A Fistful of Sky (34 page)

We flew out over the freeway, over the cemetery, above the bird sanctuary and the zoo and the broad beaches where people played volleyball when the weather was right, over the high-priced beachview hotels and convention centers, and along the beach boulevard toward the pier. Sabado y Domingo, the weekend open-air market under the line of palm trees beside the boulevard, was in full swing below us, artists and jewelers and potters and others selling wares. Christmas shoppers thronged the booths in search of gifts. It flashed by, and so did the pier, the harbor, and the breakwater where Ian and I had been last night. We flew across the boulevard and the Speare Beach parking lot, over the STCC campus and right to the Learning Center.

Campus was deserted for the holidays. Altria dropped us down next to the bench where I had waited for Ian the night before. No one was around to notice our descent.

She let go of me. I swayed and staggered. I had never flown like that before, and didn’t know if any of my siblings had. I had loved the view, but feared the fall; the whole distance I had been terrified aid elated, and now I just felt shaky as hell.

Altria, distracted, flapped a hand at me. A short tongue of orange flame flew from her fingers into my face, and I breathed it in without meaning

to. It slid down my throat, hot and sweet and smooth, settled in my stomach, and warmed and steadied me.

Altria leaned over and sniffed at the bench.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to find that man,” she said, “and decide what to do about him.”

Suddenly I felt excited. Who was Dennis Ralston, if that was even his name? What did he want? Did he really threaten people, or was that just my paranoia talking?

With Altria on the case, I felt like we could actually find out about him, and resolve my own unease.

She stroked the bench, then sniffed at her fingers. I wandered over to look at the hole in the row of cement stanchions where the one I had atomized used to be. A moment later she came up behind me and slid her arm around my waist. “Oh,” she said, following my gaze, “that.” She touched my chest. “Have you got something more for me, my sweet? Ah, yes.” She drew her hand away, and a trail of red power followed. “We’ll fix that first, just to be nice.” She flicked her fingers three times, and a new cement stanchion, identical to all the others, spun up on the stump of the old one.

“How can that be?” I asked. “I used up a whole load of curse energy to destroy the other one. You can make a new one with just a little?”

“A fraction. You’re wasteful, but you don’t know better yet. I know how to use this gift. If you call me back again, I’ll teach you. I’ll feed you knowledge a fragment at a time. Are you happy now?”

The pillar was repaired. “Yes,” I admitted.

“Good. Let’s go.” She dropped her arm to hold my hand again, and led me over the bridge above the road to the east side of campus. “He walks,” she said, “mostly at night, but he comes here sometimes during the day, too. He has secret places.”

We crossed most of campus, walked to the opposite side, which looked down over the edge of a cliff at a city park below, its baseball diamond and tennis courts and swingsets. Clumps of trees dotted the park, and there was a bandshell and a concrete amphitheatre for concerts, too. Altria went with the confidence of someone familiar with the area to a place at the edge of one of the walking paths, then pushed off the path through some bushes, following a faint trail or none at all.

Dennis had a little carved-out earthen nook three feet below the top of the cliff, where he could sit in comfort with his binoculars and watch things happening in the park below.

Altria pulled me to the edge just above his head, tugged me down beside her. We squatted there, watching Dennis as he watched other people. He was riveted. I stood, trying to see what he was looking at. Altria gripped my ankle so I wouldn’t slip.

Below, sheltered, or so they thought, by a thick screen of eucalyptus trees between them and the park, and the cliff between them and the rest of the world, a boy and a girl were hard at it. She lay on her back on top of her dress. He still wore his shirt. Her head thrashed from side to side. Her small short gasps were almost swallowed by traffic sound and the cries of children chasing each other on the nearby lawn.

I ducked down. Altria smiled. I sat back and raised my eyebrows.

She leaned forward. “So,” she said in a low whisper. “You like to watch.”

Dennis jerked, would have dropped the binoculars, except they hung from a strap around his neck. He turned to stare up at us, then teetered in surprise.

Altria leaned over and grabbed a handful of shirt, steadied him.

“Get back,” he whispered.

We went back through the bushes to the path. He followed.

“What are you doing here?” he asked when we were tar enough from the cliff that nobody below could possibly hear us.

“Checking you out.”

“Why?” He looked at me, then at Altria, then back at me. “Cripes, you’re twins? I didn’t know that about you. I mean, I’ve watched you before—one of you, anyway.” He stroked his mustache. His eyes narrowed. “You. Gypsum.”

He nodded to me. “I had no idea there was another one. I was just trying to help you last night.”

Altria put out her hand.

Dennis ignored it. “What can I do for you?” he asked me.

I checked the campus. It was broad daylight. It was Christmas Break. There was no one on the mesa but us.

“Look, you came to me,” Dennis said. “One might almost say you stalked me. Something wrong with your boyfriend?”

“No.”

“What is it you want, then?”

“Are you the campus rapist?”

“I already told you I wasn’t.” He frowned. “What if I said I was?”

“Well, I—” I turned to Altria. What were we doing?

She stepped behind me, fitted herself to my back, her arms around my waist, her chin on my right shoulder. She was warm against my back.

“Two of you,” Dennis said. He glanced around too, then focused on us. “That’s more interesting, even though you’re still not my type. You want to come home with me?”

“Is that a line that works?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“So suppose we say no.”

“You still have your keys to the Learning Center?”

“Sorry, didn’t bring them.”

“That’s all right. I’ve got the keys to one of the portables.” There were several prefabricated buildings on campus that had started as temporary classrooms and were now permanent, though they were still called portables. Dennis dug a key ring out of his pocket and jingled it. “Want to check it out?”

I glanced at Altria’s profile. She smiled. “Okay,” I said.

“Now, look. Are you seriously interested in me, or are you just teasing me?”

“I’m serious,” Altria said. “My sister is scared.”

Dennis pursed his lips, then turned and walked toward the nearest portable. Altria moved to my side, grabbed my hand, and followed. “Guard walked past here about ten minutes ago,” Dennis said as he unlocked the door. “He won’t be back for another half hour. Time enough?”

“For what I want,” said Altria.

Dennis gave her a wicked smile. We walked in past him, and he closed and locked the door behind us. He set his binoculars on the teacher’s desk by the blackboard, then dug his hands into his jacket pockets and pulled out some nylons. “Restraints?”

“No,” Altria said.

He shrugged and stuffed them back in his pockets. “What is it you want?”

“I want to know if you hurt people.”

“Is that what you like?”

“Sometimes. Right now I want to know if I can use you to teach my sister a lesson.”

“Kinky, but okay.”

“Lie down.”

He took off his jacket, folded it, and lay on the floor with the jacket under his head. Altria stood over him, her feet planted on either side of his waist. She lowered herself to sit on his stomach.

“Not comfortable,” Dennis said. “You weigh a ton.”

She put her knees down at his sides and raised herself off of him a little. “Gyp. Come here.”

“What are you doing?” My voice quavered.

“Come on,” she said. Dennis looked up at me and laughed.

I squatted beside them, scared and uncomfortable.

“Watch carefully,” Altria said. She stroked my chest, pulled a streamer of fire from me, and, as Dennis gaped, placed her red-cloaked hand on his forehead.

“Do you hurt other people against their will?” she asked.

“What?” He cried to pull her hand off his forehead. He struggled, kicked his legs, gripped her arm and pulled. She didn’t move.

“Do you rape people?” she asked.

He convulsed, arms and legs and neck straight and stiff, his head back, mouth stretched in a silent scream. Then the fit left him and he relaxed. “Only special people,” he whispered. “Only the exact right one. I don’t find her very often.”

Altria lifted her hand from his forehead and turned to me. “Here.” She placed her palm on my chest. Fire poured out of her into me. “Some of what you gave me. Curse him.”

“What?”

“You don’t want to curse the people you love. I heard you talk to Tobias after your mother ate the fruit of that beautiful tree. You’d give this up if you had to hurt people you love every day. Why not curse someone who

deserves it?” She took my hand, guided it down to rest on Dennis’s head. “It’s not hard. Give him something to pay him back for what he’s done to others.”

“But he—but you—but I don’t really know—”

“Your hand’s so hot. Hurt me,” Dennis said. “You’re turning into my type.” “Nothing twisted gives you pleasure,” I whispered. Heat poured out of my hand, flooded into Dennis.

He began to weep.

Altria stood up, leaned to pat his cheek, then grabbed my hand and dragged me out of there.

she hugged me from behind again, and we rose up into the air. Wind chilled the tears on my face. Would he be all right? Did he deserve to be cursed? I didn’t even know who he was, or if he’d really done what he said. He hadn’t hurt us, hadn’t even come close. Guilt twisted and burned in my belly. This time I’d cursed someone who had no defenses. How could that be right?

We flew fast above the boulevard for two miles, over the people at Sabado y Domingo, past the convention centers again, over the point that stuck out into the ocean, past the part of the cemetery that was on the cliff above the sea, where our family has had plots for years in preparation for the ultimate, and down to the narrow, unimproved beach in Bosquecito that Jasper and Flint and Beryl and I walked to from our house, Mariposa Beach. At high tide, the waves lapped at the rip rap and there was no beach; at low tide you could walk along the beach past a tar hill to where the cliffs curved out and away, and below them were the magical tide pools where I had been searching for treasure since I was a little kid.

The tide was halfway in or out, and seagulls flew along the strand, crying. Grownups and kids and dogs walked or raced or swam along the water’s edge, leaving footprints in wet sand that shone for a moment before all the water forced to the surface by the pressure of the feet sank down again. The air smelled of sea, with a touch of dead nsh.

At a moment when everyone faced away, Altria dropped us to the sand with a soft thud not too far from where the dark rocks that sheltered and formed the tidepools began.

The air was warm in this stretch of beach where the shore wind was diverted by the cliffs. Heat rose from sand that had been baking under afternoon sun for several hours.

I took off my shoes and socks and dug my toes into the sand, wishing I could crawl under it and bury myself. Altria sat close, her arm draped over my shoulders.

Not far off, a man and his dog played fetch the driftwood stick and throw it. Out in the rocks twelve-year-olds poked sticks into tidepools, and one stooped to pick something up. Three teen girls in bright bikinis walked along the water. A woman with her pants rolled up held her little boy’s hand, and they waded in the edges of the waves. Farther back, where the beach was just a beach and didn’t have rocks in the water, people swam, bodysurfed.

“You’re not happy,” Altria murmured.

“I wish I knew what was right,” I said. “I have no sense that that was right. I feel like you forced me to do something awful.”

“I do that. You knew that.”

“I do now.”

“But I was trying to help, Gyp. If you can open up your head a little, you’ll see that you have treasure. Open your head. You don’t even know how to curse right. And it’s all so close.” She gripped my head between her hands and stared into my eyes. So strange, this view of my own face, which I usually saw in the frozen moment of a photograph, or with planned expressions in front of a mirror, never just serious and searching and frustrated. “I want to get this right, but I don’t know my job yet, either. Will you give me more chances?”

“I don’t know.”

She caught one of my tears on a finger and tasted it. She took my hand, turned it over so she could read my wristwatch. “I have fifteen more minutes.”

“I can set time limits and you’ll respect them?”

“Today. Hmm. Fifteen minutes.” She stroked her hand across my head, warm and gentle, and looked down the beach.

A bathing-suited mother played with her two naked toddlers in the surf.

“Let’s try that,” Altria said, and laid her hand on my back.

It was like the earlier diminishing had been, a collapse and collection down into a smaller self, pulling tighter and losing pieces of myself—bone length, muscles, ail the growth and change experience had written on my body. In a moment I had dropped down into the cavern that my T-shirt became, arms and legs pulling up out of my clothes.

I sat in a dark cocoon of fabric. I had the urge to wail.

Altria lifted the edge of the T-shirt. Her face—my face—was suddenly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It promised comfort and security. I held out my arms to her.

“Hey, little one,” she murmured in a soft voice, and lifted me, cradled me against her breast. I reached my arms as far up toward her neck as I could and laid my head on her chest. I could hear her heart beat. The sun blazed on my skin. A breeze brushed my back. Both things felt like touches.