Magic in the Blood (6 page)

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked.

Pike’s eyes widened. I was pretty sure this was the first time I’d ever seen him surprised. “Don’t believe in them,” he said, dead flat and poker-faced.

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked down at his shoe, his body language turning inward, as if trying to dodge an old pain. When he straightened and squared his shoulders, he was nothing but steel cold killer again. “Can’t live as long as I have without seeing things.”

“Like ghosts?”

“You want to talk, call the number and come to the meeting.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “When did you give up on talking straight?”

The light changed; traffic stopped. My bus had pulled up on the other side of the street. Passengers were getting on. I really wanted some coffee and a chance at being warm and out of the wet. I took a step, but Pike did not follow. I glanced over at him. He had already turned and was walking away, back the way we’d come.

“What? You giving up on coffee too?” I yelled.

“Call the damn number,” he yelled back without turning.

I shook my head and then jogged across the street before the light changed again. I didn’t care how many times he ordered me to do something. I wasn’t going to join his little club.

I got to the other side of the street but not soon enough. My bus pulled away from the curb, gunned the engine, and rolled through the yellow light, leaving me behind.

“Damn it!”

And all I heard was Anthony’s shrill laughter.

I hated missing my bus. That, most of all, officially put me in a pissy mood.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and strode off toward Get Mugged. The coffee shop was maybe eight blocks away. Against the wind, of course.

I kept a steady pace, not worrying about getting there fast—it didn’t matter now because I couldn’t get any wetter—but instead working on getting there in one piece. I watched the people moving around me, looking for Trager’s men; breathed through my nose, smelling for Trager’s men; used all my nonmagical observation skills to stay aware of Trager’s men. But seriously? Trager’s men could be anyone, anywhere.

The few other people tromping through the crappy weather didn’t make any strange moves. No one paid any attention to me. No one even made eye contact. My teeth started chattering, so I picked up the pace, hoping faster would make for warmer.

By the time I’d made it to Get Mugged’s cross street, I was wetter and warmer, which is not as sexy as it sounds.

I turned down the street and spotted the roofline of Get Mugged. The neighborhood had gone through some heavy reconstruction. Buildings had been torn down, leaving behind dirt, concrete, and gravel. There were two buildings left standing: Get Mugged and an empty warehouse with boarded-up windows.

Get Mugged held down the corner of the block, a coffee-scented old broad wearing too much paint and plaster to cover her age but still turning over clients like a dime-store hooker. The warehouse looked like Get Mugged’s meth-mouthed sister, broken, rotting from the inside out, spongy, and frail.

For years, people had wanted to turn this area into boutique shopping. A building would go up, something would move in, and before there was time to hang curtains, the business would bankrupt. Enough of that had left the whole block looking a little like an unmade bed. Nothing seemed to survive here for long. Except Get Mugged.

I jogged across the street and walked beside the empty gravel lot, heading toward Get Mugged on the far corner. On this side of the street there were no awnings to keep me dry and no buildings to block the wind coming up off of the Willamette River. I was tired, and the cold, wet, and weirdness was catching up with my lack of stamina.

Neat.

A flash of color caught my eye.

One windowless wall of the empty warehouse faced the gravel lot. Magic glyphs I’d never noticed before were painted across that wall, running from the second story’s rusted gutters to disappear somewhere behind the piles of dirt at the foundation.

I slowed. The glyphs were strange, bright whorls of color ribboning from one spell into the next. I couldn’t read them, not exactly, which was a little weird. It was like there was too much rain between me and the wall, even though I was only about half a block away from it. The glyphs looked washed out, faded. The bricks cut ridges through them like ribs stretched beneath pale skin.

My gut told me they were protection spells, warnings of some kind. I blinked, wiped rain out of my eyes, and squinted to see them better. No, not exactly wards and warnings. The glyphs were a study in opposites. Several glyphs for Healing and Thrive and Life were painted on the wall. But what caught my eye was the glyph repeatedly drawn around all the others.

Death.

Over and over again.

Death by magic. A glyph and spell no one ever drew, and never cast, since the price for casting it was death not only to the target but also to the caster.

Sure, you could trace it out, but if you so much as flicked a speck of magic on it, Death would ricochet back on you so fast you wouldn’t even have a chance to swear before you were done breathing. I can’t believe someone hadn’t complained about the glyph on the wall, hadn’t demanded the city or the property owner take it apart, paint over it.

That glyph was bad luck. Dangerous.

To say the least.

But as I came closer to the wall, I realized why the glyphs looked so strange.

They were in the style of my dad’s signature. All of them. The Healing and positive glyphs and even the Death glyph were written in his hand. Written by him.

And just as my brain did a nice double somersault to try to wrap some logic around all this—that somehow my stern, corporate father had become a graffiti artist in his spare time four months ago when he was still alive—the glyphs were gone.

Gone. As in one blink they were there—pale water-colored lines of spells two stories tall, with no magic behind them—and the next blink, nothing but brick wall and rusted gutters.

Holy shit.

A chill dug nails under my skin as I realized there wasn’t even a hint of color on that wall. I am not stupid. Slow, sometimes, but not a complete idiot. Something really weird had just happened.

I scanned the empty lot, looked behind me at the sidewalk, the street, and the buildings beyond. A few people moved through the rain, but except for a steady stream of cars on the street, I was alone out here. I inhaled deeply, my mouth open, to try to smell if someone were near enough to cast magic—Illusion, maybe—to make me think I saw those glyphs.

Nothing but the stink of the city and the sour bite of my own sweat and fear.

I walked the rest of the way to the wall, smelling, tasting the air. The wall looked like an old brick wall of an old brick warehouse.

Nothing, the world around me seemed to be saying, had happened.

But I knew better.

I stopped close enough that I could touch the wall if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. Not yet.

Then I did something I do not love doing: I cast magic in public. Now that I carry magic in me, it takes a lot of concentration not to let it get out of hand. And I hate the idea of someone sneaking up on me while I’m in the middle of a spell. What if I lost control and hurt them? Casting magic also points me out to every other Hound in the city. To a Hound, cast magic is as clear as if the user ran around with a paintbrush and wrote:
Allie Beckstrom was here at seven o’clock in the morning, freezing cold and freaked out, so she decided to cast a Sight spell.

Of course there was the whole angry ex-con thing that made me a little hesitant to put all my attention and concentration into casting a spell too.

But for this, to Hound my father’s signature, it was worth the risk. I whispered a mantra, just a little childhood jingle to settle my mind—
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black
—and set a Disbursement for the price of using magic. A head cold—maybe a headache—would hit me in a couple hours. I was starting small, with a little spell to pull a little magic into my sight, so I could see glyphs my father had drawn on the wall, or see the jerk who thought throwing an Illusion in my face would be funny.

I traced the glyph of Sight in the air with the fingers of my right hand. A few months ago, I would have been very conscious of tapping into the stream of magic that pooled naturally beneath the city, or the stored magic held in the special network of heavily glyphed lead and glass conduits that ran beneath the sidewalks and in and over the buildings.

But now I had all the magic I needed inside me, constantly replenished from the stores beneath the city. I was a sponge and magic filled me.

Handy, that.

Magic flowed warm and thick down my neck, pouring like heated oil over the curve of my breast and down the length of my right arm to settle hot against my palm. I traced the final lines on the glyph for Sight and pushed magic out of my fingertips into the spell.

Like pulling a blindfold from my eyes, the world was suddenly too bright and too clear.

Vivid lines of color shot through the air, draped like lace shrouds over buildings, flickering at the corners of streets, clinging to people who moved in the distance. Magic was everywhere in the city. From spells for bad breath to intricate and subtle Influences luring consumers into shops, glyphs of individual spells lingered in the air, crouched on the soil, and stuck to the glass, steel, and stone of the city.

This was what I imagined it would be like to see on a more microscopic level—to see the germs that lingered long after a hand had touched a surface, long after a kiss, an exhale.

I scanned the empty lot, looking for a spell big enough to pull off the graffiti trick. A few faint, old spells lay on the ground, mostly protections to let the owner know if someone was messing with the chain-link fence. All of those were used up, and useless as tissue paper in the rain.

There was no sign of foolery. That worried me.

I looked at the brick wall, where magic had just a moment ago dripped in pale, chalky warnings. Warnings of death. Brick, just brick. There was no sign of magic being cast—no sign of my father’s signature.

I leaned closer and inhaled, scenting rain, cold and clean, and the sharp counterpoint of dirt and mold. I could taste gasoline, the soap from the dry cleaners down the street, and the bitter hint of coffee that had roasted hours ago.

I traced a glyph for Smell and poured magic into it. I leaned in closer to the wall, close enough that I could press my palm against it without straightening my arm. Close enough my lips almost brushed the rough brick. Closed my eyes and inhaled again.

Just the faintest sour scent of leather flavored my tongue, but it was there—the smell of leather and wintergreen. My father’s scents.

I opened my eyes and backed the hells away from the wall. I was breathing heavily, sweating despite the rain. And as I stood there with Sight still covering my eyes, I realized everything—the wall, the street, the city—had fallen beneath a fog of pale watercolors.

Ghostly images of people, who I knew had not been standing on the street a second ago, appeared.

Holy shit. This was not a good time to be hallucinating.

None of the watercolor people seemed particularly aware of me or of the traffic that moved by. Some seemed more solid than others, and they were interacting—talking, strolling, holding objects in their hands I couldn’t quite make out. Some were only the faintest blur of movement at the corner of my eye. Others moved so near me, I could count the buttons on their shirts.

And all of them smelled like death—rank, fetid flesh.

Okay, this was scaring me now.

I blinked hard, but the watercolor people did not go away. Clarity. I could cast a spell of Clarity to strip the street of illusions.

I muttered a Diversion and pulled on magic.

All the watercolor people stopped. All the watercolor people looked at me with black, soulless, hungry eyes. All the watercolor people could see me. Then they started toward me slowly, as if they were moving underwater.

Oh, hells, oh, hells.
Magic leaped readily to me—too quickly, too much, a flare of heat burning up my arm. I suddenly found myself working hard
not
to use magic, lest I burn up.

Calm, calm. I am a river.
It wasn’t working, because, hey, magic won’t do what you want it to do if you’re freaking out. Magic flushed through me, too hot up my right side, too damn cold down my left. Still, the watercolor people drew near.

I looked for my father among them—hells, I expected him to be leading the march. But I did not see him, did not recognize any of these people/ghosts/ illusions/whatever they were.

And then it wasn’t a march anymore. As if broken from a chain, the watercolor people sped forward, fast, faster than anything human, a blur of transparent colors anchored by bright, hollow eyes that were too far away and suddenly way too damn close.

I tried to yell, but they were on me. Hands grabbed and stroked, dug into my skin, and pulled misty tendrils of magic out of me. They stuffed fistfuls of magic into their mouths, moaned, and slapped at me for more.

Everywhere they touched, magic rose and broke through my skin, like blood gushing free into their hands. I swayed, dizzy from the loss of magic, and pushed at their hands while I stumbled backward.

I yelled. The watercolor people followed me back until I was flat against the chain-link fence. Ghostly hands dug deeper for magic, burning down to my bones.

Then I did what I usually do in tight situations. I got angry.

No more Mr. Nice Girl. I had magic—magic they were pulling out of me, magic they were feeding on—and I was not about to be anyone’s all-you-can-eat buffet.

I let go of the magic bolstering my sight and smell, ending that flow of magic so I could recast something to protect myself. I needed to pull magic into a new spell, something that could kick watercolor ass—what the hells
could
kick watercolor ass? A mop? A hose? But as soon as I let go of magic, before I even started to trace a new glyph, the world snapped back into place.

The real world was the real world again. The watercolor people were gone.

“Allie?”

I traced a Hold glyph so fast, it was cocked and ready to fire before my heart had a chance to slam one more beat against my chest.

I didn’t pour magic into it.

Good thing too. Grant, the owner of Get Mugged, stood outside the door of the coffee shop in a T-shirt and flannel shirt, cowboy boots, and dark jeans tight enough to show he had bragging rights.

The only thing he was doing was getting rained on and looking worried.