Authors: Justine Larbalestier
“What did you do to me?” Jay-Tee asked. She could feel whatever it was pushing deep into her body. It didn’t feel right. It unbalanced her, wrecked her rhythm. The web shattered all around her. She felt hot. Not from the outside, from the inside. There were spikes inside her, twisting around, burning her. They didn’t belong inside her. She could see a thin thread running between her and Esmeralda, but the thread wasn’t right either: it was jagged and frayed.
“I’m sorry,” Esmeralda said. “I don’t think it works for you.” “What? What isn’t? What didn’t? I don’t understand.” JayTee started to shake. The kitchen moved. She swayed on her knees, then leaned back. The floor slid from under her, pulled her down. Her cheekbone hit the tiled floor. It hurt, but not as much as the things impaling her from the inside. Besides, the floor was cool. Green and black tiles arranged like a checkerboard. “I hurt. What did you do to me?”
Esmeralda put something cold and wet on her forehead,
“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t realise. Will you let me try to get it out?”
Jay-Tee started to shake harder. “It hurts!”
Esmeralda put her hand on Jay-Tee’s arm. It didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. Jay-Tee shook harder.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.” But Esmeralda’s hand stayed locked on her, sucking at her, pulling something out.
Jay-Tee shook so hard her head banged back into the tiles. There was a smacking sound. Jay-Tee wondered if she was bleeding. Probably. She couldn’t see any threads between her and Esmeralda. The something inside was trying to crawl out, something hard and sharp and angled. It would rip her to pieces. Esmeralda was calling the thing towards her. She fought as hard as she could to get away from it, away from Esmeralda. She tried to scratch Esmeralda’s face, but Esmeralda held her hands down. She was stronger than a man, stronger than Jason Blake.
The world narrowed to Esmeralda’s head bent over her, the woman’s eyes closed, concentrating.
She’s stealing all my magic,
Jay-Tee thought.
She’s killing me
.
She convulsed again, head and legs and arms smacking hard onto the tiles. The pain burst inside her like a rotten tomato. The narrow slit that was the world shaded into nothing.
Jay-Tee was unconscious, she was gone, she floated. She wondered if she was dead.
I nodded. Neither one of us had touched our ice cream. It was starting to melt into green puddles.
“And you, too?”
“Yes.”
“How young?”
“I don’t know.” I especially didn’t know now. What old man Cansino had done to me must have eaten away even more of my magic. Had I lost minutes, days, months? I wished I could look inside myself, see my own rust. “It depends on how much of your magic you’ve used. I don’t know the precise formula. I don’t think anyone does.”
A string of tinny notes bleated from inside Danny’s coat. His phone again, I realised after a confused half second. He made no move to answer it. “So why use your magic at all?”
I sighed. “That’s the other downside. If you don’t use your magic, you go insane. My mother, and Tom’s, too—they’re in a loony bin in Sydney.”
“Wow.
That
is messed up.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s like a disease.”
I burst into tears.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know I was going to. It exploded out of me. Tears poured out of my eyes, snot from my nose, and choking sobs from my chest. I cried so loud, Danny looked around nervously. One of the waitresses brought tissues and patted me on the back.
“Family troubles,” Danny said, which almost made me laugh.
The waitress nodded. “Ah, yes.” She cleared away the melted green ice cream. “I bring you more. Colder.”
Danny pulled out one of the tissues, pushed my hair out of the way, and held it to my nose. I took it from him and blew. More tears and snot came flowing out of me. Danny pushed the box closer. Half blind through my tears, I groped for another tissue, blew my nose again, even though it felt like I’d have to blow it a thousand times before all the snot would be gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally getting some words out. Then I started sobbing even harder. “I don’t want this.”
Danny reached under the table to hold my hand. “Who would? It sucks.”
I was crying so hard my chest and throat ached. I thought of Sarafina, empty and numb at Kalder Park. Of Jay-Tee dying one day soon. Of Tom. Of what the old man had done. I cried and cried and cried.
Danny moved beside me, put his arms around me. His phone rang again.
He must have thousands of friends,
I thought.
And I have only four.
He ignored the insistent snatch of song, pulled my head to rest on his shoulder, stroked my hair.
“I’ll look after you,” he told me. “We’ll fix it. If it’s a disease, then we’ll just have to find the cure. For Julieta and for you.”
Danny took me back to his flat, insisting that there was nothing more we could do that night, that I was tired, but I wasn’t. Midnight in New York City; four in the afternoon in Sydney. I lay in Jay-Tee’s bed wearing one of her old T-shirts, staring at the ceiling. The outside streetlights made shadows stretch out across it like claws. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the hand was reaching down at me. The old man’s hand.
I could hear cars and trucks still thundering along the highway. Occasionally car horns and sirens. Was this city ever quiet? I had been overwhelmed by Sydney, but it was orders of magnitude calmer than this place. All those noises outside made me feel even more alone. Sarafina was far away, and even if she’d been right there with me, she wasn’t able to help me anymore.
I missed her. I missed how she’d been
before
. Whenever I’d been scared in the past, she always reassured me, talked me out of it. “There are worse things,” she’d always say. But now I was caught in the midst of those worse things.
I tried to think of something else. How would Jay-Tee feel when Danny told her that he knew about magic,
all
about magic. That I had told him what lay ahead for his sister. Would she be angry?
My mind veered back to the old man, to the grey-brown stuff lodged inside me. I got up, went into the bathroom, peed, washed my hands, stared at my face in the mirror.
I didn’t look any different. My skin didn’t have a tinge of grey added to its brownness. Nothing scary bubbled out of my pores. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it wasn’t there. I could feel it inside me, though. I wasn’t the same. I wished fervently I could blur my eyes, see inside myself, see what he’d done, and, more importantly, undo it.
I didn’t go back to bed. I couldn’t. I opened the door quietly and peeked outside. All the lights were out, but there was so much light streaming in from outside that I could see well enough. Cities, I decided, were never dark.
I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. There was nothing in there to eat, just endless cans of beer. I shut it again. I wished Danny was up. I needed to talk to someone.
There wasn’t any light coming from underneath Danny’s door. That probably meant he was asleep. I crept over and put my ear against the door and listened. I couldn’t hear anything.
I opened his door slowly, my heart beating fast, and slid inside. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I just knew I couldn’t be alone with old man Casino’s golem thing chewing away inside me, changing me.
His room was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I took another step forward and stood there listening, waiting to hear something other than the loud thumping of my heart.
My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the blackness. Maybe he had heavy curtains. I heard a siren outside. Then another. They rushed by, fading into the distance, and there was silence again.
Then I heard Danny breathing. The light, even breath of sleep.
I should go
.
“Danny?” I asked instead. “You awake?”
Nothing. I thought about going back to bed, lying there and feeling the old man’s creature crawling about inside me.
I took another step into the room. “Danny?” I repeated a little louder. “Danny?”
His sheets shifted. I took a step towards the sound.
“Danny!” I called, louder still.
“What? Huh?”
I heard him sitting up, his skin sliding against the sheets. I moved towards his voice. “It’s me, Reason.”
“What is it? Is something wrong? Is that old man here?” All of a sudden he sounded a lot less sleepy.
“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I, ah, I couldn’t sleep.”
“You what?”
I took another step forward and bumped into his bed. I sat down, put my hands on my lap. They were shaking.
“It’s still early in Sydney, so I’m wide awake.”
“Huh.”
“So I was hoping you were awake—”
Danny snorted. “I wasn’t.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m awake now.”
“Sorry.”
I shifted further up the bed, closer to his voice. “I, I won- dered if . . .”
“What?”
“Do you have any video games? I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never played any and I wondered what it was like.”
“You what?” Danny burst out laughing. “Sure. Sure thing. What the hell—I got the TV all set up.”
We played a game full of dark alleys and underground passages and cellars. It was a world of grey and brown and black and white, so that the explosions of red blood were shocking. We were attacked by zombies who we had to kill by cutting off their heads (Danny was horrified that I hadn’t known how to kill zombies properly) and vampires who we killed by banging thick wooden sticks through their hearts. He was even more disgusted by my vampire ignorance, groaning aloud when I asked what the garlic was for. We had to shoot werewolves with silver bullets (which was annoying, because our guns had plenty of normal bullets, but we had to go find the special silver ones) and mad people with guns, who died in all the ways that normal people do. Not from lack of magic.
I wasn’t very good, but it was fun, and I could die as many times as I wanted and always come back. I got lost in the strange world on his huge TV screen, which vaguely resembled New York City but was darker and gloomier, with no gleaming white snow or dazzling neon lights. I became so absorbed in trying to stay alive and out of Danny’s way so we could blow up our enemies (those that could be killed that way) that I forgot there was anything else in the world outside the television screen. I could understand why people spent so many hours shooting and running in imaginary worlds.
Danny sat next to me, controls balanced on his knees, eyes intent on the screen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just pyjama bottoms. In those seconds in between my deaths and resurrections, it was hard not to look at his smooth, brown skin. The lights of the game flashed across him. I wanted to kiss him.
“Come on, Ree! Pay attention. You got killed again. Sheesh!” He turned to me, grinning. “You gotta be faster than that.”
I swallowed and leaned forward. He looked at me oddly. “There’s something on your chin,” I told him, brushing the imaginary something away. His chin was a little scratchy, like sandpaper.
He rubbed his chin where I had touched him. “Need a shave. Want another game?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t, I wanted to kiss him. “No, I want to . . .” I swallowed again. “I want to . . .” I leaned forward fast. My mouth bounced into his, teeth clashed against teeth, and yet it made me shiver. “Oh, sorry.” I looked down, feeling like an idiot.
“Reason?”
“Yep.” I didn’t look up.
“You’re my sister’s friend. You’re fifteen.”
“You’re only eighteen. That’s only three years older.”
“But you’re way young for fifteen even. When I picked you up today, you had jewellery pinned to your pyj—”
“That brooch is magic! Like the ammon—”
“Reason. You’re really pretty and everything, but Julieta—”
“I’m pretty?”
“Sure, you’re pretty, Reason, but you’re a kid. You didn’t even know that Manhattan is an island.”
“I do
now
.”
“Reason, that’s not the point. You’re just a baby!”
“No, I’m not. I’m an old woman. For a magic-wielder I’m old. I could die tomorrow. I don’t want to die without ever having kissed anyone.”
“You’ve never been kissed?”
I shook my head. “Not ever. I’m fifteen and I could be dead tomorrow and you smell good and I want to kiss you.”
Danny laughed. “You smell pretty nice, too, but I can’t. You’re Julieta’s friend. It’d be too weird.”
I leaned closer to him. He was rejecting me, but I leaned closer. My body was doing it, not me—my brain had lost all control. I felt my nervous animal responses: pulse rate, sweat, my eyelids fluttering, an uneven twitch in one of the muscles of my left cheek. Just like any other animal, Sarafina had told me when she explained the facts of life. I didn’t feel like any other animal. I felt like me.
“I can’t kiss—”
I put my lips against his, gently this time. Neither of us moved a muscle. His lips were warm, soft, dry. I was terrified he’d move away, terrified that he wouldn’t. What was I doing? The old man’s pins and needles shifted inside me, pushing me closer to Danny.
His mouth opened; so did mine. I felt his tongue on mine. It felt good, not gross at all. I hoped I wouldn’t forget to breathe. His hands slid over my cheeks, so big they covered my entire face. He pulled me closer to him. All my senses were focused on the connection between our two mouths. There wasn’t anything else. I didn’t know if my eyes were opened or shut. I swivelled around onto my knees to reach him more easily, put my hands on his shoulders. They were hard with muscle, smooth and warm. My fingers glided across, onto his back. His hands slid from my face onto my back, the two of them almost covering it entirely. There was so much of him, so much more of him than me.
Still, we kissed. Sharp pins and needles danced throughout my body, pushed me closer to him.
Danny pulled away. “Are you sure?” he said. His voice sounded odd, throaty. It made me want to kiss him more, touch him more. There was a sweet smell filling the air in between us.
“You smell like limes,” I said. “You smell good.” It wasn’t just him: everything smelled of limes, of lightly toasted bread, of cinnamon.
He slipped an arm under my knees, gathered me to him, went up onto his knees, grunted a little, and then stood. “Are you sure?” he asked again.
Sure of what?
I wondered. I was sure I wanted to kiss him a lot, touch him, and I wanted him to touch me. “Yes.”
He carried me into the bedroom, stumbling in the darkness before he laid me on the bed, leaned over me, kissing me again and again and again. Finding each other by touch, by taste. “We shouldn’t,” he said, his mouth so close to me I was stealing his breath. “I shouldn’t. Tell me no.”
I kissed his mouth. The smell had come with us. The room was full of sweet limes, of something fresh and newly baked. The smell was so familiar, so good. I felt Danny’s hand moving up my waist as he pulled my T-shirt over my head. I heard him pulling at his pyjamas. “Are you sure?” he asked again, his voice beside my ear.
Every cell of my body wanted to touch every cell of his body.
Had
to. “I want to bury myself in you,” I said.
“Oh, God,” Danny said. “I have to bury myself in you.” But he pulled away, took a deep, noisy breath, said something fast in a language I didn’t know.
I couldn’t see him in the dark, so I let my eyes blur, to see what was there beneath his skin, what he looked like right down in his cells. He was so clean he glowed. There was no magic there, none at all.
I moved across the bed to the sound of his breathing. Reached out my hands, touched his chest, ran my fingers along his body till I found his chin, his lips. I kissed him again. He groaned and returned my kisses. We leaned back onto the bed. Sheets against my back, his hot skin against my front. We rolled, sheets and skin wrapped around each other.
“I’ll try not to hurt you,” he said.
I couldn’t imagine how he could.