8. Weird Brothers
Weird Brothers
Two blocks from the park, Elias was starting to appreciate what Luna had meant about this being “the future.” The smell alone was enough to knock a man sideways.
Garbage piled high in the summer heat, car exhaust thicker than anything he’d ever experienced in Chicago, and something else he couldn’t identify. Something chemical and unpleasant.
Unbelievable, he thought. What did they do to this poor city?
Their salvation appeared in the form of a small bodega, its metal security gate rolled halfway up, warm light spilling onto the sidewalk.
Outside, sitting on plastic milk crates, were two identical boys who couldn’t have been more than eight years old.
Both had dark hair and serious brown eyes, and both were working their way through what appeared to be their third or fourth ice cream bar each, judging by the collection of empty wrappers at their feet.
“There they are,” she breathed. “My gods, that’s wild. Last time I saw them, they were fifty-eight.”
“Hmm,” Elias said. “How they’ve not-yet-grown . . .”
Luna picked up her pace, practically skipping over to them. “Hey! Hector! Diego!”
The twins looked up in unison, which was Elias’s first sign that something was off. Not just that they moved together, but the way their eyes focused on exactly the same spot at exactly the same time. Like they shared a brain.
“Do we—” one began.
“—know you?” finished the other.
Both boys stared up at him with undisguised fascination, and Elias could practically see the gears turning in their identical little heads.
“Are you—” said the first twin.
“—in a play?” asked the second.
“What’s with the—”
“—fancy suit?”
“I’m . . . between costume parties.”
“Cool,” they said in perfect unison. Their together-talking was somehow even more unnerving than their sentence-finishing.
Luna crouched down to their level with the sort of easy familiarity that suggested she was good with children. “You’re Hector, right?” she asked the twin on the left.
“I’m Diego,” the kid corrected. “He’s Hector.”
“Sorry. You guys are out pretty late, aren’t you? Where are your parents?”
“Inside, helping Mr. Morales—” the one called Hector started.
“—hand out free ice cream—” Diego continued.
“—before it all melts,” they finished together.
Creepy little ankle-biters, Elias thought. But Luna didn’t appear to be at all bothered, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to let on that all the hairs on the back of his neck were standing at attention.
“So,” Luna continued, “I have kind of a crazy question for you guys. Do either of you ever . . . notice things? Like, things other people don’t notice?”
Here we go, Elias thought. She’s fishing to see if they’re magical.
“I mean,” Luna pressed on, “do you ever feel like you can do things that are . . . special?”
“Like what?” Diego asked.
“Well, like . . . magic? Have you ever made something happen just by wishing really hard? Or how about knowing things? Have you known something you shouldn’t know?”
The twins went silent, and Elias shuddered. Their sudden seriousness was by far their most unsettling trick.
“Sometimes we know—” Diego started slowly.
“—what the other one is thinking,” Hector finished. “But Mama says that’s just because we’re twins.”
Luna stood up to confer with him. “We need a new approach.”
“What can you expect? They don’t know they’re witches yet. I think this is a dead end.”
“But they clearly sense things. They sense one another’s thoughts; they’ve got instincts, for sure.
I’m just not asking the right questions.
” She paused, frowning, then turned abruptly back to the boys.
“What about other people . . . like, adults? Do you notice anybody around who seems . . . I don’t know, unusual? Surprising?”
“Oh yeah!” Both twins sat up straighter, suddenly animated. “Over at the Waverly—”
“—there’s all kinds of weird people.”
“What’s the Waverly?”
“Movie theater,” said the boys as one.
“Midnight show,” Hector offered. “Very weird.”
His brother nodded. “Super weird.”
A flash of excitement crossed Luna’s face but quickly dimmed, and Elias could see her practical side taking over. “Wait, though. What kind of weird are we talking about? Are you saying they act weird or just look weird?”
“Both?” Hector said uncertainly.
“But these people—” Diego continued.
“—they do things.”
“What kind of things?”
The twins looked at each other, having an entire discussion without saying a word.
“It’s hard to explain—” Hector started.
“—there are boys who dress like girls—”
“—and girls who dress like boys.”
“One time we saw this lady—” Diego added.
“—who made flowers appear out of nowhere—”
“—except they wilted really fast and turned black.”
“And everyone was arguing about something,” Hector continued.
“—but we couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
Luna grabbed his arm without thinking, and Elias was surprised by how natural it felt. “Did you hear that? Conjured flowers?”
“I heard,” he said grimly. “Maybe a sign?”
“That’s—”
“Weird,” Diego finished helpfully. “Like I said.”
Elias could see Luna’s mind racing. “How far is the Waverly from here?”
“Not far—” Hector said.
“—if you take the subway,” Diego added. “But the subway’s not running.”
“So you’d have to walk—”
“—over to 6th Avenue and Third.”
“In the dark,” Hector added ominously.
Luna looked at Elias, clearly weighing their options.
“A long walk through a blackout to maybe find some practitioners who might be able to help us? Or might just be more people with broken magic who can’t do anything useful?
Or . . .” she sighed. “You know, it’s probably nothing at all.
Probably it’s a bunch of Greenwich Village hipsters who just look weird if you happen to be eight years old. ”
But he found himself thinking about the twins’ determined repetition of the word weird. Something about it nagged at him. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “weird has another meaning. An older meaning.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Shakespeare, doll. You know Macbeth? There are a trio of witches, referred to as the Weird Sisters.” He looked at the twins, who were listening with the kind of intense focus children reserved for things they didn’t quite understand.
“Back then, weird didn’t just mean strange.
It meant magical. Supernatural. Having to do with fate and prophecy. ”
“So when Hector and Diego say weird people . . .”
“Maybe they mean our kind of people.”
“Or . . . maybe they’re just a couple of eight-year-old boys struggling to describe drag queens.”
Elias shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
The twins looked back and forth between them with identical expressions of confusion and interest.
“Are you guys—” Diego started.
“—going over there?” Hector finished.
Luna looked around thoughtfully. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I think we are.”
“Cool,” the twins said. “Can we come?”
“Absolutely not,” Luna and Elias replied.
They’ve got us doing it too, he thought wryly.
The twins shrugged and returned to their ice cream, as if the whole conversation had been a mildly interesting diversion.
As they walked away, toward the distant glow of Park Avenue, Elias could hear the boys resuming their conversation behind them:
“Do you think they’re—”
“—going to a costume party too?”
“Maybe. That lady was pretty—”
“—weird herself.”
Weird. Yeah, that was one word for it. Here he was, walking through a blacked-out New York City, fifty years in his future, with a witch on his arm. This was shaping up to be the most delightful evening he’d had in over a century.
* * *
They’d been ambling through the outrageous July heat for about twenty minutes and Elias was starting to recognize the neighborhood.
Greenwich Village was a bohemian enclave in his time, too: artists and radicals, cheap rent and cheaper wine.
But this version was grittier, more desperate.
The graceful buildings he remembered were now covered in graffiti, their stoops littered with trash.
Where once he’d seen well-dressed rebels sipping absinthe in cafés, now he saw what appeared to be opium addicts nodding off in doorways.
Christ, he thought, what happened to this place?
Just outside Washington Square Park, they came across a naked man crouched beside a fire hydrant.
He was surrounded by what looked like the contents of someone’s junk drawer: bottle caps, brass tokens, a broken watch, and numerous pencil stubs were arranged in a careful pattern around his feet.
He was muttering under his breath while moving his hands in elaborate gestures over the collection.
Elias slowed down his pace to watch. “What do you reckon? One of our kind?” Poor bastard looked like he was trying to divine tomorrow’s weather from bottle caps. “Or just another New York loony?”
Luna shot him a look. “You keep saying that. ‘Our kind.’”
“So?”
“So? There’s no ‘our’ here. Witches and magicians aren’t the same. We’re not allies; we’re not friends. We’re completely different species.”
Species? He had to bite back a laugh. This gal was pretty as a picture and sharp as a tack, but her prejudices ran deeper than the Chicago River. “Species? Really? Last I checked, we’re all human beings who happen to possess magical abilities. That’s a pretty significant commonality.”
“Hardly.” Luna picked her way carefully around a pile of garbage bags. “Witches have innate powers. We’re born with it. Magicians are just . . . performers. Card tricks and smoke machines.”
Now that was genuinely annoying. “Oh, come off it, sweetheart. You’re too smart to really believe that.
Some magicians are fakes, sure. I got my doubts about ole Maximillian the Magnificent, trust me.
Some magicians are just palookas doing card tricks at birthday parties.
But the council that sentenced me to the Void?
Those weren’t party entertainers, kiddo.
They were powerful enough to tear a hole in reality and stuff me right through it. ”