Mulberry Wands (12 page)

“Shouldn’t we wait for them?” Griff asked,
craning around to see what had become of Alex.

Fallon’s friend had gotten out of Alex’s car
and was waiting for him with her arms folded. Alex had his keys in
his hand, and was waving his arms around. He slammed the door shut.
It was too dark to read her expression in the moonlight, but it
sounded like Alex was telling a story.

“No,” Fallon said. “We will go alone.”

“Didn’t you say you wanted us to meet some
friends?” Griff asked. Something crossed his vision, and when he
looked up he about shit his pants because a little grey alien was
sitting in the branch above him. A second later, the alien
fluttered its wings, and he realized it was a barn owl. He chuckled
nervously. It had looked exactly like an alien. “Hey, check it out!
There’s an owl!”

Fallon seemed unimpressed. She ignored the
owl and led him by the hand further down the wash, pushing branches
out of her way when it got too narrow. Griff tripped over something
in the dark, but Fallon seemed to know the path well enough to see
it even in the weak moonlight.

Another owl glided across the sky, landing on
the arm of a saguaro.

“Good night for wildlife,” he said, still not
comfortable with Fallon’s silence.

Three small creatures sat on a boulder at the
next bend in the wash. He thought they were quail at first, but he
realized they were also owls, the small burrowing kind he had never
seen anywhere but the zoo and on nature documentaries.

Two more owls flew across the moon and
settled into a nearby tree.

The wash opened up into a flat bed too sandy
for trees, where the moonlight peeked over the hill like a silver
spotlight after the darkness. He could see better now, well enough
to pick out that the shapes dotting every cactus and rock were
owls. Owls dotted the arms of saguaros, they sat on boulders, they
perched in trees. A dead mesquite, overturned in a flood, had a
line of owls in all different sizes along its fallen trunk. Some of
the owls had ears, some were pale and white faced, and others were
small and speckled ones he’d never seen often enough to recognize.
Tiny owls gripped the soft edge of the wash bank. Three new owls
swooped in, and since there were no more perches, they took their
place among those crouching in the bed of the wash. Once they
landed, they didn’t move, or hoot, or ruffle their feathers or fly
away or squabble.

As he and Fallon came out from under the
shadow of the last tree, the owls turned their heads at once to
stare.

“Oh. My. God,” Griff said in a whisper. For a
moment, his civilized brain tried to make sense of this, tried to
fit this into the world he knew. He meant to turn to Fallon and
make some comment about how unusual this was, and how he was glad
he wasn’t a mouse, ha ha. And if Fallon had been a normal girl, she
would have said something to reassure him that this was harmless,
or to brag that she had baited the clearing with dead gerbils just
to impress him, or say that she worked for Fish and Wildlife and
the owl roost was one of their secrets. His sense of denial
flailed, drowning, wanting some flotsam of explanation. For a
moment, he stared back at the owls, holding Fallon’s hand.

But only for a moment. Even Griff’s
well-developed sense of denial couldn’t cope with this.

His monkey-brain took over, and he ran. If
Fallon had called out after him, assuring him that it was okay,
begging him not to go, his civilized side would have kicked back
in. He would have turned around and apologized for being silly. But
she said nothing, and as the owls swooped silently after him, he
didn’t feel silly at all to be running for his life. He kept
running until he got to his motorcycle, and even the twinge of
remorse that nice guys don’t abandon girls without a ride home
wasn’t enough to keep him from speeding back home so fast that his
engine whined in protest. The sensible civilized voice got louder
as he unlocked the door at home, protesting that he didn’t need to
be acting like a scared little baby just because he had seen a few
owls (a few hundred) gathered (why were they gathering?) in a
desert park. Usually the sensible voice was louder than anything
else, but it wasn’t enough to silence his fears, and no amount of
inner protest at how silly he was being was enough to keep him from
sleeping with the lights on all night.

Moving Saturday had finally arrived. Zoë had
packed up all her things into boxes, neatly labeled, but Darius and
Susan hadn’t done jack, so they were flinging clothes into laundry
baskets and garbage bags at the last minute. She didn’t think she
had that much stuff, and thought maybe she could get rid of some of
it, but every little scrap of useless crap was precious to her.
She’d saved that box of popsicle sticks for five years, why not
keep it a little longer? What if she needed popsicle sticks again?
Ditto for the box of cheap rhinestone jewelry, the box of broken
tiles, the spool of phone cable, the hardback books she’d gotten
from the book club and never read (but might one day), and all the
other stuff. She told Darius it was all potential spell components,
but he just scoffed and teased her mercilessly.

Zoë must have asked her customers and
employees, because five strong young men and women, all pierced,
tattooed, and with unnatural hair color, showed up exactly at one
and worked hard all day, carrying boxes from the storage room to
the truck like well-paid ants. Susan found herself increasingly
jealous of Zoë’s friends’ loyalty, and wondered what Zoë had that
she didn’t.

Susan asked six people to help, but only
Amber and Maggie came. Paul called and apologized that he would be
late. She didn’t think he’d moved from the “I’ll have a drink with
you” to “I’ll help you move” category, and gave him bonus points
for calling, though she was pretty sure he wouldn’t show up. They
spent most of the time in her bedroom, packing crap into boxes.
Amber had her hair up under a kerchief, which was pretty in a 1940s
sort of way, and she had her fingers splayed out to protect her new
acrylic nails.

Maggie sat on the counter with a roll of
packing tape. As Amber finished filling a box with wrapped drinking
glasses, Maggie tore off a piece of tape and handed it to her. “Hey
Susan, any idea how long this is going to take? I’ve got movies I
want to watch this weekend.”

Maggie, Susan’s mom, had a cloud of bushy
hair, round glasses, and a cluster of bead necklaces, that made her
look a little like Janis Joplin. Maggie liked to say that people
always thought that she and Susan looked like sisters, and once
upon a time it had been true, but Maggie had put on too many miles
since then, and she looked her age.

Maggie had given birth to Susan at sixteen.
She’d had Jess and Christopher right after that (Irish twins) and
then Julia a few years later. She’d actually gone so far as to
marry Julia’s dad, though their marriage had a shorter duration
than their divorce proceedings. Neither Julia nor her dad spoke to
Maggie any more. Susan still got a card from Julia now and then,
especially when it was for an event that suggested a gift, like
Julia’s high school graduation, but she thought of Julia more as a
cousin than a sister. Jess, Christopher, Maggie, and Susan had been
the real Stillwater family.

Jess and Christopher had died a year ago, in
a car accident, which was the reason why the grief-stricken Susie
Stillwater had wanted to switch places with Susan Stillwater from
the non-magical alternate version of Hayden’s Ferry. Susan didn’t
have to look at the mirror in her closet to know that back in her
own reality, Jess and Christopher would be helping Susie pack. Jess
and Christopher had been more than just her brother and sister,
they’d been her best friends too. They’d always be there to help
her, no matter what. Even if they couldn’t do anything, they’d at
least give her moral support. Unlike Maggie, who had never quite
seemed to grasp how the mother-daughter dynamic was supposed to
work, Jess and Christopher knew how to be great siblings.

“Some guy came by the other day.” Maggie tore
off another piece of tape for Amber. “Was trying to find you.”

Amber stiffened. “Looking for Susan? Was he a
gnosti?”

“Nah, just some guy. He was young, maybe
early twenties. Really cute, nicely cut. Short though. Shorter than
me even,” Maggie said.

“Why was he at your place then?” Susan
asked.

“I guess he looked up Stillwater in the phone
book,” Maggie said.

That made sense. Susan had paid to keep
herself unlisted ever since she’d had to get a restraining order
against her stalker ex. Nothing like death threats from a freaky
ex-boyfriend to make you paranoid.

“Are you sure he wasn’t a gnosti?” Amber
asked.

Maggie shook her head and stubbed out her
cigarette in the sink. She picked up her handbag off the counter
and rummaged around in it. “Didn’t seem like it. He said his name
was Griffon or something. He gave me his business card.”

Susan watched as Maggie rummaged around in
her purse for the card. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Something about wanting to hire a mage.”
Maggie pulled a breath mint tin and a package of cigarette papers
in her purse. After handing Susan the card, she opened the tin and
took out pieces of marijuana, which she laid into one of the
cigarette papers.

“Wanted to hire a mage? Did he ask after Jess
then?” In this reality, Jess and Christopher had tried to make
money as professional mages. It didn’t pan out that way, but even
though they were dead, their marketing stuff was still out there,
occasionally gaining customers for them.

“No, he asked after you specifically. I would
have offered to work for him, but he didn’t tell me what he wanted
done or what the pay was like.” Maggie licked the edge of the paper
and rolled up her joint. She patted her pockets until she found a
lighter. “You know him? If he comes by again, you want I should
tell him where you live?”

Susan looked at the card. Harrower Bros.
Handyman service. The contact information on the front was
scratched out and replaced with Griff Harrower, along with a
number. “No, I’ll call him, find out what he wants.”

The kitchen door had been propped open on
account of Zoë’s friends carrying boxes, but Darius managed to make
enough noise entering the room that they turned even without the
rattle of a latch to warn them.

“Hey ladies, the party can start now. Me and
G are here to make it happen.” He gestured to G, the adorable lanky
guy standing behind him.

G had baggy pants, a wool cap pulled down low
over his head, and white headphones dangling around his neck. He
looked all of fifteen. He made a gesture with his hand that might
have been a wave.

“Can you guys help carry my mirror?” Susan
asked. The mirror was big enough that if the portal spell had
worked like it was supposed to, she should have been able to walk
right through it without even touching the frame. It had taken two
professional movers to get it into her room. She should have asked
Zoë’s friends to carry it, because she didn’t want it to get
broken, but she didn’t like the smug attitude of Darius and his
friend, and she wanted to see them try to lift an insanely heavy
mirror. More to the point, she wanted to see them fail to carry it,
and have to ask Susan and Amber to help.

“The one in your closet?” said Darius, who
wasn’t supposed to have ever been in her room without permission
(and she always kept it covered when other people were around.)

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Sure, Sue.” Darius playfully backhanded G in
the chest. “Come on, bro. Let’s show these ladies how it’s
done.”

G turned out to be useless, but the three of
them (with Maggie holding the door) managed to get it safely into
the truck. After that, Darius went to pack his own stuff. G
appeared allergic to work, but Darius barely had anything so it
didn’t matter.

Paul showed up around three, as he said he
would.

“Paul!” Susan said, embarrassed at how
surprised she sounded to see him there.

“Hi Susan. I’ve only got an hour, but I’ll do
what I can.” He was wearing coveralls with his name on the pocket,
and both his hair and the neck of his uniform were damp as though
he got out of the shower and put his clothes on without drying
himself off.

Amber sneered at his janitor uniform. Not
openly, but she raised her eyebrows and made a tsk sound, and Susan
knew Amber well enough to know when Amber was unimpressed.

“So, um, can you help carry stuff to the
truck?” she asked.

“You bet,” he said.

Maggie walked by with a box in her hand and
nodded hello, but when she passed Susan in the hall later she
didn’t say anything about Paul not being human. Susan wasn’t sure
if that meant Maggie couldn’t tell (because Maggie was a more
experienced mage than Susan was, but she didn’t know everything) or
if she normally could spot the difference between a Sunward and a
normal guy, just not when she was high.

There wasn’t time to ask her though, not
privately, with everyone quickly emptying out the house of
belongings. By the time Paul had gotten there, all the boxes were
gone (which was good, because the one time he carried one, he
stepped into the sunlight and it slipped through his fingers to
crash on the driveway.) As the boxes went into the truck, the
furniture they’d been resting on got exposed, reminding everyone
that tables and chairs had to go too. Susan sighed. She was tired
of carrying furniture. At least they were near the end now.

Amber had gone into the back bathroom, and
she was clattering around, so Susan went back to see if she needed
help.

Amber was taking scouring powder and window
cleaner out from under the sink.