“Magic, right,” he repeated, but he carried her away.
Astrid picked up the block of ice with numb hands, dropping it onto the still-leaking hearth. It crackled, melting fast. She kept her back to the body.
The body. Oh god, I killed him.
She made a round of the first-floor windows, pulling curtains shut, closing up the house. When she was done, she stood in the kitchen, desperately trying to think. Mark returned, still handling the keys. She fought an urge to snatch them away.
He’d have killed us and let Mark take the blame, she thought. He needed someone to take responsibility because Jacks lives here, because Jacks might suspect…
Oh shit, I killed Jacks’s father.
“I decided I could use the pocketknife on the…the corpse, Will,” she said, remembering how she had crumbled the animals Henna had brought home. “If I move fast…I still think he doesn’t have to know.”
“Will?” Mark repeated. “Listen, I think Sahara needs an ambulance. Maybe you do too.”
“I’ll have a look at her. Could you check the Chief for more of that glass?” she said. “Take it off him. Then—I don’t know…just wait here.”
He stepped toward the body and she cringed.
“Don’t touch the blue stuff.”
“I heard you the first time,” he said, a hint of the old whine returning to his voice.
Mark had taken Sahara to Astrid’s bedroom by mistake. Her friend was tucked in like a doll, covers up to her shoulders and her arms laid straight at her sides.
Astrid kissed her forehead. No response.
She glanced around, finding a plastic saltshaker on the desk next to a dirty plate. Snatching it up, she dripped vitagua from her bitten tongue.
“Something to heal her,” she muttered. “Please, no birds today, just fix her, make her better.”
It worked. She turned the shaker over, and small white stars drifted out. Sahara’s bruises faded. Her cuts closed.
I should have siphoned her first, Astrid thought, too late, as all the cuts healed and Sahara’s eyes opened.
“Thought I was dead,” she rasped. “God, look at you. I must be.”
Astrid sniffled, shaking her head.
“Where’s the Chief?”
“G-gone,” she said.
“Mermaided him off, huh?”
“No. I hit him, Sahara.”
“That he richly deserved.” She rubbed her throat.
“No. I mean I hit him a lot…a couple times, uh—Hard. Sahara, he’s…”
Sahara’s face paled.
“H-he was attacking you,” Astrid said. “He’s…”
“You killed him,” Sahara said. She looked, more than anything, astounded. After a second she opened her arms. They clung to each other, squeezing so hard, Astrid’s ribs began to ache. “You killed someone for me.”
“I love you, remember?” Astrid laughed bitterly.
“I broke this, Astrid,” Sahara said. “I’ll fix it.”
“No, it’s too late.”
“Darling, it’s never—”
She was interrupted by screams.
• Chapter Twenty-Seven •
“Jacks had Mark up against the wall when I got downstairs,” Astrid says. “He was livid—given half an excuse, he’d have busted Mark’s arm. But Mark wasn’t struggling. He kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me….’”
“Astute of him,” I say.
“Mrs. Skye was there too. She was on the phone, telling 911 that Chief Lee was hurt, that Mark had broken in and assaulted him.”
In Astrid’s hand is a fortune card, its paint still crawling. It bears a mini-portrait of an enraged Astrid in a blue dress, swinging the block of ice at the Chief. So she did kill him after all. I hoped, for reasons I barely understand, that Sahara had done it, that Astrid was lying to protect her. But she has always been the logical suspect. She and Lee Glade have a history of antagonism, of conflicts over Jacks and Albert. It adds up.
I’ve talked to more than one killer whose actions, however spontaneous at the time, seemed inevitable when tallied against his relationship with the victim.
“How did you feel?”
“With Mrs. Skye talking to the cops, our options were melting away. Everything was covered in vitagua and I had to tell Jacks it was me who’d cracked his father’s skull.”
“But—”
“Don’t ask again; I’m trying to remember. I was…panicky.”
“Not remorseful?”
“Not right then.”
“How about later?”
Her face fills with what looks, strangely, like sympathy. “Sometimes I’m sorry, sure. More often I remember the Chief had his hands on Sahara’s neck, that he shot Dad. Or I think how stupid it was that he died. I hit him, yeah, but people are supposed to be tough. You hear about babies getting frozen solid in snowstorms and being saved. People crashing their cars in the middle of nowhere and surviving for days before they’re found. You know?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe someone so strong died from a few smacks to the head.”
A few smacks. The autopsy report speaks of multiple cranial fractures and craniocerebral injury. The first blow fractured Lee Glade’s skull in two places and in itself constituted a terminal wound, albeit one he might have survived—if he’d gotten immediate treatment. The second compounded the problem, expanding the fractures and creating a massive subdural hematoma.
“Astrid, suppose his general state of health had made him more resistant to ‘a few smacks’—”
“Then he’d have lived.”
“No. You’d have assaulted him more ferociously. You wanted him off Sahara, didn’t you?”
She looks away.
“You were angry, and you hit him hard. You say he was groggy and confused after he got off the floor—”
“Don’t—”
“Come back to the containment facility with me.”
“I’m not sorry enough to consider that.”
“How sorry are you?”
Her voice rises in frustration. “You don’t think I’ve been over this a thousand times? One minute I was deciding to have a romance with Jacks—”
“Fucking him, Sahara would say.”
“…the next, I’d beaten up his father.”
“Murdered him.”
“Murdered him, fine, and the Sheriff was on his way. Vitagua was dribbling out of the fireplace, there was a body on the floor of Albert’s house, Mark knew about magic, and Jacks was furious….” She wipes away tears. “On top of that, Sahara had triggered this huge melt in the unreal. Patterflam was going to break out and burn everything.”
I imagine the unreal burning. “Why did you do it?”
“I wanted him off Sahara, remember?”
“Not the murder. Why did you choose Jacks?”
She dries her eyes, carefully, one at a time. “What would you do? If you had to choose between having the person you wanted or being with someone who loved you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Picking Jacks was the only way to keep them both. I wanted Sahara…but she didn’t love me; not romantically. Jacks could give me kids and a normal life. Sahara might stay because of the chantments…and if she left, I wouldn’t be alone. We could all be mostly happy, and nobody would get hurt.”
“Mostly happy.”
“Pathetic, huh?” She laughs bitterly, kicking a spray of dirt over the weeds. A thin furred tendril whips out at me, as if in response. Then a pulse of cool air blows out from my wedding ring. The tendril drops away, lashing sulkily, and I feel a thread of fatigue.
“So the police were coming. What did you do next, Astrid?”
“I focused on Jacks. Took him aside, told him what happened. I said the Chief had shot Albert…I was covered in punctures from the sea-glass he’d stuck in me.”
In the news footage when Astrid is coming out of the house with Patience, she is filthy, barefoot, covered in blood,
and her ear is shredded. Now she shows me a picture from just after the murder. There are angry gashes in her forearm and shoulder, a cut on her hand that is a classic defense wound. Her ear is intact, though, the dragon earring scratched but in place.
“How did Jacks react?”
“You mustn’t think badly of him. I had the lipstick on.”
“You’d killed his father.”
“Jacks loved me. And he was in shock.”
“So he forgave you.”
I see her struggling to keep tears back. “Just don’t blame him for what happened next.”
“The standoff.”
She nods. We had paused but now, without discussion, we hurry down the bone-bleached dune after Ev and Patience.
“Sahara wanted to preserve your monopoly on magic, and Jacks wanted to keep you safe. What’s your excuse?”
She sighs. “I wanted to keep the cops from getting contaminated.”
We have arrived at the edge of the peculiar city. People stream around us, chatting in tongues I don’t understand. Their voices are friendly. The smell of cooking food fills the air, and as I inhale, I begin to feel as though I am eating the best meal of my life. The banquet lasts for a single, intense moment, and then I am full.
The crowd around us grows until it is thousands strong. People dangle from oversized blades of grass, hover on butterfly wings. Heads on giraffe necks loom above us. They regard Patience with wonder and hope. Hands extended, she circles the space they have left us, letting them brush her fingers. She is speaking, softly, asking about their long years under the ice. Some call back, their voices tainted with animal barks and the trills of birds.
She turns to Astrid. “They want to see you fuse a chantment into someone. If anything happens to you, they won’t know anything about fighting the curse….”
Astrid, of course, is unsurprised. “Will?”
“You’re not contaminating me,” I say.
A weak smile. “I need something to chant. Something small, something you don’t mind losing.”
Licking my lips, I take stock. Small, disposable. After a second I pop a button off my shirt. I hand it to her along with a couple coins from my pocket and a key from my keychain—Caroline’s house key.
Astrid chants them all, dribbling vitagua from her much-bitten lips. Then she holds them up.
“Magic button,” she says dreamily. “It lets you see things—as if you had a telescope and a microscope built into your eyes. The quarter keeps you from getting lost, and the dime…Well, the dime’s for you, Pop. The key unlocks doors—any door you touch will open for you.”
She offers the dime to her mother. “Volunteers?”
A woman with a beaver’s tail takes the button. A man with the talons of a bald eagle indicates he wants the quarter. The key goes to a small red deer with long black hair and the eyes of a human being.
Pooling vitagua in her palm, Astrid paints a blue line across Ev’s hand and sets the dime on the smear, pressing the coin into the meat of her hand.
“Vitagua is cohesive,” she says, loud enough for all to hear as she repeats the process with the other volunteers. “The magic in the chantment calls to the vitagua in the affected individual. The chantment’s molecules fold into the person’s body.”
Ev waves her hand for all to see. The dime is gone.
“If you X-rayed her, it’d be there in her hand. But you couldn’t get it out surgically,” Patience murmurs.
Ev Lethewood bows to the crowd as Astrid, surprisingly, gestures like an old-style sleight-of-hand magician. Down she bobs—and when she comes up, Ev’s goatish features are less pronounced. I blink—in addition, Ev is now male. Taking out a handkerchief, he mops his brow, puffing like someone who has just run a marathon.
“You okay?” Astrid asks, and Ev nods wearily.
There’s a gasp from the crowd as the deer girl’s head changes, becoming fully human.
“Magic calls to magic. The embedded chantment will absorb the vitagua residue in her body,” Astrid says. “It will take time. She was submerged for centuries.”
I ask: “She can use the powers in the chantment?”
“Yes. From now on she’ll be able to unlock doors.”
“Well?” Patience asks the crowd. They murmur, examining the three changed individuals. Then their voices rise in a musical, chord-packed babble. Cheers erupt around us. They raise the trio onto a platform of woven reeds.
“This is the part where they ask you to go preside over a celebration,” Astrid tells Patience. “If you want.”
Patience glides up to the platform. “I never say no to an adoring crowd.”
Astrid says. “Pop, you want to go too?”
Ev scratches her—his—neck and speaks in a deep bass. “You’ve still got business, son. I’d like to help.”
“You do. You will.” She leans close, lowering her voice. “Figure out the city for me? Who’s who, where things are, if anyone from Indigo Springs ended up here.”
Ev considers this, yawning. “I can do that.”
“Sure you can,” Astrid says. “You’re hyperobservant.”
Her mother shakes his head. “I can walk around town for you anyway. You’ll be back soon?”
“Yes.”
Ev offers me a hand then, and I shake it. “Try not to worry, young man. My kid, she’ll take care of you.”
“I know.”
“Thanks, Pop.” Astrid blows Ev a kiss.
With a wave, Ev climbs onto the platform with the others. The crowd abandons us. The city hums with voices—conversations, animal calls, music. The nest-like buildings are resonating, forming tones that play my emotions like a harp, lifting me on a rising wave of joy.
Astrid chooses a path out of the city. “Your kids are young enough to learn the unreal tongues, Will.”
“What?” I hide the jolt that accompanies the thought of my son and daughter having a future here…or anywhere. I’ve become accustomed to thinking all their prospects were doomed. “Do you know where my children are?”
“I’d have said if I did.” She tilts her head, listening. “The grumbles say you’ll find them.”
“When?”
“I’m not so good with when.”
“Try.” I hand Astrid the ace of hearts.
She drains the card to whiteness and creates a picture—the house again. The police are in the picture now—literally—uniformed men barricade off Mascer Lane. “Sorry. We’re still focused on the standoff.”
I sigh. “Fine. How did that play out?”
“When Mrs. Skye said she could see the Sheriff coming, we all froze.”
“Everyone but Sahara?”
“Yes. She had the mermaid on, and she had Chief Lee’s shotgun. She put the gun in Mark’s hands and told him to fire a shot out through the front door, over their heads.”
“One more step and I kill them all,” I murmur.
“That’s what Sahara forced Mark to say,” Astrid agrees. “That’s how the standoff began.”
• Chapter Twenty-Eight •
“Are you insane?” There was no force behind Jacks’s words.
“They already think he’s a killer,” Sahara said, tugging Mark inside. She called out, “Sheriff Lews? Pete?”
A muffled call came in response.
Sahara’s voice was thick with Siren vibrations. “Mark says keep your distance and everyone will be fine.” She slammed the door and, coaxing Mrs. Skye away from the window, shut the curtains with a snap. “That’ll buy us some time to fix things.”
The old woman curled out of her grip, lifting Sahara’s fingers off her braceleted wrist with visible distaste. “By blaming him?” she said slowly.
Sahara ignored her. “Mark, go do some crazed gunman stuff. Make sure nobody can see inside. Block the back door. Don’t get shot.”
Wordlessly—eyes blank—Mark moved to comply.
“Kids,” Mrs. Skye objected, physically interposing her frail-looking body into Sahara’s path, “t
hink about what you’re doing. Mark didn’t kill the Chief.”
“She’s right.” Astrid’s gut twisted as she watched Mark disappear upstairs. A smell of gunpowder hung in the air, and her ears rang from the sound of the shot. She was full of vitagua and the headache had returned full-force, gnawing at the right side of her head. “We can’t make him out to be some hostage-taking stalker type….”
Sahara groaned. “It’s just for a little while.”
“We can’t,” Astrid insisted.
“So…what? We let him go, he tells the truth, they bust in here and get contaminated by the spilled magic?”
“No…but when you say you think this is fixable…how? Jacks, what should we do?”
Jacks was staring at her, half-smiling, and Astrid remembered she was wearing the lipstick. She’d put it on before coming up to talk to Sahara. Had that only been an hour ago?
She rubbed her mouth fiercely, and Jacks looked around the room, taking in the spill and the body of his father.
“We do have to hide the magic before anyone else comes inside,” he said. “Saving Mark’s our second priority.”
“But how? How do we keep him out of trouble?”
“Yeah, smart guy—how?” Mrs. Skye crossed her arms.
“All I know is we can’t let half the town troop through this mess and get contaminated.”
“Right,” Sahara sneered. “Contamination’s so awful.”
Astrid shuddered. “We clean up, then I’ll confess.”
“No,” Sahara objected.
Astrid paused, foundering on everything she knew, or would know. Confessing. When would that happen? And Sahara going away. She had to find out what triggered the departure—find out, and change things so she stayed. Jumbled knowledge assailed her, and she couldn’t sort through it. “Is someone crying? Is it me? Blood on my dress, freezing the birds—”
“Hey, focus.” Sahara snapped her fingers. Terrible knowledge shimmered, just within reach…then slipped away.
“More people,” said Mrs. Skye as car doors slammed.
“I’ll get the kaleidoscope,” Sahara said, heading upstairs.
Astrid rushed to catch up, murmuring: “We ought to have Mark let Mrs. Skye go.”
“And have her tell them you killed the Chief?”
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