A Sudden Wild Magic

Zillah lifted the bowl high, and Marcus was revealed below the level of the table, lightly dusted with flour and still with both hands raised to grab the bowl, gazing at them blandly. “Little devil,” she said. “Did nobody notice you for five minutes? Is that it?” She lifted him up, absently checking the stout denim seat of him for damp, and dusted the flour from his hair, which had the same reddish tone as her own.

Marcus gave utterance. “Bond Jewry,” he said, stretching a hand like a plump pink starfish toward the bowl.

“It’s not jelly,” Zillah said, translating expertly. “And you’re not having it. Amanda, if we go to the warehouse, we’ll have to take him too. Will that be safe?”

“Honestly, Zillah, the way you’ve got that child warded, I don’t think even Gladys could touch him,” Amanda said. “I doubt if a nuclear missile could.”

Zillah checked a need to cry out, Because he’s all I’ve got! and also to explain that most of the protection was so that Mark — and therefore Mark’s wife — should never know that Marcus existed. “Well, it’s not so much what it might do to him, but what he could do to it,” she said. “But if you think it’s all right, let’s go, shall we?”

With Marcus safely strapped into the backseat, Zillah drove — ferally, as she did many things — while Amanda crouched down in the passenger seat and invoked protection from several different pantheons, wishing she had remembered the way Zillah drove before she suggested this. Amanda did not care for driving herself. It was useful that Zillah enjoyed it. Besides, she had sensed that Zillah was having a resurgence of unhappiness lately and needed a break. But this — they hunted down a lorry and overtook it on a bend; luckily there was nothing coming the other way — this was enough to make Amanda wish she had left Zillah by the wayside two years ago. If she killed them, what became of the capsule, of their plans, of the world?

The road opened up straight. Zillah stalked a motorcycle down it at ninety miles an hour, only dimly aware of her sister’s growing panic. She always hoped that driving dangerously would take her mind off the ceaseless tramp of misery inside it, but it did not. Nor did having Marcus. It was not that he was a constant reminder of Mark: he was another thing again. When Marcus was born, she discovered it was quite possible to love two people with the same intensity. It was as if her mind opened up another lobe, and there was Marcus in there, passionately precious. Alongside him, her feelings about Mark remained, exactly the same. They said you got over things in time, but it was just like her, Zillah thought, to have missed the trick of that somehow. Two years had made absolutely no difference. Maybe it had something to do with the weirdness and intensity of that moment—

She caught the motorcyclist where the road bent, passing him well over to the right, and absently dodged the Bedford van coming the other way. Beside her, Amanda uttered a faint, brave gasp. Marcus turned his head calmly to watch the van driver waving two fingers about. He liked the way they always seemed to do that.

— the moment when she had seen Mark as a shadowy reflection of himself at the bottom of a deep well. And Paulie down there too, drinking him. The horror of it was that she clearly knew Mark was allowing Paulie to do this to him. He was letting Paulie have all the eager, interesting, vital parts of him — the parts that laughed, or cried — and Zillah was only going to be allowed the pale, decorous, serious Mark. Prim, she had often thought, when she first met him. Priggish was a better word, she thought now, as old, gray factory buildings began to flash by.

“Next left,” Amanda said faintly. “Then the first big gate on the right.”

Zillah turned the wheel and they howled left into a side road. She slowed to sixty, not to miss the gate. If ever she could bring herself to tell Amanda about this vision of Mark in the well, she was sure Amanda would tell her it was a true Seeing. Amanda always said Zillah’s talent was enormous, but Zillah had never noticed it herself, except just that once, when she knew she had seen the most important fact about Mark there was and—

There was gate. She swung through it. And there was another car parked just inside it, no time or space to miss it.

— left him. Zillah thought that something picked the car up and lifted it bodily sideways. At all events, they were stopped, facing the warehouse, side by side with the other car, and not even scraped. Just a little shaken.

“I’m grateful to rather a lot of gods,” Amanda said.

“Whose bloody car is that?” Zillah demanded.