Mulberry Wands (13 page)

“Shouldn’t we leave the cleaning stuff and a
few towels here, so we don’t have to bring them back later? Did Zoë
say she was going to clean it herself, or was the agent going to
hire someone?”

“I thought that’s what Paul was here for,”
Amber said, almost loudly enough to be heard in the kitchen, where
Paul and Darius were trying to get the table through the door.

Susan shot her a look, because Amber’s tone
was condescending enough that even a guy would have noticed. Amber
gave her a look right back.

“What?” Susan said, daring Amber to explain
why she didn’t like Paul. His otherworldly-ness wasn’t obvious,
unless you were watching him fade in bright sunlight, and Paul had
been pretty careful to stay under the shade of the roof or the
mesquite tree when he was outside (except for the accident with the
box). If Amber had some other way of spotting gnosti, then she
wasn’t the rank amateur mage that she pretended to be.

“He’s not—” Amber’s whisper got cut off as
Paul walked into the room.

“Hey Susan, I’m going to ride with the guys
to the other house and help unload, but then I have to go to work.”
Paul jerked his thumb towards the front of the house. “It looks
like this is the last load though.”

“About time,” Amber said. They’d rented the
largest truck that U-Haul had, and this was the third time they’d
filled it.

“Thanks for coming to help,” Susan said. She
stood up and, just to spite Amber, she tilted her head up for a
kiss.

Paul didn’t hesitate in planting one on her.
It was a great kiss, sexy and warm, thrilling her all the way down.
She rested her hand on his shoulder, liking the curve of muscle
under her fingers. He put his arms around her and gave her a little
squeeze on the backside, just enough to let her know he appreciated
her tush but not so obvious that it counted as a PDA.

“I want to see you soon,” he murmured.

“Yeah. Call me,” she said.

He kissed her again, and trailed his fingers
along her arm as he left, a gesture she found sweetly romantic. Her
face broke into a stupid grin. Amber made a discreet snort.

He smiled as he waved goodbye, a nice smile,
friendly and sincere, and really, what was Amber’s problem?

“What?” Susan said again, as soon as Paul had
left.

“A janitor?” Amber asked.

“Oh, so that’s your problem with him?”

“Yeah, isn’t that enough? Really, Susan, you
dump Jason to go with a janitor?”

“Jason is a louse,” Susan said. She decided
not to tell Amber that Paul was a Sunward. ‘Thaumaturge with
inhuman capabilities’ was close enough to ‘gnosti’ to make Amber
unhappy. Ever since the djinn had imprisoned and tried to kill her,
Amber didn’t want anything to do with people who weren’t 100%
normal human. “And I like Paul. He’s nice.”

“Oh, he’s nice. Nice,” Amber scoffed, and
rolled her eyes. “At least tell me he’s good in bed.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“At least you have some standards,” Amber
said. “Really, Susan, you can do so much better.”

Zoë walked in the room. “Susan, I think we’re
pretty much done here. Do one more sweep and then meet us at the
new house.”

Susan and Amber took one more pass through
the house and stuffed the remaining lampshade, hanging wall clock,
and phone books into the back of her already-full car. Then she
turned off the lights, locked the doors, and told herself it wasn’t
the last time as she drove away from the home she had loved for
years.

As they pulled up in front of the new house,
another truck pulled up with several cases of beer and a stack of
hot pizzas. The pierced and tattooed work crew cheered and declared
Zoë to be the best person ever. Maggie took half a pizza and a
couple of beers, and went off to share a joint with G.

Even filled with boxes, the new house echoed.
It was huge, too big for them really, with one more bedroom than
they needed and nearly twice the square footage. Zoë had to take
out a huge mortgage to buy it. Even with her dad helping her,
they’d need to get another roommate, and what if it was someone
they didn’t like? Why couldn’t they have stayed in the old house?
Susan found herself getting choked up, feeling melancholy and
powerless about how life had changed without her permission. She
ate some pizza, drank some beer, and tried not to think about
it.

“Zoë just gave me the tour,” Amber said,
looking up at the two story foyer. She walked slowly, like a person
in a museum. “This is a great house, Susan. I’m kind of
jealous.”

“Yeah,” Susan said, with fake
cheerfulness.

“Oh, Sue, don’t worry. You’ll get used to it,
really.”

Susan didn’t trust herself to speak, so she
just shrugged.

Amber gave her a hug. “I gotta go, but I’ll
call you later, okay?”

Susan nodded.

Maggie, G, and Zoë’s workers stuck around for
another hour or so, and then night fell and they left the three of
them to their new home.

That night, Darius, Zoë, and Susan lay on the
floor of the living room, aching and exhausted. None of them wanted
to sleep on the floor in an empty bedroom, and they were too tired
to dig their way to the beds, so they decided to camp out in the
living room to make it feel like a party. Zoë found the box with
blankets in it, and they pretended not to notice as Darius helped
them finish the beer. The house smelled funny, like old musty
carpets and stale cigarette smoke. When the heater clicked on, it
smelled like burned dust. A dog barked a few houses over, a
different dog from the old neighborhood, with a different bark.

Susan was overcome by loneliness, and regret,
that she wasn’t going to have the same life she had before, with
the same routine, in the same place. She’d always been like that,
as long as she could remember. The last day of school always made
her sad. Even the last day of the month sometimes gave her a hint
of melancholy. If she got to pick her own heaven, it would be like
Groundhog Day from that movie, where everything stayed the same
forever, and you could keep doing it until you got it perfect.

“Pretty exciting, isn’t it,” Zoë said. “I
can’t wait to think of how I’m going to fix this place up. All the
walls are white. It’s like a blank slate.”

“Yeah. All this space. Big yard too. We can
have some bitchin’ house parties. This is gonna be cool,” Darius
said.

Susan just whimpered quietly.

In the morning, Griff felt a little ashamed
of how freaked out he had been. After all he’d been frightened of a
couple of pretty girls, who weren’t even armed, and so what if
there had been owls? Everyone knew that owls didn’t hurt anyone.
Alex probably thought he was a coward.

Alex didn’t call him. Griff hadn’t meant to
contact him anyway, not before the wands ran out, and thanks to
Griff making the wand blanks, Alex had been able to make an
inventory of nearly fifty. After another week or so, Griff had sold
all but a dozen wands, and he had an envelope with Alex’s carefully
counted-out share. He went to Jake’s house in the afternoon,
knowing that Alex wouldn’t be awake in the morning.

But Alex wasn’t there, or at least he wasn’t
answering.

So Griff came by again that evening,
reasoning that even a crackhead would be awake at seven pm after
sleeping all day, and Alex was somewhat more straitlaced than a
crackhead.

Jake answered the door. He was wearing his
work clothes but no shoes, and the start-screen music from Need for
Speed hummed from his surround-sound speakers. “Oh, hey, Griff.
Good to see you. What’s up?”

“I came to give Alex his money.”

“Alex took off,” Jake said, and turned away
from the door. He sat on the couch and picked up a controller, so
Griff followed him and took the other one. “Good riddance. He
didn’t steal anything this time, at least.”

“This time?” Griff typed his name into the
player two slot and started to play. He didn’t have an account on
Jake’s system, so his car avatar didn’t have any upgrades, but he
was pretty good at racing games so he thought he’d do well against
Jake anyway.

“Yeah, don’t you remember?” Jake leaned over
to one side, as if his own motion would make his car take the turn
better. “Oh, wait, that was when I was living in Phoenix, the house
up on Indian School.”

“You had that night shift,” Griff said. “We
were kind of out of touch then.” As with many people he knew from
high school, his friendship with Jake had waxed and waned based on
proximity and convenience.

“Yeah, well Alex came to town after couch
surfing his way through the Colorado branch of the family, and my
aunt started giving me shit about family obligations. I said he
could crash with--whoa!” Jake’s car careened off the road in a
fiery explosion, allowing Griff to gain a few more seconds of lead
time.

Griff had now edged into first place. Jake
concentrated on his driving to get into a close second before
resuming his story. “Alex has always been like this. When he was a
kid he was in some special school because of behavior problems. I
don’t know how he graduated, but he’s never held a real job, even
though he’s older than me.”

“He’s older than you?” Now it was Griff’s
turn to crash, and he cursed playfully as Jake zoomed past him. He
got stuck behind another car, and found himself in fourth place. “I
thought he was our age.”

“No, dude’s old, like almost forty.” Jake
sped over the finish line. “New match?”

“Sure,” Griff said, hitting the button to
start a new game.

“I don’t get why we’re expected to let him
couchsurf every time he comes into town. I was gonna tell him to
just get a job and stop mooching off people, but the next thing I
know, he’s moved in. Maybe he cast a spell on me,” Jake said in a
half-serious tone.

Griff concentrated on driving. It was
something he hadn’t considered. Something quite likely. Like most
people, his knowledge about mages had come off of television shows.
He was cynical enough to realize that television, especially prime
time dramas, wasn’t exactly full of facts, but they had enough in
common that some of what they said about mages was probably
true.

One common theme was that mages could and did
control the minds of people around them, often in very subtle ways.
Like that one time on ‘The Simpsons’, where Bart had a new friend
that ended up living with them for a year before people figured out
that he wasn’t really their long lost cousin. Come to think of it,
they’d used the same plot on ‘How I Met Your Mother’, and
‘Sopranos’ too. And he could remember at least one show in which a
mage convinced characters to give them money, and the characters
spent the rest of the show trying to figure out where the money
went. Of course, on sitcoms, the mage always got caught, and they
found a funny way to wrap it up before the end of the show. In the
‘Sopranos’ episode, they just shot him.

Everything else, television had gotten wrong.
Alex couldn’t fly through the air, and he couldn’t turn into a
lion. He couldn’t make other things float across the room to him,
no matter that he was lazy and the beer was always on the other
side of the counter. But what if the television shows were right
that mages manipulated people into providing for them? It would
explain why Alex was still couch surfing, though you didn’t have to
be a mage to be a deadbeat.

“If he did cast a spell on you, he might not
even be related to you,” Griff said. “Anyone else in your family a
mage?”

“Not really.” Jake’s car sped into view on
Griff’s half of the screen. “But I know he’s my cousin, I remember
playing with him as a kid. Besides, guy’s got the same chin.”

Griff smashed his car into Jake’s to try to
get some advantage. They were tied for first, but Griff edged into
the lead just before the end of the game.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that Alex just
took off?”

Jake tossed his controller on the couch and
laced his fingers behind his head to stretch. “He does this shit
all the time. He’ll be back in a few months, and he’ll pretend like
he was never gone.”

“Well, that sucks.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m glad he’s gone. The
dude doesn’t shower enough,” Jake said. “Don’t tell me you loaned
him money or something?”

“No, but I quit working for my dad to sell
wands, and the last thing I want to do is ask my dad for more hours
again.”

“That sucks,” Jake said. “Can’t you find
another mage to make them for you? You kind of know how he did it,
right?”

“I don’t know any other mages,” Griff said.
But as soon as he said it, he realized that wasn’t true. Hadn’t
Fallon mentioned someone named Susan Stillwater? Stillwater wasn’t
a common surname. He could probably find at least an address or a
phone number.

Paul sat on his tiny balcony, smoking a
cigarette and wondering if he wanted a beer badly enough to walk to
the convenience store to get one. Stores were open even at midnight
here, which was a fantastic improvement over the last time he’d
been on earth. He tapped his ash in an empty beer can. He didn’t
have to be at work for another four hours. It would have been a
perfect night for relaxing, if he weren’t about to receive
visitors.

He knew that an owl was coming to see him
minutes before she arrived, which meant that he was learning a
little bit about how to communicate with them. The thought didn’t
cheer him up enough to balance out the irritation he felt that an
owl was going to visit him. She wasn’t coming for a social call.
They never visited him for a reason other than to criticize him or
give him an order.

It wasn’t [this owl] and it wasn’t Fallon,
but a barn owl he didn’t recognize. She held a translator in one
claw, and set him down on the metal railing as she perched. The
translator didn’t look very happy to be there, and he gripped the
metal railing with two hands and both legs. It was less than twenty
feet to the sidewalk below, but probably felt like a mile when you
were that small.