Magic, Madness, and Mischief

by Kelly McCullough

  “That I believe in you.”

  “Huh?”

  “You have a true heart, Kalvan.” She chuckled. “A lousy sense of self-preservation, perhaps, but a true heart. That’s ultimately why I got you into the Free School.”

  “I’m not following you. I thought it was because I kept clashing with the teachers at the other schools you sent me to.”

  “That, too, but it’s because of your heart. You won’t bend when you know you’re right. It’ll serve you well when you’re grown, but it’s very dangerous at your age.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because the world isn’t made to deal with a child who won’t bend to the adults around them. School isn’t just there to teach academics, it’s there to mold children, to bend them to fit the world. But you don’t bend. Most schools can’t accommodate that, not without them or you breaking, and you’re not strong enough to break a whole school.” She chuckled again. “Not yet, anyway, though I wouldn’t bet against you winning in the long run.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She nodded. “It’s that true heart. There’s nothing in the world stronger. I don’t know what you’re going to grow up to become, but I believe in you, and I know it will be amazing. All you have to do is listen to your heart.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. It made my heart hurt in a good way, and I could feel my cheeks heating. “Thanks, Mom. I … just thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, Kalvan. I know that’s not what you were asking when you wanted to know if you could do anything to help me, but it’s important that you hear it. Now that you have, let me give you a more practical answer to the original question. You can help me look through the attic for your great-grandfather’s Vulcan uniform. It was very important to my grandmother, and I really do want to find it.”

  She smiled dreamily then, briefly lost in some fond memory. “Grandpa was a sweetheart and not much bigger than you. I bet you’d look fantastic in his old red suit.” The smile turned into a grin. “We’ll have to find it and find out, won’t we? We should have plenty of time, since you won’t be going to school today and I’m not even trying to drive in that.” She pointed out the window.

  So, Mom and Sparx and I spent the next couple of hours digging through the attic. The previous owner of the house had mostly finished the space, with the intent of turning it into a separate apartment. But he’d never gotten around to the details, like putting a door on the bathroom, or trim around the skylights, or plates on the outlets and switches. So, we mostly used it for storage.

  When my grandmother Elise died, they’d simply packed up her entire house and stuffed all of it into our attic. Anytime Oscar suggested that we do something with it my mother would go extra spacey and faraway and stay that way for weeks at a time, so it simply sat there and collected dust. Now we opened up everything big enough to contain the item my mom wanted—a wooden box that she described as looking like it was built by someone who’d read about one of those little shrines you see in Chinese restaurants but hadn’t ever actually seen one.

  It never turned up, and neither did Oscar, though we did find any number of other small treasures from my mom’s childhood. At one point, Sparx whispered that we would need to look at some of this stuff again sometime, though he didn’t think any of it would help us now.

  Finally, at lunchtime we gave up. If Oscar was around, he still hadn’t emerged from his basement, so the two of us put on heavy coats and walked a couple of blocks to my favorite little Mexican restaurant. The snow was halfway up my thighs and it was bitterly cold, but they were open. The family that ran it lived in the house across the alley.

  It was the first of many cold days. Once winter got a grip, it went right on squeezing. The weather people kept saying things like polar vortex and arctic outbreak as they talked about the dark-blue spot that hovered over Saint Paul on all the weather maps while the rest of the country was having one of the warmest winters on record. And that was probably true as far as it went, but none of it spoke to what Sparx and I knew to be the real cause—the wrath of the Winter King.

  The two of us spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do something about Oscar’s control of the Corona Borealis, and the thing in the basement. Dave helped when we found things he could do, which wasn’t often. But over and over again we’d start looking into something only to come up cold and empty at the end of the trail. I slept better as time went by, but too often with my lights on, and we got no closer to a solution as the weeks slid icily away toward Christmas.

  * * *

  Portrait of a boy and his bunny. The date is Tuesday, December the twentieth. It is the last day of school before winter break. The two of us are sitting under the main stage at the Free School, surrounded by moldering theater props and worrying desperately about the next day.

  “It’ll be the solstice,” said Sparx, “the shortest night of the year and the peak of winter’s power, a very dangerous time for the fire-born like you and me under the best of circumstances. Given my druthers I’d have headed for points south weeks ago like I usually do. Since I’m stuck here with you, I’m going to suggest we simply lie low and spend a week or two pretending your stepfather isn’t Winter’s King until the pressure eases.”

  I shook my head. “It’s also winter break, which means we’ll have the house completely to ourselves most days. That’s going to offer us opportunities like nothing we’ve had this year to get in and out of the basement without getting caught.” I had a growing sense of urgency about the whole thing, as if there were some hidden deadline coming up. “We need to take advantage of that.”

  Sparx threw his paws in the air. “How? Nothing we’ve learned in the last few weeks offers us any hope that a largely untrained mage child and a fire hare missing three-quarters of his powers can take on the Winter King on his home ground at the height of his reign.”

  “Then we need to broaden our search.”

  “Again, how?”

  “I don’t know!” I snapped.

  “I do.” The voice was quiet and calm on the surface, but there was an anger underneath that I knew well.

  “Josh?”

  A rough foam gargoyle from some long-ago play shimmered like moonlight on water and became the older boy, sitting cross-legged. “I’ve been keeping a very close eye on you and the hare since that day when you spied on me while I was painting.”

  My stomach filled with acid shame. “I’m sorry about that. Sparx wanted me to see the magic in the paintings. I don’t think it occurred to him how much of a violation of your privacy me looking at the … the one with the bruises would be. I should never have seen that. There’s no way I can unsee it, but I am truly sorry. I had no right. If you want to beat the crap out of me, well…” I shrugged. I couldn’t have done much to stop him under normal circumstances, but this time I wouldn’t even try because I figured I’d earned it.

  Josh shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. When I’m old enough to walk away, I’m going to show that picture to the whole damn world. That and all the others—because they’ve done worse. I can’t do it yet, but I want people to know what kind of people my parents are. And I want my parents to know that people know. I want them to drown in it.”

  His voice was still calm and quiet and oh so very angry. I didn’t know what to say to that. My relationship with Oscar was bad, but … “I—I’m sorry, Josh. It’s not right. Maybe you could—”

  “Shut up!” The rage suddenly boiled over, and I half expected him to punch my face in. “I don’t like you, Kalvan, not one little tiny bit. I don’t want your sympathy or your stupid suggestions. Child Protection took me away from my parents for a while, and my foster home was worse. I just need to wait it out for a few more years and then I’ll get out and get even. I could do it now, you know. Ms. Sippi would help me. She’s offered, many times. She likes drownings, but I am never going back to foster care.”

  “I—” I began again.

  “I told you to shut up,
Kalvan. I didn’t think she should drown you that day on the railroad, but I wouldn’t have been sorry for more than five minutes if she had. Not after you nearly set the class on me with your devil’s tongue.”

  I was simply too stunned to respond to that.

  But Josh was still talking. “Ms. Sippi was surprised when you got away, and that made Her curious. So, She exerted Herself to learn more. She’s ancient and very powerful. When She wants to know something She can find out a lot. That’s why I’m here now. If it were up to me I’d as soon see you rot, but She thinks you have some interests in common. So, if you want to learn some things that might help you with your parent problems, I can take you to see Her.”

  Sparx shook his head firmly no, but I asked, “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Noon. Meet me at the railroad bridge on this side of the river.” While he was speaking Josh stood up—well, as high as the low ceiling of the stage would let him, anyway. At the end he turned away from us.

  “We are not doing this,” said Sparx.

  “Makes no difference to me,” Josh said over his shoulder. “Be there or don’t. Honestly, though, I’d come if I were you. She wanted to see you pretty bad, and standing Her up might piss Her off enough to drown you both.”

  “We’ll be there,” I said.

  * * *

  “Have I told you how much I hate the idea of getting anywhere near the Rusalka?” Sparx’s voice was muffled by my backpack and several layers of thermal blanket. Even at noon the temperature was down around five below zero, and the breeze coming off the river was brutal despite the bridge support I’d chosen as a windbreak.

  “Only about eleven thousand times.” I patted the pack gently—easy enough to do since I was wearing it on my front this time.

  “Well, call this number eleven thousand and one. She’s too dangerous for the likes of you and me. It’s unnatural, like mice having tea and cookies with a cat.”

  “It sounded to me like the kind of invitation that’s more dangerous to refuse than it is to accept.”

  Sparx sighed. “There is that to consider.”

  “Why do you suppose Josh called Her Ms. Sippi?”

  The top of the backpack unzipped itself and Sparx stuck his head out, his expression indignant. “We’re about to risk skin and soul to deal with the most dangerous water spirit anywhere this side of Lake Superior, and that’s what you’re wondering about?”

  “Yeah. What people choose to call themselves and each other matters. It can tell you all sorts of things about respect and self-image and personal and group identity. I mean, is She calling Herself that? Or is it just Josh? Or what? This stuff is important.”

  Sparx’s eyes caught fire for a second—literally—but then he took a deep breath and pushed it out. “Riiiight. I keep forgetting you’ve been corrupted by the crunchy-granola types who run that hippie school of yours, and that you’re completely serious when you say things like that.”

  “Of course.” I nodded. “So, back to my original question: Why Ms. Sippi?”

  “Because She’s no one’s Missus,” said a voice from the brush down closer to the river. Josh followed his words out into the open a moment later.

  “What’s that?” I pointed at the long, narrow pack he had hanging over one shoulder, its strap cutting deeply into the material of his parka.

  “Door knocker.”

  “Huh?” I didn’t get it.

  “You’ll see. Come on.” He started out onto the bridge.

  “Eleven thousand and two,” grumbled Sparx. He was visibly shivering, but he didn’t pull his head back into the bag.

  Warily, I fell in behind Josh. My reluctance was half because of the icy winds and half sheer terror. I might not have been willing to follow Sparx’s advice on this one, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t listening to him and scared six ways from Sunday about the whole thing. Heck, I was scared enough that I’d written a note to my mom and mailed it off to Dave to give to her if I didn’t come back. Pretty soon we were out over the middle of the Mississippi. For only the second time that I could remember, it had completely frozen over all the way through downtown.

  “What if someone sees us up here?” For anyone looking we’d show up pretty well as two little black specks in a sea of ice-white.

  “Won’t happen,” replied Josh. “I’ve covered us in a seeming of snow.”

  “Seeming?” I asked.

  “A type of illusion,” said Sparx, taking on what I’d come to think of as his “teacher tone.” “A lot of water magic plays with light and reflection.”

  “Here.” Josh stopped walking so suddenly that I almost bumped into him.

  “Why?” I couldn’t see any differences in the snow blanketing the river below us.

  “Weak place in the ice. Hang on.” He shrugged off his pack and pulled out a half-dozen pieces of rebar that had been taped into a tight bundle that tapered to a point at one end.

  My heart jumped in my chest like it was trying to get out, and I said the first thing that came into my head in hopes of putting things off a little longer. “You’re not going to drop that off the bridge, are you?”

  “Duh.” Josh looked at me like I was some kind of idiot. “Gotta break the ice so we can talk to Herself.”

  “From up here?”

  “Wouldn’t go through if we dropped it from down there.” He pointed at the ice. “And we wouldn’t want to do it that way even if we could.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s plenty of spots you could break through the ice with a decent hammer, but none of them are close enough to shore or over the gentler channels. The farther you get from calm waters, the harder a time She has treating you as a person.”

  “As opposed to?” My voice actually squeaked a bit then, but I hardly noticed.

  “A toy.” Josh’s words came out as flat and cold as a sheet of ice.

  Sparx flicked his ears against my chin. “She’s one of the great elementals, boy, and nothing like human—infinitely less so than I or even the deepest sort of delver.” He pointed at Josh. “She cares for you, does She not?”

  He nodded. “I believe so.”

  “But you would no more venture out on that thinner ice alone than you would with us along, for fear that Her nature might overcome Her urge to nurture. Am I right?”

  “She’s still better than my parents. She warns me where the ice is thin. But this is all wasting time.” Without another word, he picked up the rebar bundle and dropped it off the bridge point-first.

  It hit with a sullen thunk and barely slowed as it punched through the ice and vanished into the darkness and the deep. As it went through, a fountain of black water shot upward. It should have stopped rising within a few feet. Instead, it kept right on climbing, taking on subtle shape and form as it did so. By the time it came level with our position on the bridge it had assumed the appearance of a beautiful woman’s head and torso attached to a long and fishy tail, like the body of an enormous eel. Minnows flickered in the depths of her head and chest like silver coins amid green weeds.

  She reached out and touched my cheek, my chin, my nose. Her hand burned cold where it touched my skin, and when I looked into Her eyes all I could see was a terrible, churning hunger. I tried to speak, but when I opened my mouth water filled it.

  I was drowning.

  14

  Drowning Season

  WHEN I WAS four or five—after my dad left but before Oscar—my mother took me up north to visit my grandmother at some family friend’s lake house. I spent much of the afternoon in the water, chasing tiny sunfish through the shallows. I was having the time of my life until I hit the drop-off where the swift little stream that fed the lake had gouged out a deeper channel.

  One moment, I was running along in water that rarely came up past my knees. The next, I was under it. Reflex opened my mouth in a scream and physics filled it with water. I panicked, thrashing wildly. I was too young for my brain to really process the possibilit
y that I could die, but my lungs and gut had no such issues. My body thought I was going to go under and never come up again. It understood drowning.

  If the water had been deeper, I might have done just that, because I’d been playing safely for hours, and that meant my mother and grandmother were paying less attention than they probably should have been. In my panicked flailing, I put a foot down on the bottom. More by reflex than planning I pushed off hard and my head broke through the surface. I caught my first breath of air since going under and started coughing and shrieking … and kept right on shrieking and coughing as my feet touched down again in water that was barely deep enough to reach my ribs.

  My grandmother was there seconds later, scooping me up onto her hip and soothing me with gentle words and gentler hands. She carried me back to where my mother stood on the shore looking utterly lost and half a scared child herself as the tears streamed down her cheeks.

  I reached out toward her as we got closer. “It’s all right, Mommy. I’m fine.”

  I wasn’t. Not in my heart. I was coughing and still terrified, but she looked soooo lost, and I knew she needed to hear that I was going to be okay. That she needed me to reassure her. I lost something in that moment, something that I have a hard time talking about even now. I lost the sense of security that comes with knowing your mom can protect you from the world. Because, in that instant, I could see that the world was more than my mother could handle without help. I’ve been trying to protect her ever since.

  It changed the way I see the world and left me with a lifelong suspicion of deep water. My grandmother paid for me to take swimming lessons after that, and my mother made me go until I was good at it. But I’ve still got a down-in-the-bones fear of drowning, and the Rusalka’s touch brought the whole thing back in one terrifying instant.

  I think I screamed. I know I wanted to, and my throat was raw afterward. But that might have come from getting a mouthful of thirty-three-degree Mississippi River water. A very brief mouthful since She pulled Her hand away in an instant, but more than enough to send me into a complete freak-out. Leaping backward, I caught my heel on one of the rails and went down hard.