February Thaw

by Tanya Huff

  "...they want everyone’s power but you’re the only one they can find."

  And Fred was with her.

  So they could find Fred.

  She could barely see him inside the shifting darkness although she could clearly see a dozen or more glowing red eyes swirling around him. He was confused. He'd expected her to be attacked and Fred didn't change gears quickly. By the time he did, it would be too late.

  She was his only chance.

  And when they finished with him, they'd be after her.

  Hands ten centimetres apart, Isabel fought to control her breathing.

  Find the sizzle. Find the sweet spot. Find where it works.

  Two strings of light stretched from palm to palm.

  Oh, that’s a lot of help.

  How did Fred do it? He never concentrated on anything this hard.

  Duh.

  Power snapped into place with an almost audible click. Half the shadows turned as a hundred strands of light formed between her palms.

  Too late.

  She smacked her hands together.

  It was still nothing more than a crude release of power, but this time she was doing it on purpose. With a purpose.

  "Fred!" Blinking away after images, she dropped to her knees by his side. "Are you okay?"

  After a short struggle, he focused on her face. "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

  Isabel grinned. Suddenly, her dad's appallingly cliché interest in musical theatre was actually useful. "Could you possibly mean, by Jove, I think she's got it?"

  "Huzzah."

  *

  "We rule. We rock. At the risk of sounding like the end of every bad sports movie ever made, we are the champions and champions deserve ice cream. There's a pint of Cherry Garcia in the freezer." She flashed a smile at a still wobbly Fred and reached for the condo door. "Technically, it's dad's but he's not.... Dad!"

  "Isabel."

  Hurrying out of the living room behind her father were Mrs. Harris, a police officer, and two large men dressed like ambulance attendants. Isabel was suddenly very aware that behind her stood a skinny, grimy man who looked like he'd just been bounced across a park and who still had folded newspaper down his pants.

  Anger and worry showed about equally on her dad's face. No, wait, anger seemed to be winning.

  "I didn't want to believe what Mrs. Harris was telling me, Isabel, but when you weren't home last night and then I got the message from the school about you not being in class, and then you wander in... Do you even know what time it is?"

  "Uh, ten?"

  "Three."

  She checked her watch. Three. AM. In the morning.

  "Time flies when you’re having shadows."

  "Thanks, Fred. You might have told me that!"

  Fred shrugged. "Iceberg."

  Which was either an enigmatic Titanic reference, or he was gone again.

  "He's probably her dealer," Mrs. Harris snorted.

  Isabel ignored her, stepping between Fred and her father. "Dad, I know this looks bad, but Fred's my..." Quick, a word for what Fred was that her father would understand. "...friend. Okay, I cut school and I let him sleep on the terrace, but he needs me."

  "Needs you?"

  "Yes! And he's teaching me so much."

  Mrs. Harris pursed her lips. "I can't imagine what."

  "Try compassion," Isabel snapped. "And I'm sure you can't imagine it!"

  "Isabel..." Her dad sighed and began again. It looked as though worry had won the final round. "Izzy, your friend has run away from a facility in Scarborough. The police have been searching for him for weeks. They recognized him the moment Mrs. Harris gave them a description. These men are going to take him to the facility and see that he gets back on his medication."

  "Dad, he's not crazy."

  "All right, but look at him, he's skin and bones, if he stays on the street he'll die. I don't know why you've suddenly decided to adopt him – and believe me, we're going to talk about this – but he's a person, not a puppy or a kitten, and you can't know what's best for him." Grabbing hold of Isabel's shoulder, he moved them both to one side. Pressed up against him, she could feel the fear rolling off him like smoke.

  Afraid for her? Or of something?

  The ambulance attendants, advanced.

  "Fred! Do something!"

  He stared wide-eyed at the approaching attendants. "I can macramé a plant hanger."

  "Not helpful!" She had to do something. But what? All she knew how to do was make a bright light which was great at chasing shadows away, but these were flesh and blood men. Big men. Big scary men. Even if she temporarily blinded them, Fred would probably just stand there blinking.

  But what else could she do? What else had Fred taught her?

  Trust what you actually see not what you think you see.

  They'd already gone after Fred once.

  What will you do if they come after you again?

  No wonder the ambulance attendants were so terrifying. Their eyes were a deep, blood red. Her dad couldn't see it, but he could tell something was wrong.

  As she pulled her hands apart creating a cat's cradle of light, the closer shadow turned to face her. She froze.

  "They should take all these sorts of people off the streets and put them in institutions where they belong."

  Thank you, Mrs. Harris. Shadows held no terror for her, she spent her life surrounded by shadows of her own making.

  For the second time that night, Isabel slapped her palms together.

  When she could see again, the shadows were gone and Fred was gone – was safe, she knew that for a certainty without knowing how she knew. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harris and the cop remained.

  "Well, you have your daughter home safe and sound, Mr. Peterson. I'll leave you to handle it." From the look the constable shot her, he clearly thought rather too much had been made about a sixteen year old who stayed out late on a Friday night.

  Her father looked like he had every intention of making even more about it. "I'm sorry to trouble you, officer."

  "No. This isn't right." Mrs. Harris stared wide-eyed around the foyer. "Where are the others? There were other men here. A filthy one, and two strong men to carry him away."

  "Uh, ma'am, there was only the three of us until the young lady came home."

  "No. That's wrong!"

  The constable exhaled once, through his nose, and moved behind Mrs. Harris. "Just the three of us, ma'am. It's late, I'll escort you safely home."

  She could walk out the door or she could be pushed. She chose to walk.

  Isabel turned to face her father. "So. How was your trip, Dad? Have a good time?"

  "Apparently not as good as you did."

  *

  Isabel was out on the terrace at dawn, holding a three day old salmon steak.

  With a poof of displaced air, a broad shouldered blond in a cable-knit sweater appeared by the table. Throwing the piece of fish at him seemed like a perfectly reasonable reaction.

  He frowned and deflected it with a glance. As it hit the floor, he turned his bright blue gaze back to Isabel. "Congratulations, you am passing your test."

  "Am passing?"

  "Are passed?"

  "Let me guess. English as a second... Are there going to be many more of you?" she asked as a small Asian woman and a tall, distinguished looking man in a turban appeared as well.

  All three of them ignored her, turning instead on each other.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I came to inform her..."

  "No, we agreed I would tell her that..."

  "I are telling her, yah."

  "Oh no, not you. Me."

  Shouting simultaneously, they disappeared.

  "Well, you can see how much help they'd have been to you," Godfry muttered, dropping out of the sky beside the salmon. "Is that for me?"

  "Yes. Let me guess; three more of the nine?"

  "Who else. Do you know what they call a group of wizards? An argumen

t."

  Made sense. She shifted her weight to one hip and waited until the crow finished eating. "They said I passed my test."

  "Yep." He flew up to his regular perch on the chair. "Last night, when you didn't immediately try to save your own ass and saved Fred."

  "The first time or the second time?"

  "The second time. The first time you were thinking that once they finished with him, they'd come after you." Wings folded, he cocked his head up at her. "As Fred would say, the world doesn't need wizards that taste good, they need wizards with good taste. You have to be worthy of the power."

  "So Fred wasn't teaching me how to pass the test?"

  "Wasn't he?"

  Try compassion.

  Isabel sighed. "Where is Fred?"

  "Having breakfast."

  "At the Second Cup garbage bin?"

  "Nah. Not on a Saturday. Saturdays it's the dumpster behind the Royal York. You get in much trouble with your old man?"

  She shrugged and, greatly daring, stretched out one finger to stroke an ebony shoulder. "I've been grounded for a month with no TV, but Dad says he understands teenage rebellion – as if – and I can probably pay my scholastic debt with a thousand word essay on responsibility. It could have been worse."

  "You could have been swallowed by shadow. Not a problem now," Godfry continued before Isabel could respond. "You got control so you're in no immediate danger. The rest of the lessons can wait for a month."

  "The rest of the lessons?"

  "Oh yeah. A wizard's apprenticeship lasts seven years."

  "What?" Stepping back, she kicked the chair leg, sending Godfry flying. "I am not spending the next seven years looking into dumpsters!"

  "Hey, you agreed; don't take it out on the bird! Besides, there's a lot more than dumpsters – there's garbage cans, landfill sites, soup kitchens, overpasses, winters in cardboard boxes, summers in storm drains, roadkill..."

  Isabel slammed the terrace door, cutting off the crow's litany.

  It was going to be a long seven years.

  When you're asked to write a story for a "retelling fairy tales" anthology, you've got to move fast to get the cool stories. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast were gone right out of the gate. This means, if you're me and you sometimes have a bit of a problem responding promptly to email (see, it's not just you, I'm that slow responding to everyone) you need to come up with treatment for the more, shall we say, second string stories.

  One afternoon while playing Freecell (in the dark days before Spider Solitaire) and mentally flipping through the fairy tales that remained unclaimed, trying work out how I might modernize them, the words Throw me my axe! appeared outlined in fire on my monitor. Okay, maybe it was a bit less dramatic, but that line from Jack and the Beanstalk was the line this entire story was based on.

  Warning: this story contains profanity, out-dated tech, and egregious abuse of the music industry. Readers below a certain age may have to Google Carson Daly.

  Jack

  Once upon a time, a young man named Jack lived with his band in a dilapidated third floor walk-up on what would have been the wrong side of the tracks had the city actually enclosed tracks. As it didn't, the boarded-up storefronts, uncollected trash, and debris-filled vacant lots were a fairly good indication of the local socio-economic condition.

  Not good.

  Jack and his band were determined to move up and out and so they practised day and night. Unfortunately, they were a thrash metal group who didn't so much play as assault their instruments in an era of breathy boy bands and vapid blondes. No one wanted to hear their music: not the producers who signed bands for the major record companies, not the DJs at the local radio station, not the guy who booked bands at the club on the corner, not even their neighbours…

  *

  "Would you shut up! It's three in the morning and you suck!"

  "Come back to bed, babe. No way they hear you over the damned reverb anyhow."

  "They're always fucking practising; you think they'd get it right occasionally!"

  "Word."

  *

  Especially not their neighbours.

  *

  Jack slammed his way through the C#, jumped to the G, smashed through the B on 7, and shifted hard down two frets to the A, really leaning on the strings for all he was worth. They were in the space; his axe was screaming, Gustav's bass was rattling the windows two freaking rooms away, and Maitland was leaving bruises on his skins. They should've been making music, but something was wrong.

  He stopped playing. After a couple of minutes, he stepped back and turned off Gustav's amp. The bass player kept going for a couple of bars then he frowned, stared down at his fret board, and finally turned toward Jack. Who pointed at Maitland.

  Gustav pulled a ballpoint pen out of his dreads and threw it at the drummer's head.

  "Fucking OW!" In the sudden silence, Maitland rubbed at the blue dot in the centre of his forehead with the end of a stick. "That hurt."

  Jack ignored him. "I couldn't hear Angela."

  All three turned to face the skinny blonde in the centre of the room. She shrugged bare shoulders, her butterfly tattoo rising and falling. "So?"

  "If I can't hear you and I'm standing right next to you, how the hell can they hear you?" He nodded toward the "audience"; on this particular night made up of the usual imaginary crowd and a cockroach investigating the top of the toaster.

  "Pretending I care. Look, you got two problems: First, your lyrics blow and second, you play too damned loud."

  "Sing louder."

  "This is as loud as I sing. Look at this." Angela held out a pale arm Jack could have circled with his thumb and baby finger. "I'm still vibrating. You guys have to play quieter – and when I say play, I mean that in the most general sense."

  Maitland stopped scratching down the crack of his ass long enough to frown. "Was that a burn?"

  "Yes, you idiot, it was a burn! I am so wasting my time here." Heavily kohled eyes narrowed. "Gustav, let's go." As she reached the door, she realised she was alone. "Gustav! I mean it! Me or the band."

  *

  "Cheer up man, she wasn't that good."

  "Maybe not at the whole singing thing," Gustav allowed. "But she sure looked fine in all that leather underwear."

  "Word." Maitland stroked a brush over a cymbal. "What do you call that red thing she had?"

  "A corset, man."

  "Guys!" Jack cut the reminiscing off cold. "We don't need a skinny fetishist, we need someone with pipes. It doesn't even have to be a chick."

  "Dude!"

  "For the band, Maitland, you neb. We got the sound, we just need a voice."

  "And some food."

  "What?"

  Gustav stepped back so that the other two could see into the fridge. "The cupboard is bare, Jack."

  "That's not a cupboard, man, that's…"

  "Shut-up, Maitland." Jack stepped carefully through the web of wires spread out over the floor. "What about the packets of plum sauce?"

  "Ate them."

  "And those three olives?"

  "Them too. Man, we are down to tap water and toaster leavings."

  Jack glanced over at the cockroach and mentally stroked the toaster leavings off the list. "Tomorrow, we'll buy…" His voice trailed off as Gustav slowly shook his head. "We're broke?"

  "Totally. And I am not scooping coins out of that fountain again; I almost got pneumonia last time."

  "Well, then we can…"

  "No."

  "You didn't even hear…"

  "I don't want to hear another dumb-ass idea, Jack. Face it, you got to sell the cow."

  Jack turned to face the closet and his leather trench coat hanging black and supple over the top of the open door. "No."

  "You have to."

  "I can't." The coat made him feel tough and sexy and powerful and talented and tall.

  Gustav draped a supporting arm across his shoulders. "It's all we've got left, man. You don't sell the cow, we don't eat."

  *

  The next day, Jack set out with the coat over his arm, heading for the pawn shop on 7th. There were pawn shops closer – some days it seemed like they were the only growth industry around – but the pawn shop on 7th was next to the closest store selling food. Besides, Jack wanted to spend as long as he could with the coat. The weather was cool and he could have put it on, but he was afraid that if he caught sight of his reflection, if he smelled that distinctive aroma of tanned cow hides, if he felt the leather flapping around his calves one more time, he'd never be able to part with it.

  About to walk past the park – because as depressed as he was about pawning the coat, he wasn't suicidal and that's what it would take for a sane man to actually walk into that junkie/mugger-haven-with-trees – he heard the wail of a guitar rising up over the ever present roar of traffic.

  Drawn by the sound, he stepped off the sidewalk.

  Jack found the axe-man under the skeletal remains of a swing set; a barrel-chested dude with long grey hair and a short grey beard, he was just standing there, pulling the most amazing music out of an old Martin. It was an acoustic, a bluegrass guitar, but it sounded like Eddie Van Halen, and Joe Satriani and Chris Impellitteri all rolled up in one. Incredible sounds. Impossible sounds.

  With the coat over his arm and his mouth open, Jack stood and listened. The music pounded through him, vibrating blood and bone.

  After a final, amazing chord progression – chords Jack couldn't even identify the sausage-sized fingers moved so fast – the old man stopped playing, looked up and frowned. "What?"

  "That was, like, wow. And loud. Like, really, really loud! Unboosted loud! I never heard a guitar played like that. I never knew anyone could play like that!"

  The old man snorted. "You don't get out much, do you? What's your name, boy?"

  "Jack. I play. Not like that; but you know. I have a band."

  "Of course you do."

  "I got a demo disc!" He pulled the tiny MP3 disc out of his back pocket. "We already pawned the player but I got a disc. I carry it everywhere because, like, you never know."

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