Indigo Springs

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Astrid rushed to the front door. “This way, Ma,” she wheezed.

  She threw the door open…and was startled to catch Jacks’s father out on the porch, his fist raised. He’d been about to knock.

  She squeaked in surprise and Chief Lee jerked back a step. He hadn’t been expecting her either, she guessed.

  “Hey, Astie.” He glared down at her, face red, as if she’d popped out just to scare him.

  Before she could reply, Ev and Mark trooped past. Ev gave the Chief a quick and very sane smile as she guided her young charge down the steps. “We’ll get you to your sister’s,” she said, and Mark grunted.

  “Jacks isn’t here, Chief,” Astrid said. It was practically a reflex. The fireman was staring after Ma and Sahara’s ex as they departed.

  “That the Clumber boy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s visiting from out of town.”

  He nodded, visibly filing the gossip but suddenly far away.

  “Chief? Jacks isn’t here.”

  He glowered, then stepped through the doorway. “Late in the day for your pj’s, innit?”

  She blushed, realizing how tight and short the orange T-shirt was. Its buttons gapped at the front—she was broader across the shoulders than Sahara. “I’ve been sick.”

  “I heard. Where’s your furniture?” He looked past her into the living room, taking in the tacky blue fireplace. Astrid couldn’t help glancing at the ceiling, with its vitagua stain. What would he make of that?

  But the stain was gone.

  Sahara painted again while I was ill, she thought, remembering the sheet that had been laid out across the rug. It was hanging on the back of a chair now, folded and inconspicuous—Ma’s doing.

  She felt a glimmer of gratitude, relief that Sahara had covered up the blue stain, that she was working to keep the secret without Astrid’s having to watch and nag.

  “I have furniture everywhere else,” she said. “It’s just this room’s empty. Want the grand tour?”

  “No, I won’t wear you out.” He peered down at her. “So, what is it? The flu?”

  “Guess so.” Self-conscious, she crossed her arms over her chest.

  “When’s Jacks coming back?”

  “I wasn’t up when he left.”

  Sahara chose that moment to appear, a bathrobe in her arms and—thankfully—no mermaid pendant in sight. “You should go back to bed,” she said. “Chief, Jacks ran into Lorry Hamilton downtown and got conned into taking him home. I don’t figure he’ll be back anytime soon.”

  The Chief’s expression soured.

  “You can wait in the kitchen if you like. I’ll fix some tea.” She slipped the robe over Astrid’s shoulders. “I think we have some vegan muffins.”

  He sighed. “You don’t want me around all afternoon.”

  “I doubt the town could do without you that long,” Sahara said sweetly.

  “I’ll tell Jacks you came by,” Astrid added.

  “Right.” With a curt nod, he jogged down the steps and was gone.

  Sahara shut the door loudly, throwing the dead bolt. “I thought for a second he was gonna force his way in.”

  “And then you’d have zapped him?”

  “Ha,” she said. “Wonder how Jacks would take that?”

  “Was it true?”

  “What?”

  “Where Jacks went.”

  “Yep. Lorry had a painting to show our resident artiste. Way Jacks’s luck has been running, I figured it’s probably a lost van Gogh. Plus he was drunk.”

  “Jacks?”

  “Lorry. Jacks had to see he got home safe. Hey, you’re awake!” She swept Astrid into a hug, setting off painful shivers in her midsection and triggering an inexplicable urge to cry.

  Astrid pulled free. “Speaking of brainwashed elders—how come Ma’s so improved?”

  “Ta da,” Sahara sang. “I’ve been practicing. You said the more you practice magic, the better you get?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Speaking of which, I drained her. With luck we won’t have to zap her very often now.”

  “Wonderful,” Sahara said, but her expression clouded.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What if Ev likes knowing what’s in the mail?”

  “You ought to be glad,” Astrid said. “The less you need to use Siren on her, the better.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She reached for Sahara’s hand, but her friend pulled away. “I know you want to recontaminate yourself.”

  “If I did, I’d have jumped in that puddle in the unreal, wouldn’t I?”

  Jacks was watching you like a hawk, Astrid thought, but it wasn’t worth arguing.

  “Astrid, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know I’m setting up a new advice column online, marketing myself as a psychic. I’ll open an e-store, sell books, Tarot cards, crystals…”

  “Did you make a lot from your old site?”

  “No. But I was thinking—what if I did some public appearances? At psychic conferences, music festivals, Renaissance faires…”

  “What—oh. Appearances with Siren?”

  “I’d just use it here and there, on people with cash they’re gonna spend anyway.”

  “No,” she said. “It’ll get noticed. We’re supposed to be under everyone’s radar, remember?”

  “Please. Even with inflation, Web self-help gurus are still only a dollar a dozen. This could help people, Astrid, and we could use it to cover up our cash flow.”

  Sahara on the road with Siren. She tried to stand straighter, and was dismayed by the pain. Her stomach cramped.

  “Your dad hid what he was doing by pretending to be a shiftless mooch. You can’t do that.”

  “If anyone realizes you’re using chantments to make people buy stuff, they’ll trace the money here.”

  “So I’ll move—”

  “No!” It came out too loud, and Sahara’s brows quirked in astonishment. Astrid folded her arms over her chest to keep from trembling.

  “I’ll move the company address,” Sahara finished.

  “Eventually the money comes here,” Astrid said dully.

  “We’re not hiding from Homeland Security. An ancient cult of witch-burners, that’s who Albert said to watch for.”

  “We can’t,” Astrid said. “Make things right with Mark and get rid of him, okay?”

  “Make things right?” Sahara repeated scornfully.

  She struggled to find the right words, gentle words. “He’s suspected of murder, Sahara. I know he was unfaithful, but that’s pretty mean.”

  “I didn’t expect it to go so far—how could I? You’ve got to admit there’s a funny side.”

  Astrid smiled, pretending she agreed it was funny. “Just now, the way you hit him with the mermaid—”

  “Astrid, nobody is going to notice us.”

  Astrid winced. Maybe they’d be better off if Jacks made good on his threat to blowtorch the mermaid pendant. “Let’s talk about this when Jacks gets home.”

  “Why? We’re pretending this is a democracy, but you’re the chantment maker, you own the house, you get the instructions from Dear Dead Dad. I’m your minion. If you’re going to veto me, have the guts to admit it.”

  Astrid raised her gaze to the ceiling. Now that she looked again, the paint job wasn’t perfect. A blue shadow was just barely visible through the white. She eyed the fireplace uneasily. Had Albert painted it to hide a vitagua stain? Was that why he’d painted the chimney?

  The frozen expanse of the unreal rose in her memory, silent, waiting, and reproachful. The trapped treedwellers…how long were they supposed to wait to be freed?

  “Astrid, where are you going?”

  She hadn’t realized she was moving. “I need to think.”

  “Think here! You’re sick—you’re not even dressed.”

  Tightening the bathrobe around her waist, she stepped into her sandals and shuffled out to her truck.

&n
bsp; “Astrid, I wasn’t trying to upset you, it’s just…you can’t go.”

  “Stop me,” she rasped, getting in. The sun-baked cab of her truck was a furnace, and she felt the internal chills subside a little as she started the engine. Sahara’s protests blew away in the wind as she drove off.

  She turned onto Ravine Road, then right at Penance Way. Trees rolled by on either side of the road, blurring green in the windows.

  Maybe if I just keep turning randomly, I’ll find Albert’s favorite old flea market. Then she was bouncing down the gravel maintenance road that ran behind the cottages at Great Blue Reservoir.

  Astrid had been ten back when Albert started working as a gardener for the resort. In the summers he’d take her with him to work. Sometimes she found kids to play with on the beach, children whose parents had rented the cabins. Mostly, though, she roamed the woods around the Reservoir.

  Parking at the back, she cinched the bathrobe again and staggered along a trail at the edge of the property, following it down a spruce-covered hill. Grass rubbed her exposed ankles, and she broke through cobwebs with every step. Twice she got so out of breath, she had to stop. The third time she succumbed to a coughing fit so severe that her vision fogged over.

  The land had been bought at the turn of the century by an eccentric coal baron with ideas about building a castle on the riverbank. He’d left the place to a daughter with a more practical turn of mind, and in the fifties she had built the cabins, opening the lake to summer tourists. Astrid remembered her, a little—she taught grade school in town for over forty years. When she died, the cabins went to a cousin who hired a manager to handle the business.

  Springers had always claimed Mrs. Voltone was a legendary pack rat, that she kept every student gift, every lesson plan, every program from school recitals. Astrid was probably the only one who knew this legend was true. The house the old teacher lived in—and the junk collection—had been untouched since she died.

  The abandoned house looked the same as when she’d prowled it as a kid—guarded by garden gnomes with smashed-in faces, swaddled in overgrown hedges, its windows oily. Pushing on a cracked window frame to gain access to the latch, she found the gap was too small for her adult-sized hand. She had to knock out the glass with a rock instead.

  Then she was reaching in to unlatch the rusted door, raising dustclouds as she pushed her way inside and stared at the shelves of school trophies and bric-a-brac—ceramic cats, child-crafted clay mushrooms, a coffee can that had been covered in glued-on macaroni and then spray-painted gold, wooden flutes, a lumpy plastic doll, a horseshoe, rubber flies—all of it on garish random display.

  “A little sparkle,” Astrid said, retrieving a shard of broken glass from the floor. She inched over to the nearest likely item, a necklace hanging on a crooked shelf. Then she sliced into the back of her hand with the shard.

  Red blood and blinding pain. Vitagua pushed toward her arm, eager to bond with the necklace but too slushy to flow freely. It tried anyway, dragging—at least it felt that way—her internal organs with it.

  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.

  • Chapter Twenty-Two •

  “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.”