Читать книгу Stolen Magic - Esri Rose - Страница 9

There are a lot of ways you can “work” without working. Surfing the Internet counts as researching human behavior. Reading pop-culture blogs counts as finding possible new companies to invest in, like that company that makes shoes with little tubes for each individual toe. And listening to music online counts as, well, goofing off.

Every once in a while I got up and kept Fia from doing something inappropriate, like pouring paper clips down the shredder. By the time morning came, Fia looked decidedly peaky and I was done sitting in the office.

I called Lenny, one of my coworkers. He didn’t answer, so I left a message. “Hey, it’s Adlia. Where were you last night? Since you’re such a slacker, I think you’re the next person to do a little babysitting. Meet me by the creek, near the office.” That ought to bring him, if only to figure out what I was talking about.

I locked all the file cabinets, put the key under a mess of binder clips in Kutara’s desk drawer, and left a message on her cell telling her where it was. If I were lucky, she wouldn’t listen to it before she needed something. Ha.

“C’mon, Fia.” I slapped my thigh and whistled. “Here, girl.” I was counting on her to get better or I never would have done it.

She followed me outside and across the concrete bike path to a couple of dry boulders beside the water.

“Sit on this rock.” I waved a hand at it. “Do you remember how Galan showed you to get energy?”

“No.”

“Do you at least remember Galan? He’s the hot one.” I sighed. “There’s energy coming off the creek. Humans call it negative ions, but we call it ma’na’spira—mother’s breath.” I sat next to her on the rock, squirmed until I found a spot that wasn’t too pointy, and put my hands on her waist.

If I closed my eyes, the energy around us looked like swirling blue mist against my lids. I opened to it, felt it soak through my skin, then shifted my physical boundaries slightly so that it passed through the edge of Fia. “That’s it. Take a big drink.”

When she was doing it on her own, I stood and watched her hair regain its wave and shine, her face plump up again.

Eventually she turned and gave me a little smile.

“Better, huh?” I asked. “Do you remember your name?”

“Fia.”

“That’s right. And what’s my name?”

“Um…”

I gave her the first syllable. “Aaaa…Aaaa…”

“Adlium?”

“Adlia. Very good!”

“What’s wrong with me?” The lost look on her face was enough to break your heart.

I sat on the grass and opened my messenger bag. “I don’t know, but Kutara’s bound to figure it out. As far as I can tell, all that bitchiness just hones her intellect.”

“That what?”

“Biiiiitcheeeeeeness.” I sounded it out for her as I opened my journal and ripped out a page to give her. She held the paper uncertainly. “Kind of flimsy, huh?” I folded it in quarters, then handed it back along with a pen. “Here. Draw a picture or something.”

Instead, she sat and gazed at a couple of ducks that had risen early to stake out the best sludge. Well, there were worse ways to pass the time.

I found my place in my journal and started a new entry.

Galan found Fia today. Is she still bonded to some land somewhere? What are we going to do with her if she doesn’t regain her memory?

Of course, Fia wasn’t the only one with memory problems, although mine were limited to the past. Unlike every other elf I knew, I couldn’t remember my parents.

Kutara’s best guess was that I had been orphaned at an age when most elf children still drew energy from their parents and would have died from the separation. Instead, I had apparently bonded to my dead parents’ land and spent the next couple of centuries merged with it.

Kutara was the one who had found me, corporeal once more and clueless about my place in the world. That was about a year ago, shortly after they had gotten rid of Fellseth.

Kutara had taught me to be an elf in the way a stern aunt would foster an unwanted relative. She wasn’t maternal and I wasn’t filial, but she felt I should have a purpose in life, and working at Elf Ops was all I knew. My crush on Galan used to pull me into the office, but any lingering feelings I had were merely irritating now that he was taken.

Kutara had also set me the task of learning about humans, since all elves had to deal with them. I had spent the last nine months watching movies, learning to read newspapers, and observing humans. That’s when I had started keeping a journal, and I still jotted down expressions I liked and movies people talked about that sounded interesting. And then there was The List.

I flipped to the back pages of the journal. Every other elf in the universe had some artistic talent. The List showed all the talents I didn’t have. Wood carving, ice carving, stone carving, metalworking, painting, drawing.

Oh, sure, I had picked up drawing a little faster and better than the average human, but if that were my true ability, Mark Speranzi wouldn’t have asked if that was his picture I had drawn—he would have gasped at seeing his likeness leap off the page.

I jiggled my pencil over the blank page and wrote, Is Mark Speranzi taken? Recently I had become obsessed with his forearms, which had the most silky, luxurious hair I had ever seen on a man. Elves didn’t have much in the way of body hair. Mark’s animal magnetism fascinated me, as did the way he seemed to invite me to laugh at the world, including myself.

I heard scratching, and looked up to see Fia scribbling on the piece of paper I’d given her. “What are you writing, Fia?” Maybe it would give us a clue to her background.

She held it up.

“Oh, you’ve drawn the ducks. Very nice.” That was a feeble compliment for her sketch of a duck raising itself in the water and flapping its wings. The flying drops of water she had drawn made me want to wipe my face.

My cell phone rang, and I saw it was Lenny. “Finally.”

“Got your message. Are you still at the creek?”

“Yup. I’m sitting on my favorite boulder, and do I have a present for you. A sweet, shiny girl elf!”

“Are you talking about Fia? Kutara left a message about her. It sounds pretty sad, actually.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course it’s sad, but if you can’t laugh, you’d have to cry. Where were you all night, anyway?”

“Someone must have cleaned out their garage, because I had a bunch of paint come through in the groundwater. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent all night corralling molecules into one clump.”

“What color paint?”

“Orange, but it’s gone now. I’ll be right there.”

“Bye.” I put away my things and stood to brush off the seat of my pants. “Fia, your Uncle Lenny is coming to take care of you now. Won’t that be nice?”

Most elves would have gone back to the old homestead to refresh their land bond and grab some energy, but after two hundred years underground, a girl likes to get out and see things.

I snacked on creek energy as I strolled on the grass, watching bicycle commuters whiz past on their way to work.

“Hey! Adlia!”

I looked around. Mark Speranzi was walking toward me, camera in hand and magnificent arms on display in a short-sleeved black shirt that draped like water.

My mind searched frantically for something witty to say and came up with, “Hi.”

He glanced at his watch, a silver model that looked great against his olive skin. “Are you on your way to work at six thirty in the morning?”

“Actually, I’m coming back from a wild party,” I said. His expression cooled slightly, so I wiped my last statement right out of his head and replaced it with something about staying up with a sick friend. We always have the last word, remember?

“That was nice of you,” he said, all smiles again.

“I can be nice.” If I waited for something better to say, we’d be here all day. “What about you?”

“On my way to get coffee, and taking pictures as I go. Can I buy you a cup?”

“Um, sure.”

We fell into step. I was giddy with a sense of possibilities. Here I was, going for coffee with a friend. Of course, I wouldn’t drink the coffee, and I’d be hypnotizing him not to notice that. My happy balloon deflated a little. Was someone still your friend if you controlled his thoughts a tiny bit? Was Mark my friend if I couldn’t answer any of his questions truthfully? I decided to keep him talking about himself, to avoid the whole problem. “What are you taking pictures of?”

“Anything that says Boulder. One of my easiest moneymakers is a calendar of local-color shots. You don’t have to be a famous photographer to sell pictures of a pretty town when it’s filled with tourists and college students looking for gifts.”

“Do you use digital or film for that kind of work?” Look at me! I was having a conversation!

“I do a lot of digital, but I’m using film today, just to keep my hand in.”

I nodded. “So are you from Boulder?”

He laughed. “Is anyone from Boulder?”

I opened my mouth but shut it just as quickly. Boulder hadn’t existed when I was born, so I probably didn’t count.

“I guess I’ve lost most of my accent,” Mark went on, “but the rest of my family lives in Boston. My parents have a wedding-cake business. I started out taking pictures of cakes, graduated to the weddings themselves, then moved out here to get a little space from my family.”

“You wanted to get away from your family?”

The concept seemed bizarre to someone who’d never had a family.

He held up both hands. “It’s not that we don’t get along. It’s just that I have two sisters and a brother, plus about a million cousins. It’s a little hard to hear yourself think.” He smiled wryly. “Speaking of being attention-deprived, I will continue to talk about myself unless you stop me. How ’bout you? Are you close to your family?”

“I don’t have any family. My parents are dead, and I don’t have any siblings.”

“Oh, Adlia.” He touched my back lightly. “I’m sorry.”

Any pleasure I felt at the contact was lost in a jolt of surprise. There were strong traces of elf glamour on Mark, and they weren’t mine.

“Stop,” I commanded, and he halted in his tracks. I kept him still and blank while I ran my hands over his head, his chest, his hands. Only a skilled tracker could specifically identify a glamour that wasn’t his own, and even then, he’d need to personally know the elf that had done it. But even I could tell that someone had glamoured Mark pretty heavily.

My first response was visceral and shocking. This was my human. I picked up his unresisting hand and stroked his arm down to his fingertips. Warm skin, silky hair, the complicated bones of his knuckles. Humans didn’t dissolve into Ma’Nah until they died. This was Mark in his entirety, beneath my fingertips. Humans were so vulnerable singly, but together they changed the world.

A heavy glamour could be the innocent result of an elf trapped by unusual circumstances, or it might be a dark elf setting up shop. Kutara would expect me to find out more.

I started him walking again and released him from the glamour. “You were telling me about coming to Colorado. How long have you been here?”

“About five years. I was visiting someone and never got around to leaving. What about you?”

Lying was second nature to me, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed it. “What about me? I like to listen, and you said you enjoy talking. Do you really want to mess with a winning formula?”

He didn’t laugh. “I’d like to know more about you. For instance, where does the name Adlia come from?”

It’s elven. “It’s Czech.”

He smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”

“Most men appreciate a bit of mystery in a woman.”

He shrugged, then hiked up the strap of his camera bag. “As long as the mystery doesn’t include stuff like alcoholism or cutting yourself.”

I stopped, and a bicyclist who had been waiting to pass narrowly missed running into me. “Is that why you asked me to have coffee? You think I’m broken and you feel sorry for me?”

“No. I asked because I’m curious about you. Also, I like the color of your hair.”

“Oh.” I stared at him, resisting the urge to glamour him and see if he was telling the truth. He looked like he might feel a little sorry for me, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling a glow about the hair comment. All this time I’d thought Mark just found me amusing. Could there be more to his attentions? We slowly resumed walking. “I don’t cut myself or drink. I do keep a journal, with the obligatory bad poetry.”

“If you know it’s bad, why don’t you write something better?” He had the nerve to grin at me.

“Because recognizing goodness is not the same as having it. Sometimes all you can achieve is crap.”

He nodded. “You know what I first noticed about you? Your inherent cheerfulness.”