Ev swallowed. “We all want the same thing. The Roused freed, the magical balance of the world restored…”
“Small change, Everett. I’ve spent centuries under ice, and someone’s gonna pay.”
“I’m not a killer,” Astrid said.
Teo smirked. “Come on, sweetie pie, we all know that ain’t true.”
“I’ve given you chantments, power to run them, and more people free each day. I draw the line at human sacrifice.”
“If you won’t hand over my enemies, dear heart, I may have to start on your loved ones.”
“Teoquan.” That was Patience, her voice iron. She was barefoot, wrapped in a blanket. “Even if the unreal is calling for the blood of its enemies, nobody Astrid loves has wronged us. Not Jacks, not me, not Ev.”
“No?” Teo’s eye fell on Ev, and once again he had that sense of being seen, known.
“If it’s a matter of needing blood, the actual substance—” Astrid looked thoughtful. “We could steal medical waste.”
“Kid,” Ev protested, repulsed.
“Low-end hospital leftovers?” Teo looked affronted. “I said the blood of our enemies.”
“You want a Fyreman, Teo, get your own. I’ll bet you’re capable.”
“That’s twice now you’ve denied me,” he said. “Want to go for three? Where’s my chanter?”
“We’ve located Patience’s niece, finally, but Patience is right—Lilla’s contaminated. She can’t become a chanter.” Ev caught a look of relief on Patience’s face.
“Was that your doing, Astrid?” Teo asked.
“Of course not,” she said.
“I’ll get you another name.”
“The grumbles mentioned that judge, Skagway. He’s … Haida, is it?”
“That old man? I want someone with a bit of punch.”
“Punch?”
“He wants someone short-tempered and easy to manipulate,” Patience said.
“I want a warrior. Not some airy-fairy pacifist who’ll act only on Astrid’s say-so.”
“You’re asking me to go find some random violent jerk with a grudge?”
“Hundreds of the People are in prison, I hear,” Teoquan said. “Why not start in Winnipeg?”
Astrid’s jaw worked. “There has to be some middle ground.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. You know where this is going?”
Ev’s chest pounded—he was holding his breath.
“Do you?” Astrid said. “I don’t think you and I ever come to blows, Teoquan.”
“Maybe you haven’t let yourself remember yet.” With that, Teo walked away.
“Where it’s going?” Patience demanded when he was gone.
“He’s bluffing.” Astrid waved that away. “I’ve told you where we end up. Magic loose in the world, people using it, the Roused free, everything getting better. Will and his kids together, after all this … blows…”
“What is it?”
She was turning in a slow circle. “Here. We’ll be here, on Pucker Hill. This is where our cottage will be. This is where I see Jacks again.…”
The relief on her face was unmistakable.
“There is a whole lotta room for bad between now and the dream house, kid,” Patience said. “Teo’s after your ass, you get that? Couldn’t you give him the Fyreman?”
“The guy’d already been tortured once,” Astrid said.
“How much time do we have left?” Ev interrupted.
“Pop, I don’t know, okay? We’ll talk more later: this mouse is finished.” With that, the vitagua Astrid froze solid.
“Ducking the question,” Patience said. She poked the ringer. “Sucks when someone you love’s keeping secrets, huh?”
“She’s going to die. Teo’s going to kill her.”
Patience’s scowl broke. “Ev, no. Happy ending, remember?”
“Those damned grumbles.” He shook his head. “She’ll get that day with Will and the kids, but … how do we stop him?”
“You think I know?”
“You know something. Who is he? Why isn’t he cursed?”
“This isn’t just about your daughter, Everett Lethewood.”
“Who’s holding out on who now?”
Whatever she might have said next was drowned out by a crash from the direction of the elders’ village. They ran to the bone bridge, stepping out into calamity.
It was Eliza.
Part of the cliff had broken free above her. She was dead, a raccoon smear with shattered glasses, her blood puddling among the fallen rocks. The crack in the mountain had widened where she fell; the bubbling spring had become a torrent, ice cold and filled with salmon.
“Tragic,” Teo said.
He was at the edge of the crowd that was forming around the rockfall. Haughty youngsters, half-human teenagers with sharpened claws, surrounded him. He looked from raccoon’s body to the flow of water. “See the renewal?”
“I see it,” Ev said. “So?”
“The unreal demands the blood of its enemies, remember? Poor Eliza must have been a little corrupt.”
“That’s enough,” Patience said. For months, she had been unable to control her shape-shifting, but now she became herself again, an old woman with arresting features and blazing eyes. She scanned the crowd, seeming to poll the villagers.
The buffalo nodded: “Walk away, Old One.”
Teo’s nostrils flared. “We’ll be down in the Pit—with Miss Astrid’s Fyreman boy toy.”
He sauntered away, leading the entourage of young warriors, leaving the elders with the corpse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE ROAR OF A plane brought Astrid’s attention to the canopy of the alchemized forest, and the sight of the jets blasting a fireball into the woods near the edge of the Big Blue Reservoir. Plumes of blue smoke were pouring skyward.
She wasn’t worried: another Astrid was in the Octagon, watching Mark and his defense crew as they brought rain down to quell the flames.
She had a ringer down in the sea pipe, too, reading maps for Chakeesa and her crew as they worked in their bubble of letrico-pressurized stone, force-growing coral to extend the vitagua pipeline. They’d tacked a hand-lettered sign reading Hawaii or Bust on a hook-shaped stalactite. Bramblegate, on the chamber wall, offered a quick escape route back to town in case of emergency.
The only place she didn’t keep a ringer full-time was the unreal: many of the Roused, not just Teoquan, found her use of animals to construct the dopplegängers offensive.
One of the Astrids was in the so-called Doghouse in London, surrounded by newshound volunteers as they watched a visibly uncomfortable Juanita Corazón take reporters’ questions about Sahara, Gilead, and the slaughter at the courthouse.
“The air force is in control of Wendover,” Juanita said. “Sahara Knax remains in government custody.”
It was barely true; according to the seers, the Alchemites had almost flattened the place in the recent battle.
“We should reach out to Juanita again,” she said to Olive. “Any ideas?”
The mouse within her ringer in the Octagon wasn’t going to last much longer. Its heart fluttered; pains shot through her fingers and toes. She took it to the plaza, heading into the glow. Katarina’s ecologists had pinpointed a number of remote, inaccessible wildlands, prime sites for contamination. Choosing one, she stepped out into the humidity of the Laotian jungle. Ambling through the woods, she let the substance of her vitagua body turn to mist, leaving the barest traces on flowers and vines. Smaller plants didn’t overgrow as conspicuously as trees did. When she spread the contamination thin and kept away from human settlements, the effects usually went unnoticed.
Her sense of illness intensified. She focused in on Astrid Prime, stretched out in bed within the cave.
Janet was holding her hand. “How’s the battle?”
She tried to sit, and couldn’t. “Rolling downhill. Can you send for Will?”
“Of course,” Janet said, touch
ing the tuning fork that hung around her wrist.
Sinking into the pillows, Astrid reached out to the Chimney, drawing liquid magic through a channel in the rock, filling one of the stone basins she’d created when she and Olive were remaking this bolt-hole into a cave of wonders.
“Astrid?” Will’s voice brought her back. They were both healing her now, beating back the pain. Letrico poured through them. So much power, just to keep her alive …
“It’s time to get the glass out.”
Janet frowned. “I’ll call—”
“Just you two,” she said. She didn’t want a hundred witnesses to this. The feeling of being owned—by the volunteers, by the Roused—made the hurt more intense. “I want it done without fuss. It’s not gonna kill me, I promise.”
They exchanged a long glance, wordlessly debating.
“What do we do?” Will asked finally.
She held out her hands. “Get me up.”
Janet put a hand on her back, helping her sit, and then Will lifted her. Astrid tried to resist, to step down, but she was weak, too weak. “The tub.”
He carried her around the jade privacy screen that hid her bed. The basin waited, brimming with vitagua.
“Put me in,” Astrid said. “The vitagua and the sea-glass will destroy each other.”
His arms tensed around her. “Are you serious?”
“Janet’s ready with the healing chantment.”
“Astrid, this is risky.”
“If we don’t believe in a Happy After, Will, how can we expect anyone else to?” She met his eyes and was shocked: there was no answering belief in his face.
He said carefully: “So it’s a leap of faith?”
“It’s only a leap if you drop me.”
“That’d make it a dunk of faith,” Janet said.
Okay, he wasn’t sold. There’d be time to convince him. Don’t cry, she lectured herself. Sound sure. “Put me in, Will. It’s all right, I swear.”
Still he hesitated.
No more waiting. Astrid stretched out a toe.
Her body, ever the sponge, drew the fluid in. Pain flared in her hand, and she screeched as blood flowed. A second later, part of her knee was gone, just gone. White bone shone through a gory hole.
Will tried to pull back, but Astrid twisted out of his grip, collapsing, pitching into the vitagua. She grabbed her neck, clamping her hands over the big veins there.
Red blood and blue magic, she thought, is that now?
Exsanguination. Now there’s an ugly word.
More pain as past and future jumbled. She was Before, kissing Sahara with blood on her hands, she was five years old and playing with one of Dad’s magic toys, she was having sex with Jacks, with Will, with her first real girlfriend, Jemmy. She was standing by the wreckage of the power plant in the unreal, she was bleeding, she was on trial, she was flirting with Juanita Corazón. She was fog, drifting through a big mall in Alberta. She was upside down, like a bat. She was helpless, she was dead and burning, she was watching Jacks take a bullet.
Let go of the reins, rip the Band-Aid, poison the world, warmth-Will-think-warmth-Boom …
Agony, a thousand cuts, stench of burned flowers …
Will pulled her out of the pool of magic. Janet healed her, one last time. New flesh—pale, unfreckled, and hairless—grew over her wounds. The stink of burnt vitagua hung in the air.
Sandblasted crater with a bone-shaped mountain at its edge … Roused, Fyremen, and Alchemites at each others’ …
“Throats.” She released her neck. “Is this the part where we find the fire hall? All Chief Lee’s stuff, the potions…”
Janet shone a light in her eyes. “Astrid, snap out of it.”
“It’s just the grumbles.” Will lifted Astrid again, carrying her to the Chimney. As he stepped out into Bigtop, volunteers mobbed them, their voices mixing with the grumbles:
“What happened?”
“Is she dying?”
“Is she cured?”
“Where you taking her?”
“To the fire,” Astrid answered.
Will shushed her. “Astrid, just make chantments.”
“Janet healed everything,” she said, twisting the barbell she’d had pierced through the web of her right hand.
There was no pain.
Teoquan slugging it out with Lucius’s brother, warriors pouring out of the cracked, bloodied Chimney …
“Chant, Astrid,” Will repeated, and she realized she had almost wandered off.
She stared at the objects, baffled. Fear spiked through her: had she forgotten how, lost her connection to the well?
But no, that hadn’t happened yet. A sagging Victorian footstool caught her eye. When the unreal popped, someone named Parminder would use it to keep back a storm surge that would otherwise have destroyed Galveston.
She reached out, thinking of disaster prevention—tornado deflectors, firebreaks, chantments to strengthen buildings that would otherwise fall in quakes, chantments to turn those that did fall into harmless dust. Something to carve channels for lava—because there would be eruptions: when the unreal popped, more than one mountain would go boom too. Storm shelters, lifeboats, something to capture debris in Shanghai before it became shrapnel in the rising wind. Spotlights to lead people to safety, something to calm panicked animals, a horn whose shriek would drive people inland before the tsunamis could take them, air bubbles for sinking ships …
Diggers for tunnels, more routes for Ilya’s spillway …
The volunteers were whooping. “Three cheers for the boss!” someone shouted, and she could see relief on their faces as they embraced, as they reached out to touch her.
Will had her by the arms. “Better?”
He’s looking for a pen…, one last voice said before the grumbles subsided.
“You’re looking for a pen?”
He stared through her. “How are you, Astrid?”
She had forgotten what it was like not to be in pain. Her mind was sharp, and she was bursting with energy.
“Astrid,” Pike asked. “Is it true—you’re okay?”
“I feel … I feel amazing.”
“Rumor’s spreading that Will cured you. People are calling … Plaza’s got a thousand people in it. Your ringers have frozen over. Nobody knows whether to panic or party.”
“Tell them I’m cured.”
Turning to the diminishing pile of scavenged objects, she chanted a bubble gum machine. Each turn of its crank would bring her another sick, contaminated animal.
Around her, tuning forks and pipe whistles hummed: a general announcement going out to say she’d been cured.
She reached for her doppelgängers, splitting her attention even more easily now that the pain was gone.
“Sometimes this is so easy,” she told Will, cranking up a new mouse for another ringer. Clothes and skin grew over it, and she grinned into her own face. She could go everywhere.
“You’re okay?” Will said.
Astrid caught his hands, trying to twirl, but he resisted. She grabbed for a random volunteer instead, and the growing crowd lifted her to their shoulders.
“Did someone say they found the fire hall?” she asked.
“You. But if it was a grumble talking, the timing could—”
Pike interrupted: “Astrid, scavengers just found the fire hall.”
“Ha! Get the strike team together, Pike.”
“Hold your horses,” Janet said. “You aren’t going anywhere near that place.”
“I’ll send a ringer.” A parade was forming beneath her; people bobbed and sang. “I’ll send a dozen.”
“Won’t that defeat the purpose?” Will said. “The idea’s for people to take them for you.”
She stuck her tongues out at him. “Spoilsport. Race you there?”
She found the fire hall untouched by the quakes and overgrowth of the forest, as Lee’s house had been. It sat atop a crumbling ridge south of town, encircled by blue-tinged roots and foli
age, a brick edifice crowned by a six-story fire tower.
“Dad brought me here as a kid,” she told Will when he appeared in the cleared patch of woods. “We’d watch the men run up and down the tower with their tanks and hoses. Middle of summer, full gear, sweating in the summer heat.”
“It’s a demanding job,” he said, still remote.
“I came back when Jacks was training, to watch him. Took a picture, but never developed it.”
“You must have been the last person on earth without a digital camera.”
The scavengers had cleared a ten-foot perimeter of forest around the hall, binding yellow tape around the property that marked the point where the magic stopped. Glimmering letrico crystals had been piled just outside the tape.
“Where’s that magic shovel?”
“Here.” Igme shoved the blade into the ground, and willow roots, thick and vital, plunged into the ground around the building.
Astrid’s ringers glanced around. Everywhere she looked, the letrico supply was surprisingly robust. “How much juice did it take to keep me alive?”
“It took what it took,” Clancy grunted.
“Meaning?”
Janet said, “Thunder put in that second power plant.”
Astrid shivered. All that energy, just for her …
“Thar she blows,” Igme said.
The fire hall seemed to sigh. It doors buckled inward. The ground danced, dirt pluming as the buried primer cord ignited. They stepped over the threshold, the ringer first, Igme last.
“Look for test tubes,” Will said, voice tight. “When Gilead Landon killed Caro and the rest, at the trial, he drank potions.”
“For a second, I thought he was doing shooters,” Astrid said. She walked past the trucks, into a narrow hallway that led to a kitchen and a gym, and came face-to-face with a portrait of the fire department from the year before. Six uniformed men grinned into the camera. Lee Glade had an arm around Jacks.
Jacks looked happy.
Whatever their differences, the father–son affection was evident in this picture. Astrid remembered anew how it felt, swinging the block of ice at the Chief’s head, the rage …
“Hola! Found an office,” Aquino called.
The Chief’s furniture was old-fashioned but ordinary enough: a bulky desk and chair, steel file cabinets, a fifties-vintage electric fan. A laptop sat atop the desk, looking out of place. Framed news stories about past fires hung on the walls, their paper yellowing.
Blue Magic Page 23
