A Criminal Magic (4 page)

The ginger turns her head, annoyed, in my direction. But then she stops, sizes me up, faintly blushes. I know she must like what she sees, they almost all do before they really get to know me. Sure enough, her cherry mouth starts to turn up like little stems.

“Lana Morgan, Alex. Alex, Lana Morgan,” Warren introduces us quickly. I notice he leaves my last name out of the introduction.

“Pleasure.”

Lana leans closer. “So are you a freshman too? I haven't seen you around—I'd remember.” She lets her eyes linger on me. The line starts moving again, and we all take a few steps forward together. Warren uses the chance to reinsert himself between us.

“No, Alex is a friend from the old days, just along for the ride,” Warren says quickly. “He works for the government.”

I watch Lana's interest deflate. “The government,” she says blandly. “How interesting.”

“I'm actually a sorcery expert,” I'm quick to add. “I'm training with the Prohibition Unit, the Domestic Magic division.”

“You don't say?” Lana's smile brightens a few watts, as Warren rolls his eyes next to me. “I bet you're just chock-full of all sorts of fascinating information.” Then she shoots Warren a confused, fearful glance. “Wait, if he's a Fed, what's he doing here?”

Warren laughs out something like, “My thoughts exactly,” but I talk over him: “Let's just say I value fieldwork.” I shoot her my smile, the cocky, off-center one, the one my last fling told me was the only reason she put up with me so long.

“So you're one of
those
Unit men, the fun kind.” Lana meets my smile and wiggles her eyebrows.
The corrupt kind
, is what she means. The Unit's notorious for making more money off bribes than their government salaries. It's part of the reason I joined—the agency's messy, disorganized, an easy place to get lost and hide. “Did you ever have to take a shot of shine, you know, as part of the job? To see what it's like?”

“Absolutely.”

Her eyes become liquid, hungrier. “So what's it feel like, drinking the sorcerer's shine?”

The sorcerer's shine—the magic spell without any other elements, water turned into pure magic touch inside a bottle. The primary reason the anti-sorcery activists were able to pass
the Eighteenth Amendment, besides the record-high crime rate during the Great War and the media's frenzy over a slew of high-profile magic robberies, and one of the most sought-after, addictive magic drugs on the black market. A spell quite literally stumbled upon centuries ago, goes the rumor, when some sorcerer was so drunk he forgot to add his spell's other elements.

I hesitate before pulling out the little silver flask of shine that I brought, the one I made this morning before I took the streetcar into work and sat behind a desk for ten hours. I was planning on giving it to Warren as a thank-you, pawn it off as a score from the Unit's temporary evidence room, but now I'm not in the mood. Now I want Warren—with his big Sigma Phi dreams and his golf-trip-wielding father and his borrowed hair toss—to feel what it's like to lose something.

“It's different for everyone.” I pull the flask out of my coat with the flourish of a true performance sorcerer. “You've got to try it for yourself.”

Lana wraps her hands around mine, which are wrapped around the flask, and gasps. “Are you serious? I can have this?”

“Of course, doll. But better drink it tonight. Shine's magic only lasts a day—that flask will just be water again tomorrow.”

She looks around, then takes it from me slowly, as Warren mutters, “Stealing government property now too?” But I ignore him, just relish this moment of having something to offer.

“Drink it now,” I urge her, “so it'll hit you right as you walk into the party.”

She nods, like I really am some unquestionable expert, and then takes the flask to her lips and downs it in one gulp.

“When will I feel it?” she whispers, giggles, as she passes the flask back to me.

“Any minute.”

We're moving closer to the front, now maybe one or two
groups away. A narrow white door to what looks to be a broom closet stands half-open about ten feet ahead, and a nice if nondescript-looking man sits on a stool next to the door. As we take another collective step forward, Lana gasps, stops.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispers, arching her neck back. “Holy Mother. Holy effing Mother.”

She closes her eyes, licks her lips, purses them. I haven't hit the stuff myself in a long time, but I know the stages of a shine trip inside and out, from working with my father, and now the Unit—at least the stages of a trip before your body comes to need the stuff. First comes the euphoria, the flood of magic out of the bottle and into your blood. Then “the clarity,” where things take on a different sheen, like the world is coming together. Like there's been a secret, evasive all your life, that's now being whispered into your ear. Then, as our Unit guidebook clinically states, comes a “heightened sense of invincibility, increased sociability, and the ecstasy of the senses.” Which, in layman's terms, basically means that the world becomes enchanted.

“Good?” I ask.

Lana laughs, seductive, guttural, looks me right in the eyes, her pupils two tiny specks. “Perfection.”

“You ever think these kinds of tricks could land you right alongside your old man?” Warren digs, as Lana stumbles to my other side, so now I'm in between them.

“Relax, Warren,” I mutter, as Lana wraps her arm around mine. I try to focus on her, but Warren won't let it go.

“I still remember what you told me, right after his indictment, how you never wanted to be like him. Ever.” Warren leans in. “Every time you ask me to take you out, I think about that, how ironic it is. 'Cause it's like you're
trying
to be him,” he adds. “It's like you can't help it.”

Warren's words hit me hot and quick, the shock of his jab quickly settling into angry shame. “I guess neither of us is man
enough to change,” I cut next to him. “Jealousy still looks bad on you, Warren.”

We reach the cleaning closet, come face-to-face with the man on the stool sporting a black jacket, black pants, and a bowler hat. He gives us a smile and folds his hand out like a welcome toward the door. “Your turn, folks. Step inside.”

Lana, Warren, me—we all peer into the closet out of instinct. There are cleaning supplies stashed in the dusty corners, an old broom, buckets. No light.

“But it's not a closet.” Lana looks at me with those wide eyes. “It's a test.”

The doorman nods with an almost cringe-worthy, put-on flourish. “Very wise.” He smiles at me. “Appearances can be deceiving.”

Lana takes me by the hand, and Warren and I follow her into the broom closet.

The closet is a double-sided trick, it has to be: linking two objects together through time and space, so that guests walk into one door, only to instantly walk out of another located somewhere else. Sure enough, as we pass through the broom closet, we magically exit a different door that leads into a low-lit, windowless hallway faintly smelling of mildew. My guess is that we've been transported into the cellar of the house.

A double-sided trick, a link, isn't particularly difficult—like all magic manipulations of reality, it just takes the right words of power, the right objects, and of course, the magic touch—but it's definitely a crowd-pleaser. And it's real sorcery, not one a puffer could try to fake in a pathetic attempt to flaunt himself as magic. So my guess is that Warren's buddy Sam has shelled out quite a lot of cash for this little party to go down. Sorcerers aren't the typical frat-house fare—you hear whispers of performances in higher-echelon circles, you find them in the city's shining rooms owned by the mob. And even though magic itself doesn't wow
me, the keys to it—money, influence, power—that's a bag of tricks I still can't accept that I've lost.

“Don't leave me,” Lana says dreamily. She works her hand up to my bicep as we walk down the hall. “You're an angel, you know that? You've brought me something amazing. You've brought me light.”

“Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere.”

“That's for damn sure,” Warren mutters behind me.

I ignore him, just wrap my hand around Lana's, and together we follow the hallway until it dumps us into the main space of the cellar, a wide, low-ceilinged, windowless den that looks like it spans the entire length and width of the house. The ceiling is peppered with small, blinking lights, and the floor is shiny as a still mirror, reflecting back the lights on its glossy black surface, which creates the effect that we're walking over a field of stars. There are a few trees lining the perimeter of the crowded room, oaks with arms that stretch and bend like they're being animated by a magic wind, with leaves that rustle and sway, all tucked away in the basement of Sigma Phi.

All of this will be gone tomorrow. All pure magic is
real
, a true manipulation of reality, but it's fleeting. From sorcerer's shine to magic replicas, force fields, and every type of trick, all of a sorcerer's magic is condemned to fade away after a day. Most people think that makes sorcery even more mesmerizing: getting a glimpse of a world that's better than our own, but one that only lasts for a moment. But magic's taken too much from me to see it as anything but a swindle.

“I feel like we're flying.” Lana takes my face gently and presses hers into it, her cherry lips on mine, before she pulls away. “More magic,” she says. “Take me.”

I scan the room. The crowd is divided into clusters, anywhere from ten to about thirty college kids arranged in a semicircle around each of the three hired sorcerers on the floor. Each
holds their audience's attention with a small, space-friendly trick, performing it parlor-style for their enraptured crowd on repeat.

My eyes rest on the nearest sorcerer, a few feet away. He takes his time fanning playing cards into a rainbow above his head, and then folds them back into a perfect deck that lands softly on his outstretched hand.

“Come on”—I pull Lana toward him—“you'll love this.”

She practically coos as we watch the trick once, twice, three times. I bet the show must seem even more wowing when she's on shine. She sneaks me another kiss as we stumble over to another performer, one who holds a small sphere of fire in his palm, waving it back and forth and jovially threatening to hand it over to a particularly shell-shocked dame on the sidelines. Lana whispers, “That light is so hot, so blinding, Alex.”

As she leans into me, I can't help but agree; it's bright in here, warm and familiar.
If I just focus on this girl, the way she's looking at me, on the jazz music blaring and the faint scent of privilege that perfumes the cellar, I can forget. I can lose myself in the now.

“I want to get so lost,” Lana whispers into my ear, then pulls away from me suggestively.
I want to get lost too.
“Come find me.”

“Wait, Lana,” I laugh. But as I move to chase after her, Warren steps in my way.

“You can stop, all right?” he says flatly, yelling into my ear over the jazz. “Uncle. You want to feel like a big man? I say uncle.”

I shake my head. “What are you taking about?”

“God, you're really going to make me spell it out?” He looks around uncomfortably, blushes. “I have my eye on Lana, all right, Alex?”

An electric feeling, shiny and heady, lights me up from the inside. “That's funny, 'cause it seems like she's got her eye on me.”

“Yeah, as a joke, as a trip, same as the shine,” Warren snaps. “She's the daughter of a freaking senator. Don't kid yourself.”

And despite the blood sport we're playing, the hard daggers we've been slinging at each other, I'm still surprised silent by his cut. My eyes pinch without my permission, and I have to look at the floor.

“Jesus, what are we doing, Alex?” Warren says. “Look, I'm sorry.”

“No, you're not.”

“You're right, I'm not.” Warren runs his fingers through his hair, gives me that infuriating, borrowed hair toss again. “I'm tired of this. It's awful what your father did, it really is, all right? And I felt bad for you. Sometimes I still do. But you're becoming poison,” he says. “Happy? There's the truth.” And then he turns to walk away.

The anger starts to boil, overflow inside. I need to direct it, somewhere, anywhere else, besides letting it burn me inside out. So before Warren gets away from me, before I think better of it, I take a step forward and give him a sharp shove to the back.

He stumbles forward, and a couple of chaps and dames on the edge of the nearby performance circle stop talking and stare. Warren whips around. “Are you serious?” He takes a few running steps toward me and pushes back. “Leave. Just go home, Alex.”

But I shove him again, sending him off balance.

“Keep your dirty hands off me,” he seethes, as he barrels back into me. I grab his neck into a headlock and send us both scrambling to the floor.

“Fight!” I hear from somewhere above us.

I grab Warren by the collar, give him a hard slap to the jaw, not enough to hurt, just enough to shock him. “You're a pathetic fighter,” I say, as I grip him tighter.

“And you're just pathetic,” he spits. He thrashes his hand, nails bared toward me, and manages to cut my lip. As he tries to
roll over, I send my shoulder into his stomach before two pairs of hands rip us apart. It's only when I'm pulled to my feet that I realize the music has been cut, the sorcerers have stopped their tricks, and Warren and I are now the main performance.

“What the hell, Warren?” this Napoleon of a frat boy says, barreling in between us.

Warren freezes. “Sam, I—”

“Who is this guy?” Sam interrupts, nodding toward me.