Magic Lessons (17 page)

alled and got a strange beeping sound. He tried Danny’s landline. It rang and rang until Danny’s smooth movie-star voice announced, “You missed me. If you’re feeling it, leave a message. If you’re not, well, that’s cool. Catch you later.”
Wanker,
thought Tom, before putting the phone back in his pocket and running downstairs.

“Esmeralda! Esmeralda!” She wasn’t in the kitchen. “Esmeralda!”
Where could she be? What should he do? Jay-Tee was dead to the world upstairs. He fished his phone out and dialled Danny’s mobile again. This time it went through to voicemail with an equally annoying message. “Hi,” Tom said, “it’s me, Tom. Could you call back?” He gave the mobile number just in case. “I’m worried. Are you okay, Ree? Let us know.” He tried the landline again with the same result, but this time he left a message.
Esmeralda came out of the bathroom.
Good
, he thought,
she’ll have some clue what to do
. Then he remembered he didn’t trust her anymore.
“What’s wrong, Tom?”
“Jason Blake’s got Reason. We were on the phone talking, you know, and then she said that Blake’d shown up, and then the phone clicked off, and I’ve rung and rung but there’s no answer.”
Esmeralda said nothing, but the expression on her face was not happy. Tom found that he was biting his bottom lip. He stopped.
“What would he want with her?” Tom asked, though of course he could think of many things Blake’d want from Reason.
Esmeralda raised an eyebrow. “More magic. A longer life.”
“We have to do something.”
“We do. We will. First, though, we’ll need winter clothes.”
“We’re going through the door?” Tom asked, feeling stupid as soon as the words left his mouth. How else were they going to rescue her?
Esmeralda nodded. “Is Jay-Tee awake?”
“She was, but then she got tired again. Do you want me to check on her?”
“No, I’ll do it. Run next door and get clothes, enough for a couple of days, toothbrush, whatever else you’ll need. Tell your father you’re going, that you’re not sure when you’ll be back.”

Tom returned with a chock-a-block backpack dangling from his left shoulder, carrying a big winter coat with pockets stuffed with other winter gear, and his ears full of his dad’s messages to Cathy, which Tom wasn’t at all sure he’d have a chance to deliver.

Jay-Tee was sitting at the kitchen table eating porridge, looking terrible. The bruise on her cheekbone was red, purple, and blue. There was a bandage on her hand.

“You’re not coming,” he said, dumping his stuff at the other end of the table.
Jay-Tee pulled a face. “Can if I want.”
“Sure, but you can’t if your body won’t let you.”
Jay-Tee began what looked like a shrug and then stopped, wincing.
Tom raised his eyebrows and said, “See?” because his eyebrows were not renowned for their visibility. Then he remembered Jay-Tee claiming
she
could see them.
“I’m not coming,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t stay in bed. Not with Reason . . .” She blinked, and Tom realised how upset she was. He felt stupid. Of course she was upset. Jason Blake scared her so much she wouldn’t even say his name, and now he had Reason.
“There you are, Tom,” Esmeralda said as she entered the kitchen carrying her briefcase and a black leather winter coat lined with sheepskin. Even folded over her arm Tom could see how elegant its lines were.
“Lucky you have a spare coat,” he said. “What with the other one getting eaten by the door and . . .”
Jay-Tee grimaced. Tom wondered if it was meant to be a smirk or a smile. “Second spare,” she said. “She’s lost two now.”
“When did that—”
“How are you feeling, Jay-Tee?” Esmeralda asked, ignoring the discussion of her coats.
“Sore, achey. But I’ll live. For a while, anyway.”
“Has Reason rung?” Tom asked.
“No,” Esmeralda said, turning back to Jay-Tee. “Do you think you’re going to be up for this?”
“Probably not, but I’d rather be here than lying in bed upstairs
imagining
what was happening.”
“Up for what?” Tom asked.
“I’m going to try a spell on my own, to get the door open and to make me strong enough to deal with the old man on the other side.”
“Oh,” Tom said. “Is that all?”
“Very droll,” Esmeralda said, moving closer to the door. Tom noticed there were even more feathers lining the bottom now. Mostly green ones that were longer and curvier than the first lot they’d magicked.
“That sounds like a big spell. Won’t it be kind of risky?”
She nodded. “I’ll need you and Jay-Tee to keep an eye on me. If it starts to look dangerous or too strange, I’m depending on you both to pull me out of it.”
“How, exactly? You’re a lot more powerful than we are now. Are we supposed to slap you or something?”
“If you need to,” Esmeralda said. “But I don’t think it should come to that. A gentle shake should be enough.”
She closed her eyes and reached out towards the door. Tom grabbed her hand. “Esmeralda. You don’t know anything about the old man’s magic. It might not be safe. You haven’t used it for a spell this big—”
“I’d say healing broken bones was rather large.”
“But how do you know what you’re doing?”
“Reason is in danger. I have to rescue her.”
“I know that.” Tom was close to shouting. “But how’s it going to help her if you wind up dead?” He looked at her right hand. Her fingers moved as they always had, as if he’d never lost his temper. Tom thought about all the things Esmeralda could do with a magic that didn’t eat up your life. She would never steal from him again. If this magic was everything she thought it was, it would mean he could trust her again.
“That won’t happen.”
“How do you know? What if this magic lulls you into thinking everything’s right as rain and then burns you up? Look at Jay-Tee! Look what the old man’s magic has done to her.”
“Hey! I don’t look that bad.”
“Yes, you do,” Esmeralda said. “Tom, everything you say is reasonable. But sometimes you have to take risks. Think of the old man.
Old
man, Tom. He’s been using this magic for a very, very long time without ill effect—”
“Without
ill effect!
Reason says he’s some kind of monster!”
“Without his magic, Tom, I’d be dead already. Every second I live from now on is a bonus. I want to rescue my granddaughter.”
“But it nearly killed Jay-Tee. What if it’s turning toxic inside you as we’re talking?”
“It’s not turning toxic, Tom. It feels right inside me. It feels like it belongs.”
“Doesn’t mean you can trust your feelings.”
“Tom, this argument is over. I’m doing this.”
Esmeralda closed her eyes and put her hand palm first on the door. The wood began to ripple outwards from her fingers. A metal-against-metal sound started small and grew. Tom and Jay-Tee put their hands over their ears and looked at each other.

with a sharp crack. Pieces of it skidded across the floor, one stopping in front of Jay-Tee’s bedroom, another near the far windows.

Danny glanced at his broken phone and then turned to Jason Blake. “You’re the jerk who was messing with my sister.”
Jason Blake nodded, agreeing that he was.
“Get out,” Danny said, stabbing the lift button. The doors opened immediately.
“I don’t think so. I need to speak with my granddaughter.”
He was looking at me, not Danny, his stare eerily like old man Cansino’s. I stared back at him as if I was unafraid.
“She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
“I think she does.”
“Not really,” I said, speaking for myself. “I’d like you to leave.”
Blake flicked his hand, and something arced through the air at me. I caught it. Grey-brown, almost like putty. A piece of the old man. It even smelled like him, fresh-baked bread. It began to sink into my hands, sharp and biting. “No,” I said, concentrating on the golden spiral, letting it uncurl within me, growing wider and wider, expelling the old man’s stuff so that it bubbled up into my hand. I shaped it into a perfect ball, tossed it back at him.
Blake caught the ball, held it lightly in his left hand, not bothering to watch as it sank back into him. “Well done. I see you’ve already met Señor Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino? I thought as much.”
“Who?” I said, but then I remembered that name. I’d seen it etched on marble in the cemetery on the other side of the door. The cemetery in Sydney. The one Tom had shown me, where the remains of my family were kept. “Died 1823.”
“Except he didn’t,” Jason Blake said, “did he?” He took a step towards me.
“All right, that’s enough,” Danny said, moving closer. Blake was tall, but Danny was taller. He loomed over him. “Get back in the elevator.”
The smell of baking bread became more intense. One of the kitchen stools flew past me. I called out. Danny turned just in time for it to hit him full in the face and knock him over.
My grandfather dashed across the room. I stepped back, running into the kitchen table. He reached out and grabbed my shoulders. His hands were hot, burning my skin. I screamed. Something inside me began tearing itself loose, racing through my body towards Blake’s hands, into his body. He was seizing my magic.
“No!” I yelled. “No!”
“I don’t have to ask anymore.”
I closed my eyes, reached for my ammonite in a pocket that wasn’t there. I tried to clear my mind without it—I thought of the night sky out bush, filled with tens of thousands of stars, too many to count at a glance. I coaxed my Fibonaccis, prodded them to unfurl inside me, radiate out, but they curled tight, into an Archimedean spiral, not golden, the distance between each coil the same, like a roll of paper, not like my ammonite. And then the spiral wasn’t even that. It unravelled, raced burning through my veins, through my skin, into Jason Blake.
He was not the Jason Blake he had been, cautiously using only enough to keep from going insane. Taking other people’s magic in only the most economic of ways—asking, never taking. Taking used too much magic.
But he was stripping me bare. Through blurred eyes I saw the magic growing in him—the old man’s magic floated in every part of my grandfather’s body. And something else, too: Jason Blake was related to old man Cansino. He was a Cansino, too.
“Asshole,” I heard Danny say from somewhere far away.
Jason Blake grunted; the burning pressure of his hands lifted. The flood of magic stopped. Shockingly sudden. I fell back, landed hard on my arse.
“Get up,” Danny said, grabbing my hand. “You have to get dressed. We have to go.”
Jason Blake was unconscious on the floor. A broken stool lay beside him.
I stood up and wobbled. Danny steadied me. I looked up at his face. His cheek was bleeding. A trickle of blood ran down his jaw onto his neck.
“We have to go now. Before he wakes up and starts throwing furniture again.” Danny hauled me over to Jay-Tee’s room. I got dressed as quick as I could, stuffed my ammonite into my pocket. I’ve had a lot of practise getting dressed on the run, grabbing everything, exiting out the nearest door or window. Even with the awkward winter clothes and in my shaky state I was fast.
Danny dragged me to the lift. As we stepped around Jason Blake he groaned, his eyelids fluttering before closing again. Danny punched the button and the doors sprang open. We lurched inside, stabbing the button for the ground floor.
The door slid shut just as Jason Blake started to stir.

Stepping outside was like walking into a freezer. I shivered, hugged myself. Jumped as a truck’s horn blasted loud enough to wake the dead. On the other side of the highway, lights gleamed out across the black of the Hudson River. The river was the only true darkness I could see. The sky glowed orangebrown from the city and its pollution.

Danny grabbed my arm and started walking as fast as he could. I stumbled, struggling to keep up with him.
“Where are we going?” I asked, my words emerging in puffs of condensation.
“Away from your grandfather. What did he do to you?” “Stole my magic.”
“Bastard. All of it?”
“No, but enough. I don’t . . . I don’t feel very strong.”
Danny picked up his pace, dragged me around the corner of the nearest busy street, and turned off the highway.
“Where should we go?”
“Away from your grandfather.”
“He’ll follow us. You don’t understand. He has
so
much magic now.” I coughed. The cold burned my lungs. “He’ll find me wherever I go.”
Danny kept dragging me along the street. “There has to be somewhere he won’t find us.”
I couldn’t think of anywhere, but I could think of someone who might protect us. It was risky. “We could go back to the old man.”
“The old man? You figure he can handle your grandfather?”
I nodded. “They might be doing this together, though. . . .”
“Then why didn’t the old man try”—Danny lowered his voice—“to steal your magic? He didn’t, did he?”
I shook my head.
“If we go anywhere else, what will happen?”
“Blake’ll take the rest—”
“Let’s get a cab,” Danny said, sticking out his arm and moving onto the road. A yellow taxi pulled up straightaway. Danny looked surprised.
“Hurry,” I said, opening the door and scooting to the other side. Danny jumped in after me.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“East,” Danny said. “Seventh Street and Avenue B.”
Danny sank back next to me. He reached out and squeezed my hand.
Something tugging at me sharply. I twisted around to look out the back window. Jason Blake was running towards us.
“He’s coming.”
Danny turned. “Damn.”
I leaned forward to the driver. “Do you think you can go faster? Please?”
The driver started to tell me no. “I’m going as fast—”
“There’s twenty bucks in it for you if you can get us across town in less than ten,” Danny said.
The driver looked in the rear mirror, caught Danny’s eye. “Make it fifty and I’ll see what I can do. And you pay any fines if those policemen bust me.”
“Done.” Danny fished out a few bills and handed them over.
“Put your seatbelts on!” the driver told us. He pressed heavily on the accelerator.
I turned and saw Jason Blake less than a metre behind.

Mere up. It didn’t look like it. She hadn’t moved an inch since she’d put her hand on the door, closed her eyes, and shut JayTee and Tom out. She stood still and steady, her skin glistening with a light coating of sweat, as if she’d slept in Central Park overnight and woken to find herself covered with dew. The door, on the other hand, had gone totally wack, making the most awful high-pitched metallic noises, bucking and kicking like an enraged horse.