Magic at the Gate

  This was something new about Shame. For all he liked to make jokes and poke fun at people, there was a seriousness, a deadly seriousness, about him now. Ever since the battle, or maybe ever since Zayvion had been almost killed, he had changed.

  “I haven’t tried it yet and I don’t want to.” He wanted honesty. He got it.

  “You should.”

  “Not now.” I pulled the door open and got in the car.

  Shame got in too, and started the engine. He rolled down the window halfway and tapped his cigarette over the edge.

  “How about now?” he asked.

  “Shame, I didn’t even want you to come with me. Don’t make it miserable, or I’ll try out more than just my magic on you.”

  “You talk tough.” He blew smoke out the window but didn’t put the car in gear. “I’m not joking around. Cast something small. It’s better to find out now than when you might need it the most.”

  I realized I was rubbing my fingers with my thumb, uncomfortable, stressed. On a scale of one to ten for how much I did not want to cast magic I’d give it a hundred.

  The hollowness inside hurt. The comforting candle flame of magic that had always filled me was gone. I felt like I’d lost a limb, or had just woken up to find life was the dream and my nightmares were real all along.

  There was a little part of me—okay, a big part of me—that wondered if leaving my magic in death in Mikhail’s hands might have been a really bad idea. What if he was connected to me?

  If I cast magic, would he know it? Would he try to use me to get through the gates into this world? There was still magic in my body—the magic from the cisterns and rivers that flowed deep beneath the earth. I just didn’t have my soul magic.

  “I’ll spot you,” Shame said after I had been quiet for too long. “Let’s face this and move forward.”

  “Since when has it ever been a good idea to listen to you?”

  “Since there is the very real possibility that the little slap fight we got into back in St. Johns is just the beginning of magic users trying to kill magic users. You walked into death. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be killed. Cast.”

  He sounded way too much like a teacher right now.

  He sucked the rest of his cigarette down, then tamped it out in the ashtray.

  Arguing was getting me nowhere. “I don’t like you,” I said without any heat.

  “Get in line.” Cast. I’d been using magic for almost all my life. My dad started teaching me young—easy things like making a spark of light or changing the color of flower petals. I was good at magic. I’d always been good at it.

  Then why was I sweating at the thought of doing it?

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. Magic can’t be cast in high states of emotion.

  My heart was pounding so hard, I bet Shame could hear it.

  “I got you,” he said. “Go ahead now.”

  Something easy. Something I did all the time. Something that wouldn’t hurt. I recited a mantra—the “Miss Mary Mack” song, and set a Disbursement—headache, because I was used to that.

  I traced the glyph for Sight with my right hand. My hand shook so hard the glyph did not fully form, and I knew magic would not take hold in it.

  Holy shit, I hadn’t been this scared since my first semester in college, learning magic basics.

  Shame didn’t say anything, even though I had just failed spectacularly at drawing a glyph I knew as well as my own name.

  I focused on the distance between myself and the windshield and tried again.

  Almost got it. Lost my concentration. Swore.

  “It’s fine,” Shame said, low and soft, like maybe he’d talked people through this kind of thing before. “We have time.”

  I licked my lips, tasted the salt of my fear. And tried tracing the spell again.

  Got it this time, a nice clean glyph for Sight. It was a Hounding glyph and one I used most often. I hooked the glyph with my pinky, then poured magic out through my bones, my body, into the spell.

  Magic filled me—everywhere but the cold hole in my chest. Magic lifted, wove with warm pressure down my arm, into my finger, and into the spell.

  My vision sharpened. The world opened up like fog had just burned away.

  Shame’s car was just a car. I sensed something receptive to magic in his glove box—maybe a void stone or some other Authority trinket.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  I glanced out the window. “Nothing particularly magical. Not a lot of spells out here in the parking lot.” My heart was still pounding, but I’d had a lot of practice being scared out of my wits and still using magic. All in a day’s work for a Hound.

  “The inn?” Shame asked.

  I twisted so I could look back at it.

  A shadow, black, thick, solid, a man, near the door, then gone, slipped the edge of my vision as I tried to track his passage, and almost slipped my mind. I felt a paper-dry brush at the back of my skull—my dad—pushing the image forward to me again.

  The shadow man.

  I shivered. It was same shadow I’d seen in death. And in St. Johns.

  “What?” Shame asked.

  “It’s . . . I saw a shadow. It’s gone now, but I saw it in St. Johns too. It’s a man, a manish shape, with no features, no . . . details. Like a man-shaped black hole. But it moves. Fast. I think it’s following me.”

  “When did you first see it?”

  I turned, looked at him. I still had Sight, and Shame looked completely different. Without Sight, Shame looked like he was nursing a three-month flu. With Sight, he looked thin, pale, but burning hard, light pouring from him to make his black eyes not strange but hypnotizing. He was sharp, his skin silky-pale, a contrast of light and shadow and something more, something powerful, sexual. I felt my pulse quicken.

  Shame looked like someone who could make you want more of anything he did to you.

  If Zay, when seen through Sight, was a silver-glyph, black fire warrior, Shame was a blade edged with liquid heat and blood.

  I’d never seen him like that before, not even when he’d cast magic and I was watching him with Sight.

  “You changed,” I breathed.

  He gave me a smile and I could feel it like a thumb dragging down the marks of magic on my arm. The palm of my left hand warmed, like someone had just poured heated oil over my skin.

  “Do you like it?”

  I nodded, my left hand reaching up for my collar. It was suddenly really hot in here. Stifling.

  “It’s. . . . it’s . . . ” I turned my head, looked away from him. What was wrong with me? I knew Shame. He was Zayvion’s brother in everything but blood. He had always been very brotherly toward me and I wanted it to stay that way.

  “It’s fine,” I finally spit out. “What did you do? I mean, why are you all . . . ” I almost said sexy, but caught myself in time to say, “. . . Death magic powerful and Blood magic hypnotic?”

  “Is that how you see me?” He actually sounded a little surprised.

  I nodded. I stared out the window, still holding Sight, and keeping my left hand in a fist. Having to concentrate on the spell helped me not think about other things. Things like the power Shame was radiating.

  “Since Mum’s been hurt, and both Jingo Jingo—may he burn in hell’s Dumpster—and Liddy are gone, I’ve shouldered more of the responsibilities for Death magic, some for Blood too. Don’t worry. As soon as Mum is herself and the gates stay closed, and we find Sedra, and take down Jingo Jingo and whoever else is trying to screw with the Authority, I’ll go back to my do-nothing, magical slouch-boy self.”

  He’s a master, my dad whispered in the back of my mind. He’s finally showing what he truly can do. Greater than I believe Jingo Jingo ever was. Such a waste.

  I like it better when you don’t talk, I thought to him.

  “So how long?” Shame asked.

  “Since?”

  “Since you’ve been seeing the shadow?”

  I let go
of Sight. Turned back to him. Without Sight, Shame looked like a man in deep need of rehab. Strange how that broken exterior hid such pure burning power and ability. I’d never expected him to be filled with such fierce strength. Or maybe it wasn’t all that strange. People, like magic, are rarely what they seem to be.

  “I first saw it in death,” I said. “I think it followed me here.”

  Chapter Eight

  Shame shook his head slowly. “You’re a bloody lot of trouble, you know that, Beckstrom?”

  “Define ‘a lot.’ ”

  He pulled out his cell, dialed, then backed out of the parking space, the tires of the car crunching on gravel. “Terric?” he said as he drove up the access road. “What? No. Listen. Beckstrom says a shadow followed her through the gate. Here. Well, at St. Johns and now here. About two minutes ago. Man shape. That’s what she said. I don’t know. I’m not a Closer. That’s your job.” He paused. “Bite me.” He thumbed off his phone and scowled at the road.

  “Terric going to take care of it?” I asked.

  “Terric’s going to look into it. He’ll call if he knows anything.”

  We were headed to the bridge back to Portland.

  “There are wards around the inn, right? Around Zayvion?” I asked.

  “Yes. Since the well is there, we have a lot of protections in place. Old spells that we can trigger when we need to. It’s the safest place he could be.”

  I bit at my bottom lip, wanting to believe that. I didn’t know of a safer place. Certainly not my apartment, not my dad’s old place, and not the police department. When you didn’t know the danger you might face, safe was hard to achieve.

  “Does Terric know what it might be?”

  “There are a lot of things that can get through gates. Hungers, the Veiled, creatures, and fragments of once-living things that stumble through. Not every gate leads to death. Some lead between countries.”

  “Seriously? Why don’t more people use those?”

  “It takes a hell of a lot of magical output to open a gate. There’s a lot of pain behind that—more than one person can bear. You don’t get enough people to Proxy, and you end up dead. It’s a last-ditch kind of thing, and even then, the gates aren’t reliable. You might end up in the country you want to go to. Or you might end up in the middle of the ocean. Fun, huh?”

  “Thrill a minute,” I said. “They train all Closers in this stuff?”

  “Yes. But not all Closers can open gates. Guardians, like Zay, can. You have to use light and dark magic. And down that road is crazy. Chase,” he said. “But gates opened from the other side, from death, happen way too much. Oh, bloody hell.” We were across the bridge and making our way toward my apartment. Shame slowed the car, took a tight right turn.

  “What?”

  “A gate.” He dug for his phone, dialed, and forgot to use his blinker around the next corner.

  “Victor, there’s a gate on Southwest Thirteenth Avenue and Southwest Washington. Don’t know. I’m getting there.”

  Another turn and we had made the full circle. Instead of easing out into traffic, Shame parked in a loading zone.

  “Stay here.” He got out, his hood covering his face as he stormed up the sidewalk. The people on the street gave him a wide berth.

  Oh, like that would work on me. I got out of the car too, checked it for keys—which Shame had taken—then locked the door and started after him.

  It was cool enough in the shade of the high-rises that the wind still carried winter’s teeth. But it wasn’t raining, and the sky, between the restless clouds, was a shock of blue. I tucked both hands in my pockets and tipped my chin down into the collar of my coat. I wished I’d had a hat.

  No rain meant more people were out on the street. Other than giving Shame space as he passed, no one paid particular attention to him.

  I closed the distance between us, trailing him to a parking lot with gutted, uneven pavement gone to weed at the edges. The dilapidated red, white, and blue pay booth creaked a little in the wind. There were no attendants. The lot was full of cars except for one space against the brick wall of the neighboring building.

  That was Shame’s destination. Even though I kept a good pace, he made it up the street before I did. He stopped a car’s length away from the parking space and lit a cigarette.

  I traced the glyph for Sight. Yes, I set a Disbursement first. Yes, I was going to be sucking on a double dose of headache tonight.

  But at least my hand was steady enough I drew the gylph right the first time. It was weird to pull magic up through me, to have it wrap hot tendrils around the cold hollowness inside me. I tried not to think about it.

  The world brightened. Old spells and new spells hung on cars, the side of buildings, skittered along with traffic. Someone had even taken the time, energy, and pain to cast a spell on the dilapidated pay booth. The spell created a hat with a propeller on top sitting at a jaunty angle on the roof of the booth. The propeller spun lazily in the wind.

  That spell did nothing more than look good if someone cast Sight. I had heard there were walking tours, and other treasure-hunt-type trips you could take to see what magic art was hidden around town. It was the latest rage. The very temporary nature of magical art—spells just didn’t last that long unless they were refreshed constantly—drew a lot of enthusiasts.

  Which meant there either had been or would soon be people walking through here to see the pay-booth beanie.

  Great.

  To the unmagical eye, Shame was just a guy in a sweater, pacing, smoking, and talking on his cell phone. His pacing route blocked the parking space and made it look like he was saving the spot for a buddy, or calling the cops to report a stolen car.

  Either way worked. No one seemed interested in trying to park there.

  And I knew why Shame wouldn’t let them.

  A gate, about ten feet tall, pulsed in deep blue, black, and a strange lime green against the brick wall. I didn’t see anything coming out of the gate. I did a quick look around to see if any lines of magic trailed off. If there were Hungers loose in the city, those beasts from death would hunt down the first magic user they could find and drink the life out of him. They were deadly, ruthless, and, I sincerely hoped, not on the streets.

  I wondered who Shame was calling, and hoped they’d get here soon.

  Shame closed his cell and took one last drag off of his cigarette before flicking it to the wet ground. He looked over at me and threw his hands up in frustration.

  “This is how you stay in the car?”

  “I’m not going to let you deal with this on your own.”

  “Allie, you’re not a Closer.”

  “Neither are you. Deal. Who’s coming?” I strode over to him. I was glad they had picked one of my heavy sweaters from my closet, but it was windy enough that I was still chilly.

  “Nik and Sunny are busy shutting down a gate in the southeast.”

  “Terric is still staying with Zay, isn’t he?”

  “Yep.”

  “So?”

  “Victor or Hayden, I’d guess. But they just pulled the graveyard shift and I don’t know who Mum’s going to be able to wake up.”

  “Anything we can do while we wait?”

  “Not you, no. But I thought I’d throw an Illusion or two around.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He drew a glyph in the air—definitely an Illusion of some sort. Then lit another cigarette. When he drew his fingers away from his mouth, he flicked them. Magic is fast—you can’t see it with bare eyes. But I could feel magic lift out of the ground, sticky and slow, like coagulated glue. It filled the glyph, and then there was a pickup truck in the parking space and a very convincing, very solid-looking wall of bricks covering where the gate had been—where the gate still was.

  “See how I don’t listen to you and everything turns out?”

  “There’s an art tour coming.”

  “What?”

  “Do you see the beani
e on the tollbooth?”

  He glanced over. “No.”

  “Sight,” I suggested.

  He pulled a quick glyph for Sight in the air. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. When?”

  “I have no idea. But that spell doesn’t have more than a day left and today’s Saturday.”

  He squinted at it. “Are you sure?”

  “Stinks like old milk. And here they come now.”

  Shame looked up the street and swore. There was nothing we could do to further hide the gate. The pickup Illusion was solid, strong, the brick wall clear. I set a Disbursement and drew Sight, not intending to hold it for long. With Sight, the pickup was outlined in a chalky blue neon, like someone had found a way to make crayon glow under black light. That was a dead giveaway that the truck was an Illusion. So too the rosy glow of the bricks. That didn’t worry me.

  No, what worried me was the gate pulsing black behind the fake rosy bricks and slowly eating through the Illusion. A wisp of ghostly green pushed through the bricks and attached to the pickup, swirling along it like a wave of tentacles trying to catch hold.

  Something was pushing its way through from the other side. And that something wasn’t human.

  Shame swore again, then drew a glyph with the ring finger of his right hand. He was burning hot, strong, and yes, sexy, hooking the glyph with his thumb, and drawing more, shifting the glyph, and shifting how the magic filled it. He was finger painting with magic.

  I had never seen anyone make magic shift from glyph to glyph, fluid, mobile, alive like that. That was going to cost him a hell of a lot of pain.

  Magic responded like a paint-filled brush, drawing the glyph with the turns and angles of Death magic. The longer Shame used that magic, the more the mark on my palm warmed, sending sweet, slow heat through my body. I opened my mouth and inhaled spring air to try to cool down.

  Death magic had never affected me like this before. I looked away from Shame and dropped Sight. It helped a little.

  The crowd of art enthusiasts was really more like a dozen people. Two men near the back of the group in matching red rain jackets with an art gallery logo across the chest had that migraine-sufferer look of professional Proxies. The rest of the people were young, maybe art students. They all held their hands in front of them with fingers of both right and left hand pinched together. It was the most simple, and least pain-inducing version of Sight. Didn’t do a lot to reveal the nuances of a spell, or the burned-out aftermath of casting like the Sight I used when Hounding. It was like having a good pair of glasses, or binoculars at your disposal that let you see spells.