Small Persons With Wings (10 page)

Durindana retreated into her pink-slipper bed, mouth contorted like a mask of tragedy. This proved exactly what I'd been trying to say about her facial expressions, but nobody noticed that.

“She says she saw a giant walking doll,” Dad told Mom and me as the laughter began to die down. “
Pupa
means ‘doll.' ”

“But of course she has not been seeing a giant walking doll,” Rinaldo said. “Mademoiselle Inepta is besotted by the nectar of Ogier Turpin.”

“When did she see this giant doll?” Mom asked.

“This very morning, she says. Durindana was in her bed and a giant walking doll was conversing with Roland and Melissa Angelica Turpin.” Rinaldo bowed to Dad and me as if we were royalty.

“She means the real estate lady,” I said.

“What real estate lady?” Dad said.

“Try your pockets. She gave you her card.”

He stood up and fished around. He came up with a quarter, six pennies, a bunch of nails, three postcard stamps gummed together, an unwrapped throat lozenge with fuzz. And, stuck to the lozenge, a bent and grimy business card.

“
Gigi Kramer
,” he read. “
Real estate
. And then there's a street address, phone, fax, and e-mail. Huh. Don't know where I got this.”

“She came this morning, when Durindana was in bed with the bourb . . . Well, in bed,” I said. “She sounded like she was shouting in a tunnel and she had dead-looking eyes like a shark. She looked at me and I got weird, but mostly she looked at Dad. And now he doesn't remember her.”

“Mellie, this isn't like you,” Mom said. “Are you feeling all right, sweetie?” She reached for my forehead, but I evaded her.

“She kept asking what we were doing with the inn. And she turned Dad into a zombie.”

“I'm not a zombie.” Dad rubbed his hands together to get the circulation going. “For example, I'm freezing. It's a known fact that zombies don't freeze.”

Rinaldo wagged his finger at me. “You are making up a story, Melissa Angelica Turpin.”

“Why would a giant doll care what we do with the inn?” Mom asked, the voice of reason.

Durindana shouted something from her slipper. Lady Noctua's delicate hand flew to her mouth in shock. The Parvi on the floor murmured and milled around.

“She says this giant doll has a Small Person with Wings inside of it,” Rinaldo said. “How can this be?”

“Her voice did sound sort of hollow,” I said.

Dad shook his head. “Why don't I remember this dame?”

Rinaldo frowned. “Melissa Angelica, you say she looked in your eyes and you—how did you say this . . .”

“I got weird. I wanted to please her. And Dad turned into a zombie.”

Lady Noctua's gentleman friend strode to the edge of his table and cried out, “Magica Mala!” Rinaldo leaped from his chair and unfurled his wings to their most impressive; the other guy unfurled back and gabbled in Latin. An ocean of murmurs swelled up from the floor.

“What's Magica Mala?” Dad asked.

Rinaldo patted the air to shut the other gentleman up, then slip-slapped his bare feet to the edge of his table to address us. “This is our third magic, discovered many years after the Magica Artificia. This is forbidden, except for study by the
magi
.”

“Forbidden? What's wrong with it?”

“You must understand . . . the Lady Imprexa, a
maga
of great renown, invented the Magica
Artificia
with the help of a sorceress. It is part sorcery—not like Magica
Vera
, our true magic, which was in our bodies when we sprang from the earth. Magica
Mala
was developed by rogue
magi
long after the death of the Lady Imprexa, and is a stronger magic, with more sorcery in it. Magica Mala makes a deeper illusion, controlling the actions of an object, even other creatures, other Parvi. This offends nature, this befuddling of others.”

“So you made it illegal,” Dad said.

“Yes, yes. We named it Magica Mala, as I have said.”

“
Mala
means ‘bad,' ” Mom said.

“So . . . I guess Inepta's right about seeing a giant doll,” I said. Rinaldo stiffened.
Score one for the downtrodden.
“And you think whoever's inside might be using Magica Mala.”

“This cannot be true,” Rinaldo said. “Although I admit, our plight does breed desperation. When we were possessed of our native magic, we lived under woods and fields, each of us a Small Person alone in nature. The Magica Artificia requires that we live together, sharing the power of the Circulus. This makes great beauty but also, as you have seen, great irritation. And, perhaps, illicit behavior.”

He swept us an especially low bow. “Another reason why we wish you, the esteemed family of Turpini, to return to us the Gemmaluna, our stone of insight.”

“We don't know where it is,” I said without thinking.

The room went utterly, freaked-out, frozen-up silent.

A shriek rose from the floor, and so did the five hundred Parvi Pennati. The air was solid with fancy little figures, expressionless but menacing, frigid fingers curled into claws, wings beating in fury. Lady Noctua's gentleman friend was an inch from my nose, claws reaching, wings muddy brown.

I clapped my hands over my eyes. The beat of a thousand brown wings filled my head, whirring, whumping, whirring. Cold fingers pricked at me—I pressed against Dad, waited to be chilled unconscious, frostbitten to death.

Nice one, Mellie.

MY DAD HAS HIS AWE-INSPIRING MOMENTS.

He lurched away from my side—I was afraid the Parvi had somehow carried him off. But then he bellowed so loud I almost jumped out of my cold-pricked skin. “GET AWAY FROM US! NOW AND I MEAN NOW!”

The cold prickings stopped. I peeked between my fingers and saw Dad standing next to me, three feet of empty space between us and a crowd of angry, fluttering Parvi.

Dad wagged his finger like a schoolteacher. “That's enough of this. You calm down RIGHT NOW and we'll explain.”

“How can you make us calm down?” yelled a furious little guy in yellow. “What will you do to us, you Turpini, hey?”

Dad folded his arms over his chest like some Turkish pasha, chin jutting out. “You need us. Without us, no Gemmaluna.”

“But you do not have the Gemmaluna,” Rinaldo said, fluttering forward and landing on our table again. “Melissa Angelica Turpin has said this.”

“I believe my father hid it somewhere in this house,” Dad said. “We will find it.”

“The Parvi Pennati will help,” Rinaldo said. I was relieved to see that his wings were lightening, the iridescent color returning.

“The Parvi Pennati will do no such thing,” Dad said. “You may search this cellar if you wish, but we will do the rest of the house. This is your place, that is ours. Is that clear?”

“
Bien
,” Rinaldo said. He turned to the fluttering, overdressed crowd behind him. “
Pacem
, Parvi Pennati. Peace.” He talked soothingly in Latin and his people drifted away, back to the floor and the bar and the chandelier. The music started up. I breathed again.

Rinaldo invited us to stay for dinner. The menu turned out to be slugs in truffle sauce. We declined, pointing out that we were too big to get much out of a slug. Also too grossed out, but we didn't say that. Also too freakin' cold.

Also too freakin' freaked out.

“I suppose a slug is pretty much the same thing as a snail,” Dad said as we trudged up the silk-lined staircase.

“I think slugs are squishier inside,” Mom said.

“Can we stop talking about this?” I'd never eaten snails and never intended to.

Mom had run around the corner to the store again and bought spaghetti and a bottle of sauce. We put on sweaters and socks and ate the spaghetti with more peas, everything piping hot.

There's something about spaghetti that radiates calm from your stomach to your whole body. I think it's an amino acid or something. Anyway, I was feeling all right. I almost forgot that we'd faced death by a thousand frost-bites.

“Now,” Dad said, “we have to decide whether to give back the moonstone.”

“Finding it would be a nice first step,” I said, yawning.

“Right,” Dad said. “Tomorrow we hit all that stuff in the backyard, and maybe some of the mattresses upstairs.”

Mom groaned and buried her face in her hands. The end of her rope was in sight.

“C'mon,” Dad said. “It'll be fun.”

“When did you turn into Susy Sunshine?” Mom asked through her fingers.

“I'm employing a positive attitude,” Dad said. “Somebody has to.”

Mom dropped her hands and gave him a look that could have fried his liver. My parents don't fight that much, but you can always tell when the atmosphere's about to decay. “I feel sick,” I said.

“Oh, sweetie,” Mom said. She reached out to feel my forehead, and I let her do it. “You don't feel hot, but it's been quite a day. Why don't you go up to bed?”

They forgot about bickering and I got out of doing the dishes. Good deal.

I woke up the next morning with an ice cube on my chest and something tickling my nose. “Warm dolt,” said a tinny voice. “I wish you awake.” She tickled my nose again.

I opened my eyes. Durindana tucked an ostrich plume back into her hairdo and fluttered up to my bureau. She landed next to my china guy. “This pretty man is—”

“China,” I said. “He's not alive.”

Durindana looked much better: Her hair was powdered white and done up in an intricate knot with plumes. Her blue dress was silky and flouncy and exquisitely clean. Jewels sparkled here and there.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm sorry they were so mean to you down there.”

“It matters little. Parvi Pennati never have admired me. No one dances with me.”

“That's too bad.”

“They remember my shame.”

“I'm sorry.” I was curious, but didn't think I should ask.

She muttered something. I caught “skirt” and “gubernator.”

“I didn't catch that.”

She unfurled her wings, and flapped over to hover in front of me. “If you must know, Turpina, my skirt disappeared when I danced with the gubernator.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I was in my drawers!”

“I'm sure it was awful.”

“Everyone laughed! This was a deep, deep humiliation, never to be forgotten!” She flung herself onto my pillow and curled up the way Fidius used to. Something happened to my heart—it warmed up or lifted up or maybe both.

“Isn't there some way to train yourself?” I asked. “I mean, take a class or something? Organize your brain?”

“In my youth I tried this,” Durindana said, a dispirited lump of silk. “In the Gigantes year 1880, my poor mother asked the Lady Noctua to school me in secret.”

“Lady Noctua? Rinaldo's wife, with all the jewels and flounces and things? She seemed kind of ill-tempered. Not to mention overdressed.” It would be like me asking Janine how to kiss boys.

“This is to show her skill at the Magica Artificia. The Lady Noctua is very well regarded among the Parvi Pennati.”

“And did it help you, having her teach you stuff?”

Durindana assumed her mask-of-tragedy look. “The effort was a dismal failure. As was seen when my . . . my skirt . . .” She wailed and flung herself facedown on the pillow.

I let her have her cry, and when she quieted down I told her the Tampax story. I wasn't sure she'd know what a Tampax was, so I described it as “an object even more secret than underpants.”

She was upright in horror. “How can you be laughing at such humiliation?”

“I've moved away now. Nobody knows me here. I can start all over again.”

Her shoulders sagged. “I moved away, but I did not find him.”

“Him who?” I had one of those flashes of inspiration you get sometimes. “Fidius?”

Her pale cheeks took on a greenish tinge, which I found out later was the Parvi equivalent of blushing. “Fidius alone was pleasant to me in my darkest days. He was kinder when he returned from his ordeal.”

“His ordeal?”

She shuddered. “He left the Domus by himself and was caught by a Giganteus boy.”

I felt like she'd doused me with ice water. “I know about that! He was in a glass jar.” I fingered my frostbite handprint, remembering what Fidius had made me see the day before he left me.

“Yes, one cannot imagine a greater torment. He came home strange, both angry and kind. He feared the Gigantes, would not leave the Domus by himself, said small creatures such as we must protect ourselves, travel in groups. After his parents had their calamity, however, he became more angry than kind, almost—how do you say this—unhinged. He fought with the
magi
and all his friends, then to my horror he left alone, and now who knows where he is?”

“Well, he was with us eight years ago. A blink of an eye to you.”

“This is so. Thank you, Melissa Angelica.” She unfurled her wings, and I thought I'd cheer up pretty fast if I had something that gorgeous attached to me. She took off and bounced slowly around the ceiling in that wasp-like fashion I remembered from Fidius. When she returned to my pillow, the subject had changed.

“This room is being very clean,” she pronounced.

“We did a lot of dusting and stuff when we got here.”

“Ogier was a pig.”

“No joke. Do you have any idea where he hid the moonstone . . . the Gemmaluna?”