“I know that. You need to go.”
“This was the right thing to do, Niece.”
I let him leave without telling him goodbye. My ears were ringing. There was snot drying on my upper lip. My head felt swollen and tender, but I was cried out. I creaked to my feet. My joints hurt like I was carrying the weight of the world. I dragged myself over to my kitchen area and got a couple of garbage bags and my dustpan and broom. I had to sweep Dolly’s remains up and trash them.
I crouched over the carnage I’d created. Wearily, I leaned over to sweep it up.
A form guttered into existence on the pile of disassembled bits. Shocked, I yanked my hands away. It was an ugly toddler with hands too big for its body. Then it was a writhing, snaky thing with too many fangs. Then a cross between a massive toad and a soft-boiled ostrich egg, wearing flashing baby runners on three of its four splayed feet. It bled a sickly green light from scissors slashes all over its body. One of its eyes had been slit open. With the remaining one, it glared hurt and hatred at me. My haint! Exulting, I reached for it to cradle it to me, to bandage its wounds. It slapped me away with man-sized hands. I fell backwards onto my ass. Quickly the haint shovelled up as much of Dolly as it could in its arms. The cuts I’d made in it scabbed over as I watched. “Please,” I begged. I reached for it again. It snarled, baring ragged ridges of yellowed fangs.
My door banged open. Brie came rushing in, wild-eyed. “Brie! Help me!”
Brie looked at the tableau in front of him: me sprawled on the floor, my haint glowering over me, its too-long arms full of broken birds and scrips and scraps of yarn. He growled at me, “What are you doing to it? Leave it alone!” He pushed himself between me and my haint.
“I can explain,” I said. “Uncle made me do this.”
“Don’t. You don’t deserve something this wonderful.” Brie turned to embrace the haint. That was when I saw that it had a large scaled and feathered tail. It walloped Brie sideways with it. He crashed to the floor. I heard his head hit the concrete. Then it hissed at me and was gone, leaving me bereft and so, so cold.
Brie hissed as I touched his head with a towel I’d soaked in cold water and wrung out. “Damn, that hurts.”
“Let me have a look.” I moved closer to him on the bed and parted his ’fro. “Bit of a bruise, but no swelling.” I checked his eyes. They were tracking fine. “You feeling confused? Or sleepy?”
He scowled. “Bitch of a headache, is all.”
“You should probably get checked out, but I don’t think you have a concussion. What the hell was that about? And why were you even home? Shouldn’t you be at the concert hall? You’re on in a couple of hours.”
Sullenly, he replied, “I just needed to pick something up first.”
The bastard. “As in my haint?”
“I can’t perform without my zimzam! I’m gonna look like a fool up there!” He pulled his head out of my hands. “But clearly, now that it has you, it doesn’t want me.”
“Yeah, you see how badly it wanted me.”
“Well what do you expect? You destroyed its home!”
“My uncle says that it’s not a mojo.”
“I don’t know what you guys would call it. But it’s my zimzam. I feel it like I feel my left arm attached to my left shoulder. I don’t have to look to know that it’s there, or to reach out with it. Only time I couldn’t feel it was when it was wrapped up in that rug of yours. And I guess when it was out looking for you.”
“I dunno, Brie. All this time I thought it was dangerous.”
Brie looked at his feet. In a small voice he said, “It is.”
My heart did a fear-flop. “Go on.”
He turned towards me, his face a picture of misery. “You gotta understand,” he pleaded. “I never meant to do it the first time and I haven’t done it since!”
The creeped-out feeling was crawling up my spine, vertebra by vertebra, from the inside. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I had to take care of them! I never meant to hurt them!”
Slowly, the story came out. “My zimzam, or hoodoo, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, if I’m not careful, it hurts people. Like any drug, I guess. It gives you a buzz, but it takes something from you, too. It took me a while to work out that that’s what was happening.”
“That’s what happened to Fleet?”
“Oh, God. Faith. My sweet Faith.” He put his head in his hands. “Fleet and I used to date. We met at one of my gigs. She came up afterwards and said she wanted to play with us. She could make a flute do things it wasn’t meant to. And she was gorgeous. When the cops came and told me the other night that she’d died, I locked myself in my room and cried for hours. I only came out because you knocked on my door. I’m not quite sure what it is that happens. But my band members started to look really tired.”
“What, the Soul Chain guys?”
“No, the first Soul Chain.”
“Crap! What happened to them?”
“You saw Fleet.”
“So everyone who comes to your shows starts to age prematurely?” I fought the impulse to check the backs of my hands for liver spots.
“No, no! Jesus. Just the band. I swear, when I realized it was happening, and I realized it was me, it made me sick.”
“What’d your band members think about it?”
“It was like they didn’t notice. They kept saying they felt great, they didn’t know what their friends and family were worrying about. Then the first one dropped dead. And then another. This building was a godsend.”
“How come?”
“Milo, he’s an under-the-table kinda guy. People in his building out of work? He gets them to put him down as their landlord when they apply for pogey. Rent money comes directly from the government to him. He didn’t say boo when I moved Fleet and Win in, and then filled up the other units with the new members of Soul Chain.”
“Win, too?”
He hung his head. “Yeah. I make sure that Fleet and Win and those guys…”
“And what’re you doing about your new band? ’Cause I don’t think there’s any such thing as just using a little crack.”
He replied, “You know what? I’m done with all this.”
He stood up. I leapt up to bar his way. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
He backed towards the door, his hands held up to ward me off. “I can only deal with so much weirdness, OK? Your family are gods—”
“Demigods.”
He stopped. “Whatever. Sometimes they’re cats. They can control the fucking weather. You’re being chased by some kind of scary goblin thing that turns out to be one of your organs, then you work some far-out mojo that seriously makes my zimzam look like baby spit-up, and you’ve been excuse my French fucking your cousins the cats. The twin cats—”
“Not while they’re cats!” I protested. “That would just be creepy.” The Bejis had been right, though; why had I decided to stop dating them? Maybe I could ask them out next time I saw them.
“And now your sister, the princess royal of music, wants me to jam with her in public without my zimzam? Don’t you get it? I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed your goddamned goblin mojo thing. But clearly, it doesn’t want me any more.”
“Brie—”
“Don’t. You know, I thought maybe there was something between you and me.”
“You did?” I’d hoped there could be, too. But for the past few days I hadn’t been feeling it so much.
“Yeah, but there can’t be. It’s all too much. I can’t keep up with you guys.”
“With us guys? You mean with Abby. She’s the sister with the power.”
He glowered at me. “Sister, you have some power of your own, and it just clonked me on the head and fucked off.”
A horrible thought occurred to me. “Shit. Where’d it go?”
He shook his head. “Dunno, but it’s not in the building. I can sense it when it is.”
I went all over goose bumps. “Oh, gods a
bove. Abby. It’s gone to try to get rid of Abby. It’s jealous of her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s a piece of me. I gotta help her!” I grabbed my phone off my worktable. “Looks like you’re going to be at your gig after all. You’re coming with me.”
He looked really unhappy at that. “Why? What can I do?”
I was trying to call Abby while shrugging into my jacket. “I don’t know, but I can probably use all the help I can get.”
My cell phone rang. It was Abby’s number. Had my haint already reached her? I didn’t want to scare her if I could help it. Maybe today could still go off smoothly. I answered the call. “Hey. Don’t worry, I’m on my way with Brie. He just had a bit of cold feet.”
“Maka, Abby needs you over here right away.” It was Lars’s voice.
“Crap. Did my haint get to her?”
“No.” He sounded puzzled. “But she’s lost her voice.”
“She got a cold, or something? But she knows a bit of anaesthetic spray will—”
“No. I’ve never seen anything like this. She can’t speak above a whisper, and nothing works. She thinks it’s overexposure to Quashee. She can’t go onstage like this.”
“That’s the least of her problems right now. Get her somewhere safe, OK? Behind a locked door, out of sight. I think my haint’s after her.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ll explain later. Don’t tell her what’s up.” I had a glimmer of an idea. It was a terrifying one, but it might solve everyone’s problems. I slipped my cell phone into my pocket and shrugged the rest of the way into my jacket. “Come on,” I said to Lars. “You can warm up in the cab.”
“Can’t I just stay here? Abby doesn’t need me.”
I thought of the skunk that used to fetch and carry for Dad; of all his animal supplicants, in fact. They served him if and when they wanted to, because they wanted to. He never compelled them, never took their love for granted. A real lord knew that his subjects were his equals. “Well, maybe I need you.”
“What’re you going to do?”
I said the words I’d never thought I could utter. “You should have your zimzam, not me. I don’t want it. Especially if it tries to hurt my sis.”
He brightened up. “You’d give it back to me? Wow, Maka. That’s… wow.”
“And that right there is the problem. You’re acting as though it has no choice in the matter. It’s not your slave, Brie. You are not the boss of it.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
I said, “I want you to thank it for everything it’s ever done for you. Then I want you to ask it to please come back to you.”
“Ookay,” he said doubtfully. “And if that doesn’t work?”
I took my Super Soaker down from its hook on the wall. “It’d better work. ’Cause if it tries to do anything to Abby, I’m gonna do my best to destroy it.”
Lars met us when we arrived at the gallery. He gave Brie a measuring look. “So you finally decided to show, huh?”
Brie sighed and pointed at me. “She made me.”
Lars nodded. To my surprise, he said, “She can be fierce.”
Could I? “Where’s Abs?” I asked.
“In the greenroom. She should have gone onstage ten minutes ago.”
Brie touched my arm. “It’s nearby. I can feel it.”
“Fine. You go and try to reason with it.” He nodded. He looked scared, but he went anyway.
Lars asked, “What’s going on?”
I replied, “My haint’s gone rogue. It’s pissed at me, and I think it’s looking to get back at me by hurting Abby.”
“Shit. I gotta get back to her, then!”
I took his wrist. “Brie might be able to stop it.”
But when Lars and I rounded the corner, we found Brie leaning against a wall with a fresh shiner on one eye. “That thing packs a wallop,” he said. “I’m just glad it didn’t use those four-inch talons it’s grown since we saw it a few minutes ago.”
“You should go to Emergency.”
He pulled away from the wall to stand straight. “No, I’m going to keep trying.” He stumbled off. Lars and I rushed to the gallery’s greenroom. An ashen-faced Abby flew into my arms. She was safe! I hugged her back. She said not a word. She just looked at me with lost, frightened eyes. She coughed. She put her hand to her throat and grimaced. In a hoarse whisper she said, “Nothing works. I can’t sing!”
I stroked her hair, kissed her forehead. “Poor Abs.” I meant it. For her, being unable to channel her voice would be like losing all her faculties at once. “I think I can fix it. But I need a little time.”
Lars said, “No problem. She was only due to go on ten minutes ago. People will just think she’s getting her diva on. The band will play in the meantime. I’ll go get them started. Just don’t take too long.”
I moved to let him past me. I clicked the door shut and turned the latch to lock it.
Abby was still standing just in front of me. “I’m bombing.” Her voice crackled like old potato chip bags. Her face was slick with tears. “The show’s a complete failure. We have to give people their money back.”
Something banged on the door, thrice. It came from too low down, and it wasn’t the right cadence for a knock. I gulped. “Probably the stage manager.” I prayed Abs would believe me. I was running out of time. “Have you put on your makeup yet?” I asked her, edging her closer to the dressing room. It had a door with the right kind of handle. I prayed that it opened to the inside.
She shook her head. “Why would I bother with makeup?”
She coughed again. It looked painful. The haint tried again to bang the door down. This time Abby realized that it wasn’t the stage manager. “What—?”
I hustled her into the dressing room. I was in luck for once; the door did open inwards. I shoved Abby in the direction of the old couch that was in there. It broke my heart to see her stumble, but she caught herself and sprawled onto the couch. “I’m sorry, Abs.” She was still struggling to turn to face me, trying to ask me in a whispery shout what was going on. I grabbed her outfit up off the chair she’d hung it over and snatched her cane from the dressing table. I dashed out of the dressing room and slid the cane through the door handle.
A massive blow from outside the greenroom cracked the frame of the outer door. It held, but it wouldn’t for much longer. I tossed Abby’s clothing down and braced myself, holding her cane like a club. I was all flop sweat, but I would go down fighting.
The next sound was a knock. Two raps, quiet and civil, about halfway up the door. “Abby? Makeda? It’s Brie.”
“Yeah?” I replied. “Prove it.” Abby banged on the dressing room door and rattled it.
The voice from outside the greenroom said, “Oh, come on! What am I going to know that my zimzam doesn’t? Just let me in, while I can still control the damned thing.”
“Fair enough.” He sounded tired. I let him in. He looked tired. And as though he was still fighting. I asked him, “Did it agree to come back to you?”
“Not exactly.” He took in the jammed dressing room door, the angry thumping from behind it, me stripping down to my undies and getting into Abby’s clothes. “Let’s just say that we’re having a battle of wills at the moment, and I’m not sure who’s winning. I don’t know how long I can hold on to it. What’re you doing?”
I pulled on Abby’s jacket. “I’m being Abby.” At that, Abby’s noises got louder. Sounded like she was throwing herself against the dressing room door. I called out, “Relax, Sis. I’m trying to protect you.” If this worked, I could fix everything in one fell swoop. Abby would be safe, Dad could have his mojo back, and Brie could have his precious zimzam, if he could convince it to stay. And me? I’d cross that bridge when and if I came to it.
Brie said, “You’re not going to get up onstage, are you?”
“I may not get that far if you can’t talk some sense into your zimzam. Crap, I really haven’t thought
this through, have I? Listen: It’ll come after me, thinking I’m Abby. It’s not very smart. When it does, you grab it. Try to convince it to come back to you.”
“Jesus. It nearly took me out the last two times I tried.” He twitched. “Holding on to it now’s like riding a bucking bronco. And I’ve never ridden a horse.”
“If you and it can’t come to an agreement, I will do my very best to beat it to shreds. Hear that, haint o’ mine?” I sounded about as brave as I felt, which wasn’t much.
“OK, OK. How much time do I have?”
“How would I fucking know?” I had a thought. “Hey; can you sing, now that you’ve roped yourself to your zimzam?”
Abby tried to shout. All I could hear was squeaky hissing. I said, “Stop it, Abs. You’re going to ruin your voice.”
Brie shook his head. “Don’t dare try to sing. I’m just holding it still so you can do what you have to.” He looked close to tears. “I’m really going to miss it. And the band. And being a musician.”
“It’s not like I want to do this!” I truly did mess up everything I touched.
“Hang on,” said Brie. “Maka, sing something, would you?”
“In a pig’s eye. I sing like someone’s freezing the balls off a brass monkey! Plus I don’t have any training.”
He replied, “Just try it. Sing ‘In Anyone’s Home.’ ”
One of Abby’s pieces. I gulped. This was going to be horrible, I was going to squawk like a chicken in a blender. But Abby needed me. I took a breath, opened my mouth, and softly tried the first few words of the song:
Mm, mm, mm, mm
In anyone’s home we are lost.
God, I was even worse than I’d feared. I clamped my braying mouth shut. But Brie waved me on. “Keep it up,” he said. “Those last few notes were better. I guess I was, like, calibrating.”
“Come again?”
“I’m not strong enough to force my zimzam to help me sing, but I can draw energy from it and pass it on to you, if I concentrate hard enough. Go again.”
Damn it. I threw myself at the next couplet:
Sister Mine Page 27
