Something Magic This Way Comes (6 page)

Ramõn was waiting. Ramõn, his brother, stood in the center of the golden grove that had somehow been lifted whole from the hills of Vermont and settled here, in the midst of pure jungle. The stippled white trunks of the birch trees looked frail as wheat stalks beside the massive boles of the forest giants, but Oxossi was lord of all forests, even this one, even here, and when he laid his dark hand on the pallid bark, he drew the same strength from it, the same worship.

A harsh sound tore the air. Leaves rustled softly, then loud and louder, branches swished and snapped, tree trunks groaned before they broke. The beasts shouldered their way into the sacred grove to reach their prey. Jorge stared out at them through Oxossi’s eyes. He could not name them or say what manner of monsters they were, not even if his soul depended on the answer. Their eyes shone with copper light, their fangs were black at the roots and as bloodstained as their talons, the colors of their ragged pelts shifted before his eyes from the parched yellow of desert sand to the scarlet blaze of sunset.

But they had the faces of men. Jorge saw the bullies from school, the dealers who didn’t care how many lives they gobbled up, the sneering bosses who doled out dead-end jobs, and treated you like dirt, and told you to be grateful, the gang-bangers whose smiles offered the promise of belonging but whose eyes were dead. Every one of them was thirsting for his brother’s blood.

“Ramõn!” Jorge cried, and his voice, at least, was still his own. “Ramõn, come to me!” He held out his spear and the beasts cringed away from its shadow.

But Ramõn did not come. Ramõn stood stiffly in the center of the sacred grove, frozen with more than fear. His eyes flickered with the same cold, coppery light as the beasts that stalked him, and his mouth was a thin, hard line.

“Why should I listen to you?” he called out, and the beasts began to pace around him in a slow, encircling dance. “For what? More promises? More lies? We have
nothing
! No respect, no strength, no one to teach us how to be men! I’m tired of being just another kid, always afraid, always helpless. That changes,
hermano
. That changes
now
.” He stamped his foot, and the beasts wove their pattern closer around him, their shaggy shoulders brushing his legs. Their lips parted in an awful parody of human laughter.

“I’m tired of being the one who’s afraid,” Ramõn went on. “There’s only one way to be on top, and I’m going to be there. Try and stop me if you dare!”

“On top?” Jorge echoed, lowering his spear. “On top of what?”

“The world,” Ramõn answered, grinning. His face grew thinner, his nose and mouth elongating into an animal’s snout. His fangs were pure white, still free of any stain. The others crowded closer still, and one of them reared onto its hind legs, tottering like a dancing dog. A feather of flame burned on its brow, but the flame crackled black and gray, a fire that was already ashes.

The forest lord, the master of the trees and every life that dwelled in the gentle shelter of their shadows, Oxossi who was Jorge who was dreaming, saw his little brother stretch out one hand. It was still a child’s hand, but it was reaching for things no child should touch, for heartlessness and hate and willful ignorance, for a pit that was deeper than any grave. Ramõn’s hand reached for the black flame that leaped and hissed like a cobra on the monster’s brow, and if he touched it, Jorge knew he would be lost forever.

Oxossi’s battle cry shook the birch leaves from their fragile branches, made the earth crack and shift underfoot in the holy place where his father’s spirit dwelled.

Oxossi’s spear flew like thought, like love, and struck Ramõn’s hand clean through the palm. The circling creatures threw back their heads and howled, smelling blood, but Oxossi was among them before they could draw another breath. He called his spear back to his hand with a single word and he used it valiantly. He struck the beasts back, down, away from his little brother. Wherever one of them fell dying, a tree erupted from the earth, swallowing up darkness with living light. Soon only one monster remained.

It was the flame-bearer, a creature with a fanged face like a skull. The plume of black fire arched and spat. A single spark touched Oxossi’s shining shield and devoured it, an ember popped and turned Oxossi’s magic spear to cinders.

Lord of woods, lord of worlds, why do you stand
between me and what is mine?
The creature’s voice echoed wickedly inside Jorge’s head.
Even you can
never hope to hold this child back from a path of his
own choosing. Without your weapons in your hands,
even you must fail and fall. You call to him, but see!

He comes to me.

It was true. Jorge saw his little brother’s eyes fixed on the black flame as if it held nothing but joyful promise. Illusion and temptation sang to Ramõn from the killing fire’s core, and their song cut him off from true hope as surely as if they’d set an iron wall around him. The instant that the boy touched the doom-bright flame, it would own him, he would be lost.

As his little brother reached out his still-bleeding hand to the black flame, Jorge leaped forward on Oxossi’s strong, bare feet and plunged his own hand into the blackness, through the killing fire, deep into the monster’s grinning skull. The creature screamed, but Jorge’s scream, Oxossi’s scream, drowned out the hideous sound. The birch grove shook as the pale trees split from crowns to roots and a great voice, filled with pride and sorrow and love rang out above them, crying,
My sons, my beloved sons,
mijitos!
Stand strong
against the enemy, be brave against the monstrous thing
that once stole me from you!

It was the last thing that Jorge took with him as he plummeted into darkness.

* * *

“Hey, man? Jorge? You awake?”

Jorge heard his brother calling to him through all the layers of his dreams. He swam back into the waking world, sat up slowly, realized he was lying on the floor of his bedroom with Ramõn squatting beside him. He managed a feeble smile.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” he said. “And you’re back from the police station. Man, I oughta kick your skinny ass. Ripping off the grocer’s, giving
tía
Clarinda a heart attack, yeah, that was real good, you stupid little—”

“Huh?” Ramõn stood up, looking genuinely confused.

“What station? What ripoff? Where you getting this stuff from,
hermano
? You fall off of the bed or something and hit your head? How come you’re lying on the floor, huh?”

“You saying—?” Jorge stopped himself, touched his own face with his left hand as if trying to remember what he looked like without resorting to a mirror. Oxossi’s mask was gone. He shook his head and sighed deeply.

“Hey, no fooling, something wrong?” Ramõn sounded worried. “You want me to get
tía
Clarinda or what?”

“No,” Jorge said softly. “I don’t want that.”
I want
to know I’m not going crazy,
he thought.
I want to know
why someone’s put the world on rewind. I want—

“What I want is a little help up,” he told his brother.

“Sure, man. What’s a brother for?” Ramõn grinned and held out his hand.

Only Jorge saw in his brother’s palm the thick scar of the spear’s bright, healing passage. Only Jorge saw how the green lizard that crouched across it winked its ruby eyes once, twice, three times before it vanished, leaving footprints like a trail of fallen leaves.

Only Jorge felt, as he took his brother’s hand, how the forest god’s strength closed around them, bearing the endless warmth and life of their father’s love.

T
IM’S armies chased Geoffrey’s across the game board on the floor of Geoffrey’s room. One more good throw of the dice and he would win. As he reached for the red plastic cubes, though, he noticed the full moon shining through Geoffrey’s window.

Startled, he looked at his watch.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I’m late. My mom’s gonna skin me.”

“We’ll call it a draw, then,” Geoffrey said happily.

“I would have stopped you at the river anyway.”

Yeah, sure you would
, Tim thought, but he was too late even to stay and argue about it. He grabbed his coat off a chair and hurried for the front door. Geoffrey followed, still going on about how well he’d played.

Tim hopped onto his bike. “See you in school tomorrow.”

He couldn’t resist a parting shot: “You still going to need help with your math?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” In bright moonlight, the dirty look Geoffrey gave him for being reminded seemed especially sweet.

Chuckling to himself, Tim was about to ride off when something in the woods back of Geoffrey’s house made a horrible noise. Time almost jumped out of his skin.

“Wh—What was that?” he said. “A coyote?”

“Maybe,” Geoffrey said. “Maybe it was a werewolf, too.”

“Don’t be stupid. There’s no such things as” —the horrible noise came again—“werewolves.” The hair on the back of Tim’s neck tried to stand up.

“Whatever you say. I’d ride fast if I were you, though.” The gloating tone in Geoffrey’s voice made Tim wish he’d never brought up the math homework, especially since Geoffrey helped him almost as much as the other way around.

Tim lived only a few blocks east of Geoffrey. He pedaled as if he were trying to catch up with the long, black moonshadow that stretched out ahead of him.

When he was halfway home, he heard the howl from the woods again. He was so nervous, it sounded to him as if it came from about three inches behind him.

He yelped and made his legs go even faster, which wasn’t easy.

He had never seen anything so welcome as his house, even if his mother did come down on him like a ton of bricks when he went in. “You still have your homework and nine million chores to do before you go to sleep,” she said, the way he’d known she would.

“And you need a bath.”

“Okay, Mom.”

He gave in so easily, she stopped being mad and started being worried. “Are you all right, Tim? Did something happen over at Geoffrey’s?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. No, nothing happened.” That wasn’t quite true, and Tim knew it. He hesitated, then went on, “Mom?”

“What is it, Timmy?” She hadn’t called him Timmy in a long time.

He hesitated again, feeling dumb, but finally blurted out, “Mom, there really aren’t any werewolves, are there?” Once he’d said it, he felt even dumber, but if he couldn’t be dumb around his own mom, who could he be dumb around?

“Werewolves?” she said. “What ever gave you that idea?”

He’d surprised her, he saw. That wasn’t easy. He explained what had happened over at Geoffrey’s house. By the time he was done, even he was laughing at himself.

“Well,” his mom said, laughing, too, “I certainly think it was a coyote. I’ve never seen a werewolf except in the movies, and I don’t think anyone else has, either. All right?”

“Sure, Mom.” Talking about it made him feel a lot better. “Boy, it sure sounded scary, though.”

“I believe you. Go do your homework anyway. Didn’t you tell me you have a math test tomorrow?”

“Oh, Mom!” She
would
remember! Then she gave him a hug, and he said, “Oh, Mom!” again, in a different tone of voice.

“Go on, now. Remember, you still have to take that bath.”

He went. But even when he was dividing fractions and plotting points on graph paper, part of his mind still heard that dreadful, unearthly howling. He rarely wondered if his mom was wrong, but this was one of those times.

When he and Geoffrey came out of math class together, Geoffrey asked, “How do you think you did?”

“I don’t know. Not too bad, I guess.” Tim paused.

“What did you get for number eight?”

“Which one was that?”

“Five twelfths divided by seven eighths.”

“Let me think.” After close to a minute, Geoffrey answered, “Oh yeah, that one. I almost didn’t remember to reduce it to lowest terms. It’s ten twenty-firsts.”

“Uh-oh. That’s not anything like what I got. I got thirty-five ninety-sixths.”

This time it was Geoffrey’s turn to say, “Uh-oh.”

They both put some worried thought into the problem.

Then Geoffrey said, “I know what you did wrong. You forgot to invert the divisor before you multiplied.”

Tim slammed his hand against a bank of lockers, hard enough to hurt. “You’re right.” He scowled at Geoffrey. “It’s your fault, you and your miserable werewolf. I couldn’t study straight last night.”

“Don’t blame me because you’re dumb,” Geoffrey said loftily.

Tim shoved him. He shoved back. It might have gone further than that, but behind them someone with a deep voice said, “Boys, you don’t really want to go visit the vice-principal, do you?”

“No, Mr. Tepesh,” they said together.

“Good. Cut it out, then.” The wood-shop teacher walked on by.

“Boy, I ought to—” Tim said, but the moment where there could have been a fight had passed. “You and your miserable werewolf,” he repeated.

“Well, there’s nothing to worry about for the next month, anyway,” Geoffrey said. “Not till the next full moon.” He let out a howl that sounded nothing like the one they’d heard the night before.

“Will you shut up, for Pete’s sake?” Tim usually didn’t lose his temper easily, but he felt his right hand, the one that wasn’t carrying his books, curl into a fist.

But Geoffrey said, “All right, already, all right. Did I tell you my dad’s going to the ballgame tomorrow? Some people have all the luck—we’ll be stuck in school.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. It blew over, as quarrels often do. Pretty soon the two of them were laughing about the way their math teacher’s saggy arm muscles flopped like fish out of water whenever she wrote on the blackboard.

A couple of days later, Tim went over to Geoffrey’s house after school. He kept a careful eye on his watch.

He also trounced Geoffrey at their war game, so badly that it was done fifteen minutes before he had to leave. He was feeling pretty smug as he climbed onto his bike.

Then that horrible howl came from the woods. Tim flinched. He couldn’t help it. Geoffrey noticed—
he
would
, Tim thought. If he’d just laughed or something, it wouldn’t have been too bad. But instead he said, “You’re probably safe this time, Tim.”