Magic to the Bone Read online

  In the best light, like maybe a sunny day in July, the north side of Portland looks like a derelict row of crumbling shops and broken-down bars. On a cold, rainy September day like today, it looks like a wet derelict row of crumbling shops and broken-down bars.

  Crawling up from the river, the neighborhood had that rotten-tooth brick-and-board architecture that attracted the poor, the addicted, and the desperate. Unlike most of the rest of Portland, it stood pretty much as it had been built back in the 1800s, except it had one other thing going against it—there was no naturally occurring magic beneath the streets of North Portland. The city had conveniently forgotten to add the fifth quadrant of town into the budget when running the lead and glass networks to make magic available, so now the rest of the city largely ignored the entire area, like a sore beneath the belt everyone knew about, but no one mentioned in polite company.

  The driver rolled the cab to a stop just on the other side of the railroad track, and I couldn’t help but smile. He must have heard of the neighborhood’s rules and rep. Outsiders were tolerated in St. John’s most days. Only no one knew which days were most days.

  ‘‘Want me to wait?’’ he asked, even though he probably already knew my answer.

  ‘‘No,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ll bus home. Will ten cover it?’’ He nodded, and I pressed the money into his hand. I pushed the door open against the wind and got a face full of rain.

  I stepped onto the sidewalk and got moving. Mama’s wasn’t far. I took a couple deep breaths, smelled rain, diesel, and the pungent dead-fish-and-salt stench off the river. When the wind shifted, I got a noseful of the sewage treatment plant. Then I caught a hint of something spicy—peppers and onions and garlic from Mama’s restaurant—and grinned.

  I didn’t know why, but coming to this part of town always put me in a better mood. Maybe it was a sick sort of kinship, knowing that other people were holding together while everything was falling apart too. There was a certain kind of honesty in the people who lived here, an honesty in the place. No magic to keep the storefronts permanently shiny and clean, no magic to whisk away the stink of too many people living too close together, no magic to give the illusion that everyone wore thousand-dollar designer shoes. I liked the honesty of it, even if that honesty wasn’t always pretty.

  Or maybe it was just that I figured it was the last place my dad, or anyone else who expected me to do better by myself (read: do what they wanted me to do) would ever expect to find me. There was something good about this rotten side of town. Something invisible to the eye, but obvious to the soul.

  Except for piles of cardboard and a few rusting shopping carts, the street was empty—a hard rain will do that—so it was easy to spot the motion from the doorway to my left. I didn’t even have to turn my head to know it was a man, dark, an inch or two taller than me, wearing a blue ski coat and black ski hat. From the stink of cheap cologne—something with so much pine overtone, I wondered if he had splashed toilet cleaner over his head by mistake—I knew it was Zayvion Jones.

  He was new to town, maybe two months or so, and so unpretentiously gorgeous that even the ratty ski coat and knit hat couldn’t stop my stomach from flipping every time I saw him. I knew nothing else about him except that he liked to hang around the edges of North Portland, didn’t appear to be dealing drugs or magic, or doing much of anything else, really. Since he’d shown me no reason to trust or distrust him yet, out of convenience I distrusted him.

  ‘‘Morning, Ms. Beckstrom,’’ he said with a voice too soft to belong to a street thug.

  ‘‘Not yet, it isn’t.’’ I glanced at him. He had a good, wide smile and a high arch to his cheeks that made me think he had Asian or Native along with the African in his bloodline.

  ‘‘Might be better soon,’’ he said. ‘‘Buy you breakfast?’’

  ‘‘With what? The fingers in your pocket?’’

  He chuckled. It had a nice sound to it.

  My stomach flipped. I ignored it and kept walking.

  ‘‘Maybe dinner sometime?’’ he asked.

  Mama’s place was a squat two-story restaurant with living space on the top floor and eating space on the bottom. It was just a couple blocks down, a painted brick and wood building hunkered against the broody sky. I stopped and turned toward Zayvion. Now that I looked closer, I realized he had good eyes too, brown and soft, and the kind of wide shoulders that said he could hold his own in a fight. He looked like somebody you could trust, somebody who would tell you the truth no matter what and hold you if you asked, no explanation needed.

  Why he was following me around made me suspicious as hell.

  I thought about drawing on magic to find out if he was tied to someone’s magical strings. Even though St. John’s was a dead zone, Hounding wasn’t impossible to do here. It just meant having to stretch out to tap into the city’s nearest lead and glass conduits that stored and channeled magic, or maybe reach even deeper than that and access the natural magic that pooled like deep cisterns of water beneath all the other parts of Portland.

  But I had sworn off using magic unless necessary. Losing bits of one’s memory will make those sorts of resolutions stick. I wasn’t about to pay the price of Hounding a man who was more annoyance than threat. Still, he deserved a quick, clear signal that he was wasting his time.

  ‘‘Listen. My social life consists of shredding my junk mail and changing the rat traps in my apartment. It’s working for me so far. Why mess with a good thing?’’

  Those soft brown eyes weren’t buying it, but he was nice enough not to say so. ‘‘Some other time maybe,’’ he said for me.

  ‘‘Sure.’’ I started walking again and he came along with me, like I had just told him we were officially long lost best friends.

  ‘‘Did Mama call you?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘I told her Boy needed an ambulance, but she wouldn’t listen to me.’’

  I didn’t bother asking why again. I jogged the last bit to the restaurant and took the three wooden steps up to the door. Inside was darker than outside, but it was easy to see the lay of things. To the right, ten small tables lined the wall. To the left, another three. Ahead of me, one of Mama’s Boys—the one in his thirties who spoke in single-syllable words—stood behind the bar. The only phone in the place was mounted against the wall next to the kitchen doorway. Boy watched me walk in, looked over my shoulder at Zayvion, and didn’t miss a beat letting go of the gun I knew he kept under the bar. He pulled out a cup instead and dried it with a towel.

  ‘‘Where’s Mama?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Sink,’’ Boy said.

  I headed to the right, intending to go behind Boy and the bar, and into the kitchen.

  I stopped cold as the stench of spent magic, oily as hot tar, triggered every Hound instinct I had. Someone had been doing magic, using magic, casting magic, in a big way, right here on this very unmagical side of town. Or someone somewhere else had invoked a hell of a Disbursement spell to Offload that much magical waste into this room.

  I tried breathing through my mouth. That didn’t make things better, so I put my hand over my mouth and nose. ‘‘Who’s been using magic?’’

  Boy gave me a sideways look, one that flickered with fear.

  Mama’s voice boomed from the kitchen, ‘‘Allie, that you?’’ and Boy’s eyes went dead. He shrugged.

  I pulled my hand away from my mouth. ‘‘Yes. What happened?’’

  Mama, five foot two and one hundred percent street, shouldered through the kitchen doors, holding the limp body of her youngest Boy, who had turned five about a month ago. ‘‘This,’’ she said. ‘‘This is what happened. He’s not sick from fever. He hasn’t fallen down. He’s a good boy. Goes to school every day. Today, he doesn’t wake up. Magic, Allie. Someone hit him. You find out who. You make them pay.’’

  Mama hefted Boy up onto the bar, but didn’t let go of him. He’d never been a robust child, but he hadn’t ever looked this pale and thin b
efore. I stepped up and put my hand on his chest and felt the fluttering rhythm of his heart, racing fast, too fast, beneath his soccer T-shirt. I glanced over at Zayvion, the person I trusted the least in the room. He gave me an innocent look, pulled a dollar out of his pocket, and put it on the bar.

  What do you know, he did have money.

  Boy, the elder, poured him a cup of coffee. I figured Boy could take care of Zayvion if something went wrong.

  ‘‘Call an ambulance, Mama. He needs a doctor.’’

  ‘‘You Hound him first. See who does this to him,’’ she said. ‘‘Then I call a doctor.’’

  ‘‘Doctor first. Hounding won’t do you or him any good if he’s dead.’’

  She scowled. I was not the kind of girl who panicked easily, and Mama knew it. And she also knew I had college learning behind me—or what I could remember of it, anyway.

  ‘‘Boy,’’ Mama yelled. Another of her sons, the one with a tight beard and ponytail, stepped out of the kitchen. ‘‘Call the doctor.’’

  Boy picked up the phone and dialed.

  ‘‘There,’’ Mama said. ‘‘Happy? Now Hound him. Find out who wants to hurt him like this. Find out why anyone would hurt my boy.’’

  I glanced at Zayvion again. He leaned against the wall, near the door, drinking his coffee. I didn’t like Hounding in front of an audience, especially a stranger, but if this really was a magic hit, and not some sort of freak Disbursement-spell accident, then the user should be held accountable for Boy’s doctor bills and recovery.

  If he recovered.

  I pressed my palm against Boy’s chest and whispered a quick mantra. I didn’t want to stretch myself to pull magic from outside the neighborhood. So instead, I drew upon the magic from deep within my bones. My body felt strange and tight, like a muscle that hadn’t been used in a while, but it didn’t hurt to draw the magic forward. Four years in college had taught me that magic was best accessed when the user was close to a naturally occurring resource, like the natural cisterns beneath the west, east, and south sides of the city, or at an iron-and-glass-caged harvesting station, or through the citywide pipelines.

  What Harvard hadn’t taught me was that I could, with practice, hold a small amount of magic in my body, and that other people could not. People who had tried to use their own bodies to contain magic ended up in the hospital with gangrenous wounds and organ failure.

  But to me, holding a little magic of my own felt natural, normal. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have the deep, warm weight of small magic inside me. When I was six I’d asked my mother about it. She told me people couldn’t hold magic like that. I believed her. But she was wrong.

  I whispered a spell to shape the warm, tingling sense of magic up into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and wove a simple glyph in the air with my fingertips. Like turning on a light in a dark room, the spell enhanced my senses and my awareness of magic.

  No wonder the stink of old magic was so heavy in the room. The spell that was wrapped around Boy was violently strong, created to channel an extreme amount of magic. Instead of a common spell glyph that looked like fine lacework, this monster was made out of ropes as thick as my thumb. The magic knotted and twisted around Boy’s chest in double-back loops—an Offload pattern. This spell was created to transfer the price of using magic onto an innocent—in this case, a five-year-old innocent. It was the kind of hit that would cause an adult victim’s health to falter, or maybe they’d go blind for a couple months until the original caster’s use of magic was absolved and the lines of magic faded to dust.

  This was no accident.

  Someone had purposely tried to kill this kid.

  That someone had set an illegal Offload bothered me. That they had aimed it at a child made me furious.

  The Offload pattern snaked up around Boy’s throat like a fancy necklace, with extra chains that slipped down his nostrils. I could hear the rattle of magic in his lungs. No wonder the poor thing’s heart was beating so fast.

  I leaned in and sniffed at his mouth. The magic was old and fetid and smelled of spoiled flesh. A fresh hit never smelled that bad that fast. Boy hadn’t been hit today. He probably hadn’t even been hit yesterday. I realized, with a shock, that the little guy had been tagged a week ago, maybe more.

  I didn’t know how he had hung on so long.

  I resisted the urge to lick at the magic, resisted the urge to place my lips briefly against the ropes that covered his mouth. Taste and smell were a Hound’s strengths, and I could learn a lot about a hit by using them. But no one wanted to see a grown woman lick someone’s wounds—magical or not. I took another deep breath, mouth open, to get the taste of the magic on my palate and sinuses at the same time. The lines were so old, all I could smell was death. Boy’s death.

  I muttered another mantra, pulled a little more magic, and traced the cords across his chest with my fingers, memorizing the twists and knots and turns. Some of the smaller ropes lifted like tendrils of smoke—ashes from the Offload glyph’s fire.

  Every user of magic had their own signature—a style that was as permanent and unique as a fingerprint or DNA sequencing. A good Hand could forge the signature of a caster, but the forgery was never perfect, and rarely good enough to fool a Hound worth their salt.

  And I was worth a sea of salt. I retraced the spell, lingered over knots, and memorized where ropes crossed and parted and dissolved into one another.

  I knew this mark. Knew this signature. Intimately.

  I jerked my hand away from Boy, breaking the magical contact with him. No wonder the signature was familiar. It was my father’s.

  It had been deconstructed to try to hide his distinctive flare, but I knew his hand, knew his mark. The room was suddenly too hot, too small, too close.

  Boy was sick, dying, and my dad was killing him.

  ‘‘Get him a doctor.’’ My voice sounded thin and far away. I swallowed and clenched my hands, digging nails into palms until I could feel the pain of it.

  ‘‘Mama,’’ I said, ‘‘this is bad. A big hit. And it’s old. He needs to get to a doctor right now.’’

  ‘‘Who did this?’’ Mama asked. ‘‘You tell me who. We make them pay.’’

  But I couldn’t say it, couldn’t wrap my brain around what my father had done, couldn’t understand why he would do such a thing. Boy was only five years old.

  Not too far off, a siren wailed.

  ‘‘Is that an ambulance?’’ I looked to Boy—the one with the beard—who stood in the doorway to the kitchen. ‘‘You did call an ambulance, right?’’

  He gave me a level look and a sinking feeling hit my stomach. He hadn’t called an ambulance. Probably hadn’t called anyone. I guess they trusted doctors as much as they trusted magic. Or they didn’t have the money to pay a hospital bill. Maybe they thought Hounding would take care of it, would magically make Boy better.

  Sweet hells.

  ‘‘Give me the phone,’’ I said.

  Mama waved her hand. ‘‘We call, we call.’’

  That was a lie. I took two steps toward the Boy by the phone, wondering how fast I could dial 911 before he dragged me away. Both Boys—the one from the kitchen and the nonspeaker—crossed their arms over their chests and stood shoulder to shoulder in front of me, blocking the phone.

  ‘‘Get out of my way,’’ I said. ‘‘I am using that phone.’’

  ‘‘Allie girl,’’ Mama warned.

  ‘‘He could die, Mama.’’

  ‘‘You tell me who did this and I call.’’