Indigo Springs (15 page)

“Remember how she killed that rabbit?”

I nod.

“Well, she was still doing it. Bringing home pigeons, rats, rabbits. Once in a while it’d be a barn owl, a fox.”

“A fox?” I whistle incredulously.

“I know. Plus the vitagua was still flowing from the fissure in the mantel. Once a day we’d pop the hollow brick out of the hearth and siphon the droplets into a jar. We got a few drops a day, sometimes less.”

“So little?”

“Yes. The big splash that first day had built up over the year since Albert’s death.”

How much vitagua had Astrid poured into my wedding ring? A half cup? “If the flow was so modest, you ought to have been able to catch up.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She laughs bitterly. “We’d constructed our whole lives around the vitagua spring. A couple drops a day. It should have been easy.”

Managing the magic was simplicity itself.

Sahara had a gift for secrecy and intrigue. She was the one who suggested Astrid take up driving as a volunteer for the local secondhand store, picking up unwanted junk from big-hearted Springers and searching the castoffs for chantable items before delivering the rest. It was Sahara who found hard-luck cases in news stories on the Internet, who tracked down their addresses and matched chantments to their needs. Jacks dumped packages in post offices all over the county. Nobody was the wiser.

“We’re getting behind,” Dad had told her
.

The memory came back to her as Astrid was thinning foxgloves at Percy Heath’s, pulling up just enough to make the flowers look—as the old farmer put it—“like they come up wild.” In the memory flash, she had been about thirteen and achy with cramps from one of her first menstrual periods.

“Behind?” she’d said, feeling disaffected, resentful.

“Too much vitagua, not enough sparkly things. I gotta find more—or risk making a few biggies. Pressure’s increasing, see?” He rubbed dirty hands through his hair. “I can’t keep up, Bundle. Even if I make two chantments a week instead of one, I have to find ’em homes. Your ma’s starting to think I’m shooting her paycheck up my arm….”

They were alone in a big commercial greenhouse, facing each other across flats of newly sprouted garden vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, dill, glossy plants with leaves unmarred by age, dust, or insects. Albert was wearing a grubby white-and-red T-shirt, looking the part of town derelict. Astrid wore the uniform of her early teens—rugby pants, tank top, and ball cap.

“Tell her the truth,” Astrid said.

“She’d be in danger…she’d be a danger. We don’t know how the witch-burners find chanters, Astrid. Everyone my granny ever told died, but for me. My other two apprentices too.” He paced, anguished. “We’re the mice hiding in the corner, Bun. Nobody notices us.”

“If you tell Ma, she’ll stop being so mad at you.”

“And if someone notices that, and wonders why?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk it, baby.”

“Let me talk to the vitagua. Maybe there’s a way.”

“I don’t want you carrying too much spirit water.”

“If you won’t let me be a chanter, we might as well both quit.”

He sighed; she’d said this before. “Bun…”

“Why?”

“You gotta learn to be careful.” He stroked a  spinach leaf. “You’d tell Ma, let someone get contaminated—”

“I have not!”

“We got to keep people away from the raw magic. Even before it got pressed together and concentrated, a little spirit water went a long way. A little splash to make a medicine woman, shaman, prophet, whatever you call her. Even then it drove them mad sometimes….”

Astrid sighed, bored.

“Listen, Bun. With the crude stuff, even a drop’s too much. Granny told of people growing horns, killing people with just a thought, bringing down hurricanes—an’ all of them became lunatics before the witch-burners got them.”

“Say I do contaminate someone,” she broke in. “Couldn’t I just fix ’em?”

Albert led her behind the greenhouse to a couple of outdoor sinks, washing the dirt off his hands. He was thinking about it, Astrid could see, thinking hard. Would he finally let her show him something?

Hope rose in her—and then was dashed as he filled a glass with water. He drank half in three gulps. Then he upended it, spilling out the rest.

“Look,” he said. “Water’s gone, but the glass is still wet.”

“Use a rag and dry it.”

“There’d still be a bit of water on the glass,” he said. “Residue. Only way to really dry it off—to get all the liquid off it—is to let it evaporate naturally. That’s something a person can’t do. Understand?”

She shook her head.

“Vitagua, it lies in your bones. If we can’t dry water off a cup…”

“Dad, let me experiment.”

“No. Please, kid, do things the way Granny taught me.”

“I could change the rules,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Make it evaporate—make everything different, Dad.”

Albert had gone pale. His voice, when his mouth stopped flapping, was terrified. “Don’t hope for that, Astrid. You don’t want to live through that, I mean it.”

The recollection ended there, leaving Astrid headachy and morose.

That night Jacks was out playing poker while Astrid and Sahara hosted a dinner for Sahara’s old school pals. The following evening they all went to a movie with Olive and her new boyfriend, a Korean-American hippie named Thunder. She crawled through both evenings in a haze of headachy pain.

That Saturday morning, she found the cat dragging a mangled Scottish terrier up the steps.

“Oh Henna, no,” she said, horrified. She looked both ways for witnesses before she took up the cat, stroking her until she was relaxed and purring. Gingerly she edged the magic pocketknife out of her jeans, nicking the dog before anyone could come by and spot the corpse. It crumbled to a smelly pile of dust and bones.

“Come on inside,” she said wearily, cuddling the triumphant cat all the way to her room. Henna’s legs were unusually long; the pads of her toes elongated into proto-fingers that curled amid fur mittens.

Astrid, her stomach churning, laid the purring animal on the bed. Time to improvise.

“This’ll work, Dad,” she murmured. Listening hard, she picked a suggestion out of the musical, grumbling hum inside her head, pulling on the magic within her. Vitagua welled up her throat like a wet fist, cutting off air. Fluid bubbled around her tongue, a cold stew aboil, blue and frothy, behind her teeth.

She gagged. Vitagua was in her sinuses, popping as if it were carbonated. Her ear was ringing, her right eye leaking tears again. A muscle in her cheek twitched.

Sorry, cat, she thought. She tried to be subtle as she pinned Henna’s legs down. But feline danger sense had kicked in; the tabby yowled and struggled with more than animal strength. Her back leg scissored through bedclothes and jeans to lay open Astrid’s leg above the knee. Astrid tried to adjust her grip, and a swinging forepaw tore one of the pillows into foamy shreds.

Bite her, the grumbles urged. Astrid pressed her blue, boiling mouth against the body of the struggling cat. Her teeth—was it illusion, or were they sharper?—combed through the fur even as the fluid clogged against her lips. Her canines found flesh, and while Astrid had imagined struggling even to pierce the cat’s skin, her jaws reacted instinctively, squeezing hard.

Draw it, came the grumble. She imagined vitagua pouring through the cuts and pulled—too hard.

Henna yowled and Astrid felt something tearing. Then a bolt of cold unflavor hit her throat. Neither blood nor water, it punched her backwards. Her aching head smacked the wall, crunching the dragon earring against the plaster.

As Henna darted free, Astrid was overtaken by another rush of paranoia. Sahara would abandon her…soon.

Fluffed out and haughtily furious, Henna balked at the closed door of the bedroom. Sobbing, Astrid crept forward and caught the animal. She writhed furiously, just a cat again, easily held. Four seeping blue-lined punctures…

…the residue, Astrid thought…

…lined the cat’s back, buried under the thick fur, the only evidence of the bite.

“But you’re better,” she wept, examining Henna’s apparently normal paws.

From her glare, Henna had a different opinion.

“It doesn’t have to fall apart,” she told the cat. “If I know it’s going to happen, I can change it.”

The door banged. “Yoo hoo, Sleeping Beauty, busy day ahead! I’ve brought contraband!”

“Contraband?” Dashing the tears away, Astrid gave herself a mental shake. Sahara wasn’t leaving. The grumbles were just playing games with her insecurities.

She’s going, they replied. She’s practically gone.

The door flew open. Sahara pranced in, bearing a long platter piled high with meat and cheese: sliced salami, steaming sausages, dolmades, olives, and Swiss cheese. “His Vegan Holiness is off getting a start on the Sistine Mural and we’re going to eat animal flesh.”

“Jacks never said you couldn’t bring meat home.”

“True.” Sahara waved the platter. “He just exploits my inborn laziness by cooking all the time.”

“Fiendish.” Astrid took a slice of salami, turned away, and shoved the vitagua deep into her body. She flashed her teeth at the mirror to confirm the blue stains were gone; only then could she bite into the meat.

“Shall we go over our agenda for the day, milady?”

Astrid nodded, setting down the tray on a bloodstain she had only just noticed. Her lacerated leg burned, and she flipped the torn pillow to cover the tear in her jeans.

“First, you and I go on the weekly junk run, acquiring resellable crap for the community’s underprivileged shoppers.” Sahara reached out, twisting the dragon earring so its coils lined up. The ear burned; Astrid blushed.

“After we fish out anything you want to chant, we take Mrs. Skye to her doctor’s on Spirit Valley Road. While she’s getting poked and prodded, we go stroke the Ego known as Jacks Glade by admiring his masterpiece in progress.”

“Doctor’s appointment?”

“If Mrs. Skye doesn’t see her doctor once a month, Lilla the wicked stepniece sweeps in and takes her house.”

“I thought you got her a carpool.”

“To work, yes.” Sahara waved a slice of salami under her nose, and Astrid glommed on to it. Her teeth clicked shut over the meat, just missing Sahara’s finger. “We’ll also make sure she has her hearing aid.”

“She’s deaf?”

“Deafish.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She gets vain and leaves it at home.”

“Okay. What next?”

“We come home, you make chantments, I do the requisite Web surfing to find them new owners. Maybe we find another good one for Marlowe, maybe not.”

“I want useful information from Marlowe this time,” Astrid said. “She’s stringing us along.”

“Agreed,” Sahara said, nibbling an olive. “Either way, we package up the goodies and we’re free. Plus you’ll be buzzed from the chanting and we can stay up late watching Indian musicals on my laptop. Sound like an agenda?”

“Mmmm,” Astrid said casually. Eating felt good; she could feel the meat and cheese replenishing the strength she had used when she’d destroyed the terrier’s body with the pocketknife. “There’s one other thing. I know how to siphon the vitagua out of your body.”

“Get it out?” Her friend’s gaze skittered away. “It’s not doing any harm.”

“It is.” She clasped Sahara’s hand, and was struck by an image—Sahara, with iridescent hair and black, inhuman eyes. She turned her friend to face the mirror, pointing out the odd gold highlights in her hair. “It’s cursed. Albert said people who are contaminated are doomed—”

“That’s melodramatic.”

“Doomed to self-destruct, Sahara. That what you want?”

“Can’t you enjoy this?” Sahara waved a hand at the chantments. “You’re working yourself to the bone to recover those memories…and I know you feel sick all the time.”

“It’s my responsibility.”

“Just slack off a little.”

“Sahara, the vitagua inside you is dangerous.”

Sahara said, “It could be dangerous to take it out.”

“I tried already.” She nodded at Henna, who was snoozing in a patch of sun. “Behold our test subject.”

Sahara grasped her hands. “I don’t want you to. When I talk to people now, I know what they need to hear. I always wanted to help people sort out their lives, and now I can. Do you know how rare that kind of sensitivity is?”

Uncomfortable, Astrid extracted her hands from Sahara’s grip. “It’ll make you nuts.”

“It’s harmless.”

“We can’t let it concentrate—” She stopped, paralyzed by the grumbles’ insistence that Sahara would leave. Was this what sent her away? She fumbled with a cracker and salami, stacking them, cramming them into her mouth, and chewing woodenly. Only after she’d swallowed did she speak again. “If you don’t agree, we can ask Jacks—”