The Shattering (16 page)

Christmas morning was sunny and warm, like almost every Christmas morning I could remember. But the house was empty again, and that was completely the opposite of Christmas. Mum was already at work. I ate a festive breakfast of reheated chips, drank the last of the milk, and decided that it was time to get clean. after nearly two days without a shower and in the same clothes, I felt disgusting, and probably smelled worse.

I wasn't sure I could make the cast waterproof enough to risk a shower, and getting some soak time in sounded good. But it turned out that a bath wasn't the soft option, either.

Our tub was old-fashioned: deep and solid, with cold, slippery sides, and a wide mouth. I'd planned out what to do, but I hadn't thought through how much the broken arm changed things. My body felt like it was fighting me, like it had when I'd first fallen, and I nearly tumbled in twice just trying to put the plug in. I
did
start to fall when I reached across to turn on the tap and saved myself only by shoving hard at the bottom of the bath and tipping myself back out, staggering backward across the vinyl tiles, free arm windmilling like a cartoon clown.

I slammed hard into the bathroom door, went ‘oof!' as the round handle dug into my back, and slid down the door onto my bum, where at least it would be hard to fall any farther.

Somebody should have applauded. Instead, I got the chirping of fantails outside the window and my own breath coming out in heavy pants.

‘Okay, plan B,' I said, voice echoing in the white space, and went to call the hotel.

Sione sounded pretty much how I felt, which surprised me until I remembered it was his first Christmas, too. But he said yes to my coming over and a less certain yes to what I wanted to do.

The problem, I decided, staring into my wardrobe as I tried to pack the bag I'd need, was that I didn't dress fancy enough. I could probably yank on a sports bra for underneath, but all my shirts were T-shirts or polo necks — things impossible to pull over the cast and my head one-handed.

I gnawed at an already-shredded fingernail, sighed, and went into Mum and Dad's room. Mum's clothes took up most of the wardrobe, including a bunch of button-up blouses in pastel shades. I grabbed a pink sleeveless top with shell buttons down the front, which was the least girlie-girl thing there.

I started to leave, then paused.

The Christmas present Wii that Jake would never play sat on the wardrobe floor.

I picked it up before I could think too hard about it, balancing the box on my hip, and went back to my room to write Mum a note.

When I got to the hotel, I went around to the service entrance. There was leaving the house in defiance of Mum's orders, and then there was doing it right in front of her. The last thing she needed was temptation to go nuclear in the lobby.

‘Huh,' I said when Sione opened his door. ‘You look like shit.'

He grimaced, but it was true; his clothes were as crisp as ever, but the dark circles under his eyes were almost black, like an enraged makeup artist had gone at him with eyeliner. ‘Thanks. You too.'

‘At least you don't smell. Let's be the Looks-Like-Shit Club.' I dumped my bag on the end of the unmade bed. The hotel room looked a lot less tidy than usual — clothes had exploded over everything, and his messenger bag had been tossed on the table in the corner, spilling the contents over the polished surface. A black skirt thing with pockets — lavalava, I thought — and a white shirt were the only neat pieces of clothing, carefully folded over the desk chair.

‘Merry Christmas,' Sione said when I turned around. He was holding out a little box wrapped in silver paper.

‘Thanks,' I said, trying not to sound too surprised, and carefully unwrapped the box. It was a pair of earrings, little silver ankhs. Stylish, and witchy, and completely wrong for me. I didn't even have pierced ears.

I looked at the earrings for a second, while Sione shift ed from foot to foot, and then decided not to point out that they were very obviously a gift for someone else. ‘These are great,' I said instead, and put Janna's earrings in my bag. ‘I didn't get you anything, but there's a surprise in the bag. If you want, you can set it up while I have my bath.'

With that reminder, he went into the bathroom. I heard the rush of water, and then he came out to help me tape the plastic bag over the cast. He did it well, which surprised me, but when I mentioned it he ducked his head.

‘Matthew broke his arm playing rugby last winter,' he said. ‘I helped him.'

He was staring straight at the floor when he said that, radiating so much misery that I moved without any plan at all. I wrapped my good arm around him and, when he didn't move, managed to get the cast around his waist, too. I couldn't squeeze properly, but it was enough; I felt his sigh shaky against the side of my neck, and he relaxed into the hug. I stayed there a second more, wondering if he was going to cry, and wondering if I'd have the patience to stand there if he did, but he pulled away and wrinkled his nose.

‘You do stink.'

‘I told you so,' I said, and went to the bathroom with my clothes. ‘I should have given it another couple of days. Got a really cheesy ripeness going.'

‘That's disgusting,' he informed me through the closed door. ‘Oh, hey, a Wii!'

The clumsiness that had attacked me at home wasn't bothering me here; I managed to get into the bath with no problems, with my arm resting on towels folded onto the curved rim. I soaked until my toes wrinkled, soaped myself down one-handed, and soaked again. From the main room, I could hear rhythmic beeping and the occasional groan or cheer as Sione wrestled with the Wii.

When it came time to get dressed, the sports bra was easy enough. But it turned out the buttons on Mum's fussy sleeveless top didn't go all the way down the front — I'd have to pull it over my head after all. I strained at the shiny unstretchable fabric, sweating and cursing and undoing all that relaxation, until Sione knocked on the door and asked if there was something he could do.

I opened the door, and his eyes went wide.

‘Could you help me put this on?' I asked. ‘Sorry.'

This close to him, I could see the blood darken Sione's golden-brown face when he blushed, practically feel the heat on my skin as he wordlessly took the shirt and helped tug it over my arms and then my head. I tried to interfere at one point, but it just slowed things down, and there was only so much I could ask him to take. So I suffered allowing him to dress me without doing anything myself.

‘Thanks,' I said when he was done and backing away. He nodded, deep in one of his silences. I was beginning to recognise it now, the way he retreated, the same way I recognised how Janna turned away from things she didn't want to acknowledge by dancing down new conversational paths.

I hadn't planned on this. I'd wanted to find revenge for Jake, not find a new friend, or an old one.

But I was probably stuck with them now.

I thought we should really should go over the plan again, make sure we knew where and when to be, and what to look for when we got into Rafferty's house.

‘Do you want to play Wii?' Sione asked.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘That sounds nice.'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

JANNA

Janna did pretty well out of Christmas; mostly gift vouchers,
but that was okay, since no one in her family was any good at
picking out things she wanted.

‘It's a shame your friend couldn't come,' Mum said while Petra and Mariel folded up wrapping paper and stowed it in the craft cupboard.

‘He needed to wait for the call from his parents,' Janna said. Sione had said so himself, so it wasn't technically a lie, even though she was positive
he'd
been lying.

‘He could have taken it here,' Dad said. ‘We wouldn't have minded.'

Mum stiffened at this interference, and Janna tried not to roll her eyes. This was exactly why she'd lied about the invitation to Sione. A family Christmas wasn't any good when your family was
broken
, and it was definitely nothing to invite your friend to, especially when your friend already took everything nice you did as the next thing to a marriage proposal.

So far today her parents had fought over Mum's ham recipe (‘You know I hate pineapple; why pineapple glaze?'), how much Dad had spent on the girls (‘Didn't we agree there'd be no more bribery attempts?'), and whether Janna's dyeing her hair bright pink just before Christmas morning Mass deserved a grounding. On the last one, they'd swapped sides halfway through and hadn't even noticed.

Maybe she
should
have brought Sione. Introduced him to what happened to love, van der Zaag style. That would have stopped his mooning after her; who'd want to love a girl with those genes?

She'd always wondered why Dad hadn't left Summerton permanently after the divorce, instead of moving back after six months and making both him and Mum suffer when they bumped into each other in the supermarket. They still slept together sometimes, Janna knew; it was gross enough to know your parents had sex, but way grosser when your
divorced
parents had sex and then tried to act as if they hadn't. At least they'd stopped deluding themselves that maybe they'd get back together for real, but the push-pull act was almost as bad. They might have been able to change, if Dad had left for good.

If Dad had been able to leave.

Janna pushed her chair back from the table.

‘We haven't finished discussing your hair, madam,' Dad said.

‘I didn't do it to make you mad,' she protested, holding a strand at arm's length to stare at it. It was a
nice
pink, a kind of bright cerise. ‘I just had the dye there, and I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep and I thought I might as well.'

‘Everyone looking at us in Christmas Mass, that's what you wanted,' Dad said.

‘They might have been looking at you, Peter, since that's the only time you go,' Mum snapped.

Janna got up and left them to it, rubbing her Christmas-extended belly. She scraped and stacked the plates, including Schuyler's unused one, and ran water over them.

‘Dad,' she said.

Her father paused mid-sarcasm and blinked his pale blue eyes at her. She'd inherited those eyes; so had Schuyler. The kids took after Mum.

‘Why did you come back to Summerton?'

He glanced at Mum, obviously preparing a shot, and then appeared to think better of it. Mariel was watching from the corner, dark-eyed and solemn.

‘I missed you,' he said. ‘I missed this town. I was homesick, every night. I felt empty and sore. Something was missing, and I knew it was here. I had to come back.'

So the spell was obviously wide-ranging — as it should be, with a boy's life energy going into it every year. Keeping an eye on Takeshi might not be good enough. A protection spell for him would be better. Janna could do that, maybe. But she wasn't happy about doing it from one of her books. Most of them were for Northern Hemisphere witches anyway.

Sandra-Claire would probably give her advice, but Keri would go into fits. So it would have to be Daisy, who'd ask questions. She'd better come up with some answers.

Tomorrow
, she thought.
After I get a good look at that crown.

‘Janna, we're pulling crackers now,' Mariel said. Her hands were on her hips, and her chin pulled down stubbornly, in an expression she'd made for as long as Janna could remember.

‘You can't cheat this time,' Petra told her. ‘Only grab the
end
of the cracker.'

‘Bossy, bossy,' Janna said, and gathered with her family under the brightly coloured tree.

She did cheat, of course. It was what big sisters were for.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SIONE

Sione had no idea how to dress for breaking into someone's
house.
He kept thinking about the news reports Mum hated, where the solemn-voiced reporters would say, ‘The perpetrator was described as a large Maori or Polynesian male in dark clothing.' He'd never seen a report about a medium-sized Polynesian male in Calvin Klein jeans and a funky button-down.

‘Too good to make the news,' he said out loud, and giggled quietly into the mirror until the urge to laugh abruptly faded and he went back to feeling sick to his stomach.

He almost wanted Janna's magic theory to be right. At least that way Matthew would have died
for
something — something sick and terrible, sure, but not just to give a serial killer his thrills. And he wasn't sure he wanted to find
trophies
. Matthew had been buried with all his fingers and toes, but what if there was, like, a wall of hair clippings?

He got the person at reception to call him a taxi. The taxi driver was an Asian-looking man who didn't talk much, obviously sharing most Summertonians' anti-tourist prejudices. He raised a bushy eyebrow when Sione gave him directions to a resident's house instead of the bird-watching sanctuary or one of the bushwalk entrances, but that was all. Sione slid down into his seat as they went past the art gallery, just in case.