“Ask her to keep quiet.”
“Too risky. She’s pissed at us, didn’t you notice?”
“Use the mermaid—zap her.”
“She’s practically deaf.” Sahara shook her head. “Siren doesn’t work on her.”
“What?”
“The hearing aid—she’s partly deaf. Remember it didn’t work through the phone, either? It doesn’t work, I’ve tried.”
Astrid felt a pang of disappointment—she’d believed Sahara had scruples about brainwashing the old woman.
“I’ll fix it, Astrid. I promised, didn’t I?”
“Don’t bark at me. It’s not my fault.”
“So it’s mine?” Sahara said.
Yes, she thought, and tension boiled between them until Astrid grabbed the kaleidoscope, leaving the question hanging. She peered through the house walls to the street. “Three squad cars,” she reported. “The whole Sheriff’s Department. Pete Lews is knocking on doors. Evacuating the neighborhood? I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Don’t you know anything that will help clear away all the vitagua we’ve spilled?”
You spilled, Astrid thought, but anger wouldn’t help. “It’s been weeks since I remembered anything new.”
“Okay. Let’s think—oh! Is there anything of Albert’s left in the house? Something you haven’t already touched?”
“I doubt it,” Astrid said. She started opening her dresser drawers, poking through her tools and treasures. As the items passed through her hands, pieces of insight came to her—thoughts about the objects’ history, old memories of occasions when she’d worn them, ideas about what kind of chantments they’d make—
“Nothing?” Sahara asked.
“Not yet.” She thumbed through the clothes in her closet, dragging her finger over the hangers. Nothing. “Where’s that dulcimer Ev gave me?”
“Ahh.” Sahara chewed her lip. “Jacks was playing with it on the back steps yesterday.”
“Did he bring it inside?”
“Astrid, you already touched it.”
“Gotta try.” She thundered back downstairs, only to be brought up short by the sight of Mrs. Skye draping a paint-spattered sheet over Chief Lee’s corpse. Shaking, she slipped into the kitchen, where Mark was heaving the refrigerator up against the back door. He had taped black garbage bags over the windows, cutting them to fit precisely. The darkened room was already getting stuffy.
Astrid said, “Jacks, where’s the dulcimer?”
He pointed, and Astrid snatched it up, squeezing both the mallets in one palm, straining. She had a brief sense of her mother, pregnant, bored, and bedridden.
“Jacks, do you have anything of Albert’s?” Astrid asked. “Anyone? Patience, he ever give you anything?”
They shook their heads, but something flickered over Sahara’s face.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“We’re in trouble here, Princess. Give it up.”
“I just thought…” She jerked a thumb in the direction of Albert’s funeral urn.
“Oh,” Astrid said, voice small.
“No,” Jacks said. “You don’t have to, Astrid.”
But she did.
Face pallid, Jacks handed over the urn. Astrid knelt on the floor, unscrewing the top. The mouth of the aspen container was as wide as her wrist. She slid her fingers inside, straining to just brush the ashes, to disturb them as little as possible. Grit raked under her nails.
“Is it working?” Sahara asked.
“Hush,” Astrid said, and then the past swept her away.
She was at Liv Celedine’s place, planting petunias for an upcoming wedding. It was the day before Albert was sentenced for the house-renting swindle, the last time they ever tended a garden together.
They had been trying not to fight. Albert didn’t want to leave Astrid in charge of the magical spring.
They were almost done when a tree swallow swooped out of the ravine and hit Liv’s front window.
“And then you bleed out,” Astrid had said, irrationally, scooping up the bird. The vitagua in the unreal grumbled a suggestion, and she scratched off a scab on her wrist. Pooling vitagua in her hands, she immersed the corpse. Blue steam rose from her cupped palms.
“What the hell?” Dad was at her side, eyes wild as he looked around for witnesses.
“He doesn’t have to die,” Astrid had mumbled as she chilled the vitagua-soaked bird. Now it was iced: a faceted lump the size of a bar of soap that threw sparkles of reflected blue light around the yard.
Dad threw a rag over her hand, hiding the lump of ice.
“Dammit, kid! What’re we supposed to do with that? Stick it in the freezer for the witch-burners to find?”
“Dad—”
“That’s it, Astrid. No more improvising.”
She laughed. “Stop me.”
He slapped her, hard, horror on his face mirroring the anger rising within her.
She had knelt, sweeping dust off the sidewalk.
“Bundle…,” Albert pleaded.
She pulled on the unreal. Vitagua seeped out of the concrete, a perfect circular puddle with a circumference just wider than the cube of iced bird. “Live,” she said, and birdsong rang through the vitagua. She slid the cube into the pool and it vanished, leaving the circle of vitagua in the sidewalk.
“Astrid!”
“Okay, go back,” she said.
The puddle glugged. The grumbles hummed and murmured.
Nothing happened.
She put her hand on the puddle. “Go,” she said again, and the grumbles disagreed. They’d waited so long. Their time was approaching, why wait, why wait?…
“Someone’s coming,” Dad said, voice desperate. Astrid pushed, trying to force the vitagua to vanish. And it did. There was a crackle and the puddle was gone, replaced by broken chunks of sidewalk.
Albert let out a long trembly breath.
Then the ground began to shake. The gazebo wobbled, tumbling roses to the ground. There was a low rumble that became a roar. Astrid and her father were thrown to the ground.
I did this, Astrid thought. Did I just get us both killed? But the quake stilled a moment later. Dad hobbled to her side, favoring his ankle.
“You okay?”
She felt tears threatening. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“I’m gonna check on Miz Celedine,” he said, staggering to the house.
Sirens began to wail across the ravine. How many people had been hurt by the earthquake…had she hurt?
A horn blared nearby and she sprinted to the road. What she saw there chilled her heart: a postal service van had struck a blue sedan.
Ma, Astrid thought, but she could see the drivers climbing out, one uniformed postman and old Reff Jundy. They were laughing, clearly okay.
It could have been Ma, she thought, and she turned back to the Celedine place. Albert was pressing a bloodied rag to Liv’s forehead.
He’d been right all along. She wasn’t careful enough.
“I have to quit,” she murmured.
You can’t quit, the grumbles said. She’d been initiated—there was no way to undo that. Till death do us part…
She was pacing when her father returned. “I have to quit.”
“Calm down, Bundle,” he’d said. “You just need to learn some caution.”
“If I can hear the vitagua, I’ll want to improvise,” she said. “You never wanted me to be the chanter, Dad.”
“Astie, Bundle—who would I find to take your place?”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone in jail.”
He sucked on his lips, coloring. When he spoke again, his voice was soft, infuriatingly reasonable. “If I found someone, and initiated them…what if they were more powerful than you? How scared would they be?”
“I don’t care,” Astrid said, thinking of the mangled mail truck. “I could’ve killed someone!”
“Don’t panic on me,” Albert said. “You just do things how I showed you�
��”
“I can’t!”
“Bun, I’m scared too. Granny couldn’t do half what you can with magic. And you’re still young, still learning. How’m I supposed to teach you? But quitting—”
“I’ll hurt someone.” She wiped her nose.
“Bundle…”
“Stop calling me that!”
Albert put his dirty hands on her shoulders. “I been careful about the magic all my life. Never had more than a few drops of spirit blood in me at once. Granny Almore, she took in the stuff by the quart, and it made her peculiar. She knew things, Astrid. Told me once I’d die a-suffering…I never figured it was good to know so much.”
“You’ll be in terrible pain at the end,” young Astrid agreed, and then moaned as she heard her own words. “Don’t you see? I can’t stop myself.”
Dad’s mouth worked soundlessly for a second. “I know it’s going to be hard for you. I should’ve done better. Should have risked it maybe, peeked at what’s to come…”
Her words came in bursts between dry sobs. “It doesn’t—matter because I’m—quitting!”
“Bundle, I know you end up the well wizard. I know. You can’t back out—”
“Stop me.” She yanked free, backing up against the remains of the gazebo. With the nails of her right hand she scratched hard, digging into the flesh of her left arm. When the skin broke and the vitagua welled up, she grabbed the only thing she could think of, the thick gold twist of her three-part dragon earring. She pulled and vitagua flowed into its gold coils. “I’m forgetting it all, Dad.”
“You can’t hide from this.”
She’d bellowed then. “Find someone else!”
“Okay,” he said, putting up his free hand in surrender. “Okay, Astrid. I’ll get someone. You don’t—”
She hadn’t listened. There was one way out. She finished making the chantment, feeding vitagua into it, then releasing the dragon from the pinch of her finger and thumb. As her hand dropped to her side, everything she knew about magic drained out, like water soaking into a washrag. She wiped her teary eyes, mumbling. “Magic magic, go away.”
The last thing she’d forgotten was the stricken look on her father’s face.
“It’s the Chief, Dad…,” Astrid tried to say now, as pain burned down the side of her head and into the cords of her neck. “Watch out for Chief Lee.”
“Astrid!” Sahara’s shriek broke the reverie.
Astrid blinked, finding her face wet with tears. Her left hand was fisted deep in the urn, clenched around ash and lumps. The palm of her other hand ached, as if something was biting through the meat under her thumb. Her ear throbbed, but her headache was diminishing.
“Are you okay?” Jacks asked, dabbing at the right side of her face with a rag that came away bloody.
“I think so.” She looked at her sore hand and saw the three pieces of her dragon earring. Magic magic, go away…
“You tore it out,” Jacks explained unnecessarily.
Gulping, Astrid dropped the earring.
It fell soundlessly, three interlocked gold pieces slicked with blood, and as they dropped away the gnawing in her hand and the fatigue cleared too. The memories came back cleanly, as if they had never been gone: everything Albert had taught her, everything she had learned from the vitagua, all the time they’d spent together. Hiding it all from Ma, from everyone.
She’d been so impatient with him. He’d spent his life playing it safe, and she’d been sure she knew better, chafing and fighting as he showed her everything in his imperfectly learned bag of sorcerer’s tricks.
She remembered him in the hospital, dying, reaching up to grab at her face. Trying to pull out the dragon.
“Guys,” she whispered. “I remember everything.”
She slid her left hand out of the urn. Her fingers and palm were streaked with black and for a second she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to rinse Albert down the sink, or wipe him off on the increasingly grubby dress.
Finally she let vitagua flow over her skin, washing him into itself. The black-flecked spirit water clung to her hand like a glove.
She scooped up the bloodied bits of the earring with a rag from the counter, wadding them up and pocketing them.
“Astrid, did you learn anything we can use to contain the spill?” Sahara said. “You know, the vitagua coming out of the chimney and dribbling into the downstairs freezer? The big problem?”
“Talk it into flowing back?” Astrid said.
“Don’t joke,” Jacks said.
“No joke.” Astrid returned to the living room, letting her hand drift over the blue-stained carpet. She tugged, and all the vitagua within her body surged to her hand, dense and cold, pulling her fingers down like magnets, magic calling to magic.
“Wait,” Jacks said, still holding the bloody cloth. “You should practice, right?”
“No, this is old hat,” she said, reveling in the sense of control. This was how it had been when she was a kid, before the quake, before she’d scared herself. “Watch.”
She pulled a single drop of vitagua out of the soaked carpet, raising it in midair and letting it fall. She envisioned it getting bigger, like she was rolling a snowball on a warm winter day.
Grow it did.
She heard Jacks’s measured intake of breath as she pulled, hard but carefully, sucking liquid magic out of the rug. A perfectly spherical reservoir formed under her outstretched hand, growing to waist height.
Astrid pulled harder.
Droplets of blue wept through the layers of white paint on the ceiling, leaving pockmarks in the plaster. Vitagua burst from the bricks of the fireplace, rupturing the blue paint as it joined up with the rest. Spirit water threaded up from under the floor, drawn from the spill in the basement. Another miniature river came from the fireplace—the flow from the unreal that was still shoving itself into the house.
Grunting with effort, Astrid forced vitagua out of her body through the punctures the Chief had left in her shoulder and arm. She drove it out, adding to the pool hanging in the living room, and as the level of magic she was carrying dropped, the confusing swirl of knowledge about the future decreased.
The grumbles quieted.
She didn’t purge completely…. You never knew when you might need a little foreknowledge.
“Okay, you’ve gathered it up. But how about getting it back into the unreal?” Jacks said.
“That’s easy too,” she said. Skirting the Chief’s corpse, she set her hands on the hearth. The globe of liquid followed her, rolling onto the mantel as if it were solid. She shoved it into the fireplace, letting it flow a couple feet up the chimney.
“Stay,” Astrid said, as if it were a dog, and the liquid magic undulated in place, clinging to the mantel as if dammed there.
Once she was sure it wouldn’t move, she imagined it flowing back through the crack in the hearth. “Just for a while,” she crooned. “Not for long.”
Resistance from the other side—the great vitagua icebergs and their frozen inhabitants had sensed a chance, after so long, to melt themselves free.
“Please,” Astrid begged. She gripped the mantel, clenching mentally. After a second a vortex formed in the pool of fluid, a miniature whirl pool that crept around the edges of the vitagua, which was draining back into the unreal a bit at a time. “It’s going back,” she said.
“Okay,” Sahara said. “One problem solved.”
Jacks let out a sigh. “What now? Figure out how to get Astrid out of here once it’s gone?”
“All of us out of here, Jacks,” Astrid insisted.
“Right. Us…” He scanned the spattered room, gaze stuttering over the shrouded body of his father. Then he turned, disappearing down the hall.
The sound of Jacks retching made her concentration lapse…and the vitagua flowing into the unreal slowed, just a bit. She clenched her fist—a concentration trick Albert had taught her—and pushed. The flow increased.
Okay. She could lock her atte
ntion there in her hand—by keeping the fist clenched, she could keep the flow going and still think about other things.
“How long will it take to drain it?” Sahara said.
“An hour, maybe?” One-handed, Astrid fumbled with the kaleidoscope. The Sheriff and his minions were scurrying about outside, waving their arms and pointing at the house. “They’ll try to contact Mark. Isn’t that how it goes in the movies—they contact the hostage-taker?”
“Sheriff did call,” Sahara said, voice edgy. “I shouted at them through the window, with Siren on—told them to hold tight. It should be okay.”
“Okay.” Beyond the police line, the street was filling up with neighbors. Grimfaced firefighters were on the scene, setting up lines to keep the people at bay.
“Just another hour,” she said again, not sure whether she was pleading with the police outside or the impatient reservoir of magic in the unreal.
• Chapter Twenty-Nine •
Quiet settled over the living room as the magic continued to drain. Astrid leaned against a wall, pushing vitagua into the unreal and trying not to look at the Chief’s corpse. Jacks returned from the bathroom and took up the kaleidoscope, tracking police activity outside.
Mark Clumber rocked on his heels at the threshold between living room and kitchen, staying well away from the windows. The shotgun dangled from his left hand; with his right, he toyed with his glasses.
When Sahara broke the silence it was like a pin jabbing through skin.
“I know you want to get out of here,” she told Mrs. Skye. She and the old woman were seated on the steps that led upstairs. “I can tell you’re scared. I can feel it. You don’t have to be—you could walk out of here right now.”
The older woman fiddled with her hearing aid. “I knew this house was haunted. Didn’t figure you three were breaking out the ghosts….”
“We didn’t do a very good job,” Astrid said dully.
“If you wanted them loose, girl, you’ve done fine.”
“Pat, you’re not helping,” Sahara said. “We want to let you go. Promise you won’t tell what’s going on?”
“Sweetie.” Mrs. Skye brushed away a lock of Sahara’s hair. “I can’t lie and tell ’em the boy’s to blame.”
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