Crystal Caves Read online

  “Even if they don’t know where the Empire State Building is?” Gordon asks, keeping his gaze on me.

  They’re never going to forget that incident. I was standing at the edge of Central Park, looking directly at the Empire State Building, and that’s when I asked where it was. How was I supposed to know it was in my line of sight? How was I supposed to know what it looked like? I was lucky just to know it existed.

  “What do you care about culture?” Danny says. “You didn’t even know what Lincoln Center is.”

  “Leave her alone,” E says, and I look at him gratefully. He smiles, just a little. “So your dad is really old.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then why was Mother interested?” E asks.

  “He doesn’t look old,” I say and then bite my lip. That gets into the magic. Mages don’t age the same way as mortals. We do age, but only with extreme magic use, and like usual, Daddy found a way to exempt himself from that.

  “How come?” Danny asks. “Plastic surgery?”

  “He’s not like Mother,” I say, and there’s a collective gasp around the table. I guess we’re not supposed to talk about Mother’s too-smooth face, either.

  “So how does he look young?” Gordon asks in that tone that just tells me he’s going to criticize whatever answer I give.

  So I smile at him. It’s my breezy, I-don’t-care smile. “He’s magic.”

  All four of them stare at me like I’ve smashed each plate on the dinner table.

  “Magic?” Danny asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You believe that?” Fabe asks.

  “I know it,” I say.

  “Prove it,” Gordon says.

  “Look it up,” I say. Tiff used to say that to me, and I’ve been wanting to use that one on someone else for years.

  “How can I look it up?” Gordon asks. “I don’t even know what your dad’s name is.”

  I answer so fast that I don’t even give myself time to think about it. “It’s Zeus.”

  “Zeus what?” E asks.

  “Zeus,” I say, beginning to get annoyed.

  “One name?” Danny asks. “Like a dog?”

  “Like a god,” I say. “He’s the Zeus.”

  They stare at me again, and this time, I can feel the malevolence.

  “Jeez,” E finally says. “If you didn’t want to tell us about him, you could’ve just said so.”

  “Yeah,” Gordon says. “It’s not nice to lie to people.”

  “Or to make fun of them,” Fabe says.

  I, of course, never tell them that they’ve been making fun of me. I’m outnumbered.

  That was Day Four. They tried again on Day Seven, and one more time on Day Ten (and no, I don’t know if they waited three days on purpose or because that’s how long their attention span extends). I kept telling them the truth, and they kept accusing me of lying, and then they stopped talking to me altogether—except on those rare occasions when Mother or Owen came to dinner.

  Then we’d discuss our days or the books we were supposed to be reading or the shopping I still needed to do to make myself presentable.

  And that’s my home life. I have a life outside of the home. I’m supposed to go to school, and I do sometimes. But mostly, I shop. Because I can.

  So far, it seems, that credit card doesn’t have a limit—at least that I can find.

  Supposedly, that credit card is a perk of my new lifestyle. That’s what my real sisters, Brit and Tiff, say. They’re envious of the unlimited money because, they say, it’s hard to learn how to use the stuff properly.

  I haven’t really learned. I just use the credit card.

  I used it to get them each an iPhone, so we could talk and text whenever we wanted to. I sent the phones to them, and their mothers Freaked Out, like major big time.

  Their mothers called my mother, and it got ugly. My mother hates dealing with me, and she had to after that.

  So I was in trouble for being nice.

  Everything gets me in trouble. Just breathing gets me in trouble. And without the iPhones or my sisters, I can’t tell anyone how I feel.

  Because no one seems to care.

  TWO

  HERE’S THE THING that pissed off the mothers so badly (I think):

  Brittany, Tiffany, and I aren’t supposed to talk to each other except on Saturday afternoons. Brittany lives in some place called the Midwest and Tiffany lives in Oregon, which I can actually find on a map. We’re supposed to stay separate, at least until the winter holidays, so that we can develop our own identities.

  It’s our shrink’s idea to keep us apart. Megan—that’s our shrink—believes that we’ve spent too much time together. All three of us were born in the same week to different mothers, but of course we have the same father, and he raised us (well, he hired out the raising, but that’s a different story). We hadn’t been separated at all until this summer, and before that, we were so intertwined that we could almost hear each other’s thoughts.

  Our magic—which we weren’t supposed to have at our young ages, but Daddy had broken that rule too, like he breaks so many others—had intertwined too, and when Tiff decided she wanted to follow the normal mage’s path—no magic for female mages until after menopause (!)—we had to either go along or force her to keep her magic.

  If you’ve ever met Tiff, you know why forcing her was out of the question.

  So Brit and I went along because that’s what we always do. If Tiff wants something, we go along. If Tiff doesn’t want it, we don’t want it either.

  At the time, it didn’t seem so bad. But I’m rethinking it now.

  If I’m going to be honest—and I decided I was in writing this all down—then I have to say that we were all pretty miserable in Mount Olympus. We three girls only had each other for family (and our numerous other siblings, some of whom are so old that they can’t remember when they were born either) and Daddy had actually given us a job.

  The problem with the job was that it was more than full-time, and we weren’t qualified to do it. Maybe Tiff was. She’s the brains. Me and Brit, we’re just hangers-on. We kinda sorta got our revenge on Tiff by having her do all the brain work, but when I look back on it, I think we’re not quite that petty. It was just easier to let Tiff do the thinking for us, just like it was easier to let Brit do the crying for us.

  I’m not sure what I did. And that, Megan says, is why we had to separate.

  Everyone else says it’s because of the stupid job we had the last few years. As the Interim Fates, we were placeholders, really, while the Powers That Be decided what to do with the real Fates.

  Daddy said we were the real Fates, but not even we believed that. The real Fates are these superpowerful women who scare the crap out of Daddy, which is why he maneuvered and maneuvered and maneuvered to get rid of them.

  Then he was successful (and I think it surprised even him), so he gave me and Brit and Tiff the job. He could’ve given it to Artemis, Athena, and Aletheia, but he knew they’d be too smart to manipulate. Or he could’ve given it to the Horae (Diké, Eirene, and Eunomia), but, come to think of it, they’re closely tied to the real Fates and besides, Eunomia is the Goddess of Good Governance (actually, it’s one of her passions—and she’s militant about it), so she probably would’ve prevented Daddy from manipulating everything right from the get-go.

  I guess if Daddy wanted daughters he could manipulate, he could’ve chosen any three out of a hundred girls, many of whom aren’t grown yet. But if he wanted three who’re as close as the Fates are to each other (and who look kinda like them), then he didn’t have a lot of choices. Most of us kids don’t know each other well because Daddy had different groups raising us.

  Me and Tiff and Brit were just pretty lucky that’d we’d found each other so young. Otherwise, our lives would’ve been even more miserable.

  Although this acting-Fate thing—being the Interim Fates—was hard. We thought it was an honorary title at first, and then everyone wanted us
to decide stuff and we didn’t have the brains for that. Or at least, me and Brit didn’t have the brains. Tiff did, but she said she didn’t have the education.

  She spent almost that whole time we were Interim Fates reading and learning and trying to teach us. She was getting mad at us all the time, and Brit was crying all the time, and I was tired of being in the middle.

  I was just so mad at Daddy for putting us in that job and making us work and then abandoning us and forgetting about us because we weren’t in his way like the real Fates had been. That’s when we realized he really didn’t care what we did, as long as we didn’t stop him from doing what he wanted to do.

  Then we met Megan, who is both a therapist and an empath—a real one, with a rare magical ability to pull your emotions from you (and to understand them: even rarer!)—and she caught all the animosity between us, and between Tiff and Daddy.

  The animosity between us—that was what worried me. We were closer than sisters. We were almost the same person, and we’d started to hate each other just because we were together—without a break—all the time.

  So when Megan showed up at the library (where we had to live—this magical library that sounds cool, but is really like a giant prison with books), we asked her to help us quit.

  Or rather, I asked her.

  For once, I decided something. I decided we should stand up to Daddy, even when Tiff and Brit started to worry that it was a really bad idea.

  We spelled our way to Megan’s office (which took some fancy magic, let me tell you) and Daddy showed up and then Tiff let fly. She called him every name in the book, told him he wasn’t a good father, and then cited all his crimes. I’ll never forget the look on his face.

  Daddy’s a bit of a bull—I mean that he looks like a bull: short and squat, with a nose that’s pushed in and extra-large nostrils. For some reason, though, adult women find him attractive. Megan says that’s because he has charisma, but if he does, his daughters are immune to it.

  Daddy can actually make his eyes flash—he’s not called the thunder god for nothing—and he did that when he looked at me and Brittany when Tiff had finished her harangue.

  “Is that true?” he asked me. “Am I a bad parent?”

  Okay. I still remember that moment. Because for the first time in years, I had to make a decision all by myself. Did I tell my father—who had never, ever, not once in my entire life asked me a direct question before—that he sucked at parenting? Or did I betray my closest friends and my sisters by telling him what he wanted to hear?

  Megan would have said—if I’d given her the chance—that I should have expressed my real opinion, but at the time, I didn’t know what my real opinion was.

  My heart was pounding, and my cheeks got warm. I don’t usually blush—Tiff and Brit do—but that day, I was turning red under Daddy’s scrutiny.

  “Well?” he asked in that bullish way of his. “Is she right?”

  Tiff glared at me, and that was when I realized she got bullish tendencies from Daddy. Maybe that’s why we followed her, no questions asked.

  “Am I a bad parent?” he repeated, louder, like I had gone deaf just because I was trying to figure out how to answer him.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered—I couldn’t find my voice, even if I wanted to. It seemed to have just vanished. “This is the first conversation we’ve ever had.”

  Daddy made this horrible sound, and Megan chastised him, and then he turned to Brit.

  I was shaking so bad from the look he gave me after I spoke to him that I never heard what Brit said to him.

  All I know is that by the end of the session, we’d shaken Daddy’s faith in himself (which, after centuries of being worshipped or followed or obeyed, was darn near impossible) and he left, vowing to interview the other two hundred children of his that he could find easily.

  Leaving us with Megan. Who asked Tiff, of course, what she wanted to do.

  She wanted out of Olympus, away from Daddy, and a mundane life. Megan warned Tiff that to go live with her mother, she’d have to give up her magic until she came into it naturally, and Tiff said that was fine.

  Then Megan asked me and Brit what we wanted to do. Brit said it’d be nice to have some time away. I didn’t answer. I just wanted to stop being an Interim Fate. I didn’t really want to leave home, though. I had no idea what would happen to me if I did.

  I’d never really been anywhere else. They both had: Tiff’s mom spent entire summers with her and actually took her to places around the world.

  Brit’s mom spent as much time in Olympus as possible, usually in two-week chunks.

  For most of my life, my mom came to the obligatory parents’ meeting in June and then left the minute the meeting ended. The two Junes that I was an Interim Fate, my mom didn’t show up at all. Or maybe it was a few more Junes than that. I’m not sure, because that Interim Fate interlude screwed up my sense of time.

  Somehow, in that session, Megan got it into her empathic little head that we all wanted to be with our mothers. And she arranged for us to lose our magic (for the next thirty to forty years!) and head into the greater world so that we could grow up “normal.”

  Or at least as normal as teenagers could be with a god for a father, hundreds of siblings, and an upbringing that doesn’t include early childhood education.

  I get the sense, from our once-a-week phone calls, that Brit and Tiff are pretty happy where they’re at. Tiff’s mom is cool—I’ve met her—and Brit has been accepted into the bosom of her family (whatever that means). I’m the only one stuck here all alone with the three creatures and the master of ceremonies.

  So I used my credit card to buy everybody the iPhones. I had the store send Brit and Tiff theirs, along with the family plan for all three of us, and I figured that even if we couldn’t e-mail, we could text. There was nothing in the rules that Megan gave us that said we couldn’t text.

  (Except the no-contact part. Y’know. Only talk on Saturday.)

  But that’s not what upset everybody.

  Tiff’s mom called first and somehow managed to talk to my mom, which is a modern miracle. Tiff’s mom complained that the gift cost too much money (!), which Mother didn’t understand at all (“Why are they complaining about that?” she asked) and then told Mother that she was sending the iPhone back.

  Which she did.

  And so did Brit’s mom, only without the life’s-about-to-end phone call.

  We had an awkward three-way phone call that Saturday, trying not to talk about what happened, and then everybody told Megan.

  Everybody except me.

  Here’s the other part of the deal. We each have one hour sessions with Megan every week. She flies (sometimes literally—like that transport thing in Star Trek—sometimes on a real airplane) between the locations and spends the day there. She lives in Los Angeles with this really rich, really hot guy whom she married just last year, but that doesn’t seem to sway her from her mission of saving the magical from themselves.

  Or at least, saving the three of us from our father’s evil influence, whatever that means.

  So in their sessions, Brit and Tiff talk about the horrors of the iPhones and when I go in every Sunday, there’s Megan waiting for me.

  She’s chubby and redheaded—only with that auburn color that Mother wishes I had—and once, Megan made the mistake of saying that large women sometimes end up like her, which has made me even more paranoid about dessert.

  Until we had to leave Olympus, I kinda liked Megan. She was the first woman I ever met who didn’t wear any perfume at all (although she does use this vanilla soap that’s real faint, but in her personal spaces, like the office, does linger in the air).

  So every week, I go into Megan’s office, and she opens the door to the therapy room, and I sit down on the couch while she sits in this big brown chair. This week’s no different.

  The first question she asks me is the first question she’s asked now every week since I moved to New York:


  “Is your mother with you?”

  I shake my head. The agreement is that Mother comes too so that she can handle a formerly magical child (the other mothers do this as well) and help with the transition. Mother came to the first session, deemed it beneath her, and has refused to come since.

  Only in typical Mother fashion, she hasn’t really refused so much as scheduled a conflicting—and more important (she says)—appointment at the same time.

  Megan’s office here—which she owns (apparently she owns one in Oregon too and another in the mysterious Midwest)—is in the West Fifties, in one of the lovely old buildings that has been restored to a kind of former glory. The office itself is small—only three rooms: a reception area, Megan’s office proper, and a group therapy room, which she hasn’t used here yet—but it’s pretty. Very feminine—lots of plants and delicate art depicting mothers and children and everything’s in rich browns and mauves and warm shades.

  I do feel comfortable here, which I refuse to tell her, although she suspects it. Or maybe she knows it, being an empath and all.

  “You have to tell your mother that this is important,” Megan says.

  “Yeah, I will,” I say. “Next time I see her.”

  “You said that last week.”

  I shrug as I thump into the oversized chair she has for clients. “I haven’t seen her.”

  The past few sessions when I say that Megan says, Don’t be flip, Crystal, but this time she peers at me, and I wonder if she’s using that empathy crap on me.

  “You really haven’t seen her, have you?” Megan asks.

  And when she uses that empathy thing, it sorta pulls answers out of you. I don’t know how to describe it except that it’s like an ache in your brain, and then you’ve answered even before you realize you’ve opened your mouth.

  “I saw her when she confronted me about the iPhones,” I say and mentally curse myself. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say anything about the iPhones.

  “She actually confronted you?” Megan asks, which suggests she knows about the iPhone incident from somebody else.