Taniwha's Tear (5 page)

The air had a strange reek to it suddenly, and tasted slightly oily and unpleasant. Mat felt his mouth go dry. The girl had the same powers that he had, and she had just used them to steal.

He leapt to his feet and ran after her.

H
ey!’ The girl turned, and Mat suddenly found himself staring into intense eyes so vividly blue, they were almost turquoise. Her nostrils flared and she glared at him, wary, as if expecting to have to fight. Her strange friend just goggled at him, trying to wrestle a laptop headset from her ears.

‘What?’ The blonde girl’s voice was clipped, defensive. Up close she looked a year or two older than him, slightly taller and intimidatingly pretty.

Mat stopped short of her. ‘I saw what you did,’ he said softly.

She blinked, and sucked in her lower lip. Her frown was part-guilty, part-curious. ‘And?’

It was his turn to blink. ‘Don’t you think it’s wrong?’

She shrugged, slightly belligerently. ‘If you’ve got it, use it.’

Her offhandedness made him angry. ‘That’s bullshit. You stole.’

The stringy girl with the laptop finally unplugged her headset. ‘What are you two saying? Couldn’t hear you,’ she laughed nervously. She peered at Mat with super-magnified eyes. ‘Do we know you?’

‘Yeah,’ said the blonde girl disdainfully. ‘Do we know you?’

Riki and Damien piled out of the café and peered at them curiously.

‘I’m Mat Douglas,’ Mat said to the bespectacled girl. ‘Your friend forgot to pay at the café.’

‘Oh! How embarrassing,’ the girl gasped. ‘I’ll do it, Lena.’ She began rummaging in her pockets.

‘Don’t worry, Cassandra, I’ll get it,’ Lena answered levelly, her eyes on Mat. She walked past him and the two other boys, back into the shop. Mat followed her. She half-turned. ‘Checking up on me, are you?’ she whispered harshly.

‘I just want to see how you do it,’ Mat replied coolly, though his heart was thumping.

Lena walked up to the counter, and when she had the owner’s attention, told her that she had mispaid, and handed back the twenty-dollar note, plus another twenty dollars. This time Mat felt the discharge of energy in a subtler, more gentle way, and there was none of the queasiness he’d sensed before. He immediately felt better.

The owner was flustered but took the money, shaking her head. Lena looked at Mat coldly as she swept down the dim passage to the exit once more. ‘Happy?’ she asked.

‘I’m happy…to meet someone…like me.’

The girl turned. She was suddenly close to him, in the shadows of the doorway to the café. She was wearing an expensive perfume, but Mat could smell fresh perspiration beneath it. The mix was heady and suddenly intoxicating. ‘Show me,’ she whispered, her face just centimetres from his.

His chest pounded as he lifted his hand, and called a tiny blossom of flame into his palm. It was harder to do under such close scrutiny, but he managed. The dark little corridor was suddenly drenched in light, making their shadows dance on the painted walls. The girl’s eyes went wide, her lips moving soundlessly. She looked from the flame to him with hungry eyes, then Mat heard other customers coming their way, and let the flame wink out.

‘Can you…could you…show me how to do that?’ she whispered when they were alone again, her earlier defensiveness gone, replaced by some thing far more welcoming.

He swallowed. ‘I don’t know…I could try.’

She startled him then by leaning forward and seizing his hand, and staring at the palm as if looking for some scar or sign of what he’d just done. Her hands were hot and damp. ‘I’m Lena, from Auckland. The geek-girl is Cassandra. She lives here. She’s not really my friend, y’know, but my father knows her parents, so I’m stuck with her. Let’s dump the lot of them and go some where. I want to see that again.’

Mat reeled slightly. He’d heard that Auckland girls
moved fast. ‘Umm…’ He nodded towards the door. Lena turned and pushed it open, and they emerged blinking into the heat of the mid-morning sunshine. The street was beginning to fill with early-morning shoppers. Mat quickly made introductions. Cassandra seemed to know Riki’s extended family, but only by reputation, and the way her nose twitched suggested it wasn’t a particularly good reputation, but she didn’t say anything.

‘So, Mat, what are your plans for the day?’ Lena asked him.

Riki nudged Damien. ‘We were going to go round to Wainui Beach and do some surfing,’ Riki replied before Mat could answer. ‘I’ve got a car,’ he added.

‘Cool!’ exclaimed Cassandra. ‘I love surfing!’ The boys looked at her skinny frame doubtfully.

Lena sighed, but then smiled warmly at Mat. ‘I’d like to come and watch,’ she said, pulling on some Gucci sunglasses. She took out an expensive-looking cellphone. ‘What’s your number, Mat?’

Riki had to borrow his grandparents’ car, but as they seldom drove, this wasn’t a problem. They arranged to meet the two girls at the end of Wainui Beach, which was northwards around the coast from Kaiti Hill, facing east, about twenty minutes’ drive away. Riki drove alarmingly, paying hardly any attention to the road at all, so intent was he on speculating about Lena’s bust size. The little Datsun veered everywhere as he waved his arms about.

They had only just pulled up in the gravel car-park to
the beach access walkway, set in scrub and lupin in a gap between the holiday homes, when an open-topped BMW sportscar with a board sticking out the back roared in beside them. Cassandra peered across at them from the passenger seat. ‘Ha! They beat us here!’

‘She’s yours,’ Riki muttered to Damien. ‘I’ll have the blonde, when she realises that Mat is underage.’

‘I am not underage,’ Mat retorted. ‘I turned sixteen in November.’

‘Touchy, these kids,’ Damien remarked airily. He grinned at Cassandra as they got out of their vehicles. ‘Hey, babe.’ Cassandra ignored him.

Lena pulled up her sunglasses and smiled dazzlingly at Mat. ‘Hi,’ she said brightly.

Mat felt a smile climb across his face, and his skin moisten, while his mouth went dry. Riki rolled his eyes in mock despair. ‘You gotta learn to relax around chicks, man,’ he murmured, not helping at all.

They took the surfboards from the Datsun’s little roof-rack, and headed for the beach. Lena was still clad in her tiny shorts, and the boys all had swimming trunks, but Cassandra was now wearing most of a black-and-navy wetsuit, and had her own surfboard. Her glasses were clamped on with some vivid orange sports-elastic. ‘Let’s hang ten! Ha!’

Lena rolled her eyes at Mat.

Mat wasn’t a great surfer, but he had decent balance, and his new surfboard was a good one for his ability. Riki was
very good, and made sure they all knew it. Mat didn’t mind—he knew what he was good at.

Damien was…well, Damien was totally awful at surfing, as Riki noted often that afternoon, but it didn’t seem to deter him. The surprise was Cassandra, who was almost as good as Riki, darting among the waves nimbly, and surprisingly strong about the shoulders when paddling out to the waves. The whole beach knew when she had caught a wave, she hooted so loudly.

Mat finished before the others, and walked up the beach to where Lena was sitting above the wave-line, staring out across the water. He felt her eyes on his form as he walked up, and felt suddenly self-conscious. It was quite one thing to fantasise about girls when he had little chance of actually meeting one, coming from a single-sex school and stuck at home most nights with his father, but it was quite another to know how to deal with a worldly Auckland girl, especially after what he’d seen earlier.

Best to go straight to the heart of things,
he supposed. ‘Are you mad at me?’ he asked as he sat beside her.

She seemed to consider the question for half a second too long. ‘No. I was just surprised. No one has even spotted it before. I don’t do it often, but I was in a funny mood.’

As an explanation for attempted theft it seemed fairly inadequate, but Mat decided to let it go. ‘When did you learn how to do it?’

She looked at him appraisingly, and spoke hesitantly, as if to a priest in a confessional. ‘It started when I was
twelve. It was really odd. I noticed that I could tell the most blatant lies, convince people the sky was pink, or black was white, and they would believe me for a few seconds. At first I thought I was imagining it, and then I started to try doing it deliberately, and it worked. If I keep it close to the truth, they believe me utterly—it doesn’t even wear off now.’ She sucked on her lower lip. ‘It’s kinda scary. But I’m not a thief! You need to believe that. I was just short of a little cash, that’s all.’

Mat nodded, not really believing her, trying to decide if that mattered.

Lena went on, her voice distant. ‘I can do it to animals too, even easier than people if it’s a simple thing. Once I convinced a dog to bite someone—this guy who was following me in a park in Auckland. The dog went for this guy like a mad thing. I couldn’t call it off. The guy was a creep, but it was still freaky. He ended up in hospital, and the dog was put down.’ She shuddered slightly. ‘What about you?’

Mat considered carefully. ‘Three months ago.’

‘And you can make fire? Cool!’

‘Other stuff too.’ Mat kept his voice modest. He could tell the girl had pride, a lot of it, and he didn’t want to put on airs with her.

‘What like?’ she asked, slightly distantly.

‘Umm…it’s kinda hard to explain. Little things.’ His mind raced: over shifting between worlds, messing up Donna Kyle’s powers to free Wiri, and calling Wiri out of the tiki. How could he describe such things to
anyone that wasn’t there? And he wasn’t sure how to talk about what Pania had shown him. ‘Just little things,’ he said lamely, then added: ‘I’ve never met anyone else who could do these things.’ It wasn’t quite true, but he wasn’t ready to tell her about Puarata, and Donna Kyle, and those acolytes of Puarata that had clustered beneath him at Reinga during the final confrontation. They were all dead now, except Donna, whom they’d left bleeding and unconscious in Auckland and he hoped to never meet again.

‘I’ve not met anyone like me either,’ Lena said quietly. She smiled at him. ‘We’re like a secret society. Even a coven!’ She sounded taken with the thought.

‘I suppose.’

‘I’ve been reading a lot about it: books on witchcraft and the like. I’ve got spell books and tarot cards and stuff at home. I got them at these New Age shops in Devonport. I’ve tried a lot of it out, but I’m not sure it works. But what I do does.’

Mat had a sudden vision of her dancing beneath moonlight, casting witchy spells from New Age books. She wasn’t wearing a lot in his imagination. He caught her looking at him with a playful smile, and had an uncomfortable feeling that she could sense his thoughts. ‘You don’t read minds or anything like that, do you?’ he blurted.

She laughed softly. ‘Not as such. But you’re kind of transparent.’ She smiled gently. ‘You’re very cute. Are you part-Maori?’

He was definitely blushing now. ‘Yeah, on my dad’s side.’ His voice sounded husky and nervous to his ears. ‘Mum’s Irish.’

She grinned. ‘All that wild Irish blood, maybe?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Mum’s pretty, ummm…earth-bound. What about you?’

‘My father’s grandparents were Polish; I think the rest of us were Scots or some thing.’

‘Any mystics and seers in the bloodline?’

‘No! Not that I’ve heard anyway. I call it my Gift. I’m having to teach myself. But I can feel myself getting stronger.’ She looked at him. ‘I guess you’ve been doing the same?’

‘Yeah,’ Mat replied, unwilling to mention his training with Pania for fear of putting himself above her. ‘I’ve got a friend called Wiri. He says he knows people who can help. I’m expecting to hear from him sometime soon about it.’

‘Wow,’ Lena breathed. ‘Then maybe there really is a secret society of people with the Gift! How amazing! And we’ll be, like, the newest acolytes.’ She rattled off a string of movies and novels of secret magic societies with passwords and secret signs and forbidden rites. She evidently read a lot. Her passion was slightly alarming; Mat had found the whole ‘magic’ experience terrifying and it had taken him a while before he could bring himself to confront it. But Lena seemed to want to immerse herself in it, and him too. She knew nothing of Aotearoa; other worlds did not feature in her speculations at all.

Finally, Riki, Damien and Cassandra emerged from the
water and joined them on the beach. Mat and Lena let their conversation lapse, but both wanted to talk more, when they could find privacy again.

‘So, you two seemed to be having a nice little chat,’ Riki observed slyly.

‘Yes,’ Lena replied, her voice tart. ‘Mat makes very pleasant conversation, as against limiting himself to making smart-arse remarks in the hope of getting cheap laughs.’

Damien mimicked getting his hand smacked. ‘Ouch, put-down!’ he grinned at Riki. ‘Hey, Cass, nice wave-riding moves.’

‘Mmm, I guess. You, like, never got to stand up, so we still can’t tell if you can surf or not,’ she replied with a sudden smile.

‘Double-ouch. Put-down City!’ Damien complained. ‘What’s this, “Pick-on-Damien Day”?’

‘Every day, bro,’ grinned Riki.

‘This beach used to be a road,’ Cassandra announced, halting the conversation. They all looked at her. ‘You see, before they cut the roads through to Gisborne, they used to have coaches come around the coastline. They’re mostly shingle and rock so they hold up well. The drivers used to say they were good roads, because they were washed twice a day.’

‘That’d be a thing to see,’ Damien remarked softly, glancing at Mat. Mat shook his head slightly.

Lena noticed the exchange and frowned slightly. ‘What are you doing tonight, Mat?’

Riki nudged Damien. ‘Yeah, what’re you doing tonight, Mat?’

Mat softly cursed his cheeks for colouring yet again. ‘My folks are taking me to some restaurant at a tavern out in the country. It’d kinda piss them off if I skipped it,’ he added apologetically.

‘Riki and I are free,’ Damien put in quickly, looking at Lena. ‘What about a movie, eh?’

Lena stared down her nose at him. ‘I’m doing my nails.’

‘And I’m doing my hair,’ put in Cassandra, whose hair looked like it hadn’t been ‘done’ in months.

Damien looked crushed.

Lena looked at Mat. ‘Tomorrow, then?’ She patted her pocket. ‘I’ve got your number.’ She and Cassandra rose, and Lena swayed back up the sand towards the car-park, with Cassandra trailing inelegantly behind her, carrying her surfboard. They watched them drive away.