BLUE ON A SPRING DAY a story in the "Blues" universe by Antaeus Feldspar version 1.00 "Ooh! This song is great!" Jenna squealed, diving for the volume dial set in the dashboard of the ancient convertible. Cleo grinned as her friend bounced up and down in the passenger seat with the backbeat, fingers snapping and long black hair flying. Since she happened to be driving and since the Coronacion neighborhood of San Jordi was never the easiest to navigate, she contented herself with singing along with the song's hook, a chanted command to "rock every day, ole!" "Inane little song," she commented as it was cross-faded to a DJ's patter. "But fun." Jenna pouted at her. "We can't all be as brilliant as you." "Hey, I like it fine, girl. Just said it was inane. If inanity wasn't forgivable in pop music, where would we be?" She steered the Bomber carefully around a couple of street carts taking advantage of the warm weather. "Getting anything on your little gizmo yet?" Jenna held the blue stone of her pendant, closing her eyes for a second. "Hmmm. I really can't be sure. I thought I felt a little ebb in that direction." She pointed, and Cleo deftly steered the convertible down the narrow street at the next intersection. "Thanks for helping me patrol, Cleo. Wizardry isn't the easiest thing to multi-task." "Hey, as long as you're providing gas for the Bomber, no problem at all. And as long as I don't have any tests to study for..." Cleo reached out to turn the dial down as a loud car commercial came on. "Sorry." "Hunh?" Jenna let the blue stone fall back to the V-neck of her white top. "Sorry for what?" Cleo shrugged with one shoulder. "I ... just realized that I was sounding a little crass. My momma did not raise me to be crass. Here you are, giving up your own time to do this patrolling, which I gather is a public safety service for which you can't even collect public credit..." Jenna waved an embarassed hand. "Oh, hey now, don't make me sound better than I am. I mean, sure, the Blues don't pay me directly for my patrol duties, but -- well, they take care of their own. They'll support me if I need it, later; I mean, they're probably gonna pay most of my way to college in a few years." "You're kidding me! Really? Man, it must be nice to be a wizard, then..." Jenna gave an embarassed shrug. "It's ... I don't know. The college thing is nice, but the wizardry itself, learning to touch those energies, shape them... I don't think there's anything I can even compare it to. It's ... really its own reward." She stroked the blue stone of her pendant, staring thoughtfully off into space... or perhaps just across the street, as she pointed and bounced upright, the pensiveness of a moment ago forgotten. "Hey! Look there, it's Pilot! Hey, Jenna, let's pick him up, okay? We can give him something to eat and he can patrol with us, okay?" Cleo, slowing the Bomber to a crawl, eyed the man in question dubiously. Shuffling along the sidewalk hunched-over, stopping every few steps, and wearing a heavy black jacket in the heat of a Californian Saturday in late spring, he was currently holding a trash can lid in both hands and staring at it as if he'd never seen such a thing before. "Are you sure that's such a good idea?" "Oh, come on. Pilot's okay. Considering what he ... Hey, Pilot! Want to patrol with us?" Cleo wasn't more comfortable with taking Pilot along when Jenna had introduced them; it turned out that no one including Pilot himself had any better idea than that of his real name, and the idea of shaking hands to seal the introduction was abandoned after two attempts. He seemed to grasp the theory, which relieved Cleo's mind, but actually making the contact made him nervous; he turned away with eyes fixed on the pavement and tried to shuffle away. It was only because he seemed docile and responsive to whatever Jenna kindly suggested to him, and because she kept insisting he was worth the trouble, that Cleo agreed to let him into the Bomber's back seat. Then again, Jenna had been like that in all the time Cleo had known her: always looking out for the bird with the broken wing, with an earnest faith in the basic worth and goodness of people so strong that people often prejudged it to come from naivete. They were waiting at a red light, just ahead of a compact car whose blown-out speakers were still very much in use, when Jenna touched her pendant and raised her voice to be heard over the rapcore. "Think I feel something!" She nodded her head to the right, indicating a narrow side street packed with narrow storefronts; a laundromat, a convenience store advertising in English, Spanish and Korean that it could provide money orders, a law office, an "import gifts center". The compact's horn started blaring, and Cleo winced as she felt the Bomber's engine stall taking the turn onto the side street. "OK, it could help if you know where it is you've got to do this ..." This time, heading for the parking space, the engine actually did stall. Cleo sighed and resisted the irrational impulse to noogie the Bomber's dashboard. "Is there a valve or something you have to bleed?" Jenna snorted, amused. "It's natural phenomena, Clee, not a heating system... Pilot, maybe you can get out and push us into the parking space?" She turned and repeated the request, demonstrating a left-hand Pilot patiently pushing forward a Bomber played by her right-hand; he nodded his head, got out the passenger side when she opened it for him, and began pushing the rear bumper. Jenna continued. "Though it's gonna be easiest if we can find the 'sweet spot', that's what Mr. Hughes calls it. That's where it's easiest to tap a magic swell... OK, Pilot, stop pushing! You can stop pushing now!" Cleo quickly braked the Bomber and kept her foot on the brake until he had stopped, then put the car in park. After a little wavering, Jenna identified the import gifts shop as more likely to be where the 'sweet spot' was. The owner, fortunately, turned out to know a little about wizardry and about the Blues, and though surprised, was willing to let them in the back of the store, from which Jenna thought the magic seemed greatest. "I just hope we don't end up having to go back behind the building," Jenna said as they opened the door. The tiny room at the back of the shop turned out to be already occupied, however. The trio already inside faced a circle on the floor, drawn in a glistening white powder, but turned to face Jenna and her friends as they entered. Jenna took in the man, who seemed to be the one in charge. He wore a cowled brown robe reminiscent of a monk's habit, and stepped forward, putting himself between the circle and the newcomers. "What are you doing?" exclaimed Jenna, looking down at the circle and back up with an expression of indignation. "Coronacion isn't your zone! It's Blue territory, by treaty! You can't tap magic in these boundaries except in cases of emergency!" The man managed an expression that scowled and grinned at once. "Well, we're not 'tapping' magic here, little miss. We're disposing of the evil." Cleo managed not to back off, quite, as the man stepped forward intimidatingly; he was tall, and loomed over even Pilot. Pilot scuttered backwards, into the half-open door, and Cleo edged off to the side; Jenna was the only one of the three who stood her ground. "So take your apostate master and your little ..." The man's hateful eyes bored into Cleo, briefly; she knew which adjective he was leaving out. "... little *friend*, and go back to your corrupt cabal." "You want to cause an incident?" Jenna asked, her voice soft but precise. "You, personally, want to be the one who breaks the Allowood Treaty? Really?" Cleo stepped a little further to the side, out of the big man's field of vision, and looked at his companions and what they'd been doing. There was a hard-faced woman, who clutched a little boy by the shoulders and glared at Cleo. Her shorts came down barely past her hips and were split up to the waistband anyways; she looked like she had been Saved! from the life of a magdalene but hadn't caught on yet to the change in dress code. In the center of the circle, there was a talisman of some kind, that looked like a pewter circlet attached by a slender chain to a feather. The chain and the feather were standing up in the air, twirling in the center of a thin column of visible heat waves. "The Blues can do as they like, trying to enforce their 'treaty'. But God has sent His soldiers to enforce His will." The feather began to descend to the Earth; the little boy, wearing a Sunday-best blue suit, moved forward from out of the woman's grasp and placed his hands carefully on either side of the circle; the heat waves visibly intensified once more, and the feather was buoyed up once more. "Yeah, I'm so glad it's God who's signing your orders. I'm sure glad he never sends his instructions through fallible humans who can get it wrong." Jenna looked at Cleo and nodded her head towards the door. "Come on, Clee, this one's at least handled, even if it is a waste. By the way," she said, turning back to the intimidating man as she held the door open for Cleo and Pilot, "if God really considered you guys the ones who should be in charge in His name down here, how come you had to sign treaties?" The man had turned his back to them, dismissing them from attention, but his back stiffened visibly at this last line. Jenna closed the door to the small room. "I'm still pissed," said Jenna. They had retreated to a nearby shop that sold homemade donuts and other breakfast foods all day. Cleo had chosen a jalapeno corn muffin, and they had bought an egg-and-cheese-and-bagel sandwich for Pilot, who held it up and stared as it thoughtfully, brow wrinkled as if trying to remember something. Jenna chomped her glazed donut angrily and muttered through it. "Shouldna backed down, not when we were in the right..." "Who were those people, anyways?" Cleo asked. "And what was that about treaties? I thought this was like ... firefighting, preventing disaster..." Jenna sighed. "Those were Burners. As you heard, we, the Blues, are _nominally_ in a state of peace and truce with them. However, they take a very rigid view of wizardry that goes along with their fundamentalist beliefs, namely that it's inherently sinful and the only non-sinful thing to do with it is to 'burn it off' as quickly as possible. Which is all they learn to do." "So ... the treaty stuff..." Cleo looked towards the shop's front window, as if the Burners might appear there. "Is this a war you gu-- that you're in?" "Oh, no. Or at least..." Jenna put down her donut, as if it suddenly tasted sour. "We have -- _had_ -- a very clearly worked out agreement, about which territories the Blues would patrol, dealing with magic surges as we see fit, and which territories the Burners would patrol, dealing with magic surges as *their* beliefs allow." She sighed. "Crud. Crud and a half. I'm going to have to call Mr. Pitiko with the news, and he's not going to be happy. This will throw the Allowood Treaty in the toilet --" "Not necessarily," Pilot commented thoughtfully. "They may not be Burners. Or should I say, they probably do not consider themselves the same Burners who signed the treaty, and vice versa. It could signal a power shift, true. Or it might only mean a rogue element which both the Blues and the treaty-keeping Burners have an interest in putting under control." Cleo turned to look at Pilot; that hadn't been the actual first complete sentences that she'd heard him make, but all that he'd said until now had been vague in content and manner. Now he was fully with them, biting decisively into his sandwich and chewing, and waving his finger in a semi-professorial fashion. "The Burners schism quite often, you see. The particular passages that form the core of Burner doctrine are only to be found in the Apocrypha -- books passed down by the same traditions as the books of the Bible, but decided by Church authorities to not be true Scripture. So the Burners don't really come from fundamentalist traditions, but more from the charismatics. As such, they've shown a remarkable tendency, for such a small population, to diverge into small sub-sects over small points of doctrine. Jenna looked at Cleo, and back at Pilot, who was tearing into his bagel ravenously. "Interesting," she said casually. "They looked like any other Burners to me." Pilot nodded, chewed and swallowed, and resumed. "Oh, they would. But the style of their talisman says things about them. You didn't see a ring, or a crystal, or a cross-bar somewhere in the middle of the chain, did you?" Jenna shook her head. Cleo said, "I didn't; I just saw a ring and a chain and a feather. What's --" Jenna put a hand on her wrist, but Pilot was already gesturing. "You see, that was the sort of talisman they used to use. No regulator on the chain; they might make the talismans safer to use, but that was less theologically pure than converting every iota of corrupt, corrupting magic into purified air -- or fire, since that was held to be even purer -- as fast as possible. Josiah Threadlow, that was the man who founded the Burner sect, and he told his followers that Jesus had sacrificed all for their sakes, so how could they selfishly turn down the higher risks they were running and do a half-assed job for Jesus? Though I'm sure he didn't put it in those terms." Pilot's red, unshaven cheeks dimpled as he smiled at them. "This line of thinking went over very well while Threadlow lived. Less well when he managed to burn down his own church with one of his purer talismans. And with himself and three of his deacons inside, I'm sorry to say. After his death, the majority of his followers decided that Jesus would understand them doing his will in a slower, safer fashion." "So those were traditionalists we ran into today," Jenna said. "Interesting." "Or -- again -- a splinter group," Pilot said. "One that didn't take any of its parent group's truly knowledgeable wizards with it when it split off." "And that would explain why they're towing around a little kid who should be playing with action figures to do wizard work instead," Jenna commented dryly. The corner of her mouth turned down. "He could be the only wizard out of the three," Pilot said. "Potentially." "What kind of people put a little kindergartener to work like that?" Cleo burst out, not realizing until she spoke that she was going to. Jenna whirled to her and made a quick gesture, trying to head her off, but it was too late. Pilot shifted his attention to her, and started to answer, and then paused, his mouth silently moving up and down, as he stared at her with suddenly confused eyes. "... dunno," he finally murmured, his gaze falling. Jenna patted his hand softly. "It's okay, Pilot. Tell you what, why don't you get us another --" she raised her voice slightly -- "egg-and-cheese-and-bagel, a chocolate-glazed donut, and a ... jalapeno corn muffin?" She looked sidelong at Cleo, who nodded; the white-haired counterman, who'd caught the signalfrom the raised voice, nodded as well. "To go." She counted out a few bills and pressed them into his hands, gently disengaging the bagel sandwich from them at the same time. He stood there for a while, until a little gentle pulling at his elbow turned him towards the counter, and he started to trudge in that direction, brow still befuddled. Jenna sighed, watching him. Cleo lowered her voice. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I did --" Jenna waved it off with a hand. "No -- you couldn't have known. Sometimes all it takes is a direct question to slip his gears." "What happened to him?" Cleo whispered. "Yee-oww, I never expected him to start talking like that; what's the deal with him? Where'd he come from; how'd he get like that?" Jenna scoured a slow trail through the donut glaze with a fingernail. "We're ... really not sure. Whoever did it... did it very thoroughly." "Well, did what?" "Burn-out. Overload. 'Brainfevering', that's the lovely little term they use to describe it in the old books they've been having me read." Jenna sighed. "It's a ... very old, symbolic punishment that some orders of wizards would inflict on any wizard they felt had committed treason against the order." Cleo felt a chill down her back as she looked at Pilot. "They ... put some sort of spell on him? That's what did that to him?" "Not quite. -- Remember I've been telling you about how magic works? What happens when magical energy comes into contact with any functional spell structure?" Cleo nodded. "You've used the lightning analogy -- it actually seeks out those structures, trying to ground itself. And you've used the gas and pilot light analogy -- when there's too much built up and changing state all at once, it's a real bad day for anyone standing too close." Jenna twirled her crystal pendant around her finger. "Yeah. Well, ah... brainfevering is... deliberately subjecting a wizard to an overflood of magical energy. After paralyzing him, and preparing him so that the nearest functioning spell structure... is within his own brain." Cleo put her muffin down. After a moment she said, "I take back what I said before." "What part?" "About wishing I was a wizard. This is a dangerous world you've got yourself into, isn't it?" Jenna's mouth twisted up at the corner, and she spoke softly, wistfully. "I was always in it. I just never had the words for it before ... or anyone to let me know that the things I could feel around me were real." Suddenly, Jenna sat bolt upright, a look of shock on her face. At the same time came the soft 'paff' of something soft and papery hitting the floor; Cleo looked over to see Pilot standing in a similar stock-still stance, as if the hackles on his neck had also been raised. The white wax-paper bag that held their take-out food lay at his feet. Cleo found herself unnerved, so much so that she didn't know what to say. The counterman opened his mouth to say something, but she never found out what, because the words were drowned out by a low rumbling, a shaking beneath their feet, and the rattling of everything in the store that wasn't secured, including the front windows. "" said the counterman. "" He looked over at Pilot, and at Jenna, who had hurried over to pick up the bag, and now towed Pilot towards the door, with puzzlement shifting over to suspicion. "" "" said Cleo, gesturing at Pilot's retreating back. "" With that, she turned and hurried out the door, and jumped into the driver's seat of the Bomber just as it looked like Jenna was going to slide over and take the wheel herself. "Okay," said Cleo, "what all went down there? I'm not tuned in to this station, remember, you got to keep me in the loop." She started the Bomber's engine. "Shift," said Jenna tersely. "Minor geologic shift, very BIG shift in magical energy. Now it's one big tightly packed concentration, and anywhere it finds a flashpoint, it could go off --" "Well, where?" Cleo said. "I can't feel this; you have to tell me if I'm gonna drive! At least give me a direction!" Jenna stared at the buildings around them, the storefronts and plazas, and finally jabbed a finger, indicating a direction that went straight through a braiding salon. "OK.... do you remember where we were when that guy called us 'salsa chicas'?" "Right by the bank with the statue, got it," said Cleo, and slipped the Bomber into drive, wincing as gears ground under the hood. "That's from where it's feeling strongest. There's no telling where we could be needed, but if we can stay near the center till it equalizes, we can react fast to any breakout." Jenna held her pendant between finger and thumb, and frowned as she closed her eyes. "By the way, what did that mean? That the guy said?" "Did you think he was cute?" "Cute? Ewww, no!" Jenna shuddered. "Not even close!" "Then you probably don't want to know what it meant." After a few moments Pilot chuckled softly, from the back seat. It didn't take Cleo long and it didn't take wizardly senses to know when they had reached the zone of potential trouble. The plumes of smoke, pouring from the windows of what appeared to be a storefront church, indicated the potential had already become actual. A small handful of well-dressed people, Saturday worshippers or perhaps some church committee, stared into the flames in horror. Sticking out like a sore thumb among them, grabbing Cleo's eye even as she skidded the Bomber to a quick stop, was the hard-faced woman they'd confronted earlier in the bodega's back room. As they ran up to her where she knelt sobbing with terror, Cleo looked around for her habited companion, or for the little boy. The crowd held neither. The woman turned her face to the trio as they came up, tears cutting wide tracks through her makeup. "Jeremiah's in there, he's in there. Isaiah never said -- Isaiah ran away, the coward! My baby's in there --" she burst into loud, shocked sobs too thick to talk through. "Where? Where in there?" Jenna said. She grabbed the hard-faced woman's wrists and repeated the question, but it was a matron in a indigo pantsuit who answered the question, Cleo translating her stammered Spanish. The man, the woman, the child, they come and interrupt the prayer meeting, say they must speak with Father Luis. The big man yells at the Father, the Father finally opens the door to the sacristy -- "The what?" "It's the room at the back of the church where the priest prepares for Mass," Cleo said. "... the big man came running out before the fire, the woman had to be dragged out by Father Luis. Where are the damn fire engines?" she translated that last on behalf of an angry man whose hands were clenching as he stared back and forth between his church in flames and the hydrant going untouched. Jenna took a deep breath. "OK." She looked pale as she took her pendant in her right hand, pulling it up and over her head, wincing as it caught in her dark, straight hair and she yanked it free. She turned to face the door of the church, held her firmly gripped pendant before her face... A shimmering force appeared before her, a haze of white sweeping from the outstretched fist down and along the line of her arm, like a shield or a wing. Several voices in the murmuring crowd broke off abruptly; Jenna only took a deep breath, dropped to a crouch, and sprinted into the building. "" exclaimed the big man by the fire hydrant, staring. "" Cleo gave him the widest-eyed stare she could make. "" _If there's no good excuse_, Jenna had told her, _just pretend you saw nothing at all. Most people will follow your lead, just to keep their world free of questions they can't answer._ Cleo fully believed it; she didn't want the questions coming to her mind, of what was Jenna *thinking* running into a burning building, and what if she didn't come back out? She grabbed Pilot's arm, and whispered, trying to fight the panic. "What *was* that she did? That spell? Is she gonna be all right? What can we do from out here?" Too late she remembered the rule against direct questions, but she couldn't even start to think of how to re-phrase it not-directly. Pilot stared at her, his mouth opening as if to answer but no words coming out. Finally, his hand came up and started following the gesture others in the crowd in the crowd were making, the fingers touched to the forehead, the chest and the shoulder in the sign of the Cross. In the smoke Jenna's ankle caught on a chair; she stifled her shriek and turned the fall into a stop, drop and roll. Just like the fire marshal who came to their first grade class had taught them, to put out clothes that might be on fire -- though he'd also told them not to go into places on fire to begin with. She crawled on her hands and knees a few more feet, breathing in as much oxygen as she could. Her fire-keep-away spell -- she took a moment to renew it -- would do what it could to push away the flames and smoke. She was on her own for oxygen, though, and took a big breath of it from down near the floor before pushing up from hands and knees and hurrying into the sacristy, hunched over and holding the keep-away before her. The heat was intense here, though the fire hadn't spread as far yet as Jenna had expected. She knew, though, that fires could erupt quickly; even as she scanned the room, a malicious spark leapt from the edge of the channeling-circle, where the fire had clearly started, to the hem of a set of vestments left hanging half over the edge of a table. A loud report, as something cracked open in the heat, startled her, and made her focus even harder on getting the kid and getting out. But where was the kid? What was his name -- "Jeremiah!" she called, and coughed on the smoke. "Jeremiah!" She turned in a slow circle, trying to pick out any sign of the blond, tousled hair or the good Sunday suit through eyes stung by smoke. Could he have gone out the back way? Gotten past her somehow as she came in? Succumbed to the smoke while trying to get out? "JEREMIAH!" A muffled scream told her he was still close by. What could be muffling -- oh, no. Her eyes fell on the brass-finish latch of a closet door. He couldn't have, everyone *knew* that you didn't hide from a fire in a closet -- except if you weren't in first grade yet and the fire marshal hadn't come to your class yet. Dang it. And the muffled sobs coming from behind the door confirmed where he was. She reached out and tried the latch before remembering that you also shouldn't touch door handles in a fire; she yanked her hand away quickly and shook away the sting of the heat. Locked; Jeremiah must have hit the button in his panic, or maybe it auto-locked. She wheeled around, to run back and get help. _No can do,_ a voice in her head said. _You ARE the help. And look at the way the fire's spreading, you really think Jeremiah has TIME for you to go back and pass the buck?_ The fact that she couldn't even see the door she'd come in through the smoke said no. She coughed and crouched down, to get away from the smoke while trying to think. She didn't really like the Plan B she came up with, which seemed failure-prone, but it didn't look like the fire was going to give her time for a Plan C. "Jeremiah! Move to the back of the closet, okay? I'm going to get you out!" She straightened up, and drew in a slow breath, and thanked heaven she had chosen the thick-heeled boots today for patrol and not the new open-toed sandals. She snapped the kick out hard and fast, with a pivot and a hard "HA!" and follow-through just as Sensei had taught, and was amazed to feel the door cave in under her foot like -- well, like cheap wood, just so. She warned Jeremiah to stay back again, and put another, bigger hole in the door even closer to the latch; when she braced her foot against the doorframe and yanked hard on the door, the latch tore free. She felt a sense of elation, that only swelled as Jeremiah came forth from the dark back of the closet, staring at her with eyes wide with respect. And that lasted until she turned around, taking Jeremiah by the hand, and found that the fire had spread between her and the door. Jenna crouched, held her pendant up before her again, and tried to restore the fire-keep-away spell she'd had to drop in order to kick in the door. For just a second, she couldn't visualize the shape of the spell, like being unable to remember a tune just heard on the radio. She felt panic surge in her like a hypo of adrenalin to the heart. Thanks to God, something triggered the memory of Mr. Burkes who'd taught her first courses in wizardry; an almost parenthetical comment he'd dropped after a class, about what to do when you'd forgotten or didn't know a spell. She stretched out her senses to the fire, feeling for its signature; the minute she succeeded and touched its elemental nature, the shape of its antithesis the keep-away flooded back into her head. She raised her hand again, drawing on the energy stored in her stone and any floating around loose, and poured it all into the keep-away. It flared into life -- far too well. Larger than before, bright and shimmering -- where was it drawing so much energy? She stared with horror at the spot on the floor where the summoning circle had been, now obscured by fire. It couldn't be still tapping the magical surge in all that flame, could it? She crouched down again, and slipped an arm around Jeremiah's thighs, picking him up; he clung to her, shaking silently. "Jeremiah," she murmured in his ear, trying to keep her voice low to calm him. "We're going to be okay, we're going to get out of here. I've got a spell that should keep the fire away --" as his hold around her neck stiffened, she realized she shouldn't have said 'spell' -- "long enough for us to get to the door and get out of here. Ready?" He gave a frightened nod. "Then once I see a chance -- we'll dash for it. And be out and safe in no time. Okay?" He nodded, hesitantly, and his hold on her tightened. She knew they didn't have long, so when she saw no break in the flames within a few seconds, she pretended there was one and dashed for it. The fire licked up at her bare legs and she ignored its vicious bite, and though she couldn't see through the thick smoke she thought she was around the big table with a clear way out to the main church -- And then from off to the side, something in the heat at her head-level cracked and exploded. Jeremiah screamed; something slashed her cheek; she thought she was still going straight but she caught the hard corner of the table in the stomach; disoriented, the only direction she could be sure of going was back the way they'd come. She darted back and gasped, both from the omnipresent smoke and from Jeremiah's panicked hold around her neck. She readied her keep-away again, determined to give it one last try, and then in the heat something gave way with a sharp, explosive report. Jeremiah screamed and clutched her neck tight and threw out an arm and Jenna felt a new shell structure materializing in the room, one that drew in magical energy like a sponge... ... and sent it out again as snow, thick sleety bullets of snow that slapped down into the rising flames. She dropped her fire-keep-away and funneled all her energy into Jeremiah's snow-summon, pulling as fast as she could from the surge that had fueled the fire to drain it off. Soon the wet stinging fusillade had scrubbed the smoke from the air and the blue glow of the spell fractured through the glistening moisture in the air was painfully bright, and she had to squint to protect her eyes. But when she reached out, trying again to touch the signature of the fire, she found only a small pocket of flame remaining. Pushing her way through the snow, feeling her legs goosebump up from the cold, she walked over to it, and methodically stomped it out -- feeling the errant talisman crunch underfoot. And then it was over. Jenna hugged the little boy close to her; both to comfort him, and selfishly, because his shivering body was warm. "Wow, Jeremiah, you're a hero. You stopped the fire with that... How did you know how to summon snow?" Jeremiah clung to her tightly. "Saw 't few times," he mumbled. "When I 's little, b'fore we came to San Jordi." Jenna looked through lashes crusted with ice at the tiny tousled blond hair (also with a little snow melting in it.) He'd successfully channeled energy into a spell construct that he'd never been taught -- of something he'd last seen, probably, before he learned his numbers or colors. She felt amazement (and maybe a stab of envy) for what a wizard he'd make someday -- if they allowed him to be what he was. Suddenly he buried his face in the side of her neck and she felt hot tears running down her shoulder as he began to bawl. She rubbed his back with a firm, gentle touch. "Jeremiah, what's wrong? You did great! You put out the fire!" Between hitching sobs he blurted out "'s BAD! Jesus hates magic! Magic's evil and ..." the rest of it was lost in his shaking. She was starting to shake a little herself, from the adrenalin letdown. Her ears began to ring -- no, that was the descending whine of a fire engine siren; funny how it seemed so far away. "Shhh, shhh," she said, still rubbing his back. "Jeremiah, I don't know what they told you. But in my Sunday school, they taught me something that Jesus said. People asked him what was the most important rule of all, that he wanted people to follow, and he said 'Love one another'." She could hear, now, the tromping of boots coming closer. "You saved these people's church. Don't you think that's pretty loving?" There was no reply, except for, after a few seconds, Jeremiah hugging her tight -- not out of panic, as before, but just a little-boy hug. A fireman in black rubberized jacket and boots chose that moment to come around the door, carrying the end of a firehose, and stood stock-still at the sight before him: lumps of snow and ice rapidly melting, the furnishings coated with a layer of black soot and the soot in turn trapped under brittle ice. Wordlessly, he arm-motioned his fellows forward, and two other firemen in turn came forward to stare at the interior of the sacristy. Jenna sighed inwardly, and went into her Jenna-the-flake act. "Wow!" she said, wide-eyed. "I thought we were really in trouble, but then that stuff started coming down, and put the fire right out! Did it come from those, um, what-do-you-call-em, Freon sprinklers?" She carefully avoided looking up at the ceiling, where she knew well there were no sprinklers. As galling as it could be, the space-cadet act was a preferred method for ducking away from difficult questions. And right now, that seemed like the best idea anyone had had all day. "So I called headquarters," Jenna said. "They're sending someone to pick up Jeremiah and his mother for an optional debriefing. They could refuse it, but between what the Blues can offer and Jeremiah being abandoned inside..." She shivered. They were sitting on the trunk of the Bomber, Cleo and Pilot on either side of Jenna in case she felt worse for the wear after her adventure. She was also wearing Pilot's volunteered jacket, which was helping her warm up nicely. And where the Bomber was parked, they were not only in a good position to catch afternoon sun, but to watch Jeremiah and his mother hugging, with the congregation of the storefront church flocking around them, and a few puzzled folks from the Fire Department still trying to get answers. "Think they'll leave the Burners, then?" Cleo asked. Jenna stretched her legs, one at a time, noting ruefully both smoke and snow damage to the clothes. "Let's hope so. As for us... well, if I show up at home having gone through fire and ice, my mother is not going to be appeased with a vacant stare and giggle." Cleo nodded. "Your mother is no fool." "So... we've been ordered to report to the mansion in Silver Hills. Where, among other things, we can all get some food, I'll report on the whole incident including the Burner connection, and I can clean up before going home." She brightened suddenly. "Hey, wait a minute..." "OK, Jenna, what's that crafty look for?" Jenna smiled and tapped her lips thoughtfully. "Well, even if these clothes can be cleaned up, it's probably gonna take time. So ... if I want to keep the secret of where I was... I pretty much have to get new clothes, don't I?" Cleo shook her head. "Unbelievable. You come out of a fire and half-an-hour later you're ready to clothes-shop?" She hopped off the trunk, and looked at Jenna grining like a cat with cream, and Pilot beside her, smiling wryly. "You are really, really crazy, Jenna, you know that?" Jenna smiled. "You don't mind, do you?" "Heck no. Come on, let's roll." THE END