Every Gift a Curse

1
Here’s something that they don’t tell you about being cursed: The first thing you feel is fear. But the second thing—the thing you really notice—is beauty. The world is so beautiful when you don’t think you’ll have long to look at it.
   The colors shine brighter. Even now, in the December twilight, when it’s almost completely dark. The chilly mist from the river melds with the light of the city, and all you can see is a gold-and-blue blur. A box of jewels you need to squint your eyes just to look at. The sense of a city dancing in your blood.
   Thirty-six days have passed since I became responsible for the deaths of two women. One who tried to kill me; the other who died trying to save my life.
   “There you are,” Fiona says, flinging open the door to Nuala’s house. No matter how early I get to Nuala’s house these days, she’s always here first. “Come on, the Apocalypse Society is already in session.”
   She takes me through to the kitchen, and everyone’s here: Manon, studying a bound stack of paper; Nuala, taking something out of the oven; Roe, peeling an apple with a knife; Lily, sitting on the kitchen counter.
   The question: Were we directly responsible for the death of
   Heather Banbury and Sister Assumpta, or was it all an accident? Does the Housekeeper even care about accidents, or does she swing the ax regardless of who’s guilty?
   “That’s the problem,” Nuala says midflow, gesturing with a wooden spoon. “The Housekeeper is revenge without judgment. She’s not a thing who can make her mind up. She’s a windup toy. Isn’t that right, Maeve?”
   I haven’t even taken my coat off. “How come no one ever says hello to me anymore?” I say indignantly. “What am I? Dead?”
   “Not yet,” Manon muses, highlighting a line of text with a yellow marker. “But soon, perhaps.”
   “Well, joyeux Noël to you too.”
   We know of three Housekeeper summonings, spread out over the last thirty years. The first was when she was summoned by Nuala’s sister, Heaven, who traded her own life to bring on the death of their abusive father.
   The second was Aaron, when he called her to break out of his far-right Christian rehab center. She took his friend then. Matthew Madison. A death that Aaron spent three misguided years trying to atone for within the gnarled fingers of the Children of Brigid.
   And the third: Lily. A botched tarot reading that ended in chaos, and that brought us all together.
   Who knows what a fourth visit might bring about? Who might fall victim, and who might be spared? Aaron hasn’t waited around to find out.
   I bend down to kiss Roe on the cheek, the movement unraveling my thick scarf.
   “Hello,” he says, nuzzling me. “You’re cold.”
   “Hey.” Lily is drawing on the window with acrylic craft paint, her knees under the sill, feet trailing in the kitchen sink. She appears to be drawing a very complicated pig, its face filled with red and green swirls.
   “What’s this?”
   “A boar. A yule boar.”
   “Of course.”
   Lily pushes a strand of blond hair back off her face. “I didn’t want to do something boring like a Christmas tree. I thought we would do something pagan. For winter solstice.”
   “Hence the yule boar.”
   Lily starts to smile to herself and keeps painting. “Hence the yule boar, yes.”
   When Lily and I summoned the Housekeeper, it happened in days. And we hadn’t even meant to call her. She was just a spirit who was accidentally woken by a combination of my sensitivity, the Well of magic below Kilbeg, and the throbbing hatred Lily and I had for each other. Dorey told me almost a month ago that she was planning on calling the Housekeeper—surely she would have done it by now.
   Dorey’s warning to me was clear. She spoke like the Queen of the Fairies, offering foul bargains through a glinting smile. The Children wanted total dominion over the Well in Kilbeg, and would do anything to get it. Anything, that is, except kill us. Murder in the magical world is more trouble than it’s worth: everything comes back to you eventually. But if you have just cause for summoning something like the Housekeeper, you can let her do the dirty work for you.
   So where is she?
   “We must first understand,” Manon says, “whether they truly do have just cause.”
   “We killed Heather Banbury,” Roe says flatly.
   “No, we didn’t,” Fiona responds, her voice unusually high-pitched. “She accidentally died.”
   “While she was magically bound to our will,” Nuala corrects. “Although, if the Children hadn’t come to the tennis courts, it wouldn’t have happened at all. So they could be equally responsible.”
   “In the eyes of who?” Lily asks, still painting her boar.
   “I don’t know.” Nuala throws her hands up. “The great cosmic abacus that doles out fairness?”
   “Justice,” Fiona says, holding up the tarot card. I might be the sensitive, but Fiona’s eye for tarot is now every bit as good as mine. She shuffles the pack and straightens the cards, tapping the deck twice on the table so they’re neatly aligned.
   At that moment, as if in response, there is a tap on the glass panel of the kitchen door. An orange-tipped magpie flutters outside, waiting to be let in. Fiona reaches for the handle.
   “We cannot let that thing in here,” says Manon, wrinkling her nose.
   “Don’t talk about Paolo that way,” Fiona says defensively. Paolo and Manon have very quickly become the two great obsessions of Fiona’s life, and so of course they are permanently in opposition.
   Manon shudders. “I hate birds.”
   Paolo the magpie hops in and balances himself on the long arm of the tap. Lily shuffles her feet over. Paolo starts noodling the spout with his beak, looking for drops of water.
   “Can I fill a bowl, Nuala?” Fi asks.
   “You can, love.”
   “Fionnuala!” Manon protests. Manon has an abandoned child’s tendency to be overly formal with her own mother. “Fin.”
   “Manny,” Nuala replies soothingly. “He’s no harm.”
   “I don’t like him.”
   I’m nearest the cupboard, so I fill a bowl for Paolo. I even get him the filtered water, out of the fridge. I don’t have any sense of what Paolo thinks or feels, but I do think that he prefers filtered water. He’s Fiona’s familiar, after all, and Fiona does enjoy the finer things.
   Fiona rests her gaze on him and, after a moment, he comes to perch on her shoulder.
   “Well?” I ask, trying not to sound too expectant. “Does he have any news?”
   Fi tilts her head for a moment, then closes her eyes. The magpie doesn’t touch her, doesn’t fuss with her hair, but it’s obvious that they are communicating. Paolo has become our little drone, scouting the city from the air.
   “No,” she says at last, blinking her eyes open.
   “Are you sure?” I press. “How can you know?”
   “I know what Paolo knows. He hasn’t seen him. Or the Children, for that matter.”
   “Are we still acting like they’re two different things?” A long line of skin has fallen from the apple that Roe is peeling, almost touching the floor. “I mean, let’s face it. He’s gone back to them, hasn’t he?”
   “We don’t know that,” I reply. “We have no proof of that.”
   Aaron disappeared after the conversation with Dorey, on the day of Sister Assumpta’s funeral. There are only two ways to interpret the disappearance: betrayal or cowardice. It’s hard to know which with Aaron. He was, after all, a master manipulator working on behalf of a right-wing religious cult, which indicates weakness and betrayal. He also had the courage to leave them and to radically reassess his own worldview, which signals bravery, as well as character.
   Where are you, Aaron?