A Fistful of Sky (28 page)

I could call Altria.

I took my hand out of my pocket. The flames were steady over my fingertips now. I felt the heat. Curse heat. “See?” I said.

“Whoa!”

“It’s gotta go somewhere or I’ll make myself sick.” I bit my lip. I pointed toward one of the concrete pillars. “But once you start thinking about things, you get the feeling there’s no good place to send it. Here goes.”

I zapped the pillar, and it blew into bits of stone and rebar. Then the bits blew into smaller bits, and then those blew apart until the pillar was completely pulverized. Dust floated in the air, then dispersed into the fog.

Ian jumped a foot and grabbed my arm.

First normal curse I could remember casting. Well, since I blew up the computer, anyway. I wondered about that. What if the computer had really been alive? Had I murdered it? Killed a thinking being?

I wasn’t looking forward to going to sleep tonight.

“And that thing probably costs a lot of money to fix,” I said. “But I didn’t know what else to do. So let’s get out of here!”

We ran for the parking lot.

We were both breathing hard by the time we reached his car, which turned out to be a red Saturn. He dropped his keys three times while he unlocked the passenger door for me. Then he ran around the car and it took him a while to work his own door open.

I leaned on the car while he worked at it, and then, when he was going to get in, I said across the roof, “Let’s talk.”

He leaned on the car on his side and looked at me through the fog. It was getting dark. The light from the orange streetlamps hovered in haloes up where it was coming from; the fog was so thick that not much light reached the ground.

“So was that okay with you?” I asked.

He breathed, then said, “Yeah.”

“Oh, good. Can I put my pack in the trunk?”

Pant, pant. “Okay.” He opened the car door, reached in, and pressed something that popped the trunk. I went back and dumped my pack in there, pulled out a scarf my Ultimate Fashion Sense self had stuffed in there eatlier— lavender snakeskin pattern—and wrapped it around my neck.

I climbed into the cat beside Tan. The seat was ultracomfortable, and I felt relaxed since I had kicked all that energy out of my system. I strapped in and glanced at him.

He was watching me. His eyes looked soft. After a second he started the car. “You hungry?”

“Yeah.”

“Seafood?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bistro okay?”

“Great.”

The Bistro was one of the trendy upscale restaurants that looked out over the yacht harbor. I had never eaten there; it wasn’t one of the places we went in our Sunday Evening Family Forage. I’d heard the food was good, though.

I had forgotten to figure out pseudo-date etiquette. Was this one of those things where we each paid for ourselves? Or did Tan pay? Which meant I should just order an appetizer, I guessed. Maybe I should ask him.

“We going Dutch?” I asked as he pulled into a parking space down by the beach.

“You want to?”

“Is that a signal for ‘let’s do it that way?’ ” In all our previous activities, we’d paid for ourselves; we’d been with big groups of people and it had been the obvious thing to do.

“No, it’s a signal for ‘what do you want to do?’ “

“Oh. Subtle.”

We smiled at each other.

I dug my wallet out of my jeans and checked the currency compartment. I had some money. “Let’s go Dutch this time.”

“Okay.”

Maybe we should go Dutch every time. Who knew if there’d ever be another time? Jeeze, this was nervewracking.

The restaurant was decorated with blown-glass globes in all kinds of weird colors, supported by weird cages made of steel and antlers. A mess of the globes lay like alien eggs in the big stone fireplace. Each table had its own little glass-and-antler sculpture.

Our waiter brought out weird breadsticks in a vase made of glass panels wired together. The breadsticks looked like slices of focaccia and pita buttered and dusted with sesame, dill, and caraway seeds.

“Huh,” Ian said after he tried one.

“Good huh or bad huh?”

“Vaguely good.”

I liked them. Lots of flavor, soft texture. I wanted to remember this in

case Flint and I baked bread again. “You get the feeling we’re experiencing California cuisine?”

“More than a feeling.”

The waiter brought us a basket of root vegetable chips that ranged in colors from white to orange to purple to pink. The water glasses were blown-glass goblets with twists of iron around them.

“Have you ever eaten here before?” I whispered.

“Nope,” he whispered.

We studied the menu in silence.

Okay. I could afford a shrimp cocktail and a dinner salad. Not that they were called that. I closed my menu. Good thing there was lots of bread included with the meal. I checked the supplies on the table. Turbinado sugar came in paper tubes with illustrations on them in the style of Matisse.

“Well, it’s an experience,” I said.

“Right.” Our waiter returned and took orders. Ian ordered a portabello mushroom appetizer. Great minds.

“So,” Ian said after we had finished the breadsticks.

“So.”

“Curses.”

“Yeah.”

“Since Wednesday, you said.”

I did some mental acrobatics, ended up flipping into the tell-him-everything net. “See, in our family, if you’re going to be powerful at all, you’re supposed to get your powers by the time you’re, say, fourteen or fifteen. And I didn’t. So I’m twenty, and suddenly I get my power, when I thought I wouldn’t have any at all. And it’s curse power.”

“Huh,” he said. “In my family, we had to figure out how not to shoot your first deer or join the neo-Nazis by fourteen. No, actually, the deer thing was more like twelve.”

“Did your family manage that?” I knew he had four older brothers, and a sister who was the eldest.

“It was a struggle. Actually my brother Patrick had a brief cigarette-smoking neo-Nazi period when he was sixteen, but Dad

managed to talk him out of it. The parents sent us to summer camps out of state and encouraged us to make weird friends, and I finally escaped by running away to California. Of course, no one back in Dahlia will speak to me now. Idaho local thought is that California taints everything it touches. With some justification.”

“Why do your folks live there, if they don’t have the local mindset?”

“Mom has about half of it. She wanted to move somewhere where she could learn to survive without too many blessings of civilization. She cans tons of things all summer and autumn. She spends the winters sewing and weaving. They raise a beef cow every year and slaughter it. She makes Dad hunt stuff. I have shot birds, and I’ve caught and eaten plenty of fish. She’s tried to get everybody involved in something that will come in handy in case the world ends, like, my oldest brother Frank is a potter—he’s got some kilns in the yard, and he digs his own clay. Patrick is an apprentice blacksmith. Sarah is Mom’s apprentice. She’s learning all the skills Mom taught herself. Ricky’s always been fascinated by archaeology. He learned how to knap arrowheads and knife blades from obsidian and make stoneage weapons. Art is learning woodworking and carpentry.”

“And your dad telecommutes.”

“Right. He makes tons of money designing software and supports everybody else’s obsessions.”

“So what skill did you learn?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I was never interested in any of that. I wanted to learn music and art. Oh, and I went through a Goth period in high school, and studied everything I could get my hands on about the black arts.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows at me three times.

“And you met Claire—”

“In creative writing class at UCST.”

I had heard that story before at some point, but forgotten.

“The black arts,” I said. “Did you ever get good at them? Did anything you tried work?”

“Gave it all up when I graduated high school. None of it worked, but I was getting too many nightmares. But a couple of my Goth friends came to Santa Tekla with me. We share an apartment. Only one of us still wears black all the time, though.”

“Claire’s mom is a witch.”

“Yeah, I know. So’s Claire.”

“She told you?”

“At one of her parties, when there were only a couple of us left, she was kind of drunk and wanted to do a love spell, but she said she needed some help. Joel and I were kind of drunk too and said we’d help her.”

“A love spell on who?” I wondered how recent this party was and who Claire was interested in now. Had the spell worked;* We hadn’t had lunch in too long. We had a lot of catching up to do.

“She didn’t tell us. She had some of his hair. She gave us some chants to do, and lit candles and burned incense and did strange stuff with various small objects. Our job was just to chant.”

“Did it work?”

“Don’t know. It made me notice things about her apartment, though. Symbols above the door, the altar on the mantle. All the artwork depicting witches at work.” He smiled. “Makes you think.”

“So what did she tell you about me?”

“Hardly anything. You come from a big family, and you and she have been neighbors and best friends since you were kids.”

I wasn’t sure what other questions to ask him. Some of the ones I wanted to ask verged on the pathetic. Like, “So, do you like me?” “Why do you like me?” No, forget that.

“So, the curse thing,” I tried instead.

“Amazing,” he said.

“Usually it’s more complicated than just zapping something to bits.” I wondered who would pay for repairs on the concrete post I had destroyed. Should I offer to do it? I could say I hit it with a car. What if it cost thousands of dollars to fix? Maybe I should curse myself with Ultimate Fashion Sense again and fix it myself.

Maybe I should curse myself with Ultimate Fashion Sense all the time. Wouldn’t life be easier if the magic came out straight instead of crooked and unkind? If I could tell it to do something, and it would do what I asked? But why did that work? Why should I be able to control the magic so much better when I had cursed myself?

I wasn’t really myself with UFS. Close, but not really. I had had much more of my own brain with UFS than I had had when the computer told me to be a Girl Thing, but I was still a step away from my true and familiar self. Maybe the curse energy thought it was being filtered through

someone else, and hence worked like regular energy.

I could make good magic as long as I spent my life being someone else.

Whoa. Something to think about.

My first impulse was to nix the whole thing. Why should I turn myself into someone else? Someone I considered cursed? That would have to be a prerequisite, too; to curse myself, I had to afflict myself with something I didn’t like.

I didn’t want to give the idea up without considering it, though. If cursing things got too hard, it was nice to know I had some alternatives—Altria, teaming up with somebody else to filter the energy, and this. Maybe I didn’t have to use UFS. I could curse myself into other, different kinds of people and see what happened.

“Complicated how?” Ian asked.

I told him about the chalk, and a little about the computer. Our food came, and we got more breadsticks. We traded bites of our appetizers. I shared my salad. What there was was good, but there wasn’t enough of anything. We even ate the vegetable chips.

I told Ian about Ultimate Fashion Sense.

“I thought you looked different, but I couldn’t quite figure out how. The makeup,” he said. He frowned. “Your hair’s a different color, too, isn’t it? And you got it trimmed?”

Interesting. He paid more attention to how I looked than some members of my family did. “Yeah. That was part of a different curse, though.”

“I get the feeling some of these curses aren’t too awful.”

“They have their ups and downs. At least they expire after a certain point.”

“Could you turn someone into a statue?”

“I don’t know why not.” A statue. I could curse myself into a statue, maybe. But where, and what if people did things to me while I was stone? Birds could fly over and bomb you… . Well, suppose you really wanted to meditate. Being turned to stone might be the ultimate sensory deprivation. I’d want to try more curses before I went that far, though, to make sure that I knew the timing was firm. What if a curse lasted longer than a few hours? Suppose I cursed myself or someone else into a statue and they stayed that way for years? “Why? You have somebody you want petrified?”

He shivered. “Not offhand. I’m just curious about what kind of limits there are on this.”

“Huh. Me too.” I shifted my shoulders. I checked my watch. An hour and a half since my last curse, and already I was too tense for comfort? “If you could curse anybody or anything you liked, what would you do?” Brainstorming! I could brainstorm curses. Maybe other people would have better ideas than I did.

“That’s a scary thought.” He sat back.

“Would you care for dessert?” our waiter asked. He waved someone over to take our plates, and then got out this little scraper tool and cleaned the crumbs off our tablecloth.

“I’ll treat,” said Ian.

Okay, was that some kind of signal? Did it mean I would owe him something? Or was he just being nice? Who knew date vocabulary? I could ask Ian about this, too, but I thought, we’ve already talked about all kinds of stuff. Just take it at face value. My stomach growled. “Thanks,” I said.

We checked out the dessert menu. I ordered something that involved custard with chocolate shavings and raspberry drizzles. Ian ordered something densely chocolate.

“Really, we could just go to my house and get dessert there. Yesterday my brother and I made acres of brownies.” I said it before I thought. Only aftet it was out did I realize that for the first time in my life I had invited a guy to our house. I mean, occasionally I had had over boys who were friends from school. Special occasions. But not like this.

We never invited people over without alerting the family first.

He was going to think it was just an idle suggestion, anyway. He wouldn’t take me up on it, would he? I mean, we were having dessert already.