Magic to the Bone Read online

  Someone had gone all stab-happy on him, and recently. The wound oozed a little, but wasn’t gushing, which didn’t make sense until I placed my finger at the edge of one of the puncture marks.

  Magic.

  I could feel it, a slight, warm tingle like I’d just stuck my tongue on a battery. There was magic sealing this wound. I glanced at his face—still unconscious—then leaned down close and sniffed his blood.

  Magic had created the wound, and magic had sealed it, perhaps keeping it from killing him. I’d never seen someone use magic like that before, though I supposed doctors might during surgeries. It was a beautiful, simple glyphing, and I wanted to trace it with my fingers and see just what kind of glyph could hold a man’s soul to his bones, but if I did I would have to draw upon magic and Hound him.

  Sure, I wanted to know who had felt the need to stab him with a knife and magic several times. I wanted to know if the person who hurt him and the person who sealed the wound were one and the same.

  But now was not the time. Any draw I made on magic would light me up like a neon ‘‘get me’’ sign, and I needed that as much as I needed an almost-dead guy and a kitten.

  I pulled his shirt back down and considered finding a safer, warmer place for him to rest while I found the cops. I stood and looked around. I thought I’d passed a makeshift tarp strung between rusted shopping carts a minute ago.

  ‘‘Please don’t leave me,’’ he said.

  The sound of his voice, high, frightened, gave me the instant creeps and sent shivers down my spine.

  His eyes, blue as a summer afternoon, were open.

  ‘‘Please,’’ he said. ‘‘I need you.’’ He swallowed. ‘‘You and the powerful man. The dead man. I know how. I was there.’’

  The chills just kept coming.

  Okay, sure, it might be incoherent babbling. It might be some sort of elaborate trap, though I couldn’t believe anyone would go through staging an almost death here on garbage shore just on the off chance I’d dodge by on my way to the cops. No one needed me dead that much.

  So if it wasn’t incoherent babbling, then maybe the guy knew something. If not about my dad’s death, about someone’s death. Maybe someone who was willing to stab him and dump him down here to get rid of him.

  It could have been a gun deal gone bad, a drug deal, a fight over a girl, a fight over a boy, hell, he could have been fighting with a girlfriend over who got to keep the cat. Whatever had happened to him, it was none of my business. I wasn’t a cop, wasn’t a doctor, wasn’t anybody who was in any kind of position to help him.

  ‘‘You stay here and rest,’’ I said. ‘‘I’ll try to get you some help.’’ I started unzipping Zayvion’s coat, figuring I could at least give him some shelter from the rain while I called the cops and probably the hospital now too.

  ‘‘No,’’ he said, his voice lower and somehow older. ‘‘Your father, Bed—Beckstrom. I was there when he died. I was you. I did—’’ He ran out of breath and worked hard—too hard—to pull air into his lungs.

  Holy shit.

  ‘‘What? What’s your name?’’ I asked him.

  When he could talk, when he could breathe, his voice was high again, scared. It was eerie, like maybe I was suddenly talking to someone else behind those baby blues. ‘‘Cody. Cody Hand,’’ he said. ‘‘And Kitten. Please? Take us. Away.’’

  Take him away? Not likely. Haul his pretty blue eyes down to the cops? No problem.

  ‘‘This is going to hurt,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Okay,’’ he said in a small, childlike voice.

  I bent and pulled his arm up over my shoulder and heaved back, getting him to his feet. He moaned and whimpered and breathed in loud, raspy gasps. I gave him a minute to get ready for the fun ahead.

  ‘‘Ready?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Kitten,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t leave her.’’

  Hells.

  I half bent and held out the one hand I sort of had free. Luckily, the kitten was either too tired or too sick to back away. I picked her up and stuffed the poor thing down the front of my zipped jacket. If she fell out, there was no way I could go back for her. The kid might be slight of build and short—his head barely came up to my shoulder—but his legs weren’t working too well, his lungs weren’t working too well, and I figured his eyes weren’t working well either.

  Still, we hobbled along. I took us closer to the water because trying to pick our way over the slime of garbage and shin-bruising rocks wasn’t doing us any favors.

  So I was out in the open with a mostly dead guy on my shoulder and a cat stuffed down my bra.

  Living the good life, oh yeah.

  It took some time to get anywhere. The kid blacked out once or twice, and I had to wait until he came to before moving on again. The good thing was I didn’t see Bonnie, didn’t hear Bonnie, didn’t smell Bonnie. The bad thing was the rain never let up and the cat peed on my shirt.

  I’d wanted olfactory disguise; I’d gotten olfactory disguise. I smelled like garbage, cat piss, and somebody else’s blood. Couldn’t have asked for a better cover. A nicer one, yes. But better? Not in a river full of sewage. And I was pretty sure that not even Bonnie would be looking for two people stumbling along the shore like a couple of drunk hobos. She was looking for sporty-me, rich-girl me, long-coat-and-running-shoes me. Not wet, smelly, old-ski-coat-and-half-dead-guy me.

  Things were looking up.

  Except I was freezing, sweating, worried, stinking, and tired. Hells, I was tired. If even one of the mattresses scattered across the rocks didn’t look like a whorehouse reject, I would have taken some time to sit, lie back, rest. Dead guy, cat pee, or no.

  It occurred to me, however, that I hadn’t a clear idea of where the shore went exactly. My theory was to follow it away from certain death and toward the police in shining armor. But as for how long that might take in reality, in crappy weather with a half-dead guy at my side, nope. Not a clue.

  I was pretty sure the kid wasn’t going to hold up much longer. He blacked out more than he stayed conscious, and I spent as much time dragging him as shaking him to wake up. I scanned the shoreline looking for another decent tumble of rocks to climb (shudder) or maybe, (please, please, please) a road or alley that wound up to the streets above.

  So when a slope of cliff to my left made mostly of flat-topped boulders appeared, I shook the kid awake again and headed toward land.

  It was not easy dragging him up the boulders along the embankment, but I managed without doing much more damage to either of us. The going got easier once we got to the top. A narrow gravel road wended away from the river, blackberries and other brambles crowding it on both sides. I could hear cars and buses growling somewhere ahead of us. The constant cry of gulls faded as the road took a bend, leaving the river to the right of us and the rest of civilization somewhere to the left.

  Even though I was breathing hard, and the kid wasn’t breathing nearly hard enough, I could smell the oil and dirt of the city, the salt and hickory of hot dogs getting the grill, the pineapple and smoke of chicken and teriyaki.

  I could smell something else too—the copper and lye of magic being cast, spoken, chanted, channeled, used, like a blanket that smothered the city, every crack, every brick. There wasn’t a building or person in the city that wasn’t touched, coated, and shaped by the force of magic. It was in our soil, in our air, and in our blood. We breathed it, we ate it, we used it. And even though it used us back, we wanted more.

  In my opinion, the fine line between advancement and addiction had been crossed years ago.

  I was close to the edge of the city. Close to the train track that divided North from the rest of Portland. Close to magic.

  The wind changed directions again, and I caught the black-pepper smell of lavender. Bonnie. Or another woman who smelled a lot like her. And since I couldn’t draw on magic to investigate the nuances of that smell, I had to assume it was probably Bonnie coming to shoot me.

  I stopped trudg
ing along and wondered how much I smelled like me. Maybe I smelled enough like garbage, cat pee, and blood to hide in plain sight. Maybe she wouldn’t expect me to be dragging an injured boy along with me.

  There had to be something smart I could do. But the only thing that came to mind was getting myself and this kid to a hospital or police station quick. Quick meant car or cab on the other side of the railroad tracks. Quick also meant walking straight over the top of Bonnie if she tried to get between me and a reliable set of wheels.

  We were at the end of the line here—the brambles stopped, and a clear and open road continued between some warehouses and into a mix of small businesses and apartments.

  I shook the kid. ‘‘Hey. Cody. Come on, kid. We gotta get going.’’

  His head lolled to one side, and I shook him one more time, shifting his weight from where I held him propped by one arm over my shoulders, and my other arm around his waist, thumb tucked tight in his belt loop.

  He exhaled, and I swear it rattled like he had just blown bubbles in a cup of milk.

  Shit. Maybe he was worse off than I thought.

  I lowered him as gently as I could and went down on my knees beside him, taking a hard look at his face. Oh, not good. Not good at all. He was white heading toward a horrible pale blue. His eyes rolled into his head and his eyelids flickered. He jerked spastically, his limbs moving like a puppet’s on a string.

  ‘‘Hey now, you’re going to be okay. Hang in there, guy.’’ I pulled off Zayvion’s coat. The kitten dropped off my shirt and did not land on her feet, but rather pitifully tumbled onto her side, on top of the kid, and then fell down next to his arm. I tucked my coat over his chest.

  What were the emergency things you were supposed to do when someone was dying? A hundred scenes from movies and TV shows flashed through my mind, most of them involving someone beating on a prone person’s chest and screaming at them not to give up.

  Old information from high school came back to me, and I pulled off my sweater, leaving me in a tank top, and balled the sweater under his head. I didn’t have anything to wedge between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue, and I debated the wisdom of that, anyway. He looked like he needed all the room he could get just to breathe.

  I put both hands on his chest and tried to press his body down gently, tried to still the spasms racking through him.

  What the hell was I was doing trying to dodge a Hound, get to the cops, and take someone to a hospital all on my own?

  What choice did I have? My father was dead and this kid might know who did it. Might know who I could make pay for killing the man I wanted dead and somehow couldn’t handle living without.

  I wanted to scream, but Bonnie was still out there. If she heard me, she would find me and shoot me. It was enough to make a girl paranoid. Or furious.

  I decided to go with furious.

  But unless I wanted to pull on magic, there wasn’t anything else I could do. It wasn’t like I could turn bullets if someone pulled a trigger.

  This would all be a hella different if I had a damn cell phone.

  Or if my father hadn’t died.

  Or if I had taken his advice and finished school and gone to work for him.

  Or if this kid and his cat hadn’t gotten stabbed.

  ‘‘P-please,’’ the kid rasped.

  I about jumped out of my jeans. I thought he was way past being able to talk.

  ‘‘I’m right here, kiddo. Hang in there, you’re going to be okay.’’

  ‘‘H-hand,’’ he said.

  I didn’t know what he wanted, but took both of his hands in my own.

  ‘‘M-magic.’’

  I bit the inside of my cheek. I couldn’t. Sure the magic was close enough, maybe a couple blocks away at most. But I couldn’t draw on the magic to do so much as add pressure to his wound or make the air he breathed richer in oxygen because Bonnie would spot me. And I certainly didn’t have enough medical experience to save him, with my hands or with any of the spells that could ease pain at an exorbitant cost to the caster. If I drew on magic at all, I was screwed. I could smell Bonnie and the reek of lavender getting stronger by the minute.

  ‘‘P-please?’’

  Hell. Screw Bonnie. If she was so determined to kill me, she’d just have to get in line and wait her turn. This kid didn’t have any time left.

  I took a calming breath, even though I was freezing and soaked through my tank top and really freaked out. I set a Disbursement spell, deciding, even though I didn’t like it, I should take a long and slow pain this time so I could remain functional—maybe something along the lines of a bad sore throat or a recurring stomachache over the next couple weeks. I held tightly to the kid’s hands and thought about the soil beneath us, and below the soil, beyond the train tracks, to the magic pooled there deep under the city, caught and held by ironworked conduits.

  I spoke a mantra, a jingle from a cereal commercial, and called for the magic to come over to this side of the tracks, coaxed the magic, invited the magic into my body and into my hands.

  To my surprise, the kid managed to pull my hands, still clasped with his, down upon his stomach, over his wounds.

  Kneeling next to him, I was close enough to see his eyes, blue, unfocused, looking at me, or maybe through me, close enough to see his lips and see that he, too, was chanting.

  Holy hells. Soft as a whisper or the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the kid reached out for the magic I drew upon, and used me like a channel, like an ironworked conduit. He pulled the magic he wanted through me, not through the ground or through the channels. That shouldn’t be possible. People were not conduits of magic. Magic killed the people who held it inside their body for any length of time. Magic could only be channeled by lead, glass, iron, and glyphs.

  And, apparently, me.

  Like a breeze stoking a flame, the small magic I carried within me flared to life and the magic the kid drew upon mixed with it. I filled with magic, more magic than I’d ever held before. Like an artist mixing paint beneath my skin, the kid guided the magic to blend and move, connecting the magic beneath the city to my flesh, to my bones.

  This couldn’t be good.

  But it felt good, very good. Magic shifted and changed in me, and I realized my eyes were closed. Instead of darkness, I saw lines of magic that pulsed in jeweled colors, connected in contrasts of sharp angles, and softened like a watercolor. I could suddenly see so many possibilities in magic, so many things I could use it for. Things I’d never thought of. Like a balm to soothe pain, or a thread to stitch flesh.

  ‘‘Oh,’’ I whispered. I didn’t know it could be so easy to heal someone with magic.

  But I did now. I used one hand and drew a glyph for health—the sort of thing that might reduce the effects of a head cold, or revive a wilted plant. I could see how the glyph would fit around the kid, and how it would sink inside him, like a tattoo of color and magic on his bones. It would stay there too, supporting him, healing him. I worked the magic inside of me out into the glyph and then directed the glyph down over his body—inking it above him from his skull to his toe, magic that urged healing, health, life.

  I’d never seen anyone use magic like this before. I’d never seen anyone try. But I could do it. Of course I could do it.

  So I did.

  Magic spooled out of me and into the glyph. I let go of the kid’s other hand so I could catch the power and guide it, weaving and bending the force of it like ribbons of light, of heat, some rough, some slick and smooth, all fast, faster, falling out of me and into the glyph, then over him, then into him, wrapping around his bones, webbing through his muscles, arcing across his tendons.