Magic to the Bone

  ‘‘About what? Weren’t you the one who was telling me business matters are confidential? How would breaking that confidence be good for my reputation?’’

  ‘‘You have a reputation?’’

  He shrugged one shoulder. ‘‘I make a living.’’

  ‘‘Stalking?’’

  ‘‘Not much money in stalking.’’

  ‘‘So you’re what, a detective? An economic spy? Why would my father hire an economic spy?’’

  ‘‘The only reason your father had one of his men approach me was because I know the neighborhoods in North Portland and he knew you had done some Hounding jobs there.’’ He went back to staring out the window and drinking coffee.

  He was lying. I could smell the sour tang of it on his skin. Plus, I knew my dad wouldn’t do anything, not in his personal life, not in his business life, not in any other part of his life, so haphazardly. He didn’t even choose his socks so casually.

  Any sane woman would have cut her losses and called it a day. But it intrigued me that he would tell such an obvious lie, and then look away like he was sort of sorry when he did it. He didn’t strike me as a stupid man. As a matter of fact, I was sure the harmless-tramp bit was a ruse. He had to know I was familiar with my father’s fastidious attention to detail in all matters of business. So why lie?

  ‘‘How many years have you been working for him?’’

  Zayvion did me the favor of eye contact. Then, quietly, ‘‘Four.’’

  That smelled closer to the truth. I nodded. ‘‘Just me?’’

  He shook his head.

  ‘‘Gonna tell me who else you tailed?’’

  He took a drink of coffee. ‘‘Buy you dessert?’’

  Back to avoidance mode. ‘‘How sweet. Tell me about the hit on Boy.’’

  ‘‘What makes you think I know anything about Boy? You Hounded the hit. You tell me.’’ Those eyes were all brown and fool’s gold, and my stomach flipped.

  Sweet loves, he was good-looking.

  It would be so easy to put some Influence behind my questions and pry the truth out of him. Well, except I hurt, and was fatigued from using magic. I’d probably blow a vein if I tried to use any kind of magic, even the easy stuff that was most natural for me.

  I rubbed my hand over my lips, which were still swollen.

  ‘‘Listen,’’ I said, changing tactics. ‘‘I’m tired. I want to go home and get some sleep. I’m not going to be able to do that knowing that a five-year-old child is dying because my father decided to Offload magic on the poor kid. You’ve been following me around. If you’re any good at what you do, you know I think Mama is a decent human being. You know how I feel about Boy, and you probably even know exactly how I feel about my father and his business practices.’’

  ‘‘Everyone knows how you feel about your father and his business, Allie. Dropping out of college, publicly disowning any contact with him, then going into hiding for the last few years paints a pretty clear picture.’’

  Like I needed to be reminded of any of that. Still, it prickled. I just sat there, wondering how he could get under my skin so fast.

  ‘‘So there’s no mystery about how much I hate my dad.’’ I smiled and told myself he didn’t know, could never know, what it was like growing up under my father’s Influence. There was a reason my mother changed her name and lived overseas, and hadn’t ever tried to contact me. There was a reason he’d married and divorced four times since then. People in my father’s life were commodities to be consumed and discarded. And I, his only child, was tired of being recyclable goods.

  ‘‘Since you just quit your job and no longer work for Beckstrom Enterprises, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t tell me what you know about the hit. Why they did it and why Boy was the target.’’

  He frowned and looked down at his hands.

  ‘‘Zayvion,’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t want the kid to die. I’d like to think you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t want a little kid to die either.’’

  ‘‘You Hounded the hit,’’ he said. ‘‘Are you sure it was your father’s signature?’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  He looked back up and there was a fierceness in his eyes. ‘‘Do you think it could have been a forgery? Or someone else’s signature? Something magically forged?’’

  ‘‘I know my father’s mark intimately.’’ End of discussion.

  Zayvion glanced back out the window again, and I wondered if he were watching for someone, or maybe if he thought he was being watched by someone. Economics, my ass. This man was either a PI or an undercover cop.

  ‘‘I don’t know what to say,’’ he said. ‘‘I have no idea why your father would Offload illegally. It seems like there would be too high a risk that he would be found out. He’s a careful man.’’

  That was an understatement.

  ‘‘You know him better than I do.’’ He looked back at me. ‘‘Why would your father do such a thing?’’

  And hearing someone else ask it brought a dozen answers to my mind. Maybe he knew I’d been nice to Mama and wanted to hurt me through her. Maybe Mama was indebted to him and had agreed to let him do it. Maybe he thought hurting the kid would get me storming into his office after seven years of avoiding him.

  Maybe he’d done it for no reason at all.

  I wanted to take the easy way and just believe my father was thoughtless in his cruelty, but I knew that wasn’t true. He wouldn’t have put a hit on Boy without weighing the risks and deciding the odds were on his side. And there was no way it could have been a random mistake—he was not that sloppy.

  But what did he have to gain from Boy dying?

  I shook my head, frustrated. ‘‘Do you think I’d be sitting here having lunch with you if I knew the answer to that?’’

  Zayvion’s expression went carefully blank. ‘‘No,’’ he said, ‘‘I don’t suppose you would.’’

  I rubbed at my eyes and regretted it because they started to water. My head was pounding.

  ‘‘Sorry. Don’t take it personally. I wasn’t kidding about having no social life. I’m a little rusty on the finer points of polite conversation. But tell me this: you weren’t going to really help me, were you? Because you’re still working for my father, right?’’ It was a hunch, but I was pretty sure I was right.

  ‘‘I told you I quit.’’

  ‘‘You told me you quit tailing me for money. Didn’t say you quit working for Beckstrom Enterprises.’’

  A little bit of sadness, or maybe guilt, seeped through the cracks of his calm expression. ‘‘No, I didn’t.’’

  ‘‘That’s what I thought.’’ I stood. It took me some time and effort to put my coat back on without grimacing, but I did it.

  Zayvion didn’t help me, which was smart since I would have smacked him if he touched me with so much as a single pinky. I should have known better than to like him. When people spent too much time around my father, they tended to get infected with his rotten morals and scruples. Too bad Zayvion hadn’t gotten out when he had the chance.

  ‘‘You should go see a doctor, Allie,’’ he said softly.

  ‘‘Is that you or my father talking?’’

  He just shook his head.

  ‘‘Good-bye, Zayvion Jones.’’ I zipped my coat. ‘‘Thanks for lunch.’’

  I walked between the tables and made it out to the sidewalk, into the smell of smoke, oil, and wet, dirty concrete. People on their way to or from lunch moved around me, and I tried to decide if I could sweet-talk a cabbie into a ride home. I had zero money on me, zero money in my bank account, and my crappy apartment was miles away in Old Town.

  Lovely.

  I stood there, sore, hating the rain, hating my father, hating Portland. But mostly hating that someone who was nearly a stranger to me could make me like him so much in so short a time.

  One thing I was clear about—I was a good Hound. One of the best. I knew how to do my job. And no soft-talking, mint-fingered Zen economist was
going to convince me that I was wrong about that hit. My dad was behind it.

  ‘‘Taxi!’’ Zayvion called out.

  I hadn’t even heard him come up beside me. That man was quiet when he wanted to be. ‘‘Don’t bother,’’ I said. ‘‘I can find my own way home.’’

  Like magic, a cab appeared out of nowhere and pulled up to the curb.

  Zayvion turned to face me. We stood almost eye to eye. I was tall but he still had an inch or so on me. ‘‘You might be a good Hound, Allie,’’ he said. ‘‘And you might have your dad figured out, but you got me all wrong.’’ He grabbed my wrist, turned my hand over, and pressed cab fare into my palm.

  I should be angry. I should tell him to keep his money. I should pull away.

  Instead, I took one step closer. I don’t know what I was thinking—okay, I did know what I was thinking—I liked him, was drawn to him, despite my reservations, like a magnet pulled to steel. A jolt of hot, electric pleasure sparked through my body as I pressed against his warm, strong chest, hip, thigh. The smell of his cologne and the musky male scent of him filled me. Warm waves of need rolled beneath my skin. I could not think. I did not want to think. And I did not want to let him go.

  So I kissed him.

  I think he was surprised. Frankly, I was a little surprised too. But I was not disappointed.

  What I thought would be a quick kiss stretched out into a lingering moment of discovery. His lips were soft and thick, and I sucked at them gently, pleased when his mouth caught mine in an even deeper embrace. I bit, but not hard, and he answered by drawing the tip of his tongue so slowly along the bottom of my lip that I could feel the echo of it vibrate through every pore of my being.

  More, I thought.

  But he pulled back, pulled away, and suddenly the rain, the noise, the city, and the world returned.

  ‘‘Be careful,’’ he whispered. He walked away, hands in his coat pockets, stocking-capped head bent against the falling rain. It took a blink, two, before he was swallowed by the crowd, hidden from my sight, gone. It took several more before I could think again.

  The cabbie powered down the passenger-side window. ‘‘You want a ride, lady?’’

  I opened the back door and got in. ‘‘Fair Lead Apartments,’’ I said.

  The cab pulled out into traffic, and no matter how hard I looked out the rain-fogged windows hoping to catch a glimpse of Zayvion, he was not there.

  Chapter Four

  My apartment building is a dump. When it rains, it is not just the appearance of the building that reeks. It is also the walls.

  I was halfway up the climb to my fifth-story apartment. With each step the smell of old magic got worse. Thirty years ago, when the technology was being developed to harvest wild magic, people thought all it took was a lightning rod—well, a Beckstrom Storm Rod—and some copper tubing to channel the magic throughout the city.

  That could not have been further from the truth. Channeling magic through anything but iron, lead, and glass pipes that had each been carved and molded with very specific kinds of glyphing and holding spells made the channel useless, rotten, and dangerous.

  This old building was lousy with rotten magic. The useless copper tubing was set inside the walls, as was the fashion thirty years ago. The idea was people wouldn’t want to live in a building that looked like a birdcage. The result was having to tear the building down to access the tubing and not only reglyph the holding spells, but also replace the copper with something expensive and patent-permit laden. The owners of the Fair Lead didn’t go out of their way to replace lightbulbs. So we dealt with the smell that always got worse when it rained.

  By the time I reached my room on the fifth floor, I had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from smelling, and worse, tasting the wet, rotten magic seeping out of the walls. It was a health hazard, I was sure of it, but if a few cockroaches could be ignored by greasing the right palm, then so could old magic. Even though it’d been thirty years, the law hadn’t caught up with the use and misuse of magic.

  I walked down to my apartment, put my key in the lock, and opened the door. The smell was twice as bad here. So bad that my eyes started watering.

  Great.

  A small flash of green halfway across the room told me there was a message on my answering machine. I crossed the room and pressed play.

  ‘‘Hi, Al!’’ My best friend in all the world, Nola’s warm, happy voice piped out of the machine. ‘‘Happy birthday! When are you coming out to the farm to visit me? I sent you a birthday present. Check your bank balance. There should be enough there for you to come out for a week. Leave a message at this number and let me know if you take the train or bus, and I’ll meet you. I mean that. Oh, and Jupe says hi!’’

  The machine beeped and the sudden silence, along with the heavy smell, was just too much.

  This birthday sucked.

  But it was still my birthday. Three o’clock. I rubbed at the back of my neck. If I weren’t feeling so bad, I’d go out, see a movie, maybe take some of Nola’s gift money and treat myself to a pedicure. But it would be at least the rest of the night before the magic stopped hurting in me, and despite Zayvion’s insistence that I go see a doctor, I knew a nice long bath and ten hours of sleep would get me through the worst of it. And that wouldn’t cost me money I didn’t have. But the smell in the house was unbearable.

  Come on, Allie. Time to think smart and find a warm, odorless place to sleep for a few hours.

  My hand hovered over my phone. Who could I call? Nola’s farm was in eastern Oregon near Burns, a town almost three hundred miles away, at least a five-hour drive from here, so that wouldn’t do. Who else did I trust? Ex-boyfriends came to mind, but there was a good reason each of them was an ex. I hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from college, and being both unemployed and doing freelance Hounding jobs, usually at night, hadn’t exactly created a close-knit social network. Sure, I knew a few of the other Hounds—Pike, for instance. But I didn’t think an ex-marine who Hounded for the cops would put up with my whining. Other than Pike, not a single person came to mind.

  I had to laugh. There were times when being a sour, distrustful, jaded young woman didn’t make my life easy.

  I could call my dad.

  Not in a million months of never.

  Mama. Though I didn’t love the idea of ending up right back where I’d started the day, I figured she’d let me stay late at her restaurant, might even offer me a cot to sleep on if I paid her, or did dishes or something. Or maybe we could trade the Hounding job I did on Boy for a bed. Besides, I wanted to know if Boy was okay. Wanted to know if she’d called the police and what they were doing about the hit. They might even need to talk to me.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Mama’s number even though I knew she never answered the phone. Still, maybe this once. When the phone rang for the twentieth time, I gave up. If she said no, maybe I’d just get a cab to the bus station, and head out to Nola’s. Fresh farm air sounded good right now. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was a plan.

  I grabbed a backpack—a hideously pink and green thing with a cow on it that Nola had given me years ago—and packed a change of clothes, an extra sweater, my tennis shoes, a brush, deodorant, and toothbrush. I left the apartment and the building as quickly as my swollen feet could take me down the stairs.