Once the bandages come off, I go back to the blue zone, alone this time, and I have my skates with me. The power tower line is much spookier with nobody else nearby. It is very easy to think of these steel giants as alive, motionless only because they want to be. I gear up on a convenient curb, knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, helmet with mouth guard, and my skates, which are fitted with outdoor wheels. No way do I want my indoor wheels getting cut up by broken glass or rough asphalt.
I remember stories I’ve read of people who come out of the blue so confused, they can’t remember their names.
Geared up, I skate slowly down the street. The neighborhood is all dead factories.
On the factories’ front lawns and parkways, the grass has grown tall, waving faintly like wheat in the breeze. Doors and first-floor windows are boarded up. It’s sad and spooky, in spite of the peaceful summer sun and a lake breeze.
The tower with the blue zone at its foot looms over the empty factory. I remember hearing voices, or thinking I’d heard them, when Katterfelto brought me here.
On the edge of the factory’s parking lot, I stop and listen.
There. A voice like a promise, a come-on, a lure. I can’t understand what it’s saying, but I can feel it tickling me, teasing me.
O-kay.
Very slowly, I roll up to the edge of the blue. It seems to be a very small blue zone, like a cloud concealing the base of the big power tower.
what do you want? what do you want, hel?
The voice is deeply familiar. Weird.
what do you want? anything you want, you can have. anything at all, hel.
The hair stands up all over my body.
The blue seems to soak outward, like a cloud sinking to the ground, covering me.
I’m beginning to remember where I’ve heard this voice before. It was coming from a coin in my hand. I remember that it knew my name, and I remember what I asked it to do for me.
The blue closes in around me.
And then I hear another voice.
“Been in there two minutes. No, she’s not wearing a tracer. I told you, she threw it away. Why would I bring up the coin?”
I gasp.
Nick says, “That’s need to know. Are you giving me clearance to release that to her? Boss, she’s only twenty-four.”
So he claims to believe that? He hasn’t admitted it to me.
Nick protests, “I really wouldn’t suggest—”
I don’t stay for more. The longer I listen, the louder Nick’s voice gets. Either he’s coming closer, or the weird distance-warping quality of the blue is shifting him nearer to me. Time to get out of here.
I look down at my skates, then carefully turn around until I am facing them a hundred eighty degrees away from their original position.
Then I roll. Toward my car, I hope.
As I roll, I hear something huge moving over my head.
I look up.
Above me, the power tower is bending over. It’s bending in half. The long arms of its line carriers stretch and lower until they touch the tower halfway down. Then the arms bend in the middle.
The power lines stretch like taffy. They sing like screaming guitar strings.
It looks for all the world as if the tower is bending over, putting its hands on its knees, to look at me, a bug down here at its feet.
I put on a burst of speed and sprint away on my skates, through a feeling of loss, through what feels like fifty yards of blue fog, although I know the blue zone can be only a yard or two deep, and then I am falling on wrist guards and knee pads onto the smooth black asphalt of the parking lot.
Panicked, I roll over and stare into the sky, half expecting to see the angular metal crown of the power tower peering down at me.
Nope. It’s standing up straight like always.
My heart hammers like mad.
Right now I would be positively glad to see Agent Nick show up with his you-stupid-little-girl expression.
Nothing moves.
Then I hear his voice, again distant, and so faint. My vampire-ears are picking him up. No human ear could catch him.
“Wait, I see her. She’s out.” He sounds hugely relieved. He starts swearing. The other person he is talking to is not quite audible. Probably he’s on the phone.
I listen harder, straining, focusing.
Now I can hear the other voice. “Don’t tell her about the coin yet. If she’ll go in there cold, she’ll go in for any reason. Come up with something else.”
This is a man’s voice. Gentle and friendly and bossy at the same time. I feel my hackles rise.
Now that I know Nick is watching, I feel completely safe. I stand up. I look up at the motionless power lines. I look at the asphalt. A daddy-long-legs spider walks down my leg, across the tip of my skate, and flops to the ground. He seems to be headed for the blue.
I wonder what that whispering voice is offering the spider.
Okay, that’s weird enough. I get up, brush myself off, check my fanny pack, and head back for the car.
Agent Nick does not turn up to scold me while I am taking off my gear and storing my skates in the back. Either Nick is learning something about me, or his creepy-voiced boss wants him to stay out of my sight.
o0o
My hands shake only a little bit as I drive over to Dr. Katterfelto’s seventies-era one-story office building. I don’t try to lose Agent Nick. He’s probably put a tracer on my car by now anyway.
To play it safe, I leave my purse in the car, which was in the car while I was on skates in the blue, and which may also be bugged by now, and I bring the fanny pack with me.
Dr. Katterfelto is accepting a heavy backpack from a wino on the front steps.
The wino smells fierce. But when he turns to leave, stuffing some cash into his pocket, he smiles at me, and I smile back.
Katterfelto sees me and smiles at me. They have the same smile.
“That guy a relative of yours?” I say as I came up the sidewalk.
“Vot makes you say that?” Katterfelto says.
“I dunno, expression, I guess.”
“We are brothers in spirit only.” Katterfelto looks me over. I wonder if the skin around my new tattoos looks pink. “You have news.”
How does he do that? “Yes. Let’s go inside.” Nick may not have vampire ears, but he could certainly have conventional spying equipment. If he can afford it.
In his office, Katterfelto says, “Vill you haff coffee?”
“No thanks. And why don’t you drop the cheesey mad scientist accent with me? It sucks anyway.”
He smiles at me again. “Some people find it comforting. And frankly I’ve been using it so long, it feels natural.”
I can’t see why, with a smile like that, he needs to comfort people extra.
I say, “I’ve been in the blue zone, at the foot of that power tower.”
“Alone? That’s very dangerous.”
“I believe you.”
“What did you see?”
“I heard a voice. It wasn’t loud. But I don’t think it was coming from anyone. Oh, and yeah,” I add, “the power tower bent down and looked at me. Scared the pee out of me.”
“Wait, wait, slowly,” Katterfelto says, and I tell him about everything except Nick’s conversation with the man he calls Boss.
Dr. Katterfelto looks somber. “You have exceptional hearing.”
“I do.”
“But this voice did not speak aloud.”
He looks almost scared now, and I make another decision. “Dr. Katterfelto, that Federal agent I mentioned? He’s looking for a coin.”
Katterfelto’s eyes widen, and he stands up as if he doesn’t notice he’s doing it. He blinks through his little wire-rimmed glasses at me.
“This is a very dangerous enterprise,” he says.
I know he is seeing a teenager in my chair, in spite of my tattooed-on crow’s feet. I roll my eyes.
And then I remember when I have heard that voice before.
When I was seventeen. Living in our ratty apartment in Rogers Park. Standing in the darkened living room with my mother’s tip apron in my hand, fishing for quarters, touching something larger than a quarter, heavier and warmer. A coin that whispered wonderful things.
Katterfelto pulls at the lapels of his lab coat as if feeling them for rough spots. “Perhaps I should tell you. Yes.” He looks over the tops of his glasses. “You see, it is my fault that the blue zone is here in Chicago.”
I feel my eyes bug out. “Okay, didn’t see that coming.”
“That man you met on my doorstep. I fund my work through men like him. They have taken the elixir, as I have, and no longer want for anything. But they understand the importance of my work. So they beg for me, and I convert the change into bills, and share the money with them. My vork—” He stops and takes off his glasses and rubs his round little face with an actual handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I cannot talk any other way. The habit of many years is strong.”
I shrug.
“Eleven — no, twelve days ago, a man brought me a bag of change, as this one just did, and in it I found a special coin. A magical emblem, such as I have read about in texts from the Latin. This one looked like the work of Pseudo-Honorius.”
I nod. I’ve read enough real magical history to recognize that name.
“This emblem, it was freaky. Warm, you understand. Alive.”
A prickle ripples over my skin.
“I translated two of the four words on it, and I took some photographs. I studied the figures. Some I could identify. But all the time,” he says to me, “it vas — it was speaking to me.”
I clear my throat. “That is freaky. What did it say?” I remember that my coin, the one in Jilly’s tip apron, was covered with tiny writing, lots and lots of words. Not just four words.
“It said, ‘Vot do you want?’”
“That’s what the voice was saying when I was inside the blue. It knew my name, too.”
He nods. “As did my coin.” He fidgets. “I finally answered it.”
I hold my breath. “What? What did you say?”
“I said that I wanted to know what its purpose was. And it told me, ‘To give you magic.’”
I blink. “Really.”
“Really. Fortunately, I was protected by the elixir. I have no more wants, not of the kind it meant. But I was very afraid. Such a thing could be terribly dangerous. So I took it to a place where many factory have been closed, very underpopulated, and I buried it under the parking lot at the foot of an electrical tower. I came back two days later to make sure that it had not been discovered yet, and there is the blue zone.” He gives a mad scientist titter. “At that point, I would have hired a boat and gone out on the lake and thrown it in, only I knew vot would be the likely result.”
I blink. “What result?”
“Oh, a fish vould gobble it up, and der fish vould come to shore and be caught and eaten, and lo, the coin vould be found in its belly. Or something foolish like that.”
I say, “What do you think it meant, when it said ‘what do you want?’” After a pause, I add, “And why don’t you want anything?”
Katterfelto says, “I have taken the elixir. I am happy with myself. All those who vork with me have taken it. We must vork with very volatile things, you see. Human emotions. Magic. To have left desire behind is the first step in the successful vorking of magic, and yet almost no one hass ever done it. Because once they have achieved desirelessness—” He shrugs. “They no longer want to vork magic.”
“But you do,” I say, struggling to keep up.
“It is not for myself I do this. But you see what has come of my hiding the coin. Within days, the blue zone grows. It has gobbled up the power tower. There is no telling vot can come of that.”
I frown. I remember the power tower bending over with its hands on its knees to look at me. “Oh. Did the blue stuff make the power tower come alive?”
“No. Yes. Perhaps. Something else makes it alive. It, and potentially all the other towers.”
Now I see that Dr. Katterfelto is nuts. His mad scientist thing is no fake. He believes every word of this.
On the other hand, it would not be funny if all the power towers in the city started bending over and looking at people. “What makes them alive?”
“Prana.” he says.
The hairs stand straight up on the back of my neck.
“Chi,” he explains. “Life force. The phlogiston. The substance of life, of being, of desire. Sexual energy. Élan vital.”
That’s my derby name, Hélan Vittle. The “vittle” points to how I eat life force. That’s me, Helen Life Eater. Now I’m regretting putting my big secret on the back of my derby shirt. I gulp. “Those wacky power towers.”
“It permeates the power grid somehow. I discover this only last year. I had ambition then, base ambition that I am relieved to say I have left behind me,” he says, his specs flashing as he throws his head up, “but I have learned this much. For many years the power grid has been filling up with prana. It is a vast reservoir of human energy.”
I’m silent. My heart is beating fast.
He says, “How it gets there, I do not know. Why it does not leak out, I do not know. How to release it for human use again, I do not know. But I am committed to learning all these things, and I vill return this energy to humanity, vich has somehow been robbed of its vital essence.”
He doesn’t sound at all fakey, in spite of the mad scientist act. If nobility comes in a tubby little human shape and wearing a spurious lab coat, Dr. Katterfelto is noble.
“Huh.”
“You,” he says, looking at me with those searchlight specs now, “you have a special interest in energy.”
I’ve been silent so long, I don’t know what to tell him. My throat has seized up.
“Vork wiz me,” he says, leaning forward. “Even your Federal agent, he has something to contribute, if he can be brought to see this.”
“Uh, he won’t,” I say. “That guy is solid wood.”
Dr. Katterfelto raises his eyebrows. “Wood is a noble element. But I see you do not trust him.”
“Heck no.”
“Very well. Ve proceed as best we can.”
I’m blinded with a brilliant thought.
What if the coin can fix me? Change me back? What if it can turn my chakras around, or make me not a vampire, or just kill me?
So far I don’t know if anything can kill me, and, in spite of all my sulking and whining, I’ve been too afraid to experiment with suicide.
The world seems alive with possibility.
I know somebody who is working on the magic problem.
Weird, wild magic is infiltrating the whole world. Our government is forming secret agencies and thrashing around. The City of Chicago has declared that magic doesn’t exist in the vain hope that denial can achieve what paranoid scrutiny cannot.
But I can do something about it.
Because I know something.
Not very much.
But I know something. More than most of these clowns.
I say, “What do you want to do, if you don’t mind my asking? Are you going to try to move the coin?”
Katterfelto puts the tips of his fingers together. “The coin must stay where it is until ve haf a safe place to put it. But the blue is chaotic. It must not be permitted to absorb the power grid. Who knows what could happen then? I think the answer must be—” He hesitates. His head shakes. “Something has bridged the gap between the human power system and the power system of the nation, its energy life blood, if you vill.”
I don’t say anything.
He looks at me over the tops of his glasses. He may not be as ignorant about me as I hope. I’m not confessing anything.
“How is the prana moving into the grid? How can ve get it out?” He leans forward now, his face deadly serious. “And how can ve keep it from falling into the wrong hands?”
At this I blink. Katterfelto is such a sunny soul that it comes as a surprise to me that he can be paranoid, too.
“Whose?” I say.
“Not every magician has taken the elixir of self love,” he says portentously.
I remember something Dr. Springe said about Katterfelto, that he’d taken an elixir of some kind, and yet he desired something. I’ll be going to see her tomorrow. I’ll ask her what she meant by that.
I say, “Look, I have to get going.” I have to see my shrink again. And Agent Nick is no doubt waiting to ream me a fresh one for venturing to the blue zone on my own. If he admits to following me. Should be interesting to see how he finesses that one. I feel warm at the thought. I look at my watch. “Can I come back soon? I’d love to talk about this some more.”
“I vas going to ask ven you would be so kind,” Katterfelto says. “There is much I vant to show you.”
Oh goody. More wackness.
Yet I am so ready. I have my leave of absence. Much as I love the boys, it’s a relief to get a little vacation. And I am betting that in spite of every wack notion in his noggin, Dr. Katterfelto will not ask me to change a pull-up full of pee-pee.