Downpour (36 page)

“I don’t understand. Why Willow?”

“Willow is Sula’s daughter, and, until you built this house for Jewel, the nexus had been husbanded by Sula’s family for generations. All the other mages are Johnny-come-latelies, not people who were born here. They aren’t connected to the power; they’re just leeches. Magic tends to run in families and, in a place like this, old connections mean a lot; Willow, not Jewel, is the rightful guardian of the nexus.”

Newman looked stricken, but he kept his gaze down. “Jewel never did like her. She said Sula had made Steven reject her after Willow was born for being half-black, for not being Chinese enough, like Willow. I told her it couldn’t be true. Sula always had tried to be our friend and she looked after Jonah like her own son, even though he was—well, he was a bully, arrogant, and mean with it. He and Jewel used to be friends, but then they started to fight like cats and dogs. He used to say horrible things—
horrible
things to Jewel! He’d make her so angry and frustrated, she’d be sick for days. I wasn’t so sorry when he died and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

“You don’t have to. Geoff, did it never seem strange to you that this county’s overwhelmingly white, but most of the . . . powerful people I’ve met around the lake aren’t? They’re black, or Chinese, or mixed like Jewel. . . .”

“Did you ever notice how Western history is mostly white man’s history? Even when people of color do something important, it’s treated like a fluke or it’s buried under the contributions of whites. Washington is full of people who aren’t white and they get treated like they don’t exist, even though they worked just as hard or harder to make this place a safe home. They built roads and ships and cleared trees and hauled coal out of these mountains. They worked in logging camps and rail gangs and mines.”

He looked up suddenly. “Hell, half the workers who made the highway out there weren’t white. And where do you suppose they lived while they were cutting roads and laying rails and cooking and cleaning for white folks at the fancy hotels down at the springs and on the lake? They lived out here where there was no running water or sewers or boardinghouses, because the trip up the mountain took too long if you worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. They lived in shacks and tents. And they were mostly black and Chinese and Indians. Why shouldn’t they be the ones to find some magic—if there is such a thing? Don’t they deserve it?”

So it was a creole magic, shaped by the beliefs and practices of the people who lived here even when the weather was terrible, the ones who couldn’t afford to leave. When the magic got loose, it attracted magic users whose skills weren’t of the schooled and methodical practices I’d seen with Mara and Carlos. In its current state, it benefited the rogues and inventors more than it benefited the more traditional form Jewel used with her cards and her books.

“Yes, they do,” I said, but I was thinking.... The natives had stayed away from the lake, fearing the spirits of those drowned under Storm King’s wrath. No one had laid claim to the magic or tried to govern and protect it until Sula’s family came along, quietly staying below anyone’s notice. They must have worked very subtly to keep the lake’s power in balance and under control, helping to shape it into a hybrid unrecognizable to most Western mages—until something had happened to set it loose and Sula died without passing that control on properly. Jewel had benefited from the disordered magic, at first, and usurped the nexus. She must have fought with her brother over it and they’d both shut Willow out—Jewel at the source and Jonah at the circle beside the family house. But Jewel wasn’t Sula’s child; she wasn’t the rightful owner. She didn’t have the right tools, and instead of controlling the nexus, she was now controlled by it. Whenever someone else used “her” magic, they drained her and she didn’t know how to stop them, short of destroying them all.

But someone else was determined to control the lake—someone with little power, unable to oppose Jewel directly. So they got others to ruin her, encouraging other mages to draw on the lake, running her down until Jewel was too weak to stop them. And so long as Willow was on the run, she wasn’t likely to grab the power back—she didn’t even know it was hers to take.

“Geoff, who knew you’d given me the key to Steven’s cabin?” I asked.

“No one. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Jewel must have known.”

He gave a hard shake of his head. “No. Not even her. I—I wanted you nearby, in case . . .”

“You never wanted me here.”

“I didn’t. At first. But once I couldn’t stop you, I thought . . . well, I thought I ought to get you on my side and get you close at hand, in case things got worse. But you didn’t trust me. I didn’t know you were at Steven’s house. I swear. And neither did Jewel. I didn’t tell anyone I’d given you the key because I can’t trust any of them, either.”

I couldn’t see any sign that he was lying in his body language or his aura. Neither of those is foolproof, but Newman hadn’t been a very good liar earlier and I had no reason to believe he’d suddenly learned how. “Well, one of them figured it out.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything and I don’t know what to do now.”

I pitied him, but I was also a little angry that he’d snuck around and manipulated and not told me the truth earlier.

“I don’t know who tumbled to it, either. But I can find out. Talk to Jewel. Tell her she’ll have to lure the other mages here so I can see them all.”

“Why would they come?”

“Because your wife is the queen bee. Ridenour told me she runs the community. She’s still the nexus keeper, even if she’s not in complete control, and they are still afraid of her. She can’t trust any of them, but they’ll still come, even if they’re just curious to see how sick she really is. I don’t think the ley weaver to the south will come, but I already know about that thing and it doesn’t seem interested in human struggles. She shouldn’t waste her energy on it, but the rest . . . Tell her they need to be here tonight. Even her sister. Even Ridenour.”

“Why?”

“Because I can solve her problem if she’ll do this. It’ll be over by tomorrow night if she does.”

“You swear?”

“What do you want me to do—prick my finger and sign in blood? Yes, I swear.”

I was lying through my teeth, but if I couldn’t fix it all by tomorrow, we might have a bigger problem. Whoever was killing people had learned to send the monsters to do the dirty work, which meant he or she didn’t have to bash in heads in person anymore. No one was safe.

TWENTY-NINE

F
rom the Newmans’, we headed toward the Lyre River and Elias Costigan’s house. Although I’d see him later, I still needed to figure out how he’d known about the house, and it wouldn’t be safe to try once the sun was heading down. down.

“What do you think the anchor does?” I asked.

“Um . . . anchors things?” Quinton replied.

“I mean, how does it work? Something to do with its piezoelectric properties?”

“I’m not thinking so, but I can’t speculate without data. You’re talking about the field interactions of an energy state for which there are no scales or standards. We can theorize based on what we know, but it’ll be a pretty rough theory.”

“Then what do you roughly theorize?”

“Well . . . is there more than one anchor?”

“Apparently, and I’m led to believe there’s a total of four in and around the lake. When they were all in place, the lake’s energy was contained and channeled into the nexus where two major leylines crossed��about where the Newmans’ house is now, so that would be the top of the T or the middle of the X, depending on how you see it.”

“Do we know if the other three anchors are in place?”

“Not by eyewitness, but the general belief is that they are, and my observation of the leylines leads me to agree.”

“Hearsay is not very convincing, but I’ll accept your observation as being persuasive enough. So one is out of place, and merely putting it
close
to its proper location—unlike in horseshoes and hand grenades—wasn’t good enough. I’d hate to see what happens when more than one of the anchors is pulled.”

“But that’s not going to happen.”

“We hope. Because if it did, the system would have no guidance. Huh . . . could it be part of a waveguide?”

“Unknown term, geek-boy. What’s a waveguide?”

“Waveguides restrict the radiation of electromagnetic energy into a linear direction. They’re kind of like pipes, but not really. Energy naturally radiates in spherical waves—outward in all directions at the same time and rate. That’s fine if you want an omnidirectional antenna for radio or television transmission, but some kinds of energy, like, say, microwaves, need to be a little more restricted or they dissipate and do damage. The waveguide has to be specific to the type and wavelength of the energy you’re managing. Broadly—and this is really generalized and a little squishy—by pairing the right conductive materials at the right distance, you essentially create an electrical trough for the energy to flow down that constantly reflects the waves back into the trough, rather than letting them radiate outward.”

“OK. I’m not sure I get the details, but I get the idea.”

“All right, so, if the anchor is part of a waveguide for Grey energy, it has to have an opposite polarity mate creating the ‘walls’ of the pipe. Removing one of the pair for either directional leyline basically lets the energy at that end radiate without proper control or direction. Since it’s anchored at the other end by the nexus and partially directed by its other half, what you get is something like a firehouse that’s hooked up to the hydrant at one end and flopping around loose at the other, spraying energy everywhere. With the way this particular energy is influenced by water, I’d guess that the lake itself acts like a conductive sink and lets the energy flow around until the lake’s too saturated, and then the magic starts leaching up through the ground wherever it can. Or wherever the thrashing pipe has hit the ground, creating transient hot spots and upwellings.

“Normally, this system around the lake is restricted and the crossing leylines probably created a single sort of wellhead at the nexus. Once the anchor was gone, the magic became fair game for anyone who could use it. But, and here’s the slippery bit, the wellhead still exists and instead of pumping energy out to whoever’s in charge of the nexus, it’s now able to suck it back from that person when demand is high, which is why Jewel Newman experiences the sensation of drainage when someone else uses it or when it rains and the lake overflows, pulling more energy out of the sink.”

I nodded. “That certainly sounds like our situation.”

“You know it’ll kill her sooner rather than later if the anchor isn’t replaced.”

“Yes, I do, and I don’t have any great soft spot for her, but if what you’re speculating is the truth of the situation, it won’t change or get better once Jewel’s dead. But how do we figure out where to put the anchor to re-create the waveguide and fix this damned problem?”

“You can see the leylines, so if we can figure out what the anchors look like in the Grey, we should be able to calculate where the uprooted one goes by the position of the other three.”

“Only one problem,” I said. “The lake’s more than a thousand feet deep. I’m pretty sure I can’t hold my breath at that depth to go snooping around to figure out where the in-place anchors are.”

“Let me give it some more thought,” Quinton said while I parked the Rover at the end of the road.

We got out under a threatening sky and began walking toward Devil’s Punch Bowl.

Along the way, I didn’t see a single ghost or zombie. That made me a little curious, since every time I’d been past the area before, the place had been populated with ghosts. The wayward energy still swarmed around in balls and strings, pooling on surfaces like light on glass, but there were no human remnants, nor animal ghosts, either.

The last stretch was a raked gravel path that was remarkably free of mud and puddles. As we came around a tree-shaded bend a few dozen feet from the house, something shrieked. Then a fireball exploded against the tree closest to us—an actual fireball like the real-life version of a special effect from a Harry Potter movie. It splattered and left smoldering bits of flame on the tree and the path near us.

“Get off my property!” someone screamed from behind the screen of trees.

I edged around and looked out. A skinny man with dead gray hair and skin that looked as if it had never seen the sun stood on the porch of the low log house, tossing a knot of fire from hand to hand as if it were a potato fresh out of the oven. In spite of the frost-edged air, he wore nothing but a sort of sarong slung around his hips and a gold cross on a long chain around his neck.

“I just want to ask you a few questions, Mr. Costigan,” I called out.

He suggested something anatomically unlikely and gymnastically ambitious in language so blue I was surprised it didn’t hang in the air like fog. “You took ’em! You stole ’em, you sneaking bitch!”

“The zombies? They came after me!”

“You were trespassing! They left you alone once you crossed the bridge, right enough. You didn’t have to snatch ’em and destroy ’em! I’ve been raising those for years! How dare you just go and . . . ruin my work!” And he was off again in a spate of abuse and creative cursing.

One of the curses floated languidly in our direction, a ring of bluegray smoke and nasty red energy spikes. I didn’t like the look of it, and I shoved Quinton backward while I flicked my palm outward in a tiny push on the Grey that sent the thing wafting toward the still-smoking tree.

When the curse touched it, the tree cracked and, with a screech of breaking wood, tore itself into two charred pieces.

Costigan flung the next fireball right behind it, shrieking what I thought was French, but with the way he spat it out, it could have been anything. He made an upward-pulling gesture and the ground heaved in a localized earthquake that spilled Quinton and me onto our backsides. Four glowing green shapes oozed out of the disturbed ground. Humanoid, but not human, they were made of nothing more substantial than colored mist. I still had the feeling I didn’t want to touch any of them.