“As long as she doesn’t get pregnant.”
“I got her to Planned Parenthood. She’s really glad to have the birth control.” Aunt Eileen paused for a sigh. “Just don’t mention that around Father Keith.”
“Another thing to hide from him, huh? Like my own visits there.”
Aunt Eileen rolled her eyes at the memory. When I turned sixteen, I started pouring out Qi like a lighthouse, and boys became the moths. I’d had no idea why they all started ignoring my awesomely beautiful younger sister to swarm around me instead. Not all of my would-be suitors were boys my own age, either—unfortunately. It was a period of my life that I did my best to forget.
“I’m just glad Ari’s taken an interest in Mike…” She hesitated with a quick drum of her fingertips on the table. “And speaking of Ari, I’ve been wondering. I know he’s here to be your bodyguard. Does this mean that someone’s threatening you? I’d really hoped that when that awful man Johnson was killed, you’d be safe.”
“Yeah, so did I. But I honestly think that this bodyguard business is just an excuse. I’m really not sure why he was attached to the Agency. It doesn’t seem to be the way Interpol usually operates.”
“Jim’s been saying the same thing.”
“He’s right. Of course, if the State Department asked for Ari, that would count for something, but no one will tell my boss if they did. I do know that somebody very high up in Ari’s chain of command wanted him here.” I shrugged. “Ari doesn’t know who.”
She sighed with a shake of her head. “I do wish you’d get another job. Something safer, where people would tell you things if they were important.”
I smiled as vaguely as I could. Eileen got up and poked viciously at the stew with a long wooden spoon.
Michael and Ari came downstairs a few minutes later. Sophie, Mike informed me, was going to take a shower. Although Ari sat down at the table, Michael hovered near the doorway. He shoved his hands into his jeans’ pockets and put his back against the wall, mimicking the way that Ari often stood. He was a skinny kid, just about my height, 5’8”, though with long legs that promised more growth later. We look a lot alike, black hair, fine features including the slightly tilted Irish nose, but his eyes are blue whereas I have hazel eyes that tend toward green.
“I need to find something in the upstairs storage rooms,” I said. “Mike, why not come with me? I’m going to need your help to move cartons around.”
“Oh, okay.” He groaned the words rather than speaking them and peeled himself off the wall.
Ari cleared his throat. Mike glanced at him, then turned to me. “I don’t mind helping,” he said.
“Great!” I said. “Let’s go.”
At the extreme north end of the Houlihan house is a stack of three small rooms where Uncle Jim’s mother, Nanny Houlihan, had lived before she passed away. Eileen had turned them into storage areas, though recently she’d cleared out the ground-floor room and stashed its contents elsewhere, because it housed the psychic gate to the deviant world level known as Interchange. Uncle Jim had padlocked
the door into that room and hammered a couple of boards across it to keep it shut. We climbed the stairs up to the door of the second storage room. On the landing Michael paused and turned to look at me.
“I’m real sorry about the bad grades,” he said.
“So am I. If you want to go to college, you’d better bring them up in summer school.”
“That’s what Ari said, too. He told me I was hella lucky to have a chance at college.” He reached for the doorknob. “School would be seriously better than going into the army like he did.”
Michael opened the door and held it to let me go in first. Since an old venetian blind covered the room’s only window, I flipped on the overhead light. The antique steamer trunk in which I’d stored my college notebooks and other souvenirs sat against the farthest wall of the square room. Big storage cartons and a treadle sewing machine blocked the path. Michael began moving things out of the way, then stopped and turned toward the window. He frowned and seemed to be listening to a distant noise. I heard nothing.
“What is it, bro?” I said.
“This is totally whack,” he said. “I’m not sure—just let me—” He took a couple of steps toward the window, then stared at it. “There never was a gate here before.”
“Is there now?”
“Yeah. I can feel it, but it’s not on right. I mean, it’s sort of skewed or hanging weird, like a door that’s off one of its hinges.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “I’m thinking I could pull up that blind, and then we could see what’s over there.”
Over on the other side of the trans-world gate, he meant. I ran an SM:D and felt nothing but the usual low hum of suffering inherent in earthly existence.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.”
It took us a couple of minutes to clear a path to the window. I stood at one side of it and Michael, at the other, where he could reach the pull cord to open the blind. As soon as he touched the cord, the blind made a clattering noise and melted away.
Sunlight flooded my vision and made my eyes water. I
could smell fresh air, scented with damp earth and manure. I blinked hard and squinted to look around me. We were standing right on the edge of a flat roof, looking down at a vegetable garden edged with mutant morning glory plants, ten feet high, some of them, supported on poles. We’d come through to Interchange.
“Oh, shit!” Michael said. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?” I said.
“That the house is different here. It’s only got one room at this end. Nola, step back, a big step, and then turn around. Okay?”
“Okay.” I followed orders.
I bumped into a pile of cardboard cartons. Dim electric light replaced the sunshine. I heard Michael whistle in relief, and I let out my breath in a sigh. We were back in the storage room at the Houlihan house.
“Sorry ’bout that,” Michael said. “That was hella stupid of me.”
“Well, it’s not like you knew what was going to happen.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m having to learn how to world-walk on my own, and sometimes I seriously mess up. I wish Dad was here. It’s gross that he got busted like that.”
“Yeah, I have to agree.”
Michael scowled at the venetian blind. “It’s weird about this gate opening up. I helped Aunt Eileen carry some stuff up here just last week, and it wasn’t open then, the gate, I mean.”
“Huh.” I considered the problem. “Well, I know even less about this stuff than you do, but let’s look at it logically. There’s a couple of possibilities. Dad opened the original gate downstairs a long time ago, but he’s in prison. So, maybe someone else opened this one.”
“They did a fail job if they did.”
“The second possibility is that it opened itself. Do you think gates can expand themselves? Sort of like a leak in a packed earth dam, where the water keeps washing away the dirt once the leak gets started. The hole gets bigger and bigger.”
“Maybe.” Michael sounded doubtful. “But why now?
Dad must have made that other gate what? Thirty-five years ago?”
“About, yeah.”
“And it never spread in all that time.”
“That’s true. Maybe it’s spreading now because you’ve found your talents. You’re another world-walker in this house. Do you think the gate has some kind of property that would sense that?”
“Maybe. I might be sending out, like, vibes, and I was using the gate downstairs hella often for a while. But—I dunno.”
We looked at each other in utter confusion.
“It might have something do with Dad,” I said. “In that letter he smuggled out, Dad mentioned being paroled. He also said he was thinking about us a whole lot. Maybe he’s out, and that had an effect on the gate. This whole process takes place on some deep level of your mind, after all.”
Michael’s eyes got very wide. “If that’s true,” he said, “we could go get him.”
“We could—if only we knew exactly where he is and how to reach the place. And of course I might not be right about the parole. I’m just guessing. For all we know he’s still in Moorwood Prison, whatever world that’s on. I’m willing to bet it’s not on Interchange. That would be too convenient.”
“Too dangerous, you mean, with all the rads.”
“That, too, yeah. If he’s still in jail, we can’t even visit him. The authorities would want to know where we came from. You don’t want to end up in the cell next door for the same crime.”
“Yeah, guess it would be the same, if I brought you along. Transporting someone across world borders. I keep forgetting it’s illegal. Well, it is there, anyway, wherever there is.”
“Exactly.” It occurred to me that Austin Osman Spare14 had to know something about world-walking. “Now, look, I may be in a position to find out more about this situation. I don’t know yet if I can or not, but I’m going to try. Getting Dad home is high on my priority list these days.”
“It would sure be easier to concentrate on stuff like
school if I could, y’know, talk to him about world-walking.” Mike sounded sincere. “I just get seriously confused sometimes, trying to read my school stuff, and trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing with these gates.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Unfortunately, I also have Agency work to do here. I can’t go haring off across the worlds until I know what I’m doing and have the time to do it in. Understand?”
“Yeah, I do. Y’know, there are other gates in San Francisco, like the one that over-there police squad used to take Dad away. I’ve been thinking about making a map.”
When I did a scan around this idea, I felt only a distant and faint chance for danger. “The Agency could use something like that. They’ll pay you for it.”
“Cool!”
Michael glanced back at the window. “We better get the stuff you wanted and go back downstairs,” he said. “This room’s starting to give me the creeps.”
When I opened the trunk, I had to rummage through a lot of notebooks as well as shoe boxes full of things friends had sent me, like Christmas and birthday cards, the kind of paper junk that somehow you never want to throw out even though there’s no reason to keep it. I did find the material about Chaos magic about halfway down the layers, as well as an old college notebook from a class on Jung’s psychological theories. On impulse I grabbed that, too, and we left.
As we walked down the hall toward the living room, I heard women’s voices, arguing. Aunt Eileen was one, and the other—
“Oh, shit!” Michael said. “It’s Mom!”
He turned and ran back to the stairs. The miserable little coward had gotten halfway up before I mentally registered the news. I was tempted to follow his example. Instead, I squared my shoulders and walked on into the living room. Why hide? Mom had already figured out that I was in the house.
“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Condescending to say hello to me, are you?”
Deirdre O’Brien O’Grady, five foot two, slender, her
graying hair dyed a tasteful auburn, set her beringed hands on her hips and glared at me with cold blue eyes. Yet she was smiling with the little twist of the upper lip, the flare of one nostril, that we all called her sneer. She was wearing a boxy pants suit in powder blue, with matched pearls at her throat.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I thought you never wanted to see me again. Just trying to do what you asked.”
“The one time you ever did.” She made a girlish giggling sound—I wouldn’t call it a laugh—and went on looking me over with the cold stare, her usual minute assessment of my hair, clothes, body. “At least you’ve finally lost all that weight,” she said eventually. “But you could get some better clothes now that you can fit into them.”
Aunt Eileen was hovering, watching her sister, glancing now and then at me. I was determined to avoid a screaming fight in front of her, and in front of Ari, too, who was standing on the other side of the room, his eyes narrow, his mouth slack in disbelief. I noticed that he’d put on his jacket, probably to hide the shoulder holster.
“I was just introduced to your boyfriend,” Mom continued. “The latest one, I suppose.” Her eyes flicked his way, then back to me. “How many does that make, anyway? Five? Six? Or do you even bother to keep count anymore?”
My good intentions vanished. “What’s wrong?” I said and smiled. “Envy’s a sin, you know.”
Mom caught her breath. From somewhere upstairs a sharp cracking noise rattled through the living room. The windows trembled and boomed, but the glass held unbroken.
“Oh, come on!” I said. “Why can’t you just say it instead of sounding off in the aura field?”
“What? Do you honestly think I did—it must be Michael and his damn firecrackers again.”
One section of the brocade sofa lifted about three inches off the floor, then dropped with a groan.
“He’s not hiding under there,” I said. “Why the hell can’t you just admit you’re as talented as the rest of us? This stupid charade—ever so middle class, are we? And for the wife of a man in the building trades! Crap, look at you! The
way you’re dressed! Do you think you’re the bloody Queen of England?”
Mom stared at me openmouthed. I realized that I’d just hurled all the insults Dad used when they were fighting on the same theme. I squelched a temptation to apologize. Mom turned to Aunt Eileen.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I don’t have to stand here and be insulted.”
“No, you don’t.” I found something original to say. “You can be insulted anywhere you go. It’s your hobby, isn’t it? Indignation.”
An invisible hand grabbed a thick bunch of my hair and yanked. I yelped. Mom smiled at me, turned on her heel, and stalked out. She slammed the front door behind her so hard that the windows rattled again, this time from natural causes.
Aunt Eileen let out her breath in a long sigh. Ari stopped lurking in the hall and hurried over to me. He slipped an arm around my shoulders and hauled me in to rest against him. I leaked a few tears onto his chest, then pulled myself together.
“She dropped by unannounced,” Eileen said to me. “I’m so sorry, dear.”
“Well, I’m sorry I lost it.” I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. “Ari, will you forgive me for being a jerk?”
“What makes you think you acted badly?” Ari said. “She has to be the most appalling woman I’ve ever met.”
I decided that falling in love with him had been one of my better decisions.