Indigo Springs (21 page)

Eyes streaming, hunched over and shivering, Astrid fumbled the buttons of Sahara’s pajama top. A cold knob of shining blue skin bulged under her left breast, and she pressed the glass against it. Just a pinprick, she thought, but the skin tore open in a ragged line.

Secrecy forgotten, Astrid screamed. She heard a sound like pipes emptying: blue slush rocketing out of her chest. It struck the necklace of fake pearls, vanishing inside them and leaving them glistening. Then it changed direction, soaking a rag doll on the shelf nearest Astrid. A massive pine cone covered in silver glitter was next, followed by a plastic pony and a cast-iron griddle.

Strength flooded into her body, bringing warmth, a sense of safety. The dreadful sense of the future dulled. The certainty that Sahara would flee Indigo Springs diminished, and Astrid could finally breathe.

By now the force of the vitagua spray inside her chest was diminishing. The stream washed over a wooden vinegar cruet next, and then an old photograph. A last drop spat over one of the horseshoes. Then she was bleeding—painlessly—from a gash under her breast.

“Exit wound,” she gasped, and the dust seemed to rise slightly at her words before settling once more.

The vitagua, all but that last indelible trace, was gone. Her head cleared, pain receding for the first time since she’d found the vitagua in the fireplace. She touched the blue-tinged edges of the rupture in her skin.

The grumbles quieted to whispers. The knowledge she had gained in the unreal—the story of how vitagua had formed, Patterflam’s history, all of it—seemed to dim, becoming dreamy, untrustworthy. At the same time, the room glowed. Astrid scanned Mrs. Voltone’s carefully stored objects, and saw their chanting potential everywhere.

They all had sparkle now, not just the handful of items she had noticed when she first staggered inside. Only the glass knickknacks and an old adding machine remained dull and magic-resistant.

“Getting better at it,” she grunted.

How very like Albert she would seem if anybody caught her now—trespassing, half-dressed, looting the ancestral home of a venerable Springer family. Maybe Sahara was right, and they needed a better way to do things. If she didn’t want sole responsibility for the magic, she had to let her friends make some of the rules.

With the pain and chill and pessimistic grumbles gone, Astrid found it easier to take hope in the future.

“And if Sahara left, whose fault would that be?” she said as she tucked the chantments she’d made into a canvas gym bag. “You can’t expect someone to read your mind.”

Putting a life together. That’s what she was supposed to be doing. That’s what Sahara was trying to help her with. This magic stuff of Dad’s had to fit in, but it didn’t have to be everything.

Humming Ma’s Highland air, she skulked to her truck and found her first-aid kit. After bandaging her chest, she drove home.

As Astrid pulled up, Sahara came sprinting across the yard. The terror on her face was genuine, not at all the look of someone who would abandon her.

“I’m fine,” Astrid said, before she could ask.

“I thought you’d passed out and had an accident!”

She shook her head. “I just had to decontaminate.”

Sahara’s voice dropped. “You chanted something?”

“Maybe too many somethings.” Astrid handed her the bag. “We have to unload these fast.”

Her friend barely glanced at the chantments, instead throwing an arm around her and squeezing.

She hugged back, inhaling the clove scent of Sahara’s hair. “Let’s go out somewhere tonight, you and me.”

“I’m on the air,” Sahara answered. “Early show.”

“You’re off at nine? We’ll have supper late, like big-city girls. Somewhere fancy, my treat.”

Sahara licked her lips. “What’s the occasion?”

“Me not freezing…no. Me having a life.”

“Astrid day,” Sahara said.

“Say yes and I’ll buy you a steak.”

Sahara laughed. “Here I am trying to figure how to explain to Jacks that I let you run off and you’re—”

Astrid hopped in place. “Say yes, Princess.”

Sahara dropped a curtsy. “Why, Miz Wizard. It would be an honor and a pleasure.”

Astrid bowed, and flourished her arms outward.

“Magic wants to be known,” Astrid says, twirling a lock of hair on her fingers. Before her, old playing cards are being bleached white and repainted with new images almost faster than my eye can follow.

“What does that mean?”

“It means becoming a chanter is about opening yourself to the vitagua. Being initiated into a vitagua well gives you access to all the knowledge of the unreal. The more vitagua you take in, the more you hear the grumbles. But there’s a downside. The more you hear, the more confused you get. Too many voices, each with its own agenda…” I pick up a card that shows the young Astrid with her father, the two of them sitting with a single drop of vitagua between them in a golden bowl. “My impression is that your father never got terribly good at chanting.”

“The grumbles scared Albert. He made small chantments and got rid of them fast.”

“He kept his vitagua exposure low?”

“It kept the grumbles quiet,” Astrid said. “Me, on the other hand—a year passed after his death before I found the well in the fireplace. There’d been buildup. I got a big blast of spirit water all at once. That—and the amount of chanting I had to do—taught me a lot. By the time I’d made all those chantments in the old Voltone house, tons of things had Dad’s sparkle. He needed antiques, but I outgrew that. If I hadn’t siphoned out my vitagua reserves, I could have chanted every piece of bric-a-brac in that old house.”

“Except the glass and electronic gadgets.” I rub my face. “So it wasn’t that you had more natural ability to begin with?”

“No, my basic ability
was
stronger. Dad did a good job of initiating me….” She looks—to see if I remember why.

“He’d done it before…some cousin who died?”

“Right. Cousin Ron and then some other guy. ‘Third time’s the charm,’” he said to me that day.

“What other guy?”

“Dad never said for sure, but he had been pals—in a quiet way—with this greenhouse operator’s son.”

“Why do you think it was him?”

“Because he died in a gas explosion.”

“Ah.”

“My point is that Albert had initiated people before. When my turn came, he was good at it. Then I got exposed to more vitagua than him, I made more chantments than he did, and I accidentally visited the unreal. Of course I was a better chanter.”

“And it was your second time learning,” I say. “How is it that you forgot what Albert taught you as a child?”

“I—” Her hand drifts upward, to her ravaged ear. “Jemmy’s on the move.” The change in her tone makes me tense up, even before the emergency lights flicker out. “I bet your recorder’s dead now.”

I do a rundown on my pager, phone, and recorder, looking for battery lights. “All dead,” I report. The idea that we aren’t being monitored comes as a relief. It is a bad sign: Astrid is engaging me, and I need to pull back.

“What’s going on upstairs? Is Sahara here?”

Astrid utters a lyrical mishmash of nonsense words, and suddenly I can see again. She has chanted one of the teaspoons. Light blazes from it like a torch. “Yes, Will, Sahara’s come.”

She hands me the spoon. Its handle is chilly.

“She’s here for you?”

She nods. “She wants me to make her followers into people like Patience.”

“You knew about this? Why didn’t you warn Roche?”

A flinty smile. “I’m the bad guy, remember?”

There is a sound of things breaking, muffled by the thick walls, and then gunfire.

“Oh,” Astrid says. “
This
is the part where the guards start shooting.”

“What’s happening?”

“Sahara’s Primas are holding off the troops.”

“Primas, here?” I think of Caro, and my stomach burns. “What about Sahara?”

“She’s with Ma. Will, your ring is a protective chantment. You’re completely safe.”

“Says the alleged bad guy.”

“She won’t keep us waiting long.” Now she does rise, leaning against her grandfather’s cabinet, breathing in its woody scent before licking the wood. Blue fluid seeps from her tongue and into its structure. The grain of the oak glimmers blue before the vitagua is absorbed.

“Another chantment? What does this one do?”

“Toughens things up.” She lays both hands on the cabinet and sings the cantation again. Then she sets one of the empty teacups inside, closing it. Bringing it out, she invites me to smash it.

I clunk the delicate china against a wall and the jolt travels up my elbow. It feels diamond hard.

“Try again?”

“No.” The floor trembles. Astrid could have walked out of here anytime, I think. Roche ought to forget about Jemmy Burlein and the others.

But there’s no getting out, no warning him. All I can do is my job. I raise the spoon, noting the moonlight silver of its glow, and continue the interview. “You say after your experience at the Voltone house, you could chant a wider range of items.”

“Yes.”

“Albert could only chant antiques. Why antiques?”

She weighs her answer, her expression suddenly calculating. “Albert preferred things that had been loved.”

“When did you get to the point where you could control what an item would become when you chanted it?”

“A couple days after the batch at Voltone’s.”

“Your learning process was accelerating.” I touch the bright bowl of the spoon. It isn’t hot; I can close my fingers over it. The blood within me glows red.

Astrid plucks a couple of her photographs off the wall and puts them in the cabinet, toughening them up.

I sort through the facts. “On your first trip to the unreal, the vitagua in your body froze. You became ill.”

“Yes. I almost froze myself solid trying to contain Patterflam.”

“And it was all ice, all of Fairyland.”

“Yes.”

“You took me to the unreal, and it was warm and dry.”

She nods. “All the vitagua the witch-burners forced out of the real? It’s thawing.”

I don’t like the sound of that. “The unreal is warming? What about the people frozen in the icebergs?”

“They’re getting loose, of course.” She puts the paintbrush handle inside the cabinet. “Luckily for the real, most of them are too busy celebrating to think about revenge.”

“For how long?” A flutter in my gut. I flash on campouts from my Boy Scout days, remember that I always hated ghost stories, darkness, and freaky tales.

“Some big players are still stuck in those ice floes.”

“Elves or something? Brownies?”

“The fairies and leprechauns are dead. The witch-burners did a thorough job on the Old World’s magical ecosystem.”

“Who then?”

She gives me a moment to come up with the answer, then shrugs. “Raven, maybe? Wendigo. Quetzalcoatl.”

“You expect me to tell Roche a bunch of old Indian myths are going to rise from the grave—”

“And bite him on the ass? It’s true.”

“Why would Raven be around if the fairies are gone?”

She sighs. “Will, the witch-burners owned Europe when they started their crusade against enchantment. They had to
take
the Americas, inch by inch. There were people here—spirits, walking gods—and they weren’t dumb. They saw what was happening and banked their power in the unreal. They hoped their shamans and medicine women could trickle magic back drop by drop, without doing any harm—”

“No
harm
? We’ve got a flood on our hands, and Sahara busted the dams.”

“They’re busted, it’s true,” she says, voice rising. “I don’t know what I was doing.”

She is panicking. With the paintbrush chantment locked in the cabinet, Astrid is losing track of past and present again. I open the cabinet and hand it to her.

She gulps air for a second. “Albert’s great-great-grandmother Melissa was a proper white lady whose adopted sister happened to be Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow. Melissa got Elizabeth’s birthright because her tribe was dead. Maybe she stole it from her, I don’t know. The Almore family—my family—got the chanting ability, but they never understood the magical well. Dad was hastily initiated and scared of its power. He didn’t trust the grumbles, and never learned how things worked. A spill was inevitable.”

“So it’s fate? Fate’s to blame?”

“I’m to blame,” she says. “If I’d listened to Jacks about the potlatch massacre…”

“You can’t expect to convince anyone that what’s happening is payback for the past five hundred years. Sahara’s not Native. She’s not spearheading some anti-colonial Renaissance.”

“Renaissance? Try Apocalypse.” She raises her gaze to the ceiling. “Those five hundred years could get wiped off the board. It could all go, Will—elections, satellite TV, presweetened breakfast cereal. Sahara’s no Renaissance. She’s out to destroy the world she used to love.”

I laugh. “People aren’t going to give up centuries of democracy, freedom, and technology without a fight.”

“You are fighting.”

“You’re saying we’ll lose? Astrid?”

“I am the one with the sneak preview. You’re just some guy who’s afraid to grow flowers in his own backyard.”

My face heats.

She plucks a silk begonia off one of the fake plants, chanting it. Once this crisis passes, we’ll have to put her in a cell with nothing but glass objects. How will we keep Patience from slipping things to her?

Reciting a cantation with the fake blossom between her hands, Astrid brushes it over her wardrobe. The cabinet shrinks, becoming smaller and smaller, until it is less than an inch high. Bending to pick it off the floor, she puts it in the pocket of her shirt.

Packing up her treasures…I try to think of ways to raise an alarm amid a blackout. “Astrid…”

“The nice cultivated world is over with, Will. No amount of pruning or even firebombing is gonna keep the weeds from overrunning the petunias. The only questions are how long will it take and how ugly is it gonna get?”

Below the cuffs of her shirt and under her hair, she glows with dim blue light.

“I can’t accept that. Sahara’s not that powerful.”

“It’s okay to be sad.” Our eyes meet and my inner criminal analyst sees how good Astrid is at engaging me. “I am. I liked the old world fine.”

“There must be a way to stop her.”

“Sahara? She’s just riding the flood.” She leans against the fake picture window, her breath fogging a circle on the dead, opaque glass. “Using magic to pull in the gullible, the weak—”

“Meaning what?”

Another bump and more shots—closer than before.

We’re shut down tight, I remind myself.

The steel bolts bang open…and I am in the presence of Sahara Knax.

She is taller than I expected. Long-limbed, willowy, and terrifying, she glows blue. She has none of Astrid’s control: the liquid roils randomly, squirting from one part of her body to another, raising her skin in bulges.

Sahara’s long hair is mottled with the iridescent markings of starlings. Brown feathered wings sprout from her shoulder blades. Her leather coat—a blue sheath with dozens of bulging pockets—has been modified accordingly.

Sahara’s eyes are dark and beady. Her fingers are shaped like talons, sharp-tipped and cruel. Her mouth is pursed, half a beak but still lip-pink. Necklaces dangle from her throat, bracelets from her wrists. Rings encrust her fingers.

Two of Sahara’s so-called Primas are with her, similarly bedecked. Ev Lethewood stands between them, dressed as a man, fully bearded, ears pointed and bristling with white hairs, like a goat’s. One of the women gripping Ev’s forearm is Jemmy Burlein, Astrid’s onetime lover.

Sahara is completely focused on Astrid.

Jemmy moves, stepping sideways so that I, like Astrid and Ev, am encircled by the three Alchemites.

“Time we struck a deal,” Sahara says.

“No, it’s not that time.” Astrid smiles at her mother. “Hi, Pop.”

“Petey,” Ev Lethewood replies, back in the grip of delusion.

“Sahara wants me to work for her, Will. She brought Ev as a hostage. It’s not just Patterflam’s curse, you see. Albert would say she’s got the greeds.”

“Astrid,” Sahara growls. “Stop talking to this drone and shut up about the curse.”

“Take a person whose weakness is selfishness. Add vitagua and—”

Sahara raises an old-fashioned cigarette case and cracks it open. A thin stream of fire burns from its opening, crisping a line across the floor, through the couch. The singed upholstery reeks and burns as she plays the flame over Astrid’s wall of photographs.

“So you’re a firebug now?” Astrid says. Alarms ring and sprinklers chug, soaking us with chilly water. “Just like old times. Wait. When are we?” Her hand rises to her throat.

“I will hurt her, Astrid.” Sahara glances at Ev with her dark avian eyes. “You think I won’t?”

“Are you that far gone?”

Trilling laughter, Sahara turns, opening her magic flamethrower full-on.

In my face.

A furnace of heat blows past me, scorching the air. As I flinch, raising my hands over my face, flames play over my skin…but I do not burn. My hair doesn’t so much as crisp. The heat is answered by a chilly gust from my ring. The fire goes out.

Heart pounding, suddenly famished, I start for Sahara. Her Primas grab for my arms, and as I shake them off, something moves through me.

It’s Patience, using her unusual ability to go misty to pass through my body. “Boo!” she shouts. Sahara back-pedals, startled. Jemmy Burlein releases Ev, groping for a chantment of her own.

And like that, we are in the unreal again—me, Astrid, Patience, and Evelyn Lethewood. Sahara and her Primas are left behind. There’s the sound of starlings shrieking, far away. A white dust devil swirls up from the chalky soil underfoot.

“So this is Fairyland?” Ev says, and in the same instant Patience points at the twisting vortex of sand and asks, “What’s that?”

“Sahara’s trying to break through,” Astrid says, wrapping her mother in a tight hug. I look away as mother and daughter cling to each other, laughing and crying.

Painted and unpainted playing cards are scattered at my feet, fluttering like windblown leaves. I bend to collect them as I ask: “Is this what I think it is?”

“It was a jail break.” Astrid hands me a protein bar.

“I can’t allow you to leave.”

“You can’t stop me. You must know that by now.”