“Keep telling yourself that,” Jayla replies.
My sister’s partly right. If I don’t get my head in the competition, my future could be darker than this alley. I just don’t know how to—not when I keep thinking about Emma. Magic, hormones, and Emma’s face graffitied on the brick walls of my mind make things distracting. Is this all because she was so fearless that she bewitched me, or is it because of the drink Ma made me?
Everyone in our family has power in different ways. Jayla shape-shifts. But the shape that she morphs into with little pain and effort is the lion, which is hardheaded and jumps out of her when it thinks she needs protection. Like tonight when it caught me off guard by hopping out to make our friendly sparring match a lot less friendly.
“Well,” Jayla says, headlights illuminating her petite frame as she approaches the truck. “Thanks to me, when Emma kicks his butt, it won’t be the first time he got beat by a girl.”
My head hangs. I’m supposed to be the family’s protector. My mother’s soldier. And I couldn’t calm or defeat my opponent tonight. I got beat by my little sister… badly. Yeah, Jayla’s a lion too. But she’s still my little sister, by sixteen minutes. So I’ll have to listen to my twin brag about this forever. Wish I’d gotten the power to shape-shift. I’d turn into a roach and crawl away.
A giant gold timepiece with black serpentine hands and spades where numbers belong appears, suspended and glowing in the starry sky above. Jayla sighs and climbs into the truck. “Big-Mama wants us home.”
The truck rolls out of the alley. I look back at the brick walls and fairy lights we are leaving behind. My imagination makes them all flicker with visions—projections—of Emma. She’s not beat up and crying anymore. Her beautiful face is framed by hair that looks like an ocean at midnight. She looks like she did the night I met her, silky brown skin, that red dress fitting her curves just right. I see the fire in her eyes when she threw a ball of stardust at me. Emma flawlessly walks on walls, with steam curling by her heels in the glow of the fairy lights. She waves to me, laughing as we turn outof the alley. Ma-a-an. The Tether is a no-win situation. I don’t want to hurt someone so beautiful and strong, so protective of her family… but I sure as hell don’t want to die either.
Jayla brushes my arm as she buckles her seat belt.
I wince.
“Oh, shit,” she says, pushing her glasses farther up on her nose before she examines my injury with wide eyes.
Charles changes lanes. The streetlights blur in the corner of my vision, making trails of light that shift and bend into cats floating on the wind, and I wonder if anything I see is real. Is magic alive in this place? My family has spelled it so that the magic of our enemies won’t work here and we can practice for the Tether undetected in this area. Is that spell affecting my vision now? Or is whatever poison Mama conjured in that drink—the one she thought would protect me—making me hallucinate? Either way, I gotta get better. I’m supposed to see Emma soon.
“Let’s get Malcolm home and heal him up,” Charles says.
“Dang, Malcolm,” Jayla mutters, gazing at my arm again. “Sorry… I didn’t mean to—”
“You meant it,” I reply. “That’s why you insisted on being the one I train with, why you skipped dinner and didn’t feed the lion. You know how cranky she gets when she’s hungry.”
“Nah. I wasn’t hungry. And you know the lion just takes over sometimes,” Jayla says. “She protects me. But I chose to train you because I know you best, twin. I know how to push you, make you better. And I need you to be on point. You gotta stay focused so you can come out on top. But… where’s your head at, Malcolm?”
I shrug.
We drive. The streetlights on the highway stretch, their twinkling twisting tails reminding me of the wild strands of Emma’s hair flying behind her as she ran out of my life. Right after she’d run into it at the concert.
“I ain’t trying to live without seeing your stupid face across the dinner table,” Jayla says.
“You won’t.” I groan.
I’m wedged in the middle of the bench seat, Jayla at the passenger-side window. She digs into the glove box, moves aside a bunch of papers, and takes out some bandages. She starts wrapping my arm.
Charles changes lanes again. Cars roll by us. “You good, bruh?” he asks.
I nod. My arm burns.
Jayla gives me that look she always gives when she’s trying to lift my spirits. “Why did the Black time traveler go to therapy?” she asks. “To get ‘past’ family issues!”
I force a smile. The tails on the lights fade away, and my vision is normal again, but the pain gets worse.
Jayla pouts as I slump in my seat, gripping my sore arm. Every bump in the road is misery. My sister tries to rub my arm to comfort me, but I shift away. It hurts like hell. I half want to tell Jayla about the drink Ma made me but decide against it. My sister would nag for hours and accuse me of being crazy for ingesting one of Ma’s spelled concoctions. But since Alex died, Ma has been so frail. And now she’s so anxious for me, I’d just wanted to ease her worries. Let her think she was helping.
“You better get serious about training, Malcolm,” Jayla says. She frowns at my wound, but her eyes look wide and worried. “The Tether ain’t no joke.”
“Neither is what you did to the hood of my truck,” Charles says. “You got fur, claw marks, and drool all over it, Jayla. Hell, you lost control of the lion inside you, and she could have killed Malcolm if I hadn’t distracted her. Everyone doesn’t heal as fast as you do. Worry about controlling your power and paying for repairs instead of worrying about Malcolm.”
I watch Charles’s irritated reflection in the window. As he merges behind a yellow car, he turns on the windshield wipers to clear away fur and spit. “Malcolm’ll be fine,” he says. “God protects babies and fools.”
I’d fuss at Charles about that “fool” comment if my arm didn’t feel so bad. I’ll need his magic to help heal it. I gotta meet Emma in two days. And I sure can’t do it like this. I rest my head back and close my tired eyes. We hit another bump, and I groan, praying for that drink Mama gave me to wear off.
Jayla gently nudges me awake. We’re parked on the street in front of the house. Her voice is soft but urgent: “You okay, twin?” Her warm brown eyes are brimming with guilt and worry when they meet mine. She forces a shaky smile. “What’s a sorry time traveler’s favorite song?” Before I can answer, she blurts, “‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ by Cher. I should play it on repeat till your arm feels better…”
