The Christmas Megapack Page 6

“Seek one who desires to die.”

  When that penetrated, they got louder, and talked faster. “Ax murderers!” “Fire hands!” “Teeth faces!”

  They were so loud I felt scared they would fall on me. Great-Uncle Tobias told me trees had a stretchy sense of time. Usually people walked past so quickly the trees didn’t notice them, unless the people did something obnoxious. I wanted to run back to the car, slip out of the conversation and beneath their notice, forget all about the Christmas tree. But I remembered Mama saying that traditions existed for a reason. I waited, murmuring, “I seek one who desires to die, for tradition’s sake.”

  Eventually they stopped speaking about things they’d suffered or heard of other trees suffering. I kept repeating myself. Tree voices dropped away, until I was standing, cold, in the forest, talking to myself.

  I quieted. I waited. I wondered whether I should go back to the car and tell Mama there wasn’t going to be a tree this Christmas. Then I noticed a small voice saying, “For tradition’s sake?”

  I walked toward it, and discovered the speaker was a small oak sapling.

  “Speak to me,” it said.

  “If you come with me, I will cherish you. I will try to keep the life in you as long as it can be kept without soil. I and all my family will worship you, make offerings to you of things that look beautiful to us, and stare at you, each time reminding ourselves that you are a wonderful lifeform and you and your seedmates share the Earth with us and we love you. And you will die. And we will love you even as you die and lose your chance to scatter seed.” I murmured the words over and over, and somewhere deep inside I wondered what Flint had said to his trees the two years he did this, before I went through transition. The first year he brought home a pine, a small one with two tops. The second year, a eucalyptus sapling. I said, “We will celebrate your death with fire, the great transformer, and keep the image of you in our memories forever.”

  At last the little tree said, “I will come. I give up my seeds to you.”

  I felt stabbed to the heart. What did any of the things I said mean to a little tree? Why should it care if humans remembered it, or decorated it? What did that have to do with the perpetuation of its seedline? I opened my pouch, already murmuring the ritual thanks to the Lady and to the Lord, to the Elements and to the Spirits, to the falling of the fates. I took out my packet of tobacco and offered some to the tree and to the Earth that raised it. I got out my bottle of water and poured it at the base of the little tree, then dug with my hands and with my trowel to loosen the earth binding the roots. I was just going to add the unrooting powder that would let the roots become slippery and muscular enough so the tree could follow me back to the van when I stopped.

  “Why?” I said. “Why do you say yes to me?”

  “Trees have traditions. Every cold time, someone goes to live as humans, always the ones who are most curious. I grew knowing it might be me, thinking I might not mind choosing a known death instead of waiting for an unknown one, realizing that at least my curiosity would be satisfied, and that this is a piece of the great Greenwork I can do.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and loosed the unrooting powder, and the words to give the tree mobility. All the way back to the van, as I walked with one hand clasped to one of my tree’s branches and the tree shuffled and rustled beside me, I pictured two peoples having traditional ceremonies that intersected at their heights, each achieving something mysterious, each not understanding what the other was accomplishing. Just before my tree and I climbed up to the road where the van waited, some other tree dropped an acorn on me. I put it in my pocket, and wondered: was this too a part of the ritual of the trees? What part did I play?

  “A beautiful tree, Beryl,” Mama said. She opened the back door of the van. I helped the tree up into the van and bound wet earth around its roots and sat beside it all the way home, one hand around a branch, the other cupping the acorn, wondering who answered whose prayers.

  FLINT’S LIGHTS

  I always thought, when I hit eighteen, bam, out of the house, away from the family, GOOD-BYE. It’s much harder than that, though. I’m going to be eighteen two days after Christmas, and I’m having second thoughts. Now I understand why none of the others have left. Opal’s the oldest, twenty-four already, and I never heard one movin’-on word come out of her mouth, before she turned eighteen or since. Jasper acts restless, but he doesn’t leave, either; sometimes he goes off for a while, but he always comes back. And what could Gypsum do if she went out in the wide world, among the ungifted? Ungifted herself, but raised in the expectation of gifts. The world must look even scarier to her than it does to me, and my gifts are strong.

  I always thought, gifts after transition. Stick around long enough to have Great-Uncle Tobias train me in them. Then go out and wreak havoc. Toe-to-toe with the wide world, and I planned to cheat, win, grin, and start over. But that’s another broken dream. Used to be, when all my world was what could balance on a skateboard, my only dream was thrashing with the guys. I couldn’t wait to gift so I could zoom up walls and across ceilings, maybe over water, maybe underwater! Crash, tinkle. Gifts don’t work like that. All mine did was make me scared of everything, because when I address my gifts, I never know what they’ll give me.

  Mama told me I was in charge of the lights this year, since Beryl’s doing the tree now. “Strike some sparks, Flint,” she said.

  I went upstairs to try making lights, in case it was a skill that needed practice. I didn’t want to ask Great-Uncle Tobias about it because he always tells me more than I want to know about things. Jasper wasn’t home, and even if he had been, he might have been in a mean mood. He might withhold information just to spite me. Opal was concentrating on her own Christmas project, a special ornament, and she was sneery anyway. So I went to my room, turned on the goosenecked lamp by my bed, and sat on the rug between piles of dirty laundry, pieces of driftwood I’d been studying for the shapes inside, and pieces of driftwood I’d carved to let the shapes out. I stared at my hands in my lap.

  Lights. We needed lights to put on the tree, and last year Jasper summoned up enough lights to festoon my tree and dot the front of the house, making it look like a fairy palace after nightfall. He’d even placed lights on the ceiling of the living room. Was Mama expecting me to do all that? Jasper was always better at everything than I was, which was why I got interested in things I knew he wouldn’t like, like wood carving.

  How the hell did you make a light?

  I thought about Jasper’s gifts. He seemed so much more in control of his than I was of mine. If he wanted to turn Gypsum green or make it rain on me, he did it, no hesitations, no problems. He probably just said “Lights, appear,” and his gifts obliged. No, he probably said something that rhymed. He was good at that stuff, what Great-Uncle Tobias called a power lubricant, something that made the interaction with gifts work better and easier.

  I held my hands up. “Lights, appear before me here,” I said, and felt the stirring under my skin that meant something gifted was happening. Then a small purple rip shimmered in the air in front of me. It widened into a floating curtain about a foot high and two feet wide, strings of purple and lavender beads made of light that shifted as if a wind were blowing them. It was beautiful and strange. The rustling in my hands went on, and tiredness stole over me. Great-Uncle Tobias said my main problem was learning when to stop supplying power and let what I had reached for exist by itself. I closed my hands into fists, cutting off the flow of power. The lights shivered and slipped away, a bead string at a time.

  “This won’t work,” I said as the last strand of lightpearls winked out. Why wasn’t the curtain there enough to stay, when I had put so much power into it? Jasper hadn’t played battery for his lights last year. He just set them up and left them.

  I went down to the kitchen. It smelled like warmth and butter and fresh cookies. Gypsum was there, dropping spoonfuls of batter on cookie sheets, looking wild and frizzy and contented. She had dough in her hair,
a streak of chocolate across her nose, and a dusting of flour on her shirt. I grabbed a cookie off a cooling rack and bit into it, then said, “How do you make light?”

  She shoved one tray in the oven and pulled another one out. “It’s an emission in the electromagnetic spectrum somewhere between heat and X-rays,” she said. “I can’t remember if everything makes it or if reflections count. I mean....” She held up her hand, staring at the outstretched fingers. “If the light is coming from the fixture on the ceiling, and it hits me, am I emitting photons or does the light bounce off—no, I’m all mixed up. Anyway, you could try taking something hot and heat it up into the visible spectrum, or you could do what I do—turn on a light.”

  I finished my cookie (chocolate chip, still warm and chewy) and held out my hands. “Tree lights, free lights,” I said, and suddenly there was a swarm of little green lights above me. I closed my hands right away to stop the power flow. These lights didn’t disappear. They started out in a globular cluster, then peeled off, darting everywhere. Some flew into the living room, some headed for the dining room, three flew into Gyp’s bowl of cookie dough, and one landed on her forehead.

  “Hey!” she yelped, reaching up to touch it.

  “Is it hot?” I asked, going to her.

  “No. Is it still there?”

  “Yes.” It looked like a glowing green penny, pressed into her skin just above her nose.

  “I can’t even feel it.”

  “It looks funny.”

  “Thanks a lot! Free lights! What kind of powers do they have?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How long are they going to last? How do I get it off?”

  “It looks kind of neat, actually,” I said. She frowned at me and looked at the lights in the cookie dough. At first I thought they were just perching on the mountain of tan-and-chocolate chip dough, but then I noticed—

  “They’re eating it,” said Gypsum. The three lights in the dough were sinking into pits of their own creation. She lifted a wooden spoon. “Shoo!” she said, swatting at them. They giggled and tunneled deeper into the dough. “Damn!” she said. “This is no way to make light,” she told me.

  “But it worked. Better than the last thing I tried.”

  “Get specific,” she said, leaning her elbows on the counter and staring at me. The light on her forehead looked like a third eye, greener than her other two, staring harder. “Map out exactly what you want, then put it into rhyme on paper, then try it out loud, okay?” Like the rest of us, she had sat through a lot of lessons with Great-Uncle Tobias, though, since she had no gift, she couldn’t use any of what she’d learned. She remembered her lessons better than I did.

  “That’s too worky,” I said.

  “A little work won’t hurt you. It doesn’t hurt me.”

  “Sure it does,” I said. I grabbed three more cookies and headed for the door. “You should see your face.” Conjured cookies never tasted as good as ones somebody actually made from scratch.

  In my room, three cookies later, I sat on the bed. I held up my hands. “Uh—lights on house, lights on tree, lights on ceiling, lights on—” I had been about to say me, but that would never do. Tomorrow was a school day, and effects I had conjured before sometimes lasted two weeks.

  Despite my breaking off the rhyme before the end, I felt a prickling that started under the skin of my palms and spread up my arms, washing over my shoulders and down my chest and back. Oh, no. A major effect. At this point there was nothing I could do but wait and see what my gifts brought me, and try to pretend I had done it on purpose.

  Heat flushed along my skin. I felt the power rising, flowing out of me, felt it take the form of needles that rushed everywhere, poking holes in things, tiny punctures that let light through from some other place. A moment, and my ceiling was speckled with constellations; through my connection with my power, I knew that all the ceilings in the house were, and the front of the house was, and off on some road, needles dived into the open window of the van and poked light holes through the air around Beryl’s tree.

  I tensed my muscles to cut off the power flow, and waited a moment, exhaustion pressing down on me like a lead blanket. Yes, I had managed to stop the flow. And yes. There were still lights on the ceiling. After that, I fell asleep.

  I woke up some time later, and there was no light on the ceiling. Great-Uncle Tobias was sitting in a chair by my bed, watching my face. His thick white hair looked more peaky than usual, and his eyes looked tired, and they danced.

  “What you did, Flint,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “It was fascinating. And very dangerous. It took your mother and Hermetta and me to undo it.”

  I sighed. “What was wrong with it?”

  “Well, the place the light was coming from is closer to a source than we like to be. More than light was coming through. Hard radiation, too. Not good for people and other living things.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle.”

  “Well,” he said, and patted my knee. “You’ll do it differently next time, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He left.

  I sat up, still tired in my bones, like I’d been skateboarding down the biggest hill ever, tense the whole way because I needed to pick a direction at the bottom, which was coming faster and faster, and I couldn’t see far enough ahead. “Light,” I said, staring at my hands. “Light.”

  I got up and went to my desk, opened the top right-hand drawer, and fished my cash stash out from behind a stack of graph paper, old math assignments, and some chewed pencils. I sat on the floor and counted it. Twenty-four dollars, sixty-three cents. It ought to be enough to buy some normal Christmas lights.

  Maybe next year I’ll get it right.

  GYPSUM’S COOKIES

  Nobody can do anything without ingredients. That’s what I tell myself, because in one sense it’s true, and so it makes what I do as important as what the rest of my family does, even if what I do is less impressive. So what if one of their main ingredients is magic? So what if that’s still a secret ingredient to me? So, I can still bake a good batch of cookies, and none of my siblings bothers to read recipes and learn methods, so that’s beyond them. So there.

  Before I came up with the Gypsum Theory of Ingredients, the kitchen in our house was just a big place I went several times a day in hopes that somebody had powered up some raw stuff into something edible, which they usually had. Everybody in the household was supposed to do some work, and I usually chose dishes, because I knew how to do dishes; my brothers and sisters and I had learned how in the years before they went through transition sickness. Grownups did all the cooking back then.

  I woke up one morning when I was about twenty-one and thought about that. In the novels I’d been reading, I’d noticed that normal people cooked their own food instead of waiting for somebody with magic to do it for them, and it occurred to me that I wasn’t just ungifted and incompetent and pitiful. I was normal. So why not try doing things like cooking? So it took longer, who cared? If it didn’t work, that would be what everybody expected of me, and if it did work, I could surprise them all.

  Now the kitchen is the heart of the house for me. I write things on the shopping list. I know what the more obscure tools are for. I’ve left my fingerprints here: I’ve scored the breadboard while chopping vegetables, and I melted a hole in the plastic spoondrip once when I left it too near the burner. A lot of what I’ve learned strikes my relatives as arcane and beyond them, so one of the secret things I cook up in the kitchen is my own smile.

  This is the second year I tackled the Christmas cookies. This year I actually bought a book of cookie recipes, and I tried things that didn’t even seem like they’d taste good. I didn’t have to eat them. I just wanted to make mountains of cookies that would sit around the house testifying to my worthiness, and if I made cookies nobody wanted to eat, that meant my monuments would last longer.

  Everybody wanted Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, tho
ugh, so first I made millions of those. Then I started frenzying my way through a bunch of recipes with foreign names like Berlinerkranzer, Krumkake, Pfeffernusse, and Sandkager. It was weird how big a difference the way you treat butter, sugar, flour, and eggs made. I loved that.

  It was like a spell, the ingredients the magic, the expression a result of how I shaped them.

  I was rolling pieces of Berlinerkranzer dough to form wreaths when Jasper came in from outside, taking off his motorcycle helmet and running a hand through his light hair.

  “You have something green on your forehead,” he said.

  “One of Flint’s lights. He decorated me by mistake—I think.”

  Jasper picked up a piece of dough and bit it. “Yum,” he said. Then he frowned. “Orange?”

  “Orange rind. I think baking will make it taste better.”

  “It’s pretty good now, just weird.”

  I watched him sample the dough again and thought, I wish we were children. Jasper and I were close before he went through transition. We got into so much trouble together Mama seriously considered sending one of us off to live with cousins, but Daddy talked her out of it. I worked the dough again, rolling it into pencil-thin lengths, then joining the ends. Jasper watched me load a baking sheet with cookies. I brushed their tops with meringue and added green and red candied fruit accents, then put the cookies in the oven, and he still stood there, a slight frown drawing a line between his brows, his hazel eyes shadowed.

  “What?” I said as I went to the fridge for more dough.

  “This stuff you’re doing is so picky. You’ve already made the dough. I could spell it into those little rings in half a minute.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, then clapped a hand over my mouth. I hadn’t said “no” to Jasper in a long time. It wasn’t safe.

  But he didn’t look mad. “Why not?”

  “Because, this is what I’m doing for our celebration,” I said. “You do your part, and I do mine.” It had been years since my heart was in the prayers we offered up on Christmas, because I thought the gods we honored had abandoned me; I was tired of petitioning them to take me back. I was normal, and I would make do with a normal lack of faith. Still, I said the prayers. And now, I discovered, I wanted to make my offering, too, whether there were gods to receive it or not. The people were here. They would receive.