Indigo Springs (24 page)

The door to the living room was blocked.

“Hey!” Astrid yelled, thumping on the door with her free hand. Now what? Was Sahara rolling in the vitagua?

She ran to the studio, swinging the block of ice in its plastic bag, and, for the third time that day, scrambled through the windows. Moving fast and carelessly, she knocked a pane of glass loose, breaking it to shards as she tumbled out into the yard. She ran up the porch stairs to the kitchen entrance, and found the door unlocked.

No, not unlocked: forced open. Splinter marks marred the frame; the latch hung loose.

Jangling, thumps, and a strangled mew of distress emanated from the living room. Sahara.

Astrid tiptoed through the kitchen, the heavy block of ice dangling from her hand in its bag. The brightness of the yard had blinded her: now the kitchen was too dim. It took a moment to make out the short-handled ax on the kitchen table, the shotgun beside it.

She followed the noises: the wet squish of carpet, grunts, vitagua dripping, keys jingling.

It’s Mark, Astrid thought. He came back….

She stepped into the blue-splashed living room and saw a figure bent over the limp body of Sahara, a man, familiar somehow, hands locked around her throat, squeezing. Vitagua was boiling from Sahara’s eyes, nostrils, ears…

…she wasn’t breathing…

…and the man wasn’t Mark at all, he was too big, and anyway Mark was standing by the hallway, eyes blank behind his dirty glasses, twirling Sahara’s car keys around his index finger. But it was too late, and it didn’t matter anyway: the man was strangling Sahara, and Astrid was already moving. Her arm swung the block of ice at the end of its plastic sling….

It’s Chief Lee, she thought, I figure that out right before I—

Contact.

Before I kill him.

The impact of ice against the Chief’s skull was remarkably quiet. He slewed sideways, then caught himself—but Astrid was enraged now. The block dropped to the bottom of the bag, jerking her wrist before she swung it again, overhand this time. When it struck him there was a crack. The Chief fell facedown to the floor and she pushed him off her motionless friend with one blue-stained high heeled shoe.

Jacks’s dad. He was dressed all in black: baggy pants and a turtleneck. He repelled the vitagua that was, by now, all over the room. As he tried to raise himself, Astrid saw the blue liquid bubbling and hissing, becoming floral-scented smoke, leaving pristine handprints on the pink carpet.

The Chief groped for the handle of a glass dagger that hung in a scabbard at his hip. Astrid grabbed his hand. Knowledge seared into her—memories of Lee Glade’s grandfather teaching him to hunt well wizards. He’d developed the killer instinct, a calm righteousness that soothed his conscience. But it was time now for Lee to train someone, and Jacks kept trying to leave town. Shredding the boy’s art school applications, funding requests. Even Olive’s road accident, breaking his ex-wife’s leg as she lay drugged in her car…

The sensation—touching the Chief—was like touching Patterflam. The magic within her boiled and died where her skin met his. Astrid clung anyway, savoring the Chief’s frustration with Jacks. His perfect son, so much like his mother, refusing to go hunting, even to fish….

The Chief jabbed at her, bringing her back to the present. Lightning ran up and down her arm, vitagua burning in a line up her wrist. A shard of white glass was embedded in the meaty part of her hand.

Shrieking, she kicked out, knocking the Chief down by good luck rather than by design as she staggered toward the mantel. Moaning, she pinched the hunk of glass out of the wound. It fried her finger and thumb when she grasped it, and she dropped it on the vitagua-soaked mantel, where it flared into a dancing, electrified ball. A sizzle annihilated the sliver and a good portion of the vitagua slick it had landed in. A smell of ozone filled the room.

“Sea-glass,” Astrid choked. “We found sea-glass in the bottle factory.”

The Chief was struggling to his knees. “Astie,” he said, voice thick. “She has to be stopped. Sahara’s into something that you don’t want to see let loose. Water magic…dangerous stuff…”

“If you killed her…” She fisted her throbbing hand.

“Has to be done,” he insisted. “Come away from the fireplace, kid. I gotta clean this up, burn out the spring. Everything’ll be okay, I promise.” He touched the back of his head, swaying. “Jacks here?”

“You’re one of the witch-burners Albert talked about,” Astrid said coldly.

Dismissal flickered in his bloodshot eyes. “What’s Albert Lethewood got to do with anything?”

“You shot him. One night when he was moving chantments…” She had known it since she touched him. It felt like she had known it all along. “You were on the ridge, watching. Always watching, weren’t you? On the bottle-factory roof, on the training tower at the fire hall. You fired that shotgun, without knowing whose car it was, who was inside….”

“Albert?” This time he was incredulous. “Albert’s liver pickled—he didn’t have anything to do with—”

“He’s wearing the magic coat; you don’t recognize him. He gets away, but there’s a piece of shot embedded in his liver. You spend weeks looking for a shot-up car, and you don’t think anything of Albert dying. You shot at him blindly, with sea-glass.”

“Crushed sea-glass in a shotgun shell.” He lurched closer, one foot dragging. Pink footprints marked his path across the vitagua spill. “It’s not Sahara.”

Astrid bared her teeth, backing away, up onto the mantel. The Chief’s fist closed around her throat.

“Albert Lethewood wasn’t the ancient enemy of the Fyre Brigade,” he hissed. “He was a rummy.”

She pushed vitagua into her neck to counter the strangling pressure, gargling her answer as the fluid boiled against his touch. “He had you fooled, Chief.”

He shoved her against the fireplace, grinding her earring against the bricks until her head rang. “Is my son cursed, witch?”

She surprised herself by laughing.

Glass sliced into her skin just below the collarbone. Vitagua fizzed throughout Astrid’s body; her bones vibrated like tuning forks. Burning and boiling, she thought. Roasted Astrid, poached Astrid…

“Is Jacks infected?”

“He’ll never become like you,” she managed.

“Let him make his paintings,” he said. His voice was guttural, his enunciation mushy. Or had the pain affected her hearing? “The magic well closes today, Astie.”

“That’s not how it goes.” Biting her lip until the skin ruptured, she pulled the madly bubbling vitagua into her mouth, spitting it in a stream at his unprotected eyes. The Chief’s grip on her broke.

With a crude, panicky movement, Astrid shoved. Her bare palms smacked against his chest, and more knowledge—memories of deaths, Lee learning the bloody history of his fathers, prophecies about Patterflam’s eventual escape from the unreal—poured through her in a flood. Braced as she was against the hearth, the jolt added force to the push. The Chief rocketed backwards, slamming to the floor. His body slackened as vitagua burned out from under him, creating a manshaped halo of singed pink carpet.

Astrid collapsed, falling into a crouch as she clawed the glass shards out of her arm and chest, only then crawling to his side. She was shaking violently, and it was almost a minute before she could put her hand on his throat. She was expecting another shock, but nothing came from his bare skin as she felt for a pulse.

No heartbeat. He shuddered under her hand. Then the smell of urine merged with the oversweet flower-stench of burnt liquid magic in the room.

“Birds,” she mumbled. “I froze the birds for this.”

Weeping, she leaned over to listen to his chest, but heard nothing. She tried to pull vitagua to him, to pool it around his corpse, but there wasn’t enough.

“This isn’t the part where I freeze the body?” She listened intently, but the grumbles refused to help. Finally she crawled to Sahara, groping for a heartbeat, dully certain that it would do no good.

Unlike the Chief, Sahara’s heart was fine. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Blue-black marks smudged her throat. The mermaid hung on her neck.

In the corner, Mark was twirling the car keys as if nothing had happened.

“Mark?” Astrid said.

His face pinched up, and he gaped at her foggily.

“Help me,” Astrid pleaded.

He plodded to her side, staring blankly down at Sahara. “What the hell?”

“She’s hurt,” Astrid said. “Can you carry her upstairs? Whatever you do, don’t touch the blue fluid.”

He lifted Sahara clumsily, and as Astrid caught her friend’s lolling head, their hands met.

“Oh,” she said, and Mark froze. “This is the part where I figure out why you’re here.”

Knowledge came in a rush. The Chief had gone to Mark’s sister, asking about the confrontation with Sahara.

“He saw I was messed up, the other afternoon,” he said, more alert now.

“Right. He came here just after Sahara zapped you.”

“What the fuck is going on, Astrid?”

“Magic,” she said. “Okay, take her upstairs.”

“Magic, right,” he repeated, but he carried her away.

Astrid picked up the block of ice with numb hands, dropping it onto the still-leaking hearth. It crackled, melting fast. She kept her back to the body.

The body. Oh god, I killed him.

She made a round of the first-floor windows, pulling curtains shut, closing up the house. When she was done, she stood in the kitchen, desperately trying to think. Mark returned, still handling the keys. She fought an urge to snatch them away.

He’d have killed us and let Mark take the blame, she thought. He needed someone to take responsibility because Jacks lives here, because Jacks might suspect…

Oh shit, I killed Jacks’s father.

“I decided I could use the pocketknife on the…the corpse, Will,” she said, remembering how she had crumbled the animals Henna had brought home. “If I move fast…I still think he doesn’t have to know.”

“Will?” Mark repeated. “Listen, I think Sahara needs an ambulance. Maybe you do too.”

“I’ll have a look at her. Could you check the Chief for more of that glass?” she said. “Take it off him. Then—I don’t know…just wait here.”

He stepped toward the body and she cringed.

“Don’t touch the blue stuff.”

“I heard you the first time,” he said, a hint of the old whine returning to his voice.

Mark had taken Sahara to Astrid’s bedroom by mistake. Her friend was tucked in like a doll, covers up to her shoulders and her arms laid straight at her sides.

Astrid kissed her forehead. No response.

She glanced around, finding a plastic saltshaker on the desk next to a dirty plate. Snatching it up, she dripped vitagua from her bitten tongue.

“Something to heal her,” she muttered. “Please, no birds today, just fix her, make her better.”

It worked. She turned the shaker over, and small white stars drifted out. Sahara’s bruises faded. Her cuts closed.

I should have siphoned her first, Astrid thought, too late, as all the cuts healed and Sahara’s eyes opened.

“Thought I was dead,” she rasped. “God, look at you. I must be.”

Astrid sniffled, shaking her head.

“Where’s the Chief?”

“G-gone,” she said.

“Mermaided him off, huh?”

“No. I hit him, Sahara.”

“That he richly deserved.” She rubbed her throat.

“No. I mean I hit him a lot…a couple times, uh—Hard. Sahara, he’s…”

Sahara’s face paled.

“H-he was attacking you,” Astrid said. “He’s…”

“You killed him,” Sahara said. She looked, more than anything, astounded. After a second she opened her arms. They clung to each other, squeezing so hard, Astrid’s ribs began to ache. “You killed someone for me.”

“I love you, remember?” Astrid laughed bitterly.

“I broke this, Astrid,” Sahara said. “I’ll fix it.”

“No, it’s too late.”

“Darling, it’s never—”

She was interrupted by screams.

“Jacks had Mark up against the wall when I got downstairs,” Astrid says. “He was livid—given half an excuse, he’d have busted Mark’s arm. But Mark wasn’t struggling. He kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me….’”

“Astute of him,” I say.

“Mrs. Skye was there too. She was on the phone, telling 911 that Chief Lee was hurt, that Mark had broken in and assaulted him.”

In Astrid’s hand is a fortune card, its paint still crawling. It bears a mini-portrait of an enraged Astrid in a blue dress, swinging the block of ice at the Chief. So she did kill him after all. I hoped, for reasons I barely understand, that Sahara had done it, that Astrid was lying to protect her. But she has always been the logical suspect. She and Lee Glade have a history of antagonism, of conflicts over Jacks and Albert. It adds up.

I’ve talked to more than one killer whose actions, however spontaneous at the time, seemed inevitable when tallied against his relationship with the victim.

“How did you feel?”

“With Mrs. Skye talking to the cops, our options were melting away. Everything was covered in vitagua and I had to tell Jacks it was me who’d cracked his father’s skull.”

“But—”

“Don’t ask again; I’m trying to remember. I was…panicky.”

“Not remorseful?”

“Not right then.”

“How about later?”

Her face fills with what looks, strangely, like sympathy. “Sometimes I’m sorry, sure. More often I remember the Chief had his hands on Sahara’s neck, that he shot Dad. Or I think how stupid it was that he died. I hit him, yeah, but people are supposed to be tough. You hear about babies getting frozen solid in snowstorms and being saved. People crashing their cars in the middle of nowhere and surviving for days before they’re found. You know?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I can’t believe someone so strong died from a few smacks to the head.”

A few smacks. The autopsy report speaks of multiple cranial fractures and craniocerebral injury. The first blow fractured Lee Glade’s skull in two places and in itself constituted a terminal wound, albeit one he might have survived—if he’d gotten immediate treatment. The second compounded the problem, expanding the fractures and creating a massive subdural hematoma.

“Astrid, suppose his general state of health had made him more resistant to ‘a few smacks’—”

“Then he’d have lived.”

“No. You’d have assaulted him more ferociously. You wanted him off Sahara, didn’t you?”

She looks away.

“You were angry, and you hit him hard. You say he was groggy and confused after he got off the floor—”

“Don’t—”

“Come back to the containment facility with me.”

“I’m not sorry enough to consider that.”

“How sorry are you?”

Her voice rises in frustration. “You don’t think I’ve been over this a thousand times? One minute I was deciding to have a romance with Jacks—”

“Fucking him, Sahara would say.”

“…the next, I’d beaten up his father.”

“Murdered him.”

“Murdered him, fine, and the Sheriff was on his way. Vitagua was dribbling out of the fireplace, there was a body on the floor of Albert’s house, Mark knew about magic, and Jacks was furious….” She wipes away tears. “On top of that, Sahara had triggered this huge melt in the unreal. Patterflam was going to break out and burn everything.”

I imagine the unreal burning. “Why did you do it?”

“I wanted him off Sahara, remember?”

“Not the murder. Why did you choose Jacks?”

She dries her eyes, carefully, one at a time. “What would you do? If you had to choose between having the person you wanted or being with someone who loved you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Picking Jacks was the only way to keep them both. I wanted Sahara…but she didn’t love me; not romantically. Jacks could give me kids and a normal life. Sahara might stay because of the chantments…and if she left, I wouldn’t be alone. We could all be mostly happy, and nobody would get hurt.”

“Mostly happy.”

“Pathetic, huh?” She laughs bitterly, kicking a spray of dirt over the weeds. A thin furred tendril whips out at me, as if in response. Then a pulse of cool air blows out from my wedding ring. The tendril drops away, lashing sulkily, and I feel a thread of fatigue.

“So the police were coming. What did you do next, Astrid?”

“I focused on Jacks. Took him aside, told him what happened. I said the Chief had shot Albert…I was covered in punctures from the sea-glass he’d stuck in me.”

In the news footage when Astrid is coming out of the house with Patience, she is filthy, barefoot, covered in blood, and her ear is shredded. Now she shows me a picture from just after the murder. There are angry gashes in her forearm and shoulder, a cut on her hand that is a classic defense wound. Her ear is intact, though, the dragon earring scratched but in place.

“How did Jacks react?”

“You mustn’t think badly of him. I had the lipstick on.”

“You’d killed his father.”

“Jacks loved me. And he was in shock.”

“So he forgave you.”

I see her struggling to keep tears back. “Just don’t blame him for what happened next.”

“The standoff.”

She nods. We had paused but now, without discussion, we hurry down the bone-bleached dune after Ev and Patience.

“Sahara wanted to preserve your monopoly on magic, and Jacks wanted to keep you safe. What’s your excuse?”

She sighs. “I wanted to keep the cops from getting contaminated.”

We have arrived at the edge of the peculiar city. People stream around us, chatting in tongues I don’t understand. Their voices are friendly. The smell of cooking food fills the air, and as I inhale, I begin to feel as though I am eating the best meal of my life. The banquet lasts for a single, intense moment, and then I am full.

The crowd around us grows until it is thousands strong. People dangle from oversized blades of grass, hover on butterfly wings. Heads on giraffe necks loom above us. They regard Patience with wonder and hope. Hands extended, she circles the space they have left us, letting them brush her fingers. She is speaking, softly, asking about their long years under the ice. Some call back, their voices tainted with animal barks and the trills of birds.

She turns to Astrid. “They want to see you fuse a chantment into someone. If anything happens to you, they won’t know anything about fighting the curse….”

Astrid, of course, is unsurprised. “Will?”

“You’re not contaminating me,” I say.

A weak smile. “I need something to chant. Something small, something you don’t mind losing.”

Licking my lips, I take stock. Small, disposable. After a second I pop a button off my shirt. I hand it to her along with a couple coins from my pocket and a key from my keychain—Caroline’s house key.

Astrid chants them all, dribbling vitagua from her much-bitten lips. Then she holds them up.

“Magic button,” she says dreamily. “It lets you see things—as if you had a telescope and a microscope built into your eyes. The quarter keeps you from getting lost, and the dime…Well, the dime’s for you, Pop. The key unlocks doors—any door you touch will open for you.”

She offers the dime to her mother. “Volunteers?”

A woman with a beaver’s tail takes the button. A man with the talons of a bald eagle indicates he wants the quarter. The key goes to a small red deer with long black hair and the eyes of a human being.

Pooling vitagua in her palm, Astrid paints a blue line across Ev’s hand and sets the dime on the smear, pressing the coin into the meat of her hand.

“Vitagua is cohesive,” she says, loud enough for all to hear as she repeats the process with the other volunteers. “The magic in the chantment calls to the vitagua in the affected individual. The chantment’s molecules fold into the person’s body.”

Ev waves her hand for all to see. The dime is gone.

“If you X-rayed her, it’d be there in her hand. But you couldn’t get it out surgically,” Patience murmurs.

Ev Lethewood bows to the crowd as Astrid, surprisingly, gestures like an old-style sleight-of-hand magician. Down she bobs—and when she comes up, Ev’s goatish features are less pronounced. I blink—in addition, Ev is now male. Taking out a handkerchief, he mops his brow, puffing like someone who has just run a marathon.

“You okay?” Astrid asks, and Ev nods wearily.

There’s a gasp from the crowd as the deer girl’s head changes, becoming fully human.

“Magic calls to magic. The embedded chantment will absorb the vitagua residue in her body,” Astrid says. “It will take time. She was submerged for centuries.”

I ask: “She can use the powers in the chantment?”

“Yes. From now on she’ll be able to unlock doors.”

“Well?” Patience asks the crowd. They murmur, examining the three changed individuals. Then their voices rise in a musical, chord-packed babble. Cheers erupt around us. They raise the trio onto a platform of woven reeds.

“This is the part where they ask you to go preside over a celebration,” Astrid tells Patience. “If you want.”

Patience glides up to the platform. “I never say no to an adoring crowd.”

Astrid says. “Pop, you want to go too?”

Ev scratches her—his—neck and speaks in a deep bass. “You’ve still got business, son. I’d like to help.”

“You do. You will.” She leans close, lowering her voice. “Figure out the city for me? Who’s who, where things are, if anyone from Indigo Springs ended up here.”

Ev considers this, yawning. “I can do that.”

“Sure you can,” Astrid says. “You’re hyperobservant.”

Her mother shakes his head. “I can walk around town for you anyway. You’ll be back soon?”

“Yes.”

Ev offers me a hand then, and I shake it. “Try not to worry, young man. My kid, she’ll take care of you.”

“I know.”

“Thanks, Pop.” Astrid blows Ev a kiss.

With a wave, Ev climbs onto the platform with the others. The crowd abandons us. The city hums with voices—conversations, animal calls, music. The nest-like buildings are resonating, forming tones that play my emotions like a harp, lifting me on a rising wave of joy.

Astrid chooses a path out of the city. “Your kids are young enough to learn the unreal tongues, Will.”

“What?” I hide the jolt that accompanies the thought of my son and daughter having a future here…or anywhere. I’ve become accustomed to thinking all their prospects were doomed. “Do you know where my children are?”

“I’d have said if I did.” She tilts her head, listening. “The grumbles say you’ll find them.”

“When?”

“I’m not so good with when.”

“Try.” I hand Astrid the ace of hearts.

She drains the card to whiteness and creates a picture—the house again. The police are in the picture now—literally—uniformed men barricade off Mascer Lane. “Sorry. We’re still focused on the standoff.”

I sigh. “Fine. How did that play out?”

“When Mrs. Skye said she could see the Sheriff coming, we all froze.”

“Everyone but Sahara?”

“Yes. She had the mermaid on, and she had Chief Lee’s shotgun. She put the gun in Mark’s hands and told him to fire a shot out through the front door, over their heads.”

“One more step and I kill them all,” I murmur.

“That’s what Sahara forced Mark to say,” Astrid agrees. “That’s how the standoff began.”