A Little Night Magic (7 page)

At the moment, though, I was too tired to think about it, so I stuffed the toiletry bag under my bathroom sink and went to take a nap.

*   *   *

It was a little after seven at night when I woke up, although with the sun being out so late in the summer, it took me a moment to realize it was still Wednesday, my day off. I lay back in my bed and stared at the ceiling, wrist resting on my forehead. I supposed I could eat, but it was hard to work up any enthusiasm for it. Really, the only thing I had enough energy to do was go back to sleep.

Just as I’d closed my eyes, I heard it. A sound, downstairs. A door opening. I shot up in bed and my heart raced as I tried to remember … hadn’t I locked the door? Not that anyone in this neighborhood needed to lock their doors with Peach and Ginny Boyle around, but still … I thought I had.

“Crap,” I said, trying to decide what to do. Maybe whoever it was would just steal my television and leave me in peace. I really didn’t care; it was an old TV, and it’d save me the trouble of selling it. I closed my eyes and tried to convince myself it was my imagination, but then I heard more shuffling downstairs and figured I had to at least check it out.

I grabbed my pink softball bat and walked down the stairs; when I got to the foyer at the bottom, I heard a sound in the kitchen, and relaxed a bit as I realized it was probably just Peach. We’d traded house keys years ago, and she had no boundaries. It would be just like her to let herself in if she needed sugar or eggs or something.

“Peach?” I called out, still holding the bat in my hands, but a little lowered. “Is that you?”

The kitchen door flew open and Davina stepped out, her bright peacock-colored skirt whirling around her. I screamed. Davina threw up her arms and screamed, too, spilling a bit of her drink on the floor. She took a breath and raised one hand to the wall to steady herself as she laughed.

“Oh, baby, you scared the hell out of me.” She looked down at the floor and said, “Crap, I spilled,” and then flew through the kitchen door, leaving it swinging in a wake of blue silk and lilac scent.

I stood in my foyer for another minute or so. I realized my mouth was hanging open and I shut it. Adrenaline shot through my body on every hard pump of my raging heart, and I went into the kitchen, where I saw Davina placing a second glass of scotch down on my tiny linoleum table, presumably for me.

“Sit down,” she said, grabbing a sponge off the sink. “I’ll be right back.”

She disappeared, humming an unfamiliar song as she cleaned up the spill on the other side of the kitchen door, then came back in and sat down opposite me, lifting her glass in the air.

“We need to talk,” she said, and downed her glass.

“Talk? About what? You broke into my house. We don’t need to talk, you need to leave.”

“You look good,” Davina said, her eyes bright. She reached out and patted my hand. “You got your color back, which is good. Especially after that incident in the alley next to Happy Larry’s.”

I felt a chill run down my back. “What are you talking about?”

She laughed. “I’m talking about how I saved you from that guy.” She made a flinging motion with her arm, then made some
boom! pow!
sounds to imitate knocking the guy out in the alley. Then, she giggled. “Women’s Ultimate Frisbee Champion, University of Louisiana, 1981.” She glowed, proud of herself. “I still got it.”

“Well … what the…? That was
you
?”

“Sure was,” she said. “And I saw what you did, too.
Dog!
” She laughed and clapped her hands. “
Very
impressive work, and really advanced for someone who’s only been at it for what? A week?”

I swallowed and sat back. “You saw … the dog?”

“Sure did.”

“But … you couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve spent the better part of the last few days convincing myself none of that happened. That it was a drunken hallucination, a brain tumor maybe. I was making progress with that.”

“Ain’t no brain tumor, baby. It’s magic and you have it.” She giggled again, like a little girl. “Isn’t it exciting?”

I stared at her. I had a lot of emotions whirling within me at the moment. Excitement wasn’t one of them. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am. I’m Davina.”

“No, I mean … what is up with you? You threw a gym sock at me. What was that about?”

“That was necessary. I had to be sure you were who I thought you were.”

“What was in the gym sock?”

She looked to the ceiling for a moment as she composed her answer, then smiled at me. “Think of it as a magical DNA test. It came out positive, and unblocked your power.”

“I don’t have any power,” I said.

“I know an aluminum dog might beg to differ with you there.”

“Yeah, and speaking of that … why didn’t you just come out in the alley instead of throwing things? I was totally freaked out.”

“Oh, I couldn’t risk that man seeing me with you, baby.” She leaned forward. “He’s trying to kill me. Who knows what he’d do to you if he knew we were friends?”

“
Kill
you? Why?”

“Well, for the same reason anyone wants to kill anyone else,” Davina said simply. “He’s crazy.”

“Who the hell is he?”

She took another sip, a grim look on her face. “His name is Cain. Avoid him. He’s bad news.” Her expression brightened. “I want to talk about you. What other magic have you done? Anything fun?”

I stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about, then gave up.

“Yeah. Okay. That’s it.” I got up and pushed through the kitchen door, walking into the living room, and hunting for my cordless phone. I never put it back on the stupid cradle, and I can never find it when I need it.

I could hear Davina’s footsteps coming up behind me. “What’s the matter, baby?”

“The matter? I don’t know. Trash can lids turning into dogs. Strange men trying to kill you. Either I’m nuts, or you’re nuts. Likely, we’re both nuts. Maybe you’re not even real. Either way, doesn’t matter. I need to call someone. Like … I don’t know. A doctor? Maybe?”

“You don’t need a doctor.”

I started pawing through my couch cushions, feeling underneath them for the phone. Davina’s hand clamped down on my arm, pulling me back. I stared at her dark fingers over my skin. I could feel them there. I looked at her.

“I can feel you.”

I reached out and poked her cheek with one finger, and she swatted my hand away.

“I’m
real,
” she said.

I pulled out of her grip. “Look, go away. I know you’re not real. You’re a hallucination, and the trash-can-lid dog was a hallucination, and that guy probably was, too. I’m going to call a doctor, and he’s going to give me drugs that make the whole bunch of you
go away.
”

Davina stared at me, and took a step back. Good. I went back into the couch cushions and my hands hit something hard and plastic. I pulled it out: the phone. I held it out to her like a weapon, hit the call button. The numbers on the dial pad lit up orange, and I poised my fingers over it to dial …

… but I didn’t have a number to call. I needed the Yellow Pages. Except—crap—it was after five. I wouldn’t be able to make an appointment. Did this qualify as an emergency? Should I call 911?

I looked at Davina. She was either real, and had broken into my house, or she wasn’t, and I was hallucinating. Both possibilities counted as emergencies in my book.

“Nine-one-one it is,” I said, and dialed the 9, but then Davina said, “Don’t do that,” and touched my arm and I wigged out and tossed the phone up into the air. My hands tingled with extreme heat, and I felt dizzy and disoriented.

“Agh!” I yelled. “Don’t do that. You’re freaking me out!”

“Calm down, Olivia,” she said.

“No. I need my phone. I need to call nine-one-one.” I glanced around the floor, looking for where the phone had landed, but I didn’t see it anywhere. I was just registering that I couldn’t recall hearing it fall to the ground when something flew past my head. I swatted at it and looked up to see a small black body floating above my head with bony wings, wisps of electric yellow light circling around it as it flew …

“Bat!” I screamed, pointing, but Davina just stared, watching it fly around. I stared, too, looking closer as it flew in circles overhead. It had bat wings, and a bat body, but on closer inspection, it seemed to be made of some kind of hard plastic.

And there were glowing orange numbers on its chest.

Davina just watched it, smiling as her eyes followed its circular arcs around the room, banging into walls, zooming back, and trying again.

“Oh, Jesus!” I yelled as the thing swooped down at me. I grabbed Davina and used her as a human shield, hiding behind her. “Oh, god, I hate bats!”

Davina angled around and looked at me, her face warm and smiling. “You
have
been practicing. Good girl.”

I ducked down behind her. “What the hell are you talking about?” I pointed at the bat. “Kill it, kill it!”

“I can’t kill it.” She motioned up toward the bat, her face aglow with joy. “That there isn’t a bat. Bats don’t fly during sunlight. They also don’t have glowing numbers on their bellies, and they aren’t made of plastic. That there”—she pointed to the bat, which bounced blindly off the living room wall and course-corrected into the opposite wall—“is your magic.”

“My what?” I asked.

Davina turned to where I was crouching behind her and pulled me up by my shoulders. She positioned me in front of her and said in my ear, “That’s your magic, baby. Isn’t it beautiful?”

5

Magic.
I straightened, breathed in, and felt a hesitant calm wash over me.

Do you believe in magic?

Maybe.

I blinked a few times, and stepped through the open archway into the living room, leaving Davina a few feet behind in the hallway. I watched the bat fly in circles, bouncing off the occasional wall with a hard clink, leaving puffs of plaster behind with every collision. The harsh
buzz-buzz-buzz
sound of a phone that’s been left off the hook grew stronger as it circled over me, and faded as it moved to the other side of the living room. I glanced down at my hands, still hot and tingly, just like with the trash-can-lid dog, and I came to a sudden, calm realization.

I’d just turned my phone into a bat.

I looked behind me at Davina and pointed. “I did that.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice soft as if talking to a small child. “You did.” She patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. It probably won’t last too long. You got some good juice there, but it’s still early days. We got awhile to go yet before you start to mean some business.”

As if soothed by her voice, the bat slowed a bit. Then, suddenly, its wings pulled in and it jolted into complete stillness.

Then my phone landed, with a lifeless plop, on my couch.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Davina said. “Such a pretty bat phone.”

There was a
tap-tap-tap
on my living room window and we both started, but then I released a breath and said, “Oh, hell.” I walked over and pushed the window up. “Hey, Peach.”

Peach pulled her broomstick back into her house. She wrapped her fleece bathrobe around her and said stiffly, “What’s going on in there? I thought I heard screaming.”

“There was a bat in the house.” I glanced at the broken phone on the floor. “It’s gone now.” I looked back at Peach, looking for some kind of regret in her expression; there was none. “Sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no problem.”

There was a long silence, and then I said, “Okay, then,” and reached for the window to close it, just as Peach leaned even farther out her window and waved pointedly in Davina’s direction. “Hey, Davina!”

Davina moved in next to me and waved back. “Nice to see you again, Peach.”

Peach turned her smile on me, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I figured you wouldn’t mind, Liv, I gave your aunt my key when I saw her out there earlier this afternoon.”

I nudged Davina with my shoulder and whispered, “Aunt?”

Davina shrugged. “By marriage.”

“I couldn’t very well let her sit outside on your porch all day in this heat,” Peach went on, her eyes shimmering with hurt. “And what a surprise to find out you have an aunt none of us knew anything about.”

I sighed. “Peach, it’s … complicated.”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she said. “I’m just your neighbor.”

And then she shut her window and went back inside.

I shut my window and turned to Davina, who was looking through it at Peach’s house.

“Nice girl,” Davina said. “She told me you two were like family. I think that’s nice.”

I held up my hand to get her to be quiet, and amazingly enough, she shut up. In my head, I set the tension with Peach aside; I would deal with that later. For now, I had a dead bat phone to think about. I blinked a few times, indulging myself in a distanced, packed-in-cotton feeling. Something was very, very wrong, and my rational mind (
brain tumor!
) was beginning to go to war with my gut (
magic!
) and it was giving me a headache.

“I’m gonna go get my drink.” I turned on my heel toward the kitchen.

“Good idea,” Davina said, and followed me.

I walked into the kitchen, grabbed the scotch she’d poured for me, and downed the rest where I stood.

“Oh, that’s—you’re drinking that fast, baby.” Davina shook her head back and forth,
tsking
like a metronome. “That is not a good idea.”

I handed her my empty glass. “Another.”

Davina crossed her arms. “No.”

I walked past her, grabbed the bottle of scotch off the counter, whipped the cap off, took a slug, and sputtered for a minute or two as the liquid actively resisted my attempts to swallow it.

“Oh, you’re gonna regret that,” Davina said under her breath.

I angled my head to look at her. “Am I going to die? Are you, like, an angel of death or something? Coming to get me? And the brain tumor that’s killing me is giving me hallucinations? Because that makes sense. Kinda.”