His eyebrows rose. “Was I? I’m not aware of it.”
She sketched spell signs for enhanced vision in the air between them. Now when she looked at him, she saw again the strange glow of pale fox fire around him, but no evidence of an attract or compel spell. His personality was so submerged he was almost invisible. Why did she feel this strange heart tug?
“So what are you doing back in Guthrie?” Terry asked.
He glanced around. “We’re in Guthrie?”
“You don’t even know where you are?”
“I tracked you and found you. That was more important than knowing where you were.”
Terry frowned. “So where’s your boss? He going to come and scoop you up again? What is it you want from me, anyway?”
Galen straightened, looked back to the beach, searched all around. “He may follow me. I left when I knew he was occupied with something, but he might leave his study sooner than I expect. He’s been watching me more carefully lately.” His voice remained flat and unemotional, but Terry sensed agitation.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Maybe he knows I’m restless and looking for answers in directions of which he doesn’t approve. Will you help me?”
“How can you ask me that? You and your master hurt my friend!”
“You’re strong and disciplined. With your help, I may be able to do what I need.”
What was with this guy? Maybe his lack of emotions made him think nobody else had them either. He sure scored low on empathy. But maybe Terry could use that. “What’s in it for me?” she asked. Should she just blast him? Drop a tether spell on him and use truthtell to get some answers about the strange things that had happened so long ago? She should at least tell Tasha and the others that something important was happening out here on the rocks. She scanned the beach, searching for her sister.
“Please,” said the boy. He crouched beside her again, and pulled something out of his pocket. “It’s not for me. Here’s my heart.” He dropped something the size of a ruby grapefruit into her cupped hands.
Heat flowed from the thing. She looked at it: the same thing he had tried to show her in the bar. A knot of glass shaped like an anatomical heart, and inside its clear crystal walls floated something—two somethings. Terry felt horror chill the pit of her stomach. Two tiny children floated inside the chambered glass. Their faces were pale, their eyes closed as though asleep. Her vision was still bright from the spell. She saw the heart’s aura, and realized that these were real people, nearly dead but not quite.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“My brother and sister,” said Galen in his flat voice. “My master put them in there. I carry them with me everywhere. Can you help me get them out?”
“What?” She closed her hands around the heart, its throbbing warmth, its terrible cargo, and felt her throat thicken with tears.
“I only know my own heart once in a while,” said Galen, “when I touch shaped stone. It has taken me a long time to make this decision. I have thought it over a thousand times, though, and I believe I know what I want. Let the children out.”
“Your master locked your brother and sister up in here?”
“He said it would keep them safe. I gave up my heart to keep them safe. This is not what I wanted for them.”
“No duh,” said Terry. “He did that to your brother and sister, and you still stay with him?”
“My master and I bound ourselves to each other before he did this.”
“Oh, God! That’s awful!”
Galen shrugged. “It’s not so terrible when you don’t know your own heart. Will you help me?”
“Yes,” said Terry.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Galen!” cried a freezing voice from behind him.
Terry jumped to her feet. She didn’t recognize the voice, though she knew she had heard it before.
Galen sighed and looked over his shoulder. “I’ll leave them with you,” he whispered. “Please keep them safe. Please!” A whirl of shadow came out of the air and swallowed him. A second later Terry was alone on the rock.
The glass heart still beat in her hands.
matt woke from dreamless sleep to music and warmth. The music sounded like wind chimes, the really good kind with tuned pipes. She opened her eyes and saw a pillar of shifting, fiery colors floating in the air beside her bed. Warmth flowed from it, and the music came from it too.
“What?” she said. She sat up. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.
“Did you call me?” Its voice was beautiful, burned clean of impurities, rich as gold.
“Julio?”
“Who are you?”
“Julio,” she said again, then put her hands over her mouth.
“I don’t know you,” it said.
“No. No, I’m sorry. I’m Matt. I didn’t call you. I don’t know how. But I’ve been looking for you.”
“Why?”
She felt strange talking to a column of flickering fire. “Two things. I’m helping Edmund find his old friends. And the house wants everybody to come back.”
“House.” A streamer of fire reached from the main mass of light to touch the wall. Then the whole column of light shifted past Matt, over her bed, to shimmer against the wall, half submerge in it.
Matt wanted to touch the light. The desire burned in her. She held out her hand, wanting more than anything to connect with this strange thing. If she could connect, they could talk in the language of things, a straightforward language with few evasions.
She’d already had a lot of conversations with Julio, only he hadn’t been there. What would he do when he found out what she knew?
She brushed her hand through the edge of fire. Her hand tingled: not quite a burn, more like waking after falling asleep. She felt an immense thrumming, like a silent engine doing a big job.
“Hey,” said the voice. It sounded like it was laughing.
“Sorry.” Nathan had said he could feel Julio’s hand when the light touched him, but this wasn’t like that. Matt drew her hand out of the light. “You’re so pretty.”
“Thanks,” said the fire, and changed into a person.
Not the person Matt expected.
A dark-skinned, black-eyed woman in a yellow dress stood on Matt’s bed. She was short and shapely and reminded Matt of Juanita. Her heavy black hair was braided and coiled in a crown around her head. “Who’s this sleeping in my bed?” she asked, and dropped to sit cross-legged on the covers in front of Matt. She smiled wide, showing strong white teeth, and a dimple in her right check.
“Hi,” said Matt.
“Hi. House just told me who you are.”
“Are you Julio?”
“Not exactly, but not far from it.”
“Who Julio is now.’” Matt remembered: when Edmund asked whether Nathan still saw any of his old friends, Nathan had said, I see who Julio is now.
“My name is Lia.”
“House told me way too much about who you used to be, without asking you if it was all right.”
“House just told me all about who you are, without asking you if it’s all right,” Lia said, and shrugged. “What can you do?” She held out her hand, and Matt grasped it. Lia’s hand was strong and calloused. “It’s excellent to meet you, Matt.” Lia smiled and looked away. “I’m not sure I’m ready to face the others yet.”
“It’s a lot different when you’re a girl all along and they just think you’re a boy, but then find out they’re wrong. This is … a lot more.”
“Sometimes it seems gigantic. Sometimes it’s little. When I’m alone, I don’t even notice most of the time. This shape works much better for the life I live now, though.” Lia pleated the hem of her dress between her fingers, “Since my real self is fire, I can be whatever shape human I want.”
Matt remembered the house telling her she could step out of its wall taller, fatter, different. She looked at her new leather boots, standing beside the bed. She had said hi to them be
fore she fell asleep, and they had said hi back in the voices of her old boots. Did they even know they had changed?
She remembered Nathan telling the others that Julio’s core was the same, even though Julio had changed.
You could wear the edges off a beach rock and its center stayed the same.
“The journey from flame to human is the same length either way, just a slightly different direction. I could switch back to Julio, I guess.” Lia frowned and stared down at her thumbs. “Haven’t done Julio in a long time, though.”
“The house remembers.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Lia smiled and parted the wall. Her skin glowed orange, then glowed brighter, and she vanished into a creature of many-colored flame, which pressed into the wall.
Matt touched the wall partway inside the fire and felt the house’s quiet turquoise strength meeting Lia’s loud, boisterous energy. Matt’s hand began to melt into the mix. She pulled it out. What if she melted into the house now and got all mixed up in house and Lia? What if she went into the house and came back out a man?
She slid out from under the covers and pulled on her jeans, thinking.
How could Lia say changing genders was a little thing? Contemplating it made Matt shiver. She had spent a lot of her life pretending to be a man, but she suspected that being a man would feel completely different.
“I don’t know,” said Lia. Her voice was lower. Fire tightened and condensed. A young man stood on Matt’s bed, Julio, all in red, his short black hair flickering at the ends. “This feels very strange. I don’t like it anymore.” His voice was tenor now, not alto, but similar in tone and timbre. He jumped off the bed and walked around the room. He shook his head. “No, this is too strange.”
A guitar on a stand appeared before him. “What?” He reached out and picked up the guitar. “My old Martin. But this guitar is in my safe place. How, House?”
“Anything that was ever here can be here again,” Matt said. Suddenly she wondered: after she left, would the house summon images of her and show them to other people? Talk to them? Make them move and talk like she did? Would it walk into other people’s dreams and tell them about her? Let them be her?
Nothing she could do about it—except ask the house not to do that. Which was no guarantee that it wouldn’t. Everybody owned their memories, no matter who was in them. She had a brief vision of the scattering of selves she’d left behind all over the country, snakeskin Matts in the heads of this person or that, Matts she had stepped out of but which still held her shape and character.
Julio slipped the guitar strap over his neck and shoulder and strummed the guitar. It sounded in tune. He played flamenco.
Matt sat, entranced. The music was crisp and sharp and flashing. It made her think of people stamping and whistling.
Julio glanced at her, noticed how she listened, and played more, smiling. His face was similar to Lia’s, though narrower. His smile flashed the same dimple, the same white teeth. He finished playing the piece, and said, “The music is the same, either way—”
The bedroom door opened. “Julio?” cried Edmund as he rushed into the room.
The guitar banged to the floor. A rage of flame whooshed up and vanished, leaving behind only a faint smell of hot metal.
“Julio?” Edmund’s voice sang soft and bereft. He turned to Matt. “Was he here?”
Matt went to pick up the guitar. The fall had scuffed it. She stroked the strings, and they sounded discordant.
“Matt?” Edmund asked.
Matt put the guitar carefully on its stand, then knelt and placed her palm on the floor.—Take it away again,—she told the house.
The guitar faded.
Matt sat on the floor.—Is anybody else home?—
—No.—
—Why didn’t you tell ns Edmund was here?—
The house didn’t say anything.
—Is Lia still here?—
“Matt.” Edmund sat on the floor beside her. “What happened?”
She turned to him, smiled, touched his mouth. “Guess you shoulda knocked.”
“I heard the music. I saw him. He was here. Why did he run?”
“Kind of shy right now.”
“Shy about what? We were best friends for years. Now what?”
“Changed a lot,” Matt said.
Edmund hunched his shoulders and leaned forward. “Changed so much he can’t face me? He looked the same.”
“That was just acting.”
“Matt—” Pain sang in his voice.
She turned to him and hugged him, stroked his hair. If Edmund had been the person Matt first met, calm, serene, accepting everything that came to him as though it must be right or could be fixed, Lia could have met him without trouble, Matt thought. But that Edmund wouldn’t be the person Lia remembered as a friend. That Edmund wasn’t around much anymore.
This Edmund returned her embrace, then sighed and sat up. “You saw him? He’s all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Guess that’s all I need to know.”
Matt looked over Edmund’s shoulder.
The flame came silently this time, unaccompanied by wind chime noises.
Matt nudged Edmund. He turned.
For a moment, the flame hung there, stretching from floor to ceiling, mostly white and gold, with other colors, red, aqua, orange, lime green, balloon pink, violet, streaking through. Then it drew in, tightened, turned solid.
“This is Lia,” said Matt.
Lia gazed at Edmund for a long moment, then smiled.
“Hi,” Edmund said. “How are you?”
“Happy,” she answered.
“That’s great.” He climbed to his feet and walked to her. They stared into each other’s faces for a long time. Edmund’s brows lowered for a little while, then rose. Lia waited.
Matt held out as long as she could stand it, and then opened dream-eyes.
Above Lia’s head, Matt saw a hushed concert hall, full house, empty stage, houselights down and stage lights up, everything waiting for something to begin.
Above Edmund’s head, a kaleidoscopic rush of silent images of Julio, and an image of Lia: comparisons, cross-checking.
A much younger Julio and a misty place-holder Edmund climbed over a fence at night, sneaked close to a house to peek in a window.
Eight-year-old Julio and Edmund had an argument that involved waving comic books at each other and shouting.
Fourteen: they fought three other boys and lost, were left in the dust, bleeding. Julio helped Edmund up.
Thirteen-year-old Edmund performed a magic show for a classroom full of little kids, and Julio accompanied on the guitar. The kids’ eyes were wide with wonder.
Eleven-year-old Julio and Deirdre held unlit cigarettes, tried different poses: cigarette between finger and thumb, between first two fingers, with some fingers folded over, with all fingers straight. They watched each other and discussed, refined the ultimate too-cool cigarette pose, until Edmund came into the image, grabbed the cigarettes, and stamped on them.
Twelve-year-old Julio dragged twelve-year-old Susan over to twelve-year-old Edmund and Deirdre on an otherwise empty playground. Susan stared at the ground, and Julio talked. Susan turned to walk away, and Julio grabbed her hand, keeping her there. Edmund and Deirdre said something, and Susan finally looked up, her eyes shadowed, her mouth smiling faintly.
Julio leaned his cheek and chin on the chin rest of a violin, closed his eyes, and played. Bliss transformed his face. Gradually, his face turned into Lia’s face.
Matt closed dream-eyes.
Edmund reached out and touched Lia’s face. She put her hand on his cheek. “Okay,” Edmund said.
“But enough about me,” Lia said. “What happened to you?”
Edmund laughed. He set his hand gently on Lia’s shoulder. She hugged him fiercely, and he hugged her back. They stepped away from each other. “You don’t want lo talk about why?” Edmund asked.
“Not at the moment.” Lia p
aced the room just the way Julio had. “I’m lucky. It’s easy for me. Sometimes I wonder how many people want to change and can’t. It’s lots harder for humans.”
“You looked like your old self when I came in.”
“That was an experiment. I didn’t know how to face you, and I still don’t know how I’ll face Suki and Deirdre. The coward’s way would be to change back to the way I used to look. It’s not difficult, but it no longer feels right. What do I go for, comfort or honesty?”
Edmund sat on his bed and watched Lia pace. He smiled, but didn’t offer any answers.
Lia called Suki Suki, Matt thought. She wondered how much of her history Lia had absorbed while half-submerged in House. Enough to have gotten a good look at present-day Suki and Deirdre. Maybe Lia knew everything Matt had done lately. Matt felt that the idea should bother her more. The intimacy the house had given them somehow washed worry out. Matt was still missing a lot of information about Lia, though. The house had been careful to tell her nothing more recent than fifteen years ago.
“Hey,” Matt said, “did you ever pay Mr. Noah for his violin?”
Lia stopped. A smile lit her face. “I built him a new one. It took me four tries, but I finally built one that held together and sounded right. I put fire in it. One of my first successful projects after I changed. He forgave me.”
She straightened, glanced from Edmund’s face to Matt’s. “Who called me?”
“Called you?” Edmund asked.
“Someone called me.”
“I thought the house fixed it so people couldn’t call you,” Matt said.
“What?” said Edmund.
“The house mixed up Julio and Tabasco so people couldn’t use those article things on them, or summon him against his will.”
Lia grinned at Matt. “Easiest way to explain anything. Let somebody else do it. Yes. House changed my nature so I couldn’t be controlled the way demons are. For those who know me, though, there are still ways of summoning me. Someone called me here.”
“So who knows you?” Matt asked.
“Since I changed?” Lia nodded. “Of course. House, and Nathan.”
Matt flattened a hand on the floor and waited. The house didn’t say anything.
Nathan shimmered into sight. “I called you,” he said, “for the reasons Matt said. Edmund is looking for his friends, and House has plans.”
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