Right Hand Magic by Collins Nancy A

Author:Collins, Nancy A.
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

A few hours and several tankards of barley wine later, we headed back home, our bellies full of Lafo’s unique culinary efforts. Hexe was right—the cake had indeed been delicious, although I drew the line at the candied sea horses and the deep-fried starfish.

Hexe and I strolled side by side while Lukas walked ahead of us, surreptitiously sniffing the utility poles and trash cans along the street. Part of me longed to reach out and take his hand, but I told myself that we’d both been drinking, and I didn’t want either my action, or his reaction, to be the result of too much barley wine and not enough thought. It was a lie, but one I could almost believe.

Lukas, on the other hand, had spent the evening engrossed with Meikei, and he was happier than I’d ever seen him. The chemistry between the teenagers was obvious, which made the course of their romance far easier to chart. Despite his harrowing ordeal in the pits, the young bastet’s heart was unafraid of surrendering itself. I envied the bravery his naïveté allowed him.

Despite the warm feeling in my belly and the lightness in my heart, my mind kept going back to what Esau had said about me. After a lifetime of being viewed as a freak, it felt odd to be denounced for not being weird. Even odder was the feeling that came with being condemned as the harbinger of cultural devastation. Although I instinctively disliked him, the necromancer had a point.

All I wanted was to be somewhere I loved living in, shop locally, try to get to know my neighbors, and go about my business as an artist. But I knew that if enough white twentysomething fellow artists joined me, eventually the culture and commodity such a community created would draw those farther up the gentrification chain, triggering the inevitable real estate feeding frenzy and the erasure of everything I loved about Golgotham.

As we walked down the narrow, canyonlike street back to the boardinghouse, I stared up at the lights burning in the high windows of the buildings that surrounded us, and I wondered who—or what—might live there and if they viewed my arrival in their neighborhood the same way as Uncle Esau.

For the most part, everyone I had met in Golgotham had proved to be extremely welcoming. But now I found myself wondering how much of that was not out of genuine friendliness, but because I was under Hexe’s royal protection.

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