We Install (18 page)

Lucy checked the Fernwood scroll on CSPANC again. As soon as she did, something way more strident than a hip-hop kangaroo went off inside her head. “They can't get away with that!” she yipped.

“With what?” Jesse ambled over to see what she was talking about.

“With
that
.” Quivering with indignation, Lucy pointed out the offending entry. “Yellow-billed magpie? Here? Or in Fernwood, I mean? No way, Jessay.” She pronounced his name so the phrase rhymed, which made him wince. She went on, “No way unless Fat Freddy magicked it in, I mean. Well, if he's gonna play that way, we can play that way, too.
Oh
, yeah!” So much for immoral and unethical. What were rules, in war?

“What'll you do, Mom?” Anticipation and alarm jangled in Jesse's voice.

“I'll make sure those no-good, lousy cheaters in Fernwood don't steal this year's count, that's what.” Lucy stormed out of the kitchen and into her study. She came back with several grimoires and an armload of
materia magica
—oh, and a few birders' guides, too. She paged through one of them, then smiled carnivorously and nodded. “We'll have people down by the old slough, right?”

“We always do,” Jesse answered.

“Right,” Lucy said again. “Now we find out whether they're awake.” You could conjure in a bird—sure. But if you did and nobody spotted it, you might as well not have bothered.

Lucy's
materia magica
, unlike those of a lot of witches, included feathers of all different colors … just in case. She pulled out a dark green one, and a little bronze crown that might have graced a doll's head once upon a time. She knew where her target birds lived. She knew where she wanted to put one. The charm and the passes that got the bird from A to B were second nature to her. After umpty-ump years of training and practice they were, anyhow.

“What exactly did you do?” Jesse asked. “I mean, I can guess, but—”

“Go ahead and guess,” Lucy said. “We'll find out if it worked pretty soon.” If it didn't, if the loafers at the slough were standing around yawning or just not paying attention … Well, she'd find some other way to make sure they weren't asleep over there next year, by God!

She made herself sit there for fifteen minutes before she checked the Sunset Grove scroll on CSPANC again. That was at least fourteen minutes longer than Jesse wanted to wait. By the time they finally looked, he had a bad case of the wiggles.

His grin almost made the top of his head fall off. “Green kingfisher!” he whooped. “I thought that's what you were up to!” Belted kingfishers, larger and blue-gray, were common over water. Green kingfishers barely came north of the Rio Grande, and never visited California—not unless a friendly witch lent a hand.

Not two minutes later, his pocket crystal made hip-hop noises again. “If that's Kathleen bitching—” Lucy began.

Her son waved her to silence. A call on the pocket crystal was
important
. A parent standing right there? Fuhgeddaboutit. “Hello?” he said, and then, “Hi!” His face got all goofy. It was Kathleen, all right. He listened, then looked at Lucy. “She says her dad's not real happy about the kingfisher.”

“T. S., Eliot,” Lucy answered. “What about the yellow-billed magpie?”

Jesse asked the question. He listened some more, then reported: “She says her dad says it just happened to be there. He didn't have anything to do with it.”

“Yeah, right,” Lucy sneered. “And the check is in the mail.”

“Uh, my mom's not so sure of that.” Talking to a girl he was sweet on, Jesse was more polite than Lucy had been. He listened to Kathleen. To Lucy, he said, “She says her dad says the magpie was legit. But if you want to play that way, he can play that way, too.”

“Tell Kathleen to tell him to bring it on,” Lucy answered. Only later did she realize there were ways to say things like that, and then again there were ways. One particular fellow who'd used almost her exact phrase was still trying to shovel his way out of Mesopotamia.

But the Great Yule Bird Count in Sunset Grove and Fernwood was never the same again.

WATCH THE SKIES! the old posters shouted—as if there could be life on other planets, when magic had proved that planets were nothing but lights attached to moving crystal spheres. But weird-looking invaders from Mars were fun to tell stories about, even if they couldn't be real.

Fernwood and Sunset Grove got invaders, too, but they didn't come from Mars. And if you weren't watching the skies, you'd miss them. Birds that hadn't been seen there in a long time—birds that had
never
been seen there—showed up one after another. It was a life lister's heaven on earth (appropriate enough for Yuletide, after all). And it was one of the worst cases of Anything You Can Do, I Can Do More Of in the history of American witchcraft.

Lucy couldn't watch the skies, or even the back yard, as much as she would've liked. She was too busy checking the Fernwood scroll on CSPANC to find out what Fred O'Neill was up to and the Sunset Grove scroll to make sure the birds she magicked in got properly counted. She could picture Fat Freddy doing the same thing, only back-asswards.

Four black vultures spiraled above Fernwood. They had no business being there, not when the nearest sighting of a black vulture was an accidental bird right by the California-Arizona border. Did Fred O'Neill give a rat's patoot? Not when he had a chance to win the bird count, he didn't.

When Lucy saw the report of the black vultures, she called Fred a son of a witch, or something like that. Then she pulled a big black feather and a little yellow one out of her
materia magica.
She incanted like nobody's business.

Some Sunset Grove birders at a park were surprised and delighted to spot black-backed woodpeckers drilling on pines. Black-backed woodpeckers didn't live within hundreds of miles of Sunset Grove. Well, hey, if you were going to fuss about every little thing …

Lucy waited to see what Fred O'Neill would come up with next. It was like a prizefight, with all the punches in extremely slow motion.
Sure
, Lucy thought.
A featherweight prizefight
. She poured herself more coffee. By all the signs, she was pretty punchy herself.

Fernwood birders declared they'd seen a smew at a pond. “What's a smew?” Jesse asked, reading CSPANC over her shoulder.

“I don't know. What's smew with you?” Lucy returned. Yeah, she was punchy. Her son sent her a reproachful look. She tried again: “A kind of merganser—a diving duck. It lives in Europe. Once in a blue moon, one gets over here by itself.”

“You don't think this is a blue moon?”

“Now that you mention it, no.”

“What'll you do about it?”

Lucy was already thumbing through guides, deciding exactly what she'd do about it. She plucked a black feather, and then a shiny blue one, from her
materia magica
. The charm she chanted had a Latin rhythm.

Something
started squawking raucously in the magnolia tree. Crows and ravens and jays aren't very musical, but the noises they make show they all come from the same family. This raucous squawking was corvid racket, too, but it wasn't the kind of corvid racket Lucy'd ever heard before.

Jesse grabbed his binoculars. “Whoa!” he said, nothing but admiration in his voice. “What
is
that thing?”

“Black-throated magpie-jay,” Lucy answered, not without pride. It was a jay the size of a crow or bigger, with a fancy crest and a long, droopy tail. It flew away, skrawking as it went.

“Whoa!” Jesse said again. “Where's it from?”

“Middle of Mexico,” Lucy answered, recording it on the Sunset Grove SCPANC scroll.

Jesse got another call from Kathleen as soon as she and her father saw the claim for the new bird. “She says her dad says you aren't gonna beat him,” Jesse reported.

“He started it. I'll finish it,” Lucy said grimly.

The next exotic bird reported from Fernwood was a condor. That left Lucy unimpressed for a moment. Thanks to captive-breeding programs, California condors weren't impossible to spot these days, but a lot of birders didn't count them because they weren't truly wild.
Even a lamebrain like Fred ought to do better
, she thought.

And Fred had. It was an Andean condor. It was even bigger than a California condor, and even uglier. Lucy showed Jesse a picture in a book about Chilean birds. The head was large and naked and pink, with wattles and a comb. You were in no danger of mistaking it for any other bird ever hatched.

“What are you gonna do now, Mom?” Jesse was caught up in the competition, too.

“You'll see. I'll bring in several of these, 'cause I've always liked them,” Lucy answered. “Maybe they'll hang around once the count is over.” That intrigued her son, as she'd hoped it would. She got busy spellcasting.

Bringing in a bunch of birds was a lot harder than bringing in just one. She was good, though. One of the birds appeared in the backyard apricot tree. Crest, brown belly and back, black-and-white striped wings.
“Poo! Poo! Poo!”
it called.

“A hoopoe!” Jesse exclaimed in delight. “Awesome!”

Maybe it heard him. It flew off, skipping through the air like a butterfly. “The Bible says it's not kosher,” Lucy said. “Twice, in fact. I bet I know why, too.”

“Why?” Jesse asked when she didn't come out with it right away.

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Because it smells like
poo-poo-poo
, that's why.”

She didn't post the hoopoe on the Sunset Grove Yuletide scroll. Before long, some other local birder did. The mundanes in the birding crowd had to be talking to themselves about all the weird stuff going on. They wouldn't be complaining, though. Oh, no. She knew birders well enough to be sure of that.

She didn't know Fred O'Neill well enough to guess how he'd retaliate. She only knew he would. And he did. Not fifteen minutes after Sunset Grove reported hoopoes, Fernwood reported Carolina parakeets.

“Wait. I've heard of those.” Jesse flipped through the Sibley guide. “Why doesn't this book have a picture?”

“I'll tell you why—they're extinct.” For the first time in the contest, Lucy felt shaken. Reaching across space was one thing. Reaching across time was something else again, something much harder. She hadn't believed Fred could. She wasn't sure she could herself. Trying not to think about that, she went on, “They've been extinct for almost a hundred years. There's a wonderful Audubon painting, if you want to know what they looked like.”

Jesse nodded eagerly. “I've seen it. But now they're back, huh? How cool is that? What are
you
gonna do now, Mom?”

Lucy wasn't sure how cool it was. Didn't it cross a line somewhere? But, assuming it didn't, what
was
she gonna do? Whatever it was, it was liable to take just about all the witchcraft she had in her.

Then she started to laugh. If she was gonna do it, she'd go all-out. She gathered herself. She chose her feathers. She chose her spell. She took one moment to wonder if she'd gone off her rocker. Well, if she had, it was a grand madness. After a deep breath, she started.

It took everything she had, all right. The lights flickered. The CSPANC crystal went black. She'd have to rebless it later.

John came in (see?—you couldn't quite forget him). “What's going on?” he said. “How much crowleyage are you using, babe? What'll our magictrixity bill look like next month?”

Lucy waited till she'd finished the Summoning to answer. Then she gave him three words: “I don't care.” They'd been married a long time. He looked at her, nodded, turned around, and walked away.

Jesse was peering out into the back yard. “What did you call up, Mom? All I see are a bunch more stoogebirds.”

“Take another look,” Lucy said wearily. If she'd just turned herself inside out for the sake of more dirt-common mourning doves … In that case, Fred O'Neill and Fernwood would win the Yule Count, that was all.

“They're funny-looking stoogebirds,” Jesse said. “Kinda salmony breasts, red eyes … No. They can't be.”

There were lots of them. That was part of what had worn Lucy out—and made the lights flicker. The other part was reaching back through the years. She eyed them through binoculars. No, they sure weren't stoogebirds. “Passenger pigeons,” she said proudly. They all flew off together.

By the time Lucy had CSPANC up again, someone else had already spotted them (and recognized them, which also impressed her). And Jesse had got another call from Kathleen. “She says her dad won't quit, no matter what,” he said.

“Big deal,” Lucy declared. Later, she wondered if she should have sounded so arrogant. That was later. In the middle of a war, you only cared about winning. You'd figure out what it all meant later.

They didn't hear about the newest Fernwood bird on the CSPANC scroll. John (here he is again!) called them in to look at the news crystal. “Some kind of monster's loose,” he said.

That rated a look, all right. And he wasn't wrong. People were sending pictures from a flying carpet. The thing stalked through a park labeled FERNWOOD in the bottom left of the news crystal. It was taller than a man. It had chickeny feet, about the size of the ones that would have walked around under Baba Yaga's house. Its wings were useless, except for flapping to show it was ticked off. It had a big feathery crest on top of its head and a hooked beak that looked as if it could bite through steel bars. The only people in sight wore Tilly hats and carried binoculars, which made them birders. Even they had the sense to keep their distance.

One of the flying carpets swooped low. The monster bird snapped at it and let out a loud, furious screech. “Wow!” Jesse said. “Oh, wow! What
is
that thing?”