She turned hurriedly and went to her bedroom.
Gran and I looked at each other.
“I tried,” I said.
“You did fine,” Gran said gently. “It’s not so easy when you know that, much as you love your mother, and much as she loves you, you’re braver than she is.”
That stuff again! Could it be that Gran didn’t know how scared I was most of the time we were fighting Brightner?
Anyway, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nobody can be brave all the time, certainly not me. And Mom can’t be a weakling and still do her job for her authors and keep going in publishing, which is a business that looks like it’s dying out half the time and turning into something completely different the other half.
But Gran was generally right, so I wasn’t going to argue. Besides, I had something else on my mind.
“Listen,” I said, “you know what she said that night, about how she hated you being a witch? And you said you wished you’d known. If you had known how she felt while she was a little kid, would you have quit?”
Gran took a paper napkin and carefully dabbed at the corners of her mouth, which had a tendency to leak slightly when she was eating. She stared at the TV screen for a second.
Then she said, “No. The gift was mine, and I chose to use it. But I might have found ways to try to make it all easier on poor Laura. Why do you ask? Are you thinking about resigning your own capacities to ease your mother’s mind?”
I considered this while Gran demolished another puff of thin, fried bread loaded with chutney.
“What if I do resign?”
“That’s up to you,” she said. “But I can tell you, lovie, that deciding for someone else’s sake not to use your own strength is usually a poor choice, with sad lessons in it and precious little joy.”
I ate more pickled onions. “Actually, I think I’ll stick with the family gift,” I said.
Gran licked crumbs off her lips—for a second there she reminded me of a certain little gray alley cat.
“That decision will have its own costs, you realize. There are lessons in every choice you make, and not all lessons can be fun.”
I sighed. No sugar-coated reassurances from Gran. “I can hack it,” I said.
I hope I can.
To tell the truth, I am not sorry that Mom wants no part of magic for herself. Even without special powers, she knows things you wouldn’t expect her to. Any more of that and life could be pretty uncomfortable for me.
Speaking of which, she has never mentioned my pilfering again, maybe because I’ve quit doing it. It just doesn’t seem to fit me anymore.
Not that I’m some different person than I was, deep down. My friends recognize me all right. Barb came to visit while I was still in bed.
“So how’d things turn out?” she said, as soon as we were alone.
I told her.
She sat and thought for about five minutes. Then she said, “Listen, Valentine. Next time something like this comes up, I want to know about it right away. If you ever go off on some kind of magical adventure without me again, I will never forgive you.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry about the mirror.”
“Well, yeah,” she said, a little grudgingly. “But it did you some good, right? That’s what it was for.” She chuckled. “It’s really something, though! That dinky little mirror helped!”
“It sure did,” I said fervently. “Listen, you can have anything I’ve got to make up for it, Barb. Just name it, okay?”
She reared back and looked at me from under arched eyebrows. “Did I say I was selling you my mirror? Did I say I was trading it for something? Wouldn’t mind borrowing your Auntie Jailbreak records for my next party, though.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
We were quiet, comfortable and satisfied with that.
Then I asked her, “How’d it go with, you know, your own problem?”
Barb made a face. “Brother picked up his stuff and left home. He just walked out, after all that fuss. And he took my iPod with him. He is on his own from now on, believe me. I am going to be too busy with my own life to get messed around again on account of him, wherever he is.”
Well, maybe. I know a thing or two more about family loyalty than I did before.
Barb was a great audience. Talking to her kind of loosened up some of the tension the whole business had left thrumming around in my nerves. She made me tell it all to her about six times, till I said I was all talked out.
Then she grinned and said, “Got something for you. I don’t think it’s magic, but it will make you laugh.” She got a newspaper clipping out of her bookbag and gave it to me. “From Lennie,” she said. “He asked me to give it to you.”
“SLIME-COATED MEN ARRESTED NEAR MILLIONS,” the headline said.
No, it wasn’t about giant snail-men from Pluto captured at a football game. It was about some Italian burglars who got caught trying to break into the central post office in Rome to steal a payroll—by sneaking in through the sewers.
Mom stuck her head into my room, her glasses shoved up on her forehead. She did most of her work from home that week, especially during the part when I couldn’t use my hands too well.
“It’s not enough to pass notes in class, now you’re doing it at home? What for—practice? What’s so funny, anyway?”
I showed her the clipping. “Good grief! Where did you girls find this?”
“Lennie sent it,” I said. “His father gets lots of newspapers. When I go over there after school, sometimes we look through the stack for the most outrageous headlines we can find.”
Mom handed it back.
“Well, keep it down to a dull roar in here, will you?” she said. “I’ve got a contract to discuss with one of my authors, and it takes away from my agently dignity if he hears screams of laughter in the background.”
I told Barb, “Tell Lennie this one is a real winner. Tell him I’m glad to hear from him.”
“Sure,” she said. “Now tell me again how your Gran fed Ushah to Kali-on-the-wall.”
When I got back to school with a note from the doctor about my mysterious illness, the first thing I did was take a deep breath and walk down the hall to the office of the school psychologist. Imagine my surprise: there was Miss Matthews, back again!
Word had it that somehow her marriage had turned out to be illegal or something. Or maybe it just didn’t turn out. Anyway, she was back, all perky and chin-up and pretending she had never been shunted aside by circumstances to make room so the dreaded Dr. Brightner could move in on me in my own school.
I couldn’t help it, I mentioned his name, just to see what would happen.
“I understand that this Dr. Brightner was a pretty impressive guy,” she said, “but apparently unstable, to have just disappeared the way he did. Never let it be said that we psychologists are immune to mental troubles of our own.”
“Never,” I agreed, “especially the ones who aren’t really psychologists at all. Like Brightner.”
“Now, Valentine,” she said firmly, “just because you didn’t like the man, that’s no reason to make wild accusations now that he’s not around to defend himself.”
“You wouldn’t like it much if he were,” I began, pushed by an impulse to spill it all and blow her mind. But the look she gave me made it clear that much more of that and I’d be seeing her regularly, so I left it alone.
Lennie, having made his peace offering with Slime-coated Men, has heard part of the story and is still chewing that over. He says a little at a time is fine with him. He’s trying to get used to the idea of me having a magical grandmother, never mind my having helped to kick an evil wizard our of our world.
“Valentine Marsh,” he says sometimes, slowly and thoughtfully. He looks at me and shakes his head. “Valentine Marsh. You are really something.”
I did actually manage to catch up on my homework, by nearly killing myself. School is important. I’m thinking about eventually app
lying to Duke or some other place where they do research on the so-called paranormal.
I’ve spotted Dirty Rose once or twice, making her garbage-can rounds. The one time I tried to get close enough to give her a candy bar I had in my pocket, she scurried away muttering wildly over her shoulder at me. Whatever ironing out of the mental kinks Brightner was going to do to his captives had never gotten done, or maybe unraveled once he was gone.
You can’t have everything, I guess.
It’s a funny feeling to have somebody so scared of you. No, not funny. It makes me sad.
I know that Rose is just as scared of lots of other people, too, though probably the ideas she has of why she’s scared are delusions, not memories of real horrors that she got caught up in with Gran and me. I’m only sorry that she didn’t get something good out of it all.
In the park, they’ve fixed up Wollman rink again. The “inexplicable disappearance” of a crane they’d been using for the repairs made the papers. A street gang sent the cops a note claiming “credit” for having kidnapped the crane. Ho-ho.
On a more personal level, Mom and I don’t ever talk about the Demon Shrink. I’m not sure she remembers him much, actually. She has taken up with one of her authors, a guy who writes thrillers—as if we needed thrills around here!—and she seems pretty happy.
Me, I am delighted. If she wants normal, she should have it. As she said herself, lots of people seem to like it fine.
Actually, being back in the ordinary groove suits me. I think I’ve had about all I want of the wild world of sorcery and so on for some time. I never thought I would feel this way. I mean, I not only helped Gran, I did some magic myself, with Barb’s mirror and the silver glove.
However, a little of that goes a long way, particularly when you don’t have a lot of spare time to stand around admiring what you’ve done and basking in your own glory. Life, as they say, goes on.
And besides, suppose I’d done it wrong?
Also, in spite of what I told Gran, I do have moments of seeing Mom’s point of view about the family talent. Moments of doubt. And dreams, sometimes, of not being able to find Barb’s mirror at the crucial moment, or of seeing Mom or Gran folded in the arms of Kali instead of Ushah. Things like that.
Gran says don’t worry, you can’t expect to go through a siege like that one without some aftereffects. She seems to have a lot of confidence in me. This is a good thing, since my own confidence tends to sort of wobble out of focus when I consider that I might have failed, after all.
Gran says the mages of Sorcery Hall are grateful for our efforts, which apparently have helped them in their war with Brightner’s employers. Sorcery Hall itself seems to be out of immediate danger, which is a relief.
But we don’t talk about that stuff a lot.
I think Gran has a pretty good idea of my own feelings about what we’ve all just come through. She’s not pushing anything. She says she doesn’t want to distract me from the plain old business of growing up, and that when I’m ready for another dose of magic, I’ll know it.
I only hope she’s still around when that happens. She is a lot more frail than she was, I think. She’s living in a residential hotel not far from us, which is not great—she says she misses some of the services of the Jersey retirement home—but the life in the streets around her seems to entertain and stimulate her. She hardly ever forgets what’s going on, so shortcake remarks are at a minimum.
She’s teaching me to read Tarot cards, for the discipline, she says.
I said, “How come when you read my cards that day at the flea market, you couldn’t see what was coming and warn me?”
Gran said, “The cards don’t tell the future, you know. Nothing and no one can do that, since you create your future as you go along by the decisions you make. The cards showed what was likely, that was all.
“As it happened, the card called The Tower, which you said looked awful, turned out to be not quite what it seemed. It wasn’t that you suffered disaster so much as that you were part of a disaster that another brought upon himself. Which I think you’ll agree was not, in the long run, a bad thing at all.”
Aside from some arguments about my learning the cards, and other more usual-type arguments, Mom and I are getting along better. Whenever I look at her I remember that I am the braver one, just as Gran said—at least as far as magic is concerned. And that gives me a strange, tender feeling about Mom.
Protective, I guess. It’s weird.
Though she can be very annoying, of course. I mean, she is my mom. She still erupts when I forget to do things she’s asked me to do, or do stuff she asked me not to do. But she’s better than she was about a lot of things.
Yesterday the phone rang and I got to it ahead of her. I was expecting a call from Lennie, so naturally I answered, “Slime-coated Men; what can we do for you?”
Mom groaned and squinched up her eyes. “Oh, no, not Lennie again!”
Then she thought a minute and added quietly, “Oh, well, I suppose there are worse faults than having one continuous eyebrow.”
——
Val’s adventures continue in Sorcery Hall 3: The Golden Thread.
More Young Adult Titles
by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Sorcery Hall Series
Book 1: The Bronze King
Book 2: The Silver Glove
Book 3: The Golden Thread
This is the story of Valentine Marsh, a New York kid faced with the call of an impossible destiny; of her divided family, her enemies both home-grown and far-flung, and her awed and unlikely fellow-adventurers who, with Val in the lead, battle their way to the lofty gates of Sorcery Hall.
The Kingdom of Kevin Malone
Amy, brooding on a family crisis, retreats to Central Park—from the frying pan straight into the fire! Out of her past swoops her old arch-enemy Kevin Malone, the neighborhood punk who used to bully her. Kevin’s feverish imagination has transformed Central Park into the Fayre Farre. Here, among castles, elves, monsters, battles and prophecies, Kevin is a Prince and a legendary champion. He’s also still a self-centered jerk, and he’s lost control of his magnificent creation. Will Amy risk her life to help Kevin, or just leave him to sort out his own mess? And either way, where will that leave her?
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