Mulberry Wands (9 page)

“I’m going shopping,” she said, as if she
expected that would end the conversation.

“Can I come with you?” Paul winced, imagining
holding her purse while she tried on shoes. Well, the will of the
parliament had to be obeyed. “Sounds like fun.”

Susan raised her eyebrows. After a moment,
she gestured with her head. “My car’s over this way.”

She led the way down two blocks to her car,
not speaking until they were there, and then only apologizing for
the mess in her passenger seat. The car, like most modern cars, had
a strangely sleek shape.

“What make of car is this?” Inside it smelled
like artificial berry, as the pink tree hanging from the dash just
about knocked him over with its scent. He rolled down the window
and to keep his eyes from watering.

“A Daewoo. It’s a piece of crap,” she said.
“I hate it.”

“Why not get a new one?”

“I can’t afford a new one,” she said. She
pulled out into the street, which was congested with construction
vehicles and traffic, even though it was a Saturday. He would have
been nervous to drive on such a busy street, but she navigated it
as though it were nothing, not even using her horn or middle
finger.

“Aren’t you a mage?” he said. He put his arm
out his window, feeling the breeze. It was warm for November, and
the sunlight on his arm was making him fade, so he laid it in the
shadow of the door so the sun didn’t touch him. “Can’t you cast a
spell to get yourself a better car?”

“Someone has to pay for it,” she said.

“Who?”

She shrugged. “Someone. If I cast a spell to
get myself a better car, someone will have to pay for it. Like
maybe someone will rear end me and their insurance will give me a
settlement. But it wouldn’t come free. Someone would pay for it,
and even though it wouldn’t be me, my karma would be the one that
bore the debt.”

“Karmic debt?” he laughed. He’d met a
bead-and-patchouli wearing hairy hitchhiker who talked about karmic
debt, but never someone as straitlaced as Susan. “You believe in
karma?”

“I believe in paying for what you take.”

“So what do you cast spells for then?”

She shrugged, and leaned forward to turn the
air conditioning on.

“You do cast spells, don’t you? Isn’t that
what mages do?”

“Yeah.”

“So what do you cast spells for?”

She looked uncomfortable. “I um … I
subcontract prayers for distant cousins.”

“People pray to you?” Paul asked.

“No,” she said, pulling onto a huge freeway
that he had never seen before. “People pray to God. If they’re
descendents of Ru--my ancestral goddess, she handles it. She tells
me how to cast the spells to get them what they need, and I do it
in exchange for learning how to do the spells.”

“So you’re an angel who grants wishes?”

“No,” she said, but she was blushing. “I’m
not an angel. It’s like a magical internship. I do magic in order
to learn how to do it better.”

“What kind of spells do you cast?” he asked.
“I mean, what kinds of things do people pray for that you can
answer?”

She shrugged. Some of the ice was melting
off. “Kids are easiest, because they don’t mind asking God for
anything, and the things they want are pretty easy. Like they want
to pass their math test, or they want their puppy to come home.
Sometimes they want hard things, like they want mom and dad to stop
fighting so much, but even I can take care of that for a little
while. Adults want medical things, mostly, like to stop being tired
all the time, or to have their loved one pull through another round
of chemo.”

“You cure cancer?”

“No!” She spluttered. “Not really. I just
cast spells to give them a little strength to help them get through
it on their own. I don’t cure cancer.”

“So you don’t cast spells to help yourself?”
Paul looked out the window at the seemingly unending sequence of
box stores and office complexes that sped past the freeway. It
looked more like Los Angeles than Hayden’s Ferry. “Like have you
ever cast a spell to win the lottery or something?”

“My mom did that. She’s won the lottery three
times.” Susan got off the freeway.

“I’m surprised you don’t do it more
often.”

“They made it illegal for mages to play the
lottery. My mom was one of those people who ruined it for everyone
else,” she said. She drove in silence for a few minutes before
meekly confessing,“I did cast a spell to help me get my job.”

They were in Guadalupe proper now, and the
streets were quieter, more residential, with a homey feel like he’d
crossed the border into Mexico. Yards had cacti in pots and swathes
of bougainvillea instead of slopes of newly seeded ryegrass and
gleaming windows. The street signs were brown, unlit, and written
in Spanish. Susan pulled off the side of the road, where concrete
berms had converted a shoulder into a makeshift parking lot.

Paul was watching her face instead of paying
attention to himself, and as a result he almost vanished into the
sunlight when he stepped out of the car. He scrambled for his
umbrella, but he had to press the catch three times before his
thumb had enough substance to move the metal. With a soft whoomph
the umbrella opened and he shaded himself, feeling solidity return.
Susan was looking around at the things in the courtyard, so she
didn’t see him turn transparent.

But the old woman peering out from under the
canopy glared at him as though she wasn’t fooled for a minute.

Susan ambled through the Mercado, which sold
garden art and patio bric-a-brac. A building stood at the back of
the lot, but the yard itself was the showroom. Rusted fences,
gazebos and trellises arched above a menagerie of iron and concrete
animals. Howling coyotes sat next to turtles with river rocks as
shells. A stone fountain burbled near four other empty ones. It was
so cluttered, you had to walk slowly, one to keep yourself from
tripping over a dancing cement frog or terracotta birdbath, and two
because there were so many things to look at. It felt, for him,
like he’d briefly stepped back into the Guadalupe he once knew.

“Look at that,” she said, pointing to an owl
perched on the edge of the building roof. A shadow from a cluster
of palm trees kept it out of direct sunlight. “I thought it was one
of those plastic owls that people use to keep pigeons away, but it
moved.”

“Oh, great.” Paul narrowed his eyes, trying
to feel if the owl was one he recognized. It was a great horned
owl, and she was almost certainly here checking up on his
progress.

Oh, yeah, he knew that one. [That one] is how
he thought of her. She was full of herself because she’d once been
chosen by the lady as Raylight, an avatar to speak on behalf of all
Sunwards. Once an owl glowed bright with the lady, she tended to
become insufferably arrogant. She thought that since she had once
been a vessel for the lady, she knew what the other Sunwards ought
to be doing.

[That one] looked at him, her thought as
clear as sunlight. She thought he ought to have found out the
answer to their question already.

It wasn’t like he was deliberately stalling,
even if Susan did smell nice and have a pretty smile. Didn’t they
trust him? Didn’t they understand that these things took time?

Susan was still looking at the owl, shading
her eyes from the sun. “I didn’t think owls could be out during the
day.”

“They don’t like it, but they do it if
there’s a good reason.” Paul touched the back of Susan’s shoulder
and gently led her under the awning. He was glaring at [that one].
If [that one] thought he was doing a bad job, she might grab a
translator and bring it over to Susan so that she could interview
Susan herself. He could think of few things more humiliating. “Come
over here where she can’t see us.”

“How do you know it’s a she?”

He shrugged. Even if he hadn’t known her, he
would be certain she was female, because Sunwards were almost
always female, and an owl out in the daylight staring at him was
always a Sunward.

“Don’t you like owls?” she asked.

“Depends on the owl.” Two. There were two
owls he liked. Okay, maybe three, if you counted Fallon, though
she’d only been civil to him in order to study human behavior.

Susan let herself be led under the awning,
where a rack of postcards and a line of hanging dried chilies
decorated the check-out register. He folded the umbrella so he had
a hand free to help her set her flowerpots on the counter. She
smiled thanks. She looked twice as pretty when she smiled. Too bad
she didn’t do it very often. She was so serious, sad, almost.
People these days were sadder than they had been. Women had been
more carefree in his day.

The old woman came out from a door in the
back of the shack. She had long gray hair in a braid and a faded
pink dress. She leaned on a cane as she walked, not as if she was
using it to help her, but as if she was pressing the ground into
submission with each step. She glared at Paul, and the wrinkles
around her black eyes shifted from distrust to animosity.

“Senorita,” she said, beckoning Susan with
the hand not holding the cane.

Paul took the flowerpots and nodded to say
he’d wait for her. When Susan turned her back, he glared at the old
woman, warning her not to meddle. He had an owl at his back, and
even if he and the owls didn’t like each other, the owls were on
his side.

Susan glanced over her shoulder at him and he
quickly tried to look friendly.

When Susan came back, Paul opened the
umbrella again so he could walk to the car without fading. He tried
to read her expression, but he couldn’t hold the umbrella and the
flowerpots and navigate the cluttered courtyard without looking
where he was going. “What did she say to you?” he asked, casually
he hoped.

“She said you’re not human, that you look
like a human, but that you’re one of the owl people and that
everyone knows owls are trouble. I was trying to pretend I didn’t
know it, that for once I just got lucky and met someone attractive
who liked me just for me, but now that she said that, I can’t
pretend anymore.”

Paul laughed as though he thought it was a
joke, though his laugh sounded forced even to himself. “What a
bunch of—”

“Paul, stop.” She put her palm up. “Don’t
lie. Please. I like you, but if you start lying it’s going to spoil
everything. I already knew you weren’t a normal human.”

There went his cover. Somehow he’d blown it,
and now he was going to go back to the light in disgrace. “What
gave it away?”

“I Googled you and found nothing. That was my
first clue. Then I looked around further: Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Pinterest, even MySpace, and found nothing.”

He had no idea what she was talking
about.

“And then I figured, well, maybe he’s just
not into that. But then I did a little more searching, and still
found nothing, except for one guy with your name who disappeared
when he got his draft notice.”

“That’s, um, that’s true.” How did she find
that?

“You applied for a phone line and got an
apartment, with no work experience and no records.”

“You found that too?”

“I work for a private investigator. Brian
showed me how to find all kinds of stuff. He was kind of curious
too, especially when you suddenly got a job at a company which
usually requires a background check.”

Paul meant to deny, deny, deny, but she’d
already freaked him out with how much information she’d found about
him. “I, um, I kind of magicked my way into that.”

She nodded. “Your supervisor had a faint
taint about him, so I knew he’d been ensorcelled.”

Paul’s jaw dropped.

“But Carlos didn’t,” she said. “He was
totally clean. I figured any building owner who’s willing to take a
renter with no credit, no security deposit and waiving the first
month of rent had to be ensorcelled out of half his soul, but he
just said you were old friends and that he owed you a lot. He
talked you up. He’s a good wingman.”

“Wingman?”

“You know, a friend who tries to help you get
laid. It’s not going to work though, because I know you were just
flirting with me because you want something. That hurts. That hurts
a lot. No one likes to be used.” She had a bead of sweat along her
nose from standing in the sun. The light shone in her eyes, making
them look very green. Very green, and very unhappy. “I’ve already
figured out what you want has to do with me being a mage, from
those clumsy questions you asked me. It’s been a great lesson on
how not to be an investigator.” She unlocked her car door and got
in. She’d left the window rolled halfway down, and as soon as she
was sitting, she started to roll it up. “But now that I know what
you are, there’s nothing to convince me you’re not going to hurt me
one way or another.”

He had screwed things up, and he could have
just gone to the parliament and admitted it. They expected him to
fail at most of his tasks. They had low expectations from humans,
especially human males.

But that wasn’t the only reason why he felt
his heart lurch as she put the key in the ignition. It was at that
moment, as she turned on the engine and prepared to drive away from
him, that he had an epiphany: Somewhere along the way, pretending
to like Susan had turned into the real thing.

“Wait, Susan …” Paul reached for the window,
with the idea that if he had his fingers in the car she wouldn’t
leave just yet, but he dropped the umbrella and as the sunlight hit
him he lost substance. His fingers passed through the glass. “Come
have dinner with me!”

She’d backed out of the parking spot and
paused, like she was about to shift out of reverse, but instead of
driving off she stopped. She rolled the window down a crack. “What
did you say?”

He ran over to her window again. “Come have
dinner with me.”