February Thaw (4 page)

"Water!"

Alynne shrugged and blew a bubble. "Close enough."

*

Burning around the lock did, indeed, set the door on fire, but after Carlene had moved up by the ceiling and safely out of the way, a bucket of water put it out again.

"Could I put you out with this?"

"No. I'd just burn the oxygen in the water. I’m not
a
fire, I
am
fire."

Alynne shoved the bucket back under the laundry room sink. "Then why'd I have to wait until you moved out of the way?"

"Carlene didn't want to get wet."

"But you're Carlene."

"I know."

"Girlfriend, you need help."

"That's why we're here."

"Right." Shoving the door open with the toe of her boot, Alynne moved cautiously into the workshop.

"You can turn on the light. This room has no windows."

The four banks of three foot fluorescent bulbs temporarily blinded human eyes, but had no effect on Carlene. She swooped slowly around the cluttered room, lightly touching down on the worn chair pulled up close to the furnace vent, on a coffee mug still holding an inch of cold liquid, and on an old, stained apron.

"You miss your mom, don't you?" Alynne asked softly from the threshold.

"Yeah." This time she didn't protest the relationship. "It's funny; in spite of all the junk in here, this room seems empty without Beth puttering about, or sitting reading, or blowing something up. She summoned me back in 1859, when she needed a really hot and precise burn and we got to talking, you know the way you do, about combustion rates and stuff, and then the next time she summoned me, it was just to talk. I think she was lonely. I was her only companion for over a hundred years before she gave me flesh."

"Why? Was she was the last of her kind?"

"No, there's other wizards. They just don't get along." Carlene snorted, a tiny tendril of flame flicking in and out. "A group of wizards together is called an argument."

"Like a flock of geese?"

"Amazingly similar."

Carefully picking her way around stacks of ancient tomes, worn copies of Reader’s Digest, and piles of boxes labelled,
National Geographic: HEAVY!
Alynne made her way to the stained wooden table in the centre of the room. Unlike every other horizontal surface in the workshop, it held only two things; an enormous crystal ball on a gleaming brass base and a bulging loose leaf binder. "It looks like Beth wrote everything down," she said, flipping the binder open. "Hey, in 1968 you could buy a loaf of bread for twenty-seven cents and you could exchange six ounces of virgin's blood for a quarter pound of dragon's liver. Probably not at the same store..."

Picking up one of the loose pages, she squinted at the crabbed handwriting. "So what do you want me to do? Find her original recipe and follow it again?"

"I don't think it's going to be that easy." Discovering that the old steel brazier had been set up for use, Carlene settled into it.

"Why not?"

"First of all, you couldn't follow a recipe unless it lead you to Chinese take-out. Second, you're not a wizard and these things are a lot more complicated than they seem."

"Well, duh." Tapping the edges more or less square, Alynne closed the binder and turned to face the pale flame slowly consuming charcoal briquettes. "So why am I here?"

"I need you to summon the other wizards."

"Cool." She grinned and reached for the crystal ball. "I always wanted to take one of these babies out for a spin."

"Not with that." Carlene flared briefly blue again. "We have to find her address book."

*

The metal utility shelves along one wall of the workshop weren't as much crowded as they were stuffed. Old margarine tubs of troll parings were pressed up against tubs of gooseberry jam were pressed up against tubs of...

"Whoa! This is not oregano." Pulling a surgical glove from her pocket, Alynne filled it, tied off the wrist and stuffed it back out of sight. "I always wondered why your mother was so mellow."

"I think it may be more pertinent to wonder why you're wandering around with a pair of surgical gloves."

"Not a pair, just one."

"Oh, well, that's different." Wishing she still had eyes to roll, Carlene continued her own search.

"Hey, can I have this unicorn horn?"

"If you promise not to use it on Richard."

"Cross my heart."

"Or David, or Amend, or Bruce."

Pouting, Alynne tossed the two foot long, spiralled horn back onto the shelf. "Are you even sure the address book is here?"

"It was in 1972."

"That’s the last time you saw it?"

"I was never allowed in here as a human child."

"Hate to break it to you, girlfriend, but you haven't been a child for a while now. How'd she keep you out as an adult?"

"She was a wizard."

"Oh, yeah."

Fire saw the world as variations on a fuel source. Magical items, being both highly flammable and completely inflammable gave off a unique signature. In any other room, Carlene could have found the address book in less time than it would take her to initiate pyrolysis. In this room, it could take hours.

Hours passed.

"I am
so
bored." Sitting on the floor, surrounded by unboxed magazines, Alynne listlessly dumped a Slinky from hand to hand. "You know
my
mother kept
her
address book by the telephone."

"Beth wasn't my mother and she certainly wasn't yours." Irritated enough to be burning almost orange, Carlene blistered paint across the front of a shelf as she tried to work out where the book could be. It had to be in the workshop because there was nothing magical in the rest of the house, but it wasn't on the shelves and it wasn't in the boxes. "Wizards know when they’re going to die. She should’ve been prepared!"

"Anger." Alynne nodded wisely. "Comes after denial. Then there's grief, acceptance and something else."

"Sneezy, Grumpy, or Doc?"

"Just trying to help."

"Then find the address book!"

"Fine." Rolling up onto her feet, Alynne stretched to the limits of the Grateful Dead T-shirt and ambled over toward the armchair. "Why do you want to have a body again anyway? You're fire. You rock!"

"No, that would be earth." Carlene settled back down into the brazier. "And while being fire doesn't totally suck, I'd never be able to eat ice cream again, or have sex, or watch television."

"Sequentially or simultaneously?"

"Does it matter?"

Alynne shrugged. "Just curious."

"I want to be able to walk in the rain, feel clean sheets against my skin, keep doing all the things I took for granted for so long."

"You hated walking in the rain. You said it made your hair frizzy." Kneeling in the armchair, Alynne lifted a tangled pile of dried herbs off the phone, lifted up one end of the old black rotary machine, and pulled a small leather-bound book out from under it. "Is this what we've been looking for?"

The steel bowl of the brazier pinged as it expanded in the sudden heat. "You know, you're a really irritating person."

Alynne's smile could only be described as smug. "I'll accept that as the compliment you intended it to be."

*

The address book updated automatically. All but one of the eight wizards listed had a phone number, six had email accounts, and three had fax numbers. The eighth had only a three word address – New York City.

"Sometimes wizards have trouble fitting in," Colleen explained, hovering over the book and trying not to set her friend's hair on fire. "They can't cope with being so incredibly different and they finally snap."

"We're talking a street wizard here? Eating out of dumpsters, sleeping on vents, freaking out the tourists?" Alynne's lip curled. "That sucks. You've got unimaginable powers and you're eating someone else's spit off used pizza crusts."

"And thank you for that image. Just dial the first number."

"There's no name."

"Of course not. Names have power. Wizards don't give them out to just anyone."

"The number's in Sweden. What if this wizard doesn't speak English?"

"It's a wizard; just dial."

Dialling involved rather a great many numbers, including a few Carlene hadn't seen for the last twenty-four years. Alynne either didn't notice, or didn't care that there were suddenly numbers between eight and nine. But then, in all the years they'd known each other, Carlene could only remember Alynne actually taken aback once – after a grade eight track meet when Tommy Elliot had stripped off his sweaty T-shirt and spontaneously...

"Rude bastard didn't even say hello." Alynne's announcement dragged Carlene's attention back to the present. "He's demanding to know who I am and why I'm using this phone. Sexy accent though." She turned her mouth back to the phone. "Hey, say that you knew our passion was doomed from the start. Why? Because I’ve always wanted to hear that from a man with a sexy Swedish accent." Her fingers tightened around the receiver. "Yeah? Same to you and your mother!"

"Alynne!"

"Should you be burning that colour?"

Carlene got herself under control just as a number of magazine pages began to curl. "Tell him Beth Aswith is dead."

"He says he knows."

"Tell him that while she was alive, she gave a fire elemental a body."

"He says he knows and when she died it returned to fire."

"Tell him it's still around and it wants another body."

"He says that's impossible and that you don't exist and then he called me something that probably wasn’t an endearment and he hung up." Holding down the button with one finger, she pointed the receiver at the smouldering edge of the worktable. "Should I put that out before I call the next number?"

*

Six of the other seven wizards were even less inclined to believe or help. The seventh's line was busy.

Carlene thought over everything she knew about wizards and, had she a mouth, she would have smiled. As it was, she burned a bundle of lavender. "They must be calling each other."

"And that's good?" Alynne asked, waving the heavily scented smoke away.

"Oh yeah. They know someone's in Beth's workshop."

"That's bad?"

"Well, they can't just leave you here, there's dangerous stuff lying around."

"Oh yeah, I could really give someone a major hernia asking them to lift those boxes of
National Geographic
. So one of them's going to show up?"

"No,
all
of them. They can't leave you here, but they don't trust each other not to try and rip off Beth's spellbook, making the rippee significantly more powerful than the others 'cause he or she would then have access to all Beth's spells as well as their own. Wizards maintain a very delicate balance of power."

"And once they're all here, they'll give you a body?"

Carlene burned brighter. "They may not want to, but I'm sure we’ll figure out a way to light a fire under them."

*

The only uncluttered area in the room was on top of the workbench so that's where all seven wizards appeared – four women and three men of various races, every one of them looking annoyed. The crowded conditions resulted in a lot of pushing and shoving and the experience didn't improve their moods.

Carlene finally ended the bickering by moving just a little too close to a flask of mentholated essence.

The magical resonance of the explosion faded into a stunned silence broken by Alynne's impressed observation. "Cool. Cough drops."

Seven jaws dropped. Seven right hands rose and traced the sign of banishment.

Carlene felt herself flicker, felt the pull of pure burning, and suddenly remembered that in spite of syndication on three networks, she'd still never seen the episode of
Friends
where Rachel moves into Monica's apartment and loses the big hair and she wasn't going anywhere until she had.

Seven sets of silver brows drew down.

"That should have worked," a small Asian woman muttered, staring down at her hand in confusion.

Burning a little more oxygen, Carlene danced forward. "You have to know something before you can banish it."

"We
know
fire."

"Yeah, but you don’t know me."

A tall man in a turban sniffed disdainfully. "It is clear you have been corrupted by human thoughts and feelings."

"Well, duh."

"You should never have been given a body," declared a blond man hiding most of his face behind impressive whiskers. "In creating you, Beth Aswith created a perversion."

"Perversion!"

Alynne leaned away from the sudden heat. "Have you, like, really considered the consequences of making her angry."

One hand clutching the smoking edges of his beard, the blond man added weakly, "And, quite frankly, we have no idea how she did it."

*

"We have found the spell." The tall man in the turban moved out of the clump of wizards, spellbook open across his hands. "But we still do not understand it."

"No, no, no!" The Asian woman snatched the book from him. "We understand it. We just can't repeat it."

"Oh, you understand it, yah?" asked the bearded wizard, grabbing the book in turn. He snapped it shut. "There is nothing to understand. She has left out whole sections."

"She leave out only basics," someone back in the pack announced. "If you study basics..."

"Basically, you're an idiot!"

It degenerated into a seven part shouting match fairly quickly after that.

"If you're going to have to blow something up again..." Alynne tossed another piece of charcoal into the brazier. "...could you wait until I cover my pudding cup? The last time you got their attention, you dusted ash over my sandwich."

*

"We have decided..." An indeterminate noise caused the bearded wizard to pause and glance back at the semi-circle of wizards behind him. "We have
all
decided," he began again, returning his attention to Carlene. "That since we can not banish you, we had best do as you wish and contain you. We have figured out the spell, but there is a problem, yah?"