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.