Magic In the Blood

Chapter One

I dunked my head under the warm spray of the shower and rubbed shampoo into my hair, wondering where my next Hounding job, and paycheck, were coming from. I hadn’t been using much magic since I got back to town, and the bills were piling up. It was time to get on with my life, time to get on with tracking spells again.

I heard a distant pop, like a lightbulb blowing, and all the lights in my apartment went out. I opened my eyes just as a stream of soap dripped into them.

“Ow, ow, ow.”

Outside, the wind howled past my bathroom window. We’d been having some bad storms lately-plain old windstorms, not wild magic. Probably a tree or landslide up in the west hills had knocked out the line or blown a transformer, throwing this part of Portland into a deep early-morning darkness. The wail of an alarm from a nearby business started up, and then an answering siren, and then two, joined in on the noise. A couple car alarms got busy.

I rinsed as much of the soap out of my eyes as I could, turned off the shower, and stumbled out of the tub. I hit my shin on the toilet bowl.

“Ow!” I groped for the sink, found the cool surface with my fingertips, and looked over my shoulder at the single frosted window behind me. No light, which meant the magic grid was down too. There were backup spells to power the streetlights in case of blackout-spells the city paid the price for. Weird they hadn’t kicked in yet.

I felt my way along the sink, the wall, the light switch, and the towel hanging on the back of the door. I knew there was no one in the room with me, no one in my apartment. Still, I did not want to be alone and naked in the dark.

“Allie,” a voice whispered so close to my cheek I could feel the cold exhale.

I bolted out into the hallway and turned. It was so dark I couldn’t see anything.

I traced a glyph for Light in the air in front of me, completely forgetting to set a Disbursement for the pain that magic was going to put me through. Pain, I could deal with later. Light, I needed now.

The hallway, hells, the entire apartment, lit up like sunlight on snow.

I was not alone.

My dead father stood right there on the yellow ducky bath mat in front of my shower. It didn’t look like death had done him any favors.

Sure, he still wore a dark business suit-I’d rarely seen him out of business dress-and he was clean shaven and gray haired. Other than that, he looked like a hastily drawn interpretation of himself-his skin too pale, his green eyes gone so light as to be white. Dark, dark shadows caught beneath his eyes and pooled in the hollows of his face. He scowled. He was angry.

Angry at me.

Well, apparently death didn’t do much for a person’s mood either.

He stretched out his right hand, traced the first strokes of something in the air-maybe a glyph-and then moved fast, faster than any living person, until he was standing in front of me, close, so close his hand pressed against my forehead.

I raised my arms to keep him away, push him away, make him stay away from me. I could smell him-or maybe it was just the memory of him-and taste him, leather and wintergreen, on the back of my throat.

I yelled, tasting more wintergreen as he leaned in closer, all ice and bone-cold and damp against my naked wet skin. The Light spell flickered out, probably because I was too busy panicking to concentrate, and magic does not tolerate that sort of thing.

The apartment plunged back into blackness. I could still feel my dad’s hands on my arms.

I ran backward, scrambling to get away from the cold and wintergreen of his angry touch. My back hit the hall wall and I had nowhere else to go.

“Seek,” he whispered against my cheek.

Streetlights snapped on-the city’s spells finally kicking in-and poured blue light through the windows.

My dad was gone. Cut off midsentence like a dropped call.

Holy shit.

I gulped down air, shaking with more than cold, and backed into my bedroom, needing to be dry, dressed, covered, protected, safe, and the hells away from here as quickly as possible.

I’d been groped by a ghost. My dad’s ghost.

My hands shook, and my heart beat so hard, I couldn’t breathe. My dad touched me. And I’d been naked.

I fumbled into a pair of jeans, my bra, a T-shirt, and a wool sweater. Then socks and boots. I picked up the baseball bat I kept near my bed. I didn’t know if a baseball bat would work on a ghost, but I was willing to find out.

I stood there, breathing hard, the bat over one shoulder, and stared through the empty hallway at my empty bathroom.

“Dad?” I asked.

Nothing.

Let’s just go over the facts: I’d seen a ghost. My dad’s ghost.

And he had seen me. Touched me. Spoken to me.

Okay, that was so far down Creepy Lane that it had intersected with Scaring the Hell Out of Me Avenue. I hated that avenue.

I shook out my hands, switching the bat from one to the other, and tried to calm my breathing. Take it easy, Allie, I told myself. Ghosts aren’t real.

Yeah, well, that felt real.

Maybe seeing him was some sort of weird leftover guilt from not being there when he died. Not being there for his funeral or his burial. No, I know I wouldn’t have gone to his funeral even if I’d been able to. I was still angry at him then, angry that he had let his hunger for money and power hurt everyone in his life, including me.

As a matter of fact, I was still angry about that.

The lights in my apartment-regular electric-weren’t working yet. I didn’t want to pull on magic again for light because when you used magic, it used you right back. There was always a price-always a pain to pay. Why give myself a headache when I could just light a candle? Problem was, my candles were all the way across the apartment in the living room.

I strode into the hallway, bat ready to swing. I looked in the bathroom-no one there-and walked (not too quickly, I’ll add) over to the side table next to my ratty couch. I put down the bat and found a box of matches. I lit several candles on my bookshelf, on top of the TV, and on the little round dining table by the window. For good measure, I pulled back the curtains, letting in as much light from the street as possible.

Blue light from the streetlamps caught in the whorls of metallic color that ribboned around my fingertips and up my arm and the side of my neck to the very corner of my right eye. It was still strange to see the marks magic had left on me-brighter and more iridescent than tattoos. Stranger to feel magic heavy inside me, a constant weight that moved and stretched beneath my skin.

Even though my right arm didn’t itch anymore from the magic flowing through me, my left arm, banded black at my elbow, my wrist, and at each knuckle, was always a little cold and numb when I used magic too much.

I wasn’t sure what all of it meant-because no one I’d talked to had ever seen anything like this, like me. People who try to hold magic in their bodies die from it. Horribly. And I’d done my best to stay away from doctors who might be curious enough to want to take me apart to find out why I wasn’t dead yet.

I rubbed my arm-the right with the whorls of colors-and scanned the street below.

Rain and wind? Yes. Ghosts? No.

The last room to check was the kitchen. There were no windows in the kitchen, so I picked up a candle in a glass jar and paused in the entryway to the kitchen. My apartment door stood to the right of me, my kitchen lost in shadows ahead of me. I lifted the candle. Yellow light pushed aside blocks of shadow. Nothing.

The phone rang. I jumped so hard, wax sloshed over the candle’s wick and smothered the flame.

The phone rang again, and a wash of cold sweat slicked my skin. It was just the phone.

It rang again.

I didn’t want to answer it.

Another ring.

Could ghosts use the phone?

Okay, now I was being ridiculous.

I put the candle down on the half wall between the kitchen and foyer and jogged to the phone in the living room. Caught it on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” I said, my voice a little too high.

“Allie Beckstrom?” a low male voice asked.

I recognized that voice. Detective Makani Love had spent a good deal of his childhood in Hawaii and still hadn’t lost that particular rhythm to his words. Plus, I could hear the ring of phones behind him and then another voice, female, and likely his partner, Lia Payne. I think the police department had stuck them together for a laugh-Love and Payne-but they’d turned into such a good team, they hadn’t asked to be reassigned.

“Hey, Mak,” I squeaked.

“Is everything okay? Are you okay?”

I swallowed and worked hard to get my voice down an octave or so.

“Yes. I’m fine. Just, uh… kind of startled when the phone rang. Is the power out over there?”

“No,” he said. “But we heard part of town was down. You dark?”

The lights flicked back on, and my computer on the desk in the corner hummed back to life.

“Not anymore,” I said. “It just came back on. So, what’s up?”

“We need you to come down to the station to give your statement regarding the death of your father.”

Oh.

I’d never filed an official report. See, I’d been there the day my father died. I may even have been the last one who saw him alive-except for his killer. But since I’d spent the next several days being chased by the people who killed him, I hadn’t had a chance to actually talk to the police about the last time I’d seen him.

Well, the last time I’d seen him alive.

I wondered if Mak believed in ghosts.

“Can it wait until later? I haven’t had breakfast yet and was hoping to hunt down some leads on Hounding jobs this morning.”

“No. It’s been long enough, yah? You’ve been back in town, what, a week now, almost two? That’s patience on our side, you know. We need you this morning. Can you get here in an hour?”

“Will there be any decent coffee in the building?” Love and I weren’t best buddies, but I usually ended up going to him when I worked Hounding jobs that involved someone doing something illegal. He and Payne were two of the few police officers I knew who were cross-trained to handle magical crime enforcement.

“Oh, sure. Best coffee in the city, yah. Dug a pit this morning, roasted it with my own hands over the fire. Fresh just for you.”

“Right.” I glanced out my living room window and through the bare tree limbs that spread across my view of the street and buildings on the other side. It was six o’clock on a late-November morning and still dark. Rain gusted sideways past the window, flashing like gold confetti in the headlights of slow-moving traffic crawling toward downtown Portland, Oregon, and the freeway beyond. The police station wasn’t all that far from my apartment, but I didn’t have a car. The bus ran every half hour and would take me straight to the station doors.

It was doable.

“I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”

“Good. And, Allie?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t leave town. And be careful.”

A chill ran down my arms. Why would he say that? I wouldn’t skip town. And I was always careful. Well, as careful as the situation allowed. “I’ll be there in forty-five.”

I hung up the phone and scowled at it. Okay, maybe he had a reason to worry about me not showing up. I’d gotten myself into some weird stuff a few months ago, not that I remembered much of it. My friend Nola, who lived three hundred miles away on a nonmagical alfalfa farm in Burns, had taken me in afterward. She tried to tell me what she knew about the days I no longer remembered and the weeks that had gone by while I’d been in a coma. But her information was sketchy too.

The one thing that had become abundantly clear to me was just how much memory I had lost. It still gave me nightmares.

I glanced over at the table by the window. The blank book where I wrote everything just in case magic took my memories was there. I walked over to it, flipped it open. The most current pages were the basic itinerary from the last few days-me settling into my new apartment, the phone messages from my father’s accountant I hadn’t returned. The sandwich shop I discovered a couple streets over that made really good paninis (I give the salmon rosemary five stars), and the name of a song I liked on the radio.

But as I flipped back toward the front of the book, I found the blank page. The corner of it was worn from me going back to it so often in the last few weeks. Right there on that blank page I should have written everything that had happened to me between when I last saw my father alive and when I woke up at Nola’s farm a month later.

Blank.

No matter how hard I stared at it, the notes I should have written were not there.

Things I really wish I could remember, like what had happened between me and a man named Zayvion Jones. I remember him hanging around St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland. I remember him asking me out for lunch, and I remember him going with me to see my father.

What I didn’t remember-the things my friend Nola had said happened-was falling in love with him, so much so that I’d sacrificed myself to save him.

It just didn’t sound like me.

Slow to trust, slower to love, I couldn’t figure out how I had fallen for him so completely in such a short time.

I shut the book and pressed my fingers against my forehead. Magic is not for sissies. Sure, it can do a million good things-keep cities safer and hospitals going, and even just make a bad paint job look good-but it always comes with a price.

Sometimes magic makes me pay a double price-pain for using it, and loss of memory. Yeah, I’m just lucky that way. It was almost enough to make me want to give it up altogether. Almost.

The phone rang again, and I looked through my fingers at it, trying to decide if I really wanted to talk to anyone else this morning. It might be a Hounding job, which would mean money, or, heck, Nola checking in on me.

I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Allie.” A woman’s voice this time. I searched my memory and came up with nothing-see how annoying that is? “I’m sorry to call so early, but I’ve left a few messages on your cell phone and thought I’d try to catch you before you went out for the day.”

I flipped my book open again. Who had been leaving me messages? Just my dad’s accountant, Mr. Katz. I glanced at my cell phone-no light at all. The battery was dead, blown. I’d had it only a couple days, and it was currently plugged in to the charger.

I’d had zero luck with cell phones lately. Any electronics that worked through a line, like my computer, seemed to hold up okay, but anything wireless self-destructed when it saw me coming.

“Allie?” the woman said.

“Yes,” I said, still trying to place her voice. “My cell isn’t working. You might want to leave messages here on my home phone.”

“Do you want me to have Mr. Katz set you up with a new phone?”

And that was when I knew who it was. Violet. My dad’s latest wife. She had a young voice, and from the newspaper articles Nola had shown me, I knew she was about my age. I think I had met her, but that memory was toast too.

“No, that’s fine. It’s still under warranty. Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. Why are you calling?”

She hesitated, just a pause, an inhalation, but it made every instinct in my body rise up.

“Are you in trouble?” I asked.

She exhaled with a sort of laugh. “I’m fine, just fine. I was hoping you might want to get together for lunch today. I haven’t heard from you since before the coma. You didn’t contact me when you came back into town. I know we’ve only met once, but… well, since you weren’t able to come to the funeral… and there’s still so much unfinished business with Beckstrom Enterprises and your role in managing the company… I just thought… I don’t know. I thought we might want to get to know each other a little better. Talk about some things.”

My dad had been married six times. Years ago I’d stopped trying to make nice with the women who attached themselves to and were discarded by my father. Which is why I surprised myself by saying, “Sure. Let’s do dinner instead, if that’s okay. I have a lot of things to get to today.”

Violet sounded just as surprised. “Oh. Good. Dinner’s fine.”

We settled the time and restaurant-not one of the exclusive swanky spots in town, but Slide Long’s, known for its seafood-and then we said our good-byes.

I stared at the phone for a minute, trying to sort out how I felt about getting to know her.

I guess I was a little curious but mostly just lonely. My best friend lived three hundred miles away. The man I was supposed to love was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even know any of my neighbors.

And my dad was dead.

I wondered when I’d stopped liking being alone. Maybe somewhere in the days I couldn’t remember, I’d given up on the solitary woman bit and had actually let people into my life. And maybe I had really liked it.

Or maybe I just wasn’t in my right mind. Which might also explain the whole ghost-in-the-bathroom bit.

Well, whatever. Right now I had to get down to the police department and tell them what I knew about the day my dad died. After that I’d scout around town and see if there were any Hounding possibilities.

I picked up my journal and quickly wrote that I was giving a statement and had dinner plans with Violet. I paused, wondering if I should write that I’d seen a ghost. Common sense won out, and I simply wrote: Saw Dad’s ghost in the bathroom. Not fun. And hoped that would be that.