Indigo Springs Page 7

  “Oh, of course.”

  “When Mrs. Skye’s shift ended, Ma lured her out of the kitchen. She knew her, a little, because she used to deliver her mail. Ma had a gift for that—gallantly befriending old ladies.”

  “That was thoughtful of her.”

  “Ha! That’s what I thought—and from what I’d seen, Mrs. Skye needed friends. But it was just Everett Burke playing games. Ma interrogated her about how much Albert was around Mascer Lane—whether he’d gardened at all.”

  “Mrs. Skye didn’t find that strange?”

  “She’d have been happy to have anyone to talk to. She was lonely, you know? I remember Sahara saying, later, she thrived on attention.”

  “What about you? What were you doing?”

  “After Jacks had finished up his mural negotiations, he cajoled me into sitting up on the bar. We were telling stories about Olive and Albert’s hand fasting. Everyone was laughing. I wasn’t drinking, but I felt drunk, almost. Not sleepy—overstimulated, hyperaware. Edgy. Wired, y’know?”

  I lean back. “You were in the spotlight.”

  “Nothing wrong with wanting that once in a while.” Her eyes roam over the card.

  “You usually avoid attention.”

  “It was a special night. And sitting there with Jacks, telling stories…it felt normal. Comfortable. Almost like being a couple.”

  “Did Sahara mind that it was you in the limelight?”

  A stony glare. “She wasn’t like that.”

  “Wasn’t then? Or isn’t now?”

  “Wasn’t then. Magic amplifies your flaws, Will.”

  “Is that what you call what’s happening to your mother? Her flaws have been amplified?”

  She rubs her eyes. “You want me to say Sahara was a saint before everything happened? She wasn’t. But magic is a curse.”

  “Would you say you and Sahara are still friends?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Do you think she cares now whether you live or die? Is she grateful you’re taking responsibility for her crimes? That is what’s happening here, isn’t it?”

  “Grateful, Sahara?” She presses her palms into the couch, chuckling bitterly. “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Astrid, do you want me to believe you’re clairvoyant?”

  “It’d help matters.”

  “Tell me where Sahara is.”

  She exhales, lips tight and bloodless, and my skin crawls as she flips over a card. It shows a familiar traffic exchange, darkened by a distinctive winged shadow. “On her way here.”

  I blink. It has to be a lie, a joke. There has never been any hint that she would consider ratting out her friend.

  “Oh, it’s true.” Blue liquid rolls through her eyes.

  I pick up the card and carry it to the nearest camera. “I’m looking at the interchange where the I-5 meets Helensville Junction. Sahara appears to be heading northwest. If this isn’t clear, send someone in for the card. I can make out one of the Alchemite Primas in a car in the lower left corner of the image.”

  We wait, listening for the clank of the suite’s steel door, but there is no response. At last I return to the couch. “Thank you, Astrid.”

  Smiling oddly, she lays her hands overtop of mine.

  Suddenly I am sitting on a hump of soil the color of slate. Around me stretches a box canyon—azure walls hundreds of feet high, with rock formations of robin’s-egg blue that look more like clumped wet snow than like stone.

  “How’s this for a parlor trick?” Astrid tilts her face up to a sky filled with azure clouds. “Welcome to the unreal, Will Forest.”

  Fuzzy dirt roils around me as I spring to my feet.

  “Roach is checking my tip about Sahara,” she says. “He won’t notice if we flicker off his screens for a frame or two. Time’s funny here.”

  “Time…is…funny,” I repeat, and when she steps away I catch her arm. “Where are we?”

  “You want me to trust you, right? So trust me. Come look around.” She doesn’t pull free, just starts walking. Curiosity gets the better of me; I fall in beside her.

  We stroll off the dune and around a pillowy crag. Floating tumbleweeds the size of sparrows drift past, bobbing out of our way. The air tastes cool, almost minty, and there is a dripping sound.

  We round the outcropping and I see a cord of blue fluid, blood-thick, twisting like a beheaded snake in an otherwise dry riverbed. Droplets splash off its flying ends, striking the rocks. They roll, slow and blood-heavy, to rejoin the writhing fluid.

  “I’ve seen that flowing through your eyes.” My heart is hammering, and my eyes strain against the perfectly adequate light, convinced by the palette of blue and gray that it must be too dark. “It’s the alchemic contaminant that was on your roof this summer.”

  “It’s called vitagua.” Her shadow falls on the fluid and it congeals into an asymmetrical puddle, deeper and wider on our side of the creek bed. “Liquid magic.”

  “You’re going too fast for me.”

  She peers into the rippling cobalt pool. “When Sahara, Jacks, and I found the chantments, it was clear they were magical. We should have been loony bin candidates….”

  “Because magic isn’t supposed to be,” I agree, but not because I’ve had any difficulty accepting the truth. The ease of it, the way the human backbrain embraces the fairy tales we learned as children, is just another peculiar aspect of the new reality.

  Astrid nods. “But where had the chantments come from? Jacks and Sahara weren’t thinking about that, but I’d mulled it over a bit. Dad spends his life chasing estate sales, flea markets, auctions. There was a phrase he uses when shopping: ‘Gotta find a little sparkle.’ My first theory was Albert was buying things that were already enchanted.”

  “Were you right?”

  “No.” She kicks a pebble into the vitagua and it vanishes without so much as a ripple.

  “What was he doing, then? And what does it have to do with this?” I point at the lopsided puddle.

  In response, she slides the wedding ring off my finger. “By ‘sparkle,’ Will, Dad meant an object that was receptive to spirit water.”

  “Astrid, before you do something we’ll both regret—”

  “Dad was making the chantments.” Warming the ring between her hands, Astrid bites into her tongue.

  “That’s enough.” My tone is sharp; I’m not about to let my witness start cutting herself.

  “It’s okay. Vitagua has to come through me—into the body, out through a break in the skin.” As she speaks, blue liquid gushes from the bite, welling over her lips and drizzling down her chin. It drips into her palms, pooling in my wedding ring. The ring swells, like a sponge. There’s a sucking sound and the vitagua vanishes.

  Healthy color floods Astrid’s normally pale face.

  “What did you do?”

  “I bonded the vitagua with a receptive object. It’s a chantment now.” She holds out the ring, which is dry and cool and properly sized again. “Go ahead, put it back on.”

  I don’t move. “That belonged to my grandfather.”

  “I didn’t damage it, and it won’t hurt you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Protection.”

  “You think I need protecting?”

  “You’re planning to go after Sahara’s goons, right?”

  I pick the ring off her palm, hold it up to the nonexistent sun. It looks normal.

  For weeks now I have had nothing on my mind but retrieving my family. If that has meant finding the source of the magic and destroying it, so much the better. It is an attitude of which Roche heartily approves.

  In her public statements, Sahara has said that alchemic contamination makes her better than ordinary people. She argues we should follow her because she knows what’s best for humanity, for the world.

  What do I say? Magic is even more undemocratic than technology. But now I think: Was all that just have-not resentment?

  It’s Granddad’s wedding ring. What
am I supposed to do, toss it? And if it can help me get the kids back…

  I slide it onto my finger. The words inscribed by my wife—Forever begins today, plus our wedding date—feel as if they are raised on the metal. I read them through my skin, and as the lie of them sinks into my consciousness I flail, momentarily, against rage.

  Nothing happens.

  “I’m ‘protected’ now?” I ask.

  “I’d have to attack you to prove it,” she says, her voice almost playful.

  “Never mind that.” I stare at the pool. “So this is the source.”

  “Raw magic,” she agrees.

  “Vitagua makes the chantments. Vitagua made the monsters in the rivers and forests.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Simple contamination. See this poppy seed?” She holds up a speck of black, then spits a tiny droplet of blue onto it. The seed explodes in a profusion of unfurling stems, leaves, and roots. Red poppies bloom in Astrid’s fist, and she drops the plant to the crumbly soil. Its roots grub downward. By the time I count to ten, the flower is as tall as I am.

  “Hold your ring over the puddle,” Astrid says. I do, and it quivers. “See how it’s attracted to the chantment? Magic calls to magic.”

  I withdraw my hand and the puddle settles. “Like magnetism. Put the north and south poles of two magnets close to each other, and they pull together.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Magic is a tangible entity.” This is certainly information Roche can use.

  She produces a playing card from her pocket, leaching its color and then covering it in a painting of what looks like a blue amoeba. “Once upon a time, magic was an extremely rare living cell, just a component of the human organism. Magicules, they’ve been called. They had similarities to both plant cells and human blood cells.”

  “Cells,” I parrot. A scientific explanation is the last thing I expected in this odd place. “And they did what exactly?”

  “Responded to human will by bending or breaking the laws of nature. That’s what magic is, when you get down to it. Flying is defiance of gravity. Lead transforming to gold, seeing through walls. Properly channeled, vitagua can do anything.”

  Her words hit like a hammer. “Anything?”

  “If I can imagine it, I can make it happen.”

  “You’re talking about power on a scale that’s—”

  “I’m no god, Will.” She hands me the cell diagram and then holds both hands out over the vitagua. The fluid rises, as if to touch her hands…and then falls again.

  “Unbelievable,” I murmur.

  “Magicules respond to collective will,” Astrid continues. “In areas where most everybody believed in a given supernatural creature—say fairies—the particles made them come to be. They’d migrate into birds, or butterflies, and alter them. In Europe people believed in brownies, ghosts, werewolves, and demons. Magicules enter some female virgin’s horse, it grows a horn—presto! Unicorn.”

  “What about this place you’ve brought me to?”

  “People have always believed in invisible realms. Because they took their existence for granted, those realms came into being. We’re standing in one.”

  “The unreal,” I murmur.

  “That’s what Dad called it. Later, magic was driven out of normal people and the magicules came here.”

  “Driven?”

  She presses the paintbrush to the stone wall of the gray cliff. Pictographs bloom on its surface like bruises, blue-black stick figures crowded in what looks like a stockade or a courtyard. Lines fill in the scene: an execution. In the center of the crowd a woman is bound to a stake. Ocher smudges at her feet suggest flames.

  Making pictures. The same thing Astrid has been doing to the playing cards, but on a greater scale.

  An image paints its way across another outcropping, a village of long houses and totem poles, its people beset by disease. They lie in attitudes that—despite the simplicity of their forms—suggest coughing. Elsewhere on the cliff, a mob watches as a man is drawn and quartered.

  “Magicules were diffuse once, Will. Most everyone carried a few. Rare people had none, and others had extra, enough to make them mystics, prophets, healers. There was a time when they were honored for it. But eventually…” She gestures at the woman on the stake.

  “You’re saying that the Inquisition…that they were burning real witches.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “Witches, unicorns, and…”

  “And Fairyland.”

  I let out a breath. “You’re saying we’re in the land of the fairies?”

  “I think that’s what this realm was, at one time.” She nods. “Then the witch burnings caused a shift in collective will, creating a fear of enchantment. People didn’t want to be tainted, because they’d be murdered. Their native magicules migrated away, concentrating in people who weren’t scared. As the number of friendly hosts diminished, magic had to go somewhere else.”

  “To the unreal. To Fairyland,” I repeat. The latter concept seems safer, like something out of my kids’ books. “Are there fairies here?”

  “No.” The blue puddle is drizzling along behind us, following Astrid like a dog. “The fairies are dead.”

  “It’s just you, me, and the vitagua?”

  “Well, there aren’t any fairies.”

  Begging the question. Every criminal has her own way of lying. Astrid’s evasions seem disarmingly honest.

  She gazes up at the painted cliff, voice dreamy. “Microscopic bits of magic, Will. They had to go somewhere. The witch-burners thought they were establishing a monopoly over enchantment. Instead, they drove it here. The physical pressure became immense. Magicules got concentrated, like crude oil.” She points at the cobalt fluid. “One drop of that stuff contains as much magic as ten thousand people might carry. There are oceans of it here, seas of enchantment. Before this summer, it was trickling back into the world a drop at a time. Now, though, the dam’s been blown.”

  “Sahara blew it.” I stare at the blue hills, the puddle, the burning figures painted on the slate wall. It is too much—so I grope for something I can fasten on. Bad guys. Sahara. Caroline. And…“What people, Astrid? Who are these shadowy villains who pushed the magic out?”

  She shakes her head. “Time’s up.”

  Suddenly we are back in the apartment. I’m in my appointed place on the love seat. Astrid starts poking through the cards as though they are a collection of photos, pausing to admire images of Jacks and her mother. The portraits of Sahara she sets to one side. She selects a half-painted image, a tall man rendered in the style of the cliff paintings I just saw in the unreal. He is muscular and surrounded by clouds of smoke, a powerful, dangerous-looking figure.

  “Nicely painted,” I say.

  “Someone’s showing off,” she says with a sigh. “We were talking about the party at the Mixmeander.”

  “I remember.” I suspect she wants to see if I’ll terminate the interview, tell Roche about our escape to the unreal. But there’s plenty of time for that. “You were telling jokes and your friends were—”

  “Sahara was watching my mom,” she says. “Everyone else…Well, word was spreading about Jacks rescuing that kid earlier in the afternoon.”

  “The one who fell off his balcony?”

  She nods. “I found Aran—the Indigo Dispatch editor—trying to interview him.”

  “Trying?”

  “Jacks wanted a trade—Aran was supposed to write something about a famous fire that took place a couple hundred years back. Jacks believed local townspeople had burned out a Native potlach to settle some land dispute.”

  “This is what he’d been fighting with his father about.”

  “Yeah. Aran wasn’t interested, so Jacks refused to give the interview.”

  “A journalist not interested in a story?”

  “Aran’s a chicken when it comes to controversy. Nobody ever talks about that potlatch fire.”

  “Not
even descendants of the survivors?”

  “Mrs. Skye and her niece are all that’s left.”

  “I see. So Jacks was trying to enlist this…Aran, in his private fight with his father.”

  She frowns. “Not that I think the Chief read the Dispatch. He called it a rag. But he prided himself on knowing everything that happened in town. He talked to people. Gossiped. Town hero, y’know—everybody loved him.”

  “Everybody except you?”

  She runs a hand over her eyes. “I guess if Aran had run the story, somebody would’ve told the Chief.”

  On another playing card, two tangled sets of arms and legs are knitted in a position that is distinctly carnal. The picture is unfinished, the invisible brush moving hesitantly, and I can’t see the lovers’ faces.

  Clearing her throat, Astrid takes up the tale again.

  • Chapter Eight •

  There had been a drip in the house from the beginning, a low gurgle in the walls, audible only in rare quiet moments. Astrid was faintly aware of the sound as she lay in her bedroom with the kaleidoscope, guiltily spying on the next-door neighbor. Tonight Mrs. Skye was pacing through her house, talking out loud to nobody. Once she paused, head tilted as if she heard a response.

  We’ll invite her for dinner, Astrid thought. I can ask Ma if she has any family. We could get her a pet….

  The stuttering rhythm of falling droplets prickled her consciousness.

  New house, new noises, she thought—get used to it. Burrowing into her blankets, she let her mind drift. It was good to have a place of her own, good that life was finally moving forward. Mostly it was good to have Sahara back….

  She was dozing when Sahara’s radio, next door, shut down with a click, filling the house with cottony silence. Astrid’s legs twitched and she was awake again.

  She drew a breath in, let it out slowly. No problem, she thought. Bad timing, that’s all. Outside, an ambulance wailed briefly, probably heading up Boundary Lane to the hospital. She sipped air, smothering growing dismay. Insomnia had filled her nights too often in the year since her father’s death.

  On the other side of the hall, bedsprings squeaked—Sahara, rolling over.

  Now Astrid could hear a whole nighttime orchestra: cats yowling beyond the yard, the distant murmur of a conversation outside, wind rattling the willow next door…and the drip. Trying to hang on to the vestiges of sleepiness, she rose and slid the window shut.