Shadows (13 page)

“So?” said Ran. “I smell hot chocolate. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” said Mom, “and if you’re hungry, hot chocolate isn’t what you want.”

“Yes it is,” said Ran. “I want food
too.
”

Mom gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stood up. “I think I’m hungry too. Who wants to start the sandwiches while I make some more hot chocolate?”

CHAPTER 5

IT WAS NEARLY ONE A.M. BEFORE WE ALL GOT TO bed. Ran kept falling asleep, but he still managed to eat three sandwiches. But I think both Mom and I were so glad that some of the wall that had grown up between us was (maybe) coming down that we kind of wanted to keep on hanging out, even if it was a school night. I tried not to flinch when Mom patted Val’s hand or he put his arm briefly around her, when he said something quietly in her ear that made her giggle as she was peeling carrots at the sink, when she dropped a kiss on the top of his head after he sat down while she was setting the plate of sandwiches on the table (lettuce, cheese, and tomato or peanut butter, bean sprout and carrot—the second a house specialty, and
I
made them because I knew how to squish the sprouts and the grated carrots into the peanut butter so they didn’t all fall out again). They’ve been married less than two months, I told myself. I also told myself: and this is the way they are when I’m not around. I tried not to startle when Val turned toward me a little too quickly (for me: I don’t think he
was
turning quickly), as if he was one of his own shadows. As if he hadn’t told us . . . what he had told us. And I tried to remember that the shadows were only his . . . I didn’t know what they were, familiars? Did real magicians have familiars, like a witch in a fairy tale? I only knew that one of them was friendly. And that I was already starting to take her word (um, “word”) for it that Val was a good guy. In spite of what he had told us. The baseboards were black with shadows as we sat down to eat in the kitchen, and more of them hung from the curtain railings like swags.

I wondered how long ago it was, since his best friend died. I wondered what the friend had done that was so awful and dangerous.

There were so many more shadows than there had been all those months ago, when I opened the door and saw Val for the first time. As if Station had suddenly become a popular shadow vacation spot. As if the first ones had written back to all their friends and relations and said, Come join us here! It’s really nice, and we’re having a great time freaking out this girl who can see us!

And Val has got
married
! they might have added. If shadows knew about married. Had Val had a wife before? Did magicians have wives? I tried to remember what he’d told me on all those trips to the grocery store, the couple of times we’d gone to the zoo. But I’d always tried to forget anything Val told me, or not to listen in the first place. I remembered some of what he’d said about Orzaskan indigenous wildlife. I didn’t remember anything about family or friends.

Mom didn’t say anything when I didn’t shut Mongo in the kitchen after I took him out for his last pee. We went upstairs very quietly, as if we were shadows trying not to be noticed. I was exhausted but I found it hard to get to sleep. I had way,
way
too much to think about . . . and Casimir’s face started drifting across my mind’s eye and that made my heart beat even faster than thinking about Val’s shadows did.

Funny, I thought vaguely, that Takahiro’s face appeared a few times too. Takahiro was my friend, even if he was annoying a lot of the time, but he was too tall and too solemn to crush on.

I was almost asleep when the air in my bedroom did a tiny, funny, indescribable shift. I felt Mongo’s tail lift once and slap down gently across my ankles as he lay along my legs. I smelled her as—I guess—she settled down on the bed. Do shadows sleep? I thought about freaking out but I was tired and finally beginning to relax into comfort . . . and Mongo liked her . . . and it was a nice smell, like pine trees at the beginning of your vacation.

• • •

She was gone in the morning. I woke up late and still tired—the way you do after you’ve really tapped yourself out, even if you’ve had enough sleep and should be ready for the next thing. Not only wasn’t I ready, I didn’t
want
any next things. There were too many things already and I hadn’t been ready for them either. I also woke up stiff—stiff and sore, as if I’d been on a real battleground swinging a real sword or a real rocket launcher.

Pretty much my first thought was, She’s gone. I wasn’t even sure how I knew she was gone—how do you look for an
absence
of a shadow? It reminded me of those horrible proofs in math class—you couldn’t ever say, this is right or this is wrong, you could only say, we’ve done this a hundred gazillion times and it’s always worked out so far. But I knew she was gone, even though I thought fuzzily that there was still a faint trace of her smell . . .

Of course my second thought was, You made it all up, you pathetic broken tool. But Mongo was still here (watching me with eyes open just a slit, ready to turn into Two Ton Dog if I tried to move him) and Mom only let me take Mongo to bed with me if something really traumatic had happened. Well, but there were all kinds of traumas. It didn’t have to be about shadows with too many feet. Or terrible things that had happened to other people. Maybe it was about having flu.

Maybe it was just the fading smell that meant it wasn’t the first day of vacation. . .
drog me.
School. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t un-catch-up-ably late—probably. I mean, I’d had worse mornings. Mongo’s morning walk would be at full speed though.

I could hear people moving around in the kitchen. I wanted to go back to sleep, but that was more about not wanting to find out what had happened yesterday than how tired I still was. Why hadn’t Mom banged on my door? Maybe she thought I was ill. Maybe I
was
ill. Maybe I really had flu.

Maybe I didn’t. I sighed and swung my legs out of bed. I found my jeans and pulled out the little piece of paper with Casimir’s phone number on it. Okay, that had happened. Maybe I could face the rest. Whatever it was. Once I was up and dressed Mongo agreed to accompany me downstairs. He was trying to decide whether to be unhappy about having to get off my bed or happy about the prospect of his walk. I wished I was a dog with this kind of choice to make.

The radio news was just finishing as I walked past the sofa and across the hall. I was looking at the sofa like there was going to be a big sign on it telling me what had happened there last night. I was thinking about last night hard enough that I wasn’t paying attention to the radio.
Quack quack quack,
it said, the way it always does. I let Mongo out into the back yard and headed for the coffeepot. Ran, oblivious to everything, was eating cereal, with a book propped up against the box, which was going to fall over as soon as he turned a page. When the cereal box went over, the sugar bowl behind it was going to go over too. I picked up one of Mom’s African violets in a stoneware pot and replaced the sugar bowl with it. Ran turned a page and the box quaked.

Having swallowed my first half a mug of coffee, I began to register that it was too quiet in the rest of the kitchen. Mom and Val were just standing there. Val must have students this morning; he wasn’t a morning person if he could help it. I had an ingrained, seven months’ habit of
not
looking directly at Val, but checking the immediate vicinity for shadows when I knew he was nearby. There was a clump of them under the radiator and the sideboard. I sighed, and reminded myself they—and Val—weren’t the enemy any more. I hoped. There was a faint, something-like-whiskery touch against my bare foot and I looked down: Hix. Eeep. Wait, can you say “eeep” about something who’s been sleeping on your bed with you? Un-eeep. If she’d been a dog, I’d’ve bent down to pat her. I knelt down, and she
unrolled
suddenly and was a shadowy, slightly weaving column in front of me again, except this time she was as tall as I was as I knelt on the floor next to her. I bit down on the gasp, or do I mean scream, and hastily put a hand down to the floor before I rocked too far backward and fell over.

The hand went down right in front of her, and she must have thought it was an invitation, because she dove forward—I bit down again, and this time tasted blood—but she was now swarming up my arm. . . . I shut my eyes and sucked (gently) at my wounded cheek. She slithered around the back of my neck—my hair blew aside and came down again, like when you pull your hair up from under your collar and let it drop—and stopped on my other shoulder. The rest of her finished shooting up my arm and stopped (I thought) on that shoulder. Accordion shadow? There was a little of her trailing down against my chest, but she was only about half the length she’d been when she stood up in front of me. Shawl shadow. Feather boa shadow. I could smell her again. It was still a nice smell. She weighed totally nothing, but you—I—were still kind of aware there was something there. Someone. I warily put a hand up. I could, I thought,
just
feel her—that whiskery feeling again, against the tips of my fingers, and that lovely, first-day-of-vacation smell fanned delicately against my face. I wiggled my fingers, trying to, well, pet her, and there was this faint hum or vibration—almost like she was purring.

Finally I looked up. Both Mom and Val were staring at the radio, even though all it was saying now was that it was going to rain tomorrow. Okay, I wouldn’t invite Casimir for a romantic riverside walk then. I stood up slowly, as if I were balancing something heavy and fragile across my shoulders. “Mom?” I said. “Er . . .” Before last night I would have ignored Val unless he said something directly to me, but now, with one of his shadows draped around my neck, humming . . .

Val made it easier. He looked at me. “Val?” I said.

“There is a cobey in Copperhill,” said Val.

“Copperhill?” I said.
“Copperhill?”
Copperhill was like two towns over—less than ten miles. Most of the kids in Copperhill came to our school—a few of them went to Motorford Tech on the other side of Longiron. “I mean—confirmed?”

“Yes,” said Mom. “NIDL has just issued a statement.”

The niddles were the practical branch of Overguard. If they were involved it was too big for the Watchguard, which was definitely bad news. I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “But . . .”
But
probably everyone who ever had a cobey open up near them said that, so I didn’t say anything.

“There was one in Greenwire when you were just a baby,” said Mom, trying to be brisk. “It was pretty serious at the time, but they cleaned it up and I don’t think there’s even a scar. There wasn’t any fuss about reclassifying land use. Most of our milk still comes from Greenwire.”

And the niddles were nothing if not paranoid. I tried to breathe easier. I heard Ran pouring more cereal so I went to check on the African violet, and let Mongo back in, who was beginning to wail at the back door. He knew there was breakfast going on and he didn’t want to miss anything.

I had to reach past Val to open the cupboard where Mongo’s kibble lived (on the
highest
shelf and so relatively bad-breaking-training-moment-proof) and as he moved aside I got a better look at his face. He looked even older than he had last night, and haunted. “Val?” I said, and my reaching hand, almost without my awareness, fell on his arm instead of grabbing the cupboard handle. “Are you all right?”

He smiled at me. I didn’t think I’d ever really looked at him—without looking away again immediately—when he smiled. The lines on his face looked like they went in a long way. Mom was thirty-nine (and said crisply when asked that forty was just a year like any other year and your point was?). I knew vaguely that he was older than Mom but this morning he looked as old as a magician in a fairy tale telling you how the world began, which he knew about because he’d been there. “A cobey in the area is never all right,” he said. I was trying to decide if he was blowing me off when he added: “And last night—I spent the dark hours listening to the voices of things I thought were gone forever . . .” He paused.

Things, I thought. I wondered if he’d heard the voice of his best friend. Or of the beginning of the world.

“It will take me more than one night to adjust. I cannot even see the
gruuaa
—the shadows—as you can at present. And—if this were Orzaskan, I would be a—a niddle.”

“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

“No,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. The truth is usually to be preferred—especially in matters concerning magic, where untruth can be fatal.”

Magic was fatal for your friend, I thought.

“And I never wished to distress you. That, at least, is better now, I hope?”

“Yes,” I said, Hix still humming in my ear, although if I were one of his students I’d have trouble looking at that shirt for a whole tutorial hour. And—holy electricity—not just socks with sandals, but
plaid
socks with sandals.