something.
None of this, though, overrode the adrenaline buzz of holy fuck, I feel close to this person right now. In his skin, in his scalp even. In his chest.
“Whatever,” Laurence said aloud. “You already helped clean up after my biggest fuckup. I don’t see how your shit can be worse than that.”
On the sidewalk downhill from where they sat, a woman with a stroller was yelling at her toddler, a lank-haired kid in overalls who kept running up to the cherry tree and trying to harass the parrots. Who just laughed at him. The mother threatened to count to five.
“When I was a teenager, some of us went off half-cocked and attacked this drilling project in Siberia, and people died. Including my friend. And these days…” Patricia took a heavy breath, almost shaking. “I curse people. Like, one guy who had raped and killed a bunch of girls I turned into a cloud. There was a lobbyist who helped to block environmental regulations—they called him the Picasso of the Paperwork Reduction Act—and I conned him into becoming a sea turtle. Sea turtles live a long time, longer than most humans, so it wasn’t murder. These bureaucrats were trying to kick my friend Reginald out of Section Eight housing, and I gave one of them a rash. And so on.” She couldn’t look straight at Laurence.
“Wow.” Laurence shouldn’t have been surprised, after what happened to Mr. Rose—but Patricia had said that was one of the senior witches’ handiwork. For a moment, he felt like this steep hillside was tipping over, and then he got his center of gravity together again. “Wow,” Laurence said again. “I gotta admit, that’s not what I pictured you doing. I kind of imagined you more, I don’t know … going around and blessing babies or something.”
“You’re thinking of fairies. If I blessed a baby, it would have exactly the same effect as if you blessed a baby.”
“I doubt that,” Laurence snorted. “Babies tend to projectile vomit at the sight of me. Anyway, it sounds like you put the smackdown on people who deserve it. I don’t know. If I could turn people into turtles, there would be turtles everywhere.”
Neither of them talked for a while. The mother had coaxed her kid back into the stroller and was speeding down toward the Marina. The parrots had stopped munching and were just flying back and forth between the cherry tree and a couple other big trees flanking a massive Edwardian town house, screaming in midair. Once or twice, they flew right over Laurence’s head, green plumage extended like a salute.
“I guess I’m curious,” Laurence said. “Do you have an ethical framework? I mean beyond that one rule they kept mentioning. How do you know what to do?” He spoke carefully, because this was obviously kind of an intense conversation for Patricia—she was averting her gaze now.
“Umm,” Patricia said, raising her shoulders so her breasts lifted up inside her white T-shirt. “I mean, sometimes I’m following instructions, from Kawashima or Ernesto, and I trust them. But also … I can’t just turn everyone into turtles, I have to go with the situation. And … see those parrots?” She gestured at the candy-apple birds, which were back at their tasty cherry tree after making a few tours of the parklet.
“Yeah, of course.” Laurence watched the red spots on their heads bopping around. They seemed to be taunting anybody who might want to cage them.
“I can understand what they’re saying. Mostly, they’re pissed at their friend in the middle, who keeps almost getting eaten by hawks because he’s too dumb to stay high up. And those crows over there, too. I can understand what they’re all saying, right now.”
“Wow.” Laurence hadn’t even noticed the crows on the power line nearby, watching them intently. “So you can understand them all? All the time?”
“It takes a certain amount of concentration. But yes.”
“Can all the magic people do that, like Kawashima and Taylor?”
“Maybe, if they really need to. If they make a big effort. Not most of the time. Different people have different weird quirks.”
“And doesn’t it drive you nuts, to hear animals talking all the time?”
“Not really. I guess I’m just used to it. Most of the time, I tune it out, the same way you tune out all the people talking around you. But at the same time, I always have in the back of my mind the idea of, what would the crows think? Crows are really smart.”
The crows seemed to