"Hey, Julieta," Danny said. "That could well be just what he means."
Tom blanched. So did Jay-Tee.
Of course, it wasn't what he meant. He hadn't known Jay-Tee very long, but already he couldn't imagine life without her. How could she even
think
he wanted her dead?
"No!" he spluttered. "Of course not, Jay-Tee. You don't need magic, because you're already special. You're just as amazing without it as you were with. I'm not. I
need
my magic."
"You just think you do, Tom. You don't need magic. No one does. You can live without. I am." Her voice wobbled and she blinked rapidly.
Tom didn't say anything. He didn't know what to say.
Danny was looking at him; then he turned to Jay-Tee. "You two have hooked up, haven't you?"
29
Butterflies
Sarafina lay mostly on the
path, her left arm stretched across into the ferns, the tips of her fingers in the small stream. A fern frond fallen into the water bumped against each of her knuckles, agitated by the tiny bumps and eddies, before floating past.
I closed my eyes, and calmness returned. My mother's lights were flickering out. It would be so easy to remain there, leave the world behind, leave Sarafina to die. I didn't belong with her or anyone else. I belonged in Cansino space.
I opened them again to brilliant light, the sun high, the shadows cutting. The ferns glowed green; the colour was reflected in my mother's skin as she grew paler. Next to her head a butterfly rested on a rock, its white wings vivid against the grey of the rock. But its body was as still as Sarafina's.
One of the women who had offered me tea ran down the path towards us. She cried out, leaning over my mother, trying to make her breathe. The woman's black hair was short and cut close to her scalp. She blew air into my mother's lips, thumped at her chest.
I could let the woman continue, even though it was futile. I could let Sarafina go. More of her winked out in the corners of my eyes.
Then a shudder went through me, a sudden horror at myself, at what I was becoming. Sarafina was my mother, no matter how many lies she'd told me.
I pushed the woman away. She cried out, trying to get her hands back in position over my mother's rib cage. I reached to the magic inside her, froze her with it, then closed my eyes, stretching out my fingers, thinning and sharpening them, cutting my way inside my mother.
I began to patch Sarafina's crumbling sequence, but it had frayed too much, had already lost so many numbers. And besides, that was how I'd turned Jay-Tee's magic off. Sarafina didn't want that; she wanted to be like me.
I pulled away from her, returned to shadow, light, and the movement of air. The woman knelt there, glaring at me, unable to move.
"You were in the way," I told her, though she probably didn't speak English. "I'm saving her."
For as long as I could remember, Sarafina had hated magic so much she'd denied it existed. But somehow Jason Blake had made her love it. How could I give her what she wanted?
Then I remembered Raul Cansino's golems. Before changing me completely, he'd given me pieces of himself.
But Sarafina was so faded now that I could barely see her.
I stared at my hands, sharpened my vision to see beyond the skin and meat and bone; I concentrated on pulling magic out of myself. Acid moved inside me, burning, moving up towards my skin. Stuff bubbled out beneath my fingernails, scorching.
It was the same colour as my new skin. I rubbed it onto Sarafina's feet, watched it disappear inside her. Blood dripped slowly from my fingers until it stopped, dried up, vanished, as if the skin had never been broken.
For a long moment, Sarafina didn't move.
And then she gasped, coughed, drew in air, expelled it.
I set the woman free. She glared at me, said something I didn't understand.
Sarafina shivered. Her eyes opened. "Reason," she said. "Am I still me?"
"Yes," I said.
She shivered again, the movement travelling from her shoulders down to her toes.
"You're okay," I told her, though I didn't know if that was true.
The woman looked at us. She said something to Sarafina, a question, I thought.
I shrugged. "I'm sorry. I don't understand." I held Sarafina's hand; the skin was covered with tiny dots of blood. "How do you feel?"
"It stopped hurting," Sarafina said. "I've stopped being so thin."
The woman bowed her head, stood up, and backed away. Three other women watched from the edge of the garden. They all wore the same clothes: short-sleeved blouses, long skirts. One held a jug of water, the others towels.
Had they never seen anything this strange before? This was Jason Blake's house, after all.
The short-haired woman took the jug of water and a wooden cup from the others and placed them beside my mother, then helped her sit up. She poured water for her, held it to her mouth. Sarafina sipped, then gulped.
"Thirsty," she said, as the woman poured her more and she drank it all. She smiled at me, took the cup from the woman's hands, and poured her own water. "It tastes almost sweet."
Colour was coming back into her skin. She looked so healthy that I shivered again, remembering that I'd almost let her die.
She drained the cup and set it on the floor, crossing her legs and wiping her hands on her skirt. She nodded at the woman, who smiled and backed away, disappearing with the others into the house.
"They're very kind," Sarafina said softly, turning her hand palm up. Another one of her enormous butterflies appeared, red and green and gold. Its wings trembled. She turned to look at me. "Am I like you now?"
I didn't think so. I didn't need water; I didn't feel thirst. She was like Esmeralda and Jason Blake, with only a small piece of Cansino magic.
But she was alive, and sane again.
I had my mother back.
30
Greed
Sarafina stood up and took
several steps away from me. The sun on her face was so bright it almost whited out her features.
I stared at my hand. It still tingled where I'd pushed the magic out. I'd done it: I'd made my mother whole.
The whole world was ours now, like we'd always planned. And there was no need for money or passports: We had everything we needed woven into every cell of our bodies.
This was the real gift Raul Cansino had given me.
"I don't think it's enough," Sarafina said.
I looked up at her. Her eyebrows pushed together and the corners of her mouth tightened, giving her eyes a fierce look as she stared at me. I'd never seen her look that way before, even when she'd been crazy.
"What do you mean?"
She took another step away from me and held her arms out, palms facing up, fingers splayed, pointing towards me. The air between us shimmered. My skin prickled.
"What are you doing?"
Sarafina said nothing, but her stare remained intent on me.
Then I felt something moving through me, a thin stream of acid, burning out of my skin, across the air, and into Sarafina. I could see it too: motes lit golden in the sunlight, as if they were particles of sun.
"What are you doing?" I asked again.
"I'm making it better."
"Better?" I took a step closer to her; she took a step away. Her hands glowed, but not as brightly as mine. "Making what better?"
"See?" she said, shifting her gaze to the particles streaming out of me. "They're dancing! My father said they would." Sarafina smiled, but the tight, intense expression on her face didn't change.
"Jason Blake?" I asked. "He told you to do this?" I felt dizzy. I took another step towards her and swayed, grabbing at one of the ferns to keep from falling.
Sarafina laughed. "This is more like it. The world's getting bigger."
"It will get bigger and bigger," Jason Blake said, stepping from the shadows of the house into the radiant garden. He slipped a pair of black sunglasses on, hiding his eyes, but the expression on his face was identical to Sarafina's. As the two of them stared at me, it looked as if someone else were operating the muscles behind their skin.
He strode towards Sarafina.
"Let me help you," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "You can pull harder now."
She nodded.
The particles tore from me faster. I could feel cell walls begin to thin, then break. I turned my gaze inward and at last saw the sequence of numbers that made me— just like my mother's had a moment ago, they were breaking up: Fib (55), 139,583,862,445; Fib (37), 24,157,817; and Fib (13), 233. My Fibs were dissolving. I was getting lighter.
Sarafina loved me. Why was she doing this to me?
I opened my eyes, turned to her. "You're hurting me."
"It won't be for long. Alexander promised."
"I did." My grandfather did not look at me: his gaze was fixed on the magic flowing into my mother. Then I saw a single mote dance across the space between them, from her into him.
"It hurts, Sarafina. You have to stop." All the changes that Raul's magic had wrought in me were unravelling. My scalp was itching. My stomach contracted into a hard ball. Tears leaked out of my eyes. When was the last time I had cried?
"Soon, darling," she said, but she wasn't looking at me.
"No," I said. "You can't do this!" The motes floated as Raul Cansino's had in the cemetery, when he was dying, but now they floated out of me and into my mother and Jason Blake. "Stop!"
Neither of them said anything. They continued to tear the magic away, to rip me apart. They stood even closer together now. Shoulder to shoulder, father and daughter. Faces set like dolls.
I gasped, then pulled back with all my strength. But as the magic flowed away, my humanity came rushing back. Pain. Emotion. My love for Sarafina. How could she do this to me?
"You're killing me!"
I fell, landed heavily on my knees. Only the magic in Tom's trousers kept them from tearing.
"Sarafina!"
Her head tilted to one side as if she heard music. Jason Blake must have heard it too. The expressions on their faces were still identical.
But they weren't listening to me.
"You're killing me and my baby. Little Glory or Brilliance or Beauty or Fibonacci. If you don't stop, she won't ever be born. You won't get to name her. Sarafina!" As the magic slipped away from me, I could see more clearly, feel more clearly. I loved my child. I loved my mother. How could she do this?
Sarafina staggered. Jason Blake steadied her. Had she heard me at last?
"Fight back," someone said beside me, slipping their arm around my waist, keeping me from falling. "Pull it back towards you!"
"Look!" Jason Blake said to Sarafina. "Your mother's here to help your daughter. I told you Esmeralda owned her now."
"Esmeralda?" I asked. "Where did you come from?" The world— both Cansino's and the real one— was losing focus around me.
"Pull, Reason, pull," Esmeralda commanded. "I'm going to lend you all the strength I have. Don't waste it."
"He wants to be like me." He'd said he wanted to be like me, called me magnificent, an extraordinary golden creature.
"Of course he does. We all do. But you can't allow it. Fight him, Reason!"
Fight
, I thought, watching the floating pieces of magic flow into my mother and from her to Jason Blake.
"He's using you, Sarafina," Esmeralda told her. "He's killing you as surely as he is Reason. You don't have to help him."
Sarafina didn't hear; she was too entranced by the dancing pieces of my magic— watching it become her magic, then Jason Blake's. She was too busy killing me to hear her mother.
31
Belly of the Beast
I could feel Esmeralda's magic
inside me now, strengthening me just a little, easing the dizziness just enough to focus again. "Fight," Esmeralda hissed in my ear.
I held out my hands, pulled as hard as I could, but only managed to slow the flow, not reverse it.
I looked at my mother's face, at Jason Blake's. Both were set. Hungry. Identical. They didn't see me, just the magic they were taking. I faltered. At once the magic began to rip loose from me again.
"Don't stop. You can't stop." Esmeralda's voice was starting to sound strained.
I pulled, harder than I had before. Why was Sarafina doing this to me? She'd hated magic, had warned me never to use it. What had my grandfather done to her?