kind of knowledge did you give me?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.”
I studied Dad. Dad looked like himself—the only one in the room who wasn’t tangled up in strangeness. Mama had lines to him, but they went to his hand, where he held the ends. Mama’s other lines plunged from Mama right into our hearts.
Then there were cross-lines between us.
Some of it resembled the grid I had seen in the darkness, but mostly it just looked tangled and messy, as though it would take a lot of time to figure out.
I looked down at my chest, and saw the deep pool of red power at my core, saw that there was a matching pool in Altria, that it traveled between us in another kind of connection.
Something inside her puzzled me, a small black invitation that was also a doorway. I reached in and touched it. Everyone in the living room except Altria gasped or cried out loud. Altria just studied my hand. Then she smiled.
The door described itself to my fingertip. It led somewhere wide open and vast, where power could wait safely without suffering, without hurting anything. Maybe it was the same place power came from.
I lifted my finger from the door and touched my sternum. An image of the door printed there, sank into my center, turned from thought to reality. The door opened, and more power rushed out. I was breathing hot red light, swimming in it, drowning in it. Yet it was intoxicating, too.
I tapped my chest. “Reverse,” I said.
The red ran down into the doorway as though it were a drain. Before it was all gone, I tapped once more, and the door closed, leaving me with a small pool of power.
When I looked up again, the cobwebs were gone: everybody looked normal. Well, horrified. But they had faces instead of webwork.
“Gyp,” Beryl said.
“What?”
“You stuck your hand in her heart!”
“What?” I glanced at Altria.
She smiled at me.
“It was disgusting!” said Opal. “You stuck your hand right into her chest.”
I stared at my hand. I stared at Altria’s chest. “Did it hurt?”
“No.” She took my hand and kissed it. “You went insubstantial.”
“What did you do, Gyp? Suddenly the threat potential dropped,” Tobias said.
“Altria taught me a technique for managing power.” Was that what had happened? She said she had developed a new way to store power today—
“Did the curse work, Gyp?” Beryl asked.
“I guess it did. I’m not sure.” I opened the inner door and called some power out, let it gather in my hands. In the course of the curse, I had seen and shelved a thousand thousand dark memories and torments. It felt different, this power, still red and strong, but somehow tamer, as though we had domesticated each other. “Mama, may I curse you?”
“What did you do to me before? It hurt.”
“This won’t be the same. I’ll limit it, so you can see what it’s like and decide if you want it to be permanent.”
She sighed, looked at Dad. He took her hand. They both faced me. Mama’s free hand was a fist. “I guess it’s time I let you curse me, after the way I cursed you. Go ahead,” she whispered.
I didn’t speak to my power. I formed specific intent, thought it through three times, and sent the power down into her memories, told it to eat out the night terrors and leave her free of them, save them unhurt behind the door where I could retrieve them and restore them if she wanted them back. It was delicate and intricate; everything connected to everything else, so each cut had to be considered carefully.
At last I finished. Altria’s arm was warm around my shoulders, and my forehead was wet. I had no heat in my chest, and I had taken all the heat she had on the surface, too. I glanced at the others, wondering how much time had passed. They all stared at me.
Mama drew a deep breath. “I feel so strange,” she whispered. Her face twisted, settled into a new shape, the edges softer.
“What did you do?” Dad asked me.
“Mama? Did it hurt?”
“No.” She put her hand over her heart. “I feel—so light.”
“Gyp,” said Tobias.
“I cursed the things that make it so she can’t sleep at night,” I said.
“Bent her personality,” Hermina said.
“Yes.” I wiped my forehead with my red pirate sleeve. “I’m keeping them safe for you, Mama. Tell me if you want them back.”
“All right.” She let out a shuddering breath. She straightened. “All right. Sounds like you’ve learned control.” She stroked her knuckles across her chest, frowned. “Feels like you’ve learned control.”
“Yes. I think so. Yes.”
“Tobias?” Mama said.
Tobias shook his head. “I don’t understand it, but I think you’re right. She doesn’t broadcast dangerous anymore. Gyp, you’ve settled?”
I stared down inside myself to the door where power waited. Nothing knocked. I felt comfortable, almost normal. “I guess so.”
“Good,” said Mama. “The Gyp Factor part of this meeting is over, then. Let’s move on. Jasper, have you written us a carol yet?”
Twenty-three
BY the time the meeting ended, we all knew what we were supposed to do in the two days until Christmas. We broke up around ten-thirty. Altria followed me upstairs, her hand warm on my shoulder. Things were still shifting around in my brain: I kept noticing new and strange information, and trying to deal with it.
“Phone, Gyp!” Beryl said as I walked past her in the sitting room.
I hadn’t even noticed the ring. I took the handset. “Hello?”
“Hi. You still awake? Is this too late to call?” Ian asked.
“No, it’s fine.” I turned to Altria. She had vanished.
“How’d the curse go?” he asked.
“Pretty well. I think I’ve got this curse thing under control now.”
“Wow! Great! Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Did you go back to the party?”
“No, of course not. Just wanted to call and find out if you were okay. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good.”
Silence stretched.
“Hey,” Ian said at last. “See you on Christmas.”
“Good,” I said.
LATER that night I walked down to the beach. If anybody tried to hurt me, they would regret it. I only had to open the little black door to access my power.
Fog made the air visible, kept the night pale by trapping light close to the ground. I knew the air was cool, but my energy kept me warm.
Shards of glass clinked away from my shoes as I walked the dark tunnel under the freeway, below the ocean tides of traffic. I was halfway across when I heard the echo of someone else’s steps. I stopped below the grating that showed a barred square of sky between the southbound and northbound lanes of Highway 101, and waited for my follower to catch up.
She walked barefoot across the glass-scattered concrete, all of her a shadow here in the dark, a silh
ouette against the light at the far end of the tunnel. I held out my hand. She took it, her fingers warm and strong around mine. We walked on into deeper darkness, and then up into gray night.
The tunnel let out at the dead end of a beach road, bordered with tall, skinny eucalyptus trees reaching toward the sky. We walked two blocks and came to the beach access, crumbling asphalt-and-rock stairs the ocean kept wearing away.
The tide was halfway out, stroking the shore with a constant rush and tumble, occasional waves breaking with crashes that rolled into roars. Foam hemmed the waves, rushed up across the beach, pale against dark water and wet sand. Salt breeze gusted along the shore.
We knelt in the lee of a drift log where the sand was dry. She faced me, pressed her knees to mine. She reached across the space between us and touched my breastbone with her fingertips. I opened the door to my power and let some rise from the holding place, flow from me into her, a gift I was comfortable sharing with her now.
She lifted her hand away from my chest, then joined it with her other hand and rested her cupped hands on our knees. Clear white light pooled in her hands, my power, changed on its journey through her. She stared at me, her face lit from below, light caught in her butter-amber eyes.
“Marry me,” she said.
“What?”
Her gaze lowered to the light, then lifted again to meet mine. “I love you.”
Thoughts startled up, stuttered, subsided. But marriage was—a man and a woman? A church, a ceremony, a dress? A promise of eternity? A physical bond?
“But Altria—”
“I want to stay with you. I won’t hurt you. Maybe scare you once in a while, shake you up so you remember you’re alive. I’ll protect the ones you love. I can be whatever you want.”
“But Ian—”
“I can be Ian.” She shifted shape: his blue eyes, his half-shy square-jawed smile, his wiry, slender body.
“Don’t do that.”
She tossed her head and turned back into a honey-eyed self with long ruby hair. Her face looked more fey than human. “You can marry him, too. I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want to marry Ian. I don’t know what I want. It’s all new to me. I just want to see what happens if I keep seeing him. He’s the first—”
The first what? The first one outside my family to see me clearly and come back later? Altria had done that, too. In the last four days since I had opened the way for her to come into my life, she had helped me again and again, even if the help came guised as torture. She had acted as my mother and my sister and my friend, my helper and my director and my dark side.
I stared into her eyes, the one my uncle called Shade and my aunt called Nightmare and my mother called Creature. I thought of how she had stepped out of nowhere to save me from falling, how she had blown cobwebs out of my brain to restore me to myself, how she held me in her arms, stroked warmth into us with my own power, and took me up into the sky. She was the first one to help me fly. I had felt safe with her, even when she was threatening me.
She had seen me in different forms. She had sent me into different forms. She knew my power. She had seen me fail, watched my weaknesses. She still said she loved me.
I had had a dream, one I had never let myself have on the surface, but still, one that had dreamed itself down deep inside. Could anyone love me if they really knew me? I had found someone who could.
Maybe two people. Ian had seen me at my lowest, and he called back the next day.
I cupped my hands around hers. The pooled light shimmered, colors shooting through it, then steadied.
“See Ian all you like,” she said. “Just let me stay with you, one way or another. I can take any shape. What do you want me to be?”
“Yourself.”
“Oh, no. You’re not ready for that.”
We stared at each other.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“Good.”
“Don’t you think I know you?”
“What do you know?” she whispered.
I lifted one hand from the nest we had made for the light and touched her forehead, red flowing from my fingertips. I showed her all the ways I had seen her during my curse: the ancient serpent, hungry for fear; the nightmare spirit trapped in a vessel I had offered it, shaped by the protections and love Jasper had set in the sea stone, sculpted by every encounter with me and my family into something foreign to itself, spelled by me into reluctant love for my family. The spell was over now. Traces of the love remained. Perhaps, having tried it, she found she liked it. Still, I had seen the self she owned that walked through dark dreams and made them darker. That self still lived inside her, strong in its terrifying desires.
“No. You were never supposed to know,” she whispered.
I closed my eyes, wished I could close my eyes to all the things I had seen that I was never supposed to know. Knowledge was a curse. I knew my family better than I had ever wanted to.
I knew I had a self like Altria’s, better hidden but hungry.
I filed the dark memories away. That worked. I didn’t have to focus on them all the time. Knowledge was a curse, and it was also treasure. I could lock it up or take it out to look at. Now that I knew so many strange things, I had a flickering idea of a future. Maybe this would be my work: find people’s bad memories, the scars on their souls, and change or remove the ones that tortured, the ones hardest to bear. I could do that with a curse.
I wasn’t sure it was a good thing. Mama would tell me tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, maybe.
“Is there any part of you that you want me to curse?” I asked.
She frowned. Her face went remote. “Not yet,” she said.
“Not ever is okay with me.”
She lifted her hands, broke the cup. Light spilled out over our legs, laps, stomachs. Some drained into the sand. Some slicked her palms like a radioactive skin. She put her arms around my neck. I hesitated, then embraced her.
She kissed me. It was not the brief touch of lip on lip I had experienced with Ian. There was more pressure, movement of her lips over mine, searching, tasting, wet heat, tingling, the touch of her tongue, a taste of chile and woodsmoke. She turned her head and hugged me closer, her cheek against my ear.
We sat entwined in the darkness. I listened to her breathing, and the waves. I teetered on an edge between wonder and terror. The warmth of another person pressed against me, wrapped around me. Where did we go from here?
After a while the fear faded. Something else seeped in.
What had I heard here yesterday, when I was a baby? What was that sound under the crash of waves, the rush of water?
It still called, a sea song.
I stroked one hand down her side. She lifted her head and nodded. We untangled, and she helped me up.
We sat on the log and I took off my shoes. We walked down across the cold dry sand to the cold wet sand. I felt the cold now, but it didn’t bother me. It told my feet something about their shape.
We walked out into the water. Its cold was intense and shocking. Altria stroked my chest and summoned power to warm us. We swam out beyond where the waves broke, and the sea carried us. We held onto each other.
After a while we drifted to quiet water.
We floated, holding hands, and I heard again the murmur of something old and undivided, something early and ever. In the presence of this vast, ancient, unjudging energy, I understood that no matter what she was, no matter what I was, we were enough alike to be twins, soulmates, together.
“Yes,” I whispered.
She hugged me. “Yes,” she whispered.
We floated.
Eventually we drifted home.
NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel for The Thread That Binds the Bones, and her second novel, The Silent Strength of Stones, was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Her other works include novels A Red Heart of Memories and Past the Size of Dreaming, and the short story collections A Legacy of F
ire, Courting Disasters and Other Strange Affinities, and Time Travelers, Ghosts, and Other Visitors. Her young adult novel, A Stir of Bones, came out in 2003. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with three cats and a mannequin.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 32
