Indigo Springs

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Search engine?” I suggest.

  “That’s it. She found another newsgroup thread, much like the first one…but it was years older. Marlowe was in that group too. She was using another name but the messages she sent were identical. The people in the group, the ones who had chantments—vanished one by one.”

  “What did you think it meant?”

  “Sahara tracked down a few of the people who stopped posting, figured out who they really were. They’d all been murdered or had fatal accidents.”

  “Murdered by Marlowe?”

  “Who else? She had to be one of the chantment thieves Albert told us about. She’d look for people with magic, earn their trust, figure out who they were.” She shudders.

  “Good thing you found out the truth.”

  “Yes. Still, we’d mailed chantments to a murderer. And without her, our only source of cantations was gone.”

  “You didn’t know she was a bad guy,” I say.

  “I was almost glad to have a reason to stop talking to Marlowe. It was risky. But Sahara was devastated. She’d found Marlowe, remember? First I’d drained her vitagua reserves, then her big discovery turned out badly.”

  “It’s understandable,” I say.

  “Yeah. I decided I had to cheer Sahara up. I took her and Jacks out hiking, brought a picnic. When we were thinking of heading home, Jacks found someone’s Dalmatian knotted up in an old fishing line. He untangled it, and the owner was so grateful he took us out onto Great Blue Reservoir on his boat.

  “I found another sparkly object there—a lantern. I chanted it when nobody was looking. I figured if it did anything conspicuous, I’d toss it overboard.”

  “Did it?”

  “Sat there not making a peep and lured in all the big fish. Sahara and the boat’s owner hauled in whopping bass while Jacks pretended he wasn’t reminded of fishing with his dad. The dog ran around and we barbecued and the sun set over the lake so beautifully….”

  Her voice breaks. Her hand tightens on mine.

  “I left the lantern on the boat. The couple was from out of state. They could tow the thing home and nobody would know.”

  The emergency lights cut in suddenly, blinding me. When my eyes adjust I see Patience, embracing Astrid, as she so often does, and whispering in her ear. Patience is a new sort of goddess now—short, South Asian in appearance. Her hair is waist-long and thick, and her fingers, curled around Astrid’s arms, are inexplicably compelling.

  “It isn’t time for that,” Astrid’s voice rises.

  Patience coaxes her toward the hallway. “You should call Roche, Lawman. Tell him Astrid didn’t speak in tongues during the blackout.”

  I do as she suggests, halfheartedly placating Arthur while I wonder what the two of them are up to. Astrid’s voice is teary; Patience’s soothing.

  She’s vulnerable, I think. I have always been good at sensing people in despair. Caroline saw this as predatory. opportunistic; she hated that part of me passionately.

  Roche is eager to confirm that Astrid is under control, and just as eager to get off the line.

  “Jemmy Burlein is barricaded in the infirmary—with hostages,” he says. “We’re locked down. You’ll stay there for the duration of the emergency. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “Fine,” I reply.

  “We’ve got cameras and mikes running, so just keep working on Astrid.”

  “Okay.” Good-cop time, I think. Hanging up, I head for the kitchen. By the time Astrid appears, I’ve made tuna sandwiches.

  “I thought we’d take a break.” Making food is a deliberate attempt to remind her of Jacks, and it works—her eyes brim. She takes up a sandwich, blinking.

  She asks: “How bad is it out there, in the world?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not omniscient.”

  I ponder my response. After a moment, I say: “About fifty people from Indigo Springs have been alchemized and are turning to animals. The rest seem fine, though some are still quarantined. The town has been the epicenter of three large earthquakes, and the government has burned out several acres of wilderness to keep the contamination from spreading.”

  “It isn’t working,” she says.

  “No.” I shake my head. “Some of it is in the rivers.”

  She runs a hand over the table and a painted sea monster takes shape on its surface. “Sahara claims she created the monsters?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re just contaminated fish. What else?”

  “A lot of people are missing. Economy’s in the tank, and seventeen countries have banned Americans from traveling within their borders.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “The government needs to get a handle on the situation, Astrid. Sahara’s going out of her way to make us look helpless.”

  “She’s very in-your-face that way.”

  “For every person who has a chantment and some genuine magical power, there are ten fakes. People are shooting women who resemble Sahara.” I gesture with a carrot stick. “If we catch her, Astrid, everyone will calm down. We’ll be able to fight the contamination, establish order.”

  “You can’t turn back the clock, Will. Magic’s here to stay. Capturing Sahara won’t change that.”

  “Do you mind if we try?”

  She tilts her head, as if listening. “The rate of contamination will accelerate.”

  “Is that what the grumbles say?”

  “Yes.” She flips through the growing pile of painted cards. I examine the pictures as they flash by. Astrid lingers on a picture of a fishing boat, then digs out a picture of a bookstore. “The day after we were out on the boat, one of my gardening clients came out of her house, yelling that there was an emergency at Olive’s shop.

  “I thought something had happened to Jacks—he’d gone off to mail some chantments. I was so stressed, I was shaking—thinking of Albert getting shot in Jemmy’s car, dying a week later…”

  “Was Jacks okay?”

  She nods. “The emergency was Ma.”

  Ev Lethewood appears on a card, postal uniform rumpled, rage contorting her fair features, a book in each hand.

  “She was pacing up and down Olive’s shop, swearing, tossing books, pushing over shelves. She said Olive murdered Dad, I was in on it, we were going to jail…

  “‘Killers, killers, killers,’ she was screaming.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Called Sahara, what else? She showed up with the mermaid, and I coaxed Olive out of earshot. Sahara got Ma calmed and we took her home. Then…”

  “What?” I have to go gently now. There’s something here, details Astrid doesn’t mean to share.

  “Nothing. We nearly argued, that’s all. The day before, Sahara forgot to check on Ma. I asked how she could forget and she said she wasn’t feeling well. I said she’d been well enough to go fishing—”

  “She was punishing you for siphoning the magic out of her body.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, we couldn’t fight in front of Ma, and when we got to her place, the argument petered out.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Something else happened—Ma had torn her house apart. Carpets, furniture, clothes, pictures—all of it busted up or chopped to rags. And on the wall in the bathroom where she’d been keeping a big poster of a Picasso print…”

  “Yes?”

  “There was a blue stain, like the one on our ceiling.”

  “Vitagua? At Ev’s?”

  Astrid nods. “Using the mermaid, Sahara found out that when Dad was in the hospital, Ma ended up with some of his things. She’d gone with me to visit, and the nurse gave the stuff to her instead of Olive. One thing she got was this ratty coat of his—”

  “Let me guess—it was a chantment?”

  “Yes. It disguised him—made him hard to identify when he was out working magic. Anyway, Ma was pacing around her house, waiting for me to call from the hospital. She didn’t feel welcome there—the ex-wife, you know?
Awkward.”

  I think of Caroline. Would she come, if I was hospitalized? “Ev must have been very concerned about you,” I say. Still calm, sympathetic.

  “Sure, and Albert. She lived with him all those years, and she never stopped loving him.”

  I nod. “Ev said something to me the other day in an interview. She said Lethewood women have loyal hearts.”

  Astrid swallows, seeming to struggle for equilibrium. “Ma was pacing, and she had the coat, and she saw it was full of holes, right around the belly. She filled the bathroom sink with water and dunked the coat. The water in the sink turned red—”

  “The coat was soaked with blood. Albert did get shot?”

  “Yes. Then Ma pulls the coat out of the sink and wrings it out…and she finds Dad’s little glass vial in the pocket. There’s vitagua in it, just a drop. She pulls out the stopper and it comes spurting out. Some hits the wall…”

  “The rest struck your mother.”

  “Right. Ma was contaminated, Albert was gone, and I had forgotten the chantments. She covered up the stain on her bathroom wall with a picture, and nobody knew.”

  “And right after Albert’s death Ev began acting strangely.”

  Astrid rubs at her eyes. “Ma told Sahara that a week or so after she got splashed, she picked up a sealed envelope at work and knew what was inside. Who it was for, what it said, everything.”

  “Ev was never opening people’s mail at all?”

  “Will, Ma didn’t know about magic. But she knew what was in every envelope she touched. It was impossible. So she developed the Everett Burke delusion, told herself she was deducing what was in the mail.”

  “How did these revelations make you feel?”

  “Excited. I figured I could siphon the contamination out. If Dad was right, there’d be a trace of vitagua left in Ma, but maybe she’d improve—be her old self.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Sahara said we couldn’t.” Astrid sucks on her lips. “I thought she was angry, because I’d taken away her vitagua, but she insisted she had to show me something.”

  “What was that?”

  Astrid brushes a tear off her cheek. “The night before, while we were out on the tourists’ boat, Henna had curled up on Sahara’s bed and died.”

  • Chapter Eighteen •

  They buried Henna in the ravine behind the house, following a sketchy trail down to the banks of Indigo Creek. It was the first real day of summer, bright and hot, with a breeze that air-dried the sweat from Astrid’s body without leaving her any cooler. The perfume of scorching cedar bark hung in the air.

  Sahara led the procession, holding the aluminum hand-rake. Jacks had the corpse, a bundle wrapped in an old T-shirt. Astrid, in the rear, bore the shovel.

  They descended in silence until Jacks said, “If we go any farther, we’ll end up on Settlement Road.”

  He was right—they’d reached the middle of the ravine, a small clearing encircled by trees and bisected by the muddy green-brown line of the creek.

  Shaking herself out of a daze, Sahara pointed at a spot beneath a willow. Astrid began digging. It was good to have a task—it kept her from thinking about Ma contaminated with vitagua, about Henna’s withered body, tongue hanging loose, the festering gashes where Astrid’s teeth had broken its flesh…

  Her gaze fell on Sahara’s hand for the twentieth time that day. The puncture where she had drawn the vitagua was healing cleanly. I did it right the second time, Astrid thought. She’ll be okay.

  Sahara said the cat’s death meant it was unsafe to drain Ev. But, Astrid thought, fear of experimenting had always been Albert’s problem. If she was careful, Ma might be okay.

  “Deep enough,” Jacks said. She’d dug a two-foot pit.

  Sahara knelt beside the creek, clutching the handrake. She muttered the heat cantation, then drew the points of the rake through the grass. There was an explosion of movement—reeds growing and knotting, a churning of roots. A basket came together on the surface of the creek, filled with cattails and pine cones. The air grew chilly.

  Sahara held the basket out and Jacks unwrapped the furry body, laying it on the greenery. Together they arranged the reeds. Solemnly, Sahara set the basket in the grave Astrid had dug.

  “You want to say a couple words?” Astrid asked.

  “Just cover it up.” Sahara put her face in her hands, and Astrid saw the healing puncture again.

  “Let me.” Taking the shovel, Jacks set to work.

  “Sahara,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s Albert’s fault. You didn’t know extraction was dangerous.”

  “He said the first time you try anything magical you’ll probably screw up. I should have remembered.”

  Sahara turned from the grave. “It was Mark’s cat.”

  “If I’d hurt you…”

  “It’s for the best.” Sahara’s expression became bleak, just for a second, before the mask fell back into place.

  Jacks had been about to speak but at Sahara’s words he winced expressively and kicked at a sun-baked lump of moss, tearing it from the base of a tree root. “We’ve got to get a grip on this contamination thing.”

  “Yeah,” Astrid sighed. Ma, exposed for a year now. Sahara, tainted by magical residue. Would she have to watch Sahara fall apart, as Ev had? By fall she could…

  By autumn Sahara will be profoundly contaminated, her grumbles insisted.

  “What are you gonna do about Ev?” Jacks asked. “If Sahara takes a day off again—”

  “Who knew she couldn’t go one day without a check-in?”

  “Can we save this until we get home?” Astrid said.

  “Why? Jacks has killer timing. Nobody will overhear.”

  “Astrid, if we’re going to keep your secret, we can’t have Ev going ballistic twice a week.”

  “It’s not my fault, Eligible.”

  “Guys! Peace!” Astrid waved her arms. Jacks glowered and kicked at the moss again. “Jacks, a few days ago you said we had everything under control.”

  “A few days ago your mother wasn’t hurling the annotated War and Peace at my mother’s head. We weren’t having a kitty funeral.”

  With a struggle, she unclenched her fists. “Let’s go home, have some lemonade, and figure out what to do.”

  “I’m getting better at using Siren,” Sahara said. “I’ll get Ev under control—”

  “Control.” Jack’s voice dripped sarcasm. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

  Astrid lifted her face skyward, letting the sunlight melt out vision, frying her cheeks and forehead. She had to stop this. Move them from arguing to cooperation…

  Move, a grumble agreed, its tone dark and mirthful. The vitagua inside seemed to gurgle, and Astrid felt a deep internal wrench, a spear of cold deep in her diaphragm. Tightness made her clutch her gut….

  “Astrid?” Hands on her shoulders suddenly—Jacks. The light on her face dimmed and the air temperature plummeted.

  The grumble was laughing.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Sahara said.

  Gritting her teeth against a sharp new onset of pain, Astrid opened her eyes.

  The ravine was gone. In its place were great glaciers of vitagua, mountain ranges of frozen blue, crags that extended to the horizon in every direction.

  The three of them stood on a butte of cobalt ice, a sloping wedge that extended maybe thirty feet up from the ice flats around them. There was no breeze—just a deep cold that bit into Astrid’s flesh—and no sun. What light there was seemed to be coming from the spirit water itself, a blue glow that caught the frozen cracks and facets.

  “People,” whispered Jacks, spreading his arms protectively in front of her. Impossibly tall trees were frozen within the icebergs towering above them, and nested in their branches was a building that looked like a long house, stretched out on a hammock of netted foliage.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Sahara said.

  “There.”
Astrid pointed at a figure—a young woman caught in the act of climbing to the building. She had bear paws for hands. Her claws dug into the lumpy tree trunk.

  Beyond the first house, Astrid could see other buildings, and other half-human, half-animal figures.

  A hunk of ice twenty feet long cracked loose from the berg, falling to shatter on the frozen vitagua below.

  “Yeah,” Jack said, voice breathy. “We’ve got everything under control. Where are we?”

  “I’ll find out.” Bending, Astrid placed her hand on the ice. Information blasted through her, scattershot, and she yanked her fingers back. She was stuttering random words, in languages she didn’t speak.

  “Astrid!” Sahara shook her. “Astrid, stay with us.”

  She leaned on them, panting and staring at her hand. The warmth of her body hadn’t melted the ice—her skin was a chapped and frozen-looking red. “We’re in the unreal.”

  “Where?” Jacks asked.

  “Fairyland,” she said. “The spirit realm. A world within our world, where magical beings used to…live, I guess. To hide from the real world.”

  “Wow,” Sahara said. Her eyes were gleaming.

  The vitagua was trying to tell her a thousand things at once. There was much more to chanting than Albert ever guessed, said a grumble. Tricks and loopholes, ways to sequester magic within someone safely, endless possibilities. Spring-tappers had been making chantments for centuries, siphoning magic through the vitagua wells, but each generation got weaker, less knowledgeable. Nobody dared improvise, nobody listened to the voices of the unreal….

  Power was all around her, intoxicating knowledge, and Astrid sensed it had been this way when she was young. But she’d let it go to her head, the way Sahara did with Siren.

  She looked at her friends. Can we keep each other honest?

  Without discussing it, they edged down the slope, clinging to each other for warmth. The ice, fortunately, wasn’t slick: it had the sticky consistency of tar. They shuffled in a huddle, letting Jacks lead the way.

  “The witch-burners wanted to control magic,” Astrid told them, isolating a grumble. “They drove it out of people all across Europe—killed fairies and witches. But not everyone sat around waiting to get fried. Some came here.”