by Beth Cato
Friend? The very idea almost made her vomit. She stared at the kitsune with a renewed revulsion. Blum was lonely. No wonder she chased after Ingrid; to her, it was as if they were children playing some sordid game of hide-and-seek.
Cy was right. Blum needed to die for Ingrid to have any chance of peace, for the world to have any chance. But how? No mortal weapon could harm her while she wore her ambassadorial ring. Her greatest vulnerability had to be her hoshi no tama, the onion-shaped pendant at her neck. Knowing Blum, though, the pendant would be difficult to access and likely cursed or impenetrable.
No mortal weapon.
Ingrid’s hand went to the bundle tied to her waist: the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. She had forgotten about it amid everything else that had happened this afternoon. She motioned for the sylphs to follow her as she stooped down, slipping open her coat so she could work on the knots. If anything could kill Blum, the guandao could. Maybe that’s what the qilin had intended all along.
Sudden heaviness caused her to lurch forward. She barely caught herself on the icy concrete, biting back a yelp of surprise just in time. A few feet away, a nervous soldier glanced in her direction and then back at Blum.
This was the sort of weight she and Lee had expected when they initially unwrapped the guandao in Portland. Had the Crescent Blade read her mind, sure as any fantastic? The heat of the artifact felt the same as before. Ingrid fully lowered her body to the ground before the bag or its strings gave out and created a racket that the sylphs could never hide.
Just feet away, Blum spoke with one of the officers as the Russian was hauled to his feet. The interrogation was over. Blum was going to leave—to prepare for an attack on Chinatown.
I need to kill her! she thought at the weapon. Become lighter again so that I can move!
The negative backlash boomed through Ingrid like a banshee screaming in her face. She shuddered, trying not to make a sound that would betray her, terrified of the guandao, terrified of being revealed. She craned up her head enough to check on the sylphs. They continued their circuitous paths, unharmed by the reverberations.
Let me use you. Please, she thought at the guandao again. This time, the reply unfolded in her mind, a leaden message in a single word.
CARRY.
That was her duty, and only that. The blade would not allow her to wield it.
The weight vanished again. Ingrid relaxed against the floor, shivering. Sweat coursed down her neck as she struggled to keep her heavy breaths quiet. She restrained the urge to burst out in hysterical giggles. How nice of the holy weapon to keep her humble. After all, Ingrid couldn’t get uppity just because she had demigod-like geomantic powers. She couldn’t assume she could pull Excalibur from the stone, or the Green Dragon Crescent Blade from a leather pouch.
go? There was anxiety in the sylphs’ susurrous.
Ingrid needed to get away from this place, from Blum’s evil presence. To be warm and dry and safe—or as relatively safe as possible. She worked herself to her feet and shot Blum a final, frustrated glare. She was a horrible, psychotic thing. Relentlessly pursuing Mr. Sakaguchi. Using the Chinese as the scapegoat for the auxiliary attack. Treating the deaths of the auxiliary children as inconveniences when, in truth, they were living beings to mourn. But then, what were these few deaths compared to the millions Blum had already caused? As Blum herself had said, people were mere gnats.
And Ingrid knew she would see the ambassador again all too soon.
Anger brought a flare of power to her skin and she consciously struggled to notch it down so that she didn’t harm the sylphs as she rushed from the docks. The fairy glamour caused people to unconsciously step aside and grant Ingrid quick passage. The grayness of the clouds had deepened, the look of them causing a sudden spike of homesickness.
She wanted to go home. Her home, back in San Francisco. It had burned down, for all she knew, but she ached for her room. Her bed. Her old life. Her ojisan. Her dear friend Lee.
And she also wanted Cy and Fenris, for the best parts of her new, terrifying life to somehow blend with the old.
Ingrid waited for traffic to stop then crossed the street with a gush of humanity. The sylphs gauzed her vision in gray as they fluttered around her. Every few steps a sylph hovered in front of her face long enough for her to see its joyous smile. Then the sylph would pirouette into the cloud again, its every movement a celebration of freedom.
All of them needed to stay free. The sylphs. Cy. Fenris. Lee.
“Stay with me, we’re going to move a little faster,” whispered Ingrid. Her feet teetered at the edge of a paved curb, then she hopped out into the street. In two bounding steps, she was gripping the tailgate of a produce delivery truck and hauling herself up into the vehicle. The guandao swayed beneath her coat. Ingrid willed strength into her legs. The back of the truck was empty but for canvas bags and stray vegetables that danced as the vehicle passed over frequent potholes. She maintained her grip on the hatch and stared out the back. The truck was driving in the right direction for now, and if that changed, she’d find another ride to get her as close to the rink as possible before sundown.
The sylphs flew faster around her—they relished this increase in speed. Despite her anxiety, Ingrid silently laughed as she wondered what the sylphs would think of freely flying along with an airship—and how Fenris would react, too.
Ingrid’s footsteps slowed over the final few blocks, as did the sylphs’ flurried flight paths. She didn’t simply feel tired, she felt pathetic, and that made her grit her teeth and force her muscles to slog onward. It was as though her nerves couldn’t quite carry signals all the way to her toes.
The sun fully set as she crossed the crackled pavement to the old rink. Ingrid sensed how the sylphs were wavering, and she told them it was fine. They could rest now. The tension caused by their magic evaporated from around her skin, and she relinquished the grip on her own power.
She didn’t feel pain. Instead, she experienced sudden bitter cold. She dropped to one knee, gasping, almost expecting for her breath to fog, though it couldn’t have been cooler than fifty degrees on this April night. Her muscles seized as if she’d been dropped into a blizzard.
Someday she would learn the limits of her power and not to expend too much of herself. Today was not that day.
“Apparently, I n-n-numbed my skin a bit too—too effectively,” she whispered to the sylphs. They wavered around her, reminding her of seagulls in a hover as they fought a hard wind off the bay.
“Ingrid?” Cy’s voice rang from above. She glanced up. Moving her head felt like lifting an iron kettle. Cy’s face was visible for an instant in the open rectangular window high above the back door to the rink.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” he shouted, his voice muffled by the brick walls. She remained in a crouch as he burst through the door and dropped down beside her.
“How’d you sneak up like that? I was watching the fence, and then suddenly . . . !” The soles of his shoes scraped on pavement as he backed off, hands up. The sylphs had flared out their wings and begun a high-pitched buzz that could only be described as angry. “I see you made some new friends.”
“C-c-c-cold,” she stammered. The intense chill in her muscles made it hard to unclench her jaw to talk. She lunged forward to grab his arm. “S-s-sylphs, he’s a friend.” Though she knew it drained her more, she let the emotion of love flow through her power to the massive . . . flock? Herd? Passel? Mr. Sakaguchi would know.
He would also point to her as a textbook case of hypothermia. Did she have all the symptoms? Drop in heart rate? Likely. Confusion? Maybe? Discerning the symptoms confused her.
The sluggish sylphs withdrew as Cy wrapped both arms around her. She could have sucked in his warmth like power from an earthquake.
“Dear God, you’re like an ice block. Fenris! Fenris, grab blankets from the Bug! Hurry!” He wrapped an arm around her waist to help her inside. The heat of the sylphs’ presence followed, though their proximity did nothing t
o physically warm her body.
“No time.” She convulsed with shivers and almost collapsed. Cy’s grip dragged her forward. “B-B-Blum’s here. Almost caught me. Sylphs made me . . . in-in-invisible.”
She couldn’t see Cy’s face, but his grip tightened at the mention of Blum’s name. “The Bug’s almost ready to go—”
“Won’t help. She—she can track me. Sense me from hundreds of miles. I can s-s-s-sense her from within a few hun-hundred feet. Airship . . . not fast enough. Far enough.”
“Excuse me?” said Fenris. His shoes pattered on the floor. “What’s this about my—”
“Not now, Fenris. Here, Ingrid, on the crate.” He positioned her so she could drop down onto the box. She immediately folded over to clutch her own thighs, moaning as she shivered.
“Fen-Fenris. Need filled kermanite.” Ingrid managed to lift her head enough to see his stick-thin legs. “I did it. Pulled energy . . . like Papa. Warm me.”
“Got it.” Those legs vanished as feet clanged on the ladder. “Cy, be ready to catch!”
“Catch what? What are you talking about?”
“Kermanite! You know it’s heavy, don’t let it fall on your head!” The words echoed from the hallway of the airship above.
“How close is Blum?” Cy asked her.
Ingrid willed her body to warm up but she felt so damn cold, colder than she’d been after almost drowning in San Francisco Bay, colder than she’d been in her life. Her thoughts moved like gummy honey.
“Dock. Right where we were. Th-th-those soldiers. Hers.”
“Here!” called Fenris. Cy grunted. “Is that enough? Ask her!”
“Ingrid?” His hand passed over her forehead and to her hair, coaxing her eyes to rise. He held kermanite the same size and rough shape as a football, the blue hue denoting it as part of the March batch from the Cordilleran Auxiliary. Papa or Mr. Thornton had transmitted energy into it during the San Francisco earthquake.
“Yes,” she said, and snaked out her right hand to clutch the crystal. Nothing happened. That took her aback for a moment. Oh. Of course. She’d touched full kermanite thousands of times in her life and never pulled power out, never considered that possibility. She had to focus.
“Work, brain,” she muttered as she violently shivered. Her fingertips gouged into the facets as if she were trying to climb a rock wall. She directed the trapped earth energy to enter her body.
There was no gentle transition. One instant, she was as cold as death—the next, her body felt aflame. She screamed, her voice echoing back at her, rippling through her ears and body. Cy pressed the kermanite onto her lap and she folded over it, her hands clasping either end. The world wavered around her as if everything had been rendered into a heat mirage. Black spots dappled her vision. She ached to scream again but panted for breath instead, her heart threatening to burst from her chest.
Cy curled one arm over her back and wrapped the other over her grip on the rock. She felt secured, as if he had sufficient strength to keep her bound in place, even during a tornado.
“I don’t think . . . bodies are supposed to go from cold to hot like that,” she said, sitting up. Ingrid felt exhausted now, rather than on the verge of death.
Cy kept an arm over her shoulder. She let her hands fall slack as she gazed down at the rock balanced on her lap. The two irregular jagged ends of the kermanite bore melted imprints of her hands. She set her hand into one of the impressions; it was still warm. Ingrid frowned, puzzled that the imprint was larger than her actual hand.
“You were shaking that intensely,” Cy said, holding up his own hand and causing it to quiver.
“Oh.” She forced her dry throat to swallow.
“About half the energy capacity drained, just like that,” muttered Fenris as he crouched to stare at the darkened coloration of the crystal. “Damn. A rock that size would run a large truck for years.”
She glanced around to check on the sylphs. They had landed in the shadow of the Palmetto Bug and resembled a fluffy mass of feathers. She’d need to make sure they were fed again soon.
Ingrid touched her forehead. Her whole body felt swampy. The whiplash from cold to hot had taken place over a span of seconds—and that could have easily killed her, too. If she had focused for a few more moments, she could have ended up at the opposite extreme. Hyperthermia would have cooked her organs in her sack of skin.
But she was alive, for now. Her immediate physical symptoms had been balanced by the kermanite’s energy. What was happening inside her body, though? Would she be able to walk tomorrow? Would she even wake up tomorrow—or sleep for days straight?
At what point did these drastic fluctuations cause permanent physical damage?
“Ingrid, I have an idea. Pardon me while I take this.” Cy lifted the kermanite from her lap. “Fenris, where’s that black paint you found stashed in the building?”
Ingrid blinked and touched the oilcloth of her new rain slicker. A mottled pattern showed where the jagged crystal had rested. Her touch must have made the kermanite heat up as if it were installed in an engine. It had started to melt her coat. She could even smell the foulness now that she had her wits again.
Good God. She could have burned herself, caused an earthquake, and worsened the whole damn cycle.
Fenris dashed away. Cy crouched in front of Ingrid at face level. “Can you walk?”
Grimacing, she stood. Sort of. Cy steadied her. Blood rushed to her head as she took a tentative step. Her scalp erupted with a mad burning sensation; blackness swarmed her vision. It passed in a matter of seconds but she still felt awfully wobbly. “Yes?”
“I have no clue if this’ll work, but I reckon we’ll find out right quickly one way or the other.” Cy helped her to the office, the kermanite chunk tucked against his hip. “Back at Roosevelt’s ranch, you mentioned that the old Japanese tales address how dogs and foxes hate each other.”
“Yes?” She glanced back as they entered the office. Fenris was running their way, a small pail in his hand.
“I recall one old tale that described how to prevent a kitsune from possessing a person’s body. This old woman wrote on her granddaughter’s skin—”
Ingrid perked up. “Oh yes! I remember that one. She wrote the Japanese word for dog. ‘Inu.’ But Blum’s not trying to steal my body. God, I hope she’s not.” Ingrid shivered. Her body was faulty and frustrating, but it was hers. She had no desire to be a lost soul.
“Here’s the paint.” Fenris slid the container onto the long table. It stopped beside Ingrid’s half-eaten apple from that morning, which had puckered like an old man’s face.
“Names carry power. If the word ‘inu’ can prevent possession by a kitsune, maybe it’ll stop a kitsune from tracking a person, too. I’m no wizard, but if I do the writing, maybe you can help with the magic.”
That was a whole mess of maybes. “Yes. Anything. We can’t sit and twiddle our thumbs as we wait for her.” Ingrid worked off her coat.
“I’ll take that as my cue to go.” Fenris backed toward the door. “I’ll set the door alarms again. Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Ingrid. “Are there still rolls in the box there? Those sylphs earned more food—”
“That’s what flew in with you? What sort of sylph are we talking about? They’re not going to mess with the Bug, are they?”
“They’re Sierran sylphs, and no, I’ve never heard anything about them messing with machines. They aren’t gremlins. Listen here, Fenris. When you bring out a roll, you have to eat half of it yourself. The ratio’s important. Tear their half into pieces to distribute it.” If Ingrid was about to be captured by Blum, then it was all the more important that the sylphs’ kindness be repaid now.
Fenris looked aghast. “Damn it all. A fairy business transaction? You expect me to do this? I’ll offend them somehow and we’ll have Oberon and his lot out for our blood on top of everything else.”
Cy took Fenris by the shoulders and scooted him toward the door. “Obero
n’s with a different part of fairy kind, but do try to make nice. Equal portions, Fenris.” He shut the door and angled the lantern to provide better light.
Ingrid struggled to undo the knots that secured the guandao to her waist, but the strings had pulled tight.
“What is this artifact?” Cy asked. He tugged at the knots, frowned, and reached for his knife to cut the bundle free.
“The Green Dragon Crescent Blade of the Chinese god Guan Yu. That’s all,” she said.
Cy made an odd strangled sound and quickly set the blade on the table as if it were a fragile Tiffany vase. “That’s all,” he repeated, deadpan.
“It’s like a curvy spearhead. I don’t suppose you sense any aura around it?” He shook his head. “We’ll discuss it more later, if all goes well.” She worked off her dress, her fingers clumsy. The old rink building was bitterly cold, and the mild fever she was now running couldn’t compensate for that. “I wanted to take my clothes off for you again tonight, but this isn’t what I had in mind.”
He popped the lid from the paint pail. “To think, it was just last night we shared together. It feels like it’s been weeks since then.” He cast her a look of dismay and longing. “I’m so sorry for the turn of events this morning, Ingrid. I should’ve just stayed in bed.”
“Considering how the day’s gone, we both should have stayed there.” She shimmied out of her hose and shivered. “Should I take off everything?”
“No. Keep on your underthings so you stay warmer. I hope we’re not too late to throw Blum off your scent. Is there anything I should do as I write?”
“As if I know dog sorcery!”
“You know a hefty bit more about magic than I do.”
She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at that. Everything she had learned about geomancy over the years had emphasized that a practitioner couldn’t personally control the flow of power; it was about being a conduit. In the past week, she had broken all the rules. Maybe now was a good time to rewrite them, literally.