Magic Lessons Read online

  Reason moved closer to the door.

  “Don’t touch it,” Tom and Jay-Tee said in unison.

  “The door moved before,” Jay-Tee said. “In a freaky, meltyour-fingers kind of way.”

  Reason nodded, covering her nostrils. “The smell is really bad here.”

  “What smell?”

  “Like…burnt rubber crossed with spew.”

  “Ewww,” Tom said.

  She walked away from the back door, sniffing as she went, like a tracking dog. It should have been silly, but it wasn’t. Tom and Jay-Tee followed her out into the hall.

  “Can you still smell it?”

  Ree nodded. “I smelled it as soon as I opened the door. It’s disgusting.” She paused at the bottom of the stairs. The three of them stared along the line of the wide, curving banister. There seemed to be more stairs than usual.

  “Yep, the scent is definitely sharper over here.” Reason started up the stairs, slowly. Jay-Tee put her foot on the step behind Ree. Tom joined her; he was just as brave as Jay-Tee. He trailed his half-numb fingers along the banister, feeling the highly polished texture of the wood, until he thought of how the grains of the back door had morphed into liquid. He put his hand in his pocket. “You’re still smelling it?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you when I’m not, okay?”

  Jay-Tee rolled her eyes at him but, amazingly, didn’t make any smartarse comment.

  Reason paused at the top of the stairs. Tom’s stomach tightened—the house was different, the substance of it, as if the bricks had been transformed into plasticine. It felt like they were being watched. He looked up, but the mouldings hadn’t sprouted eyes. He couldn’t smell anything other than polished wood and eucalyptus.

  Reason took a step forward and then another, leading Tom and Jay-Tee slowly toward Mere’s bedroom. Tom had never been inside before; he felt his skin prickle as Reason opened the door. Mere’s bedroom.

  The room looked as though something had exploded. Clothes and books and empty coffee cups strewn everywhere. The pictures on the walls hung at wildly divergent angles. “Bugger,” Tom said. “That thing has totalled it.”

  Jay-Tee nodded, looking as stunned as Tom. “Like it was looking for something?”

  “Bugger,” Tom repeated. It had gone through everything in the room. The bed was covered in discarded magazines, books, coffee cups. The pictures on the walls were on the verge of crashing down. What had it been looking for?

  Reason laughed. “Nah. Esmeralda’s room always looks like this. She’s the queen of messiness.”

  “But the rest of the house—” Jay-Tee began.

  “She has a housekeeper. Rita,” Tom said. Clearly, Rita’d never set foot in here.

  Reason picked her way through the debris to the balcony.

  Jay-Tee tiptoed behind her. She seemed to think that tiptoeing decreased her odds of treading on any of Mere’s stuff. Tom followed Jay-Tee. How could Mere treat her clothes like this? He knew he wouldn’t make so much as a shell top for Mere ever again. If you cared about your stuff, you didn’t drop it on the floor.

  They stepped out onto the balcony. Tom breathed in the warmer air. The sun shone down on them through Filomena, bathing them in a bright green light. The cicadas called to one another, a high-pitched wall of sound that ebbed and swelled. A large black-and-white butterfly flittered by, then dipped low and across into Tom’s backyard next door. He waved flies away. The feeling of something being there, just out of sight, something that shouldn’t be there, grew stronger.

  “Do you think it’s gone?” Jay-Tee asked.

  Reason and Tom shook their heads at the same time. Everything was still wrong. Tom touched the bricks, and for a moment they felt like paper. He pulled his hand away.

  “What?” asked Reason and Jay-Tee at the same time.

  “It feels weird. Not like bricks.” Tom looked down at his feet, wondering if the wooden boards of the balcony might suddenly change into jelly, and they’d all go sliding through.

  Jay-Tee shivered, though it was hot and the three of them were covered in a light sheen of sweat. “It’s still here, isn’t it?”

  They looked around. He couldn’t see anything weird in his backyard—the passionfruit vine on the far fence and his dad’s vegetable garden were intact, tomato plants tied to stakes, half-grown lettuces. Filomena’s enormous spreading canopy blocked most of the view in the other directions. Tom hoped that thing hadn’t climbed into the fig tree. He couldn’t imagine Filomena would like being bitten by it any better than he had.

  “Up there,” Reason said, looking at the roof. She kicked off her ugly brown sandals, climbed onto the iron railing, sending a skink scurrying out of her way. She reached for the top of a brick.

  Then, with a scream, she leapt backward and landed on the balcony with a thud. The glow-in-the-dark yellow thing was on her forearm, sinking into her. Reason tried to rip it off with her right hand. Tom grabbed at it, but the slick stuff slipped through his fingers.

  It disappeared without a sound into Reason’s arm.

  “Get it out of me. Tom! Jay-Tee! You have to get it out of me!” Reason clawed at her own arm, smearing the little dots of blood the thing left behind.

  “What do we do?” Jay-Tee was shades paler.

  “Try magic,” Tom said, kneeling beside Reason. He’d already used magic that week, but he didn’t know what else to do. The skin across her face was tight, covered in sweat. Reason was shaking.

  Jay-Tee knelt beside him. “Don’t do that, Reason,” she said, pulling Reason’s right hand away. “You’re hurting yourself.”

  Tom closed his eyes, determined not to let Jason Blake harm Reason ever again.

  4

  Door Magic

  Jay-Tee pushed her leather bracelet further up her arm, thinking about her magic, focusing it. She put her hand on Reason’s blood-smeared arm, next to Tom’s.

  Jay-Tee let her eyes blur. The thing was wearing down Reason’s connection to Jay-Tee and Tom, fading the web of lines that linked her to magic and to the people around her. The usual brilliant green strands that made up the web were hazy, except for a handful of new brown threads. Those were thin but clear, the same brown as the thing had been—the same red-brown as the door to New York.

  Jay-Tee pushed her magic against the brown threads, looking for weak spots, trying to break them. She felt Tom do the same. Reason, too, was drawing on her magic, fighting.

  Sweat ran down Jay-Tee’s back. Reason’s skin grew hotter under her hand. The thing had made her feverish; her body trying to fight the invader every way it could. Jay-Tee could see the wood-brown lines knitting together and reaching from Reason’s body back into the house, down the stairs—to the door, she was sure, back to New York, back to him. Why wouldn’t he leave her alone?

  She reached for the fine brown line, held it in her hands, feeling for where it was weakest.

  “I see it,” Tom said. “Just there. Its shape isn’t true.” He sent his magic rushing at the weak point, drawing Reason’s and Jay-Tee’s with him.

  The line snapped.

  Reason screamed.

  The Play-Doh thing exploded from her arm through the balcony and across Esmeralda’s room. Jay-Tee scrambled up, running down the stairs after it. She reached the kitchen in time to watch it disappear under the door, back to New York, back to him.

  The noise and the shaking began again, like rusty metal fingernails dragged along echoing metal pipes. The wood rippled, looking exactly like the thing—same color, same texture, same everything.

  Jay-Tee looked around desperately. She had to keep it from coming back. She snatched up a box of matches and emptied it into her hands, pushing a little of her magic into them, then she skidded across the spilled Coke to the door, spreading the matches out along the threshold, careful not to touch the wood.

  She hoped the protection would hold.

  8

  “Are you okay?”

  Reason walked normally, not as if her body had
been invaded by some creature. Her nose was screwed up and she was wearing her something-nasty-just-crawled-up-my-nostrils face, but other than that she looked okay.

  Jay-Tee, on the other hand, was so exhausted, she’d had to sit on the sticky, Coke-covered floor and lean back against the kitchen cupboards.

  “I’m fine,” Reason answered.

  Jay-Tee looked at Tom, who shrugged.

  “It only hurt while it was inside me.”

  Jay-Tee couldn’t believe it. Her shin was still throbbing in the spot where the thing had bitten her. “You’re really fine?”

  Reason answered with a retching noise and followed it up by spewing on the kitchen floor. “I have to go outside.”

  8

  Jay-Tee and Tom cleaned up after Reason, and then they tackled the sticky Coke mess.

  “What do you think Jason Blake wants?” Tom asked, wiping down one of the cupboard doors.

  Jay-Tee wished Tom would stop saying his name. She’d learned fast never to use his name—not any of them. Though it didn’t make any sense to her, Jay-Tee knew that saying his name gave him more power. No matter how far away he was—if you said one of his names, if you even thought it—he’d know and show up to laugh at you and take more of your magic.

  “What do you think he wants, Tom?”

  “Our magic?”

  “You got it.”

  “Do you think those matches will hold?” He gestured at the bottom of the door.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been quiet, though, hasn’t it? When did Esmeralda say she’d be home?”

  “Soon.”

  Jay-Tee dumped their glasses in the sink. “I’m going upstairs to change. These’ve got Coke all over them.”

  She went into Reason’s room and picked out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. They were pretty ugly—Reason was clueless about clothes—but they’d do. Esmeralda had promised to take her shopping for stuff of her own when there was time.

  A week ago Jay-Tee hadn’t even known her father was dead and would never beat her again. It had been weird telling her brother, Danny, why she’d run away. It had been such a big secret for so long. She hadn’t even told Reason. And Danny had believed her, hadn’t doubted for a second. It had been such a relief.

  She’d felt guilty, like somehow it was her fault that her dad had gone crazy one day and started beating her. She still had no idea why. He never said anything, just laid into her, silent and furious. Now he was dead, so she’d never know what she’d done wrong. And no sooner had she run away from her dad than she’d wound up trapped by him. From the frying pan into the fire.

  She’d spent a lot of her first two days in Sydney on the phone to Danny talking about it all and catching up on his life. He’d gotten into Georgetown on a basketball scholarship, like he’d always wanted, though he wasn’t taking it up for another year because of Dad dying—plus, he’d been searching for her. He was playing ball whenever and wherever he could. Same old. He’d given Jay-Tee a majorly sketchy answer when she’d asked about girlfriends, which meant he was messing with more than one. Nothing changed there. Playing ball came first, girls a long way after.

  Talking to Danny, hanging out with Reason and Tom, being in Sydney such a long, long way from him, Jay-Tee had started to believe things would get better.

  But here he was, up to his usual tricks. Jay-Tee had forgotten that lucky was not her middle name, that no matter what happened she had, at best, only a few more years to live. Right now she felt every second of that short time piled on top of her, weighing her down. She was tired, worn thin like an old rag.

  He’d done something to the house. It didn’t feel right anymore. The three of them—Jay-Tee+Reason+Tom—had a distinctive feel together, but it was off kilter now. The thing had upset the balance. Jay-Tee could always feel the dynamic between living things. It was part of how she could tell when someone was lying or not. Or, rather, whether they believed they were telling the truth or not.

  Since she’d laid out the matches, there hadn’t been any more weird thumping or scraping at the door. Had the thing really disappeared back to New York? Was what she was feeling now just its nasty residue? Like shock waves long after an earthquake has stopped?

  The thing had been the exact same brown as the door, complete with wood grains. Maybe it was part of the door. Did that mean the door was alive?

  She’d seen that happen sometimes with dance floors, especially old ones that had been danced on by thousands and thousands of people over the years. The dance floor absorbed all that crowd magic, began to dance a little itself. Once, in a shoe store in the city, Jay-Tee had taken one step on the old wooden floor and felt it reaching toward her, accommodating itself to the movement of her feet, ready, eager for her to dance. Instantly she’d known it had been a dance floor—people had waltzed, fox-trotted, Charlestoned, jitterbugged, boogied, and twisted across its surface for many, many years. She’d spun, feeling the floor push back, giving her extra spring and lift. She’d grinned. One of the guys who worked there had grinned back, danced toward her. “Isn’t this song great? Just makes you dance.”

  He’d lifted her up, twirled her around, and danced her toward all the best shoes. The song changed, but he kept dancing. As they moved together she saw everyone else in the store swaying, dipping, shifting. Jay-Tee had felt the floor throughout her body, flowing in from her feet, through the fingertips of the guy twirling her around. She could have sworn, somehow, that the floor was smiling.

  Maybe something similar had happened to the door. Maybe it was angry at all those generations of magic-wielders stretching it across two continents. Was that possible? Maybe it was furious at everyone who had ever stepped through it. And he was using the door’s anger against them.

  Jay-Tee knew with every part of her body that he was behind this. Sending that creepy thing through to terrorize them, trying to figure out a way through the door to steal all their magic—that would be just his speed.

  8

  The two of them joined Reason on the front steps, where Jay-Tee still felt her back tingling with fear.

  “Esmeralda will know what to do,” Jay-Tee said, trying to convince herself as much as Reason. “She’ll get rid of the smell, make the door even stronger.” She’ll keep him out, Jay-Tee thought.

  A trickle of sweat ran down Jay-Tee’s spine. She’d love to go for a swim—immerse herself in cool water and float and forget that he existed.

  Reason grimaced, though it could have been an attempt at a smile.

  “Can you still smell it?” Tom asked. Jay-Tee nudged him in the ribs. Tom could be so dense; it was obvious Reason was still shaky and didn’t want to think about what had happened. Reason didn’t feel right to Jay-Tee: she was somehow separate, not connected to her or Tom like she’d been before.

  “No,” Reason answered, “but I can still taste it.” She looked yellow.

  The front gate opened and they looked up to see Esmeralda, dressed in a fancy gray suit with lots of shiny black buttons, holding a leather briefcase. Her high heels were black and shiny, too. Jay-Tee would boil in that getup on such a scorching day, but Esmeralda didn’t look hot or flustered. Tom said she was forty-five, but Jay-Tee found that hard to believe. She didn’t look old at all.

  Jay-Tee grinned and felt herself relax. It was a huge relief to see Reason’s grandmother.

  “Hi, Mere,” Tom said. He never called Esmeralda by her full name. Jay-Tee figured he did it to remind them that he knew Esmeralda best. Like anyone cared.

  “Are you all right?” Esmeralda asked, closing the front gate behind her. She lowered her voice. “I thought you said the thing went back under the door?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Maybe we should talk about this inside?”

  Reason shook her head. “Can’t. The smell.”

  “The smell?”

  “Reason could smell it—” Jay-Tee began.

  Esmeralda shook her head. “I won’t be a minute.”

  She took m
ore like fifteen, returning dressed in jeans and a shirt. She was frowning. “Let’s go next door.”

  Jay-Tee wondered why on earth they were going to Tom’s place, but then Esmeralda turned left instead of right, pulling out a key to open the front door to a small brick cottage.

  Jay-Tee had barely noticed the place before. There wasn’t a lot to notice. It was only one room wide, and its tiny front garden had been bricked over to save the hassle of watering plants. The front window was closed and shuttered, as if whoever lived there was shutting out the world.

  Before she stuck the key in the lock, Esmeralda turned to them. “Are you ready for your first magic lesson together?”

  “But what about your house? The door? Shouldn’t we be—” Jay-Tee began.

  “We’ll be able to do more here. Trust me.” Esmeralda smiled. “So, are you ready for a lesson?”

  Jay-Tee nodded and Tom said yes. Reason hesitated, looked straight into her grandmother’s eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to see.”

  Esmeralda nodded, as if that were good enough, and opened the door.

  5

  A Lesson in Magic

  Esmeralda waved us into a narrow corridor, closing the door, then locking and bolting it behind us.

  I smelled only dust and the sweat on Jay-Tee, Tom, and me. I swallowed. The taste of that thing still lingered in my mouth. My arm ached where it had pushed its way inside me. I was warmer than I should be, glowing inside where it had been. Strangest of all: that thing was familiar—I almost recognised it. I wondered if that was because my grandfather, Jason Blake, had sent it.

  The house was the perfect place for witchcraft: small, cramped, dark, and dank. There were only two doors off the gloomy corridor, which ended in what looked like a kitchen.

  “These are the three rules of this house,” Esmeralda said, turning to us. “Never come here unless I am with you. Always walk in one direction: counterclockwise.”

  Widdershins, I thought. I never lied, Sarafina’d said to me. I should have believed her. This was Esmeralda’s house of magic. This was where she sacrificed animals and did everything Sarafina had told me about.