Blue Magic (16 page)

Wait—had that been
U.S.
or
Us
? Will reached for the container, a bright orange laundry basket … then fumbled it as he recognized a sketch of Mark Clumber on top.

This is what Olive had begun to say. Astrid didn’t care about anyone but his children, she’d said. Didn’t care about—

The basket tipped, spilling cards across the floor.

Will knelt, heart slamming. He gathered up the pencil sketches of familiar faces: Mike the surfer; the strike team medic, Janet, who’d been a nurse in Vietnam. There were volunteers and Wendover workers and even the Alchemite Prima, Passion. Boomsday might engulf most of its authors, killing them as it had Albert Lethewood, Jacks Glade, and the fire chief.

His hands trembling, he scooped the cards into the basket. He’d go to the letrico factory, spin energy. He’d work harder, apologize. He’d been selfish, but he’d make it right.…

He froze, his hand hovering above the last two portraits on the floor as he recognized Sahara Knax and Astrid Lethewood.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“
ELIZA’S ARRANGED FOR US
to go see Jacks.” Patience was extraordinarily tall this morning, almost seven feet in height, with generous, curvy proportions, skin the color of soot, and a cap of short, tightly curled black hair. She was clad in a dress woven from blue-tinged grasses. Her feet, which were massive, perfectly shaped, and oddly bewitching, dwarfed the sandals she had crammed them into.

“They make fabric here in the unreal?” Ev asked.

“Had to. I failed to pack anything for a giantess,” she said without a shred of humor. “What I wouldn’t give to be myself again.”

Ev knew what it was like to be trapped in an ill-fitted body. Before he could say so, Teoquan sauntered into their rooms, wearing a knowing smirk.

Swallowing his words, Ev settled for a cool nod.

“Teo’s going to be our guide.”

“Thanks very much,” Ev said, feigning enthusiasm.

“I agreed before I knew
you
were coming,” Teoquan said.

“I appreciate it, whatever your reason.”

“My reason’s nothing to you. Let’s hit the road.”

“Fine,” Ev said. “Where to?”

An evil grin. “Off to bone bridge.”

He led them out to the Pit, whose edge, since St. Louis, had become a seeping waterfall of vitagua. Slush flowed downward into the brightness, thick, slippery, and dense with contamination. “Ready to go?”

Ev peered over the lip, blinked at the glare, and fished out a pair of tinted glasses. “Ready.”

“Cute,” Teoquan said.

“We playing whose is bigger, or we going?” Patience asked.

“Sorry, darlin’.” Parallel bridge rails, brand new, made of white grit and encrusted with ice, waited at the edge of the chasm. Ev stepped out over the edge and found himself in a low-roofed corridor of blue ice, standing beneath tons of glacier.

A thick stream of vitagua flowed from the ceiling, blocking their path. It twisted away from Teo, its movements snakelike.

Patience whistled, impressed. “Did you use a chantment to do that?”

Teoquan shook his head. “Vitagua responds to passion. I happen to be very passionate.”

“By which you mean stubborn.”

“You say tomato, baby.”

“I’ve never seen anyone but Astrid manipulate vitagua.”

“Eliza seems able to push vitagua around,” Ev said.

“Eliza used to be a chanter, back before she was murdered by the witch-burners,” Teoquan said. “She’s got a few of her old chops, even if she ain’t married to the well no more.”

“Married?” Ev said, disliking the sound of it.

“Till death did her part.” He grinned.

Ev looked at Teo’s teeth. They were big, but like everything else about him, they looked human.

“Shouldn’t the vitagua be Frog Princing you?” Ev asked.

“No,” Teo said. “I’m special.”

They stepped out of the tunnel, passing the sunken face of a child with the features of a stork, and into a cathedral-sized cavern supported by irregular columns. The chamber was aglow with orange light.

Patience strode to the base of the first column. Each of them was an ice sculpture of someone. There were dozens of them, hundreds, maybe. “These are former chanters?”

“These can’t all have been from Indigo Springs,” Ev said.

“Eliza sent out search parties. The Indigo Springs guys are all here, but she found other chanters too, from other wells.”

“Other wells—are any of the wells open?”

“Nope. Far’s anyone can tell, your kid is holding the last well. All our chicks in one fragile hatchery.”

“Astrid is working on finding … an apprentice, I guess you’d say,” Patience said.

“Will Forest,” Teoquan said. “Am I right?”

“If he agrees.”

“A white guy.
Quelle
fucking
surprise.
”

Ev opened his mouth, but Patience spoke before he could: “Where’s Jacks Glade, Teo?”

“Follow the fiery brick road,” he said, pointing in the direction of the orange light before vanishing amid the chanter statues.

“You’ve made such charming friends here,” Ev said.

She laid a hand on his arm. “The better Teo likes me, Ev, the less likely he is to make trouble.”

“You think you can defang him with a little flirting?”

“Courtesy ain’t flirting. Teoquan and Eliza have something in common. The Roused respect them.”

“But you like him?”

“I’m here to play ambassador, remember? Teo speaks for the Roused who want everything melted tomorrow, regardless of the consequences to the real, or to Astrid.”

They started toward the light, following an unusually warm breeze. Fire, Ev thought as he gave Patience a hand around a geyser of ice and caught sight of Jackson Glade.

Jacks was caught in a massive frozen wave of vitagua, a rising wave of fluid with a crisp curl at the top. Vitagua dripped from above, freezing on its upper edge, forming icicles. The ice was intensely clear and the boy was upright within it, arms outstretched as if he were swimming for the surface of this peculiar sea. His open eyes were glowing coals, and his face was lifeless. He wore the clothes he had been shot in, that terrible day of the siege at Albert’s house. The belly of his shirt was torn and blood soaked. Veins had grown from the wound into the substance of the glacier, pulsing minutely.

Ev stared. Astrid had spoken of Jacks’s death, but to find him here, torn open and preserved like a pickle in a jar …

Memory struck, crystal clear: Jacks at two in the playground, wearing a saggy diaper and nothing else, chubby baby legs churning as he ran away from the Chief.

The glow—the heat—was coming off Jacks. Under his skin was the shifting orange light of embers. At his feet, vitagua bubbled into a brick-lined canal.

“That’s the Chimney,” Ev said, but Patience wasn’t listening. She had one hand on the wave and the other over her mouth. She was sobbing.

“Hey,” he said, reaching out, feeling helpless. The touch was awkward. But pulling away would probably make it worse.

Patience turned to mist, passing through Jacks, through the wave. She solidified on the other side, changing into a short Latina beauty. The huge dress billowed around her.

“Stupid damn kids,” she said.

“It wasn’t your fault.” That was Teoquan, gliding out from elsewhere, his face wet with blue magic.

Ev had enough time to think that this wasn’t the point before Patience dissolved completely into grief.

Teoquan opened his arms and with a step, Patience was in them, crying. “You told them not to be idiots. What could you do, jump in front of a bullet?”

There was no room for Ev in this scene. “I’m going to go find Albert,” he said, leaving them together, slipping into the forest of statues.

From earliest childhood, for as long as he had been able to remember, Ev knew the world had him wrong. He’d refused to wear skirts, tried peeing standing up, took absurd pride in being labeled a tomboy. He had outplayed the boys in sports … when he’d been allowed on the field at all. He joined the town’s bagpipe band, boycotted Girl Scouts, and flirted with enlisting in the army.

Albert Lethewood had been the only man he ever felt any kinship with, any attraction for, and to this day Ev—who through his teens had had crush after crush on girls, made vows to be celibate, and periodically fantasized about becoming a priest—could not say why. Had it been the magic within Albert? Had young Ev gotten tired of fighting a battle he couldn’t even name? Had Albert come along just as he was giving up?

It was his life—if anyone could know, it was he.

Albert had been thought an alcoholic or gambler; he’d been beneath the notice of most of town. Playing the town bum had been his way of concealing the magical well: a façade, an attempt to avoid the death that had finally claimed him.

Here, in the unreal, Albert was a hero.

His statue was huge, his pose noble, his expression brave. Ev gazed upward, cast back to the seventies when they had married—Ev wearing a kilt and poor Albert in a borrowed suit.

Albert had courted Ev, chased her in his way, but it was she who had chosen him.

Now, of course, it was obvious why the sex, even with her in charge, had felt slightly off. Why the experience of pregnancy had been so awful. His body had tried to reject the life, Astrid’s life, within him.

In hindsight, it felt as though he must always have known what was wrong, but nothing was ever that simple. Ev had loved Albert; he couldn’t deny it. And Indigo Springs wasn’t the kind of place where you met other transgendered folk. Astrid was ten before Ev even heard the term. Those days, if the subject came up at all, the phrase you heard was
sex-change surgery.
In small-town America, that meant self-mutilation; it was something sick men did. Ev was over fifty the first time someone told him about female-to-male transition.

You grew up. You got married. You had kids.

Vitagua contamination had been clarifying, almost a relief. Curse or no, exposure to magic had battered down a locked door in Ev’s mind. At first he’d reached for a delusion, the most comfortable fantasy he could find: a fictional detective who delivered mail, as he did, a detective who shared his name. Of course he was Everett Burke, and of course Ev Burke was male.

Madness—for madness it had been—had been preferable to wrongness.

Here in the unreal, Albert’s statue was upright, clear eyed, all the things he’d pretended not to be in life.

“Married to the well, hmmm?” Ev said. Teo had a gift for sticking the knife in.

Part of Ev hated himself for caring at all. He’d tried to have a woman’s life—to marry a man, have a family. Seen from this side of his transformation, the attempt felt like a lie.

But he had tried. Had loved Albert. Had resented,
still
resented coming second.

Albert gazed down at him with infinite compassion.

“I’m not coming second again,” Ev told him.

That brought his thoughts back to Teoquan and Patience. And, just like that, they reappeared.

“Hey, Virgin Harry, you done moping over your ex?”

“Teo,” Patience growled. “His name’s Everett.”

“It’s all right,” Ev said.

“Honey, you’ve seen Jacks. Now we gotta shake.”

They returned to the bone bridge, stepping out atop the glacier and heading in three different directions.

Ev went in search of Eliza. “I’ve been wondering if there are any crews working outside the city.”

Eliza peered at him over her granny glasses. “We’ve been thinking about Astrid’s offer to set up a letrico mill. We need the power.”

Relief washed through him. “On the hill where the wind’s blowing in? I could work on that, yeah.”

“Didn’t your daughter send you here to be a diplomat?”

“Patience has that covered, and I like to keep busy.”

She nodded, seeming to understand. “I’d like to start soon, before…”

“Yes?”

Her eye fell on Teoquan. “My power here is diminishing.”

“Maybe we can do something about that,” Ev said, almost carelessly.

They let that sit between them, the raccoon fiddling with the cuffs of her long dress.

“I’ll talk to your daughter,” she said, and he shook her warm, tiny hand as the sound of Patience, laughing at something Teo had said, rang like chimes on the chilly air.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EAT, SLEEP, SAVE THE
world. Not the kind of job where a girl got vacations. Not that Astrid had ever taken one. Jacks was always trying to get her to ease up.…

They were in
Overlord,
sliding through the gateway in pursuit of the padlock chantment the Alchemites had used on Ellie Forest. It was in Atlanta, according to Astrid’s seers, so now they were rolling down a street in Georgia, Igme blowing barely magical bubbles out to vitalize the city and the Chattahoochee River.

The raids had almost become routine. Astrid made chantments; Janet kept them from attracting too much notice. The panic afterward had even become minimal. Two nights ago they had chased the Alchemites to Britain. They failed to recover the chantment that had turned Ellie against Will, but they did contaminate Manchester. Afterwards, barely five hundred people had fled the city. The rest stayed, adapting to the slight magical changes to their landscape.

Now it was Georgia’s turn.

Before the magical well had blown open, Astrid had barely left Oregon. Now she was crossing the world, seeing its great cities … and altering them irrevocably. All she remembered about Atlanta was Ev watching the Olympics on TV, and studying about Sherman burning the place down in the Civil War.

Her head was spinning. So much vitagua, so many voices.

They had materialized in a neighborhood called Cabbagetown, near an old mill that had been converted into loft apartments. Galleries and funky restaurants lined the rain-damp street.