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  The basement door creaked open and Orion led me down the narrow stairs into my old bedroom. I had expected my father to have changed everything, made this his poolroom, put in at least one television. Instead, it was just as I had left it. There wasn’t even a cigarette smell, just mustiness. My old twin bed was there and my travel posters and Dulac prints of illustrated fairy tales were on the walls. Somehow this calmed me. Maybe my father had been afraid of this room, in some way. Maybe I had haunted him.

  Orion sat down on the bed, took my hand and gently pulled me down beside him.

  “This was your room?” He looked around.

  “I can’t stand basements,” I said.

  “Ruby, I wanted to tell you something. It’s the main reason I came here. I mean, besides wanting to be with you for this.”

  I looked at him, right at him, for the first time, really, since he’d pulled up in my mother’s driveway. I didn’t know if I could keep myself from crying anymore. He reached up and touched my hair, trying to take out the bobby pins, but he couldn’t do it and he cursed softly.

  I rolled my eyes and did it for him, shaking my hair out around my shoulders like a shield. I was still proud, guarded; my tears hadn’t come, I had controlled them.

  “I want you to come back with me,” he said.

  Then I do cry; I can’t help it. You enfold me in your arms.

  “Sometimes the memories are more real than now,” I say.

  “Tell me a memory,” you say. “While it is happening.” And then I feel you inside of me and all my body remembers is magic.

  It is the opposite of birth. But it is not death. It is the end of separation.

  No ghosts visit us that night. It is over. It has begun.

  OPAL AND I, DRESSED in our black witch cloaks and hats, went up to the ornately carved wooden door of the yellow Victorian house. If it were not for the nine huge jack-o’-lanterns, we would have been swallowed up by the night; we were that dark in our costumes. Delicious chills tickled my spine and I squeezed Opal’s hand.

  We knocked.

  After a while, the door creaked open, as if by itself. We stepped onto the parquet floor of the entry hall. The house was lit only by candles in pink-and-gold glass holders. The very air had an unearthly glow.

  All of a sudden, two old women appeared from behind an embroidered silk piano shawl that hung in the doorway. They twirled around us, the fringes of their black wraps tickling our skin, the oversized jewels they wore catching the light. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts twinkling and winking.

  “Oh, look, oh, look, our little witches!”

  “Don’t they look just like us, Ophelia?”

  “Yes, yes, Cordelia. Even the hair.”

  “I was a redhead, girls. And Cordelia was dark, like you, Opal.”

  “And now you’d never guess! Doesn’t age play tricks!”

  “Tricks! Trick or treat! Did you say it girls?”

  We looked at each other, stunned, and whispered the words. The women reached into invisible pockets and brought out gold-and-silver-wrapped chocolates shaped like bats, cats, moons, and stars. Giggling, they filled our pillowcases until there wasn’t any more room.

  “Your grandmother lifted tables with her fingertips.”

  “Your great-great-grandmother was a circus performer. She could lie down across the top of two chairs, even when she was eighty years old.”

  “Before that your people were gypsies!”

  “Oh, we love gypsies!”

  “Before that…”

  “Do you know about fairies?”

  “Lots of the magic in your lives.”

  “All we have to do is ask, girls!”

  “Now now you must be off!”

  As they whisked us toward the door, I tried to peer into the rest of the house. On either side of the entry, I could see candle-lit rooms full of curvy wood and velvet furniture, lace doilies, books, china dolls, wind-up toys.

  It felt as if my sister and I flew on broomsticks down the staircase, giggling like the young girls we sometimes forgot we were.

  Later in the evening, we sneaked back to the house and padded around the side in the damp flowerbeds full of the skeletons of rosebushes. Through the lace curtains, we saw the two women sitting at a table stuffing chocolates into their mouths and giggling. With them was a very small person in a pointy black hat, a black house cat as big as a toddler, and a jack-o’-lantern with a carrot nose reciting nursery rhymes.

  NOW I KNOW THAT the sisters in the yellow house were another example of the magic that has always surrounded me. I just didn’t always see it. But it has been my protection, again and again. I called it to me when I was three and it has remained.

  All we have to do is ask.

  acknowledgments

  We would like to thank our families and friends and everyone at HarperCollins, especially Alison Callahan.

  About the Authors

  FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Guarding the Moon, The Rose and the Beast, Violet & Claire, and Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books, as well as Necklace of Kisses and many other books. She lives in Los Angeles.

  CARMEN STATON lives in Los Angeles with her family. She is working on Dreamstone, a book for children.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE FOR

  ruby

  “Francesca Lia Block has made a name for herself with a stream of books…in which she serves up a heady brew mingling up-to-the-minute themes and settings with hefty lashings of magic, fantasy, and fairy tale. She is clearly a writer who loves to write: to visualize, to imagine, and to set it all down in pellucid, sensuous prose as irresistibly smooth and refreshing as ice cream.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Women weaned on…Block’s mesmerizing alchemy of fairy-tale fantasy and Hollywood glitz will fall under the spell of this grown-up romance, about an L.A. nanny who uses magic to land the hunk of her dreams.”

  —People

  “Block…maintains her trademarks: fairy-tale simplicity combined with wrenching emotional realism, served with a hefty side of over-the-top romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “As always, the magic is truly magical, and the emotions are never less than deeply and honestly felt.”

  —Booklist

  ALSO BY FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK

  Necklace of Kisses

  Weetzie Bat

  Goat Girls

  Beautiful Boys

  Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

  Wasteland

  Echo

  Violet & Claire

  I Was a Teenage Fairy

  The Hanged Man

  The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

  Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories

  Nymph

  Primavera

  Ecstasia

  Guarding the Moon: A Mother’s First Year (autobiography)

  Copyright

  RUBY. Copyright © 2006 by Francesca Lia Block and Carmen Staton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition May 2007 ISBN 9780061753350

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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