The Line Between

El Regalo

«You can't kill him," Mr. Luke said. «Your mother wouldn't like it.» After some consideration, he added, «I'd be rather annoyed myself.»

«But wait," Angie said, in the dramatic tones of a television commercial for some miraculous mop. «There's more. I didn't tell you about the brandied cupcakes — "

«Yes, you did.»

«And about him telling Jennifer Williams what I got her for her birthday, and she pitched a fit, because she had two of them already — "

«He meant well," her father said cautiously. «I'm pretty sure.»

«And then when he finked to Mom about me and Orlando Cruz, and we weren't doing anything — "

«Nevertheless. No killing.»

Angie brushed sweaty mouse–brown hair off her forehead and regrouped. «Can I at least maim him a little? Trust me, he's earned it.»

«I don't doubt you," Mr. Luke agreed. «But you're twelve, and Marvyn's eight. Eight and a half. You're bigger than he is, so beating him up isn't fair. When you're … oh, say, twenty, and he's sixteen and a half — okay, you can try it then. Not until.»

Angie's wordless grunt might or might not have been assent. She started out of the room, but her father called her back, holding out his right hand. «Pinky–swear, kid.» Angie eyed him warily, but hooked her little finger around his without hesitation, which was a mistake. «You did that much too easily," her father said, frowning. «Swear by Buffy.»

«What? You can't swear by a television show!»

«Where is that written? Repeat after me—'I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer—' " «You really don't trust me!»

" 'I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I will keep my hands off my baby brother—' "

«My baby brother, the monster! He's gotten worse since he started sticking that y in his name — "

" ' — and I will stop calling him Ex–Lax—' "

«Come on, I only do that when he makes me really mad — "

" ' — until he shall have attained the age of sixteen years and six months, after which time—' "

«After which time I get to pound him into marmalade. Deal. I can wait.» She grinned; then turned self–conscious, making a performance of pulling down her upper lip to cover the shiny new braces. At the door, she looked over her shoulder and said lightly, «You are way too smart to be a father.»

From behind his book, Mr. Luke answered, «I've often thought so myself.»

Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room, doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished, feeling virtuously entitled to some low–fat chocolate reward, she wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother's room on the way. Looking in — not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was doing, until shooed away — she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn't something to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.

Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece — she had the silver top hat — very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had a hotel on Park Place.

Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a larger–than–planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the container she finally managed to stuff what she'd just glimpsed deep in the part of her mind she called her «forgettery.» As she'd once said to her friend Melissa, «There's such a thing as too much information, and it is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about stuff. Look at the President.»

For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of staying out of Angie's way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry was when you didn't see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the garbage.

The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn't simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn't catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

Angie's buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him — backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie's astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do — and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn's partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.

When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke. Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only, «My room.»

Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the bed and studied him: chubby and messy–looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of rusty–brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said, «Talk to me.»

«About what?» Marvyn had a deep, foggy voice for eight and a half — Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before Marvyn was born. «I didn't break your CD case.»

«Yes, you did," Angie said. «But forget that. Let's talk about garbage bags. Let's talk about Monopoly.»

Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, «I'm warning you right now, you won't believe me.»

«I never do. Make it a good one.» «Okay," Marvyn said. «I'm a witch.»

When Angie could speak, she said the first thing that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. «You can't be a witch. You're a wizard, or a warlock or something.» Like we're having a sane conversation, she thought.

Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch almost came loose. «Uh–uh! That's all books and movies and stuff. You're a man witch or you're a woman witch, that's it. I'm a man witch.»

«You'll be a dead witch if you don't quit shitting me," Angie told him. But her brother knew he had her, and he grinned like a pirate (at home he often tied a bandanna around his head, and he was constantly after Mrs. Luke to buy him a parrot). He said, «You can ask Lidia. She was the one who knew.»

Lidia del Carmen de Madero y Gomez had been the Lukes' house–keeper since well before Angie's birth. She was from Ciego de Avila in Cuba, and claimed to have changed Fidel Castro's diapers as a girl working for his family. For all her years — no one seemed to know her age; certainly not the Lukes — Lidia's eyes remained as clear as a child's, and Angie had on occasion nearly wept with envy of her beautiful wrinkled deep–dark skin. For her part, Lidia got on well with Angie, spoke Spanish with her mother, and was teaching Mr. Luke to cook Cuban food. But Marvyn had been hers since his infancy, beyond question or interference. They went to Spanish–language movies on Saturdays, and shopped together in the Bowen Street barrio.

«The one who knew," Angie said. «Knew what? Is Lidia a witch too?»

Marvyn's look suggested that he was wondering where their parents had actually found their daughter. «No, of course she's not a witch. She's a santera.»

Angie stared. She knew as much about Santeria as anyone growing up in a big city with a growing population of Africans and South Americans — which wasn't much. Newspaper articles and television specials had informed her that santeros sacrificed chickens and goats and did … things with the blood. She tried to imagine Marvyn with a chicken, doing things, and couldn't. Not even Marvyn.

«So Lidia got you into it?» she finally asked. «Now you're a santero too?»

«Nah, I'm a witch, I told you.» Marvyn's disgusted impatience was approaching critical mass.

Angie said, «Wicca? You're into the Goddess thing? There's a girl in my home room, Devlin Margulies, and she's a Wiccan, and that's all she talks about. Sabbats and esbats, and drawing down the moon, and the rest of it. She's got skin like a cheese–grater.»

Marvyn blinked at her. «What's a Wiccan?» He sprawled suddenly on her bed, grabbing Milady as she hobbled in and pooting loudly on her furry stomach. «I already knew I could sort of mess with things — you remember the rubber duck, and that time at the baseball game?» Angie remembered. Especially the rubber duck. «Anyway, Lidia took me to meet this real old lady, in the farmers' market, she's even older than her, her name's Yemaya, something like that, she smokes this funny little pipe all the time. Anyway, she took hold of me, my face, and she looked in my eyes, and then she closed her eyes, and she just sat like that for so long!» He giggled. «I thought she'd fallen asleep, and I started to pull away, but Lidia wouldn't let me. So she sat like that, and she sat, and then she opened her eyes and she told me I was a witch, a brujo. And Lidia bought me a two–scoop ice–cream cone. Coffee and chocolate, with M&Ms.»

«You won't have a tooth in your head by the time you're fifteen.» Angie didn't know what to say, what questions to ask. «So that's it? The old lady, she gives you witch lessons or something?»

«Nah — I told you, she's a big santera, that's different. I only saw her that one time. She kept telling Lidia that I had el regalo —I think that means the gift, she said that a lot — and I should keep practicing. Like you with the clarinet.»

Angie winced. Her hands were small and stubby–fingered, and music slipped through them like rain. Her parents, sympathizing, had offered to cancel the clarinet lessons, but Angie refused. As she confessed to her friend Melissa, she had no skill at accepting defeat.

Now she asked, «So how do you practice? Boogieing with garbage bags?»

Marvyn shook his head. «That's getting old — so's playing board games with Milady. I was thinking maybe I could make the dishes wash themselves, like in Beauty and the Beast. I bet I could do that.»

«You could enchant my homework," Angie suggested. «My algebra, for starters.»

Her brother snorted. «Hey, I'm just a kid, I've got my limits! I mean, your homework?»

«Right," Angie said. «Right. Look, what about laying a major spell on Tim Hubley, the next time he's over here with Melissa? Like making his feet go flat so he can't play basketball — that's the only reason she likes him, anyway. Or — " her voice became slower and more hesitant — «what about getting Jake Petrakis to fall madly, wildly, totally in love with me? That'd be … funny.»

Marvyn was occupied with Milady. «Girl stuff, who cares about all that? I want to be so good at soccer everybody'll want to be on my team — I want fat Josh Wilson to have patches over both eyes, so he'll leave me alone. I want Mom to order thin–crust pepperoni pizza every night, and I want Dad to — "

«No spells on Mom and Dad, not ever!» Angie was on her feet, leaning menacingly over him. «You got that, Ex–Lax? You mess with them even once, believe me, you'd better be one hella witch to keep me from strangling you. Understood?»

Marvyn nodded. Angie said, «Okay, I tell you what. How about practicing on Aunt Caroline when she comes next weekend?»

Marvyn's pudgy pirate face lit up at the suggestion. Aunt Caroline was their mother's older sister, celebrated in the Luke family for knowing everything about everything. A pleasant, perfectly decent person, her perpetual air of placid expertise would have turned a saint into a serial killer. Name a country, and Aunt Caroline had spent enough time there to know more about the place than a native; bring up a newspaper story, and without fail Aunt Caroline could tell you something about it that hadn't been in the paper; catch a cold, and Aunt Caroline could recite the maiden name of the top medical researcher in rhinoviruses' mother. (Mr. Luke said often that Aunt Caroline's motto was, «Say something, and I'll bet you're wrong.»)

«Nothing dangerous," Angie commanded, «nothing scary. And nothing embarrassing or anything.»

Marvyn looked sulky. «It's not going to be any fun that way.»

«If it's too gross, they'll know you did it," his sister pointed out. «I would.» Marvyn, who loved secrets and hidden identities, yielded.

During the week before Aunt Caroline's arrival, Marvyn kept so quietly to himself that Mrs. Luke worried about his health. Angie kept as close an eye on him as possible, but couldn't be at all sure what he might be planning — no more than he, she suspected. Once she caught him changing the tv channels without the remote; and once, left alone in the kitchen to peel potatoes and carrots for a stew, he had the peeler do it while he read the Sunday funnies. The apparent smallness of his ambitions relieved Angle's vague unease, lulling her into complacency about the big family dinner that was traditional on the first night of a visit from Aunt Caroline.

Aunt Caroline was, among other things, the sort of woman incapable of going anywhere without attempting to buy it. Her own house was jammed to the attic with sightseer souvenirs from all over the world: children's toys from Slovenia, sculptures from Afghanistan, napkin rings from Kenya shaped like lions and giraffes, legions of brass bangles, boxes and statues of gods from India, and so many Russian matryoshka dolls fitting inside each other that she gave them away as stocking–stuffers every Christmas. She never came to the table at the Lukes without bringing some new acquisition for approval; so dinner with Aunt Caroline, in Mr. Luke's words, was always Show and Tell time.

Her most recent hegira had brought her back to West Africa for the third or fourth time, and provided her with the most evil–looking doll Angie had ever seen. Standing beside Aunt Caroline's plate, it was about two feet high, with bat ears, too many fingers, and eyes like bright green marbles streaked with scarlet threads. Aunt Caroline explained rapturously that it was a fertility doll unique to a single Benin tribe, which Angie found impossible to credit. «No way!» she announced loudly.«Not for one minute am I even thinking about having babies with that thing staring at me! It doesn't even look pregnant, the way they do. No way in the world!»

Aunt Caroline had already had two of Mr. Luke's margaritas, and was working on a third. She replied with some heat that not all fertility figures came equipped with cannonball breasts, globular bellies and callipygous rumps — «Some of them are remarkably slender, even by Western standards!» Aunt Caroline herself, by anyone's standards, was built along the general lines of a chopstick.

Angie was drawing breath for a response when she heard her father say behind her, «Well, Jesus Harrison Christ," and then her mother's soft gasp, «Caroline.» But Aunt Caroline was busy explaining to her niece that she knew absolutely nothing about fertility. Mrs. Luke said, considerably louder, «Caroline, shut up, your doll!»

Aunt Caroline said, «What, what?» and then turned, along with Angie. They both screamed.

The doll was growing all the things Aunt Caroline had been insisting it didn't need to qualify as a fertility figure. It was carved from ebony, or from something even harder, but it was pushing out breasts and belly and hips much as Marvyn's two garbage bags had suddenly developed arms and legs. Even its expression had changed, from hungry slyness to a downright silly grin, as though it were about to kiss someone, anyone. It took a few shaky steps forward on the table and put its foot in the salsa.

Then the babies started coming.

They came pattering down on the dinner table, fast and hard, like wooden rain, one after another, after another, after another … perfect little copies, miniatures, of the madly smiling doll-thing, plopping out of it — just like Milady used to drop kittens in my lap, Angie thought absurdly. One of them fell into her plate, and one bounced into the soup, and a couple rolled into Mr. Luke's lap, making him knock his chair over trying to get out of the way. Mrs. Luke was trying to grab them all up at once, which wasn't possible, and Aunt Caroline sat where she was and shrieked. And the doll kept grinning and having babies.

Marvyn was standing against the wall, looking both as terrified as Aunt Caroline and as stupidly pleased as the doll–thing. Angie caught his eye and made a fierce signal, enough, quit, turn it off, but either her brother was having too good a time, or else had no idea how to undo whatever spell he had raised. One of the miniatures hit her in the head, and she had a vision of her whole family being drowned in wooden doll–babies, everyone gurgling and reaching up pathetically toward the surface before they all went under for the third time. Another baby caroomed off the soup tureen into her left ear, one sharp ebony fingertip drawing blood.

It stopped, finally — Angie never learned how Marvyn regained control — and things almost quieted down, except for Aunt Caroline. The fertility doll got the look of glazed joy off its face and went back to being a skinny, ugly, duty–free airport souvenir, while the doll–babies seemed to melt away exactly as though they had been made of ice instead of wood. Angie was quick enough to see one of them actually dissolving into nothingness directly in front of Aunt Caroline, who at this point stopped screaming and began hiccoughing and beating the table with her palms. Mr. Luke pounded her on the back, and Angie volunteered to practice her Heimlich maneuver, but was overruled. Aunt Caroline went to bed early.

Later, in Marvyn's room, he kept his own bed between himself and Angie, indignantly demanding, «What? You said not scary — what's scary about a doll having babies? I thought it was cute.»

«Cute," Angie said. «Uh–huh.» She was wondering, in a distant sort of way, how much prison time she might get if she actually murdered her brother. Ten years? Five, with good behavior and a lot of psychiatrists? I could manage it. «And what did I tell you about not embarrassing Aunt Caroline?»

«How did I embarrass her?» Marvyn's visible eye was wide with outraged innocence. «She shouldn't drink so much, that's her problem. She embarrassed me.»

«They're going to figure it out, you know," Angie warned him. «Maybe not Aunt Caroline, but Mom for sure. She's a witch herself that way. Your cover is blown, buddy.»

But to her own astonishment, not a word was ever said about the episode, the next day or any other — not by her observant mother, not by her dryly perceptive father, nor even by Aunt Caroline, who might reasonably have been expected at least to comment at breakfast. A baffled Angie remarked to Milady, drowsing on her pillow, «I guess if a thing's weird enough, somehow nobody saw it.» This explanation didn't satisfy her, not by a long shot, but lacking anything better she was stuck with it. The old cat blinked in squeezy–eyed agreement, wriggled herself into a more comfortable position, and fell asleep still purring.

Angie kept Marvyn more closely under her eye after that than she had done since he was quite small, and first showing a penchant for playing in traffic. Whether this observation was the cause or not, he did remain more or less on his best behavior, barring the time he turned the air in the bicycle tires of a boy who had stolen his superhero comic book to cement. There was also the affair of the enchanted soccer ball, which kept rolling back to him as though it couldn't bear to be with anyone else. And Angie learned to be extremely careful when making herself a sandwich, because if she lost track of her brother for too long, the sandwich was liable to acquire an extra ingredient. Paprika was one, tabasco another; and Scotch Bonnet peppers were a special favorite. But there were others less hot and even more objectionable. As she snarled to a sympathetic Melissa Feldman, who had two brothers of her own, «They ought to be able to jail kids just for being eight and a half.»

Then there was the matter of Marvyn's attitude toward Angie's attitude about Jake Petrakis.

Jake Petrakis was a year ahead of Angie at school. He was half–Greek and half–Irish, and his blue eyes and thick poppy–colored hair contrasted so richly with his olive skin that she had not been able to look directly at him since the fourth grade. He was on the swim team, and he was the president of the Chess Club, and he went with Ashleigh Sutton, queen of the junior class, rechristened «Ghastly Ashleigh» by the loyal Melissa. But he spoke kindly and cheerfully to Angie without fail, always saying Hey, Angie, and How's it going, Angie? and See you in the fall, Angie, have a good summer. She clutched such things to herself, every one of them, and at the same time could not bear them.

Marvyn was as merciless as a mosquito when it came to Jake Petrakis. He made swooning, kissing noises whenever he spied Angie looking at Jake's picture in her yearbook, and drove her wild by holding invented conversations between them, just loudly enough for her to hear. His increasing ability at witchcraft meant that scented, decorated, and misspelled love notes were likely to flutter down onto her bed at any moment, as were long–stemmed roses, imitation jewelry (Marvyn had limited experience and poor taste), and small, smudgy photos of Jake and Ashleigh together. Mr. Luke had to invoke Angie's oath more than once, and to sweeten it with a promise of a new bicycle if Marvyn made it through the year undamaged. Angie held out for a mountain bike, and her father sighed. «That was always a myth, about the gypsies stealing children," he said, rather wistfully. «It was surely the other way around. Deal.»

Yet there were intermittent peaceful moments between Marvyn and Angie, several occurring in Marvyn's room. It was a far tidier place than Angie's room, for all the clothes on the floor and battered board game boxes sticking out from under the bed. Marvyn had mounted National Geographic foldout maps all around the walls, lining them up so perfectly that the creases were invisible; and on one special wall were prints and photos of a lot of people with strange staring eyes. Angie recognized Rasputin, and knew a few of the other names — Aleister Crowley, for one, and a man in Renaissance dress called Dr. John Dee. There were two women, as well: the young witch Willow, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a daguerreotype of a black woman wearing a kind of turban folded into points. No Harry Potter, however. Marvyn had never taken to Harry Potter.

There was also, one day after school, a very young kitten wobbling among the books littering Marvyn's bed. A surprised Angie picked it up and held it over her face, feeling its purring between her hands. It was a dark, dusty gray, rather like Milady — indeed, Angie had never seen another cat of that exact color. She nuzzled its tummy happily, asking it, «Who are you, huh? Who could you ever be?»

Marvyn was feeding his angelfish, and didn't look up. He said, «She's Milady.»

Angie dropped the kitten on the bed. Marvyn said, «I mean, she's Milady when she was young. I went back and got her.»

When he did turn around, he was grinning the maddening pirate grin Angie could never stand, savoring her shock. It took her a minute to find words, and more time to make them come out. She said, «You went back, You went back in time?»

«It was easy," Marvyn said. «Forward's hard — I don't think I could ever get really forward. Maybe Dr. Dee could do it.» He picked up the kitten and handed her back to his sister. It was Milady, down to the crooked left ear and the funny short tail with the darker bit on the end. He said, «She was hurting all the time, she was so old. I thought, if she could — you know — start over, before she got the arthritis…»

He didn't finish. Angie said slowly, «So where's Milady? The other one? I mean, if you brought this one … I mean, how can they be in the same world?»

«They can't," Marvyn said. «The old Milady's gone.»

Angie's throat closed up. Her eyes filled, and so did her nose, and she had to blow it before she could speak again. Looking at the kitten, she knew it was Milady, and made herself think about how good it would be to have her once again bouncing around the house, no longer limping grotesquely and meowing with the pain. But she had loved the old cat all her life, and never known her as a kitten, and when the new Milady started to climb into her lap, Angie pushed her away.

«All right," she said to Marvyn. «All right. How did you get … back, or whatever?»

Marvyn shrugged and went back to his fish. «No big deal. You just have to concentrate the right way.»

Angie bounced a plastic Wiffle ball off the back of his neck, and he turned around, annoyed. «Leave me alone! Okay, you want to know — there's a spell, words you have to say over and over and over, until you're sick of them, and there's herbs in it too. You have to light them, and hang over them, and you shut your eyes and keep breathing them in and saying the words — "

«I knew I'd been smelling something weird in your room lately. I thought you were sneaking takeout curry to bed with you again.»

«And then you open your eyes, and there you are," Marvyn said. «I told you, no big deal.»

«There you are where? How do you know where you'll come out? When you'll come out? Click your heels together three times and say there's no place like home?»

«No, dork, you just know.» And that was all Angie could get out of him — not, as she came to realize, because he wouldn't tell her, but because he couldn't. Witch or no witch, he was still a small boy, with almost no real idea of what he was doing. He was winging it all, playing it all by ear.

Arguing with Marvyn always gave her a headache, and her history homework — the rise of the English merchant class — was starting to look good in comparison. She went back to her own bedroom and read two whole chapters, and when the kitten Milady came stumbling and squeaking in, Angie let her sleep on the desk. «What the hell," she told it, «it's not your fault.»

That evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Luke got home, Angie told them that Milady had died peacefully of illness and old age while they were at work, and was now buried in the back garden. (Marvyn had wanted to make it a horrible hit–and–run accident, complete with a black SUV and half–glimpsed license plate starting with the letter Q, but Angie vetoed this.) Marvyn's contribution to her solemn explanation was to explain that he had seen the new kitten in a petshop window, «and she just looked so much like Milady, and I used my whole allowance, and I'll take care of her, I promise!» Their mother, not being a true cat person, accepted the story easily enough, but Angie was never sure about Mr. Luke. She found him too often sitting with the kitten on his lap, the two of them staring solemnly at each other.

But she saw very little evidence of Marvyn fooling any further with time. Nor, for that matter, was he showing the interest she would have expected in turning himself into the world's best second–grade soccer player, ratcheting up his test scores high enough to be in college by the age of eleven, or simply getting even with people (since Marvyn forgot nothing and had a hit list going back to day–care). She could almost always tell when he'd been making his bed by magic, or making the window plants grow too fast, but he seemed content to remain on that level. Angie let it go.

Once she did catch him crawling on the ceiling, like Spider–Man, but she yelled at him and he fell on the bed and threw up. And there was, of course, the time — two times, actually — when, with Mrs. Luke away, Marvyn organized all the shoes in her closet into a chorus line, and had them tapping and kicking together like the Rockettes. It was fun for Angie to watch, but she made him stop because they were her mother's shoes. What if her clothes joined in? The notion was more than she wanted to deal with.

As it was, there was already plenty to deal with just then. Besides her schoolwork, there was band practice, and Melissa's problems with her boyfriend; not to mention the endless hours spent at the dentist, correcting a slight overbite. Melissa insisted that it made her look sexy, but the suggestion had the wrong effect on Angie's mother. In any case, as far as Angie could see, all Marvyn was doing was playing with a new box of toys, like an elaborate electric train layout, or a top–of–the–line Erector set. She was even able to imagine him getting bored with magic itself after a while. Marvyn had a low threshold for boredom.

Angie was in the orchestra, as well as the band, because of a chronic shortage of woodwinds, but she liked the marching band better. You were out of doors, performing at parades and football games, part of the joyful noise, and it was always more exciting than standing up in a dark, hushed auditorium playing for people you could hardly see. «Besides," as she confided to her mother, «in marching band nobody really notices how you sound. They just want you to keep in step.»

On a bright spring afternoon, rehearsing «The Washington Post March» with the full band, Angle's clarinet abruptly went mad. No «licorice stick» now, but a stick of rapturous dynamite, it took off on flights of rowdy improvisation, doing outrageous somersaults, backflips, and cart–wheels with the melody — things that Angie knew she could never have conceived of, even if her skill had been equal to the inspiration. Her bandmates, up and down the line, were turning to stare at her, and she wanted urgently to wail, «Hey, I'm not the one, it's my stupid brother, you know I can't play like that.» But the music kept spilling out, excessive, absurd, unstoppable — unlike the march, which finally lurched to a disorderly halt. Angie had never been so embarrassed in her life.

Mr. Bishow, the bandmaster, came bumbling through the milling musicians to tell her, «Angie, that was fantastic — that was dazzling! I never knew you had such spirit, such freedom, such wit in your music!» He patted her — hugged her even, quickly and cautiously — then stepped back almost immediately and said, «Don't ever do it again.»

«Like I'd have a choice," Angie mumbled, but Mr. Bishow was already shepherding the band back into formation for «Semper Fidelis» and «High Society," which Angie fumbled her way through as always, two bars behind the rest of the woodwinds. She was slouching disconsolately off the field when Jake Petrakis, his dark–gold hair still glinting damply from swimming practice, ran over to her to say, «Hey, Angie, cool," then punched her on the shoulder, as he would have done another boy, and dashed off again to meet one of his relay–team partners. And Angie went on home, and waited for Marvyn behind the door of his room.

She seized him by the hair the moment he walked in, and he squalled, «All right, let go, all right! I thought you'd like it!»

«Like it?» Angie shook him, hard. «Like it? You evil little ogre, you almost got me kicked out of the band! What else are you lining up for me that you think I'll like ?»

«Nothing, I swear!» But he was giggling even while she was shaking him. «Okay, I was going to make you so beautiful, even Mom and Dad wouldn't recognize you, but I quit on that. Too much work.» Angie grabbed for his hair again, but Marvyn ducked. «So what I thought, maybe I really could get Jake what's–his–face to go crazy about you. There's all kinds of spells and things for that — "

«Don't you dare," Angie said. She repeated the warning calmly and quietly. «Don't. You. Dare.»

Marvyn was still giggling. «Nah, I didn't think you'd go for it. Would have been fun, though.» Suddenly he was all earnestness, staring up at his sister out of one visible eye, strangely serious, even with his nose running. He said, «It is fun, Angie. It's the most fun I've ever had.»

«Yeah, I'll bet," she said grimly. «Just leave me out of it from now on, if you've got any plans for the third grade.» She stalked into the kitchen, looking for apple juice.

Marvyn tagged after her, chattering nervously about school, soccer games, the Milady–kitten's rapid growth, and a possible romance in his angelfish tank. «I'm sorry about the band thing, I won't do it again. I just thought it'd be nice if you could play really well, just one time. Did you like the music part, anyway?»

Angie did not trust herself to answer him. She was reaching for the apple juice bottle when the top flew off by itself, bouncing straight up at her face. As she flinched back, a glass came skidding down the counter toward her. She grabbed it before it crashed into the refrigerator, then turned and screamed at Marvyn, «Damn it, Ex–Lax, you quit that! You're going to hurt somebody, trying to do every damn thing by magic!»

«You said the D–word twice!» Marvyn shouted back at her. «I'm telling Mom!» But he made no move to leave the kitchen, and after a moment a small, grubby tear came sliding down from under the eyepatch. «I'm not using magic for everything! I just use it for the boring stuff, mostly. Like the garbage, and vacuuming up, and like putting my clothes away. And Milady's litter box, when it's my turn. That kind of stuff, okay?»

Angie studied him, marveling as always at his capacity for looking heartwrenchingly innocent. She said, «No point to it when I'm cleaning her box, right? Never mind — just stay out of my way, I've got a French midterm tomorrow.» She poured the apple juice, put it back, snatched a raisin cookie and headed for her room. But she paused in the doorway, for no reason she could ever name, except perhaps the way Marvyn had moved to follow her and then stopped himself. «What? Wipe your nose, it's gross. What's the matter now?»

«Nothing," Marvyn mumbled. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, which didn't help. He said, «Only I get scared, Angie. It's scary, doing the stuff I can do.»

«What scary? Scary how? A minute ago it was more fun than you've ever had in your life.»

«It is!» He moved closer, strangely hesitant: neither witch, nor pirate nor seraph, but an anxious, burdened small boy. «Only sometimes it's like too much fun. Sometimes, right in the middle, I think maybe I should stop, but I can't. Like one time, I was by myself, and I was just fooling around … and I sort of made this thing, which was really interesting, only it came out funny and then I couldn't unmake it for the longest time, and I was scared Mom and Dad would come home — "

Angie, grimly weighing her past French grades in her mind, reached back for another raisin cookie. «I told you before, you're going to get yourself into real trouble doing crazy stuff like that. Just quit, before something happens by magic that you can't fix by magic. You want advice, I just gave you advice. See you around.»

Marvyn wandered forlornly after her to the door of her room. When she turned to close it, he mumbled, «I wish I were as old as you. So I'd know what to do.»

«Ha," Angie said, and shut the door.

Whereupon, heedless of French irregular verbs, she sat down at her desk and began writing a letter to Jake Petrakis. Neither then nor even much later was Angie ever able to explain to anyone why she had written that letter at precisely that time. Because he had slapped her shoulder and told her she — or at least her music — was cool? Because she had seen him, that same afternoon, totally tangled up with Ghastly Ashleigh in a shadowy corner of the library stacks? Because of Marvyn's relentless teasing? Or simply because she was twelve years old, and it was time for her to write such a letter to someone? Whatever the cause, she wrote what she wrote, and then she folded it up and put it away in her desk drawer.

Then she took it out, and put it back in, and then she finally put it into her backpack. And there the letter stayed for nearly three months, well past midterms, finals, and football, until the fateful Friday night when Angie was out with Melissa, walking and window–shopping in downtown Avicenna, placidly drifting in and out of every coffeeshop along Parnell Street. She told Melissa about the letter then, and Melissa promptly went into a fit of the giggles, which turned into hiccups and required another cappuccino to pacify them. When she could speak coherently, she said, «You ought to send it to him. You've got to send it to him.»

Angie was outraged, at first. «No way! I wrote it for me, not for a test or a class, and damn sure not for Jake Petrakis. What kind of a dipshit do you think I am?»

Melissa grinned at her out of mocking green eyes. «The kind of dipshit who's got that letter in your backpack right now, and I bet it's in an envelope with an address and a stamp on it.»

«It doesn't have a stamp! And the envelope's just to protect it! I just like having it with me, that's all — "

«And the address?»

«Just for practice, okay? But I didn't sign it, and there's no return address, so that shows you!»

«Right.» Melissa nodded. «Right. That definitely shows me.»

«Drop it," Angie told her, and Melissa dropped it then. But it was a Friday night, and both of them were allowed to stay out late, as long as they were together, and Avicenna has a lot of coffeeshops. Enough lattes and cappuccinos, with double shots of espresso, brought them to a state of cheerfully jittery abandon in which everything in the world was supremely, ridiculously funny. Melissa never left the subject of Angie's letter alone for very long — «Come on, what's the worst that could happen? Him reading it and maybe figuring out you wrote it? Listen, the really worst thing would be you being an old, old lady still wishing you'd told Jake Petrakis how you felt when you were young. And now he's married, and he's a grandfather, and probably dead, for all you know — "

«Quit it!» But Angie was giggling almost as much as Melissa now, and somehow they were walking down quiet Lovisi Street, past the gas station and the boarded–up health–food store, to find the darkened Petrakis house and tiptoe up the steps to the porch. Facing the front door, Angie dithered for a moment, but Melissa said, «An old lady, in a home, for God's sake, and he'll never know," and Angie took a quick breath and pushed the letter under the door. They ran all the way back to Parnell Street, laughing so wildly that they could barely breathe…

…and Angie woke up in the morning whispering omigod, omigod, omigod, over and over, even before she was fully awake. She lay in bed for a good hour, praying silently and desperately that the night before had been some crazy, awful dream, and that when she dug into her backpack the letter would still be there. But she knew dreadfully better, and she never bothered to look for it on her frantic way to the telephone. Melissa said soothingly, «Well, at least you didn't sign the thing. There's that, anyway.»

«I sort of lied about that," Angie said. Her friend did not answer. Angie said, «Please, you have to come with me. Please.»

«Get over there," Melissa said finally. «Go, now — I'll meet you.»

Living closer, Angie reached the Petrakis house first, but had no intention of ringing the bell until Melissa got there. She was pacing back and forth on the porch, cursing herself, banging her fists against her legs, and wondering whether she could go to live with her father's sister Peggy in Grand Rapids, when the woman next door called over to tell her that the Petrakises were all out of town at a family gathering. «Left yesterday afternoon. Asked me to keep an eye on the place, cause they won't be back till sometime Sunday night. That's how come I'm kind of watching out.» She smiled warningly at Angie before she went back indoors.

The very large dog standing behind her stayed outside. He looked about the size of a Winnebago, and plainly had already made up his mind about Angie. She said, «Nice doggie," and he growled. When she tried out «Hey, sweet thing," which was what her father said to all animals, the dog showed his front teeth, and the hair stood up around his shoulders, and he lay down to keep an eye on things himself. Angie said sadly, «I'm usually really good with dogs.»

When Melissa arrived, she said, «Well, you shoved it under the door, so it can't be that far inside. Maybe if we got something like a stick or a wire clotheshanger to hook it back with.» But whenever they looked toward the neighboring house, they saw a curtain swaying, and finally they walked away, trying to decide what else to do. But there was nothing; and after a while Angle's throat was too swollen with not crying for her to talk without pain. She walked Melissa back to the bus stop, and they hugged goodbye as though they might never meet again.

Melissa said, «You know, my mother says nothing's ever as bad as you thought it was going to be. I mean, it can't be, because nothing beats all the horrible stuff you can imagine. So maybe … you know…» but she broke down before she could finish. She hugged Angie again and went home.

Alone in her own house, Angie sat quite still in the kitchen and went on not crying. Her entire face hurt with it, and her eyes felt unbearably heavy. Her mind was not moving at all, and she was vaguely grateful for that. She sat there until Marvyn walked in from playing basketball with his friends. Shorter than everyone else, he generally got stepped on a lot, and always came home scraped and bruised. Angie had rather expected him to try making himself taller, or able to jump higher, but he hadn't done anything of the sort so far. He looked at her now, bounced and shot an invisible basketball, and asked quietly, «What's the matter?»

It may have been the unexpected froggy gentleness of his voice, or simply the sudden fact of his having asked the question at all. Whatever the reason, Angie abruptly burst into furious tears, the rage directed entirely at herself, both for writing the letter to Jake Petrakis in the first place, and for crying about it now. She gestured to Marvyn to go away, but — amazing her further — he stood stolidly waiting for her to grow quiet. When at last she did, he repeated the question. «Angie. What's wrong?»

Angie told him. She was about to add a disclaimer — «You laugh even once, Ex–Lax — " when she realized that it wouldn't be necessary. Marvyn was scratching his head, scrunching up his brow until the eyepatch danced; then abruptly jamming both hands in his pockets and tilting his head back: the poster boy for careless insouciance. He said, almost absently, «I could get it back.»

«Oh, right.» Angie did not even look up. «Right.»

«I could so!» Marvyn was instantly his normal self again: so much for casualness and dispassion. «There's all kinds of things I could do.»

Angie dampened a paper towel and tried to do something with her hot, tear–streaked face. «Name two.»

«Okay, I will! You remember which mailbox you put it in?»

«Under the door," Angle mumbled. «I put it under the door.»

Marvyn snickered then. " Aww, like a Valentine.» Angie hadn't the energy to hit him, but she made a grab at him anyway, for appearance's sake. «Well, I could make it walk right back out the door, that's one way. Or I bet I could just open the door, if nobody's home. Easiest trick in the world, for us witches.»

«They're gone till Sunday night," Angie said. «But there's this lady next door, she's watching the place like a hawk. And even when she's not, she's got this immense dog. I don't care if you're the hottest witch in the world, you do not want to mess with this werewolf.»

Marvyn, who — as Angie knew — was wary of big dogs, went back to scratching his head. «Too easy, anyway. No fun, forget it.» He sat down next to her, completely absorbed in the problem. «How about I … no, that's kid stuff, anybody could do it. But there's a spell … I could make the letter self–destruct, right there in the house, like in that old tv show. It'd just be a little fluffy pile of ashes — they'd vacuum it up and never know. How about that?» Before Angie could express an opinion, he was already shaking his head. «Still too easy. A baby spell, for beginners. I hate those.»

«Easy is good," Angie told him earnestly. «I like easy. And you are a beginner.»

Marvyn was immediately outraged, his normal bass–baritone rumble going up to a wounded squeak. «I am not! No way in the world I'm a beginner!» He was up and stamping his feet, as he had not done since he was two. «I tell you what — just for that, I'm going to get your letter back for you, but I'm not going to tell you how. You'll see, that's all. You just wait and see.»

He was stalking away toward his room when Angie called after him, with the first glimmer both of hope and of humor that she had felt in approximately a century, «All right, you're a big bad witch king. What do you want?»

Marvyn turned and stared, uncomprehending.

Angie said, «Nothing for nothing, that's my bro. So let's hear it — what's your price for saving my life?»

If Marvyn's voice had gone up any higher, only bats could have heard it. «I'm rescuing you, and you think I want something for it? Julius Christmas!» which was the only swearword he was ever allowed to get away with. «You don't have anything I want, anyway. Except maybe…»

He let the thought hang in space, uncompleted. Angie said, «Except maybe what?»

Marvyn swung on the doorframe one–handed, grinning his pirate grin at her. «I hate you calling me Ex–Lax. You know I hate it, and you keep doing it.»

«Okay, I won't do it anymore, ever again. I promise.»

«Mmm. Not good enough.» The grin had grown distinctly evil. «I think you ought to call me O Mighty One for two weeks.»

«What?» Now Angie was on her feet, misery briefly forgotten. «Give it up, Ex–Lax — two weeks? No chance!» They glared at each other in silence for a long moment before she finally said, «A week. Don't push it. One week, no more. And not in front of people!»

«Ten days.» Marvyn folded his arms. «Starting right now.» Angie went on glowering. Marvyn said, «You want that letter?»

«Yes.»

Marvyn waited.

«Yes, O Mighty One.» Triumphant, Marvyn held out his hand and Angie slapped it. She said, «When?»

«Tonight. No, tomorrow — going to the movies with Sunil and his family tonight. Tomorrow.» He wandered off, and Angie took her first deep breath in what felt like a year and a half. She wished she could tell Melissa that things were going to be all right, but she didn't dare; so she spent the day trying to appear normal — just the usual Angie, aimlessly content on a Saturday afternoon. When Marvyn came home from the movies, he spent the rest of the evening reading Hellboy comics in his room, with the Milady–kitten on his stomach. He was still doing it when Angie gave up peeking in at him and went to bed.

But he was gone on Sunday morning. Angie knew it the moment she woke up. She had no idea where he could be, or why. She had rather expected him to work whatever spell he settled on in his bedroom, under the stern gaze of his wizard mentors. But he wasn't there, and he didn't come to breakfast. Angie told their mother that they'd been up late watching television together, and that she should probably let Marvyn sleep in. And when Mrs. Luke grew worried after breakfast, Angie went to his room herself, returning with word that Marvyn was working intensely on a project for his art class, and wasn't feeling sociable. Normally she would never have gotten away with it, but her parents were on their way to brunch and a concert, leaving her with the usual instructions to feed and water the cat, use the twenty on the cabinet for something moderately healthy, and to check on Marvyn «now and then," which actually meant frequently. («The day we don't tell you that," Mr. Luke said once, when she objected to the regular duty, «will be the very day the kid steals a kayak and heads for Tahiti.» Angie found it hard to argue the point.)

Alone in the empty house — more alone than she felt she had ever been — Angie turned constantly in circles, wandering from room to room with no least notion of what to do. As the hours passed and her brother failed to return, she found herself calling out to him aloud. «Marvyn? Marvyn, I swear, if you're doing this to drive me crazy … O Mighty One, where are you? You get back here, never mind the damn letter, just get back!» She stopped doing this after a time, because the cracks and tremors in her voice embarrassed her, and made her even more afraid.

Strangely, she seemed to feel him in the house all that time. She kept whirling to look over her shoulder, thinking that he might be sneaking up on her to scare her, a favorite game since his infancy. But he was never there.

Somewhere around noon the doorbell rang, and Angie tripped over herself scrambling to answer it, even though she had no hope — almost no hope — of its being Marvyn. But it was Lidia at the door — Angie had forgotten that she usually came to clean on Sunday afternoons. She stood there, old and smiling, and Angie hugged her wildly and wailed, «Lidia, Lidia, socorro, help me, ayudame, Lidia.» She had learned Spanish from the housekeeper when she was too little to know she was learning it.

Lidia put her hands on Angie's shoulders. She put her back a little and looked into her face, saying, «Chuchi, dime que pasa contigo?» She had called Angie Chuchi since childhood, never explaining the origin or meaning of the word.

«It's Marvyn," Angie whispered. «It's Marvyn.»

She started to explain about the letter, and Marvyn's promise, but Lidia only nodded and asked no questions. She said firmly, «El Viejo puede ayudar.»

Too frantic to pay attention to gender, Angie took her to mean Yemaya, the old woman in the farmer's market who had told Marvyn that he was a brujo. She said, «You mean la santera," but Lidia shook her head hard. «No, no, El Viejo .You go out there, you ask to see El Viejo. Solamente El Viejo. Los otros no pueden ayudarte.»

The others can't help you. Only the old man. Angie asked where she could find El Viejo, and Lidia directed her to a Santeria shop on Bowen Street. She drew a crude map, made sure Angie had money with her, kissed her on the cheek and made a blessing sign on her forehead. «Cuidado, Chuchi," she said with a kind of cheerful solemnity, and Angie was out and running for the Gonzales Avenue bus, the same one she took to school. This time she stayed on a good deal farther.

The shop had no sign, and no street number, and it was so small that Angie kept walking past it for some while. Her attention was finally caught by the objects in the one dim window, and on the shelves to right and left. There was an astonishing variety of incense, and of candles encased in glass with pictures of black saints, as well as boxes marked Fast Money Ritual Kit, and bottles of Elegua Floor Wash, whose label read «Keeps Trouble From Crossing Your Threshold.» When Angie entered, the musky scent of the place made her feel dizzy and heavy and out of herself, as she always felt when she had a cold coming on. She heard a rooster crowing, somewhere in back.

She didn't see the old woman until her chair creaked slightly, because she was sitting in a corner, halfway hidden by long hanging garments like church choir robes, but with symbols and patterns on them that Angie had never seen before. The woman was very old, much older even than Lidia, and she had an absurdly small pipe in her toothless mouth. Angie said, «Yemaya?» The old woman looked at her with eyes like dead planets.

Angle's Spanish dried up completely, followed almost immediately by her English. She said, «My brother … my little brother … I'm supposed to ask for El Viejo. The old one, viejo santero? Lidia said.» She ran out of words in either language at that point. A puff of smoke crawled from the little pipe, but the old woman made no other response.

Then, behind her, she heard a curtain being pulled aside. A hoarse, slow voice said, «Quieres El Viejo? Me.»

Angie turned and saw him, coming toward her out of a long hallway whose end she could not see. He moved deliberately, and it seemed to take him forever to reach her, as though he were returning from another world. He was black, dressed all in black, and he wore dark glasses, even in the dark, tiny shop. His hair was so white that it hurt her eyes when she stared. He said, «Your brother.»

«Yes," Angie said. «Yes. He's doing magic for me — he's getting something I need — and I don't know where he is, but I know he's in trouble, and I want him back!» She did not cry or break down — Marvyn would never be able to say that she cried over him — but it was a near thing.

El Viejo pushed the dark glasses up on his forehead, and Angie saw that he was younger than she had first thought — certainly younger than Lidia — and that there were thick white half–circles under his eyes. She never knew whether they were somehow natural, or the result of heavy makeup; what she did see was that they made his eyes look bigger and brighter — all pupil, nothing more. They should have made him look at least slightly comical, like a reverse–image raccoon, but they didn't.

«I know you brother," El Viejo said. Angie fought to hold herself still as he came closer, smiling at her with the tips of his teeth. «A brujito —little, little witch, we know. Mama and me, we been watching.» He nodded toward the old woman in the chair, who hadn't moved an inch or said a word since Angie's arrival. Angie smelled a damp, musty aroma, like potatoes going bad.

«Tell me where he is. Lidia said you could help.» Close to, she could see blue highlights in El Viejo's skin, and a kind of V–shaped scar on each cheek. He was wearing a narrow black tie, which she had not noticed at first; for some reason, the vision of him tying it in the morning, in front of a mirror, was more chilling to her than anything else about him. He grinned fully at her now, showing teeth that she had expected to be yellow and stinking, but which were all white and square and a little too large. He said, «Tu hermano estdperdido. Lost in Thursday.»

«Thursday?» It took her a dazed moment to comprehend, and longer to get the words out. «Oh, God, he went back! Like with Milady — he went back to before I … when the letter was still in my backpack. The little showoff — he said forward was hard, coming forward — he wanted to show me he could do it. And he got stuck. Idiot, idiot, idiot!» El Viejo chuckled softly, nodding, saying nothing.

«You have to go find him, get him out of there, right now — I've got money.» She began digging frantically in her coat pockets.

«No, no money.» El Viejo waved her offering aside, studying her out of eyes the color of almost–ripened plums. The white markings under them looked real; the eyes didn't. He said, «I take you. We find you brother together.»

Angie's legs were trembling so much that they hurt. She wanted to assent, but it was simply not possible. «No. I can't. I can't. You go back there and get him.»

El Viejo laughed then: an enormous, astonishing Santa Claus ho–ho–HO, so rich and reassuring that it made Angie smile even as he was snatching her up and stuffing her under one arm. By the time she had recovered from her bewilderment enough to start kicking and fighting, he was walking away with her down the long hall he had come out of a moment before. Angie screamed until her voice splintered in her throat, but she could not hear herself: from the moment El Viejo stepped back into the darkness of the hallway, all sound had ended. She could hear neither his footsteps nor his laughter — though she could feel him laughing against her — and certainly not her own panicky racket. They could be in outer space. They could be anywhere.

Dazed and disoriented as she was, the hallway seemed to go soundlessly on and on, until wherever they truly were, it could never have been the tiny Santeria shop she had entered only — when? — minutes before. It was a cold place, smelling like an old basement; and for all its darkness, Angie had a sense of things happening far too fast on all sides, just out of range of her smothered vision. She could distinguish none of them clearly, but there was a sparkle to them all the same.

And then she was in Marvyn's room.

And it was unquestionably Marvyn's room: there were the bearded and beaded occultists on the walls; there were the flannel winter sheets that he slept on all year because they had pictures of the New York Mets ballplayers; there was the complete set of Star Trek action figures that Angie had given him at Christmas, posed just so on his bookcase. And there, sitting on the edge of his bed, was Marvyn, looking lonelier than anyone Angie had ever seen in her life.

He didn't move or look up until El Viejo abruptly dumped her down in front of him and stood back, grinning like a beartrap. Then he jumped to his feet, burst into tears and started frenziedly climbing her, snuffling, «Angie, Angie, Angie," all the way up. Angie held him, trying somehow to preserve her neck and hair and back all at once, while mumbling, «It's all right, it's okay, I'm here. It's okay, Marvyn.»

Behind her, El Viejo chuckled, «Crybaby witch — little, little brujito crybaby.»

Angie hefted her blubbering baby brother like a shopping bag, holding him on her hip as she had done when he was little, and turned to face the old man. She said, «Thank you. You can take us home now.»

El Viejo smiled — not a grin this time, but a long, slow shutmouth smile like a paper cut. He said, «Maybe we let him do it, yes?» and then he turned and walked away and was gone, as though he had simply slipped between the molecules of the air. Angie stood with Marvyn in her arms, trying to peel him off like a Band–Aid, while he clung to her with his chin digging hard into the top of her head. She finally managed to dump him down on the bed and stood over him, demanding, «What happened? What were you thinking?» Marvyn was still crying too hard to answer her. Angie said, «You just had to do it this way, didn't you? No silly little beginner spells — you're playing with the big guys now, right, O Mighty One? So what happened? How come you couldn't get back?»

«I don't know!» Marvyn's face was red and puffy with tears, and the tears kept coming while Angie tried to straighten his eyepatch. It was impossible for him to get much out without breaking down again, but he kept wailing, «I don't know what went wrong! I did everything you're supposed to, but I couldn't make it work! I don't know … maybe I forgot…» He could not finish.

«Herbs," Angie said, as gently and calmly as she could. «You left your magic herbs back — " she had been going to say «back home," but she stopped, because they were back home, sitting on Marvyn's bed in Marvyn's room, and the confusion was too much for her to deal with just then. She said, «Just tell me. You left the stupid herbs.»

Marvyn shook his head until the tears flew, protesting, «No, I didn't, I didn't — look!» He pointed to a handful of grubby dried weeds scattered on the bed — Lidia would have thrown them out in a minute. Marvyn gulped and wiped his nose and tried to stop crying. He said, «They're really hard to find, maybe they're not fresh anymore, I don't know — they've always looked like that. But now they don't work," and he was wailing afresh. Angie told him that Dr. John Dee and Willow would both have been ashamed of him, but it didn't help.

But she also sat with him and put her arm around him, and smoothed his messy hair, and said, «Come on, let's think this out. Maybe it's the herbs losing their juice, maybe it's something else. You did everything the way you did the other time, with Milady?»

«I thought I did.» Marvyn's voice was small and shy, not his usual deep croak. «But I don't know anymore, Angie — the more I think about it, the more I don't know. It's all messed up, I can't remember anything now.»

«Okay," Angie said. «Okay. So how about we just run through it all again? We'll do it together. You try everything you do remember about — you know — moving around in time, and I'll copy you. I'll do whatever you say.»

Marvyn wiped his nose again and nodded. They sat down cross–legged on the floor, and Marvyn produced the grimy book of paper matches that he always carried with him, in case of firecrackers. Following his directions Angie placed all the crumbly herbs into Milady's dish, and her brother lit them. Or tried to: they didn't blaze up, but smoked and smoldered and smelled like old dust, setting both Angie and Marvyn sneezing almost immediately. Angie coughed and asked, «Did that happen the other time?» Marvyn did not answer.

There was a moment when she thought the charm might actually be going to work. The room around them grew blurry — slightly blurry, granted — and Angie heard indistinct faraway sounds that might have been themselves hurtling forward to sheltering Sunday. But when the fumes of Marvyn's herbs cleared away, they were still sitting in Thursday — they both knew it without saying a word. Angie said, «Okay, so much for that. What about all that special concentration you were telling me about? You think maybe your mind wandered? You pronounce any spells the wrong way? Think, Marvyn!»

«I am thinking! I told you forward was hard!» Marvyn looked ready to start crying again, but he didn't. He said slowly, «Something's wrong, but it's not me. I don't think it's me. Something's pushing…» He brightened suddenly. «Maybe we should hold hands or something. Because of there being two of us this time. We could try that.»

So they tried the spell that way, and then they tried working it inside a pentagram they made with masking tape on the floor, as Angie had seen such things done on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though Marvyn said that didn't really mean anything, and they tried the herbs again, in a special order that Marvyn thought he remembered. They even tried it with Angie saying the spell, after Marvyn had coached her, just on the chance that his voice itself might have been throwing off the pitch or the pronunciation. Nothing helped. Marvyn gave up before Angie did. Suddenly, while she was trying the spell over herself, one more time — some of the words seemed to heat up in her mouth as she spoke them — he collapsed into a wretched ball of desolation on the floor, moaning over and over, «We're finished, it's finished, we'll never get out of Thursday!» Angie understood that he was only a terrified little boy, but she was frightened too, and it would have relieved her to slap him and scream at him. Instead, she tried as best she could to reassure him, saying, «He'll come back for us. He has to.»

Her brother sat up, knuckles to his eyes. «No, he doesn't have to! Don't you understand? He knows I'm a witch like him, and he's just going to leave me here, out of his way. I'm sorry, Angie, I'm really sorry!» Angie had almost never heard that word from Marvyn, and never twice in the same sentence.

«Later for all that," she said. «I was just wondering — do you think we could get Mom and Dad's attention when they get home? You think they'd realize what's happened to us?»

Marvyn shook his head. «You haven't seen me all the time I've been gone. I saw you, and I screamed and hollered and everything, but you never knew. They won't either. We're not really in our house — we're just here. We'll always be here.»

Angie meant to laugh confidently, to give them both courage, but it came out more of a hiccupy snort. «Oh, no. No way. There is no way I'm spending the rest of my life trapped in your stupid bedroom. We're going to try this useless mess one more time, and then … then I'll do something else.» Marvyn seemed about to ask her what else she could try, but he checked himself, which was good.

They attempted the spell more than one more time. They tried it in every style they could think of except standing on their heads and reciting the words backward, and they might just as well have done that, for all the effect it had. Whether Marvyn's herbs had truly lost all potency, or whether Marvyn had simply forgotten some vital phrase, they could not even recapture the fragile awareness of something almost happening that they had both felt on the first trial. Again and again they opened their eyes to last Thursday.

«Okay," Angie said at last. She stood up, to stretch cramped legs, and began to wander around the room, twisting a couple of the useless herbs between her fingers. «Okay," she said again, coming to a halt midway between the bedroom door and the window, facing Marvyn's small bureau. A leg of his red Dr. Seuss pajamas was hanging out of one of the drawers.

«Okay," she said a third time. «Let's go home.»

Marvyn had fallen into a kind of fetal position, sitting up but with his arms tight around his knees and his head down hard on them. He did not look up at her words. Angie raised her voice. «Let's go, Marvyn. That hallway — tunnel–thing, whatever it is — it comes out right about where I'm standing. That's where El Viejo brought me, and that's the way he left when he … left. That's the way back to Sunday.»

«It doesn't matter," Marvyn whimpered. «El Viejo … he's him! He's him!»

Angie promptly lost what little remained of her patience. She stalked over to Marvyn and shook him to his feet, dragging him to a spot in the air as though she were pointing out a painting in a gallery. «And you're Marvyn Luke, and you're the big bad new witch in town! You said it yourself — if you weren't, he'd never have bothered sticking you away here. Not even nine, and you can eat his lunch, and he knows it! Straighten your patch and take us home, bro.» She nudged him playfully. «Oh, forgive me — I meant to say, O Mighty One.»

«You don't have to call me that anymore.» Marvyn's legs could barely hold him up, and he sagged against her, a dead weight of despair. «I can't, Angie. I can't get us home. I'm sorry… "

The good thing — and Angie knew it then — would have been to turn and comfort him: to take his cold, wet face between her hands and tell him that all would yet be well, that they would soon be eating popcorn with far too much butter on it in his real room in their real house. But she was near her own limit, and pretending calm courage for his sake was prodding her, in spite of herself, closer to the edge. Without looking at Marvyn, she snapped, «Well, I'm not about to die in last Thursday! I'm walking out of here the same way he did, and you can come with me or not, that's up to you. But I'll tell you one thing, Ex–Lax — I won't be looking back.»

And she stepped forward, walking briskly toward the dangling Dr. Seuss pajamas…

…and into a thick, sweet–smelling grayness that instantly filled her eyes and mouth, her nose and her ears, disorienting her so completely that she flailed her arms madly, all sense of direction lost, with no idea of which way she might be headed; drowning in syrup like a trapped bee or butterfly. Once she thought she heard Marvyn's voice, and called out for him — «I'm here, I'm here!» But she did not hear him again.

Then, between one lunge for air and another, the grayness was gone, leaving not so much as a dampness on her skin, nor even a sickly after–taste of sugar in her mouth. She was back in the time–tunnel, as she had come to think of it, recognizing the uniquely dank odor: a little like the ashes of a long–dead fire, and a little like what she imagined moonlight might smell like, if it had a smell. The image was an ironic one, for she could see no more than she had when El Viejo was lugging her the other way under his arm. She could not even distinguish the ground under her feet; she knew only that it felt more like slippery stone than anything else, and she was careful to keep her footing as she plodded steadily forward.

The darkness was absolute — strange solace, in a way, since she could imagine

Marvyn walking close behind her, even though he never answered her, no matter how often or how frantically she called his name. She moved along slowly, forcing her way through the clinging murk, vaguely conscious, as before, of a distant, flickering sense of sound and motion on every side of her. If there were walls to the time–tunnel, she could not touch them; if it had a roof, no air currents betrayed it; if there were any living creature in it besides herself, she felt no sign. And if time actually passed there, Angie could never have said. She moved along, her eyes closed, her mind empty, except for the formless fear that she was not moving at all, but merely raising and setting down her feet in the same place, endlessly. She wondered if she was hungry.

Not until she opened her eyes in a different darkness to the crowing of a rooster and a familiar heavy aroma did she realize that she was walking down the hallway leading from the Santeria shop to … wherever she had really been — and where Marvyn still must be, for he plainly had not followed her. She promptly turned and started back toward last Thursday, but halted at the deep, slightly grating chuckle behind her. She did not turn again, but stood very still.

El Viejo walked a slow full circle around her before he faced her, grinning down at her like the man in the moon. The dark glasses were off, and the twin scars on his cheeks were blazing up as though they had been slashed into him a moment before. He said, «I know. Before even I see you, I know.»

Angie hit him in the stomach as hard as she could. It was like punching a frozen slab of beef, and she gasped in pain, instantly certain that she had broken her hand. But she hit him again, and again, screaming at the top of her voice, «Bring my brother back! If you don't bring him right back here, right now, I'll kill you! I will!»

El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still laughing to himself. «Little girl, listen, listen now. Ninita, nobody else — nobody — ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk that road back from where I leave you, understand?» The big white half–circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.

Angie pulled away from him with all her strength, as she had hit him. She said, «No. That's Marvyn. Marvyn's the witch, the brujo — don't go telling people it's me. Marvyn's the one with the power.»

«Him?» Angie had never heard such monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, «Your brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him — you the one got the regalo, you just don't know.» The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw nothing else. «I show you — me, El Viejo. I show you what you are.»

It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything — even Jake Petrakis — but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench of the white–haired man's malevolent presence would have been. Having often felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy — and now a potent witch — she let herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely gratifying feeling she had ever known.

But it was not tempting. Angie knew the difference.

«Forget it," she said. «Forget it, buster. You've got nothing to show me.»

El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring back with the brown eyes she despaired of because they could never be as deep–set and deep green as her mother's eyes. They stood so — for how long, she never knew — until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since Angie had first entered the Santeria shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.

He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as El Viejo had done the first time she saw him — as she herself had trudged forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he seemed hardly to draw any nearer. Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy: it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or having his soul torn out of his body — she never even tried to tell herself what it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.

When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone, and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. It was black and immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked into them once, and looked quickly away.

Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as though he had just come off a three–day drunk — though she noticed that it was not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, «I had to go back a really long way, Angie. Really long.»

Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said, «Ma'am, I think this is yours?» Adults always commented on Marvyn's excellent manners.

The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.

All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn't returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish — Angie learned a few words she couldn't wait to use — and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, «What happened?»

Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn't eaten in days —which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, «What's molcriado mean?»

«What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up — troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn't call you. Why?»

«Well, that's what that lady called … him. The baby.»

«Right," Angie said. «Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?»

«Uh–huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.» Marvyn's voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. «Angie, he's so old.»

Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, «I couldn't follow you, Angie. I was scared.»

«Forget it," she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. «If you just hadn't had to show off, if you'd gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way — " Her entire chest froze solid at the word. «The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!» She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. «Did you forget? You forgot, didn't you?» She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. «Oh, God, after all that!»

But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. «Calm down, be cool — I've got it here.» He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis — more than a little grimy by now — out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. «There. Don't say I never did nuttin' for you.» It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. «Take it, open it up," he said now. «Make sure it's the right one.»

«I don't need to," Angie protested irritably. «It's my letter — believe me, I know it when I see it.» But she opened the envelope anyway and with–drew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at … then stared at, in absolute disbelief.

She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.

«Well, you did your job all right," she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack–jawed brother. «No question about that. I'm just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.»

Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.

«I didn't do it, Angie! I swear!» Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. «I just grabbed it out of your backpack — I never even looked at it.»

«And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn't matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.»

Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, «You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn't. That's what happened.»

«Oh, right," she said. «Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn't matter.»

«It matters.» She had grown so unused to seeing a two–eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, «You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.»

This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, «I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets — okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What's he care about that? But he knew you'd come after me, so he held me there — back there in Thursday — until he could grab you. Only he didn't figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that's how it happened, Angie! That's how I know you're the real witch.»

«No," she said, raising her voice now. «No, I was just pissed–off, that's different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed–off woman, O Mighty One. But you … you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You're going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he'd get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.»

Marvyn's chubby face turned gray. «But I'm not like him! I don't want to be like him!» Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. «It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn't know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn't letting me come forward I'd go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I…» He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. «I don't want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don't want to! And I don't want you being a witch either…»

Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. «It's all right," she told him, with one ear listening for their parents' car pulling into the garage. «Shh, shh, it's all right, it's over, we're safe, it's okay, shh. It's okay, we're not going to be witches, neither one of us.» She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. «You go to sleep now.»

Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards' wall beyond her shoulder. «I might take some of those down," he mumbled. «Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team's really good.» He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, «Angie? The baby?»

«What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.»

«It was bigger when we left," Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. «I looked back at it in that lady's lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He's starting over, Angie, like Milady.»

«Better him than me," Angie said. «I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he's got it coming.» She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, «Go to sleep, don't worry about it. After what we've been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is — no witch stuff.»

Marvyn smiled drowsily. «Unless we really, really need it.»

Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, " Ick! Blow your nose!»

But Marvyn was asleep.