Indigo Springs (28 page)

“We all leave,” she said, trying it out. Sahara leaves, but we go with her. Maybe this was what the vitagua had been saying all along. “Make some chantments and run.”

“As many as we can carry,” Sahara said. “Things to help us hide. They’ll be after us.”

“There’s an understatement,” Mrs. Skye said.

“Pat, you’re like a broken record. Could you—?”

“Sahara!” Jacks and Astrid barked simultaneously.

“Sorry,” Sahara said insincerely. She pressed a brooch into Astrid’s hands. “Chant this, come on.”

“It doesn’t work,” Astrid said. She looked outside again, watching the bustle near the big speakers.

“Don’t give up,” Jacks said.

“It’s true,” Astrid said, feeling the weight of her words even as she absently chanted the pin. It would summon fog, she decided—maybe it would buy time if the house was harder for the police to see. She pinned it on Sahara’s chest. “Sahara leaves, I—oh, no.”

“What?”

“Ma,” she said. “And Olive.”

Soldiers were escorting Ev Lethewood and Jacks’s mother onto a sheltered platform near the speakers. They set Ev up with a microphone. She leaned in, lips moving. No sound…then a technician flipped a switch.

“Now?” Ev asked. Her voice boomed through the walls.

Far away, the small figure—Artie Roche, bad cop to Will Forest’s good, Astrid thought—nodded.

“Mark Clumber, this is Evelyn Lethewood. You’ve got my daughter Astrid in there.”

Astrid sank to the floor, feet splayed in the remains of their last meal.

“Mark, I’ve been delivering mail to your sister Elaine for ten years. She’s a good woman, and she wants you out of there safe and sound. That’s what I want for Astrid. You get what you want from these men and I get my daughter back. Don’t hurt her. Don’t…”

Astrid sobbed as her mother paused.

“They’re putting her back on script,” Sahara said. “They’ll figure Mark needs to hear your name a lot. See you as a person. This means they’re still buying that it’s Mark who’s in charge here. This is good.”

“Good,” she echoed bleakly. “How do you know this?”

“The vitagua you want so desperately to suck out of me, Astrid,” Sahara said. “My sensitivity?”

“Oh, you’re a bundle of sensitivity, sweetie.”

“Pat—ah, never mind. Plus, Astrid, I watch a lot of crime movies.” Her eyes sparkled, as if it were funny.

“Astrid is twenty-seven,” Ev boomed, and as she went on, it was as Sahara predicted: Astrid loves this, Astrid did that when she was young. Astrid is a good person.

Astrid wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“You have to start chanting things,” Sahara said.

“Leave me alone.” She covered her face, listening to her mother’s dusty-dry desperate voice begging for her life. Then it was Olive’s turn to speak, Jacks’s turn to hear. He leaned in the corner, watching his mother through the kaleidoscope, not saying a word.

“Suddenly I’m glad I have nobody,” Sahara remarked.

Mrs. Skye snorted.

“Pat, shut up.”

“You don’t have nobody,” Astrid managed. She extended a hand, but Sahara pulled away, out of reach.

“They won’t let us sit here forever,” Jacks said.

“No giving up,” Sahara ordered. “Please, Astrid, start chanting. I can get us out of this if you just pitch in.”

Was this it? There was an argument, and Sahara leaves. Or maybe we all go. Is that what happens now, Astrid thought, are we there?

She stood, sensing Jack’s support, silent and strong. “Yes,” she said aloud, answering herself. It was time.

Except it wasn’t. The sound of ice cracking downstairs interrupted her before she could speak.

It was Patterflam. He had thrust one flame-licked arm from the unreal straight into the house, breaking through the base of the fireplace mantel. Smoke and blue steam boiled off him. The living room floor was burning.

“Shit, oh shit,” Sahara said. “What do we do?”

Jacks’s face was stony. “Kill him.”

Astrid swallowed. “I can’t. Not again…”

“I’ll do it.”

“How?”

“The pocketknife that decays things,” he said.

“It’s here.” Astrid unfolded the blade with shaking hands. “Use a cantation.”

“Do you remember the words?” Sahara asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Astrid, the knife?”

Before she could pass it over, the fire lunged out, licking her wrist. She reared back, and Jacks caught her.

Both smoke alarms went off at once, keening shrilly. Flames were spreading everywhere, streaking along the walls, dancing on the sealed windows. The living room brightened even as the air became smoky and rancid.

Astrid thought fleetingly of the police outside, wondered what they were seeing. The house aglow with firelight, smoke gouting from the chimney…

“Kid!” That was Mrs. Skye. She was pounding on the sealed front door—Mark had used the chanted rifle to barricade it. “Do something!”

Do something. Astrid yanked a geyser of vitagua up from the flooded basement, drawing it over the flames, smothering them. The smoke got denser, and fire continued to pour off Patterflam’s arm. Where it touched the vitagua the flames intensified, filling the air with a stench of scorched flowers.

Screams from the unreal howled within Astrid’s mind. Right—it wasn’t water. Vitagua was flammable.

“He’s destroying the magic,” Sahara shrieked.

No. Astrid snatched a plastic drinking cup off the floor, chanting it swiftly and tossing it to Sahara. “Point this at anything that’s burning.”

“Everything’s burning,” she coughed, struggling to utter a cantation. The air was getting thicker—wet, smoky, and filled with the smell of burnt things.

Another flame leapt to the back of Astrid’s wrist, burning a blistering line across her skin. Astrid and Sahara shrieked as one; Sahara pointed the cup. Water came out of it in a firehose torrent, soaking them both.

“Just like old times,” Astrid said, and then wondered what she meant.

“Focus,” Jacks murmured in her ear, bracing her before she could slip. “Astrid, you want to suffocate?”

“No.”

“We need to filter the air.”

“Okay.” She reached up with a tendril of vitagua, pouring it into a nearby cookbook. When it was chanted she put both hands on it, reciting a cantation. At least there was plenty of heat to power things.

The book began to flap open and shut, sucking the smoke into its pages. Clean air whooshed through the living room with every snap of its covers.

“We’re running out of time,” Jacks said as the air cleared. Sahara sprayed the room and then—as the fires went out—trained the spray directly on Patterflam’s arm. He was working his way farther into the real.

“Keep the fire down while I think,” Astrid said, panting.

“Tell
him
that,” Sahara said. Patterflam’s reddened fist began to dig at the fireplace, breaking it down. A blazing shoulder appeared as the gap between real and unreal widened.

“I can get him from beneath,” Jacks whispered in Astrid’s ear. “Get down under the hole in the floor, stick the knife in him from below.”

She nodded. It made sense. But the basement was flooded….

She dragged more vitagua up and through herself. She sent it around and upward, covering everything in the house in a thin layer of blue fluid.

One by one she isolated items, beginning with the chisel lying at her feet. It would draw the dust and grime from the ruptured fireplace into itself, she decided, clean up the scene. The more normal things looked in here when the police came, the better.

She chanted the wailing smoke detectors, drowning their electric cries in vitagua and making them into chantments that would encourage anyone who stepped inside the house to believe that everything was normal here, that there was nothing extraordinary going on.

She chanted an old marionette of Jacks’s. It would dig tunnels, she decided, in case there’s no other way out.

The house was beginning to cool. Now to deal with the flood. Astrid kept chanting things, one after another: Henna’s stuffed spider would spin them a repaired floor, the kitchen chair would make anyone who sat in it feel relaxed and calm, the tweezers in the bathroom could shut down all those news trucks, the yellow rug in the laundry room could fly….

Her eye fell on Mrs. Skye, her bracelets. Everyone in the house is going to be notorious, she thought. Pat might need to hide from the press. The left bracelet would let Pat disguise herself.

She imagined the old lady getting shot by police as she came out of the house. No, they don’t hurt her, she remembered—the other bracelet makes her misty. The soldiers out there were getting trigger happy, but the bracelet will make bullets pass right through her….

Toothbrushes, art supplies, pens, a box of paper clips, the broken clock in the pantry. Astrid chanted the silver in the kitchen drawers, spoons, forks, chanted the pots and pans, the ceramic teapot and plastic sugar bowl. The clothes hanging in the closets, the coats and shirts, the dress she was wearing, all the shoes under Sahara’s bed, everything that wasn’t made of glass or circuitry…

“Hurry,” Jacks said. “Patterflam’s getting loose.”

“I’m done—the basement should be clear.” Astrid peered through the broken floor into the basement. Patterflam was nearly free; she could see a torso and leg hanging in the basement. The leg was swinging wild; it had kicked the freezer door shut.

The house hummed with mystic energy.

A small pool of vitagua lay on the basement floor—she had run out of things to chant. Astrid dragged the liquid to the back wall and froze it there in stalagmites.

“Good,” Jacks said.

“Burn, witch!” The shout came from far away, from another world. Water boiled off Patterflam’s arm as Sahara doused him.

Something was about to go terribly wrong.

“Maybe I should do this…,” Astrid said through a rising sense of dread. The fiery legs scissored in midair, swimming.

“This guy is my problem,” Jacks said.

“Pat can fight the blaze,” Sahara said, handing the cup to Mrs. Skye.

Jacks started downstairs.

“Wait,” Astrid said. But there was more cracking, the chimney breaking apart as Patterflam demolished his prison.

No time.

She tried to force out the knowledge of what came next, but the grumbles had told her all they were going to.

Jacks was already downstairs. She hurtled down the basement steps after him.

Every object in the basement had been chanted—Jacks’s paintings, his clothes, the laundry baskets. The blue glow of magic settling into solid matter was already fading.

Patterflam’s foot swung purposefully, groping for something, anything, to support his weight. Flames dribbled off his toes, melting the plastic lid of the freezer.

“Jacks, let me.”

“You can’t touch him, remember?” His eyes were locked on the blazing, swinging leg.

“He’s right,” Sahara said, plucking at her sleeve. “He’ll poach you from the inside out—”

Patterflam roared. His head broke through the wall of crumbling bricks. With a snap, the Fyreman pulled himself fully into the real.

He dropped lightly onto the freezer, leaving footprint-shaped burns in its lid before springing down to the concrete floor.

His gaze found Astrid; he started toward her and looked amazed when Jacks stepped between them.

“Stand aside, brother,” Patterflam boomed.

Jacks slugged him, lunging with the knife. Patterflam caught his wrist, tossing him aside effortlessly.

A line of flame ran through Jacks’s hair as he struck the concrete basement wall. He batted at it and leapt up to tackle Patterflam, only to get caught in a spray of water from above—Mrs. Skye, fighting the fire. He darted sideways, swinging the pocketknife.

“Don’t run with that,” Astrid heard herself murmuring. It was a mistake. Alerted by her words, Patterflam dodged the blow, catching Jacks by the scruff of the neck and hurling him forward. Hands outstretched, Jacks ran into the wall, the knife, point-first preceding him, puncturing the plaster before he crumpled to the floor.

The house groaned like a tree about to fall.

Patterflam rounded on Astrid again, but now Sahara had the mermaid on. “Patterflam,” she said, voice abuzz. “Stop.”

The man of flame paused, just for a second. Frost spread up and down the steps, melting as quickly as it formed.

“You’re not going to hurt anybody.” Sweat was rolling down Sahara’s face. “Just stand still.”

Patterflam boomed laughter. “Befouled thing, you think to challenge me?”

“Listen—,” Sahara said. Her voice broke and she swooned.

Jacks groaned. Patterflam glanced his way.

“Hey!” Astrid said. “I’m the chanter!”

It worked: he advanced on her. She backed down the hall, leading him away from the others.

“Think your day’s come, witch?” Astrid didn’t answer, just kept retreating into Jacks’s studio. Maybe the others could escape—

Fresh air ruffled her hair as she retreated, and she remembered the studio window was still open, that she had knocked out a pane when she climbed through earlier today.

That fact seemed important somehow, important  and frightening. She stopped where she was, steps from the window, lost in time again, trying to think….

Then Patterflam was on her. Smoke dried her face. Her hair crisped and the torn cartilage of her ear burned. The thin cotton dress steamed.

But none of that mattered. Through the wall of black smoke, Astrid could see Jacks coming down the hall.

Terror seized her. She opened her mouth, but Jacks put a finger to his lips. If she spoke, Patterflam would turn around, nail him again, maybe kill him.

A crackling of amusement from the man of fire. He put his hands around her waist, burning and squeezing. Waves of heat curled the air around her.

“Stop…” Reaching back, Astrid grabbed the only thing she could reach—a plastic apple sitting on Jacks’s worktable. It was already chanted, of course, everything was, and all it did was help a person learn to read music. There was nothing left that she could turn into a weapon.

“Pathetic little well wizard.” Patterflam immolated the chantment with a glance. He continued to crush her midsection, molten fingers singeing her skin, so painful, she gave in and screamed, remembering poor Dad and the sounds he made as he died. “No witch will ever finish me—that was written long ago.”

Jacks was behind him now. “How about me…brother?”

Now, too late, Astrid knew what would happen, just in time to watch it unfold. Jacks drove the chanted pocketknife into Patterflam—through him, almost, driving the blade deep into the flames.

Patterflam bellowed in surprise, gouting smoke from the wound. Thunder cracked outside and sizzles of electricity danced over Jacks’s skin. Dropping Astrid, Patterflam turned, his body of golden flame blackening at the heart.

Astrid launched herself at Jacks, thinking just tackle him, don’t grab, that’s how it all goes wrong…

…but Jacks turned, reached out with one hand even as Patterflam, dying, yanked his other arm. The force of his pull brought Jacks upright in front of the open studio window and he had to,
had
to be knocked back down—what else could Astrid do?

Her reflexes were too slow; she couldn’t pull back.

Jacks reached out to catch her, as he always did. His fingers wrapped around hers.

“Let go!” she howled, horrified, as Patterflam lifted Jacks by one arm and her own weight dragged him down. But Jacks hung on, and as Astrid hit the floor she bore him down with her, stretching him between her arm and Patterflam’s rising fist like laundry on a line, like a kid dangling between Mom and Dad. Jacks was spread out in front of the wide-open studio window and the dying man of flame stomped her, making her screech as he ground her underfoot. Oh, Astrid thought, there’s Sahara kneeling on the floor, gathering the pocketknife along with all the chantments she can carry. Looting while Rome burns, I knew she’d do that. And there’s the pop of the sniper’s rifle.

I thought it would be louder.

Here’s Jacks letting go, falling, even as Patterflam flames out, as he finally dies and the unreal rejoices.

Jacks landed heavily atop Astrid, crushing the breath out of her. Between their bellies she could feel a spreading warmth.

“Don’t die,” she wheezed, and his eyes widened.

“Don’t die?” Sahara said, uncomprehending. “He’s toast, baby, gone and good riddance.”

“Get the saltshaker from my room. Pat, Pat, do you hear? There’s a saltshaker….” Her shout was faint, almost a gasp. Jacks’s weight made it hard to draw breath.

“You said that last night in your sleep,” Jacks said. His tone was normal, strong. “‘Don’t die, Jacks, don’t—’”

“Wait,” Sahara said, getting it. “Stop, wait.”

He sucked on his lips, hard. His forehead was resting on hers. “Then he bleeds out, you said.”

“Then he bleeds out?” Astrid repeated. He was already chalk-white. Rolling him off her, she pressed her hands against his stomach. “Jacks, I won’t let you.”

“Look,” he said. “All this mess, but that painting I did of Dad is untouched.”

“Jacks,” she said. “Don’t die.”

“He’s going into shock,” Sahara said. “If we surrender—”

“It’s too late,” Astrid said. Her belly and legs were drenched with blood.

“I can’t find any damn shell,” Mrs. Skye called from one floor up.

“She said a saltshaker!” Sahara bellowed.

Jacks blinked a couple times, seeming to shrivel, and she pressed her lips against his. “Hold on, Jacks.”

“It was their wedding,” he said. “Albert and Olive’s. You were dancing with your dad and neither of you…”

“…we didn’t know how to dance,” she finished. “Jacks, what about it?”

“Clumsy thing,” he said. The pain washed out of his face, leaving him smiling. His muscles relaxed, all at once, and he died.