A Fistful of Sky (40 page)

I hadn’t even noticed the ring. I took the handset.

“Hello?”

“Hi. You still awake? Is this too late to call?” Ian asked.

“No, it’s fine.” I turned to Altria. She had vanished.

“How’d the curse go?” he asked.

“Pretty well. I think I’ve got this curse thing under control now.”

“Wow! Great! Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Did you go back to the party?”

“No, of course not. Just wanted to call and find out if you were okay. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

Silence stretched.

“Hey,” Ian said at last. “See you on Christmas.”

“Good,” I said.

Later that night I walked down to the beach. If anybody tried to hurt me, they would regret it. I only had to open the little black door to access my power.

Fog made the air visible, kept the night pale by trapping light close to the ground. I knew the air was cool, but my energy kept me warm.

Shards of glass clinked away from my shoes as I walked the dark tunnel under the freeway, below the ocean tides of traffic. I was halfway across when I heard the echo of someone else’s steps. I stopped below the grating that showed a barred square of sky between the southbound and northbound lanes of Highway 101, and waited for my follower to catch up.

She walked barefoot across the glass-scattered concrete, all of her a shadow here in the dark, a silhouette against the light at the far end of the tunnel. I held out my hand. She took it, her fingers warm and strong around mine. We walked on into deeper darkness, and then up into gray night.

The tunnel let out at the dead end of a beach road, bordered with tall, skinny eucalyptus trees reaching toward the sky. We walked two blocks and came to the beach access, crumbling asphalt-and-rock stairs the ocean kept wearing away.

The tide was halfway out, stroking the shore with a constant rush and tumble, occasional waves breaking with crashes that rolled into roars. Foam hemmed the waves, rushed up across the beach, pale against dark water and wet sand. Salt breeze gusted along the shore.

We knelt in the lee of a drift log where the sand was dry. She faced me, pressed her knees to mine. She reached across the space between us and touched my breastbone with her fingertips. I opened the door to my power and let some rise from the holding place, flow from me into her, a gift I was comfortable sharing with her now.

She lifted her hand away from my chest, then joined it with her other hand and rested her cupped hands on our knees. Clear white light pooled in her hands, my power, changed on its journey through her. She stared at me, her face lit from below, light caught in her butter-amber eyes.

“Marry me,” she said.

“What?”

Her gaze lowered to the light, then lifted again to meet mine. “I love

you.”

Thoughts startled up, stuttered, subsided. But marriage was—a man and a woman? A church, a ceremony, a dress? A promise of eternity? A physical bond?

“But Altria—”

“I want to stay with you. I won’t hurt you. Maybe scare you once in a while, shake you up so you remember you’re alive. I’ll protect the ones you love. I can be whatever you want.”

“But Ian—”

“I can be Ian.” She shifted shape: his blue eyes, his half-shy square-jawed smile, his wiry, slender body.

“Don’t do that.”

She tossed her head and turned back into a honey-eyed self with long ruby hair. Her face looked more fey than human. “You can marry him, too. I don’t mind.”

“I don’t want to marry Ian. I don’t know what I want. It’s all new to me. I just want to see what happens if I keep seeing him. He’s the first—”

The first what? The first one outside my family to see me clearly and come back later? Altria had done that, too. In the last four days since I had opened the way for her to come into my life, she had helped me again and again,

even if the help came guised as torture. She had acted as my mother and my sister and my friend, my helper and my director and my dark side.

I stared into her eyes, the one my uncle called Shade and my aunt called Nightmare and my mother called Creature. I thought of how she had stepped out of nowhere to save me from falling, how she had blown cobwebs out of my brain to restore me to myself, how she held me in her arms, stroked warmth into us with my own power, and took me up into the sky. She was the first one to help me fly. I had felt safe with her, even when she was threatening me.

She had seen me in different forms. She had sent me into different forms. She knew my power. She had seen me fail, watched my weaknesses. She still said she loved me.

I had had a dream, one I had never let myself have on the surface, but still, one that had dreamed itself down deep inside. Could anyone love me if they really knew me? I had found someone who could.

Maybe two people. Ian had seen me at my lowest, and he called back the

next day.

I cupped my hands around hers. The pooled light shimmered, colors shooting through it, then steadied.

“See Ian all you like,” she said. “Just let me stay with you, one way or another. I can take any shape. What do you want me to be?”

“Yourself.”

“Oh, no. You’re not ready for that.”

We stared at each other.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“Good.”

“Don’t you think I know you?”

“What do you know?” she whispered.

I lifted one hand from the nest we had made for the light and touched her forehead, red flowing from my fingertips. I showed her all the ways I had seen her during my curse: the ancient serpent, hungry for fear; the nightmare spirit trapped in a vessel I had offered it, shaped by the protections and love Jasper had set in the sea stone, sculpted by every encounter with me and my family into something foreign to itself, spelled by me into reluctant love for my family. The spell was over now. Traces of the love remained. Perhaps, having tried it, she found she liked it. Still, I had seen the self she owned that walked through dark dreams and made them darker. That self still lived inside her, strong in its terrifying desires.

“No. You were never supposed to know,” she whispered.

I closed my eyes, wished I could close my eyes to all the things I had seen that I was never supposed to know. Knowledge was a curse. I knew my family better than I had ever wanted to.

I knew I had a self like Altria’s, better hidden but hungry—

I filed the dark memories away. That worked. I didn’t have to focus on them all the time. Knowledge was a curse, and it was also treasure. I could lock it up or take it out to look at. Now that I knew so many strange things, I had a flickering idea of a future. Maybe this would be my work: find people’s bad memories, the scars on their souls, and change or remove the ones that tortured, the ones hardest to bear. I could do that with a curse.

I wasn’t sure it was a good thing. Mama would tell me tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, maybe.

“Is there any part of you that you want me to curse?” I asked.

She frowned. Her face went remote. “Not yet,” she said.

“Not ever is okay with me.”

She lifted her hands, broke the cup. Light spilled out over our legs, laps, stomachs. Some drained into the sand. Some slicked her palms like a radioactive skin. She put her arms around my neck. I hesitated, then embraced her.

She kissed me. It was not the brief touch of lip on lip I had experienced with Ian. There was more pressure, movement of her lips over mine, searching, tasting, wet heat, tingling, the touch of her tongue, a taste of chile and woodsmoke. She turned her head and hugged me closer, her cheek against my ear.

We sat entwined in the darkness. I listened to her breathing, and the waves. I teetered on an edge between wonder and terror. The warmth of another person pressed against me, wrapped around me. Where did we go from here?

After a while the fear faded. Something else seeped in.

What had I heard here yesterday, when I was a baby? What was that sound under the crash of waves, the rush of water?

It still called, a sea song.

I stroked one hand down her side. She lifted her head and nodded. We untangled, and she helped me up.

We sat on the log and took off our shoes. We walked down across the cold dry sand to the cold wet sand. I felt the cold now, but it didn’t bother me. It told my feet something about their shape.

We walked out into the water. Its cold was intense and shocking. Altria stroked my chest and summoned power to warm us. We swam out beyond where the waves broke, and the sea carried us. We held onto each other.

After a while we drifted to quiet water.

We floated, holding hands, and I heard again the murmur of something old and undivided, something early and ever. In the presence of this vast, ancient, unjudging energy, I understood that no matter what she was, no matter what I was, we were enough alike to be twins, soulmates, together.

“Yes,” I whispered.

She hugged me. “Yes,” she whispered.

We floated.

Eventually we drifted home.

The End