by Russell Moon
“Wow,” I say, taking the feathers and pocketing them. I pat Chuck’s flat, magnificent head and look up at the bird flying in new, larger circles. According to the theory of familiars reflecting their owner’s status and power, that bird belongs to somebody serious.
“See,” I say jokingly to Eleanor but quite seriously to myself, “this is a dangerous place. We should go someplace safe.”
She once more drapes an arm around me. She doesn’t bother to address the subject further.
We haven’t gone twenty yards farther, when I feel I must say more. Because in light of what I have just learned, about myself and about the Spences, I may only have one thing going for me. And I need to make certain. Especially since watching and waiting has been ruled out.
“El,” I say in a big fat way that makes her get ready for what’s coming. Well, not what’s coming, exactly—no way of her getting ready for that.
“Yesss?” she says suspiciously.
“What would you do right now if you saw Dad?”
I instantly know what she would do first. She would remove her arm from my shoulders and put a good four feet between us.
“I would probably kill him,” she says as we continue to walk side by side but so very far apart. “Except that he’s probably already dead. In which case, if I saw him, I would probably kill him again.”
I hadn’t thought it would go real well, but I hadn’t quite expected this.
“Jeez, Eleanor,” I say, “you talk as if he were, like, evil”
“Well, there is a compelling reason for that, Marcus Aurelius.”
I wait for her to elaborate. I wait in vain.
“Was there nothing good about the guy, ever?” I ask finally.
Now. There. There’s something. I have struck a little something there. I can see it. She slows down, falling off the pace. I ease up to keep in step with her, looking at her sideways while she looks down at the dusty earth illuminated in the pale white moonlight. She slows further, as if trying to shake me off in a race, only in reverse. She shifts her gaze to straight ahead, then up to the sky. I slow even more, and she then stops completely, her arms falling limply to her sides as her face continues to look for something in the moon rays.
“Good,” she says in a feathery, echoey sort of way. “Good. Good?”
It is as if she is not, for the moment, even talking to me. She’s talking to the sky, to herself, to him. Slowly, as though she’s kicking herself into motion, she resumes walking, but at a pace that barely qualifies as motion.
“Was there anything good about him? How do we define good? What is good? I don’t know, Marcus, if I have ever recognized good when I saw it. I don’t know if I’m such a good judge. What does it look like?”
I want to answer, if only because I suddenly feel so guilty for sending her into a tailspin. But when I speak, a mere warble comes out.
“I don’t know good. I might know bad. Yes, yes I do know bad. And I know tired. I certainly know tired, up close and personal. But you wanted to know about good, correct? Well. Well, son,” and with this, she comes back to me, grabs me around the shoulders with more force than before, lets the grip slip up to my neck and pulls me tight, the way a rough guy might do when he’s being buddy and bully at the same time. “I’ll tell you this. He may not ever have been good. But he was, for a time, great.”
This, among all the possibilities, never occurred to me. Not that the man couldn’t have been many things—but I never imagined Eleanor speaking in such terms as great. My lips remain tight, lest I rattle the moment.
“He had capacity, your father did, Marcus. Capacity for more, for more of everything, than anyone I ever encountered. If he loved a thing, he loved it within an inch of its life. If he hated a thing …” I feel it right here at the instant she speaks it, a shudder so profound that it shudders its way all the way up her arm and down my spine.
I wait, as we walk, for more. There must be more, I have to have the more.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, knowing what I am expecting, without my asking. Her eyes glisten. “No,” she says again.
“Please,” I say.
“No,” she says.
We walk a little faster, but not much. The air is buzzy with insects that visit but do not molest us. I hear things in the trees along our otherwise deserted dusty country road. I see the hawk, here and there, though it keeps a much more respectful distance now.
“He loved that bloody dog, I’ll tell you,” she blurts with some mix of bitterness and admiration, pointing aggressively at Chuck.
Chuck meanders along beside us, his head down as if he doesn’t want to be involved.
“Chuck was his dog,” I say. A statement, but a question.
She nods.
“Jeez, El, how old does that make Chuck?”
“I have no idea,” she says. “Chuck was around before I came along, that’s for sure. So he’s twenty years old, minimum. I know it makes no sense, but little does when it comes to your father. I learned that early on.”
“When it comes …” I repeat.
“Ya?” she says.
“You said, when it comes, as opposed to, when it came. As in the present—”
“No,” she says.
“Yes?” I venture.
“He is dead. He is dead.” She is speaking in slow, dramatic, drawn-out, unconvincing syllables. “He is dead. Praise the lord for your sake, Marcus, he is dead.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask, frustration causing my voice to rise a little higher than intended. “Are you saying he would hurt me?”
It is a relief, though a bit weird, to hear her laugh now.
“Hurt you? Marcus, you know that nature program where the gigantic, ferocious alligator was carrying its baby in its mouth? That was your father. He was a complete, senseless fool during the entire time you were expected. In fact, on the day you were born, he was, without question, the happiest, gentlest creature ever to walk this earth. And I know. I’m an anthropologist.”
This, I find, has me smiling hugely, completely against my wishes. Feelings like this are not helpful, they are not sensible in my position. I need facts, not emotions, as I sort through the who’s who. What would have been, what was—these are not things that are of any use to me now. I cannot be distracted.
I think about the bastard as I have experienced him. I think about the abandonment. I think about the slithery, threatening, scary son of a bitch who has been haunting me lately, and I find it easier to maintain my focus.
“Yes,” she continues, lost for a minute in her own reverie, “the most contented being ever. Then, twenty-four hours later, he was gone. Permanently.”
“Why?”
Her bared teeth are fully visible the whole time as she speaks the four words that effectively end the discussion.
“It was bullshit-related.”
We are walking up the creaky front steps of the house in dead silence when she adds her footnote, her small begrudging concession that will perhaps let us leave the discussion, if not the issue, of my father forever and leave it with the barest minimum of goodwill.
“The one thing,” she says, the bitterness having fallen somewhat away back on the road, “the one thing I will say and give him credit for, is this. When he went away, he took the bullshit with him. He spared you that, and for that alone I will be forever grateful to him. The bastard.”
I gulp guiltily, loud enough to cause her to look back over her shoulder as she pushes through the screen door, loud enough to cause Chuck an embarrassed little dog groan.
“Well, at least there’s that,” I say quickly.
And I did notice that was not the coldest use of the word bastard I have ever heard.
CHAPTER
5
I am ultimately summoned back to school by a phone call from the guidance counselor, Mr. Sedaris. The administration as a whole seems to be largely unconcerned about my absence. No contact from the principal or vice-principal’s office, no di
rect contact with Eleanor, nothing in writing on official Blackwater High stationery stating either their deeply felt concern for my well-being or their anger over my continued disregard for the rules of civilization and the American educational system.
No, it is only my man Mr. Sedaris who seems to have noticed my going AWOL from the program, and who sincerely wishes to see me gracing their hallowed halls once again, which he expresses in a personal phone call to myself.
Pretty decent guy, Sedaris, as witch guidance counselors go.
“We are all very sorry to hear about your loss,” he says solemnly.
“Thanks,” I say.
There is a silence. I guess he didn’t expect to be thanked.
“Well, it canbe a particularly hard thing, for someone of your age, in your situation—”
“What loss are we referring to?” I ask flatly. I like Sedaris, but I am at the moment not in a mood to be soothed. Nor to be gracious.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, well, your … lady … was it Jules …?”
“It” I say bitterly, “was Jules, yes. But how did my business become public knowledge?”
He waits several seconds before coming back to me. When he does, there is a new, slightly harder edge to his voice. Apparently, patience and forbearance are running in short supply all around now.
“Right, Marcus, you know how it is. Everybody knows everything—”
“Nobody knows anything,” I cut in.
“We are a family. Everything that transpires anywhere within our—”
I hang up. I know the whole spiel, anyway, so culty and mantra-rich is the whole coven thing by now.
We are all one.
As if that is automatically a good thing.
Anyway, I don’t need the speech. I am ready. I was going back to school whether I was called back or not.
Because all the answers are not going to come out of my own head, and if I only try to look there and there alone, my head will be pillaged in the process. Terrified as I am of whatever it was I saw at Eartha’s house, I cannot avoid her; in fact, I would probably be in deeper trouble if I did.
It is eleven o’clock on the big white face that greets me above the doors when I enter school. I am late, but time no longer matters to me in that way. On a larger scale, time seems to be running short, and that is the only time I care about.
Sedaris is standing there waiting for me, as if we have arranged it. We have not.
“I don’t blame you,” he says, extending a hand.
I take and shake. “That’s good,” I say. “I am blameless where you are concerned. What in particular do you not blame me for?”
“For hanging up on me. It’s understandable that you’re carrying around a little anger at a time like this—”
“Mr. Sedaris,” I say, “you’re really starting to sound like a regular guidance counselor.”
“Oh,” he says, looking genuinely concerned. “Damn. Can’t be doing that, now.”
“No, you can’t.” I finish shaking his hand and walk on past.
“Let me take you around,” he says, “get you acclimated again, reintroduce—”
“If you don’t object,” I say, “I’d just like to reacclimate myself.”
Something about this tickles Sedaris considerably. A mischievous smile crosses his face as he asks, “And if I do object?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t meant it as a challenge or as a bitchy remark at all. At least I wasn’t aware that I had.
But now, as he stands in front of me, asking, I feel a something, a scary something but a not-at-all unpleasant something, coursing through me.
Power. Strength that, while it may be uncontrollable, is somehow comforting. Sedaris is suggesting I am the boss here, that things are going to go however I say they go, and that—most important of all—I am in control. If not of myself, then at least of him. I’d like to think it’s true.
So, if he objects?
“I don’t know,” I say, returning his grin. “I honestly don’t know what I would do. Shall we find out?”
Calmly, like a surrendering prisoner of war, Mr. Sedaris folds his hands behind his back, nods to me, and says, “Nice to have you back, Marcus.”
“Well,” I say, turning and leaving him, “might be nice, might not.”
Which is exactly how I feel about it.
For various reasons, I float through the school like an apparition, hardly intending to head to my own classroom, and hardly caring who sees that I don’t. The first thing I notice is that the regular, mortal, nonmagical population of the school seems completely unaware of me. Not that I am invisible, exactly, as I stop to peer in through the one-foot square windows of each classroom I pass. On the contrary, I notice that one cannot fail to get students’ and teachers’ attention by looking in at their boring lessons. But they just as soon turn away again, as if I may be there physically, but I do not exist in their thoughts, their imaginations, their concerns.
On the other hand, something altogether new and unexpected is going on that was not happening the last time I was in this building.
I have been made aware of the fabric. That all-covering web of connectedness my father described, that makes all of our kind, all magics in an obair, knowable to each other. I can see instantly, can feel powerfully, when I am in the presence of a witch, even if it is only one, buried at the back of a classroom of thirty bored freshmen listening to a tired old woman reciting from Julius Caesar for the forty-fifth year in a row.
My eyes go to her, little mouse of a thing, as she stares back at me, up to me, deep into me, when all the others return to their texts or their naps. She is like the only candle in an otherwise darkened room, and I must look likewise to her, because she does not seem able to look away until I remove myself from her view and go to the next window.
Where the difference becomes even more striking.
They look up, they look away, look down, all the mortal, pedestrian students. And then they leave the others.
It makes me almost uncomfortable. For it is not merely curiosity, not merely even warmth or recognition I see.
It is something like awe. They stare at me, every witch, stare up at me slack-jawed, almost doltish, radiating an unmistakable aura. They shimmer in my view the way mortal kids do not, as if to illustrate the differencebetween warm, sentient beings with heartbeats and cuttable flesh sitting next to dull granite sculptures.
Again, I have to pull away from the window, not only because of the discomfort, but because of a building desire to get to every classroom, every window, and find out. I rocket from one little box window to the next, all along the first level, peeping in every window like a hyperactive voyeur, then racing up the marble stairs to the next floor, then the next, sticking my mad, anxious face in every last window.
I do my lone little bit of actual academic work of the day as I stand with my face pressed to the last of the last of the classroom windows. My first bit of normal high-school schoolwork in quite a while.
Almost certainly the last bit I will ever do.
I do the math, as I look in at this class.
And nearly the entire class stares back, shimmering, fairly humming with cumulative, ungodly magic.
Nearly half. Nearly half the students inside are witches. The key club, apparently, was just the top layer, the ruling class, the senate. There is so much more.
“Legions,” a voice says in my ear. “You will command legions.”
I know who it is. I’m surprised, in fact, that I have been in the building this long without having him come to me.
“Hello, Arj,”I say.
“Hello, Marcus,” he says warmly. “It’s good to see you.
I turn around to face him. “Yeah,” I say, because, really, I don’t feel like returning the compliment.
“Just like old times,” Arj says as we sit in the cafeteria. Sitting with us are Eartha and Marthe, who flank me either side, and Winston and Baron, who flank Arj across from us.
/> “Old times,” I say.
“We were starting to worry about you,” Marthe says warmly.
“Why?” I ask.
“Figured you’d make a mess of things,” Baron says.
I look at him. I do not have powerful, menacing feelings toward him at the moment, just the usual, low-level contempt. But it happens anyway.
His face goes red, purple, black. He starts clutching at his throat. He grabs for the drink in front of him but suffers such a St. Vitus dance of the hand that he merely splatters the table with fizzy orange. He falls, slides under the table, struggling mightily for every breath.
I feel nothing. Everyone else in the cafeteria has begun to notice. Half the place is up and staring, but my table, the council, all remain stoically seated.
“Please, Marcus,” Arj says patiently.
“What?” I say, taking a sip of milk.
“Please?” Eartha asks, touching my hand.
Winston shrugs. “Actually, I’m getting a little fed up with Baron myself,” he says.
I haven’t made any decision, not that I know of anyway, but the moment is broken. Baron makes his way back up to his seat, his face still grotesquely discolored, but his mouth respectfully shut.
I feel a kind of sereneness, certainly a satisfaction. And I know where it’s coming from.
The difference, between now and when I last spent time with the coven, is power. I know now, and I feel now, like I have power, more power, more and still growing, and I know they know it. I still fear them, certainly, and distrust them, surely. But I am convinced that they fear me more.
“What’s the problem?” Arj says loudly to the lingering gawkers, including a handful of anemic Goths—who do not shimmer with any magic in my vision. “You people never saw a guy choke on a chicken bone before?”
They all disperse rapidly, and we calmly get back to the business of business.
I notice the others at the table are all paying inordinate attention to my hands. Or anyway, one hand. One finger.
“Can I touch it?” Marthe asks.
It seems like a weird request to me, but harmless enough, so I nod.
