Indigo Springs

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Albert had gone pale. His voice, when his mouth stopped flapping, was terrified. “Don’t hope for that, Astrid. You don’t want to live through that, I mean it.”

  The recollection ended there, leaving Astrid headachy and morose.

  That night Jacks was out playing poker while Astrid and Sahara hosted a dinner for Sahara’s old school pals. The following evening they all went to a movie with Olive and her new boyfriend, a Korean-American hippie named Thunder. She crawled through both evenings in a haze of headachy pain.

  That Saturday morning, she found the cat dragging a mangled Scottish terrier up the steps.

  “Oh Henna, no,” she said, horrified. She looked both ways for witnesses before she took up the cat, stroking her until she was relaxed and purring. Gingerly she edged the magic pocketknife out of her jeans, nicking the dog before anyone could come by and spot the corpse. It crumbled to a smelly pile of dust and bones.

  “Come on inside,” she said wearily, cuddling the triumphant cat all the way to her room. Henna’s legs were unusually long; the pads of her toes elongated into proto-fingers that curled amid fur mittens.

  Astrid, her stomach churning, laid the purring animal on the bed. Time to improvise.

  “This’ll work, Dad,” she murmured. Listening hard, she picked a suggestion out of the musical, grumbling hum inside her head, pulling on the magic within her. Vitagua welled up her throat like a wet fist, cutting off air. Fluid bubbled around her tongue, a cold stew aboil, blue and frothy, behind her teeth.

  She gagged. Vitagua was in her sinuses, popping as if it were carbonated. Her ear was ringing, her right eye leaking tears again. A muscle in her cheek twitched.

  Sorry, cat, she thought. She tried to be subtle as she pinned Henna’s legs down. But feline danger sense had kicked in; the tabby yowled and struggled with more than animal strength. Her back leg scissored through bedclothes and jeans to lay open Astrid’s leg above the knee. Astrid tried to adjust her grip, and a swinging forepaw tore one of the pillows into foamy shreds.

  Bite her, the grumbles urged. Astrid pressed her blue, boiling mouth against the body of the struggling cat. Her teeth—was it illusion, or were they sharper?—combed through the fur even as the fluid clogged against her lips. Her canines found flesh, and while Astrid had imagined struggling even to pierce the cat’s skin, her jaws reacted instinctively, squeezing hard.

  Draw it, came the grumble. She imagined vitagua pouring through the cuts and pulled—too hard.

  Henna yowled and Astrid felt something tearing. Then a bolt of cold unflavor hit her throat. Neither blood nor water, it punched her backwards. Her aching head smacked the wall, crunching the dragon earring against the plaster.

  As Henna darted free, Astrid was overtaken by another rush of paranoia. Sahara would abandon her…soon.

  Fluffed out and haughtily furious, Henna balked at the closed door of the bedroom. Sobbing, Astrid crept forward and caught the animal. She writhed furiously, just a cat again, easily held. Four seeping blue-lined punctures…

  …the residue, Astrid thought…

  …lined the cat’s back, buried under the thick fur, the only evidence of the bite.

  “But you’re better,” she wept, examining Henna’s apparently normal paws.

  From her glare, Henna had a different opinion.

  “It doesn’t have to fall apart,” she told the cat. “If I know it’s going to happen, I can change it.”

  The door banged. “Yoo hoo, Sleeping Beauty, busy day ahead! I’ve brought contraband!”

  “Contraband?” Dashing the tears away, Astrid gave herself a mental shake. Sahara wasn’t leaving. The grumbles were just playing games with her insecurities.

  She’s going, they replied. She’s practically gone.

  The door flew open. Sahara pranced in, bearing a long platter piled high with meat and cheese: sliced salami, steaming sausages, dolmades, olives, and Swiss cheese. “His Vegan Holiness is off getting a start on the Sistine Mural and we’re going to eat animal flesh.”

  “Jacks never said you couldn’t bring meat home.”

  “True.” Sahara waved the platter. “He just exploits my inborn laziness by cooking all the time.”

  “Fiendish.” Astrid took a slice of salami, turned away, and shoved the vitagua deep into her body. She flashed her teeth at the mirror to confirm the blue stains were gone; only then could she bite into the meat.

  “Shall we go over our agenda for the day, milady?”

  Astrid nodded, setting down the tray on a bloodstain she had only just noticed. Her lacerated leg burned, and she flipped the torn pillow to cover the tear in her jeans.

  “First, you and I go on the weekly junk run, acquiring resellable crap for the community’s underprivileged shoppers.” Sahara reached out, twisting the dragon earring so its coils lined up. The ear burned; Astrid blushed.

  “After we fish out anything you want to chant, we take Mrs. Skye to her doctor’s on Spirit Valley Road. While she’s getting poked and prodded, we go stroke the Ego known as Jacks Glade by admiring his masterpiece in progress.”

  “Doctor’s appointment?”

  “If Mrs. Skye doesn’t see her doctor once a month, Lilla the wicked stepniece sweeps in and takes her house.”

  “I thought you got her a carpool.”

  “To work, yes.” Sahara waved a slice of salami under her nose, and Astrid glommed on to it. Her teeth clicked shut over the meat, just missing Sahara’s finger. “We’ll also make sure she has her hearing aid.”

  “She’s deaf?”

  “Deafish.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “She gets vain and leaves it at home.”

  “Okay. What next?”

  “We come home, you make chantments, I do the requisite Web surfing to find them new owners. Maybe we find another good one for Marlowe, maybe not.”

  “I want useful information from Marlowe this time,” Astrid said. “She’s stringing us along.”

  “Agreed,” Sahara said, nibbling an olive. “Either way, we package up the goodies and we’re free. Plus you’ll be buzzed from the chanting and we can stay up late watching Indian musicals on my laptop. Sound like an agenda?”

  “Mmmm,” Astrid said casually. Eating felt good; she could feel the meat and cheese replenishing the strength she had used when she’d destroyed the terrier’s body with the pocketknife. “There’s one other thing. I know how to siphon the vitagua out of your body.”

  “Get it out?” Her friend’s gaze skittered away. “It’s not doing any harm.”

  “It is.” She clasped Sahara’s hand, and was struck by an image—Sahara, with iridescent hair and black, inhuman eyes. She turned her friend to face the mirror, pointing out the odd gold highlights in her hair. “It’s cursed. Albert said people who are contaminated are doomed—”

  “That’s melodramatic.”

  “Doomed to self-destruct, Sahara. That what you want?”

  “Can’t you enjoy this?” Sahara waved a hand at the chantments. “You’re working yourself to the bone to recover those memories…and I know you feel sick all the time.”

  “It’s my responsibility.”

  “Just slack off a little.”

  “Sahara, the vitagua inside you is dangerous.”

  Sahara said, “It could be dangerous to take it out.”

  “I tried already.” She nodded at Henna, who was snoozing in a patch of sun. “Behold our test subject.”

  Sahara grasped her hands. “I don’t want you to. When I talk to people now, I know what they need to hear. I always wanted to help people sort out their lives, and now I can. Do you know how rare that kind of sensitivity is?”

  Uncomfortable, Astrid extracted her hands from Sahara’s grip. “It’ll make you nuts.”

  “It’s harmless.”

  “We can’t let it concentrate—” She stopped, paralyzed by the grumbles’ insistence that Sahara would leave. Was this what sent her away? She fumbled with a cracker and salami, stackin
g them, cramming them into her mouth, and chewing woodenly. Only after she’d swallowed did she speak again. “If you don’t agree, we can ask Jacks—”

  “He’ll agree with you. He always agrees with you.” Sahara’s voice was surprisingly free of rancor, her manner, suddenly, almost meek. “Do you have to do it now?”

  “Yes, now.” Before you change your mind, Astrid thought.

  “Okay. How?”

  Blushing, she explained what she had done to Henna.

  “You bit my cat?”

  “It seemed…right,” she mumbled, and her face was hot. “I was improvising. But with you…”

  “Yes?” Maddening furled eyebrow—Sahara amused, the same expression she’d worn before kissing Astrid so many years ago. “You don’t want to bite me?”

  “Dammit, don’t tease.” She ruffled Henna’s fur and showed her the bite marks, which had turned a bright bloody red. Henna growled halfheartedly, dozing.

  Sahara said, “I wonder if they’ll scar?”

  “You can’t see them through the fur. But I did think…what if we tried breaking the skin with a needle? It’d leave less of a mark.”

  “Worth a try,” Sahara said. She reached for a pair of fingernail scissors. “Astrid, please don’t do this.”

  “Sahara, we have to.”

  A full-body sigh from Sahara. She offered up her hand.

  Summoning the choking well of vitagua into her throat again, Astrid sat on the bed. Sahara raised her wrist to her mouth. Astrid’s teeth pulled toward the skin of their own volition.

  “Ready?” she tried to say, but the vitagua got in the way—it came out a gargle.

  “Just do it,” Sahara said.

  The clovey scent of Sahara’s hair, so close, wafted through her. Astrid took her friend’s hand and pulled on the vitagua inside her body, ever so carefully this time. There it was, a thin cold vein under the skin, a blue patch on Sahara’s hand. Wincing, Astrid pressed down with the scissors, only to find she couldn’t make the cut.

  “Wimp.” Sahara took them from her briskly and drove the blade home. A bead of blue welled from the puncture.

  Holding her gaze, Sahara raised her wrist to Astrid’s lips.

  There was a passing warmth…and then the cold liquid moved. Astrid pulled more gently than she had with Henna, and vitagua—so much, too much!—eased over her lips. Imaginary knives cut through her skull, and the vitagua grumbles got louder.

  “Ow.” Hands trembling, Astrid gathered her friend into an awkward, unrequited hug. She won’t go anywhere, she thought: she loves the magic. It’s just blue-goo inspired craziness. Delusions. “How do you feel?”

  “Normal,” Sahara said, bursting into tears.

  Astrid held her in stunned disbelief. Sobs racked Sahara’s body, shocks intense as hammer blows. The fabric of Astrid’s shirt got damp, then soaked. Quiet miserable wails: they couldn’t all be about a little lost insight, could they?

  “Shhh, shhh,” she murmured, thinking of glasses and spilled water and residual contamination as Sahara keened, butting her head against Astrid’s shoulder.

  “It’s not the goo,” she managed finally.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s, it’s…Mark.”

  “It’s okay, Sahara. Shush.”

  Eventually she did, running down and sniffling. “I can’t go out like this.”

  “You look fine.”

  “You have low standards.”

  “You always look fine to me,” she said, and Sahara tensed up. She added, “It’s okay. I’ll do the junk run.”

  “Mrs. Skye?”

  “I’ll pick her up.”

  Sahara squeezed Astrid tighter, holding her close. “You won’t go yet, will you?”

  “Not until you’re ready.”

  “I’m such a pillowcase. You’d think nobody on earth ever got dumped before. It makes me so…”

  “Depressed?”

  “Mad. I should’ve spit in Mark’s face. Cutting off my hair and taking his car, some revenge.”

  “Call up a pizza joint in Boston and send him a hundred Hawaiian extra cheese—”

  “Well…I did that too,” Sahara said. “Sort of.”

  “Then you’re ahead. You got the karmic last word.”

  “I’m gonna end up an unloved old hag like Mrs. Skye—”

  “It won’t happen.”

  “No?”

  “I love you, Sahara.”

  Sahara punched her lightly. “We’ll see how long that lasts once you’ve shacked up with a nice sperm donor.”

  “Just because you vanished the second you had a boyfriend…” Sahara’s eyes brimmed again and Astrid found herself holding her friend through another bout of crying. This time the contact, skin to skin, brought a crawling sensation of dread. Sahara was already regretting that she’d let Astrid drain out the vitagua. But there was always more magic in the fireplace….

  Sahara shoved her away. “G’wan. Git on the road.”

  She’s got the greeds, one of the grumbles sing-songed.

  She quashed the voice. The vitagua was out, most of it anyway. Sahara would behave reasonably. And Astrid could make sure there was no more contamination available. Sooner or later she’d find a way to truly uncurse Sahara.

  You’re gonna contaminate someone, Dad had said. He’d known it would happen. But she could still make it right.

  “I’ll bring some cream for your coffee,” Astrid promised. The warmth of Sahara’s body tingled on her skin as she fled.

  • Chapter Sixteen •

  From the first Mrs. Skye had reminded Astrid of a honeybee—she kept her salt-and-pepper hair shorn close to her scalp, and was always digging in her purse as if it were a pollen-rich chrysanthemum. She wore two tarnished silver bracelets around her skinny wrists, two-inch bands with native designs on them—a frog on the left arm, an eagle on the right. When she rooted around in her bag, the bracelets jiggled, the stylized faces of the creatures drawing Astrid’s gaze. They had lots of what Dad had called sparkle, those bracelets.

  But if she chanted them, they’d have to be sent away. Sahara had offered to polish them once and Mrs. Skye refused. “Shine ’em up, someone might take ’em,” she’d explained.

  Now here was Astrid, topped full of vitagua and half contemplating the same theft.

  They had never been alone together. Whenever Astrid was working on the old woman’s garden, Sahara came along, chatting with Mrs. Skye, helping make plans to keep the old woman’s predatory niece at bay. The attention seemed to pull Mrs. Skye out of her blur of fatigue, to bring her into focus. She told Sahara about dead friends and old town gossip as she fed her tea on her broken-down porch. They competed, arguing over who’d had more boyfriends, who was prettier at age seventeen, who was smarter, funnier.

  Mrs. Skye swore that, like Sahara, she’d been an Alpine Princess.

  Astrid had doubted the old lady’s tales, but today as she chauffeured her through town Mrs. Skye raised her hand, time and again, to greet various white-haired Springers. They waved back with unfeigned enthusiasm.

  “That’s Penny Flayer—I fixed her up with her second husband,” Mrs. Skye said. “And the old gent there, I helped his wife rebuild an antique crib for their granddaughter.”

  “My grandfather made furniture,” Astrid said.

  “That’d be Ev’s dad, Struan MacTavish?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t very good.”

  “Played the pipes like a dream come true, though. I did okay with the woodworking,” Mrs. Skye mused. “Sahara found my tools in the basement.”

  “Could you still? Are your hands wrecked or anything?”

  “I got nothing to build,” the old lady said.

  They were jouncing along in the truck, two people who’d thought themselves acquaintances, suddenly realizing they were little more than strangers. The set of Mrs. Skye’s jaw was tense. Nerves about her doctor’s appointment?

  Sahara would know how to calm her, Astrid thought, or w
ould have known before I leached the vitagua out of her.

  No. That was silly. Sahara was plenty sensitive before she got contaminated. She hadn’t needed magic.

  What did you say? You offered reassurance, right? You said everything would be okay.

  She’d opened her mouth to say it when Mrs. Skye broke out in a crooked-toothed smile, grinning with approval at the hardware store wall and the outlines of Jacks’s mural.

  “Thought he was the quiet one.” She fumbled with her hearing aid.

  “I don’t see the joke,” Astrid said.

  “Who’s he got it in for? The Mayor? Indigo Springs Historical Society?”

  “The only ax Jacks has to grind is with his father.”

  “Chief Lee? Sure he’s got a big enough stone?” Mrs. Skye chuckled as Astrid parked at the doctor’s office. “I’ll be half an hour, sweetie.”

  “Okay.” Backtracking to Nathan’s hardware store, Astrid found Jacks squatting beside the road, poring over his mural sketch and a stack of paint color cards.

  Crouching beside him, Astrid looked at the roughed-in mural. It showed the interior of the shop as it might have been at the end of the nineteenth century. Women in long dresses waited as aproned shopkeepers weighed salt and flour on old-fashioned scales. Children ogled glass jars of candy and cooed over hair ribbons.

  She frowned—then hastily tried to assume a neutral expression.

  “Go on,” Jacks chuckled. “Critique.”

  “Well…isn’t this a little conventional?”

  “It is a public mural.”

  “Jacks, it’s practically an advertisement.”

  “You think?” Face innocent, he examined a paint sample the color of vitagua, Indigo Springs blue.

  “Mrs. Skye thinks it’s hilarious.” Astrid looked over the wall, looking for changes, areas where he’d worked hardest.

  “Does she? Good.”

  There. Across the scene, at the far end of the store, was a window. A little Native girl peered through the glass, watching a shopkeeper sell a carved necklace to a white man. Her face was familiar….

  “No,” she said. “This isn’t about the potlatch fire?”

  “Massacre.”