A Criminal Magic (19 page)

“And you deserve it.”

I snap, “Christ, How, it's not my fault you're the family fuckup.”

Howie stops moving, hell, it almost sounds like he stops breathing.

Shit
. That just came out.

Howie lunges over the console, manages to box my ear with his palm. It doesn't hurt, but it does the job, makes
me
mad too, and I reach out and box him back. At that, a gauntlet's thrown, and he climbs around the front seat like he's going to dive on top of me—

“Goddamn it, you two!” Win takes his thick palms and pushes our heads apart, thrusting me against the backseat, sending Howie flying against his passenger side window. Win sighs. “Howie, seriously, get out.”

Howie sits there, huffing and puffing, as I collect myself in the back. But I don't look at him. Sure, my courtship of Howie was calculated—but that doesn't mean what I feel for him isn't real. That doesn't mean I don't rely on Howie as a one-man social life more than I care to admit.

Finally Howie kicks open the flap door on Win's Model T. “Go suck each other.” He spits on the ground and closes it with a
thwap
.

I want to follow him, maybe even apologize. I want to somehow tell him that he can have this world—that I'm just wearing it to turn it inside out and destroy it.

But Howie doesn't look back, and before I can figure out whether it's childish for me to call after him, Win settles his car back onto the road.

And then my guilt gives way, slowly but surely, to something else.

Finally I have to ask, “Where are we going?”

“The Boss has heard things,” Win says slowly, eyes ahead.
“He's impressed. He wants to see you.” He locates a crumpled box of cigarettes inside his pocket, pulls two out and lights them, then passes one to me. The car immediately becomes assaulted with thick, toxic air. The kind of air where it feels like dangerous things might just crawl out of the mist. The kind of air that lies waiting to spark a fire.

I nod, trying to keep my excitement tempered, appropriate. But inside I'm practically bursting. All the work, the nights, the smuggling runs, the magic—all of it is to meet McEvoy, learn his sins, and confess them for him. “Where's the meet?”

“Somewhere safe.”

Win turns onto 13th Street, follows it through town, until the homes become stores become warehouses, until the road all but peters out. He pulls into a large abandoned lot. “McEvoy should be here soon.” He cuts the engine and we both get out.

Broken glass dusts the edges of the gravel lot, and a sad, faded billboard stands tall amid the malnourished moonlit grass. The woman in the billboard's picture sports a hole where her face should be. But it feels appropriate, right in line with the ambiance.

Because this lot? It's the opposite of safe. This is a place where murders are committed.

We wait, leaning against Win's car in the cold, tearing through the last of his pack of Luckies. After waiting months to meet McEvoy, a few more minutes shouldn't rip me apart, but I can barely concentrate on the staccato small talk Win's attempting beside me about Jack Dempsey's latest fight.

Finally a black car pulls into the lot. McEvoy, I have to assume, emerges from the front seat and slowly walks toward us. He's got a fedora pulled down low, a thick, expensive-looking gray woolen coat with the collar popped up. My pulse starts to quicken, and there's a dull, almost sickening dread rising up from my core.

“Boss,” Win says, “this is the boy I was telling you about. Alex Danfrey.”

I gulp, trying not to choke. I wonder if McEvoy can sense it—that I'm here for him, like he's here for me.

He looks like he does in the papers, early fifties, polished, intimidating, somehow bigger—and smaller—all at the same time. “Heard a lot about you, Alex,” Boss McEvoy says.

“Thank you, sir.” I take a sharp inhale. “I hope all good things.”

“You wouldn't be rising up otherwise,” he says. “As it turns out, I'm in the market again for someone like you.” He smirks and nods to Win. “But if you're going to have the honor of being my right-hand, my personal sorcerer, I need to make sure you fulfill all my needs.”
Right-hand sorcerer. This is it. What the Feds planted me for, what all my work undercover comes down to.
“Go on, Win, bring out a bottle.”

Win crosses back to his car, digs through his trunk, and removes a glass bottle filled with water—my best guess twelve ounces, what the black market has determined is the perfect amount for a sorcerer's shine transference. Any less water, the stuff's too potent, can cause a magic overdose. Any more, you're not getting the best high. But I'm surprised my transference skills matter at all to this man. McEvoy's king of the streets—he needs a sorcerer who can hide robberies, heists. Murders.

Win hands the bottle to McEvoy, who in turn hands it to me.

“Brew for me.”

It's been a long time, way too long for my first brew back to be for the Boss. “It's been a while,” I softly tell McEvoy.

“I'm not a fan of excuses.”

I give a little nod and wrap both hands around the glass.

I'm sure brewing shine is a little different for every sorcerer, but this is how it used to go for me: I imagined something mounting inside me—taking all my rage, desire, passion, fear,
my magic—and I visualized it flowing through my veins, as tangible and real as blood. And then I pictured slicing my fingers open, letting all that pour out of me and bleed into the water inside the glass. And after it was done, for a while anyway—I actually felt wiped clean.

Sure enough, it begins. The glass starts to warm between my palms, and the water starts to boil. Sharp bursts of trapped lightning start crackling inside the bottle, sending the water crashing and swirling into something glistening, dark and red.

“Give it here,” McEvoy says. He studies my sorcerer's shine, and then he smiles and hands it to Win. “Let's have a royal taster for the king.”

Win looks hungrily into the bright sea of liquid rubies inside the glass. “Bottoms up.”

He takes a sip of it, careful not to take more than an ounce. McEvoy and I both shift uncomfortably, waiting for the magic to settle into Win's veins, for the shine to take hold of him.

A minute later, Win gasps, “Holy . . . shit.” He stumbles to sit on the ground, then flings himself on his back, his arms splayed out, his legs stretched at odd angles. And then, like he's seven, he starts making snow angels in the gravel as he lets out a childlike laughter. If I wasn't scared out of my mind, I'd laugh with him. I've never seen the man even remotely out of control.

“It's so bright,” Win whispers as he stares up at the lone streetlamp in the lot.

McEvoy gives me a smirk. “Impressive.” But then he turns away from me, begins to pace, like a restless tiger in a cage. “But there're a lot of impressive people in this world,” he says. “And while sorcery is rare, I can afford to be choosy.”

He takes a quick step toward me. Thanks to the streetlamp, I can see every detail of his face—the pores dotting his nose, the small capillaries around his eyes, the deep wrinkles etched by time and anger.

“I've been in this game a long time, Alex—and that's what it truly is, a game of power. A game that can transform people, just like magic, a game that can turn them inside out. It can make people do stupid things, dangerous things, especially if power is all they're after.” Despite his aging face, McEvoy's eyes are clear, sharp, and wolfish. Like a jackal. The same Jackal who reportedly gunned down ten D Street thugs, execution-style in the street, in revenge for them killing Danny the Gun. Who runs through sorcerers almost as fast as cigarettes. Who wouldn't hesitate to skin me alive if he knew why I was really here.

“In my time leading the Shaws, I've come to understand the rules of this game intimately, Alex. And a man after nothing but power in this world is a man you can't trust.” McEvoy nods at Win, who's still lying on the ground, shocked still, looking up at the streetlamp like it's the bright birth of the world's first angel. “Take Win over there. Above all else, he's working for his family.” McEvoy turns his attention back to me. “That's something I'd bet the farm on. That's a man you can trust.”

He cocks his head. “But my last sorcerer, the one who lasted all of a few weeks?” A gash of a frown cuts across McEvoy's face. “I could see right through him. Little prick thought he was smarter, more powerful than me, hid secrets. Thought he was tricky enough that I wouldn't find out.” He stares at me, those eyes cold and piercing. “You understand what I'm trying to say to you?”

My heart is a hummingbird right now, fluttering in my chest. I swear McEvoy's so close he must hear it. “Yes, sir,” I manage to say evenly.

“So I need to know, Alex, right now. What else are you after in this game? You obviously had other options, thanks to your father.” He smiles, but it just makes him look even more like a wolf before it lunges. “Why are you and I here tonight?”

He's so close, I swear he can reach in and grab out what I'm thinking. I stop breathing, try to stand taller, refuse to let him see anything but what I want him to see.

“I want to serve you.” Flattery, a knee-jerk instinct. “I think I can learn a lot from a man like you.”

“Lie,” McEvoy snaps.

“No sir, I want to be near you,” I correct quickly.
Christ, I hear the desperation in my own voice
. “I want to be safe, to know I've got a bright future by your side.”

“I smell bullshit again,” he cuts in, slowly encircling me, sizing me up. My eyes dart to Win, who's still tripping on my magic. McEvoy could take that gun I see poking out of his holster and put a bullet in my head, right here, right now. And no one would save me. Hell, no one would even know he did it. Maybe I could manipulate the gun, the bullet—maybe I could save myself, take him down instead.

But what then?

Take out all the Shaws?

Take out the Feds?

“Alex”—McEvoy brings me back—“don't fuck with me. I'll ask you one more time. Why are you after me?”

I freeze at his word choice,
after me
. But that's not what he means. He can't know.
There's no way he can know
.

I close my eyes, try to think, but time keeps moving forward, and fear is crawling up my spine, stealing my breath, my words. I hear a sigh, and then the sound of metal on leather, a holster—

My eyes fly open to see McEvoy's gun trained inches from my forehead. Then he says softly, and not unkindly, “Afraid time's up, Alex. Pity.”

Say something. Save yourself
, my mind shrieks. But it's my body, my magic, that finally steps in—

A flat wall of stone erupts out of the ground in front of me,
ten feet long, ten feet high, rumbles fast and furious as McEvoy's bullet sounds, the hungry pop of his gun echoing through the cold air and cracking against the rock.

The wall saved me, stopped the bullet just in time—

In an odd, dissociated moment, the first thing I feel is a pang of pride for quick magic. And then I double over.
My magic only did what it had to because McEvoy almost killed me he wanted to kill me
—

“ALEX!” McEvoy barks.

I hobble to stand, sick and twisted behind the wall. I almost run, but I force myself to focus, to remember the endgame.
Keep going you can do this you're almost there—

I walk around my protection wall, approach McEvoy slowly to stand by his side. I need to give McEvoy the truth—at least, the version of the truth that I'm able to give him.

So I keep my eyes trained on my stone wall manipulation, the one that now cuts the parking lot in half. And then I reach down inside, channel everything I've got left, and perform a stacked trick, by conjuring a two-dimensional image of a man right onto my wall. A man I loathe—the man I know that McEvoy hates more than anyone for killing his cousin in cold blood—perhaps the one person who does bind McEvoy and me together, despite everything else.

I can draw the gangster from memory. The dark hair, large figure, creased face—

And then McEvoy's standing, gun in hand, face-to-face with a replica of the D Street boss, Boss Colletto. McEvoy gasps and raises his gun higher on instinct.

“The real reason I want to work with you?” I say beside him, and then I force myself to finish the trick. I look back to my fabrication of Colletto on the stone wall and imagine the entire wall glass, and my mind shattering it with a hammer. The replica and the wall burst into a million shards, break against the night
sky, and finally swirl away like dust. “Revenge,” I say numbly. “Simple as that.”

McEvoy wrestles his gaze away from the last flickers of my shattered manipulation. He glances at Win, who's on the ground, dumbfounded, unsure whether what he just witnessed was a dream or real. And then Boss McEvoy lets go with a sharp cackle of a laugh, the caw of a crow across the empty lot.

“Oh, Danfrey.” He slaps me on the shoulder, once, his grasp heavy and possessive. “We're going to work out just fine.”

A MAGICAL STORM

JOAN

Gunn tells our troupe we're stopping rehearsal early today. He doesn't explain why, though of course I already know: there's a gathering of all the underbosses at the Red Den this December evening, but Gunn and I can't miss a day of analyzing and discussing Mama's dark blood-magic spells, so he and I need time to meet before. We've been scheming in Gunn's office every evening for weeks, since that day I first confessed that I knew a set of special spells—the day I spent over an hour locked in there after rehearsal, doing my best to answer his nonstop questions.

I don't know how much Gunn's told Boss McEvoy or the other underbosses about our little side meetings, but I know my charge—
I'm
not to tell a soul.

Right now it's almost four o'clock, and my mind's been wandering all afternoon. I try one last time to focus on rehearsal, on the heady feeling I get when I throw myself completely into performance magic and manage to forget everything else. Tonight Gunn has a new finale idea he's billing as “A Magical Storm,” and it's supposed to be a true Category Five hurricane. Our visual experts Tommy and Rose are conjuring lightning, with Grace, our amplifier, on galloping thunder. Billy and Ral will send slick
curtains of rain from the ceiling to a few feet over the crowd's heads, while Stock and I will work together to churn hurricane winds, meant to span from the double doors all the way to the back stage, with the storm's eye falling right over the audience in the center.

But our performance hasn't come together yet. The lightning feels off, sporadic, dangerous. Grace's amplified thunder is kind of ill-timed, and Ral slips up once and sends the rain pummeling to the floor. While I'm to bring the winds and Stock, our motions expert, is in charge of churning them, we can't find our footing together, and we end up picking at each other through the entire dress rehearsal.

There's a hum of discord in the troupe's usual melody, a tension, even in the magic. And as much as I try and deny it, instinct tells me it's got something to do with me. How I've been slowly disrupting our rhythm as I get pulled, further each day, into my own strange dance with Gunn.

Around four thirty Gunn calls it quits, despite how unready the troupe looks and feels. He mumbles, “Good luck” and heads into his office alone—but I know it's just a matter of time until he emerges and comes looking for me.

“Well, that was ugly,” Billy declares to the troupe near the base of the back stage. “If tonight's show's just as hideous, I'm going to down a shot of shine to get through it.”

“Don't fall down the rabbit hole. Not too much, we promised each other,” Ral scolds him softly. “Drink it after the show, if you want to celebrate, not before.”

I've been noticing Ral and Billy on the floor more and more each night at the end of our performances, taking a shot of shine right along with the audience. Billy doesn't surprise me, as even back at the warehouse clearing it was obvious he was often tempted to drink the stuff. But Ral does. Then again, guess he's been working hard, and I'm sure he welcomes the escape from
missing his family—I just hope he really does know how much is too much, and when to slow down. Trouble is, I barely get any downtime with him or the rest of the troupe anymore, considering my side venture with Gunn. I doubt unsought advice from me would go over so well these days.

Billy shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Then I'm taking a nap.”

Grace smirks. “Ral, you're in charge of waking him up on time,” she says. “I'm sure as hell not trying to wake a dragon.”

I give a laugh beside her as Billy and Ral head back to their room. She hops on the stage next to me, while Tommy, Rose, and Stock walk off toward the double doors, arguing about whether they've got time to sneak in a motion picture before our own show.

“We should get some air too.” Grace turns to me once they've gone. “Catch a smoke and walk around the block or something. It's been a while since we've managed to sneak out of this place.”

She's right—we haven't done our coffee-and-fire-escape ritual in over a week, and it would be smart for me to come up for air. Between rehearsals, my secret meetings with Gunn, and our nightly shows, I barely have a moment where I'm not focused on magic of one sort or another.

Besides, things have felt . . . different between Grace and me since I started meeting with Gunn about the blood-magic. When I first shared some of Mama's spells, when Gunn said no one could know about this magic but him and me, he mentioned, in passing, that I'd need to protect myself a little more, close my mind and keep my thoughts neutral so “certain talents don't go fishing around inside.” Of course he was talking about the troupe, Grace's mining skills in particular, so when I'm around her these days I picture my mind a house, and keep all the doors locked but the breezy foyer.

Grace has to feel it. In fact, I feel
her
, trying to lock-pick her way inside, trying to use her magic to link us back together.

But Gunn's warnings, the extra payments he's funneling me for the cabin, how much I stand to win if the blood-magic comes through as Gunn hopes, or lose if it doesn't—I've got no choice but to keep her out.

That doesn't mean I don't miss her. “Let's do it.” I flash her a smile. “Haven't had a smoke since this morning.”

“That's 'cause you never buy your own packs.” She laughs, and I laugh with her.

“That's 'cause I never step foot outside this place anymore.”

“I know,” she says, and her laughter falls away. “Maybe because you've been spending an awful lot of time with someone else.”

“Gunn just wants a second opinion on our show sometimes,” I say slowly.

“Not sometimes.” She cocks her head, studies me. “You're in there every day.”

“You stalking me, Grace Dune?” I try to make my tone light, but Grace's face says she's having none of it.

And of course, Gunn decides at that moment to bellow for me, like an owner calling for his dog in the hall. “Joan, come on, don't have all night.”

Grace and I stare at each other, for a second, a minute.

“I'm sorry, I—I better go. Would have loved to step outside, though . . .”

“Hope you're being careful, Joan.”

“Of course I am. I always am.” But Lord, that sounds defensive even to me.

“I know what Stock's been teasing you about. You must know it too.” Grace's eyes roam my face, like she's trying to figure out another way inside my mind. “Stock's been whispering it to all of us, saying that you're sleeping your way to the top of our troupe, trying to angle yourself as the star.”

My face grows hot, flushed. But of course this isn't news—Stock's been making little comments every chance he gets since he caught Gunn a few times entering or leaving my room. Part of me almost wishes it were that simple. “And you believe him?”

“'Course not.” But she doesn't sound convincing.

“You've just got to trust me, all right?” I say quickly, tugging my shirtsleeves down farther, past my hands. My shirt hides my fresh, recent blood-magic cuts, I'm sure of it, but the tug still comes fast as a reflex. I lower my voice. “I swear to you, it's not like that. I know what I'm doing.”

“Just . . .” Grace pauses, sighs. “
Be careful
, Joan.” Then she leaves, heads toward the double doors to the outside world.

If she turns around
, I think in a desperate, impulsive moment,
maybe I'll tell her, about all of it, despite Gunn's warnings. I trust her, after all. I always have.

But Grace doesn't look back.

*    *    *

I'm halfway through his office door when Gunn says, “Spellbind the door. You know the underbosses are coming by, and we're far from ready to show them anything.”

Without a word, I do what he asks, cross the hallway to the men's bathroom on the other side and spellbind it with a linked trick, “
Out becomes in
.” As I walk through Gunn's door, I complete the link with, “
In becomes out
,” so that anyone opening Gunn's office will actually walk into the bathroom. And then I settle on the chair on the near side of his desk.

For weeks our meetings have started the same way: I brew twelve ounces of sorcerer's shine into a bottle he stores under his desk. Then I conjure Mama's caging spell again in front of him, the blood-magic spell I used to trap Stock and me in that glass cage during our final test in the clearing, and the same one
I'm pretty sure I managed to perform the night of Mama's death, to imprison my magic touch.

Now I place my newly sorcered shine on his desk. Gunn caps the bottle and hands me his letter opener without a word. I roll up my right sleeve to my elbow, expose ten tight, clustered cuts right at the center of my forearm. I lean my forearm over the capped bottle, and then, before I can flinch, I draw the blade quick and light across my arm once more. As the cut blooms red, and blood runs hot and fast over the cap, I recite clear and strong, “
With purpose and a stalwart heart, a sacrifice
.
Less of me
,
an offering to cage for eternity. My wish, to cage this shine forever, or until I release it
.”

The glass bottle coated in red simmers, dances, and shudders on the desk before it sighs and stops—signaling that the caging spell is complete.
Effective
.

Gunn pulls out his notebook, the leather-bound one he keeps locked in his desk drawer. “Run me through it again, exactly how it works.”

After our talk in my bedroom a few weeks back, after Gunn realized the secrets I was keeping, the deal between us has evolved. For my extra efforts and for the secrets of Mama's magic, Gunn is making weekly payments on our Parsonage cabin, like he promised. But now Gunn's given me another carrot, since he's come to think that Mama's caging spell could be a way to defy the laws of magic, a key to doing the impossible: creating a lasting sorcerer's shine, one that doesn't revert to water after a day. “All I have to do” is figure out a way around the spell's limitations—
limitations
, I might add, that are the purpose of the spell itself—and Gunn has promised me 10 percent of whatever the Shaws manage to score for the product.

Of course I feel guilty, uncomfortable, hell, even traitorous, over what I'm trying to pull off behind this door. A powerful
magic like Mama's was never meant to get into the hands of a man like Gunn, which is why she swore me to secrecy in the first place. Blood-magic is meant to be a last-resort magic, a sacrifice of yourself for something extraordinary . . . not a potential way to work around magic's limits so that a mind-bending drug can turn this country upside down. 'Cause if sorcerer's shine becomes storable, like Gunn hopes? The law wouldn't be able to control it. It would no longer be rare, or confined to shining rooms—
it could be shipped into the hands of every Tom, Dick, and Harry across America
. And I saw shine's choke hold firsthand, how the more Uncle Jed downed his own shine, the more the real world lost its color. How, eventually, it was only thing that mattered to him. I'm seeing it a bit with Tommy, Stock, and Rose, even Billy—they're more restless, less satisfied until that time of the night when they can lose themselves to shine on the show space floor. Families would be destroyed. Jobs would be lost. Hell, crime might shoot through the roof.

And yet.

I also think about what Gunn's success could mean, for me, for what's left of my own family. How floored Ben would be if I bought him his own Six Coupe, how Ruby would flip over an actual doll. I picture us, playing on a carpeted floor, with bright light streaming through curtained windows, and Ben laughing behind us, smoking a nice cigar.
They'd never go hungry, never want for anything again
.

I twist myself around completely each day about it, each time I'm sitting in this chair. But the cold, hard truth, the final say in the matter?

Even if I wanted to back out, it's too late. I signed my name in blood under Gunn's. And Gunn's not the kind of man who lets you walk away from that.

“This caging spell is from a set of spells my mama's female ancestors fashioned,” I answer slowly. “They've kept their
blood-magic secret for generations, as it's a dark and powerful gift.”
A gift never meant for a man like you
.

I keep my eyes trained on the desk, force myself to keep going, to share what I need to survive.
There is no choice here.
“The sorcerer focuses on what she wants to achieve, without regret or hesitation—with a stalwart heart—and sacrifices something of her own to achieve it.”

“You mean she offers her blood.” Gunn scratches notes into his notebook.

I nod. “Mama had a bunch of different blood-spells. Ones that used blood to track where we went. Ones that protected us from harm.” My heart stutters a beat as I picture Mama in our washroom again, painting my lips and eyelids with her blood, keeping me safe from the leering eyes of Jed, and I swallow before my voice can catch. “The one I just showed you, the caging spell, is traditionally meant to lock away an evil, by putting something symbolic in a vessel, like in a bottle or a jar. Then you lock and seal the vessel with your blood, say your intention, and the magic guards the stated evil and keeps you safe.”

But Gunn doesn't care about the spell's traditions. Just how he can exploit it now. “So this caging spell is teachable?”

“Yes. My mama taught me.”

He leans over, grabs my sealed bottle of shine to inspect it.

“The shine is now trapped by the caging spell.” I add. “It's no longer governed by the usual limitations of pure magic. It will stay preserved in there forever, or until I release it.”