The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (26 page)

“Hey, Mom. This is Terry, my new girlfriend.” Whoa! I was promoted! He went on, “Terry, my mother, Sally Mathis.”

She stiffened immediately, worked hard, and came up with a smile. “Nice to meet you. You won't distract him from his homework too much, will you?”

“Is schoolwork a problem for Gareth?” I asked. Did she or didn't she realize I was a witch? Maybe she was one of those instinctive practitioners who had never explored the range of powers available to her. In which case, Gareth might be completely untrained. I could turn him into whatever I wanted.

I grabbed a perfectly ripe avocado and handed it to Gareth.

“He lacks concentration,” said Gareth's mother. She was being pretty bitchy about her son to someone she didn't even know.

“I can help him concentrate,” I said, in my best cat-purr voice.

“Wonderful,” said Sally with a sour frown. “It's a thrill and a half to meet you.”

“Likewise, I'm sure.”

Gareth put the avocado I'd chosen in the bag with the others and handed it to his mother. “We're going for coffee.”

“But—” said Sally.

I linked arms with Gareth, smiled at his mother, and led him away. I left my half-filled basket on top of a pyramid of cans of corned beef hash.

Outside, we headed for the nearest Starbucks. We both ordered the house blend, and I paid, since I'd offered to before. We settled at one of the tiny round tables, and I hunched toward him. “So what's your new agenda?” I asked. “It's quite a distance from ‘get away from me' to girlfriend.”

He hooked both hands behind his neck and pulled his head down like someone getting ready to be searched by cops. “I thought you could help me figure out how not to be a witch.”

“Why would you want that? Are you totally not getting what a blast this is?”

He looked up. “She wanted the girls to get the power, but they didn't. She's scared of me having it.”

“Are you still living at home?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Well, there's your first mistake. Get away from her.” Like I could talk. My own mom was completely ready for me to move out. I was the one who wouldn't go.

“But I don't know how to—Dad's out of the picture. He hasn't paid child support in three years. There's four of us, and—She just barely managed my college tuition, even though I have scholarships. She can't afford to pay for a dorm room for me, and I—”

Couldn't he work his way through school? I guessed it depended on his skill set. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Seventeen.”

“Oh.” He couldn't even vote yet. But if he'd graduated high school early and gotten scholarships, why did he need spells to help him study? “How do you use your witchcraft on a day-to-day basis?”

“I don't.”

“Not at all?”

“Not on purpose,” he said, and flushed.

“How about your mom? What does she do with hers?”

“Woman things,” he muttered, his gaze on the tabletop.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“She won't tell me. She does it at home in a room with the door closed. All I know is there's stinky incense involved, and words I can't hear through the door. The craft has passed from mother to daughter in our family for generations. She hates that I got it instead of the girls.”

“Gareth,” I said, exasperated. Then I thought,
No, he knows from rough women. I better be gentle or I'll lose him.

I started over. “Okay, listen. I can't unwitch you—I don't know how—but I can teach you how to make it work for you.”

“With those stupid spells you sell? I don't know much, but I can tell they don't work very well.”

“They don't have to work well to sell well. I don't want to upset the social balance by giving anyone giant advantages in any of the areas I service. That might lead to scrutiny I don't want. I can teach you how to be a much better witch, but you have to agree to help me. If I train you in the business, you can make enough money to get your own place. What do you say?”

He stared at his coffee cup so long I thought he wasn't going to answer, but at last he said, “Okay.”

First I took Gareth home with me. I figured he should know what a mom was supposed to be like.

“It's mac and cheese again, Terry,” Mom called from the kitchen at the back of the house as I ushered Gareth in through the front door, “unless you have other ideas.”

“I have a guest, Mom.” We passed through the living room and the hall into the kitchen, the heart of the house, where Mom and I spent all our together time after she got off work. The patina of a million cooked meals covered the kitchen ceiling in a yellow haze. The center of the room was a round table, often stacked with newspapers and mail, with just enough room for us to set our plates and silverware down. Sometimes we cleared the debris off, but it didn't take long to build up again. The kitchen colors weren't very inspiring, beige and brown, with a yellow fridge, all geared toward comfort and convenience. A cheese-and-boiling-pasta scent greeted us.

Mom stirred a pot on the stovetop, her silvering brown hair coming down from its neat coils around her head drift in long, limp tendrils around her face. She was flushed from the stove's heat and still wearing the white shirt and black suspenders she wore at the florist shop. It was a weird uniform that made her look more like a waiter than a flowership girl, but they liked that at Flowers While You Wait. “Gareth, this is my mom, Rebecca Dane. Mom, this is Gareth Mathis.”

“Hi, Gareth! I hope you like mac and cheese. Terry, could you throw together a salad?”

“Sure.” I checked the fridge and remembered why I'd gone to the supermarket in the first place. Produce! We were out. I sighed. “Well, I guess not, Mom. I forgot to shop.”

“Frozen broccoli, then.” She nodded toward the microwave. I got out the broccoli.

“Gareth, would you like something to drink?” Mom asked.

“That'd be great.” He looked lost, standing in our kitchen, his hands clasped in front of his chest as though he were begging or praying, his brown-blond hair squiffed by the wind.

“Help yourself to whatever's in the fridge. Cups are in the cupboard over there.”

Gareth poured himself some orange juice.

Mom asked, “Where'd you two meet?”

“At the supermarket,” I said. “Gareth's a witch, but he hasn't had any training. I thought I'd get him started.” I filled a glass with water and took a seat at the table.

“Really?” Mom put the lid on the mac and cheese and came to the table.

Gareth had gone red again. “Terry,” he said, his voice squeaking in a surprising way.

“What?”

“Maybe he didn't want me to know he's a witch,” Mom said. “It's okay, Gareth. I don't tell anybody these kinds of things. I appreciate Terry being up front about it, too. It's when she's keeping secrets that I get upset. Have a seat.”

“Are you a witch, too?” he asked as he settled in a chair beside me.

“No, not at all,” said Mom.

He turned to me. “So where'd you learn?”

“I had a teacher for about six years after I turned into a witch.” I could take him to meet my mentor, but then I'd lose my chance to train him up to be my new twin and business partner. Besides, my mentor no longer let me cross her threshold. She was pretty strict about not dabbling in the dark arts.

“But you still live at home,” he said. “And you think I should move out?”

“His mom makes him feel bad about what he is,” I told my mom. “She's scared of him.”

“Oh, honey,” said my mom. She put her hands on Gareth's, squeezed. “So sorry you have to deal with that.”

“Did Terry put a spell on you to make you say that?”

“Nope. No magic in the house,” said Mom.

“He doesn't even know how to check for spells,” I said. “I've got my work cut out for me.”

“For once, I might actually approve of what you're doing,” said my mother.

“So can I start his training here?”

Mom frowned, tapped her index finger on her mouth a couple times, and then nodded. “As long as it's just matter stuff, not spellcasting on people. For the dark stuff you have to take him somewhere else. Okay?”

“All right.”

We had dinner, and afterward, Mom sat at the table with coffee and a crossword puzzle while I explained basic principles of magic to Gareth. Mom loves hearing this kind of stuff. It gives her insight not only into me but into my traveling twin, who blows home every once in a while. (I mean it about blowing, too. She brings the wind with her before she remembers to tell it to go outside and play.)

I said, “You have to perceive things to be able to affect them—or, at least, it helps. Do you ever sense things other people don't?”

“I don't know. How could I tell?”

“I knew you were a witch, and that your mom was, too. I learned it through my witch senses. Do you ever get strong feelings about people or things?”

His eyes narrowed, and he glanced past me, as though looking at something out a window, though he stared toward a wall. “I used to when I was little, but not for a long time. My mom's dresser set. Her brush. It's old. It felt like it might be able to—but she wouldn't let me touch it, after that time she found me waving it around.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Good news, probably. You have the senses. They're just asleep. Once we wake them up, you'll be able to do things. I'll try a spell to open your witch eyes. Wait here a sec. I have to get my kit.” I ran upstairs, grabbed my traveling witch kit, and dashed back to the kitchen. I cleared newspapers off the table. “Mom, is this okay?”

“Does it hurt anybody?”

“Not physically. I don't know about the psychic consequences. It should show Gareth what he does and doesn't see.”

“Gareth, are you ready for this?” Mom asked.

He laughed, with scorn in it. “Hey, I've seen her work before. I don't expect anything to happen.”

Mom slanted a look at me. I smiled back at her. “Go ahead,” she said.

I assembled dust of ages, scent of spring gone, sound of three high notes on a piano, and a trace of vanished sunrise. Power pooled in my palms as I bracketed my ingredients with my outstretched fingers. “Show us what he could see, and why he doesn't,” I whispered, not a spell I'd ever said before. I wasn't sure if it would work. It didn't even rhyme.

The ingredients flared, mixed, and vanished, leaving a twist of smoke behind. The world shifted around us. Everything in the kitchen glowed with colored light, and streams or strings stretched between people and furniture, appliances, floor, ceiling, walls. Some pulsed, beads of light sliding along the strings between things intimately connected; some shimmered in time to the hum from the refrigerator.

In the midst of all this weaving, an overlay that didn't obscure the physical forms of things—translucent as it was pervasive—something hovered above Gareth's head. A miniature thicket of rose bushes, and trapped inside, a pair of eyes, their irises deep, shifting gray/golden/dark and shadow. The bushes had cleared from in front of them, so that they peered out, as if from a cage. They looked this way and that. Whatever they looked at deepened and intensified. They looked at me, and I felt warmth against my face as though I leaned toward a fire.

“What is this?” Gareth cried, and his extra eyes looked at Mom. She had been turning and gaping at the room, trying to take in everything at once, but now the power of the eyes' gaze focused her into concentrated Mom. She was taller, with a crescent moon in her hair—wrong symbol, I thought; Mom was hardly a virgin goddess—and a veil of golden haze surrounded her.

“What did you do?” Gareth asked, turning on me, and again I felt the warmth of his regard. I held out my hands, studied what the eyes made of me. I was cloaked in shadow so dark it made me look like a silhouette, but flashes of color rippled through my new outer skin.