Blue Magic (45 page)

CHASING THE HORIZON SEEMED
a fool’s errand by the time Astrid had crested two hillsides’ worth of the vitagua-slick mud, but for the first time in months, she had nothing better to do. Across the real, she had ringers engaged in rescues, pitching in where they could, reconnecting with her scattered volunteers.

Here, in the unreal, she felt comfortable and centered. There were only a few voices left among the grumbles, the murmur of the well’s various chanters, Dad included. The clearest of the voices was her own. After a year with a chorus in her head, she was alone, mostly, with her thoughts.

She left Will to his kids, left Ev to his camp on Assateague Island, and explored the altered landscape.

Her first discovery was the statue of her father.

Dad and the other chanters had been columns of solid vitagua, but now he seemed to be made of white stone. He stood among a flock of intricately carved sparrows, tall and heroic. Astrid touched the statue, sensing him within. He’d been worried, both Before and during the Spill. That concern was gone now; affection and pride were what remained.

Nearby, a familiar form was melting liquid rills of stone from another block, carving out an image of Lee Glade.

“Jacks?”

He turned, coals banking in his eyes. The belly wound was there, smoking and glowing bright orange. A creature, no less a ghost than she, and Astrid’s resolve weakened.

Then he smiled, and it was Jacks’s old smile.

Astrid took a step, thinking to throw herself at him, but Jacks put out a warning hand. Extending one fingertip, he touched her. The contact sizzled painfully.

“Crap,” she said, jerking back.

Jacks laughed. “So you died too?”

Joy swelled within her. “We all died.”

“I was afraid it might play out that way.”

Together, they stared at the mud flats. “Olive’s on the East Coast with Pop. I’ll bring her. She wants—she misses you.”

He nodded, giving her that penetrating glance she remembered so well.

“I missed you too.”

He beamed, leaning on his marble pillar. “What about Sahara?”

“We all died,” Astrid repeated.

“Died like ordinary people, or half died, like you and me?”

“I didn’t have a chance to save her; Will would’ve said…” She frowned. “You heard about Will?”

“You told me.” He brightened a fingertip to molten heat, melting a rill of rock out of the sculpture. “You and he ‘sort of have a romance going.’”

“It’s complicated.”

“Because you’re dead?”

“More … I think his ex-wife got his kids to hate me.”

“You, a stepmother.”

“Don’t laugh. I’m sure not having any kids of my own now.”

“You always wanted children.” His expression was clear: nothing hidden, no resentment. “It’s okay, Astrid. With you and me in this state, we can’t pick up where we left off.”

And there’s Katarina,
she thought, remembering something she’d said … or would say. Her mouse heart triphammered. “I’m sorry, Jacks, about everything.”

But he didn’t seem angry, just happy to see her, and maybe a little resigned.

Jacks and Katarina … her and Will. But not forever, she thought. Jacks was fire now, she was fluid; the others were flesh and bone, and time would affect them all differently. “I mentioned it was complicated, right?”

Jacks mimed tweaking her nose, coming short of actual contact. “We just blew the world to crap. Do you need to sort out our personal life right this second?”

“Still the voice of reason, are you?”

“Yep.” He reached for a pile of stone chips, melting them to putty, adding them to his statue. “Relax, it’ll be okay.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“It’s already okay, remember?” he said.

And it was. Across the world, at a hundred different rescue sites, Astrid’s ringers stopped working, turning their faces up to the sky.

She had made it, despite everything, to After—and now that she had arrived, she even knew what it was. All After meant, she saw, was the point where things were going to get better instead of worse.

CHAPTER FIFTY

THE NEXT DAY, EV
Lethewood buried his daughter’s mortal remains, laying them in a rowboat and sending it out to sea.

Thousands came to see her off: Roused, a couple lapsed Alchemites, volunteers from the Springs, even strangers. The mood was solemn but not funereal, and nobody made any speeches. What did you say, after all, when the guest of honor might ooze out of thin air at any moment to join the ceremony?

They gathered silently, and people threw flowers into the boat until it was full. Ev used a chantment Will had given him to send the boat on its way. Everyone in the crowd gave up a little of their vitality, as a thank-you.

After it had vanished from view, they dug clams, made a bonfire, and danced until the tide went out. It was late when Ev walked Patience to her tent.

He didn’t stay. His transformation was too far gone, and he was more goat than man. Olive kept healing him, pushing the insanity back, but Everett Burke was lurking.

“Take care, old man,” Patience said, kissing his forehead between the horns.

Tipping a hat he wasn’t wearing, Ev strolled away.

He prowled the camp, listening to the snores and barks of the contaminated, the rush of the sea. Sand slid underfoot. Without a mailbag on his hip, his gait felt unbalanced.

He heard something—scuttling.

Ev followed the sound, rapid tip-tapping footsteps with—so said his detective’s instincts—a furtive tone to them. They came from the camp’s improvised compost pit, and as he neared it, he heard clicks and gabbles.

Starlings.

A shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds, revealing hunter and quarry to each other. It was a woman. Short, stocky, and pale, she was clad in feathers and surrounded by flint-eyed birds. She had Sahara’s hair and talons, and he’d caught her filching half-eaten corn cobs from the pile.

One of the Alchemites’ blood sacrifices, Ev deduced: a contaminated believer who thinks she’s Sahara Knax.

His gut clenched as he thought of the children of Indigo Springs—Mark, Jacks, Sahara, and Astrid herself. All gone.

“Do you still like pickles?” he asked her, on impulse. “I could scare some up.”

It wasn’t much of a peace offering, was it? Apparently not enough—the woman scuttled into the night, chirping.

Ev was about to follow, when something shifted under his skin. Heat washed through him, an unpleasant reminder of menopause. For a second, he thought he might vomit. Then the fuzziness that had blanketed him since Albert’s death—the mulishness, the lost sense of himself, even Burke’s sense of drama—dropped away.

Ev was himself, truly himself, for the first time in his life.

The rosarite band around his forearm quivered, then broke, falling in shivers to the sand. A second later, the goat horns fell too, leaving his forehead exposed and raw.

Across the camp, the Roused were crying out as their bodies shifted and became human.

Patience was out of her tent, calling for him. “It’s the curse! Astrid must have broken it.”

“Wasn’t me,” came a voice: Astrid’s otter-ringer put up her head. “Olive put that marshal, Juanita, on it.”

“A woman will break the curse,” Ev said. “All this time, I thought it was you or Patience.”

“I can’t be responsible for every little thing, can I?”

“’Bout time you learned that.” Ev clapped the ringer on the shoulder, nearly knocking it over. “What now?”

“Anything you want,” Astrid said. “Will and I are rebuilding Pucker—”

A triumphant, inhuman shriek interrupted her.

Unlike the others, who were molting their feathers and shedding their fur, rubbing off their reptile scales to reveal human flesh beneath, Teoquan was growing. He stood flat-footed on the ocean, becoming bigger and bigger, a giant. His red skin became crimson. Colors shifted beneath it, and Ev was briefly reminded of an octopus.

Then with a howl, he was gone, rising to the clouds, staining water and sky alike with bloody color.

“What in the name of Sam was that?” Ev demanded.

“T’axet,” Patience said. “Haida God of violent death.”

“You knew?”

“I charmed it out of him one day.”

“A god? How?”

“The curse turned the infected into lower forms of life. Humans became animals, animals devolved. Gods…”

“Became human?”

“Human-ish, anyway.”

“Violent death? What’s he going to do now that he’s freed?”

“Relax, Ev,” Patience said. “T’axet’s a duality. Everyone’s loose now, all the gods. His better half should turn up soon. Or he’ll deify some nice girl and settle down.”

“I’m not following you,” Astrid said.

“There’s a goddess of peaceful death. She’ll balance him out.”

“How many Native gods did the Small Bang release?” Ev asked.

“World’s changed, Ev: we all have to adjust,” Patience said. “But remember what you said to your kid? Teo’s not your problem. Really, he never was.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT
about sunrise, a squad of Ukrainian soldiers did a sweep through Pripet. Their captain was a stolid, sensible-seeming fellow, and he recognized Juanita from the broadcasts of Sahara’s trial. When he offered to take Gilead off her hands, she agreed readily—what else was she going to do with him? If the various magicians or the American government decided they wanted him, they could extradite. In the meantime, Ukrainian jail was as good a place as she could think of for a murderer.

She packed away Gilead’s book of Fyreman prophecies and his last two potions and hitched a ride south to Kiev, keeping her eyes peeled for blackberry archways that never materialized. A refugee camp came together outside the city: she bartered her first aid skills for a bed, shower, and a meal.

There were English and Spanish speakers among the displaced, and she was able to glean bits of news. The magical cloud had spread worldwide. Plants and animals were changing, but less dramatically—everything seemed less violent, less dangerous. People weren’t turning into beasts anymore.

There had been earthquakes and tornadoes and fires, rains of spiders, stampedes by giant monsters and chemical spills, but many of these stories had the same happy ending. The danger had manifested … and then someone had stepped forward, armed with magic, prepared to blunt its effects. Dozens of Astrid’s volunteers and more than a few Alchemites had died in the rescues. Others survived, along with the people they’d sheltered.

A dozen versions of what had happened that last day in Indigo Springs were spreading.

Lethewood saved us,
Juanita thought.
I wish she’d lived long enough to know.

That night, in dreams, she found her brother. He had abandoned the perpetual beach party and was queued in a long line of servicemen, journalists, and lapsed Alchemites who were moving through the endless, improbable lobby of a mostly Victorian dream-house. He lit up when he saw her.

“Nita!” He opened his arms.

She bounded into the embrace, fighting, as always, to be the one who lifted him. They tussled and then, dreams being dreams, ended up afloat above the pink flowered carpet.

“Gracias a Diosque estás salvada!”

“You been worried about me?” She laughed.

“Folks here talk,” he replied. “Terrible things happening, disasters, our families … there’s a thousand horror stories.”

“It hasn’t been as bad as it probably sounds,” she said.

“It sounds horrific, Nita. I haven’t seen anyone.…”

“What? Mamá, Lucinda, nobody?”

“Nobody.”

The jolt of fear was enough to bounce her out of sleep. She rolled over, groping for her threadbare blanket, and caught a gabble of excited voices outside her tent.

“What’s going on?” She went outside.

“Kiev airport is reopening,” one of the other refugees told her. “We’re packing up.”

She said a quick good-bye to the head of the infirmary and joined the clot of foreigners trudging out to the terminal to see if it was true, if they could fly home.

She had gone only a few miles when someone walked up beside her: Astrid Lethewood.

Juanita stopped short—so fast, she almost fell.

“I startle you?” Astrid said.

“Depends. Am I still asleep?”

“Nope.”

“I saw you die.”

“I died,” Astrid agreed. “Think of me as a kind of robust ghost.”

“Robust?”

“Tough? Juicy? Potent?”

“You want to cut right to virile?”

“I’m not flirting this time, honest.”

“Good, because I definitely don’t date
dead
magicians.”

“I still sort of have something going with Will Forest.”

“Still only sort of?”

That got a rueful grin from Astrid. “We’re a sorry pair, you and I.”

“Sorry you died, anyway,” Juanita said, deflecting. “So … you know what happened to Sahara?”

“You did the right thing. She would have killed everyone on the platform.”

“I wasn’t expecting hell to break loose afterwards.”

“Boy, do I know what that’s like,” Astrid said. “Poor Sahara.”

Juanita said, “You’re very forgiving, aren’t you?”

“I can afford to be. I won, remember?”

“Did you? You’re dead.”

“Dead-ish, yeah, but lots of other people made it.”

“Silver linings, huh?”

“My dad was always big on looking for the upside. Besides, you forgave Sahara too, in your way.”

She hadn’t considered it. “I suppose I may have.”

Refugees were sliding glances their way—everyone must know who Astrid was. “Any chance you’ll get that gate thing of yours up and running soon?”

“The Roused took it over,” Astrid said. “They’ve negotiated deals with a bunch of governments, including the one here. There’s a gate at the airport. You can take it where you like.”