February Thaw Read Online Free PDF Page B

back onto the shelf. "Are you even sure the address book is here?"
    "It was in 1972."
    "That’s the last time you saw it?"
    "I was never allowed in here as a human child."
    "Hate to break it to you, girlfriend, but you haven't been a child for a while now. How'd she keep you out as an adult?"
    "She was a wizard."
    "Oh, yeah."
    Fire saw the world as variations on a fuel source. Magical items, being both highly flammable and completely inflammable gave off a unique signature. In any other room, Carlene could have found the address book in less time than it would take her to initiate pyrolysis. In this room, it could take hours.
    Hours passed.
    "I am so bored." Sitting on the floor, surrounded by unboxed magazines, Alynne listlessly dumped a Slinky from hand to hand. "You know my mother kept her address book by the telephone."
    "Beth wasn't my mother and she certainly wasn't yours." Irritated enough to be burning almost orange, Carlene blistered paint across the front of a shelf as she tried to work out where the book could be. It had to be in the workshop because there was nothing magical in the rest of the house, but it wasn't on the shelves and it wasn't in the boxes. "Wizards know when they’re going to die. She should’ve been prepared!"
    "Anger." Alynne nodded wisely. "Comes after denial. Then there's grief, acceptance and something else."
    "Sneezy, Grumpy, or Doc?"
    "Just trying to help."
    "Then find the address book!"
    "Fine." Rolling up onto her feet, Alynne stretched to the limits of the Grateful Dead T-shirt and ambled over toward the armchair. "Why do you want to have a body again anyway? You're fire. You rock!"
    "No, that would be earth." Carlene settled back down into the brazier. "And while being fire doesn't totally suck, I'd never be able to eat ice cream again, or have sex, or watch television."
    "Sequentially or simultaneously?"
    "Does it matter?"
    Alynne shrugged. "Just curious."
    "I want to be able to walk in the rain, feel clean sheets against my skin, keep doing all the things I took for granted for so long."
    "You hated walking in the rain. You said it made your hair frizzy." Kneeling in the armchair, Alynne lifted a tangled pile of dried herbs off the phone, lifted up one end of the old black rotary machine, and pulled a small leather-bound book out from under it. "Is this what we've been looking for?"
    The steel bowl of the brazier pinged as it expanded in the sudden heat. "You know, you're a really irritating person."
    Alynne's smile could only be described as smug. "I'll accept that as the compliment you intended it to be."
     
    *
     
    The address book updated automatically. All but one of the eight wizards listed had a phone number, six had email accounts, and three had fax numbers. The eighth had only a three word address – New York City.
    "Sometimes wizards have trouble fitting in," Colleen explained, hovering over the book and trying not to set her friend's hair on fire. "They can't cope with being so incredibly different and they finally snap."
    "We're talking a street wizard here? Eating out of dumpsters, sleeping on vents, freaking out the tourists?" Alynne's lip curled. "That sucks. You've got unimaginable powers and you're eating someone else's spit off used pizza crusts."
    "And thank you for that image. Just dial the first number."
    "There's no name."
    "Of course not. Names have power. Wizards don't give them out to just anyone."
    "The number's in Sweden. What if this wizard doesn't speak English?"
    "It's a wizard; just dial."
    Dialling involved rather a great many numbers, including a few Carlene hadn't seen for the last twenty-four years. Alynne either didn't notice, or didn't care that there were suddenly numbers between eight and nine. But then, in all the years they'd known each other, Carlene could only remember Alynne actually taken aback once – after a grade eight track meet when Tommy Elliot had stripped off his sweaty T-shirt and spontaneously...
    "Rude bastard didn't even