Shadows Read online

  She dropped down to the floor and turned back toward Val. When, if she had been something like a dog jumping off the sofa, her feet should have hit the floor, there was a very odd little shudder in the air. It wasn’t a hearing thing like a thud, and it wasn’t a vibration through the floor like something heavy had just landed. It was something else, like the way she smelled was something else. Like the way she could put two pairs of feet on the sofa in spite of the way she looked was something else.

  She walked or crept or somethinged and was swallowed up in the rest of the shadows around Val. But after a second or two there was a new bulge off to one side. I was pretty sure the bulge looked familiar—like I’d now recognize that shadow from any other shadows.

  Suddenly I was shivering so hard I thought I might fall off the sofa myself. Mongo climbed back into my lap. And Mom got up from her chair and came and sat down beside me and put her arms around me (and some of Mongo). It was like the first real hug since Val happened. I put my arms around her (and some of Mongo) and burst into tears. Again. “Oh, sweetie,” said Mom. “Oh, sweetie.”

  But I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school and this was the second time I’d burst into tears in an hour? Drog me. So I stopped pretty quickly. And then I wiped my face on the top of Mongo’s head because the box of tissues was empty from my last crying fit. Dog hair up my nose. Unh. Never mind.

  “Mom,” I said. “What’s the matter with me? There’s no magic in our family. There’s no magic in anyone’s family any more—in Newworld—is there? They gene-spliced it out of existence two generations ago. Didn’t they?”

  There was a pause. Mom sat back, but she took my nearer hand and held it. A little too hard. “They tried,” she said.

  I didn’t want to hear this. I knew I didn’t want to hear this. Calories, I thought. Aren’t calories good for shock? I leaned around Mongo so I could pick up my mug. I was amazed to discover it was still hot. This conversation felt like it had been going on for hours. Mongo didn’t even try (very hard) to put his nose in my hot chocolate. He recognized some boundaries. In this case it was probably that he knew that if he did a “Mongo, no” thing he’d be put off the sofa.

  I put the mug back on the coffee table empty. “Tell me,” I said.

  It still took Mom a couple of minutes to begin. Do you know how long a couple of minutes is when you’re waiting for someone to tell you something you seriously don’t want to hear? And I’d already heard too many things I didn’t want to hear tonight.

  “Your great-grandmother was a notable magician,” said Mom at last. “When the government committee presented its report, she was involved in the campaign to change the recommendations from the then rather risky surgery to merely keeping a list of all who tested positive. You studied this in school, didn’t you? It was nearly twenty years before the surgery was finally passed as reliable, but what doesn’t get in the textbooks is that that had less to do with the progress of medical interventions and more to do with your great-grandmother and her colleagues—who were also working furiously on an intervention of their own.

  “But by the time your grandmother received the letter telling her when to show up at the hospital for the procedure, she and her sister were ready. She said it made both of them quite ill while science and magic battled it out. The newspapers were full of reports on how the surgery was not as safe as the Science Party and its adherents wanted to make out—that surprising numbers of the young people who were having the “minor” operation to disable the dominant magical gene were very ill afterward, especially those belonging to families known to have a strong talent for magic.” Mom smiled faintly. “If anyone guessed the truth—and I can’t believe they didn’t—there was remarkably little said or speculated about it.

  “Your great-aunt liked to say that at one point your grandmother turned a pale rather streaky green and began to grow scales on her elbows and knees and down her spine. Your grandmother always denied it—but on the whole I think I believe Aunt Teresa. At any rate, afterward they tested negative for magic. As do I and my sisters, and your uncle Darnel, although for a week before we went in for the test we had to have these horrible green frothy drinks every day. By the time it was your and Ran’s turn Rhonwyn had figured out how to distill what was needed into simple little pills. It probably wasn’t necessary for Darnel or Ran—magic tends to run down the female line in our family, although your great-grandmother always said there was male magic in our family, but nobody had figured out what it was yet.”

  She turned her head to smile at me, but if I hadn’t had Mongo in my lap I might have fallen off the sofa after all. “Mom,” I managed. “You’ve never told me any of this. I remember those pills. You said they were just to stop us from getting sick when we had the tests.”

  “I know,” she said. “I should have told you.” She paused. “I’m sorry. But the fact that magic runs in the women of our family doesn’t mean that every woman has it. Your great-aunt didn’t although your grandmother had it very strongly. The four of us sisters . . .”

  “You?” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “When your father died—when—” She took another deep breath. I wriggled around, pulled my hand free, and put my arm firmly around her. “After your father died—when there had been nothing I could do—I turned my back on all of it. It had always been an uncomfortable secret to have. It was—is—still an uncomfortable secret to have. But it was easier, closing the door on all of it. Blanchefleur was very angry with me . . . but then I was the only one of the four of us who married and had children in the usual way. . . .”

  I registered that “in the usual way” as well as mention of mysterious disappeared Aunt Blanchefleur but I was not going to ask. Darnel had a wife and three kids but Ran and I thought they were boring. It was one of the few occasions when Ran and I totally agreed on anything.

  “Darling, I’m sorry. But there are signs you look for—the four of us all had them when we were children. You didn’t. I’ve wondered, a few times, because of the way animals love you, but there didn’t seem to be any magic to it. And you’ve trained your maniac dog, it seems to me, by nothing more than love and grim persistence—”

  “And food,” I murmured.

  “And I felt that Clare trusts you because you are precociously responsible—”

  Oh! I thought.

  “—not because you have any kind of magical knack. I still gave you the pills—both times—before you had the test; they still don’t really understand how the inheritance works—and it is perhaps not surprising that a gene for magic should not behave quite as science says it should. I thought in our family, better to be careful.”

  Magic. I stretched the arm that wasn’t around Mom out in front of me and looked at it. I might have been expecting that if I turned it at just the right angle to the light it would be faintly greenish—and if I turned it farther, the elbow might be a little scaly. I wondered what creature the green scaly thing my great-grandmother hadn’t turned into might have been. I wondered what Hix would look like, if she wasn’t a shadow. And then Mongo, who didn’t feel an outstretched arm was doing him any good, began to lick it vigorously, till it curled (scalelessly) back toward him and the hand began petting him again.

  Mom said softly, “I wasn’t at all happy when Val told me about his old charm coming to life again. My mother did not believe in coincidence either.”

  “You did not tell me any of this,” said Val.

  I stared across the room at Val again. He still felt like the cause of everything that had gone wrong. He was looking at Mom, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to meet—or not meeting—his eyes. His shadows eddied and wrinkled, like a pond you’ve thrown a rock into.

  “I know,” said Mom. “Before, it didn’t seem necessary. It was nothing to do with me any more, except for my sisters, and we will see any of them rarely. They behaved themselves around Ber. I w
ould ask them to behave around you too. After . . . after you told me about your charm . . . I still wanted to keep that door closed, you see.”

  “Why didn’t your sisters know—about Val?” I said. “Why didn’t they, um, notice anything? Gwenda and Rhonwyn were at the wedding.”

  “Probably because they weren’t looking,” said Mom. “They know how I feel about magic—how I felt after Ber died, and how I still feel.”

  “I wasn’t looking either,” I said. “I haven’t wanted to see anything that shouldn’t be there!”

  “I know,” said Mom again. “I’m sorry. I wish you’d told me. . . . No, don’t,” as I opened my mouth. “I know why you didn’t. I’m sorry about that too. You’ll fall in love some day and—and I hope it doesn’t make you stupid about something that matters.”

  “It is not a common skill to see the shadows,” said Val. “Usually you must be trained to see them. And still not every magician can.”

  “I can’t,” said Mom. “Even watching Maggie and Mongo, I still can’t see what they see.” I wanted her to say “but I’m not a magician.” She didn’t.

  She and Val looked at each other. It was like something in a cartoon. I swear I could see the hearts and flowers rushing back and forth between them like on a golden sunbeam. It was kind of cute. It was kind of icky. Mom said, “I knew I should have told you about my family after you told me about—what happened with Maggie. But I didn’t want to think that the magic I’d renounced wouldn’t leave me alone. That I had married someone with—with magic ability. Which my daughter, who I’d been relieved to believe had no magic in her, was apparently sensitive to—sensitive enough to be seriously disturbed by what she had seen. But I was still telling myself perhaps it was just one old charm . . .”

  I tried not to sound accusatory when I said to Val, “But—if you’re a magician, if you’re still a magician, why are you here? Why did they let you in? What went wrong? I mean—”

  Val laughed, more a kind of cough, with no humor in it. “I understand what you mean. I tested negative. It is a blood test, yes? It is the same test you had.”

  Mom nodded.

  “Plus all the scans, the forms, the interviews. My tools were dead—I was dead, to magic. And there was no mention of magic in my background. It is not usually possible to—disable—someone’s magic when they are an adult, when they have used it as much as I had done. I was a special case. My government gave me a new life when it took away my magic—a new life on paper, which I had to memorize. When I thought they had taken away my magic. All my magic. I did not want to tell even Elaine the truth. I too wanted—badly—to keep that door closed.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why did they take your magic away? Why did you let them? Why were you a special case?”

  Mom didn’t try to stop me from asking this time. She was waiting for an answer too.

  The shadows around Val exploded. Even after seven months of watching them creeping and twitching and scuttling around, and flaring up huge and collapsing to almost nothing, I’d never seen anything like this. Even Mongo went very still, watching them: his ears were pricked, but he was stiff and tense against me.

  Val said, “I killed my best friend. Upon the order of my government. I said that I would do this thing on the condition that afterward they took my magic away so that I could never do anything like it again. They agreed. I was too blind with despair at the time to realize that this was what they wanted: if I killed him then they would see me as potentially the threat he had become.”

  I killed my best friend. I heard Mom suck her breath in sharply. Val looked hundreds of years old as he raised his head, first to meet Mom’s eyes and then mine. I had never seen anything so bleak as the look on his face. Not even Mom after Dad died.

  I killed my best friend.

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop hating Val in a minute, or stop being afraid of the shadows, even if one of them had come and said hello, and smelled nice, and was a girl and not an it. Even if Val looked like most of him had died with his friend.

  But shouldn’t I be afraid of a man who had killed his best friend? Even if his government told him to do it. Even if doing it had made him hundreds of years old.

  And he was married to my mom.

  Had he grown up with his best friend, like I’d grown up with Jill? I thought of Jill and me getting piggyback rides from Arnie, borrowing each other’s clothes, helping each other with her homework (Algebra I had almost destroyed me, but William Faulkner had almost destroyed her), being there, even when we were mad at each other. I killed my best friend. What . . . what if Jill’s foresight got really powerful, and she could predict everything? What if our government decided she was really dangerous, and . . .

  I couldn’t imagine it.

  I looked at the shadow lake again so I didn’t have to look at Val. Hix had sidled farther off to one side so that she was detached from the rest. When she saw me looking at her—if saw is the right word, if what I’d seen was eyes—a little ripple went through half a dozen of the feet I could see. Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. It made me smile involuntarily. So what if she had too many legs, or feet, or hands, or paws, or whatever. Whatever it was she did a great wave.

  The shadows had been scaring me crazy for seven months. Could I believe they’d come from Orzaskan with Val, despite whatever his government had supposedly done to him, because they wanted to stay with someone so powerfully evil he’d killed his best friend? What did I know about them? I looked at them, sprawled and splashed and dangling around him. If someone was asking me, I’d say they looked like a flock or a pack clustering around the wounded member of their company.

  Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. And Hix, I thought, is trying to bridge the Grand Canyon between him and me.

  Maybe I’m just too easily wheedled by anything I start identifying as a critter.

  And then—speaking of too many feet—there was a noise on the stairs like a troupe of giants, and Ran appeared. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the big meeting? Maggie”—obviously disapproving—“what’s wrong with you? And Mongo’s on the sofa?”

  I sat up straighter, and let my arm drop off Mom’s shoulders. “I have a headache,” I said, which was the first thing I could think of. The idea of telling Ran any of this was way too complicated. Also he told his buddies everything, as I had (horrible) cause to know.

  “So?” said Ran. “I smell hot chocolate. I’m hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry,” said Mom, “and if you’re hungry, hot chocolate isn’t what you want.”

  “Yes it is,” said Ran. “I want food too.”

  Mom gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stood up. “I think I’m hungry too. Who wants to start the sandwiches while I make some more hot chocolate?”

  CHAPTER 5

  IT WAS NEARLY ONE A.M. BEFORE WE ALL GOT TO bed. Ran kept falling asleep, but he still managed to eat three sandwiches. But I think both Mom and I were so glad that some of the wall that had grown up between us was (maybe) coming down that we kind of wanted to keep on hanging out, even if it was a school night. I tried not to flinch when Mom patted Val’s hand or he put his arm briefly around her, when he said something quietly in her ear that made her giggle as she was peeling carrots at the sink, when she dropped a kiss on the top of his head after he sat down while she was setting the plate of sandwiches on the table (lettuce, cheese, and tomato or peanut butter, bean sprout and carrot—the second a house specialty, and I made them because I knew how to squish the sprouts and the grated carrots into the peanut butter so they didn’t all fall out again). They’ve been married less than two months, I told myself. I also told myself: and this is the way they are when I’m not around. I tried not to startle when Val turned toward me a little too quickly (for me: I don’t think he was turning quickly), as if he was one of his own shadows. As if he hadn’t told us . . . what he had told us. And I tried to remember that the
shadows were only his . . . I didn’t know what they were, familiars? Did real magicians have familiars, like a witch in a fairy tale? I only knew that one of them was friendly. And that I was already starting to take her word (um, “word”) for it that Val was a good guy. In spite of what he had told us. The baseboards were black with shadows as we sat down to eat in the kitchen, and more of them hung from the curtain railings like swags.

  I wondered how long ago it was, since his best friend died. I wondered what the friend had done that was so awful and dangerous.

  There were so many more shadows than there had been all those months ago, when I opened the door and saw Val for the first time. As if Station had suddenly become a popular shadow vacation spot. As if the first ones had written back to all their friends and relations and said, Come join us here! It’s really nice, and we’re having a great time freaking out this girl who can see us!

  And Val has got married! they might have added. If shadows knew about married. Had Val had a wife before? Did magicians have wives? I tried to remember what he’d told me on all those trips to the grocery store, the couple of times we’d gone to the zoo. But I’d always tried to forget anything Val told me, or not to listen in the first place. I remembered some of what he’d said about Orzaskan indigenous wildlife. I didn’t remember anything about family or friends.

  Mom didn’t say anything when I didn’t shut Mongo in the kitchen after I took him out for his last pee. We went upstairs very quietly, as if we were shadows trying not to be noticed. I was exhausted but I found it hard to get to sleep. I had way, way too much to think about . . . and Casimir’s face started drifting across my mind’s eye and that made my heart beat even faster than thinking about Val’s shadows did.