A Fistful of Sky (30 page)

“I didn’t know what else to do. All charged up and no place to go.”

“Lots of things easier than normal,” said Beryl. “You could’ve made yourself old, or young, or a boy, or ugly, or a dog, or something. Normal.” Her white eyebrows drew together over her nose. “Is this what you really want, Gyp?”

When I stood on the fog-shrouded beach and thought up my latest curse, I had asked myself the same question.

I finally had power. I could do wonderful things with it, and I could do horrible things with it. If I were normal again, I wouldn’t have to come up with new ways to curse, wouldn’t have to wrack my brains figuring out how much I could hurt other people and things without hurting them too much. Normal. Maybe that would be best. So I had said my words, and tortured myself.

I met Beryl’s gaze. “If it was what I wanted, it wouldn’t have been a curse.”

She pursed her lips, then nodded. “Good point.” She turned to Ian. “And what about you?”

“Me?”

“Where’d you come from?” Her voice switched from almost Beryl-normal to the creaky voice of a crone.

“Beryl,” I said.

“Idaho,” said Ian.

“Idaho,” she muttered. “Welp. Better get this stuff to the dining room.”

“May I carry that for you?” Ian asked.

“Why, sure,” she said. She held the door, and he took the coffee tray past her.

“I’ll get the other one in a minute,” he called back. But that was silly. I grabbed the brownie platter, then put it down again. It was really heavy, and my arms were tired. I sat down. Just for a minute.

Ian returned. “Are you all right?”

“I’m really tired.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Oh, no. Not now that Mama’s decided to make a production out of your visit. You have to stay. Are you all right? I don’t have the easiest family in the world.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Hey. Beryl put her hand on your throat and you could talk again.”

“Yeah. That was nice.”

“Your whole family is like that?”

“Everyone but Dad and me. I mean—” I put my hand on my chest, feeling for my curse fire. It wasn’t there. “Everyone but Dad. And maybe me again, if this curse really worked.”

He sat down in the chair next to me. “How weird for you.”

“Until Wednesday.”

He touched my hand. “Even then, huh? Blowing up a piece of traffic furniture or turning yourself inside out isn’t the same as being able to heal with a touch.”

I turned my hand over and gripped his. My throat felt tight. I waited, then managed to say, “How weird for you this whole evening is, huh?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Oh yeah. I’m pretending it’s a dream. It’s more interesting than my daydreams, though, even the old ones where I invoked dark powers and made people do what I wanted.”

“You had that dream?”

“I bet most kids do.”

“Only in my family, those dreams come true.”

“Gyp—hey, who’s this?” asked Flint from the kitchen door.

“This is Ian.”

Flint came in and shook lan’s hand. “Hi. Nice to meet you. I’m Gyp’s brother Flint. Mama’s getting steamed, Gyp. What’s taking you so long?”

“Sorry.” I stood up, then staggered. I’d forgotten how off-balance I was.

Ian put his arm around my waist. “Come on. There are comfortable-looking chairs in there.”

Flint grabbed the brownie platter.

I leaned on Ian as we went into the dining room. He put his arm around me. And I wasn’t even screaming.

It was strange and nice to be so close to someone who wasn’t a member of my family. Also it was confusing. I liked it.

Mama, Beryl, Tobias, and Dad were seated at one end of the table. The candles were lit. Flint set the brownies down in front of Mama next to the

coffee tray. We sat down, and Mama introduced Ian to Tobias and Dad, then poured coffee and passed out plates with brownies on them. Ian held my hand under the table while my family asked him questions.

It spooked me. This was too much like interrogating a prospective husband. They weren’t supposed to get this serious after our first date. What if they scared him off?

I must have fallen asleep sitting at rhe dining room table, because I didn’t remember going to bed, or when Ian left.

The next thing I knew, I was in my bed, staring up at morning light highlighting the cracks in my bedroom ceiling, listening to the raging bonfire in my chest.

MY first thought was, Oh, thank God! The curse expired. The power came back. I don’t feel sick and lost. I’m me again.

I had wondered more than once last night if I had cursed myself right out of the curse business.

I sat up in bed and laughed.

My second thought was, Oh, my, God, I fell asleep and left Ian alone with my family. Wonder if he survived.

My third thought was, Opal’s coming home today.

Then I wondered what to curse and how. I wished I had brainstormed curses with somebody so I could have been ready for this. It was going to be like this every morning, right?

I glanced around my room. I’d finished superficial decorating during my UFS period, so that everything was different colors than I remembered, and things looked styled rather than thrown together. I liked the color combinations, but Beryl was right. It wasn’t quire right. My UFS self was not my real self.

It was Saturday. Opal was coming home today, to stay through Christmas, which was Wednesday, and then drive back to L.A. and the current project. I hadn’t talked to her in a while, hadn’t told her I’d finally come into my powers. I wondered if I had a curse to use that would help me enjoy her visit. UFS was the perfect curse to help me deal with Opal; then I would feel like I was even with her about looks and fashion for the first time in my life, even if I was wrong. But I wasn’t ready to repeat

myself, and how many more haircuts and makeovers could I do?

Today I also planned to start my traditional Christmas chore. I was going ro make lots of cookies this year—I owed Jasper three batches already, though the way he’d been shying away from eating anything sweet since he had tried out being fat, I wondered whether he still wanted them.

Oh yeah, he could give them to his bandmates.

Once I got his cookies out of the way, there were the regular Christmas cookies to make for all the parties. There was the Christmas Eve party just for family. Then a Christmas Day party, to which we all invited outsider friends, people who knew us well and people who only knew us slightly, so the family would be on their best behavior. A couple days after Christmas, we’d go to L.A. to Grandmere’s and Grandpere’s for the big semiannual family gathering. It helped to take lots of cookies to that, too. It was my big bid for popularity in the cousin stakes, since I hadn’t anything else to offer.

But wait a second.

Okay, this year was going to be different.

Oh, God. Everyone would find out about me. Mama would either be proud or ashamed. I should figure out which and plan accordingly.

And then there was shopping. I hadn’t done any gift shopping yet.

I checked my clock. Seven a.m. Saturday morning. God, I was waking up early these days.

Red light nickered near my chest and above both my hands, little half-invisible flames.

Focus, Gyp.

I pulled on pants and a T-shirt, grabbed my protection stone, and ran downstairs and out to the orchard.

One of the lemon trees was dying, almost dead. I’d studied it the day before, but I hadn’t known what I could do then.

This morning, with the image of the pulverized concrete pillar from the college before me, I had an idea.

If I damned it, it would disappear, and I would still be overloaded with power. If I cursed it, though, the power would siphon off, and I’d be safe for a couple more hours. Theoretically.

Most of the limbs were dead, but there were still two branches with glossy green leaves on them. I stroked a living branch. Red flame danced

above my hand.

I leaned my forehead against the smooth-barked trunk, avoiding thorns. Then I gripped the trunk.

Could this be my answer? Find something to destroy every morning? Oh, God, I hoped not. How long could I do that and still feel good? Maybe there were things chat needed destroying. I thought about garbage. Suppose I went through town and destroyed all the garbage of the day? Wouldn’t that put people and systems out of work?

My chest burned.

Well, this dead tree could just sit here in the orchard until it decayed, or I could use my power to do something potentially useful, like make firewood out of it. That wouldn’t interfere with anybody’s livelihood and it might, if it worked, give me a couple hours free of curse energy without my having to hurt anybody.

“Shaped by life, now you’re done. Power’s the knife; many from one.” I spread the fingers of both hands wide. Foot-long blades of red power sprang from my finger ends. I aimed them at the tree trunk.

Lesson one, if you’re going to cut something into bits, start at the top instead of slicing through the trunk low down. The red blades slid through the wood with ease. The tree toppled toward me after my first slice. I ran, but its thorny crown came down on top of me, though, because there were so many branches, it didn’t crush me. I lay on my back under dead branches, feeling the sting of many scrapes and thorn pricks. I waved my hands and sliced off more of the tree. The rest of it kept collapsing toward me, the few living leaves rustling, the smell of woodsmoke from the power slices stinging my nose.

I carved my way out from under the tree, but by then I was so hurt and so mad at it I didn’t care that I was killing some living flesh with the dead. I raged through the tree with my blades until all that was left was kindling.

The blades flickered and vanished, and I was left bleeding and crying in the middle of a pile of demolished tree, the cool in my chest a treasure.

I slumped through the orchard back to the house, headed for antibiotic ointment, waterproof Band-Aids, and a shower.

saturday was one of the days when everybody slept in. Mama and Dad didn’t work weekends unless there was an emergency, and those of us going to school didn’t have to get up for classes then either. Besides, we were all on break.

I had the kitchen to myself.

I made a big pot of coffee, put Joan Baez’s Noel on the kitchen sound system, and set up for cookies.

Two hours later I had made Nestle Tollhouse and snickerdoodle cookie doughs and was baking as fast as the oven could work. The rhythm and the repetition of beating batter, dropping spoonsful in neat rows on cookie sheets, putting them in the oven to bake, and pulling them out when they were done felt good. Finally I had found something which connected me comfortably to my previous self.

My first problem came when I had finished a batch of cookies and they were cooling on wire racks. I realized we had filled all the cookie tins we had with brownies.

I took the tin we had eaten the most brownies from, put the test of its contents on a plate, and set the plate on the counter by the coffee thermos, where people could find it and succumb to impulse. I filled that tin with cookies.

I finished baking the sheets I had already filled with cookies, waited until those cookies were ready to cool and set them on racks, put all the rest of the batter in the fridge, and went to find myself a driver.

on my way upstairs, though, I noticed that my hand was leaking red light.

I turned around and went back to the kitchen.

Okay, chopping up a tree hadn’t been such a great idea. But the grapefruit curse hadn’t been too bad. Worst thing about it was that it made the kitchen unusable for a while. If I did something like that somewhere else, maybe even that wouldn’t be a problem.

I took a banana from the fruit bowl and headed to the orchard.

I sat at the edge of our old garden plot below the pool yard and studied the banana. Whatever I did to it, I didn’t want to give it the power to hurt anybody. I should tell it something that would keep it here, outside the parts of the yard where people usually went. Also, because the curse put a reverse on well-wishing, I should tell it to be something bad, maybe. But what? Everything that came to mind seemed ambiguous, with too many ways it could go wrong. I wished I were better with words.

I swallowed. I had been so happy when I woke up, glad to have my power back. Fifteen ugly lemon-tree scrapes and scratches later, I felt nostalgic for my pre-power life.

I would love to have a good curse I could use over and over to spill off power in the least horrible way. To find it, though, I needed to do more experiments.

I dug a little hole and half-buried the banana, then curled both my hands around it. Red flame glowed around my hands.

“Be a tree, contained and small, dark and quiet below the wall,”

The banana stirred inside my hands, grew. A short dark trunk sheathed in big stiff petally things shot up, and large feather-shaped leaves unfurled from its top. They were black. Flame flowed from my chest down my arms and into the plant, and it grew, but not too big, only eight or ten feet tall, leaves unscrolling from the top of its trunk in a black bouquet. The trunk, about three feet high, swelled in my embrace.

The power flowed out of me. When it was gone, I backed up and got to my feet, held a hand out to the tree, touched a glossy black leaf. It felt smooth and giving, and it didn’t sting or make me itch. Not so bad.

A spike grew up from the center of the plant, drooped toward me. A huge, inverted teardrop-shaped bud with giant maroon petals swelled on the end of the spike, nodding down closer to my face. One of the topmost giant petals curled back, revealing a fringe of tubular flowers with thready yellow petals at their ends. A delicious smell came from them, banana, but floral, too, with an edge of vanilla. My mouth watered. Before the flowers could fruit, I backed away and ran to the house.

In the kitchen I got a Sharpie pen from the mess drawer and wrote a note. “Don’t go to the orchard. There’s a cursed tree there. Should be gone—” I checked my watch— “around four.” I signed it and taped it to the double backporch doors.

Upstairs, I wrote up my first two curses of the day in my curse journal, then went to find someone to drive me to a store. I listened at the doors in the kids’ end of the house.