Val said, “Hix.”
This time she listened. She dipped her head, patted several feet—there were at least four of them on the edge of the sofa by then, although there were also a lot of legs and tail left on the floor. But she was snaky—or at least long-bodied and short-legged. How was she getting those extra feet on the sofa? Maybe black cobey-like things handle all their dimensions differently and she could have put even more feet on the sofa and still been snaky to Newworld eyes.
She dropped down to the floor and turned back toward Val. When, if she had been something like a dog jumping off the sofa, her feet should have hit the floor, there was a very odd little shudder in the air. It wasn’t a hearing thing like a thud, and it wasn’t a vibration through the floor like something heavy had just landed. It was something else, like the way she smelled was something else. Like the way she could put two pairs of feet on the sofa in spite of the way she looked was something else.
She walked or crept or somethinged and was swallowed up in the rest of the shadows around Val. But after a second or two there was a new bulge off to one side. I was pretty sure the bulge looked familiar—like I’d now recognize that shadow from any other shadows.
Suddenly I was shivering so hard I thought I might fall off the sofa myself. Mongo climbed back into my lap. And Mom got up from her chair and came and sat down beside me and put her arms around me (and some of Mongo). It was like the first real hug since Val happened. I put my arms around her (and some of Mongo) and burst into tears. Again. “Oh, sweetie,” said Mom. “Oh, sweetie.”
But I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school and this was the second time I’d burst into tears in an hour? Drog me. So I stopped pretty quickly. And then I wiped my face on the top of Mongo’s head because the box of tissues was empty from my last crying fit. Dog hair up my nose. Unh. Never mind.
“Mom,” I said. “What’s the matter with me? There’s no magic in our family. There’s no magic in anyone’s family any more—in Newworld—is there? They gene-spliced it out of existence two generations ago. Didn’t they?”
There was a pause. Mom sat back, but she took my nearer hand and held it. A little too hard. “They tried,” she said.
I didn’t want to hear this. I knew I didn’t want to hear this. Calories, I thought. Aren’t calories good for shock? I leaned around Mongo so I could pick up my mug. I was amazed to discover it was still hot. This conversation felt like it had been going on for hours. Mongo didn’t even try (very hard) to put his nose in my hot chocolate. He recognized some boundaries. In this case it was probably that he knew that if he did a “Mongo, no” thing he’d be put off the sofa.
I put the mug back on the coffee table empty. “Tell me,” I said.
It still took Mom a couple of minutes to begin. Do you know how long a couple of minutes is when you’re waiting for someone to tell you something you seriously don’t want to hear? And I’d already heard too many things I didn’t want to hear tonight.
“Your great-grandmother was a notable magician,” said Mom at last. “When the government committee presented its report, she was involved in the campaign to change the recommendations from the then rather risky surgery to merely keeping a list of all who tested positive. You studied this in school, didn’t you? It was nearly twenty years before the surgery was finally passed as reliable, but what doesn’t get in the textbooks is that that had less to do with the progress of medical interventions and more to do with your great-grandmother and her colleagues—who were also working furiously on an intervention of their own.
“But by the time your grandmother received the letter telling her when to show up at the hospital for the procedure, she and her sister were ready. She said it made both of them quite ill while science and magic battled it out. The newspapers were full of reports on how the surgery was not as safe as the Science Party and its adherents wanted to make out—that surprising numbers of the young people who were having the “minor” operation to disable the dominant magical gene were very ill afterward, especially those belonging to families known to have a strong talent for magic.” Mom smiled faintly. “If anyone guessed the truth—and I can’t believe they didn’t—there was remarkably little said or speculated about it.
“Your great-aunt liked to say that at one point your grandmother turned a pale rather streaky green and began to grow scales on her elbows and knees and down her spine. Your grandmother always denied it—but on the whole I think I believe Aunt Teresa. At any rate, afterward they tested negative for magic. As do I and my sisters, and your uncle Darnel, although for a week before we went in for the test we had to have these horrible green frothy drinks every day. By the time it was your and Ran’s turn Rhonwyn had figured out how to distill what was needed into simple little pills. It probably wasn’t necessary for Darnel or Ran—magic tends to run down the female line in our family, although your great-grandmother always said there was male magic in our family, but nobody had figured out what it was yet.”
She turned her head to smile at me, but if I hadn’t had Mongo in my lap I might have fallen off the sofa after all. “Mom,” I managed. “You’ve never told me any of this. I remember those pills. You said they were just to stop us from getting sick when we had the tests.”
“I know,” she said. “I should have told you.” She paused. “I’m sorry. But the fact that magic runs in the women of our family doesn’t mean that every woman has it. Your great-aunt didn’t although your grandmother had it very strongly. The four of us sisters . . .”
“You?” I said.
She took a deep breath. “When your father died—when—” She took another deep breath. I wriggled around, pulled my hand free, and put my arm firmly around her. “After your father died—when there had been nothing I could do—I turned my back on all of it. It had always been an uncomfortable secret to have. It was—is—still an uncomfortable secret to have. But it was easier, closing the door on all of it. Blanchefleur was very angry with me . . . but then I was the only one of the four of us who married and had children in the usual way. . . .”
I registered that “in the usual way” as well as mention of mysterious disappeared Aunt Blanchefleur but I was not going to ask. Darnel had a wife and three kids but Ran and I thought they were boring. It was one of the few occasions when Ran and I totally agreed on anything.
“Darling, I’m sorry. But there are signs you look for—the four of us all had them when we were children. You didn’t. I’ve wondered, a few times, because of the way animals love you, but there didn’t seem to be any magic to it. And you’ve trained your maniac dog, it seems to me, by nothing more than love and grim persistence—”
“And food,” I murmured.
“And I felt that Clare trusts you because you are precociously responsible—”
Oh! I thought.
“—not because you have any kind of magical knack. I still gave you the pills—both times—before you had the test; they still don’t really understand how the inheritance works—and it is perhaps not surprising that a gene for magic should not behave quite as science says it should. I thought in our family, better to be careful.”
Magic. I stretched the arm that wasn’t around Mom out in front of me and looked at it. I might have been expecting that if I turned it at just the right angle to the light it would be faintly greenish—and if I turned it farther, the elbow might be a little scaly. I wondered what creature the green scaly thing my great-grandmother hadn’t turned into might have been. I wondered what Hix would look like, if she wasn’t a shadow. And then Mongo, who didn’t feel an outstretched arm was doing him any good, began to lick it vigorously, till it curled (scalelessly) back toward him and the hand began petting him again.