“Lou?” Jillian whispered.
“Huh?”
“Are you okay? You look like someone hit you with a cattle prod.”
“Huh?”
“Lights are on, but no one’s home,” Jillian whispered.
Louise shook herself. “I’m fine.”
Jillian watched her closely for another minute before leaning down to inspect the spell. Dufae stressed that the lines of the spell had to be solidly drawn without blemishes and that all conductive material, even fine dust, must be kept clear of the tracings. Jillian gave two thumbs up to indicate that they were ready to activate the spell. She turned her right hand sideways and tucked in her thumb to make a fist.
Jillian wanted to play “rock paper stone” to see who activated the spell.
Louise clenched her jaw in frustration. Part of her felt like she should let Jillian do it since obviously her twin wanted to — but she wanted to too. Jillian gave her a look that was a clear mix of impatience and confusion. Louise jerked up her fist.
Five games later — because Jillian was a sore loser — Louise took a deep breath and spoke the activate phrase as loudly as she dared.
The black lines of the spell suddenly gleamed like gold light. Jillian gasped. A glowing sphere rose over the spell and a confusion of landmasses and rivers and buildings took form in ghostly holographic perfection.
This of course called for a Dance of Joy, which consisted of leaping from bed to bed, with silent screams of delight.
Several minutes later, they were able to examine the spell in relative calm.
Louise was used to seeing the map of New York City as a clean, orderly collection of lines and labels with Manhattan at the center. This was a tiny exact miniature with their house in Astoria smack in the middle. The northern edge was the Bronx, and the western edge was a thin slice of the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. The southern tip was just beyond East River Park.
“What’s that?” Jillian pointed at an area of featureless terrain.
“Some kind of park in. . Flushing?”
Jillian scooted away from the spell and got her tablet to compare it to a map of the city. “It’s Corona Park.”
“Dufae said that ley lines were denoted by blue lines, the width and brightness indicating — oh no!” Louise jerked the plug of the transformer out of the wall outlet and the gleaming spell collapsed.
“What?”
“Mom and Dad!” Louise slid the marble slab across the floor and under her bed, vaguely aware that she ripped the leads free.
Jillian quickly set the transformer and generator into the shadows under her desk and scrambled into bed with her. They lay side by side under the covers, trying not to pant, feigning sleep.
“Are you sure?” Jillian whispered after a minute of silence.
“Shhh,” Louise breathed, eyes closed tight.
A moment later, the door latch clicked open. A slant of light spilled into the room from the hall as their parents silently looked in on them.
Jillian faked a restless turn, threw her arm over Louise’s shoulders and pressed her forehead to Louise’s. They probably looked like sleeping angels. If Louise weren’t so scared, she would have started to giggle.
“Oh, they’re so cute,” their father murmured.
Normally their mother would snort at his naïveté. This time she said, “Yes, they are,” in a voice that was close to tears.
The door closed as quietly as it had opened. Louise felt at once relieved and horrible that they’d fooled their parents. Jillian started to shake with silent laughter. She rolled onto her back, hands against her mouth to keep the giggles in.
Louise smacked her.
Jillian leaned close and whispered into her ear. “We’re elves! We did magic!”
Despite everything, the words shimmered through her, bright and joyous. They were elves. They did magic. Surely anything was possible, even saving their baby brother and sisters.
18: Learning The Layout
Aunt Kitty was in the kitchen the next morning, making French toast, her one and only dish. She was wearing three-inch heels, tight black leather pants, and a bright yellow blouse that accented her dark ebony skin. “You have to not let her get to you.” Aunt Kitty waved a spatula, making all her many gold bracelets chime like a tambourine. “You control how you feel, not her. She can try and make you feel things, but if you don’t let her, then she’s not going to succeed.”
Louise paused on the stair’s landing, aware that she was interrupting a private conversation. She sat down on the top step, leaning forward so she could see her mother standing in the corner, glaring into her coffee.
“Do not quote my mother to me.” Her mother was dressed for work in a quiet business suit and low heels. She was still half a foot taller than her “adopted” sister.
“Why not? She was the smartest woman I ever met.” Aunt Kitty lifted a corner of the toast and checked to see how done it was. “Anna Desmarais is simply a paranoid racist. You control you, and you’re not going to allow yourself to sink to her level.”
“And I’m not supposed to be angry that she’s involved my kids?”
“Oh, come on, you’re saying that your girls wouldn’t jump at a chance to go to this? You know how much Jillian likes everything connected to movies. And they wanted to go to the Today Show to see Nigel Reid and you wouldn’t let them. You know how much Louise would have loved to meet him. You’re going to tell her that you’ve got tickets to this and you’re not taking her?”
Louise yelped with excitement and charged down to the kitchen. “What tickets? To some kind of event? Will Nigel Reid be there?”
Her mother sighed loudly, shaking her head. “Oh, now you’ve done it.”
Aunt Kitty laughed and flipped the French toast.
“Mom!” Louise cried.
“Anna Desmarais has given me four tickets to NBC’s charity gala in June. They’re going to have a lot of their network stars there and a handful of ‘special appearances’ like Nigel Reid.”
“Really?” Louise squealed. It was hard to rein in her excitement, but obviously her mother didn’t think it was wonderful news. “What’s wrong with the tickets? Are they fake?”
“They’re real tickets.” Their mother sighed into her coffee. “Honey, sometimes when people suddenly start acting all nice to your face, you have to start looking for knives behind their backs. After all this. .” She caught herself about to swear and covered by sipping her coffee. “After calling me a thief, and dragging us through two audits in an attempt to find proof, Desmarais gave me nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of tickets.”
“The woman is married to a billionaire,” Aunt Kitty pointed out with her spatula. “Everywhere she goes, she rides in that big limo with two drivers when the car can bloody drive itself. A thousand dollars is nothing to her. It’s probably what she pays to keep her hair that blond and beautiful at her age.”
“She says she doesn’t dye her hair.”
Aunt Kitty snorted. “You know what your mother would say to that? ‘Maybe she was born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.’ Seventy and still blond? No, she dyes.”
Her mother pointed at Louise. “Don’t you ever repeat that.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
Aunt Kitty served out the toast to Louise and her mother and started a second batch.
Louise wanted to beg and plead to go to the event. It would be the perfect opportunity to give Nigel the gossamer call without the risk of meeting him privately someplace. (Not that she was scared he would do anything, but their mother would simply kill them if she found out.) “Maybe Mrs. Desmarais is sorry about how she treated you, and that’s why she gave you the tickets.”