A Fistful of Sky (9 page)

“Good,” said Tobias.

I swallowed spit. My stomach growled. Fire sang through me, then faded away, and I felt normal again. “She had really cool gloves,” I said. “Wish I had some like that.”

Something fluttered in my chest.

My hands and forearms grew another skin, black, smooth leather so thin I barely felt it. I stared at my gloved hands, my mouth open, then I looked up at Tobias. “This is my power? This is a curse?”

“You’re going co have to watch your words.”

“But I just did something magical.” My own magic, for the very first time. “I didn’t even rhyme. I didn’t even plan. I made a wish, and it came true.” I flexed my fingers; the gloves moved with them. I almost couldn’t tell they were there except to look at. I lifted a hand and sniffed it. Faint smell of leather. I rubbed the back of my gloved hand against my cheek, and felt soft smooth skin more velvety than my own. “Uncle?”

“Beware of wishes, Gyp. Beware of saying anything with a wish in it.”

“But look!” I held up my hands. They looked elegant, classy, so not mine.

Jasper frowned. “Yeah. How is that a curse, Uncle?”

“Do the gloves come off?”

They encased my arms in black leather up to my elbows. I picked at the edge of one with the fingertips of the other. No. There was no dividing line between the glove and my skin.

I swallowed again. “How long do they last?”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

I smoothed my gloved fingers across my lips. So my hands would be black. Somehow I couldn’t see that as a curse. Wasn’t a curse supposed to bother you? I liked this.

It would be hard to explain at work, though. And in class. Nobody took notes with gloves on. Nobody wore gloves in any context I could

remember, except to fancy dress-up events I saw in movies, or when it was really cold. I imagined raising my hand to answer a question in class, everybody turning to look.

I hunched my shoulders. Well, heck. Class was over until mid-January, and I only had one more shift at work, two days from now. Maybe the gloves would be gone by then. If not, well, maybe I could start some kind of trend— if anybody actually came to the center the Friday before break started, which seemed unlikely.

Black gloves.

When Opal and Jasper first did workings after transition, the effects were short-term. Beryl’s works, on the other hand, had lingered for a week or longer, and with Flint it had varied depending on what he did. Maybe the gloves would be gone by tomorrow. Maybe they’d last a month.

I frowned and looked at Tobias. Everybody else had been through transition and knew the basics. I had let go of them when I thought I wouldn’t need them anymore. I knew I had to use my power or it would twist up inside and hurt me, but I couldn’t remember details. Tobias had given up teaching. Maybe he’d come out of retirement. I hoped. “So I used my power. How soon do I have to use it again?”

“How do you feel?”

I put my black-gloved hand against my stomach. With these black hands, I look like a skunk in a comic strip. It made me smile. My stomach was quiet for the first time in a week. “Pretty good,” I said. I drank milk.

“You’ll need to do something again when you feel worse. Different people experience it in different ways, the sense that there’s something you need to do to feel better again. Sometimes it’s a thickening in the back of the throat, or a sense of something binding your arms or your guts. Beryl?”

“My eyes got hot, like I was about to cry. If I used power, the feeling went away.”

“Jasper?”

Jasper hunched his shoulders. “I felt like I ate too much. Sort of like I had to throw up.” He wrinkled his nose. “I’m glad that’s over.”

“You’ll have to learn to listen to your own signals, Gyp,” Tobias told me.

“I start feeling tense, I have to curse something?”

“Yes.”

“Next time you can give me gloves,” Beryl said. “Those look so cool.”

“I don’t know, kid. Maybe there are more problems with these than that they don’t come off. Let’s wait and see.” I turned to Tobias. “Do I have to curse a person?”

“I don’t know.”

Maybe I could curse rocks! Maybe I could use all my power cursing rocks and see what happened to them. Maybe I didn’t have to hurt anyone.

Naw. If it had been that easy, Aunt Meta would have done it.

“Do I have to wait until I feel my … signal before I can use my power?”

Tobias smiled. “What did you have in mind?”

“I could curse a rock next time, see what happens.”

“What would a rock perceive as a curse?” Tobias went to his tool cupboard and got out a rock. I never knew what he had in there. This rock looked ordinary, something local, bread-brown sandstone. I wondered what he had planned to do with it.

He set it on the table in front of me, and glanced at me, eyebrows up.

I didn’t feel like I was going to cry or throw up. I felt like I’d had something to eat, and I was tired.

I felt ordinary. Normal.

I frowned at my black gloves. No, I had proof that I had changed.

To give a spell power, rhyme helped, and so did rhythm and cadence, Tobias had taught us. Something about how sounds worked together generated energy. Spell crafting had never been my strongest suit, though I loved to read. Trying to write proper spells was one of the few things about power that I had been glad to give up. Jasper was so good at it. I knew I’d never be as good as he was.

I’d have to try again, though. All I needed to do was figure out something clever to say, and see what happened.

I put my hand on the rock. I couldn’t feel its sandy grit through the glove, which surprised me: the gloves felt so chin and invisible. I thought, then said, “Rock. Be chalk.”

Heat stirred in my chest. A cascade of pings and clinks rang out as the rock changed into a couple hundred pieces of sidewalk chalk, all colors, and collapsed across the table and floor.

Somehow this impressed me more than the gloves had. I had planned something, and it had happened. Me. On purpose. Unless—

“Did you do that?” I asked Jasper.

He shook his head and smiled.

Beryl laughed and picked up a few pieces of chalk, green, red, orange, blue. “Let’s go draw on the front walk.”

“Jasper’s got a club to go to,” I said. Was I still invited? Hey, I’d just kissed my power, and now I didn’t know what I was doing. I should stick close to home until I figured it out. Probably I should cancel my shift at the Center on Friday and tell my boss he needed to call some other tutor to fill in for me; I didn’t want to take chances with my students.

Gloves. Chalk. Ooh, scary.

Jasper said, “Forget it. I already told Trina I’d be late and might not make it. I’ll catch the band later. Uncle, do you have something we can put the chalk in?”

Tobias got a shoebox from a lower shelf and handed it to Jasper, who grabbed handfuls of chalk and dumped them in. Tobias picked up a piece of chalk from the floor. His hand jerked, and he dropped it. His eyebrows rose. “If I might offer a suggestion? Draw on the back walk instead. Be careful what you draw.”

Beryl’s smile faded. A tiny worry wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows.

“Sorry to be so ominous,” Tobias said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”

“But it’s just Gyp.”

Just Gyp. Good old Gyp. Never hurt anybody, never scared anybody, never threatened anybody, no matter what you did to her.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Tobias repeated.

I stooped and collected chalk from the floor. I sat with chalk in my hands, trying to figure out what Tobias had felt. Shock? What? I got nothing from the chalk. Then again, I was wearing gloves. Multicolored chalk dust patterned my palms. I dumped the chalk in Jasper’s box and slapped my hands together as though they were blackboard erasers. The chalk didn’t come off.

Huh. I wasn’t so worried about appearing everywhere with black hands, but black hands dusted with chalk? Maybe it would wash off. Could you wash leather in the bathroom sink? I guessed I’d find out.

“I think that’s all of it,” Jasper said. He dropped a last piece into the box. “Turquoise! So cool. We never had these colors before.”

“Let’s go,” said Beryl. Tobias yawned against the back of his hand. “Let me know if you need me. If you don’t, I’m going back to bed.”

“Thanks, Uncle,” I said, and went to him.

He suffered a hug from me. He’d never been very touchy-feely. This time, though, he closed his arms around me. He smelled like incense and black tea. “Interesting times ahead,” he murmured into my hair. “I’ll help as much as I can.”

“Thanks,” I whispered.

Jasper, Beryl, and I clattered down the stairs. The tower door locked behind us.

As we trooped past Flint’s room, he opened the door. “What is this, a parade?”

“Gyp made cursed chalk. We’re going to go try it.”

“What?” Flint came out into the hall.

“Gyp went through transition while we were in L.A. meeting Gerry,” Jasper said. “Only, she got a dark power instead of a fun one. She made this chalk.” Jasper showed Flint the open shoebox.

“What?”

Beryl tugged Jasper’s sleeve. “Come on.”

We headed down the hall, Flint trailing after. “What happened to your hands?”

“I cursed them with gloves.”

“That’s flat-out weird.” He didn’t say anything else, just followed us down the staircase, but at the bottom he grabbed my arm. “You went through transition? You went through transition! Wow, that’s great! At last! I thought it wasn’t going to happen.” He hugged me. “But hey! Who’s going to make the cake? You shouldn’t have to make your own cake.”

I felt a melting in my chest. Tobias had mentioned a celebration, but in almost the same breath he had talked about how dangerous I was going to be. Jasper and Beryl had been pretty quiet, not surprising since Tobias was trying to scare us all. Finally somebody was happy for me, the way people were supposed to be when you survived transition. I hugged my younger brother.

He got embarrassed and pushed me away. “I could try to do it,” he said.

Jasper, Beryl, and I all said “No!”

Flint clapped a hand to his chest. “You wound me!” He said that a lot.

“We’ll figure out the cake tomorrow,” Jasper said. “Right now we have to test this chalk. Tobias thinks it will do weird things because Gyp’s power is unkind. He told us to practice out back.”

From our backyard, on clear days and nights, we had a view all the way to the ocean, even though it was half a mile away. We had a big terrace with a pool and a lawn and an orange tree and a rose garden on it. At both ends of the terrace, stone staircases led down into a fenced orchard which stretched seaward, and beyond the orchard’s edge, the land sloped jungled and unimpeded to the Old Coast Highway, which was lined with shops, stores, businesses, gas stations, banks, doctors’ offices, a couple of hotels. There was a huge empty plot between our land and the highway. Various businesses had tried to buy it over the years, wanting to build something tall. Mama had made it her practice since she had transitioned at twelve, thirty-four years earlier, to jinx all the land deals so we could keep our view.

We could see everything from the back porch, which was more like a balcony, a stately concrete expanse that ran outside the great hall between the dining room and the living room, with stone arches two feet thick that framed the view, and two broad staircases down to the back lawn; but nobody could see into our backyard. It was a great place to do strange things.

“Unkind power,” muttered Flint as we all trooped across the great hall and out the double doors that led to the back porch. The night was foggy and damp. I wished I had brought my jacket instead of hanging it up when I got home. “What on Earth is an unkind power?”

“You remember Aunt Meta?” I asked. “No. We had an Aunt Meta? I don’t think I ever met r.” One side of his mouth quirked up into a half smile.

“None of us met her. She died. She had an unkind power she refused to use it, so it killed her.”

“What?” His eyes widened.

“Tobias says I have to use mine, or I’ll be in trouble.”

“But that’s—hey, Gyp… .”

“What?”

“Maybe I could work some kind of time twist? Take us back to last week

and make things come out different? I mean, not that I want to take your power away, but it doesn’t sound like fun.”

“Could you do that?”

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. My latest project.”

“How many times have you practiced?”

He looked away. “Not very many,” he muttered.

I wondered what he had done, and why. Talk about dangerous stuff! Especially with Flint’s penchant for messing up.

“Just little tiny things. I know I should start small and not mess around too much until I know it’s safe.”

“You haven’t talked it over with Tobias.”

“He’d just say no.”

I patted his shoulder. “Thanks for thinking of it, but it sounds way too risky. So far, I don’t seem very scary. Maybe my power is weak and will just annoy everybody. I can live with that. Let’s wait and see.”

“Okay.” He frowned. “The longer you wait, though, the harder it is to untwist time. Things take on weight and get sludgy. They harden, like cement. You can’t change them unless you have pickaxe power. And even though I’ve got a lot of range, I don’t have much concentration.”

“Flint? Please don’t do more of this work without talking to somebody about it, all right? It sounds like there’s huge potential for trouble.”

His face went stubborn. “Just trying to help.” I know. I appreciate it. It’s just… .”

He shrugged. “Just a thought.” He turned away.

Jasper and Beryl had gone down the steps to the back walk, a wide pale concrete path that led along the side of the house, the left way leading to the pool, the right to the steps down to the orchard. Jasper set the chalk box on the path. “Light,” he said, and studied the porch facing. The yellow outdoor light by the porch doors was lit; the arches dropped shadows across the path and lawn.

Jasper trailed his index finger along the edge of the porch, drew a line of clean white light at about head height. It lit up the path evenly and well.