The Veil (35 page)

I hid a grin. Her tone was nothing to smile at, but I’d just noticed the tiny reindeers dancing along the front of her apron.

Someone
had certainly come a long way since her first reaction to my suggestion that we have a holiday party at our house this year (“Oh Addy! Haven’t you put an old woman through enough lately?”). It took me a week of hard work just to get her to allow me to put up a “a few tasteful decorations, just in case we do decide to have the party.”

Admittedly, I went just a tad overboard after Gran finally gave me the green light. But everything holiday-ish at Party Central had been so fun and festive (and cheap! My god, who knew you could
get a string of five hundred twinkle lights for only $3.99?) that, in the end, I hadn’t been able to stop at the wreath, a few bunches of holly, and maybe a few stockings we had discussed. Luc, Nate, Olivia, and I filled up three shopping carts (well, Olivia and I did—Luc and Nate mostly just watched us, slightly wide-eyed, while they tried to keep out of our way), and the entire downstairs of the house was now virtually unrecognizable.

The first thing I did was shove the couch aside so the Christmas tree could have the prime position in the front window. If you squinted really hard from the street, through the vines growing over the front of the house, you could just make out the dozens of silver balls Olivia and I bought to decorate the tree with. I actually dragged her to several stores before I was able to find the exact color silver from the Annorasi world (I’d told her I was trying to match the menorah we bought).

Said menorah, with its eight blue candles, was now on the mantle. I had (temporarily) cleared the dusty surface of all of Gran’s knickknacks and figurines to make room for it, and also for the giant yule log and the wooden candleholder I’d assumed, when we first happened upon it at the store, was another menorah, until Olivia cleverly pointed out that it held only seven candles. A passing store employee explained it was actually a kinara, and it was traditionally used for Kwanzaa celebrations. Since I’d never celebrated any sort of winter holiday before, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try them all at once; the kinara went into the cart with everything else. It now held three red candles, three green ones, and one black.

Hanging from the rather crowded mantle were thirteen red and white stockings; one for me, one for Gran, one for Luc, and one for each of Gran’s boys. I’d meticulously added each person’s name to a stocking with gold glitter puff paint—the result was sparkly and surprisingly elegant, I think. A smaller stocking hung at the end of the row; there wasn’t enough room to write Rialto’s name on it, so I drew a cat face, complete with whiskers. I figured Santa would
be able to figure it out (especially given that Santa was most likely going to be me).

Other than that, I just added a few little things to make the room festive: a candy-cane candle here, a peek-a-boo Santa there, a few strings of holly and green tinsel twisted around the stairwell, and a few bunches of mistletoe hanging wherever I thought it might be possible to corner Luc.

After seeing Gran’s horror-stricken expression the first time she walked into the room, I had a moment of mild concern that I might have gone too far. But, in the end, it only took her a few days to stop shuddering every time she passed by the mantle. A few days after that, I knew for sure I’d been forgiven—and that the party was officially on—when I found her in the kitchen pouring over recipe books and muttering to herself about how big of a turkey she would need in order to feed the twenty people on the “sample guest list” I gave her.

And look at her now—ordering me around and wearing a reindeer apron I had no memory of buying. I was bursting with pride.

“Where’s Luc?” Gran asked.

I pointed to the front yard as I came down the stairs (I walked down—how very human of me). “Testing out the lights—it rained a little bit last night, so he was worried about some of them shorting out.”

In his own way, Luc had been almost as bah-humbug as Gran in the beginning (apparently the holidays were never that big of a deal at his house, either). But he got into the spirit of things too; he now seemed excessively proud of the display of twinkle lights he’d put up on the front of the house (well, on the vines and things growing on the front of the house). He’d done the whole thing at night, of course, so the neighbors wouldn’t see him flying around. Not that they would have been terribly surprised to see something like that in our front yard . . . Gran’s little Halloween prank on the Derby twins was now neighborhood legend, although thankfully no one actually believed the twins’ story.

Oh yeah—Luc moved in with us the day after we came home from San Francisco. He apparently thought returning to his own house every night just after ten o’clock conflicted with the promise he’d made me immediately after my confrontation with Damon Mallory. How he managed to convince Gran I needed my Guardian by my side at all times, even in the house where I already had Gran and her ten boys, is a total mystery to me, although I do know their final agreement included many conditions—including that his room be on a different floor from mine and that from now on we’d both be sleeping with a pair of burly warriors outside of our respective doors. Maybe she figured with Damon Mallory, Oran Tighe, and the rest of the Others still out there somewhere, we really couldn’t be too careful.

My memories of my conversation with Damon Mallory still haunted me—I never told Luc exactly what he’d said to me, at least not the part about my loved ones allowing me to face him alone because they all secretly wanted to be rid of me. I knew Luc had already tortured himself enough about letting me fly off the roof that day—although, as I told him repeatedly, it had been my choice to go, not his.

It had been Mr. Stratton who finally explained why my handshake with Damon Mallory had nearly killed me. He’d said, “It’s his ability—one of them, anyway. When Damon Mallory touches someone, that person feels all the pain they’ve ever felt in their entire life—physical, mental, emotional, every kind of pain. You feel it all at once the second any part of his flesh makes contact with yours.”

“The interesting thing, though,” he had continued, “is that Damon Mallory’s ability only works on the Annorasi—his touch doesn’t have the same effect on humans. So you can take comfort in the fact that when he shook your hand, it must have been at least a little bit painful for him to see you respond in the same way a full-blooded Annorasi would have. I’m sure he would have liked
nothing more than to be able to give the Council yet another reason you aren’t Annorasi enough.”

Mr. Stratton had a point there, but he hadn’t seen Damon Mallory’s face, hadn’t seen how joyful he had looked knowing he was causing me pain.

Had I really experienced all of that pain at various points in my life? That was pretty hard to believe. Over the past month, I’d woken up in the middle of the night more than once with a perfect memory of exactly how torturous the few moments I touched Damon Mallory’s hand had been. How could all of that have happened to me over seventeen relatively happy years?

That wasn’t the only question left in my head. I had yet to summon the courage to ask anybody—Luc, Gran, or Mr. Stratton—about Damon Mallory’s relationship to my parents and to my grandmother. Luc had told me once that that was a story for another time—I wasn’t ready for that time to be now. Not yet.

I was saved from my decidedly unfestive thoughts by Luc coming back in through the front door.

“The lights are all working!” he announced. “They look great—come see!”

A loud
ding
sounded from the kitchen, and Gran’s eyes widened. “My turkey!” she exclaimed, dashing to rescue it from the oven before it managed to overcook itself by even a minute. Gran was nothing if not a perfectionist, especially when it came to her food.

“I want to see,” I told Luc.

It was dark outside. Luc positioned me in the middle of the front lawn (front field, really, as the tall blades of grass came up almost to my knees), then dashed around the side of the house to plug in the network of extension cords he’d devised to bring power to the lights.

“Ready?” he called.

“Ready!” I yelled back.

Nothing happened for a very long second—then thousands
of tiny pinpricks of light burst into view, all intertwined with the leafy foliage on the outside of the house. It looked like thousands of fireflies had moved in, especially when the lights began to twinkle.

“Do you like it?” Luc asked, suddenly by my side again.

“It’s perfect. But how did you do it? All of those lightbulbs . . . ”

Luc pointed to a plastic box near the front stoop; it was near to overflowing with dead bulbs—some of them shattered, some of them burned to a crisp. “There were a few casualties,” he admitted with a grin. “But I’m getting better all the time.”

He looked so proud of himself; I kissed him solidly on the lips. When I finally let him go, he gestured to the lights again.

“Lift the veil,” he suggested.

I concentrated on the front of the house. It only took a second for the veil to lift (I was getting much, much better at that), and when I saw the house through my Annorasi eyes, I started to laugh.

Instead of thousands of fireflies, there were now hundreds of fist-sized silver sparklers, spinning around and emitting showers of sparks, just like fireworks.

I kept laughing and staring at the beautiful sight in front of me until I felt Luc’s hand on my cheek.

“That’s the look,” he said, pressing his lips to my temple, and turning me away from the house so that I was facing him. “As long as I live, I will never get tired of that.”

“Good.” I put my arms around him. “You’d better not get tired of me!”

I felt his laughter rumble deep in his chest, against my cheek.

“Not a chance,” he assured me.

Car headlights, turning into our driveway, interrupted our moment. Nate and his parents got out of the car, oohing and ahhing over the lights as they did. Gran came outside and led Mr. and Mrs. Whitting into the house, and Nate walked over to join Luc and me on the lawn.

“I can’t believe I’m finally going to see the inside of your house!” Nate enthused, practically bouncing on the soles of his shoes. When he was even with us, he gestured up at the lights. “That your handiwork, Luc?”

“It is,” Luc said proudly, still hugging me around the waist.

Nate let out a whistle of approval, then looked over at us suspiciously. “You two aren’t seeing the same thing I am, are you? You’re looking at something Annorasi-ish right now, I bet.”

I giggled.

After we’d finally managed to get Nate out of the Palace of Fine Arts in one piece, Luc and I sat him down in the living room of Mr. Stratton’s house and told him everything. He was a bit shocked at first (to say the least), to learn my made-up fantasy stories were actually real. But, rather like it had been with me, the shock was balanced out by the happy knowledge that he was not losing his mind (which he’d been starting to worry about).

“You always have to one-up me, don’t you?” he teased me later. “The second I finally find the courage to come out, you take that same moment to announce you’re a freaky half-breed with magical powers. Can’t I ever be the one who has the news?”

Back on the lawn, I laughed at his “Annorasi-ish” comment and reached out to give him a hug. As I did, I heard the distinct sound of paper crumpling inside his jacket pocket. I pulled away from him. “Are you still carrying that thing around?” I demanded.

Nate shrugged, pulling a thick, off-white piece of paper halfway out of his pocket. I thought I saw him breathe a small sigh of relief to see it was still there. “Hey,” he said defensively, “if you’d had the charming experience of two dudes in gray suits bursting into your bedroom in the middle of night and dragging you off to who knows where, you’d be carrying your get-out-of-jail-free card around with you, too.”

The piece of paper, addressed to Nate, had arrived at Mr. Stratton’s house two days after my meeting with the Council. It said:

Upon reconsideration of the matter, and in light of recent events, the Council hereby declares the sentence pronounced against Nathan Anthony Whitting in November of this year to be
suspended indefinitely
.

No further action will be taken against Mr. Whitting, by this body or by any other in the Annorasi world, so long as he proves himself to be a discreet and steadfast keeper of the honorable secrets to which he has become privy.

By “recent events,” the Council could only have meant the fact that Damon Mallory and Oran Tighe had decided to try to execute Nate in a public place in the middle of San Francisco, rather than obey the Council’s order to bring him outside of the city. One of the nuances of Law Thirty-Seven, Mr. Stratton had explained, was that you only got one opportunity to execute someone condemned under it. If you blow it, something similar to the double jeopardy rule kicks in, and the condemned must be set free. At least, that was the proper legal analysis; we couldn’t know for sure exactly what had motivated the Council to grant Nate a reprieve. They rarely explained their reasons for doing anything.

Luc gave Nate a deeply skeptical look. “You really think if the Council decides to come for you again that waving a piece of paper in their faces is going to make a difference?”

Nate shrugged. “Hey, it can’t hurt. Let’s go inside already! I’m dying to see!”

Olivia arrived next, with her parents and a giant plate of Christmas cookies. Gram greeted every guest at the door and steered them so capably toward the punch and the assorted before-dinner goodies she’d laid out you would’ve thought she’d been throwing parties like this for her entire life. She had such a twinkle in her eye as she introduced Nate and Olivia’s families to her ten brawny “nephews” (all of whom wore matching Santa hats) that I knew she was having a wonderful time—maybe this wouldn’t turn out to
be both the first and the last holiday party at Gran’s house. Olivia dragged her mother around the living room to see every single one of the decorations she’d helped pick out.