A Little Night Magic (11 page)

“So, are we doing Confessional on Saturday? I really think we should. If you want, I can host, I just have to get all of Nick’s landscaping crap out of my living room.” She switched her stance, stretching yet another muscle group, although I couldn’t tell which one. “Did I tell you about the solar walkway lights he bought when Dunlop’s went out of business? Two
freaking
thousand of them, to sell in a town that gets six weeks of sunlight a year.”

I stared down at the chocolate cake by my side. Was I really so insecure that I couldn’t snarf a little cake just because Peach was a health nut? I was just about to pick it up when I heard wood creaking, and looked up to check where the swing hooks were attached to the porch ceiling. Jeez. You know it’s bad when your house starts making commentary on your weight.

“Anyway, of course, he ran out of room in his storage space, so guess where the extras ended—
ow
!”

I jolted at the
thunk
sound. Peach pulled back from the tree, rubbing her shoulder, then bent over and picked up what looked like a pale wooden lime from my yard.

“Walnuts?” she said, picking it up and twirling it in her hand. She glanced up at the tree. “This isn’t a walnut tree … is it?” She stepped back, staring up into the branches of the tree.

“No. It’s an oak,” I said, and then I heard it again … that creaking. I got off the swing, and the creaking continued. I looked up at the tree, and saw in the light of the streetlamp what looked like long fingers of dark gray smoke swirling oddly around one branch. Then, out of thin air, another walnut appeared and flew down straight at Peach, who jumped out of the way at the last minute. She looked at me. “Are you throwing
walnuts
at me?”

I shook my head, then looked up and down the street; it was quiet, almost ominously so, and the hair on my arms shot up.

“Peach, come up here on the porch, please,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm but calm as the creaking sound started up again, louder this time. The trunk of the tree behind her seemed to be shaking now, and the gray smoke was starting to spread through more branches.

“Not if you’re throwing things at me. Jeez, Liv, I said I was sorr—
ow
!” A walnut bounced off her head, and she looked up into the branches of the three. “What the hell? Is there a bird or something in there?” She stopped talking suddenly, seeming to freeze where she was, then said slowly, “Liv, is your tree smoking?”

The creaking got louder, the sound approaching violence, and the smoke began to swirl around the branches, weaving between them with will, like snakes.

“Peach, get up here!” I yelled, but Peach just stood there, staring up into the branches, dumbfounded.

I dashed inside and grabbed my biggest umbrella from the holder by the front door, then shot it open as I ran down the front steps to grab Peach. I got her arm just as the walnuts started coming down in force, pelting us in the back and legs as we ran back onto the safety of the porch. We stood there, hands clasped together, staring in disbelief as hundreds of walnuts crashed down onto my yard, bouncing off the ground with unnatural force as they hit. After a few moments, it stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the smoke that had surrounded the branches of my tree seemed to be sucked back into it in a
whoosh.

Peach was stock-still for a long time, her eyes wide and her mouth shut, and then she turned to me, releasing my hands.

“I think there’s something really wrong with your tree, Liv,” she said, her voice shaky. I recognized the feeling, that sense of shock as you tried to reconcile something you just witnessed with everything you know about how the world works.

“Yes, there’s definitely something wrong.” I glanced up and down the street, then gave her my umbrella, which was pockmarked and beaten to a point where I was pretty sure it would never close again. It would get her next door, though, and once she was gone, I could try to figure out what had just happened.

“Why don’t you go on home, Peach? I’m gonna call my tree guy.”

“Sure.” She blinked twice, as if she was still trying to process what had happened, and then flipped the dented umbrella up over her head. “Let me know what you want to do for Confessional on Saturday. I really think we should all … you know … get together.” Her voice shook a little bit, and I patted her shoulder.

“Everything’s okay,” I said, my voice soft and reassuring. “Go on home.”

“Okay.” She nodded like a child, and then held the battered umbrella over her head as she made her way next door, giving my oak tree a wide berth as she walked past it toward her house. A moment later, her front door shut and I heard a strange
blurp
sound, like a pop played backward on a sound system. I looked back to the walnuts, which were disappearing one by one, into quickly dissipating puffs of gray smoke.

Blurp-blurp-blurp. Gone.

I stood on my porch for a few minutes, breathing in and out, trying to make sense of what had just happened. It was magic, that much was obvious, but it wasn’t the kind of magic Betty and I had. This was malevolent, magic intended to harm, maim, or kill.

Possibly, intended to kill
me.

I stood there for a moment, lost in thought, and had just started for the front door when something in the corner of my eye made me tense up. I twirled around, and there in the pool of streetlamp light at the end of our lane, stood a woman in a red dress, her ash-blond curls flowing freely around her face in the light breeze.

“Millie?” I whispered. There was no way she could have heard me, but still, she turned and disappeared from the light as soon as I spoke her name. I darted down my porch steps and ran down the road after her. Either she hadn’t been trying to elude me, or she wasn’t used to the bloodred spike heels she was wearing, but I caught up to her before she’d gone half a block.

“Mill!” I grabbed her arm and turned her to face me. “Mill, what’s…? Wow.”

Her eyes were made up dark and smoky, and the deep red lip stain brought out the fullness of her mouth. Even her nails were perfectly manicured in the same red. I looked at her again, squinting my eyes at her.

“Millie?”

She smiled sweetly, the same old Millie smile, and I recognized her again. “Yes, Liv, it’s me.”

“Oh my god.” I took a step back to survey her. “Holy crap, Mill.”

She gave a little half-twirl, like a shy little girl, and her dress swirled around her legs. “It was time for a change. Do you like it?”

Do I like it?
I’d heard stories about women who’d lost a lot of weight and subsequently lost their friends through jealousy, and my mind went to that as I checked out Millie. There was no doubt; she was beautiful. The dress was perfect for her slightly thicker frame, and the little black shrug she wore over her shoulders added an extra sexy element to the outfit. She looked amazing. But did I like it?

No.
I wanted to, but something in my gut just wouldn’t let me.

I met her eye and smiled. “You look incredible.”

She nodded, barely able to contain her exuberance. “I do, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” I hesitated a moment, then motioned back toward my street. “Hey, did you just see what I just saw over there?”

She blinked, twice. “What?”

“Um…” I wasn’t sure how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t sound completely insane if she hadn’t seen anything. “Peach, under the tree in front of my house. All the walnuts fell on her at once. It was … really weird.”

She worked her face into a frown, but there was a glint in her eye she couldn’t hide. Millie wasn’t a great liar anyway, but at the moment, she was even worse than usual.

“No,” she said, her voice going high with feigned innocence. “I didn’t see a thing.”

And that’s when it hit me; maybe Davina hadn’t unleashed just my magic. Maybe she was some kind of magic-freeing fairy godmother, going from town to town and loosing whatever magic had been tied up there.

Maybe I’m not alone.

I took a step closer and touched Millie’s shoulder.

“Mill, has anything strange happened to you lately? Like, maybe, a weird, middle-aged black woman throwing a gym sock at you that makes you sneeze? And makes … you know … maybe other things happen?”

Something flashed in her eyes; she knew what I was talking about, or something about it, anyway. I felt the hope rise within me, and then …

“Sorry, Liv.” She gave a mild shake of her head, and a shrug of the shoulder. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t care if it sounds crazy,” I said. “Whatever you want to tell me, I’ll believe you.”

Millie took a moment, eyeing me carefully, and I held my breath, waiting for her to tell me that something strange had happened to her, too. That we were in it together.

That I wasn’t alone.

“All I know, Liv,” she said, “is that the tree in front of your house is an oak, not a walnut.”

I pulled back from her a bit. There was something about the cold enjoyment in her eyes that worried me. This was the same Millie Banning standing before me who I’d known since I was six years old, the same Millie who had helped me stuff my first bra, who had helped me care for my mother, and then bury her, mourning her loss as much as I did. But in a lot of ways, it also wasn’t Millie. It was New Millie, and I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about her.

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Hey, we’re doing Confessional at my house on Saturday afternoon. Are you coming?”

A deep twinkle shone from her dark eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be there. With bells on.”

8

I got out of bed early after a night of fitful sleep, then ambled downstairs and watched the early-morning cartoons while I ate my breakfast of coffee, an orange, and a strawberry Pop-Tart. The only thing that was different from every other day off was that now, I had company. It was a magically conjured mug bunny, but hey—beggars and choosers and all that.

“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked the little mug bunny, who tottered around the living room while Wile E. Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff with an anvil in his arms.

“Don’t look down,” I said.

Wile E. looked down, looked back at me with an expression of tragic realization, and then plummeted immediately out of frame.

“He never listens to me.” I took another bite of my Pop-Tart, then picked the bunny up and offered him a bit of it; he didn’t appear interested.

“So, is it that you don’t eat,” I asked him, “or are you maybe a vegan?”

Considering that it had been over twenty-four hours since I’d made him, and he hadn’t eaten anything and seemed no worse for the wear for it, I guessed it was option number one.

“I’m feeling edgy,” I said to him. “I need to get out of here. Wanna go to the falls?”

In Nodaway, “the falls” referenced a little brook in the woods. One part of it sort of jumps down a bit of a decline, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a true waterfall. Apparently, it was bigger when the town was founded, but even so, when you exist within a hundred miles of Niagara Falls, it’s kinda ballsy to add “Falls” onto any town’s name unless there are … you know …
falls
there. Still, it was a nice walk for shaking out your sanity, and my sanity desperately needed some shaking out.

I tucked an old sweatshirt into the bottom of my worn army-navy messenger bag, and set the mug bunny inside. Immediately, it curled up and seemed to go to sleep. I threw on my sneakers, gray sweats, and
L’EGGO MY EGGO
T-shirt, pulled my hair back into a half-assed ponytail—who was going to see me, anyway?—slid my bag over my shoulder, and went out my front door just as Tobias was turning from the sidewalk onto my walkway.

“Hey,” he said, smiling up at me as I froze where I was at the top of my porch steps.

“Hey,” I said. “I was just about to take a walk. To the falls.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.” I smiled at him, feeling shaky and tense but somewhat comforted just by the sight of him. “I’d like that.”

“Great.” He motioned for me to join him, and I fell into step beside him. As we navigated the sidewalks of the village, then the dirt at the edge of the two-laner that passed for Nodaway’s highway, we spoke on innocuous subjects, town talk mostly. Maurice Greeley had been in the day before showing off his granddaughter, that kind of thing. Then, when we hit the path in the woods, we started talking about the waffles he’d made for me the other night; I asked him for the recipe, and he told me, and I retained none of it. Then, deep in the woods, we talked about nothing, just went silent and walked together. We reached the falls and sat on the big, flat rock overlooking the inconsequential brook. For the first time in a while, I felt peaceful and at ease.

And then, Tobias spoke.

“So,” he said, “I guess your power came in, then?”

I froze, not sure how to respond, and then finally, I said, “My … power? What, you mean, like … my electricity? It wasn’t out.”

He looked at me, his expression frank, and I felt my heart clutch in my chest. “Oh. You mean…”

“Yes.”

“You knew?”

“Yes.”

“About the magic. About the … things I can do.”

“I know about magic, yes.”

I shook my head, trying to absorb this. “You knew.”

“Yes. Day or night?”

“Day. You
knew
?”

He nodded. “How does it manifest?”

I joke-punched his upper arm. “Bruises. That’s how it manifests. Don’t skip ahead. You
knew
?”

“Get mad at me later,” he said. “Right now, I need answers. How does it manifest?’

“I’ll be mad at you now if I want to be mad at you now,” I grumbled, but at the same time I reached into my messenger bag and pulled out the mug bunny and handed it to him. “I turn household objects into woodland creatures, household pets, and common vermin.”

He flipped the mug bunny upside down, inspecting the bottom, and the little feet flailed wildly. Then he turned it back upright, and handed it back to me.

“Cute.”