Flicker (27 page)

In her mind’s eye, Lee saw the
pale green magic flow down her arms and pool on the table around the paper airplane.
Then she envisioned the whole scene
again:
her magic taking effect,
the plane in flight. Lee’s senses tingled
, buzzing like a tuning fork
.

When it happened, she felt it. She
snapped her eyes open
in time to see it.

The plane shuddered, twitched, and very nearly lifted off of the table before falling still.

For a moment, Lee was stunned
. She thought she’d imagined it—but no, that couldn’t be. She ha
dn’t just
seen
the plane move. S
he had
felt
it, as if the plane were connected to her by invisible strings.

Lee took a step back. Her chest felt tight, pinched on the inside.

I just worked magic.

A slow smile spread over her face as she returned to t
he table to practice the spell.

* * *

“Do you want something?” Jason was
perched
on the edge of the bed in the main room, tuning his guitar. He peered at Nasser through stormy eyes.

“No,” Nasser replied, not wanting to start another fight. Jason was always
ready
for a good shouting match, but Nasser was too tired to continue yelling.

After they left Flicker last night, Nasser had dropped Jason off at the apartment before stopping by Snapdragons. When he got home, he and Jason had quarreled most of the night. Jason demanded to know why Filo was so angry, and
what Nasser wasn’t telling him,
but Nasser wouldn’t budge. Before long, they wound up rehashing that same
tired
old argument:
Why won’t you trust me?

“Then quit with the mental patient stare,” Jason
grumbled
.

Nasser didn’t say anything, just watched Jason fiddle with his guitar. That old guitar was Jason’s favorite thing. He’d found it in the shop a few weeks after
Neman
and
Morgan
brought them to Flicker. It had given
Jason
something to hold onto, something to do, something to take his mind off of what was going on. Jason loved that guitar.

Sometimes Nasser wanted to smash it.

“Do you have to do that
all
the time?” Nasser asked. His head throbbed with each chord Jason struck, and the light streaming through the window was starting to bother his eyes. He had a migraine coming. Fabulous.

Jason con
tinued to pluck at the strings.

“You’re just like Dad,” Nasser said
wearily
. It wa
sn’t an accusation or an insult, though
it easily could’ve been. “Always messing around with that damn guitar. You even play the same songs.”

“Like you can remember what songs Dad use
d to play,” Jason said sullenly. “
You never practiced like he wanted you to, anyway.”

“He d
idn’t care if I practiced
,” Nasser muttered. “You’
re the one he wanted to teach.”

It was true. From the moment Jason first held a guitar, he’d
been a musical prodigy, which delighted their father to no end.
Their dad
also taught
Nasser
,
but h
e’d always focused on Jason, the talented son, the son he could be proud of. That
knowledge
still
pained Nasser, like biting down on a broken tooth.

The strumming ceased
.
“
Right.
Whatever
you say
.”

It wasn’t really surprising, this attitude. These days, Nasser and Jason seemed to spend more time fighting than not. Lately they’d been getting into shouting matches over the littlest things
:
how dishes were put away, how towels were hung, how books and tools were organized
. What had happened to them?

Nasser shut his eyes and wondered how long it would be until the pain in his head was so intense that he’d have to retreat into the darkness and quiet of the bedroom.
He’d been having these headaches for years
, sometimes so intense that he could barely see around the spots of white
-hot light crowding his vision.

H
e usually had some remedy
on-hand
to deaden the pain
, but they were
low on supplies. He didn’t have anything to take, so he tried to focus on the center of the pain—
this time,
the middle of his forehead—and slow his breathing. Sometimes that helped.

Not this time.
The pain increased slowly, like a physical weight on his skull. Nasser grimaced
, draping his forearm across his eyes
.

Maybe Jason noticed his discomfort, because after a long while, he ventured, his voice quiet, “What’re you gonna do about your girlfriend?”

Cracking
his eyes open
, Nasser stared
. “What?”

“
Lee.
What’ll you
do if she’s at Flicker and you’re banned for life?”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Nasser said, partly because it was true, and partly because he couldn’t say with any assurance that he wasn’t banned for life.

Jason snorted.
“Why not? Y
ou did the whole knight-in-shi
ning armor thing.
Girls love that crap.”

“I didn’t—”

“Sure you did. You rescued her from the evil faeries, didn’t you? If that doesn’t count as chivalry, I don’t know what does.”

Nasser opened his mouth, but no contradiction came to mind.

“All I’m saying,” Jason continued, “is that she could totally be your girlf
riend, if you wanted her to be.
Just
ask her out already.
”

“I cannot believe we’re having this conversation.”
Nasser
didn’t mention
that
he’d
already
asked her out.
Even if it seemed like there was no way to arrange it,
the thought of actually going on a date with Lee filled him with a strange blend of euphoria and terror.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before a date.
Every couple of weeks, Nasser was roped into buying lunch or dinner for some girl Jason met at Ladders or Chimeric—to “get him out of the house,” as Jason so cheerfully put it as he ushered Nasser
from
the apartment. The girls were nice enough; he’d even gone out with a few of them more than once. But he’d never
had a steady girlfriend, or particularly wanted one.
He’d
never met a girl he could really talk to—
at least, never before Lee.

As a general rule, Nasser listened more than he spoke. He tried to fade into the background, keeping all his hopes and fears to himself. But when he was with Lee, for the first time, he had wanted someone to
really
listen to him
.
He wanted to mean something to her, wanted it so badly that he was almost afraid.

But none of this was helping his headache.
At length, Nasser rose and went into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
He lay down on the narrow bed and pulled a pillow over his head, waiting for the darkness and silence to have some numbing effect, trying to fall asleep and ride out the migraine.

Even
through the
throbbing pain
,
he couldn’t banish
Lee
from his thoughts.
 

* * *
 

Lee ducked as
the plane whizzed past her ear.
She didn’t know how much longer she could keep dodging it.
The plane
swerved around, then
dove like an angry bird, and Lee considered trying to catch it like Filo had done. Could she shake the magic off of it? Maybe she could just let it smash into something; if it crushed a wing, it couldn’t still fly, could it?

Downstairs, the bells
jangled
. Lee rushed into the hallway and scampered halfway down the stairs, only dimly thinking that it might be a customer and not Filo, in which case she might want to make herself scarce.

To Lee’s relief, it was Filo after all, his mouth already set into a suspicious line. He asked sternly, “What did you do?”

“Nothing. I just need to know how to—”

She was cut off by the airplane as it rocketed down the stairwell. Lee, already growing accustomed to this constant dodging,
flattened
herself against the wall. Filo barely skipped out of its path, looking startled.

“I see yo
u worked the spell out,” he observed
.

“I’m just not sure I know how to stop it,” Lee said bleakly. “How do you remove an enchantment, anyway?”

Filo rolled his eyes and started back down the stairs. Lee followed him.

When they reached the shop, Filo stood by the counter, watching the plane
. When it glided close enough, he
snatched it
from
the air
.
He shook it, and Lee actually
felt
the magic disperse into the air.

“Nice catch,” she said. “How do you do that?”

Filo paused for a moment, as though searching for words. “You just
…
tear it,” he said finally, shrugging. “Grab hold and pull it off.”

“But
ho
w?
”

“Well, it’s not like turning a doorknob,” he said, somewhat impatiently. “It isn’t about taking hold of something physical.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“Finding the energy
and touching it with your own
. Enchanted air is
textured, patterned. Energies vary from person to person, so different people produce different textures in their spells. They’re like fingerprints. Eventually, you’ll learn to recognize different people’s magical prints.”

“Can you do that?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Nasser’s better, though. He’s really sensitive to energies, so he picks up on a lot of things that other people can’t.
”

“Cool.”

“Not really.
Feeling so much
energy
wears you out,” Filo informed her.
“
He used to get these awful headaches
from it
.
He’d lock himself in a dark room and we all had to be completely silent so he could sleep it off.
”

“Does he still?”

“I don’t know. You’d be better off asking him.”

“Except he’s not around to ask.”

Filo raked a hand through his jet-black hair, suddenly dour. “Right.”

“What happened yesterday, anyway?” she asked. “I mean, I know he and Jason were taking some of your stuff, but all that shouting—”

“You know about that? You know they were stealing from me?”

She backpedaled. “Well, not so much
stealing
as making use of—”

“It figures,” Filo said, “that he would go right ahead and tell
you
.”

She snorted. “As if he could tell
you
anything!”

Filo rolled his eyes. “Nice to see you like him so much.”
He shoved the airplane at her and strode behind the counter.
“I have
work to do.
Just go upstairs and practice your spell or something and leave me alone.”

Lee scowled. But she went.

* * *

Filo stared down at the cluttered counter,
aimless
ly
pushing scraps of paper through the dust
. The mess bothered him as much as it bothered everyone else, but he was slowly perfecting his ability to ignore it. He didn’t have the time for it now. He might have
made
time, but that was before Lee.

He didn’t know what he was going to do with her. Teaching her that spell had been a mistake, and it was too late to correct it. Filo could criticize and complain as much as he wanted, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Lee would
only keep at it, because she was too dogged
ly dedicated to learning magic.

Upstairs, there was a great crash, followed by a muffled shriek. Dust fell from the ceiling beams as more crashes reached his ears. Lee.