“Is that a city? Do people really live in that?”
She shrugs. “They have to live somewhere, don’t they?”
“Will we reach the city before Sahara catches us?”
“I’m not the prophet, Will.”
Her words remind me I should be focusing on Astrid. I fall back a pace, and immediately Patience is surrounded by animal-people. They mob her gently, bearing her up to the broad shoulders of a man with grizzly bear fur.
Astrid and Ev catch up with me and there’s a muddle as we work out my place within the procession. Astrid ends up between me and her mother.
“Ma and I were talking about the Blue Mountain Fair,” Astrid says. “Every year they pick a Alpine Princess. Mrs. Skye was one….”
I nod. “Sahara won in her senior year.” I look back into the wind. The white twister is still following us. “And now she’s fitting herself for another crown.”
The Lethewood women, mother and daughter, exchange a glance I cannot read.
Then Astrid produces another card from her pocket. It shows an image of Sahara and Astrid, staring at the shattered fireplace. “When I hugged Sahara that day, I learned she’d been furious with herself for letting me siphon the vitagua from her. In the unreal she’d wanted to re-expose herself, but Jacks and I were watching too closely. When I froze all that vitagua onto Patterflam, it stopped the flow from the spring. I could have brought it back, but she wasn’t about to ask, because she wanted—”
“To get the power back.” I glance at Ev Lethewood’s billy goat’s beard, remembering Sahara’s wings. “So she chiseled into the unreal through the hearth?”
“Yeah, and she softened the ice. Vitagua responds to the will of the unreal…the frozen people who want to be thawed out. They were hungry for heat…and they could feel Sahara, so close, wanting what they wanted.”
“Were you angry?”
“Furious. It was then that I finally accepted that the spring was my responsibility. That no matter how much they helped, I was the one. I’d tried to divide up my destiny, give it away—”
“But Sahara wasn’t content to be a helper.”
“Girl always was an all-or-nothing type,” Ev says.
“Isn’t that the truth?” Astrid grimaces.
Ev squeezes her arm in sympathy, and we continue on toward the lumpy nest of the city.
• Chapter Twenty-Five •
The rumble in the fireplace had echoes, burps and belches that spread from the hearth until they were everywhere: walls, windows, staircases. The carpet vibrated underfoot; on the fridge, spice jars chattered.
Moving as if in a dream, Astrid rescued the urn with her father’s ashes from the top of the mantel. Then she grabbed her friend’s arm—getting a shot of Sahara’s glee at having exposed herself to magic again, at last—and towed her away from the fireplace.
“Let go.” Sahara jerked free and they fell. A tremor thrummed through the floor.
“Shit,” Sahara whispered. Astrid was shaking. Disaster was imminent, she knew it, but all she could do was stare at Sahara, who was goggle-eyed with excitement. An orange smear of lipstick from Astrid’s lips marked her neck.
The quivers in the house stilled, and the noise faded. Silence…and then vitagua began bleeding from the fireplace.
“No…,” Astrid murmured. The cobalt fluid dribbled off the edge of the hearth, forming a palm-sized—and spreading—puddle on the pink carpet.
Sahara took a half step toward it.
“Get back,” Astrid ordered. Setting the urn aside, she snatched up the fitted brick that sealed the hearth and tried to force it into place. Ice-cold vitagua flowed over her fingers and wrist. Some seeped into her body, bringing the chill of the unreal with it. The rest continued to spill out into the house.
“Is it working?” Sahara asked.
“Too much pressure,” she grunted. Sahara’s chisel-work had deformed the opening….
Hot air from outdoors was being sucked down through the chimney, was whisking in from the windows. She could hear the screen door in the kitchen creaking.
“Can I do anything, Astrid?”
“Try closing the windows.” She twisted the brick ferociously and it slid into the groove. By now she was saturated with vitagua, more than she’d ever have guessed she could possibly absorb. A storm of things-that-were and things-to-come pelted her. She realized this was a bad idea, she should let go….
Too late. She snapped the brick into position only to discover the seal couldn’t hold the increased pressure. It was like sticking her thumb in a garden hose: with its point of escape tightened, the vitagua flow changed to a flat spray, wide and fast.
It caught Astrid in the face and chest, coating her open mouth and spilling down the front of her dress. Sahara was spattered too; a thick line splashed across her shoulders before striking the window.
With a scrape of stone on stone, the brick snapped. The spray dropped back to a gurgle. The miniature waterfall kept flowing over the edge of the mantel.
“I never meant—,” Sahara stammered. “This is my fault.”
Astrid sighed, resigned. “Forget about it.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. Catch it in a bucket, I guess.”
“What if we can’t stop it, Astrid? The secret—”
“I do stop it,” Astrid said. “I just don’t know when.”
Sahara held up her blue-spotted hands. “We’re drenched. Look at your face.”
Astrid touched her cheek. Her skin was cool, like polished marble, and she knew if she looked in a mirror, she’d see vitagua lying under the flesh like a birthmark. She closed her eyes, imagined it contracting around her innards, and pulled, chilling her belly.
Sahara said: “I can’t get over the way you do that.”
“Is it okay now?”
“Yes,” she said. “You look normal.”
“I’ll go find something to hold it,” Astrid said. “Don’t get any more spirit water on you.”
“I’m fine.”
“The more you have in you, the more I have to siphon.”
“I can’t go through that again.”
Instead of arguing, Astrid trotted down to the laundry room. Vitagua was leaking through the ceiling—the laundry was right below the fireplace—and running into the washer’s overflow drain. Snatching up a bucket, she set it under the drip. It filled quickly—too quickly.
Magic in the sewer system. She shivered.
She threw open the big freezer, hauling out frozen food by armfuls and dropping the packages at her feet until the cube was empty. She unplugged the freezer, heaving it into the middle of the room until it was below the drip.
“Fill that,” she grunted, praying the unreal wouldn’t rise to the challenge.
Liquid magic spattered the bottom of the freezer, and Astrid found herself temporarily unmoored from time: she couldn’t remember if the cat was dead or just contaminated. Visions of river fish changing into massive man-eating menaces wound through her mind. Trees, growing impossibly tall beside the sewer outflow, firebombs, giant hedges of blue brambles…she froze, trying to sort out where—no, not where, when—in time she actually was.
“It’s the flood, we’re at the flood,” she murmured. “Lots of time, everyone’s all right—”
Then she paused, cotton-mouthed. Who wouldn’t be all right, and how soon?
Grumbles muttered, in their singsong way, of the basement flooding with vitagua, of Jacks’s stuff bobbing in liquid magic, Astrid wading through the flow…. No, it isn’t time for that yet, the basement floor is dry. She bent, pressing her palm on the concrete, trying to figure out what it was she was going to manage to save.
She picked up the paintbrush he’d used this morning, tucking it in her hair and then bursting into tears.
“This is when I think of the ice I just pulled out of the freezer,” she said, fighting a sob.
Ice?
Oh. The heat in the living room, the
way the unreal was drawing it in. There had been a big block of party ice in the freezer. Maybe if she set it on the hearth, the water would melt, cool things down. The idea of freezing all that vitagua was frightening. It would solidify within her body, making her sick, and Jacks and Sahara would take care of her until Ev…
No, that was a few days ago.
Ice. Focus on ice. She found a block of it on the floor in a plastic grocery bag. She closed her hand around the bag’s handles, and another sob rose in her chest.
There was a series of crashes and thumps upstairs.
“What are you doing up there?” she shouted.
No answer.
She searched her clot of future memories, but her head reeled; it was too dense, insensible.
Clutching the bag with its block of ice, she crept upstairs to see what had gone wrong now.
• Chapter Twenty-Six •
The door to the living room was blocked.
“Hey!” Astrid yelled, thumping on the door with her free hand. Now what? Was Sahara rolling in the vitagua?
She ran to the studio, swinging the block of ice in its plastic bag, and, for the third time that day, scrambled through the windows. Moving fast and carelessly, she knocked a pane of glass loose, breaking it to shards as she tumbled out into the yard. She ran up the porch stairs to the kitchen entrance, and found the door unlocked.
No, not unlocked: forced open. Splinter marks marred the frame; the latch hung loose.
Jangling, thumps, and a strangled mew of distress emanated from the living room. Sahara.
Astrid tiptoed through the kitchen, the heavy block of ice dangling from her hand in its bag. The brightness of the yard had blinded her: now the kitchen was too dim. It took a moment to make out the short-handled ax on the kitchen table, the shotgun beside it.
She followed the noises: the wet squish of carpet, grunts, vitagua dripping, keys jingling.
It’s Mark, Astrid thought. He came back….
She stepped into the blue-splashed living room and saw a figure bent over the limp body of Sahara, a man, familiar somehow, hands locked around her throat, squeezing. Vitagua was boiling from Sahara’s eyes, nostrils, ears…
…she wasn’t breathing…
…and the man wasn’t Mark at all, he was too big, and anyway Mark was standing by the hallway, eyes blank behind his dirty glasses, twirling Sahara’s car keys around his index finger. But it was too late, and it didn’t matter anyway: the man was strangling Sahara, and Astrid was already moving. Her arm swung the block of ice at the end of its plastic sling….
It’s Chief Lee, she thought, I figure that out right before I—
Contact.
Before I kill him.
The impact of ice against the Chief’s skull was remarkably quiet. He slewed sideways, then caught himself—but Astrid was enraged now. The block dropped to the bottom of the bag, jerking her wrist before she swung it again, overhand this time. When it struck him there was a crack. The Chief fell facedown to the floor and she pushed him off her motionless friend with one blue-stained high heeled shoe.
Jacks’s dad. He was dressed all in black: baggy pants and a turtleneck. He repelled the vitagua that was, by now, all over the room. As he tried to raise himself, Astrid saw the blue liquid bubbling and hissing, becoming floral-scented smoke, leaving pristine handprints on the pink carpet.
The Chief groped for the handle of a glass dagger that hung in a scabbard at his hip. Astrid grabbed his hand. Knowledge seared into her—memories of Lee Glade’s grandfather teaching him to hunt well wizards. He’d developed the killer instinct, a calm righteousness that soothed his conscience. But it was time now for Lee to train someone, and Jacks kept trying to leave town. Shredding the boy’s art school applications, funding requests. Even Olive’s road accident, breaking his ex-wife’s leg as she lay drugged in her car…
The sensation—touching the Chief—was like touching Patterflam. The magic within her boiled and died where her skin met his. Astrid clung anyway, savoring the Chief’s frustration with Jacks. His perfect son, so much like his mother, refusing to go hunting, even to fish….
The Chief jabbed at her, bringing her back to the present. Lightning ran up and down her arm, vitagua burning in a line up her wrist. A shard of white glass was embedded in the meaty part of her hand.
Shrieking, she kicked out, knocking the Chief down by good luck rather than by design as she staggered toward the mantel. Moaning, she pinched the hunk of glass out of the wound. It fried her finger and thumb when she grasped it, and she dropped it on the vitagua-soaked mantel, where it flared into a dancing, electrified ball. A sizzle annihilated the sliver and a good portion of the vitagua slick it had landed in. A smell of ozone filled the room.
“Sea-glass,” Astrid choked. “We found sea-glass in the bottle factory.”
The Chief was struggling to his knees. “Astie,” he said, voice thick. “She has to be stopped. Sahara’s into something that you don’t want to see let loose. Water magic…dangerous stuff…”
“If you killed her…” She fisted her throbbing hand.
“Has to be done,” he insisted. “Come away from the fireplace, kid. I gotta clean this up, burn out the spring. Everything’ll be okay, I promise.” He touched the back of his head, swaying. “Jacks here?”
“You’re one of the witch-burners Albert talked about,” Astrid said coldly.
Dismissal flickered in his bloodshot eyes. “What’s Albert Lethewood got to do with anything?”
“You shot him. One night when he was moving chantments…” She had known it since she touched him. It felt like she had known it all along. “You were on the ridge, watching. Always watching, weren’t you? On the bottle-factory roof, on the training tower at the fire hall. You fired that shotgun, without knowing whose car it was, who was inside….”
“Albert?” This time he was incredulous. “Albert’s liver pickled—he didn’t have anything to do with—”
“He’s wearing the magic coat; you don’t recognize him. He gets away, but there’s a piece of shot embedded in his liver. You spend weeks looking for a shot-up car, and you don’t think anything of Albert dying. You shot at him blindly, with sea-glass.”
“Crushed sea-glass in a shotgun shell.” He lurched closer, one foot dragging. Pink footprints marked his path across the vitagua spill. “It’s not Sahara.”
Astrid bared her teeth, backing away, up onto the mantel. The Chief’s fist closed around her throat.
“Albert Lethewood wasn’t the ancient enemy of the Fyre Brigade,” he hissed. “He was a rummy.”
She pushed vitagua into her neck to counter the strangling pressure, gargling her answer as the fluid boiled against his touch. “He had you fooled, Chief.”
He shoved her against the fireplace, grinding her earring against the bricks until her head rang. “Is my son cursed, witch?”
She surprised herself by laughing.
Glass sliced into her skin just below the collarbone. Vitagua fizzed throughout Astrid’s body; her bones vibrated like tuning forks. Burning and boiling, she thought. Roasted Astrid, poached Astrid…
“Is Jacks infected?”
“He’ll never become like you,” she managed.
“Let him make his paintings,” he said. His voice was guttural, his enunciation mushy. Or had the pain affected her hearing? “The magic well closes today, Astie.”
“That’s not how it goes.” Biting her lip until the skin ruptured, she pulled the madly bubbling vitagua into her mouth, spitting it in a stream at his unprotected eyes. The Chief’s grip on her broke.
With a crude, panicky movement, Astrid shoved. Her bare palms smacked against his chest, and more knowledge—memories of deaths, Lee learning the bloody history of his fathers, prophecies about Patterflam’s eventual escape from the unreal—poured through her in a flood. Braced as she was against the hearth, the jolt added force to the push. The Chief rocketed backwards, slamming to the floor. His body slackened as vitagua burned o
ut from under him, creating a manshaped halo of singed pink carpet.
Astrid collapsed, falling into a crouch as she clawed the glass shards out of her arm and chest, only then crawling to his side. She was shaking violently, and it was almost a minute before she could put her hand on his throat. She was expecting another shock, but nothing came from his bare skin as she felt for a pulse.
No heartbeat. He shuddered under her hand. Then the smell of urine merged with the oversweet flower-stench of burnt liquid magic in the room.
“Birds,” she mumbled. “I froze the birds for this.”
Weeping, she leaned over to listen to his chest, but heard nothing. She tried to pull vitagua to him, to pool it around his corpse, but there wasn’t enough.
“This isn’t the part where I freeze the body?” She listened intently, but the grumbles refused to help. Finally she crawled to Sahara, groping for a heartbeat, dully certain that it would do no good.
Unlike the Chief, Sahara’s heart was fine. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Blue-black marks smudged her throat. The mermaid hung on her neck.
In the corner, Mark was twirling the car keys as if nothing had happened.
“Mark?” Astrid said.
His face pinched up, and he gaped at her foggily.
“Help me,” Astrid pleaded.
He plodded to her side, staring blankly down at Sahara. “What the hell?”
“She’s hurt,” Astrid said. “Can you carry her upstairs? Whatever you do, don’t touch the blue fluid.”
He lifted Sahara clumsily, and as Astrid caught her friend’s lolling head, their hands met.
“Oh,” she said, and Mark froze. “This is the part where I figure out why you’re here.”
Knowledge came in a rush. The Chief had gone to Mark’s sister, asking about the confrontation with Sahara.
“He saw I was messed up, the other afternoon,” he said, more alert now.
“Right. He came here just after Sahara zapped you.”
“What the fuck is going on, Astrid?”
“Magic,” she said. “Okay, take her upstairs.”
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