Jinx (10 page)

“Jinx, say something.”

Jinx looked at Simon’s face and saw—nothing. Just a face. There were no colors and no clouds, no rays of light and no jagged orange anger … nothing but a face. Jinx had no idea what was going on behind it, no more than if it had been a cat’s face.

It wasn’t just that Simon’s thoughts had gone opaque, like Dame Glammer’s. Something inside Jinx was gone.

“No,” said Jinx.

“No what?” said Simon.

But what was Simon
thinking
? Was he being sarcastic, was he angry, was he worried? Were you supposed to be able to figure that out from the way things moved, mouths and eyes and eyebrows? It was like being tied up inside a sack! Furious, Jinx threw the dipper into the fire.

Simon’s eyebrows shot up. Whatever that meant. He grabbed the fire tongs and plucked the dipper out—it was blackened with soot—and set it on the hearth.

“Was that really necessary, Jinx?”

“Yes,” said Jinx.

He struggled to his feet with the world shaped all wrong. He staggered. Simon put out a hand to steady him and Jinx shrugged him away.

“I can’t see,” said Jinx.

Simon bent down and looked in Jinx’s eyes. “Of course you can see. You’re looking right at me.”

“I can’t see.”

One of his senses was gone. Maybe more. All right, he could see with his
eyes
. And he could smell, feel, and hear. He licked the back of his hand—it tasted of dirt and salt. Five senses. The sixth one was missing.

“I can’t see the clouds around your head,” Jinx explained, trying to fight down the rising panic. It felt like there was a blank white space in his head.

“There aren’t any clouds around my head.” Simon spoke very patiently, and the expression on his face was—was what? Jinx didn’t know what Simon was thinking.

“I mean the colored clouds! The ones you can always see.”

“I can’t see colored clouds, Jinx.”

“Of course you can! Everybody can.”

But now Jinx was waking up and his thoughts were starting to organize themselves.
Stop trying to read my mind
, Dame Glammer had said.
Nobody can
. Was it the clouds she meant?

“I guess everybody can’t,” Jinx said, realizing it for the first time.

Simon’s spell had taken away Jinx’s ability to—not read minds, because that wasn’t really what it was, but see the color and shape of what people were thinking. Simon was looking down at him with some expression on his face that meant—concern? Anger?

It didn’t matter! Jinx lurched to the front door—the blank white space made it hard to walk straight. The door wouldn’t open. “Let me out!”

“Not right now, Jinx. Later. Calm down. Have something to eat.”

“I don’t want anything to eat!” He pushed past Simon. There was another way out of the house. He climbed clumsily up the ladder to the loft. The blank white space got in his way, and when he reached the loft, he stumbled and almost fell over the edge into the kitchen. He could hear Simon hurrying up the ladder behind him. Jinx got to the door to nowhere and flung it open. Simon grabbed him.

“Jinx! No, Jinx. You don’t want to do that.”

Jinx struggled, trying to get out. He felt better now with the small blue sky above him and the life of the Urwald pouring in the open door. At least he could still feel
that
.

“It’s a long way down, Jinx.” Simon hauled him inside and the door slammed shut by itself. “Now come downstairs and eat something.”

“You can’t make me eat anything.”

“Right. Come on, now.”

Jinx half climbed, half fell down the ladder and ran to the drain by the pump and threw up.

“All right, it can take people that way sometimes.” Simon pumped water into the drain and gave Jinx a damp towel.

He put a hand on Jinx’s shoulder and Jinx, suddenly too tired to resist, let Simon steer him over to the stove steps to sit down.

“What did you do to me?” Jinx demanded.

“It’s just a small spell.”

“It wasn’t a small spell, it was a huge spell!”

“You’ll be all right soon.”

“Not unless I can see the clouds again!”

“Jinx, you’re babbling. There aren’t any clouds. Maybe you should rest.”

“There’s something wrong with my head.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your head.”

There was one more way out of the house. Jinx jumped up and staggered down the hall to the blank wall where Sophie had disappeared. He smacked into it. It was still a stone wall. He pushed at it, then pounded on it.

“Jinx, stop!” Simon grabbed him.

Jinx wrenched himself free. “Let me through!”

“Jinx—”

“I want to see Sophie!” He threw himself at the wall again. “Tell me how to get through.”

“You can’t get through.”

“You mean you won’t
tell
me how.” Jinx had never dared to speak to Simon that way before. He glared up at the wizard, expecting jagged orange anger, but of course there wasn’t any. There was that worried-looking expression, and who knew what lay behind it?

Lies, probably.

“She’s going to be really mad when she finds out what you’ve done to me,” said Jinx.

“I haven’t done anything to you. Jinx—”

“I know there’s a way through here!” Jinx turned to pound on the wall again, but Simon pulled him away.

Jinx shook free and lurched into Simon’s workroom. He grabbed at things on the workbench, looking for the green bottle Simon had used in the spell. He pulled books off the shelves, looking to see if it was hidden behind them.

“Stop that!” said Simon.

Jinx accidentally knocked Calvin the skull off a shelf. He tried to catch him, but the blank white spot in Jinx’s head made him miss. The skull hit the workbench, rolled, and landed on his side, gazing up at Jinx crookedly.

“What did he do to
you
?” Jinx asked him.

“Jinx, sit down. Stop. Calm down. Now.” Simon grabbed Jinx, picked him up, and set him on the stool. “Deep breaths.”

Jinx looked up at Simon and still couldn’t see any clouds. He would have liked to hurt Simon, to throw something at him, to pick up Calvin and hurl him at Simon’s unreadable face, but he couldn’t because Simon was dangerous. He’d never even realized before how dangerous.

Jinx took deep, ragged breaths and tried to calm down and think, difficult as it was around the blank white space. Whatever Simon had done to him, there had to be a way to undo it. And Jinx was going to have to find it.

J
inx spent days and nights searching the house for some clue to what Simon had done. Simon, meanwhile, was working on new spells. It seemed to Jinx that Simon was getting more powerful. Jinx was not. The only progress Jinx had made in learning magic was that now he could levitate a book, if it wasn’t a big one. That was all.

It did not make up for what he had lost.

Simon had gotten scraggly-looking about the hair and eyes. He probably wasn’t sleeping much. He certainly wasn’t bathing much. And he spent a lot of time staring at the blank stone wall that Sophie used to appear through. That was the sort of thing that let you know what people were thinking, Jinx was learning … you had to go by where their eyes went and the times when they just stopped talking, and things like that.

But Jinx didn’t care. Ever since he’d lost his ability to see other people’s feelings, he’d become a whole lot more interested in how
he
felt. And how he felt was sick of everything. The only reason Jinx stayed in Simon’s house was because he didn’t see how he’d ever get his ability back if he left.

Unless he could get to Samara. He remembered something Sophie had once said—that Simon had come to Samara looking for magical answers. Jinx wondered if he might be able to find out about his missing ability there. Because Simon had taken it away with magic, and now that Jinx thought about it, maybe his ability had been a kind of magic. Deep Urwald magic, Dame Glammer had called it.

He examined the stone wall again and again. It was not an illusion. It was a wall.

Simon went out into the Urwald frequently, for days at a time. Jinx never asked to go with him. Instead he made use of the time to search Simon’s workroom and the rest of the house, looking for the green bottle. He didn’t find it.

Jinx read Simon’s books about magic, hoping to find out what Simon had done to him. The books weren’t very helpful—they tried to hide as much as they revealed. They put things in strange terms so that you would have trouble figuring out what you were supposed to do.

There was a book in Samaran called
Knowledge Is Power
.

When Jinx opened it, it burst into flames, but he just used magic to absorb them. Then he took it out to the kitchen and read it while sitting on the stove.

It wasn’t a very useful book, as far as Jinx could tell. It was just a bunch of spells that went like this:

The book was full of stuff like that. It didn’t actually tell you how to do anything, it just told you that things
might
be done. Jinx read all the way through it—if only there was a way he could figure out what it meant! Maybe it could help him get to Samara.

Jinx burrowed his toes into the forest floor. His ability to understand the trees hadn’t gone into the green bottle with Simon’s spell. Jinx didn’t know why. In fact, since he’d lost the ability to see people’s thoughts, he seemed to hear the trees’ thoughts more clearly than ever. He tried asking the trees what Simon had done to his magic, but they didn’t hear him. They knew he was listening. They just didn’t listen back.

It was summer and the trees were talking about that—about the rain and how well things rotted when the earth was warmer. And fear. The fear was something new, moving through the Urwald.

The trees weren’t afraid of ogres, trolls, or dragons. They merely found them annoying. This had to be something much, much worse. It was moving from the west to the east—toward Simon’s house, as near as Jinx could figure. The trees were unspecific. They didn’t even try to describe the terrible creature. They just said
fear
.

Jinx pulled his toes out of the dirt and started home.

Something moved in the woods behind him. Jinx turned around. There was something hairy, walking on all fours. A werewolf, or a werebear? It slid out from behind a tree trunk. A werewolf. Jinx turned around to run, stepped into a hole, and fell.

He got to his feet as quickly and silently as he could. When he put his right foot on the ground, pain shot through it. His right ankle bulged oddly on one side. He took a step. It hurt. He took another step. The werewolf was about fifty yards away now, sniffing interestedly at the ground. It hadn’t seen him, but it would pick up his scent in a second. As Jinx watched, it did. Its ears twitched. It snuffled eagerly toward the spot where Jinx had dug his feet into the ground.

Jinx concentrated on doing a concealment spell. He concentrated harder than he’d ever done in his life.

He looked down at his completely visible feet, one starting to swell to match his ankle. He tried again.
Concentrate!

The werewolf was pawing now at the loose dirt where Jinx had buried his toes for listening. It was no good: Jinx couldn’t do the spell. He’d never been able to do it. In his head he heard Simon say,
Of course you can’t if you think you can’t
.

Forget about can’t, then. He
had
to do it, or he’d be dinner. He concentrated harder.
I’m not here, I’m not here
. He reached for the power that Simon said was within him.

And suddenly he found it. For the first time, he actually sensed the presence of power. He didn’t know where it came from, but it was there. He pulled it into the concealment spell as hard as he could.

The werewolf’s ears perked up and swiveled in Jinx’s direction. It sniffed the air, then came straight toward Jinx. This one was closer to wolf-shape than to human-shape, and it moved on all fours. But its forelegs looked like arms, ending in hands with long yellow talons.

The werewolf crept closer. It was just a few feet from Jinx. It came closer still. Jinx had never been nearer to death. The werewolf put its nose to the ground at Jinx’s feet and sniffed. It moved around him in a circle, sniffing and sniffing. Its nose almost touched Jinx’s foot.

Then it sat up on its haunches and looked all around, confused. After what seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds, it ran off with its tail between its legs.

It took Jinx over an hour to limp home. It should have been terrifying, being in the Urwald, off the path, and unable to run. But it wasn’t. Jinx had power.

“Jinx, what happened?” Simon came hurrying across the clearing, looking worried.

“I did it!” Jinx told him. “I did a concealment spell.”

“Knew you could.” Simon helped him into the house. “What did you have to hide from?”