A Fistful of Sky (17 page)

Jasper shook his head. “She was a separate person.”

I searched my memory. She had said something early on that spooked me. “She told me that maybe I made her body, but people couldn’t make spirits.”

Tobias sucked in breath between his teeth. “You created a vessel, and something jumped into it? Oh, Gyp. Terrifying work. They’re all around us, waiting for chances like that. You don’t ever want to do an open summoning. You don’t want to trust your luck. Statistics are against you. So many of them are nasty!”

“Who?”

“Spirits.”

“Dead people?”

“Oh, no, it’s a much broader category than that. It can be ghosts; it can be those called demons and angels by some; it can be the nonphysical forms of sleepers, or even people from other worlds. They drift and sleep all around us. Sometimes, though, if a vessel is offered, they wake and dive in. Depending on their intent, they can do a world of harm. Did she tell you her name?”

“Eventually.”

“Hmm.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What was it?”

“Altria.”

He drummed harder, looking into the air. “No. Not a known name. I wonder what class of being she was.”

“She said she was having a great time and would come back anytime,” Jasper said. “She told Gyp to call her.”

Tobias shook his head. “This is all new to me. Did you write the experience down?”

“I started. I need more time to write.”

“Do you remember the words you used in the original curse?”

I sucked on my lower lip and opened my notebook to the page where I’d tried to reconstruct my curse. I turned the notebook around and showed what I’d written to Tobias.

His face lost color. “You said ‘be kin’?”

“You told me to rhyme.”

He shook his head. “You’ve given her a bridge. You’ve made her a member of the family. That’s a bond that doesn’t end easily. She can come back whenever she likes, and do things to any of us.” He leaned forward and peered at me. “You look different.” I ran my hand through my hair. It felt thick, crisp, and curly. “She left my hair a different color, and shorter. She gave me a tan.”

“She worked lasting change on you?” He went to the cupboard and got out the loop thing he had used the night before. He studied me through it.

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been eight hours yet. Maybe it’ll fade?”

“No, this is independent of your time constraints.” He put the loop away. “It isn’t something you did to yourself. She left you changed.”

“It could have been worse,” I whispered. Still, much as the idea had disturbed me, there was also something inviting about being so huge. Fee, fi, fo, fum!

Jasper nodded. He shuddered. Beryl gazed at him, her eyes sharp.

Tobias glanced away. His ringers drummed. “Anything can happen,” he said at last. “Please, Gyp. Please keep notes of everything you do. We might need to reconstruct it later, if things go—”

I gulped and said, “I will.”

“Anything else?” Jasper and I exchanged glances. He frowned, then said, “She changed me, too.”

“Against your will?”

“I made mistakes. I dropped my shield. I touched her. After she changed me, I lost my will. I was demoralized and couldn’t figure out how to change back. But the change disappeared a little while after she left.”

I said, “Uncle? Is this how curses work? She did scary things to us, but she didn’t make them last. Can curses be nice?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about your earlier question. Is the curse defined by the one casting it, or the one it’s cast on? If you think something is a curse and the person you cast it on thinks it’s a blessing—you could have steady work without feeling too bad about it. You just need to find someone who wants the curses you can give.”

“Mama wanted those gloves. I wonder if they’ve turned into regular gloves yet.”

“Gloves,” repeated Tobias.

“My first curse this morning.” I told him about Mama’s red gloves, then checked the clock. I’d cursed Mama up a pair of gloves at around six A.M., and now it was—almost four in the afternoon? More than enough time had passed for the gloves to have turned normal, if the eight-hour duration of the curses was the right amount of time. I had been asleep when the earlier curses had worn off; I couldn’t really be sure it was eight hours. Maybe less, maybe more.

Four in the afternoon. Mama would have already left for the TV station to do News at Five. I hoped the gloves had behaved. Maybe we should check the news when it was five, and see if she was wearing them.

Four in the afternoon? “Wait a sec. It’s my night to cook, and I haven’t even cleaned up the kitchen from the grapefruit yet, let alone planned a menu. I have to go check our supplies and sec what I can make or if I need to go buy something.”

“Gyp, strive for perspective. Learning to control yourself is more important than cooking,” Tobias said. “We can always order pizza.”

“You guys had pizza last night.” They hadn’t left me any slices, but I had seen the boxes this morning.

“We love pizza. We could have it for a week and not get tired of it,” Flint said.

“I’d get tired of it. But I’ll cook tonight if you like, Gyp,” said Beryl.

“No, I want to cook.” Maybe cooking would make me feel normal. I cooked three nights out of seven; three other nights a week, I worked the

evening shift at the Center and ate brown bag suppers or fast food from the campus vendors and the rest of the family scrounged; and on Sunday nights, everybody who wanted to went out to dinner in a bunch. We had various favorite places around town we went to, and for variety, when new restaurants opened, we descended on them. “I need some help with the kitchen cleanup, though. There was structural damage, and I don’t know how to fix that.” I looked at Jasper, pressed my hands palm to palm in prayer.

He shrugged, then laughed. “Sure. Add some pfeffernusse to Saturday’s cookies?”

I groaned. “How am I going to find time to do Christmas cookies for the rest of the household?”

He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. “I’ll put these to good use. Maybe sweeten the tempers of my bandmates, eh? We’ve been fighting a lot lately.”

“All right.”

“Gypsum, how are your shoulders?” Tobias asked.

I hunched them and frowned.

“How tight?”

I sighed.

“Before you get to the kitchen, maybe you should discharge some more energy. Wouldn’t want it to get in the food.”

“Let’s do something together,” Flint said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Are you nuts?” Jasper said at the same time.

“I don’t care,” answered Flint. “Anything. I just want to see if we can mix powers again and do something cool.”

“Please take it outside,” said Tobias.

“Out back is best,” Jasper said.

“Come with us?” I asked Tobias.

He pointed to my notebook and pens. “Keep track of what happens and tell me later.” He waved his hand to dismiss us, and we jumped up and left.

We went out on the back lawn and sat in a circle.

“Do you all really want to be here?” I asked. “This stuff backfires. I think

it’s supposed to. It might be messy.” I glanced at Jasper, then Beryl.

“No matter what happens, I want to see it,” Jasper said.

“Me too,” said Beryl.

“If it affects me, I hope this time I remember that I can take care of myself,” Jasper said. “Last time was scary. I didn’t know I could fall apart so fast.”

“I bet you would have come out of it pretty soon. Shock can affect anybody, even you guys.”

” ‘Fess up. What happened?” Flint asked.

Jasper tapped his lips with his index finger a couple times, then said, “Gyp’s demon friend made me fat, too, and I didn’t react well at all.”

“You, fat? Gaw dang! I don’t want to miss anything else!”

Jasper gave him a rueful grin. “It’s been a long time since anybody made me change without my consent.” “Pretty cool it’s Gyp,” said Flint. “It wasn’t me. It was her,” I said. Flint only smiled.

“It was educational, anyway,” Jasper said. “Knocked me in the self-confidence.”

I shifted one shoulder, then the other. I felt like a vise was tightening around me. “Guys, I need to do something curselike soon.”

“I know! Let’s do two things at once!” Flint said. “Let’s make something to eat.”

That would defeat the purpose of cooking. I really wanted to get my hands on some knives and chop things up the good old-fashioned way. Kitchen therapy. Maybe Flint and I could make dessert together, though. That had worked pretty well last time.

“How do we combine powers?” I asked. “I curse something, and you use it to make something good?”

“That’s two steps. Let’s try just one. Give me your hands.”

I handed Beryl my notebook and pens. She nodded, opened the notebook to a blank page, and started writing.

Flint reached across the circle to me, and I placed my hands in his.

He jerked his away. “Whoa! Hot hands!” I checked my palms. They looked the same as ever. “Let me try that again.” Flint rubbed his palms across each other, murmured something, then held his hands out to me. When I touched his hands, they felt icy. “Let’s do this fast. What do you

want for dinner?” “Let’s make dessert. Something easy.” “Nothing’s easier than sheet cake,” he said.

“Don’t you want some variety? Let’s try cinnamon rolls, huh?”

“No. Let’s do chocolate this time. Brownies. Those gooey ones.”

“All right. You guys, get back.” I waited until Jasper and Beryl moved a little ways away, then closed my eyes and ran through a brownie recipe in my mind, all the ingredients and the steps: melt together butter and unsweetened chocolate, remove from heat and stir in sugar, vanilla, then eggs; beat all together into a warm, dark, chocolate, gooey mixture, then blend in the flour (a little less than the recipe calls for), pour the mixture in a pan, sprinkle in loose chocolate chips for little bursts of flavor, then bake at 350 for twenty-five minutes or so. The broomstraw test for done didn’t work on these; something always stuck to the straw. I just took them out when I thought they were done. Cool them on a wire rack before cutting. The house would fill with the smell and everybody would come to the kitchen, watching and waiting until I said it was time to eat.

Heat glowed in my chest, my own internal campfire.

I licked my lips and imagined baking more brownies, only this time blond ones, butterscotch instead of chocolate. I could smell them.

Then I thought, how about some frosted ones? Chocolate frosting on some and vanilla frosting on others. Mint frosting! Chocolate mint brownies! Let’s make some with nuts, even though I don’t like those. Chopped walnuts. I think Dad likes that kind. I wonder if we could make caramel brownies. Or how about some with minced Heath Bars sprinkled through them? Yeah, let’s try that. Yum.

“Hey?” said Flint.

I opened my eyes.

We were inside something dark and hot. The air was so thick with the scent of brownies I could almost eat it. what light there was reached us dimly through random beige squares in the walls, just enough light so I could see that we were in something like an igloo.

My shoulders had relaxed again.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Kind of a Hansel and Gretel thing.” He slipped his hands out of mine and shook them. “Hot hot hot. Maybe next time we should do two steps so you don’t burn me. This is a lot of brownies.”

I put my hand against the wail. Gooey, soft, still hot. I brought my palm close to my face. Melted chocolate streaked it.

“Are you all right in there?” Jasper’s voice was muffled, coming through walls of cake.

“So far,” Flint called.

“I wonder how much air we have,” I said. I shouldn’t have said anything. I felt totally claustrophobic. “Flint!”

“Don’t worry. Worse comes to worst I’ll pop us somewhere else. But I chink it’s easier than that. Let’s eat our way out!”

“You’ll ruin your appetite for dinner.”

“Yes,” he said, “but in a noble cause. First, though, I’ll just see if we can bust out.” He got to his feet and pushed up on the roof. “Ugh! How many did we make? Did you know that when you’re spelling, you just pour energy out? Scary big flow. Almost too much for me to channel.” He put some muscle into it and poked a hole up through the roof. Brownies and blondies cascaded to the grass around us as he widened the hole.

Sunlight poured down into our structure as heat flowed up and out. I tasted fresh air and smiled at the sky.

“Okay. Now.” Flint took a brownie from the side of the hole he had made. “Smells great.” He bit it. “Oh, yeah. Perfect! What’s this light brown one? Oh, boy! Wait, there’s another kind over here. I didn’t know you knew how to make so many kinds, Gyp. This is fantastic.” He grabbed a brown-sugar-colored brownie and offered it to me.

“Just one,” I said. I wondered if we had managed to make good food again, or if there would be some curse attached. Oh well. I had to find out, right? I cook a bite. One of the scotchies. Heaven. Chocolate had never been my favorite flavor, even though everybody else loved it best; I thought again, Flint was paying attention, and I never realized it. He gave me a blond brownie because he knows me. Oh, delicious!

“Let’s go get some plates and stuff from the kitchen,” Flint said. “Gotta store some of these for later.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me up into the air. “Jeeze! I didn’t know you could fly.” “Not for very far, but I can manage this much.” We went up high enough to get out of our house of brownies, then dropped with a thud to the lawn.

I climbed to my feet and looked at what Flint and I had done.

“The leaning tower of brownies!” he said. Sheets of brownies were the bricks that had built this round, beehive hairdo-shaped structure. It was almost six feet tall, and maybe eight feet in diameter at the bottom, narrowing to about five feet across at the top. Flint had destroyed its symmetry by busting out. I stood up and brushed off my pants.

“So is it dangerous?” Beryl asked.

I licked my lip and reached for another butterscotch brownie. Perfect. Delicious. Smooth and wonderful.

“I’m going for the cookie tins,” Flint said.

“I’ll be in in a minute.”

“It doesn’t make you break out or anything?” asked Beryl.