“I’m not thinking so, but I can’t speculate without data. You’re talking about the field interactions of an energy state for which there are no scales or standards. We can theorize based on what we know, but it’ll be a pretty rough theory.”
“Then what do you roughly theorize?”
“Well . . . is there more than one anchor?”
“Apparently, and I’m led to believe there’s a total of four in and around the lake. When they were all in place, the lake’s energy was contained and channeled into the nexus where two major leylines crossed��about where the Newmans’ house is now, so that would be the top of the T or the middle of the X, depending on how you see it.”
“Do we know if the other three anchors are in place?”
“Not by eyewitness, but the general belief is that they are, and my observation of the leylines leads me to agree.”
“Hearsay is not very convincing, but I’ll accept your observation as being persuasive enough. So one is out of place, and merely putting it close to its proper location—unlike in horseshoes and hand grenades—wasn’t good enough. I’d hate to see what happens when more than one of the anchors is pulled.”
“But that’s not going to happen.”
“We hope. Because if it did, the system would have no guidance. Huh . . . could it be part of a waveguide?”
“Unknown term, geek-boy. What’s a waveguide?”
“Waveguides restrict the radiation of electromagnetic energy into a linear direction. They’re kind of like pipes, but not really. Energy naturally radiates in spherical waves—outward in all directions at the same time and rate. That’s fine if you want an omnidirectional antenna for radio or television transmission, but some kinds of energy, like, say, microwaves, need to be a little more restricted or they dissipate and do damage. The waveguide has to be specific to the type and wavelength of the energy you’re managing. Broadly—and this is really generalized and a little squishy—by pairing the right conductive materials at the right distance, you essentially create an electrical trough for the energy to flow down that constantly reflects the waves back into the trough, rather than letting them radiate outward.”
“OK. I’m not sure I get the details, but I get the idea.”
“All right, so, if the anchor is part of a waveguide for Grey energy, it has to have an opposite polarity mate creating the ‘walls’ of the pipe. Removing one of the pair for either directional leyline basically lets the energy at that end radiate without proper control or direction. Since it’s anchored at the other end by the nexus and partially directed by its other half, what you get is something like a firehouse that’s hooked up to the hydrant at one end and flopping around loose at the other, spraying energy everywhere. With the way this particular energy is influenced by water, I’d guess that the lake itself acts like a conductive sink and lets the energy flow around until the lake’s too saturated, and then the magic starts leaching up through the ground wherever it can. Or wherever the thrashing pipe has hit the ground, creating transient hot spots and upwellings.
“Normally, this system around the lake is restricted and the crossing leylines probably created a single sort of wellhead at the nexus. Once the anchor was gone, the magic became fair game for anyone who could use it. But, and here’s the slippery bit, the wellhead still exists and instead of pumping energy out to whoever’s in charge of the nexus, it’s now able to suck it back from that person when demand is high, which is why Jewel Newman experiences the sensation of drainage when someone else uses it or when it rains and the lake overflows, pulling more energy out of the sink.”
I nodded. “That certainly sounds like our situation.”
“You know it’ll kill her sooner rather than later if the anchor isn’t replaced.”
“Yes, I do, and I don’t have any great soft spot for her, but if what you’re speculating is the truth of the situation, it won’t change or get better once Jewel’s dead. But how do we figure out where to put the anchor to re-create the waveguide and fix this damned problem?”
“You can see the leylines, so if we can figure out what the anchors look like in the Grey, we should be able to calculate where the uprooted one goes by the position of the other three.”
“Only one problem,” I said. “The lake’s more than a thousand feet deep. I’m pretty sure I can’t hold my breath at that depth to go snooping around to figure out where the in-place anchors are.”
“Let me give it some more thought,” Quinton said while I parked the Rover at the end of the road.
We got out under a threatening sky and began walking toward Devil’s Punch Bowl.
Along the way, I didn’t see a single ghost or zombie. That made me a little curious, since every time I’d been past the area before, the place had been populated with ghosts. The wayward energy still swarmed around in balls and strings, pooling on surfaces like light on glass, but there were no human remnants, nor animal ghosts, either.
The last stretch was a raked gravel path that was remarkably free of mud and puddles. As we came around a tree-shaded bend a few dozen feet from the house, something shrieked. Then a fireball exploded against the tree closest to us—an actual fireball like the real-life version of a special effect from a Harry Potter movie. It splattered and left smoldering bits of flame on the tree and the path near us.
“Get off my property!” someone screamed from behind the screen of trees.
I edged around and looked out. A skinny man with dead gray hair and skin that looked as if it had never seen the sun stood on the porch of the low log house, tossing a knot of fire from hand to hand as if it were a potato fresh out of the oven. In spite of the frost-edged air, he wore nothing but a sort of sarong slung around his hips and a gold cross on a long chain around his neck.
“I just want to ask you a few questions, Mr. Costigan,” I called out.
He suggested something anatomically unlikely and gymnastically ambitious in language so blue I was surprised it didn’t hang in the air like fog. “You took ’em! You stole ’em, you sneaking bitch!”
“The zombies? They came after me!”
“You were trespassing! They left you alone once you crossed the bridge, right enough. You didn’t have to snatch ’em and destroy ’em! I’ve been raising those for years! How dare you just go and . . . ruin my work!” And he was off again in a spate of abuse and creative cursing.
One of the curses floated languidly in our direction, a ring of bluegray smoke and nasty red energy spikes. I didn’t like the look of it, and I shoved Quinton backward while I flicked my palm outward in a tiny push on the Grey that sent the thing wafting toward the still-smoking tree.
When the curse touched it, the tree cracked and, with a screech of breaking wood, tore itself into two charred pieces.
Costigan flung the next fireball right behind it, shrieking what I thought was French, but with the way he spat it out, it could have been anything. He made an upward-pulling gesture and the ground heaved in a localized earthquake that spilled Quinton and me onto our backsides. Four glowing green shapes oozed out of the disturbed ground. Humanoid, but not human, they were made of nothing more substantial than colored mist. I still had the feeling I didn’t want to touch any of them.
I scrambled up and urged Quinton back toward the truck, but one of the things was remarkably fast and sighed around behind us, cutting off the path back to the parking area.
The green thing reached out toward Quinton with its ghostly hands. I jumped toward them, yanking a bit of Grey shield between the thing and us, but not fast enough to keep it from drawing a finger across Quinton’s bare cheek.
Quinton never saw the thing, but he jerked away from its touch with a gasp of pain, and a black line appeared on his skin where the thing’s finger had passed. A point of ice seemed to score my own cheek.
Furious, I shoved a hot white wall of energy at the thing, shouting, “Get away from him!”
The phantasm of acid green mist flew backward, shredding into thin wi
sps that dissipated on the cold breeze from the lake.
Then I turned back to face the other three. I didn’t want to expend a lot more energy on this fight and fall apart as I had last night, but the green things had to go. I pulled on the thin shield and pushed my hand through it, keeping the edge of the Grey between me and the nearest thing as I plunged my hand into it.
Even through the layered edge, the horrible vision wrapped around my hand and burned my flesh. I could see the skin and muscle on my hand withering and blackening while an ice-cold pain sucked all feeling from my hand and forearm. But I clutched onto the thing with pain-dulled fingers and shook it as a terrier does a rat.
It had no core of a soul that I could grab onto—at least I felt none—but it apparently did have some sense and a mind of its own, because the monstrous thing of mist fought away from me and zipped back across the distance between us and Costigan, dragging its remaining two companions with it.
As soon as it was gone, the color and shape returned to my hand and arm, but the flesh still felt burned away by cold and my fingers wouldn’t straighten properly, as if they’d frozen in their crooked position. I glanced back at Quinton. A bit wide-eyed but still with me, he was clutching his own forearm in sympathy. The black line on his face had widened a little and spread a blue-white pallor onto the skin of his cheek. It looked like frostbite and my own face burned in anger.
Costigan had stopped moving around on his porch and stared at us with his three dire companions huddling around him. “What did you do to ’em? Are you gonna ruin all my helpers?”
“No! I never meant to hurt any of them until they hurt me first.”
“You destroyed my work last night. Almost all of ’em. Why? What’d I ever do to you?”
“I destroyed them because you sent them to do me harm.”
“I never did!”
“Then who? Who stole your work and sent it out to attack us?”
Costigan gaped, his mouth working as if he were a fish drowning in air. “But, but . . . no. No. I don’t . . .”
“If you’re done trying to kill us for today, can we come inside and talk?”
Suddenly, he looked old and frail with his pale skin exposed to the inhospitable weather. He nodded jerkily and waved us up to the porch, clearing his misty minions aside with a gesture of one hand. “Well, I ain’t gonna waste no more time trying to kill you out here. Might as well come inside.”
“Where you can kill us in private,” Quinton muttered.
I turned back to Quinton. “Are you all right?”
He started to put his hand to his face but, wincing, pulled it back before his palm quite touched. “Feels as if something burned me, but . . . it’s cold. I’m going to be a wuss and admit it hurts. Make that ‘fucking hurts.’ A lot.”
“Anything else hurt or feel . . . strange?”
He paused as if taking a mental poll of his body parts. “No. I’m OK otherwise.”
“You don’t have to come. Maybe you shouldn’t. . . .”
“You’re kidding, right? I’m not going to go hide in the truck like a five-year-old and let him kill you—or whatever he’s planning to try. Besides, if he did this to my face, I want him to fix it.”
“All right, then. Come on.”
We walked the last few yards to the house. I kept a wary eye on the Grey, just in case, but nothing molested us.
We stepped up onto the wooden porch, which creaked like a giant cricket. Up close, Costigan’s skin was the color of old ivory, as if it had once been darker and had faded under a merciless light, his features slightly flattened. His eyes were ice blue.
Costigan just waited until we were close enough to peer at, which he did. “Lord have mercy, boy. What happened to your face?” he asked, snickering. His accent sounded as if he came from the swampy bits of Louisiana so long ago and through so many other places that he’d forgotten how it should go.
“Cut myself shaving,” Quinton snapped at him. “What do you think?”
Costigan shook his head on his scrawny neck and turned to lead us into his house. Up close, he looked about ninety and more like an animated sack of bones than some of his creations had. “Well, I never seen ’em do that before. Not that I ever seen anybody still standing when they were done with ’em, neither. Today’s a ponder, that’s for sure.”
Quinton blinked at me and made a bemused face. “I think he’s crazy.”
“What would give you that idea?” I replied.
Costigan snorted a chuckle and kept walking ahead of us into the living room.
The room was not what I’d expected at all. With its low roof and long, rambling lines, I’d thought the interior would reflect the same traditional look, but the cabin was a deceptive shell around a modern, cantilevered structure that seemed to hang over the shore from interior braces of white-painted steel. The water-level view filled the wall from side to side without a deck to ruin the illusion that the lake was coming right into the living room. The only thing that seemed to keep the roof from simply collapsing to the floor was a narrow steel fire pit and its collection of hanging organ-pipe chimneys that ran to within six feet of the window on the front and the exterior wall on the back. A folding screen of glass and metal rods held the smoke and fire at bay and reflected on the polished wood floor—where you could see it. Shapeless couches like sleeping buffalo lay here and there on the floor facing no particular direction and in no apparent plan. Small lost ottomans snuggling against the couches made it look like the herd of furniture had just settled itself down for the night. A slab of black granite stood on a pair of trestles beyond the fire curtain, pretending to be a table, its surface dusty with motes and swirls of colored powder and grit. Colored candles stood in slumps of melted wax on the table and lay in pyramid stacks in the corners of the room.
The floor was partially covered by mismatched rugs that had once roamed around as the skins of bears and sheep and now lay about as aimlessly as their sofa companions. I could see traces of chalk and salt on the floor under the rugs, and the air smelled of burning herbs and pine needles, with a faint, clinging odor of dead things under it all. I imagined the furniture could be moved quickly against the walls when needed, the rugs thrown over them to clear the floor for whatever work Costigan got up to. In the Grey, the room breathed slow gusts of dark mist.
Costigan pointed at the sofas as he went toward the worktable. “You sit. I’ll get something for the boy’s face.” He cackled to himself as he strolled away.
Quinton looked at me and mouthed, “Boy?”
I shrugged and sat on one of the couch lumps, which gave under me as if it were stuffed with down. In spite of the fire in the fire pit, the room was chilly, but the squishy embrace of the sofa made me too warm and I was panting in a minute. Quinton yanked me back up, and I realized the couch hadn’t been warming me up so much as smothering me. I gave it a dirty look and stayed on my feet with my coat on.
“Think we can trust whatever crazy thing he’s bringing back?” Quinton muttered.
“Not sure. But I won’t let him do anything to you,” I replied, then added, “That would hurt you.”
Costigan shuffled back from the far side of the fire pit, a bowl in one hand and a bottle of rum tucked under his other arm. A thin Grey shadow that didn’t bear his shape followed him. He frowned at us. “Whyn’t you sit?”
“I think it’s feeding time,” I said.
“Eh?” Costigan muttered. Then he glanced at the couch I’d escaped from. “Ah. Well, I been busy.” He kicked at the sofa in passing and his shadow did the same. The furniture whimpered. “Now, lemme see your face.”
Quinton turned his cheek toward the old man warily, watching him from the corners of his eyes as he did.
Costigan huffed. “Looks nasty. You gonna get a scar there. Little scar, but you still be pretty; don’t worry.” He held the bowl in front of Quinton’s face. “Spit.” His shadow, flickering the color of budding leaves, reached to stroke the blackened weal and I blinked,
conscious of its fingers.
“What?”
“Spit, you fool. Otherwise the spirits think it’s me. You don’t want them fix you up to look like me, do you?”
Quinton made a face and spit into the bowl. Costigan cackled to himself and poured in a stiff shot of rum before he used his fingers to stir the glop in the bowl around. Then he scooped up some reddish brown paste and patted it on the black line across Quinton’s cheek. The shadow did the same while Costigan muttered under his breath. Quinton winced and so did I, which seemed to amuse the old man. “Just poultice, boy. Not gonna kill you, so stop squealing.” The crazy old sorcerer shot me a glance, but didn’t say anything.
I watched as the old man smeared the stuff on, seeing little green and gold threads, fine as spider silk, weaving out of the goo and settling into Quinton’s skin. Where they touched, the skin turned a little rosier and sparkled slightly. The effect spread slowly over the bluish patch on Quinton’s face until there was a fine gauze of magic clinging to the injury. I almost sighed in relief and felt the last of the tension drop from my own aching fingers.
But mention of a scar had made me think. “Is that how Faith got his scar?” I asked.
Costigan laughed. “No. I hear he had him a argument with a fella had a rifle and he only had him a dog. Before I come here, though, so I ain’t sure.”
“Why did you come here?” I asked as he poked at Quinton’s face.
He shrugged one shoulder, screwing up his face the way you do when you watch a man shave. “This old lake full of power. I want me some, I come take it. That damned witch ’cross the way don’t want no one else round. I say, ‘To hell with her,’ and I make me some helpers to show her the way to the door.” He cut a glare at me. “Until you went and ruined’em all.” He patted Quinton’s face aside. “You’ll do. You let that set till it get hard and fall off. Or until it start to itch. Whichever.” Then he muttered some more words and crossed himself like a Catholic at Mass.
“How long’s that going to be?” Quinton asked, looking askance at the half-naked old man.
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