Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer (4 page)

I had a sudden vision of waking up the next day with Mags gone. He would just leave, no note, no explanation, and creep back to Hiram’s, who would take him in, box his ears, and set him to cleaning the grout in his bathroom for the next ten years as punishment. And I would know that Mags had ditched me. Because I was an asshole, and a coward. I told myself it was one thing to get rid of Mags on purpose. It was something much worse to have someone with a brain the size of a pea decide I was a waste of his time.

And I knew if Mags gave up on me, then I was truly fucked. I wouldn’t survive it. It would eat me alive, losing that pure faith and stupid affection. I had a Moment of Clarity. My Moment of Clarity told me that every decision I’d made in the last few years had been about hanging onto Mags, my last and only friend.

Fucking hell.

“You know any good Glamours, Mags?”

He kept staring at the container. “Nope.”

I closed my eyes. “Then we’ll have to lose them.”

FOR ONCE, IT
worked. Mags was no fucking help. But it worked. And I lived up to my title. I Fixed it.

It was expensive.

First, I had to bleed on a fresh Charm for Scum Beard and his buddies. Made their eyes roll back in their heads and come out smiling and happy, agreeable. Then, on top of that, because I’d found that layering spells on top of each other made both spells more effective, I gassed up six singles from my hollow and cobwebbed wallet so they looked like crisp hundred-dollar bills. This left Mags and me with seven dollars in the Disaster Fund, which meant we would all just have to hope against hope that whatever disaster we faced would involve dollar tacos at the joint on Sixteenth Street.

Scum Beard and his friends were happy to accept a bit each in exchange for rigging the back of the container and loaning us one of their cars. They finished securing the container to the truck while we watched, and then offered me loopy thumbs-up gestures as they climbed into the cab and fired her up.

I walked Mags back to Charlie’s office in the rain, feeling half-dead from blood loss, asleep on my feet. We found Charlie back at his desk, exactly as we’d first seen him. He looked up as we stepped inside, dripping and shivering.

“We good?” he asked. “I figured it might be best the less I saw. In case I was asked to describe the scene later on.”

“We’re good.”

“I’ll handle the gate myself, then,” Charlie said in a distracted, competent way, “so there won’t be any record when they drive out. Clean. No records anywhere, and Mr. Heller can rest easy. You tell him I was helpful, huh?”

I nodded. “Sure, sure. We’re taking a car out, too, right behind the truck.”

Charlie hesitated for one still moment. “Okay.”

We had reached the Event Horizon of Charlie’s curiosity on the matter. I nodded again. Nudged Mags and we went outside, to stand in the rain rather than smell the burnt-coffee stink and exchange stares with Charlie. I had a feeling Charlie had been here long before Heller and the rest of us Tricksters had found him, and would be here long after we’d all been bled dry and buried in lime pits somewhere, gas for some
enustari
’s Ritual.

We stood in the rain and I reviewed my lessons from Hiram. Few and far between, but there
had
been lessons. At the pace he’d been teaching me I would have expected to achieve the rank of
ustari
by about age seventy-five, likely followed by a massive coronary and Mags, old and withered, weeping by my grave. Hiram had taught me all about
perception
. What people believed to be true
was
true, at least when backed by a little gas. Even mages. My head was sizzling with weariness, and I wobbled a little on my feet. Mags reached out and steadied me, silently, with a hand on my shoulder.

I was just a con artist. The realization bled into me, slow and cold. I’d spent my childhood hating my dad, my family, the dull, boring life they’d doomed me to live. Then I’d found magic and I thought:
Here’s what I am. I’m fucking
special
.
So I went looking, and I found
magic
, and I’d spent ten fucking years with Hiram, learning—but here I was, just a fucking con artist. I was a con artist with an edge, was all. And I was woozy from blood loss and broke and I owed Heller thirty thousand dollars and despite being a con artist
with an edge
I had no way to pay him back.

Zero. Getting back to zero had become my goal.

Outside the gate, a small brown car pulled up and one of our Charmed guys in orange overalls emerged. He looked around as if appreciating the rain and leaned against the car with his hands in his pockets, waiting.

The truck faded in from the screen of rain, lurching towards us in bouncing, heavy slow motion. As I watched it, it seemed likely the trailer would snap right off and tumble down into the mud, or that our not-quite-properly-locked rear doors would pop open. Neither happened. The truck rumbled up to the gate. Charlie emerged to squint at it, then returned inside, and a moment later the gate began to crank open. I tapped Mags on the shoulder and we walked through the gate to the brown car, the owner of which was a good-looking kid with dirty blond hair too long for his own good. He looked delighted to be giving us his car, and walked off into the rain as Mags and I climbed in, all jaunty.

I drove. Mags had never learned. He was this side of feral.

I let the truck ease in front of us and then drafted it, not allowing anyone to get between us. Ours was a stick shift, and it had been years since I’d driven a manual, so the first few miles were laborious, with stalls and sudden stops and jackrabbit leaps forward. I started to pray the clutch survived long enough, but had no confidence.

Mags began humming to himself. At first I thought it was just a random, nerves kind of humming, but as I listened it became clear that it was an actual song, a melody. I couldn’t place it. When he reached the cadence he absentmindedly spun back to the beginning and went through it all over again, a distinct pattern of verse-chorus-verse.

I waited until we were downtown, people everywhere in heavy traffic. Without signaling, I steered us into the left lane and hit the pedal, pulling up in front of the truck. Settled in for a second at the same speed, counted to three, then thought to look at Mags.

“Jesus,” I said. “Put your seat belt on.”

It took him nearly a minute, finding it hard to move in the cramped space, his shoulders up against the roof of the car. When he was finally strapped in, I took a deep breath, feeling my heart take a leap in my chest and my head clear a little. Then I hit the brakes with both feet.

The truck smacked into us and sent us rocketing forward into an old station wagon; the impact made my teeth click together, jerked me forward and smashed my forehead into the steering wheel. We half spun and came to rest wedged between the truck and the car in front. For one second I sat there in relative silence, listening to the engine click and Mags’s whistling breath. There was gas in the air, and after a moment blood dripped from my nose onto the steering wheel.

“Come on,” I said, my voice like rust. My door wouldn’t open. I summoned three Words and felt the blood in my nose burn off, the spell blowing the windshield out. I climbed out onto the hood, lost my balance, and slid backwards, hitting the wet pavement with a painful jolt. The passenger door exploded outward and Mags leaped out, the torn fragments of the seat belt clinging to him like a vine. He reached down and lifted me to my feet, then held me in place for a moment.

I nodded. “Okay, come on.”

He kept one hand on me as I limped down the length of the truck. Baldy was still in the cab, a radio handset in one hand, and he didn’t look at us.

In the back, as planned, the container doors had popped open. With me pretending to look worried, we circled around the back . . . and I wiped blood from my eyes and said, “
Fuck
.”

They were still cowering in the depths of the container. Every one of them. They stared back in silent motionless . . .
what
I wasn’t sure. Shock? A compulsion spell? I was very tired, but I was still bleeding from my scalp, so I took a deep breath and tried to think of something useful. A little
mu
that Hiram had used to jolt me out of bed when I overslept came to mind. Obnoxious, effective, and cheap in terms of gas. Four Words, too many for something so small, but I didn’t have time to rub it down and polish it. I had to add two, even, to expand its target. So I muttered six Words and felt the icy fingers of the universe reach in and scoop out a little more from me, and then every person in the container screamed and jumped.

A second later they were pouring out, leaping down onto bare feet, dressed in rags, and running. They went scattering in every direction, eyes wide, skeletal people with brown skin and matted dark hair. I watched them all run until the last one had hobbled around a corner. Then I looked around at all the people who’d gotten out of their cars to stare, all of them standing in the same pose, one arm propped up on their open car doors.

Everything was shimmery, and I floated. I’d never been this low on blood before. It was like being high, in a way, everything slippery and a constant tingling under my skin. I reached up and grabbed at Mags.

“Lem?”

“It’s okay, Magsie,” I said. “They’re gone. I fixed it.”

“YOU’VE GOT TWO
things going for you.”

Miserable, I looked up from my whiskey at Hiram. Fat, red-faced Hiram who had slapped me in the mouth and called me a “fucking wretch” when I couldn’t remember something he’d mentioned in passing months before that had suddenly been revealed as a crucial lesson in my magical training. Hiram, who had set me to cooking his meals and making his tea and mending his trousers. Hiram, in red suspenders and a black belt, a linen suit just an increment too tight on him, standing over me with a gin and tonic in one hand.

Hiram, our savior.

“Hi, Hiram,” Mags whispered next to me. He sounded like a small child who had been caught peeing his bed.

Hiram glanced at the huge man for a second and then looked back down at me. He took a deep breath. “One,” he said in his booming bad actor’s voice, rich and pompous, “Heller may be a bottom-feeder, but he’s a mage. He’s part of us, and he obeys our customs. You’re my
urtuku
. He won’t kill you without my permission.”

My guts squirmed. I thought I’d been under Hiram’s loathsome thumb
before
.

“Two,” the old man continued, “I’m not personally in the mood to kill you just yet. I’ve got too much invested in you. And you have too much potential.” He sighed theatrically. “And I still hope that someday you’ll see the error of your ways and return to your training.”

Hiram, the lying fuck, would have gladly sent me to Heller’s wolves, but he’d negotiated some small gain for himself, I could tell.

HELLER HAD KNOWN.
Of course he’d known. The second I’d called it in, I could tell he wasn’t buying any of it. But he toyed with me. He showed up in his stinky, ratty fur, his shaved head covered in a henna ink spiderweb drawn in a shaky, unsure hand, his glasses huge and black, making him look like some horrible fly. He’d inspected the truck, the crash scene, the tags. He’d grunted to himself, breathing hard, trailed by a gang of his kids and two Bleeders, a man and woman who were superskinny and scratched at themselves constantly and who had agreed, for various reasons, to cut themselves and bleed to provide blood for any spell Heller wanted to cast. So that he wouldn’t have to bleed himself. Not much by way of Bleeders, but so far above my level it was fucking intimidating.

He’d pretended to consider the possibility that I was an innocent failure, scratching his chin and humming thoughtfully. And then he’d gestured and someone bled and he’d cast, and I was paralyzed, frozen in place, and Heller was right in front of me, breath like acid in my face, melting my skin.

“You,” he hissed, “are a fucking
cunt
. You know who you just screwed over, Vonnegan? You fucking piece of shit? Not me. Nossir, not me.” He smiled. “You just fucked over a goddamn
enustari
.”

Archmage. The top of the heap. I’d already figured that out, of course. The only people bleeding whole bodies for their spells were the superpowerful mages.
Enustari
. The people who’d started wars and set off plagues just to collect the blood they needed for their spells.

“Fancy bitch building a new house up north,” Heller muttered, whirling away. “And now when she asks where her fucking sacrifices are, you think I’m gonna hesitate a
second
to tell her your name?”

But he wouldn’t. Even before Hiram had strolled in, looking disappointed and gouty, fatter than I recalled, I’d known Heller wouldn’t tell his client anything. He’d find another batch of people to send up there, he’d get some other asshole in debt to him to be a Fixer, and he’d eat the loss.

Or, more accurately, he would make
me
eat it, eventually.

"WE HAVE COME
to an arrangement,” Hiram said, fanning himself with his floppy hat. “Mr. Heller and I. Mr. Mageshkumar will return to my . . . stewardship. And you are to go work for Mr. Heller. He is setting up a . . . concern in New Jersey. I do not know the details of Mr. Heller’s business and don’t care to—you owe
me
a debt for forcing me to associate with that distasteful man so much today—but I know he will be relieving people of their money in ways augmented by tiny spells. You will be set to
casting
those tiny spells—a sad, menial task, which I have assured Mr. Heller you are capable of performing.”

My heart was racing. I opened my mouth to protest, but Hiram talked over me in that old, familiar way.

“You will earn a percentage of your ‘take,’ as the charming Mr. Heller put it to me. A very
small
percentage. When you have paid him back his losses, he will release you back to me.”

“Mags,” I said, standing up. “Mags comes with
me
.”