by Dia Reeves
“Everyone? Hello? Hi, there.” In his best let’s-be-friends voice. “I’m Jimi Elba and I used to be human, but one day this happened.” He removed his shirt and allowed his wings to unfurl. Absorbed the gasps and recoils.
“Me too! My feelings exactly. Now I know we all have problems, otherwise we wouldn’t be here seeking answers. However, not all of us have to carry our problems on our backs. So I really hope y’all don’t get your feelings hurt, but I’m next.”
Jimi walked all the way to the head of the line. Looked at the guy he was cutting in front of and wordlessly dared him to say anything.
He didn’t.
Jimi considered waiting for the scholar to finish up with whoever was behind the closed door, but the consideration lasted only as long as it took him to turn the knob and walk in.
The room was a library-office hybrid. Mediocre enough except for the huge desk that looked as though it had been carved from an ancient tree of legend. At a more humble card table in the back, a curly haired guy in a Prentiss College t-shirt stood pressing an open book to a scanner.
“You look kinda young for a scholar.”
“I’m not the Scholar—she’s at lunch. I’m her assistant, Tiggy.”
“You look scholarly enough for what I need.”
Tiggy came to the desk, to get a closer look. He had an astute gaze. “Are you Jimi?”
“How do you know—?”
“Wyatt told us about you. Your transmogrification. So we’ve been keeping tabs.”
“You’re spying on me?”
“Naturally. What question did you want to ask?” Tiggy wanted to tell what he knew—bookworms always did.
“I want to know what I am.”
“You’re a seer. Is that all you want to know?”
“All? The first time I noticed I was different was when wings exploded out of my back, so any info would be great. I mean, my dad told me what he could, but he had sex with a woman who was half insect and didn’t notice. Not too sure I can trust his recollection.”
“Don’t blame your dad. When your survival depends on blending in, you learn to do it well. The seers passed for human for a good century right here in Portero, and no one noticed. They aren’t insects; they’re a subspecies of human, if that makes you feel any better.”
It didn’t.
“What do you know about seers? Do they grow tails or die young or go psycho?” Ophelia would especially want an answer to that last question.
“No tails, they don’t die any earlier or later than humans, and we all go a little mad sometimes. Their main thing, other than having insectile wings, is reality shifting. That’s what got them banished. Remember back in 2003, when the sun didn’t rise for three months?”
Jimi did. He used to carry his dad’s old kerosene lantern when they’d walk to the park. Jimi and his friends played flashlight wars in the square for hours. It had been summer, and the coolness, the reprieve from the Texas heat, had been a blessing.
“That was the seers. Their red eyes are an adaptation that allows them to filter out certain spectrums of light, but not all seers have red eyes. For them, sunlight is especially painful. So painful, many seers have their eyes removed.”
“Or sewn shut.”
“How did you know that? Have you had contact with other seers? Your mother?”
Because it was the price everyone paid to visit the green house, Jimi told as much as he knew about seers while Tiggy recorded his answers in a black notebook.
“How did they get rid of the sun?”
“They didn’t. They moved the town where the sun wasn’t.”
“How?”
“We don’t know, but they did it together. It might not have been on purpose; all of them in one place may have been enough to work its own mischief.”
“Do the seers live outside of time?”
“You mean in eternity? Not now, though we think they may have at some point in their history; it would explain their incomplete physiology.”
“Incomplete?”
“They don’t have souls. Well, most of them. The few who do reproduce, usually with humans who have souls and can be easily manipulated. Of the babies these breeder seers produce, a third or fewer will have souls. Those babies are very special to them.”
“Then why did my other mother leave me here? I have a soul. I’ve seen it.”
“We know. That’s one of the first things we check. Soulless people have to be…monitored. But that’s not your problem. You might be damaged in a way only other seers understand though. Like you’re sterile or something.”
“Am not.”
“You’ve reproduced?”
“That’s beside the point. Besides, they do want me. They’re always scheming to get me over there. Can a living person survive in eternity?”
“No.” Tiggy seemed startled by the question. “I mean, yes, but mostly no. People who have done it used hourglass beetles. The beetles can negate time; suspend it; circumnavigate it, and lend that ability to the human lucky enough to catch one. But they’re tricky to get hold of.”
“Not for me. I know a guy.”
“I mean literally, Jimi. Hourglass beetles protect your soul, but they also feed on it. It’s a balancing act trying to keep body and soul together around those things.”
“Can they drown?”
“No. They’re resistant to fire, too. Ice. Hourglass beetles are hard to kill, which is just as well. I’m pretty sure their deaths create holes through time and space. The Scholar probably knows more about that though.”
“What’s the name of the place the seers were banished to?”
“The Mayor didn’t banish them to anywhere specific. Just anywhere not on Earth.” Tiggy smirked at Jimi’s expression. “When the Mayor banishes, she banishes.”
“Have you ever heard that when you die, you forget all about your loved ones and move on?”
“No, but then what do I know about the afterlife? What does it matter with so much to learn about this one?” Tiggy flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “Now, Jimi, tell me about your experiences so far, being a seer.”
Chapter 20
Sometimes being in Carmin’s room felt no different from being outside.
It was full of plants no one but a Porterene would recognize. So many plants, spiraling down from the ceiling and trailing along the ground since part of Carmin’s floor was covered in soil. One of his walls, the one that opened onto the backyard, was made of glass with sliding doors that Carmin kept open most of the year to let the fumes out.
He didn’t have a bed. Not a normal one. What Carmin had was a round pit in the middle of his room with a fuzzy green center ringed with matching cushions that doubled as a lounge area when he had guests. He was in the pit now playing host to Lecy, Jimi, and Ophelia.
As odd as Carmin’s room was, Ophelia was the oddest thing in it. Jimi had half convinced himself that he’d made her up and she only existed in his tortured mind, but no. Lecy and Carmin could see her too. Even talk to her, though Ophelia hadn’t opened her mouth since they’d arrived. She was almost pathologically shy around people she didn’t know.
Jimi was glad she wasn’t like that with him.
She’d been waiting for him outside his dad’s house, standing on the sidewalk peering into Darkroom’s display window.
“You into photography all of a sudden?”
He liked the way she was so obviously glad to see him.
“There’s a family in there getting their portrait done. They’re dressed as Ewoks.”
“Leave, child, before your eyes are soiled any further.”
“Not until you tell me what happened with the Scholar. You went to the green house, didn’t you?”
“I have an errand to run at Carmin’s.”
“The stupid step-cousin?” she asked, following. “I could drive you.”
“It’s not that far.”
“But it’s cold.” She did seem cold. How long had she been waiting? “Y
ou could fill me in on the way. Couldn’t you?”
Jimi decided he could. In the car, he told her everything Tiggy had told him about seers and their ability to shift reality.
“I knew you were manipulative the first day we met, and I’m not even a scholar.”
“Shut up. At least I won’t grow a tail.”
“Tails don’t bother me. The idea of watching you blow up the sun more than makes up for it, though.”
“I keep thinking,” Jimi said, “that maybe I’ll go ahead and visit my other mother, next time she sends for me.”
“Next time? You don’t think she’s given up?”
“I’m not the kind of guy people give up on.”
“Oh?”
“Well…one day it’ll be the truth.”
They chatted like that all the way to Carmin’s and before Jimi knew it, Ophelia was sitting with him, helping to test Carmin’s newly named magic smoke.
A white plume left Carmin’s lips and shaped itself into a camel that plodded through the air. The camel headbutted Jimi’s kangaroo. Because it was snuggling with Lecy’s panda bear.
Ophelia exhaled a shepherdess, complete with staff, who herded all the rowdy animals from the room via the open glass door.
The smoke curled and slithered around them, and smelled pleasantly of toffee. “This came from a sloth?” Jimi asked, impressed.
“Maybe that’s why it’s so boring.” Carmin was very much the opposite of impressed.
“It makes shapes,” Lecy said.
“Neurologically boring.”
“It mellows you out.”
“Lots of things do that.”
“It’s pretty and fun.” Lecy exhaled a stream of butterflies and laughed. “We could market it to girls.”
“Girls schmirls. I had such high hopes for this stuff.” Carmin’s smoky sigh was long and gusty enough to spawn hurricanes. “Worst Christmas vacation ever.”
“Our worst Christmas vacation involved puking up glowfish roe. It’s a long story,” she told Ophelia, “but exploding fish should not be ingested no matter how psychotropic their flesh is.”
Jimi said, “My worse Christmas vacation involved eating a swan.”
“What? Why?” The two of them, so disgusted as though they hadn’t just admitted to puking up fish eggs.
“It was when m…Alexis and me lived in France. The village only had this one rinky-dink épicerie that didn’t sell turkeys. So one of our neighbors went out and shot a swan and shared it with us for Christmas. It kept looking at me though. Like it was blaming me. It didn’t even taste good. Like a duck that had swallowed an eel. I had nightmares for a week.”
“Grandy told me about you living in France. About how Aunt Alexis stole you away or something.”
“Only to get back at dad for cheating on her.”
“She probably vanished with you because she was afraid your dad would win you in the divorce. Totally possible since she’s not related to you. So she panicked, thinking she’d never see you again, and decided to keep you to herself for…how long?”
“A year.”
This little speech was the most Ophelia’d said since they’d been here. Had Alexis really wanted him to herself? Jimi couldn’t wrap his head around an idea like that. So he wrapped his arm around Ophelia’s shoulders instead; that was easy.
“I don’t try to understand my folks anymore,” he said. “Why they do this or that. It’s impossible. Their relationship is like Carmin and Lecy’s.” Jimi exhaled a giant bee. “Solid, but toxic.”
Carmin and Lecy smiled, like that was a compliment.
“That reminds me,” said Carmin, swatting the bee out of existence, “did you still want to see that beetle? Cuz it’s about dead.”
“Why? What did you do?”
“Nothing, asshole. I just can’t figure out what to feed it.”
“I’ll show it to you.” Lecy led Jimi out of the pit to the other side of the room. Jimi reached out in passing to switch off the stereo which was currently blasting “Got to Be Real” but Carmin screamed, “Touch it and die!” so Jimi let it slide.
From a table full of odd bits of flora and fauna, she picked out a glass jar without holes poked through the lid. A tired looking beetle, brassy and tarnished, trundled at the bottom.
“No wonder it’s nearly dead. You’re suffocating it.”
“Hell with that thing. I woke up a week late last month.”
Lecy whispered, “She the one you want to pee on?”
Jimi looked startled, until he remembered his drunken ramblings at the water tower. “Not anymore.”
“She seems nice enough. Kinda shy—”
“She’s not nice. Dez was nice.”
Carmin was looking at Ophelia’s legs, yapping at her. Ophelia wasn’t yapping back. She blew a smoke ring that settled over Carmin’s head and grew into a dunce’s cap.
Lecy chuckled. “Nice is overrated.”
They took the beetle to the pit, and Ophelia immediately took charge of it. She unscrewed the lid.
“Hey! Don’t turn it loose in here. You wanna wake up 70 years in the future?”
Ophelia ignored Carmin, a piece of soul—whose soul was that?—already pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She fed it to the beetle.
“What’re you doing?”
Since it was supposed to be impossible for humans to see souls, to Carmin and Lecy it probably looked like the beetle was nibbling Ophelia’s fingers.
“Let her do her thing,” Jimi said, glad he’d brought her along. He almost hadn’t because he’d wanted to give her a chance to miss him the way he missed her when she wasn’t around.
When Ophelia put the beetle back in the jar, it was different, bright gold and zinging off the glass.
Carmin said, “That was some intense mojo, girl.”
Ophelia slumped back against Jimi, proud of her work..
“So seeing as how we saved your beetle’s life, can I borrow it?”
“You can have it.”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re sure you want it. Those things are tricky.”
“I know, but I need it.”
“Take it then.” Before Jimi could pump his fist in the air, Carmin continued, “If you can get me an invitation to the Revelry.”
Lecy spoke up, “Two invitations.”
“What she said.” He blew smoke at her that shaped itself into a lion’s mask and enveloped her face.
“That’s impossible. The Mayor only invites the baddest of asses to that thing. Why would she want you?”
“That’s officially no longer my problem. You want the beetle, get me those invites.”
Jimi looked at Lecy, pleading.
“You know we love you.” She was inscrutable behind her mask. “But business is business.”
On the driveway next to Ophelia’s car:
“You fed it Carmin’s soul, didn’t you?”
The distaste in her expression pleased him. She hadn’t reacted that way about Jimi’s soul.
“Someone else’s.” She touched her chest. “From in here.”
“How many souls are you carrying?”
“I never count them. Not a lot?”
“Do that many people kill themselves around here?”
“I eat the suicides, the ones that get left behind. The souls I carry are from people who’ve died from different things. I collect them from all over the county. There’s a lot of miles on that Rolls.”
“You should have fed the beetle my soul, since it’s for me.”
Her greedy look surprised him. “I didn’t want to.”
Greedy and jealous. She was being very pleasing today.
He put his arm around her again. She was still a little shivery thanks to Carmin and his wide open doors. “Whose soul was it?”
“Willa. Winnifred. Whatever. Are you really going to try to sneak into eternity?”
Jimi dropped his arm. “How do you know?”
“An hourglass beetle? What
else would you do with it?”
Jimi was silent.
“Well?”
“I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
“But—”
“Ophelia. Don’t worry about it.” Jimi couldn’t talk about it without her hating him, and he’d had enough of that. “I’ll see you later. I have to go figure out how to scam Revelry invites off some sucker.”
He was halfway down the street when she called:
“We can get some from the Mayor.”
“Just go to her house and ask, huh?”
“Why not?”
He walked back. “Because she once threatened to banish you? From the earth?”
“She never threatened you. Did she?”
“Not to my face.”
“Good. Do you want to go to her now? I can drive us.”
“No.”
She was crestfallen until he added, “Tomorrow. That’ll give me time enough to grow a set of brass balls.”
Chapter 21
The Gray Road was what Porterenes called El Pasillo when it ran between Portero Park and the dark park. Not a road, but an in-between place—a stubborn fold that would never be ironed smooth. A door that opened, not out of the world, but deeper into it. To one place.
Golden double doors that should have been hinged to a palace, floated into view, attached to nothing. Or maybe they were attached to a palace, a home that existed on a level far too advanced even for Jimi’s eyesight.
“Can you see it?” he asked. “The Mayor’s estate?”
Ophelia said, “I think it’s one of those things that’s real only if you want it to be. Like the Great Pumpkin. Or personal safety.”
The door stood twice as tall as they did, the Mayor’s image carved in bas-relief, floating out from the door like an optical illusion. A triple illusion that depicted the Mayor’s right and left profiles and her full face, simultaneously. The effect was jarring but harmonious, the Mayor’s forehead, nose, and chin sculpted with a celestial ratio of perfection.
