Magic in the Blood

  It was clear Mr. Jones could be a dangerous man. He’d admitted working for powerful people dealing with “complicated” things.

  Even though he remembered our relationship, and I’d asked him if we still had a chance together, I realized I didn’t know him—didn’t know enough about him to warrant trusting him so soon.

  Plus, I just was so not up to fighting for my life at the moment.

  “Allie?” he asked when I’d been a little too quiet a little too long.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s just been a long day. I’m jumping at shadows.”

  He took a deep breath, let it out. Okay, he wasn’t buying my bluff either.

  Note to self: do not play poker with this man.

  “Allie, don’t ask me about . . . dark . . . about your dad and . . . things. Things I’m working on. It’s being taken care of by people who want things right . . . good. For the city, for people. Things I want right. For you. Us.” He squeezed the steering wheel, growing more frustrated with each word of his staccato explanation. “I can’t say more without putting you in a compromising position.”

  “Maybe I want you to put me in a compromising position.”

  Oh, groan. What was I doing flirting with him? Hadn’t I just decided I couldn’t trust him?

  He smiled, a flash of straight white teeth, curve of thick lips, and then gave me a sideways glance. “When you put it that way . . .”

  Yes, I was blushing. Fabo.

  Time to reestablish some boundaries here.

  “Listen. Just tell me: do you know where my father’s body is?”

  No matter how bright those tiger eyes burned, he could not lie to me. I could smell a lie as easy as I could smell other strong emotions, as easy as I could smell the lines of cast magic. I was a Hound. And good at it. So go ahead, I thought, tell me a lie, Zayvion Jones.

  “No.”

  Not a whiff of change, not a scent of a lie. He was telling the truth.

  “But you have some idea?”

  “Not yet. Soon.”

  Okay, this honesty thing was working for me. I just needed to know one more thing before he closed up again.

  “I’d like to know what kind of people I should be worried about spying on me. The police? MERC? My dad’s ex-business partners? My dad’s ex-wives? Lon Trager?”

  He didn’t say anything, but his knuckles went yellow from squeezing the steering wheel.

  “You don’t have to name names,” I said, “but right now it feels like everyone is after me. And before you tell me paranoia will at least keep me alive, I have a job to do, Zayvion. I’m doing some Hounding for MERC. It’s possible I’ll be putting myself out there in dangerous ways. If I know where the heat’s coming from, I will do my best to avoid it.”

  Still nothing.

  “If you want me to stay safe, give me the tools to keep myself safe. Tell me who I need to avoid.” Trust me, I thought. Please.

  I waited. I am not a patient woman. But I knew if I pushed any harder, he’d close up for good.

  “There are . . . magic users . . .” he said so quietly, I almost couldn’t hear his voice over the drone of the engine and the rhythmic swipe of the windshield wipers. “Magic users who specialize in knowing when someone is over their head with magic.”

  “Like a regulatory agency?” I was thinking FBI or some sort of secret black ops.

  “No. Not like that. These people know when a person is using too much or more than they can handle. Know if they’re addicted to the rush, the pain. Know if they’re . . . abusing magic in ways harmful to themselves or others. When that happens, these people step in. Handle things. Discreetly. Without the involvement of the police, MERC, or the law.”

  Holy shit.

  “There are magic users out there who decide if other magic users should . . . what? Be forbidden from using magic?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Be put in jail?”

  Still nothing.

  “What, Zayvion? They decide if magic users should be—”

  “Killed,” Zay said softly.

  Holier shit. Magic vigilantes. Worse—secret magic vigilantes.

  I took a deep breath and waited for my heart to start beating again.

  “Are those people watching me?”

  “Yes.”

  Holiest shit. I really was going to need to start a Kill Allie Here line.

  “Are those the people you’re working for?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I took that as a yes. My mind spun with possibilities of who could be spying on me, waiting for me to use magic wrong, use it too much, or make one bad choice. Violet, Grant? Pike, Stotts? Zayvion? How secret were these secret magic vigilantes?

  “I want you to promise me you won’t go anywhere in this city alone,” he said. “I want you to promise me you won’t go looking for your father’s body. And that you won’t use magic more than you have to.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  “Allie. Listen to me. These people don’t see the world in any manner but black and white. If you fall anywhere near the gray, they will not hesitate to—”

  “Kill me. Yeah, I got that part. Holy crap, Jones. You could have told me.”

  “When?”

  I opened my mouth to answer him, but maybe it was the blur of movement that caught my eye. Whatever it was, both Zayvion and I took that exact moment to look away from each other and back at the street. More precisely, to look at the red light we were running. And the crosswalk. And the man striding across it.

  A man wearing a dark business suit with a lavender hanky in his pocket. He was tall like me, looked a lot like me, but had gray hair. He strode across the middle of the crosswalk, headed right for us, right in front of the car.

  My father.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  Zayvion slammed on the brakes. I put my hands on the dashboard to brace for impact.

  Then I screamed as Zayvion ran over my dead dad.

  Chapter Nine

  Time has a weird way of slowing down when I’m in high stress situations. I had plenty of time to study my father, to note that, yes, indeed, that was a lavender handkerchief in his pocket; yes, indeed, he turned so he could see into the car; and yes, indeed, he wasn’t looking at Zayvion but at me.

  He didn’t look particularly surprised that I was killing him. He just looked very, very disappointed in me.

  And then he was close, his face right in front of my face, much closer than should be possible with all the metal and glass between us. And yet he was still standing as if even a speeding car wasn’t enough to knock him down.

  I yelled and didn’t hear the thunk of his body hitting metal, didn’t hear anything but the brakes locking up and tires screeching as my dad slipped down somewhere beneath my line of vision, beneath the hood, beneath the tires.

  Or maybe I just couldn’t distinguish him from the blur of the city outside the window. I tasted leather and wintergreen on the back of my throat, felt the stink of it smack my skin like a cold sweat.

  I heard him, I swear I heard my father’s voice, close as my own thoughts: “The gates open, seek death.” Words that bore the push of Influence, the magical knack we Beckstroms were known for using on people to make them do what we wanted them to do. Influence forced those words into my head until my stomach clenched with the need to follow, to do as he said, even though I was still yelling and had no idea what he meant.

  All that, as the car came to a stop in the middle of the intersection.

  “What the hell?” Zayvion yelled.

  “You hit him! You hit my dad!” I fumbled with my seat belt, the door latch, and then was out into the cold and rain, running back, cars honking and swerving around me, back to where my father must have fallen as we ran over the top of him.

  There was no one there. Not a mark across the pavement except for the car tires, not a splash of blood against the rainy, dirty asphalt, not a body. Not so much as a single lavender han
ky thread.

  I blinked and blinked and could not believe what my eyes were telling me. My father was not on the ground, not wedged beneath the car (yes, I turned and looked), not anywhere.

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  Zayvion was beside me now, standing just out of swinging range. “Allie?”

  I couldn’t stop staring at the pavement. Couldn’t unsee what I know I had seen.

  “You need to get out of the street,” he said.

  Maybe my eyes couldn’t see what I knew must be there, but I had other ways to sense. Other ways to see.

  I took a deep breath and drew a glyph for Sight, Taste, and Smell, and let the magic that pooled in me slip up through my bones, my veins, my flesh, and into my fingers to fill that glyph. Magic pulled like a hood over my eyes and senses.

  The world broke open in a wild storm of smells, tastes, colors, and shades.

  Old lines of magic cobwebbed the buildings. As cars drove around us I could see smaller spells attached to them like vibrant jellyfish, tendrils trailing behind to link to the people in cars. Sharp-edged geometric glyphs pulsed on the light posts, doorways, edges of alleys.

  And there, at the corner of my vision, were the watercolor people. They had no magic tied to them, maybe because magic can’t tie to someone who is translucent—I don’t know. They walked along the street, through buildings and cars, as if the city itself did not exist.

  They all paused and looked at me.

  Again.

  Seriously, I just don’t think I’m that interesting. They moved toward me in slow underwater steps, homing in like sharks scenting blood.

  I stayed calm, because magic cannot be cast in high states of emotion. I didn’t flinch, didn’t doubt.

  Go, me.

  Show me, I thought, my fingers tracing an intricate glyph for Reveal. In any trained magic user’s hands, a Reveal spell would uncover the illusion of a thing, strip away its magical covering and let you see the aged skin, the brown grass, the old paint beneath.

  But in my hands that glowed with magic, hot on the right, cold on the left, the Reveal spell intensified the world, showing the hard edges of black, white, color, shape, angle, shadow.

  Everything was stripped down. Paint seemed to be composed of hundreds of layers, individual raindrops were sharply outlined, and the tread marks from the tires turned into a mosaic of rain and stone and heat.

  I looked at my hands.

  Wow.

  My right hand was luminescent, glowing with fire in neon colors. When I moved my fingers, magic poured out in ribbons, hovered in the air, and then floated back down to wrap around my fingers, where it sank in, beneath my skin, coursing through the heavy swirls of colors up my arm, my chest, to the silk-slender neon threads at the corner of my eye.

  My left hand was white and black, the bars of a prison, bands of ebony ringing each joint, the flesh between pale as death. My left hand felt numb, cold, dead. A memory, slight but clear—like a faraway radio tune—came to me. Of Zayvion holding my hands.

  “Positive,” he said while lifting my right hand. “Negative,” he said while touching my left. “Very sexy.”

  And then he had kissed both of my palms. The electric sensation of his lips on my skin made my knees weak.

  Oh.

  I glanced over at Zayvion.

  But I did not see Zayvion standing there—or rather I saw him in a way I never had before.

  Even though he was just over six feet tall, Reveal gave him another half a foot, made him appear wider at the shoulders, thicker through the chest and thighs. More than dark, he was a blackness. His skin flickered with blue-tipped black fire, radiating a cold deadlier than the icy air.

  Beneath the night-sky flame of his body was something that resembled glyphing.

  Spells in ebony, silver, and coal carved elusive against his skin, even with Reveal. His eyes burned Aztec gold shot through with sharp cracks of obsidian.

  “What are you?” I whispered.

  My words were like a soft breeze, stirring the flames against his skin so that they shifted and flared blue, indigo, black. He reached for me, and I raised my hands to hold him off.

  He touched my right shoulder, and the familiar heat and mint of him washed through my body. He Grounded me, easing the ache of the magic I held.

  It felt wonderful. It felt right. And I knew instinctively that this was the way magic was meant to be used.

  “Allie,” he said, and it was Zayvion’s voice. Straining to stay calm, but still him, still a man. “Your dad isn’t here. We need to go now. Come with me.”

  His words were sweet, seductive darkness. I wanted to walk to him, fall into him, let his darkness fill me.

  I took a step back, and his hand fell away from my shoulder. “I can’t. I have to see.”

  “Allie.” He looked past me, looked at the watercolor people who were closing in, still slowly, too slowly. If these watercolor people were like the ones outside the coffee shop, as soon as they got close enough, they’d start moving fast—too damn fast.

  And I was pretty sure Zayvion could see them. Wasn’t that interesting?

  The flames against his body washed blue, indigo, black over the silver glyphs of his skin. “Hurry.”

  I knelt where my father’s body should be, pressed my fingertips through the standing water until I touched pavement. I whispered another mantra while a car honked and blinding headlights swerved around us. I opened my mouth and breathed in, getting the smell, the taste of the rain, the pavement, car oil, dirt, on the back of my palate.

  I sifted scents for my father—searching for the notes of leather and wintergreen. I smelled all the common odors of the city—the chemical tang of cars and oil and waste. And I smelled the strangely antiseptic odor of falling rain. Beyond that, the stink of diesel, the rubber of tires, the heavy pine of Zayvion’s cologne, and my own sweat mixed with the cheap soap I’d used in the shower this morning.

  But I did not smell my father. Not even a hint of him.

  “Now, Allie.” Zayvion wove a glyph—something that was in the Shield family but twisted toward the center in a way I had never seen before.

  He pulled magic from the stores deep beneath the city, and it flickered like electric ribbons up into the invisible glyph in front of him, filling it in until I could see the glyph too.

  Magic is fast. Too fast to see until it has been cast.

  Well, normally that was true. Apparently when I was using Reveal, I could see magic while it was being used.

  How cool was that?

  Zayvion glanced down at me. The flames over his skin had gone bloodred, tipped with a silver so dark it hurt to look at. I didn’t know if he was trying to keep from casting a spell or getting ready to Shield the hell out of himself.

  I stood. Rain and magic dripped from my fingertips and swirled in metallic colors, joining the stream of water pouring into the storm grate. Magic rushed up into me, through me, from deep below the earth, hot and fast, while I remained cool and calm.

  “Can you see them?” I asked.

  “Get in the car, Allie,” he said.

  “Can you see them?” I asked again.

  I really needed him to say yes, to tell me that I was not crazy, not losing other parts of my mind besides my memory. I really needed him to say, yes, there are a bunch of hollow-eyed see-through people marching our way.

  “Allie—”

  I blinked rain out of my eyes. That was all the time they needed. The watercolor people broke forward, moving fast, so fast that I didn’t get my hands up in time to cast anything.

  Zayvion, however, did.

  The watercolor people hit the Shield he cast around us in an explosion of sparks that would have made a special-effects director proud.

  They all stepped back.

  Then one of them—a man in clothing that looked like it belonged to the previous century—extended his hand toward the Shield.

  Zayvion’s Shield, a ten-foot-tall and -wide lattice of blue glyphing
that strummed with power, stretched out and out toward the man’s hand. The Shield distorted until the edges became a fine mist, and finally the vibrant blue magic became a watercolor fog that streamed toward the man’s hand like smoke from a chimney.