Downpour

TWENTY-EIGHT

“What do you think?” I asked as we returned “ to the Rover.

“It’s piezoelectric—most quartz is—but it’s got some other electrical properties as well. It’s a big piece, so I’m not quite sure what the effect would be, but it kind of reminds me of old-fashioned radio crystals. . . .”

“It’s very high-pitched.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I think it was a Grey sound. Faith didn’t hear it, either.”

“Huh . . . I wonder if it’s tuned in some way . . .” Quinton mused.

“Tuned?”

“Yeah. Well, quartz has some interesting properties. Aside from the piezoelectric effect—”

“What is that?”

“It produces electricity if you deform it—that’s how the pilotless ignition on your stove works—or, if you give it electricity, it deforms in response. It’s a useful effect for transducers and—”

I interrupted him. “I’m going to take your word on that. What else does it do?”

“I’m not sure. But given that it seems to be Grey, I’d make a rough guess that it influences the amplitude or direction of magic. When it’s in place. Tuned crystals, like the ones in rudimentary radio sets, resonate to a specific frequency. In this case, it might be a specific frequency in the Grey. I wish I had some of that crystal myself. It might overcome the problems with my Grey detectors. . . .”

His excitement made my own skin buzz, and I could almost see the calculations in Quinton’s eyes as he thought about it and made mental schematics for new devices to track ghosts.

I cleared my throat. “I was actually wondering what you think of Faith and his ideas.”

Quinton blinked. I rarely ask him his opinion of people I’m working with. “He seems . . . pretty reasonable. Which means he hasn’t any idea what’s going on.”

“What about you? I mean, you don’t see ghosts. . . .”

“Sweetheart, we were attacked by walking dead things last night. I may have never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard them and I have met vampires, zombies, witches, and two-headed sea monsters that turn into homicidal canoes. I think I’m allowed to draw some conclusions from that.”

We got into the truck and I started driving up the hill. I kept thinking about the complications around the Leung children and their homes. The Newmans’ house sat nearly on top of the power nexus under the lake. That and money explained why people jumped when Jewel said “frog,” but the big glass-and-wood house hadn’t existed as long as the smaller house at Lake Sutherland with its old, time-etched circle of power and its quiet, old family who kept to themselves, sitting as firmly as Mount Storm King on the deep blue torrent of the east/west leyline. . . .

“What do you think about the case?” I asked.

“Well . . . I haven’t met any of the suspects, so I can’t say for sure. Faith did seem pretty convinced that Willow’s not a killer. You seem to agree with him.”

“Not entirely—and that doesn’t mean she’s not a troublemaker, because she is. I know she shot Timothy Scott, but Faith may be right: It was an accident for which she still feels guilty. She told me someone had ‘stolen’ the magic circle beside the house after Jonah died. It was her mother’s circle when she was born and since Willow was her student as well as her child, it should have been her circle when Sula died—or at least after her half brother died. Maybe she mistook Scott for the thief, shot him, and then realized she’d made a mistake, but then it was too late.... She was still young then. She’s powerful, but she’s not well trained. She’d already been to juvie and she might not have known at the time that her records were sealed. She probably freaked, thinking they’d send her up as an adult with one strike. Plus her other crimes, she might have believed they’d put her away for life, so she came up with the rape story to buy some time and then she ran for the woods. She seems to have an extraordinary connection to nature here—right down to animals and the plants. Maybe that was why she went to the greenhouse.”

“Yeah, I don’t get that. Why did she rob the greenhouse of a plant that was growing on the ground outside it?”

“I think she needed to rip the plant apart, but since she’s connected to the power there, she didn’t want to hurt one that was growing in the living soil around the lake. I’ve only seen her take things that weren’t alive. She knows things she won’t tell me, and, as far as I can tell, she takes a positive delight in messing with Ridenour.”

“Sounds like mutual hate. It doesn’t seem like much of a reason to kill someone’s father, though.”

“I’m still not sure about Ridenour.”

“You kind of like him.”

“I do, but that’s not a factor in guilt. I’m sure the ley weaver didn’t kill Leung or Strother. It’s not interested in human problems and it doesn’t seem to move away from its . . . sculpture or whatever you’d call it. It wouldn’t have to wreck a car since it could just draw the energy out of someone like Leung, and there’d have been no ghost left to tell me a crime had been committed. I’m reasonably convinced Willow isn’t responsible, either. That leaves Jewel, Costigan, and Ridenour.”

“Unless there’s someone else.”

I heaved a sigh. “The mysterious Number Five. I just don’t know. But I can’t get that anchor stone back without solving the murders, and I must shut down the loose power around the lakes. It’s not safe as it is and I’m not sure it’ll be better back the way it was. Jewel’s not the weak and gracious grande dame she wants people to believe her to be. She’s greedy, and until she got sick, she was powerful and dangerous, and people are still scared of her. But I think she usurped the power when she built the house. I don’t think it’s really hers, which may be why she’s sick now.”

“So where are we going now?”

“To find out who knew we were at Leung’s place.”

Geoff Newman scowled at us when he opened the door, but he spoke in a low voice. “What do you want? And who’s this?”

I ignored the latter question. “I want to know who sent a shambling army of walking corpses to visit me last night at your father-in-law’s place.”

Newman’s mouth dropped open and his aura pulsed with alarm. “Who what?”

I pushed past him into the house. Tendrils of yellow and sickly green energy stroked at my legs, but nothing stopped me. Quinton came silently in my wake.

Newman shut the door behind us and stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where’s Jewel? Maybe she does.”

“Jewel’s resting. She had a rough night. The rain—” He cut himself off.

A piece of the puzzle about Jewel’s illness clicked into place in my mind. “Rain makes her weaker, doesn’t it?” I demanded. Newman hung his head but didn’t reply. “At least I can assume she wasn’t out directing zombies to my door. But who was?”

He looked back up, imploring. “Please . . . please keep your voice down. Come on in here and we can talk.”

He motioned us to follow him toward the unused wing of the house. Well, not entirely unused, since the room we walked into was a kitchen that was plainly an active work area. It was a big space that led into a dining room facing the lake. An ill-advised little dining nook had been built at the end of the kitchen and facing the front of the house where it would never get the sun or a view of anything but the steep road up to the highway. The area had been converted into a makeshift office, and I wondered why Geoff Newman hadn’t taken over one of the doubtlessly empty rooms upstairs. I noticed that the writhing tendrils of energy didn’t penetrate very far into the kitchen, so maybe that was the reason he’d chosen it—a refuge from the demands of his wife.

He shifted papers aside and closed up an open laptop computer to make room for us all at the small table. He sat in a white kitchen chair and faced us once Quinton and I were seated on the padded bench below the window.

He played with an empty coffee cup, but he didn’t offer us any coffee.

“Tell me about Jewel,” I prompted.

“Sometimes the rain makes her sick. Not all the time, just storms like last night. I don’t understand it. Jewel always says the water is being taken away from her. I don’t see how that can be, since the water is falling down on all of us, but that’s what she says. Lately she’s been pretty sickly, like she just doesn’t have any energy at all most of the time.”

“When did it start?”

“It’s gotten worse over time, so it’s hard to say when it started. She’s been having troubles since we met and that’s why we’re here—she said building the house right here would be better for her, so we did that.”

“Did it help?”

“A bit, at first. After her stepmother passed was when she first started having bad days. When Jonah died, they happened more often. She talked about demons a lot. At first I thought maybe she was a little . . . touched in the head, but I know that’s not true now. I know there’s something about the lake that . . . I don’t know how to say it.”

“It’s the source of her power,” I supplied. “Right now the power is uncontrolled, so anyone who knows how can take some of it. When they do, they drain power your wife’s been relying on and she gets sicker. When it rains hard enough, I suspect the power in the lake gets drawn to the surface, like osmosis, and it’s easy for other mages to suck it off and use it. They might not actually be trying to hurt her, but the effect is the same. The system is supposed to be held down by a single nexus point under this house. That’s why she wanted to build here, so she could control the nexus rather than drawing power from it at a distance. But right now the nexus isn’t anchored properly and others are using the power that Jewel’s never truly been able to control. That’s what she wants me to fix.”

“I understand that. Sort of. What I don’t understand is why they have to kill anybody. Is someone going to try to kill Jewel?”

In a bland voice I asked, “Would you care if she died?”

Newman looked appalled, the energy around his head sinking into a clinging, muck green shroud. “Of course I would!”

“Why? Don’t say you love her. I know you care about her, but that’s not the same thing.” There had never been any sign of the dancing sparks between them that I associated with love.

“I do care! She’s a hard woman to like, it’s true, but she—she makes things better. Do you have any idea what it’s like to do good work? To know what you’re doing is difficult, but necessary, and that you’ll keep on doing it, even if no one notices and no one cares?”

I’d done plenty of “right” things that went without acknowledgment or reward, but they weren’t the same. He wasn’t talking about Jewel’s trying to restore the lake; he was talking about his own part—the silent support. “I’ve seen it,” I replied, knowing it was sitting beside me, and for a moment I felt the same confusion and despair that had kept me awake in the night, studying the ceiling.

“Then you know how I’d care. So . . . is someone going to kill my wife?”

“I don’t think so. I’d guess they can’t touch her directly and they don’t really want her to go away, because then Willow would become the keeper of the nexus and they certainly don’t want a rogue sorcerer like her in charge of the power around the lake. She may seem like just a crazy young woman, but, if I’m right, Willow’s potentially very dangerous to anyone who is trying to grab power from the lake.”

“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.