‘‘Who?’’ she asked again.
‘‘My father.’’ I’d never told her who my father was, but I figured she knew. I’d spent enough time in the public eye when I was younger, and I looked enough like my father that it was hard to find someone who didn’t know we were related. On top of that, Mama was smart. Smart enough to know who she hired to Hound her personal problems. Maybe she hoped some of the Beckstrom fortune would eventually find its way into her pocket.
Mama scowled. ‘‘Why? Why my boy?’’
‘‘I don’t know. I went to him. I told him we knew. Told him he would have to pay for everything, hospital, damage, and more, but he didn’t tell me why he did it.’’
‘‘He say he did it?’’
‘‘No. He denied it. But I know his signature. I know what he can do.’’
Mama considered that for what felt like a long time. Long enough that I started feeling tired again, started wishing for a cup of coffee down at Get Mugged. Started thinking about the big man I’d seen in the street and wondering whether or not I should mention him to her. Yeah, right. Like telling her a strange and possibly dangerous man was in the neighborhood would be news to her.
‘‘He agree to pay?’’ she asked.
‘‘I didn’t give him a choice. He hit Boy, Mama. And he has the money to pay. You should take him for everything you can get.’’
I expected maybe a smile out of her. Instead, ‘‘You don’t care for your own father?’’
Good question. Only I had no good answer for it. ‘‘I don’t know. I don’t like what he is.’’ It was the best I could give her.
‘‘Then we sue,’’ she said. ‘‘I have lawyer.’’
‘‘A good one?’’
‘‘Good, bad.’’ She shrugged. ‘‘I just need hungry.’’
‘‘Then you shouldn’t have a problem.’’ I shifted the weight of the backpack straps again. ‘‘I’m going out of town for a while, a week at most. You filed a report with the police, right?’’
‘‘I take care of it.’’
Which meant she probably hadn’t. I’d need to stop by the station and file a Hounding report. But not before coffee.
‘‘You really need to contact the police about this, Mama. It will make a difference when you go to court.’’
‘‘I take care of it.’’ She picked up the gun. ‘‘You do good for Mama. I do good for you.’’ She walked over to me, the gun balanced in the palm of her hand, grip toward me, like she was offering it to me.
‘‘No thanks. I don’t do guns.’’
She scowled. ‘‘Did I say I give you gun? Think with your head.’’ She said it in the same tone she used with her boys, and for no reason at all it made me happy she would be so gruff with me.
‘‘You are good Hound, Allie,’’ she said, ‘‘but you can be more. Better. I see it here.’’ She pressed her fingertips against my sternum. Warmth spread out from her fingers and dug down deep, like roots looking for water. I felt magic—it had to be magic, though I didn’t know Mama had ever learned to cast—branch out through my veins, wrap my bones, and then drain away, down my arms, stomach, hips, legs, dripping out my fingertips and the bottoms of my feet.
I felt refreshed. Awake. And suspicious as hell. That magic didn’t feel like anything I’d experienced before—too clean, too soothing—and it was gone so thoroughly, it was like it had never happened. I couldn’t even catch a scent from it. It certainly didn’t feel like the magic stored within the city. Didn’t feel like the magic harvested from the wild storms.
But there was no other kind of magic in the world. If there were, it would have been exploited. And if a new kind of magic were going to be found in the world, it sure wouldn’t be here, in the rundown section of Portland, a city where every tap of magic was carefully regulated, monitored, and doled out in billable minutes. And it wouldn’t be discovered by a woman who, as far as I knew, didn’t even have a high school education, much less a higher ed in magic, called all her kids the same name, and wore clothes scrounged from the women’s shelter.
‘‘What was that?’’ I asked.
‘‘I say if you try hard, you be better. Here.’’ This time she poked my chest, and all I felt was her bony fingers. ‘‘And here.’’ She tapped my forehead. ‘‘Think with your head. Get a real job. No more Hound.’’
I rubbed at my forehead. ‘‘What else?’’ She knew what I wanted to know. What kind of magic had she touched me with. Or what kind of spell or glyphing had she cast. I wasn’t an expert. There were spells I’d never experienced before. ‘‘What about that magic you just used on me?’’
Mama scowled. ‘‘No magic. If I had magic, would I be poor? Would my Boy be in hospital dying? Would I live here?’’
I gave her a noncommittal shrug. Mama was smart and tough. Tough enough to take a few hits, or live with less if it meant hiding what she had from those who would want to take it. She was also smart enough not to wave magic around in front of someone she didn’t know very well—me.
‘‘I don’t know what you’d do if you had magic,’’ I said quietly. ‘‘Maybe you would be poor and Boy would still be hurt.’’
I was very aware of the gun in her hand. And of the fact that she and I weren’t exactly best-buddy girlfriends.
‘‘No magic,’’ Mama repeated, flat. Final. But she didn’t smell right. I didn’t think she was telling me the truth—or at least not all of it.
The door handle rattled behind me. A key slipped into the first lock and the dead bolt snicked.
I moved to one side of the door. Mama tucked her gun into the pocket of her robe.
‘‘Boy?’’ she yelled.
‘‘Yes, Mama,’’ said a man’s voice. ‘‘It’s me.’’
Mama seemed happy with that, but I wasn’t feeling nearly as confident. I could smell the man, a heavy musk and spice odor.
I thought I knew all of Mama’s Boys, but the man who walked through the door was a stranger to me. Lighter hair than the other Boys I’d met, his dark eyes glittered in the low light, hard and glassy against the deeper tone of his skin. He looked more like Mama than most of her boys. I was pretty sure he was actually her son and figured he was older than me by maybe ten years. He looked like he’d recently taken a shower, and was clean-shaven and polished in a casual corporate way, all the way from his button-down white shirt, dark tie, and gray khakis to his loafers. He smiled and there was a smooth, slick coldness about him that made me think of reptiles. Or politicians.
‘‘I didn’t know we had company.’’ He extended his hand. ‘‘James.’’
It took everything I had to put my hand out. I might have been raised by wolves, but I still had social graces. I shook his hand and pulled mine away as quickly as possible. His hands were cold and smooth, and I had a real desire to wipe my palms on my jeans.
‘‘I was just leaving,’’ I said. So what if I didn’t give my name. Sue me.
His eyes narrowed and the smile slipped. ‘‘That’s too bad. You look familiar . . . have we met?’’
I got that question a lot, and I had zero intention of telling him I was Daniel Beckstrom’s daughter. But here’s the thing. He didn’t look familiar to me at all. His voice wasn’t ringing any bells and neither was his face. But his scent was familiar. I may not have met this man before, but I had been around him. Close enough and long enough that the smell of him—musky to the point of being sour and peppery—was imbedded in my memory. He carried other odors too—he’d been somewhere with organic death, like at the edge of the river, among fish and rotted things. He smelled of sweat too, like he’d recently done something very physical. What creeped me out was that he also carried the slightest stink of formaldehyde, very faint, like he’d brushed against someone or something that carried that scent. Maybe the big man in the street?
Despite the overriding smells, I knew I knew him. Or had known him. But I couldn’t remember him.
This is where the extra hit—the random double price magic somet
imes takes out of me—really sucks. And there was a bad stretch in college where it happened every time I used magic—pain plus memory loss. I shrugged it off at the time, and yeah, I’d turned to booze and drugs to try to handle it. But it didn’t change anything. Unless a person was very diligent about always Offloading to a Proxy, magic left marks. It scarred. And I hated coming face-to-face with my own failings. Knowing I was missing memories, maybe even days or weeks of my life, was the sort of thing that gave me nightmares.
Not to mention the fact that I did not like this man, Mama’s Boy, or no.
‘‘No, we haven’t met,’’ I said. ‘‘Unless you went to Harvard.’’
He did a fair job of looking surprised and confused. ‘‘The college?’’
Right. So we weren’t going to really find out how we knew each other. I’d had enough of this. ‘‘Listen, I don’t care what your game is, but tell your buddy out there to keep his hands and magic off me or I will report you both to the police.’’
From the corner of my eye, I could see Mama stiffen. James’ face flushed with a fury he dampened with aplomb. ‘‘I don’t know who you’re talking about. I’ve been alone tonight. And there is no magic here. Not in this part of town.’’
‘‘No magic,’’ Mama repeated firmly. ‘‘You go now, Allie girl. Go.’’ She shoved me toward the door, and opened it for me.
‘‘No magic,’’ she said. Mama was sweating even though the air outside was cold enough to sting my eyes. She was afraid, or lying. I glanced back at James. He stood with his hands in his pockets, relaxed, cool on the outside and burning on the inside, watching me watch him. He was hiding something. I figured Mama knew too, but for her own reasons didn’t want to admit it. I also figured she had a gun and it was time for me to go.
I stepped through the door. Mama closed it so quickly behind me that the doorknob literally hit me in the hip. Every lock snapped into place.
‘‘You go to those men again?’’ Even through the thick wood door I could hear her yelling at James. ‘‘Those worthless men, huh? You go to them? Do what they want like dog to them?’’
‘‘My business dealings are my own,’’ James said.
‘‘Your own! What you do, you do to family. To Mama.’’
‘‘Then you should be happy,’’ James yelled. ‘‘I’m the one who’s going to get us out of this hellhole. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to get away from this rotted dump? Have some money, some power?’’
‘‘No. Not if that man hand it to me on gold and diamond platter. There is no paying back his kind. They will use you. That kind always uses. We are dirt to them. You are dirt to them.’’
‘‘I’m not that stupid,’’ James said. ‘‘I know how to play their game. I know how to give them what they want and take what I want. We all win. We all get what we want.’’
‘‘Good.’’ Mama lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. ‘‘I want smart Boy. Boy who pushes pride away. Boy who breaks ties with those men and is not ashamed of his real family.’’
There was a pause. Finally James spoke. ‘‘Well. Maybe you won’t get what you want after all.’’ I heard his footsteps pound across the wood floor, retreating deeper into the building.
‘‘You go now, Allie,’’ Mama’s voice said through the door.
So I did.
This was so none of my business. If Mama needed me for the trial against my dad, I’d happily be there. But I did not want to get involved in her personal life.
It was cold out, so I hit the street at a pretty fast clip, heading toward the nearest well-lit street with a bus stop. Luck was on my side for a change—it wasn’t raining. Dawn smudged cobalt blue over black clouds and faded to a hazy gray by the time I found a bus stop.
Get Mugged would be roasting coffee beans about now, and I’d be there for the first cup. After that, I’d go down to the police station, file my report on Boy’s hit, and then I’d get out of town to Nola’s for a couple weeks before the trial started.
I pictured her little farmhouse and the hundred acres she farmed. In my mind’s eye it was always summer there—the summer I’d left college and landed on her doorstep trying to sort out my life. Nola and I had met in high school. She married her sweetheart her senior year and seemed happy as pie to move almost three hundred miles away to help him run the family alfalfa farm. But with Nola and me, time and distance didn’t matter. She’d always been there when I needed her and I’d tried my best to be there for her too, especially when her husband, John, had been sick with cancer.
There weren’t a lot of people out on the street yet, which suited me fine. Even better was that I didn’t have to wait long for the bus. I flashed my bus pass and settled into the relative peace of the fluorescent lights and rumbling engine.
It had been a strange twenty-four hours. The hit on Boy, seeing my father again after seven years, working blood magic to find a Truth I still couldn’t accept. The feeling of my dad’s blood and words still resonated beneath my skin. Maybe they would for a long time. Blood magic was a powerful branch of spell casting, and except for Truth spells, it was all but outlawed.
My father told me he didn’t hit Boy.
My father was really good at Influencing people to think what he wanted them to think. He was also an expert caster, and probably knew twelve different ways to fake a Truth spell. But it was hard to believe he could lie so completely held blood to blood.
Twenty-four hours had also gotten me hurt and sick from Hounding Boy and, just to make things even more interesting, I’d also gone on a nondate with a nonstalker my father had hired to either protect me or spy on me.
My thoughts circled Zayvion. There was something about that man that made me stop and want to look. Made me stop and want to feel. It wasn’t just the outside of him, which was, I had to admit, pretty nice: shy smile, quiet voice, and a gaze that made me feel like he was looking closer at me than any person had in my life. There were other things, unspoken things, that drew me to him. The long silences. The sense of calm he radiated. His willingness to step in when people were in need, like standing up to Mama for Boy. There was something about him that seemed honor-able, and yes, kind. And just thinking about that kiss sent a thrill through me.
Survival instincts said step away and leave the man alone. Something else, something deeper that was probably my heart, if I indeed still had one, told me to draw near and fold into the warmth of him.
The last time I listened to my heart all I got was a mooch of a boyfriend I couldn’t get rid of for months.
The bus finally dropped me off a few blocks from my apartment.
I decided not to go home yet, so I turned the corner toward Get Mugged, which was down another five blocks.
Someone was following me.
Dawn spread dove wings across bruised cloud bellies, lending the day some light, but not enough for the streetlamps to switch off. The city was waking up, streets and sidewalks more crowded, but not so crowded that I could easily lose my pursuer. I stopped on a corner to wait for traffic and to try to get a better look at the guy on my tail. Shorter than me, stocky. Dressed in a practical coat, knit hat, jeans, running shoes. At first I thought it might be Marty Pike, the ex-marine who Hounds for the cops. Then the wind shifted and my follower moved. I got a whiff of him—just the lightest scent of baby powder and soap, and beneath that, the peppery stink of lavender. I was being stalked by a woman.
Interesting.
The light changed and I crossed into traffic. I could lead her on a chase, maybe trap her down the end of an alley and then ask her why she was following me. I could walk to the police station and report her. Hell, I could get a cab, go to the cops, and fill out a report about her, and one about my father and Boy all in one easy trip.