Magic to the Bone

Chapter Fourteen

There is something wonderful about silence, about blackness. For one thing there is no pain. For another there is no fear, just gentle drifting and casual ignorance of reality’s harsh light.

But silence cannot stretch on forever. Sounds punch their way through, muffled at first, a man’s voice, a name. My name. And the sound of my name carries so much more—it tells me who I am, and that I am not dead just yet.

I wonder if I’m breathing. Inhale.

Air, light, sound, taste, smell, and pain—hells, the pain—chew the silence to shreds and I am awake.

“Damn it, Allie, breathe. C’mon, babe. I can’t do this. You can’t do this to me.”

I opened my eyes—okay it took a few tries—but I finally got them open. I felt like I’d just spent the last month in a meat grinder.

“There.” Zay’s voice was shaking, his words coming out too fast. “Good. Good. Don’t give up. Don’t go away. Stay here. Good. Good.”

I blinked. I was going to open my eyes again, honest to goodness, but the silence was so easy, so soft, so empty.

Zay swore and dug his hands into my ribs, sending off shock waves of pain. “No. Fuck it, Allie. Come back to me.”

If I had fallen into a vat of hot mint, I couldn’t have felt more permeated with the sting of it.

Ow.

The darkness skittered out of my reach, all of its soft, welcoming nothingness covered by a warm, wet layer of mint. And the mint flowed toward me, gently forcing me to step back, to turn, to remember I was not breathing and that was bad. To take a breath.

I opened my eyes.

Zayvion’s face, ashen-green, sweat glittering in the tight black curls across his forehead and running wet lines down his cheek, hovered over me.

“Look at you and those beautiful eyes. Good job, babe. You’re doing really good. Take another easy breath. Perfect.” He smiled. “I am Grounding the hell out of you, Dove. You need to let go of the magic, let it rest, let it fall back into the earth. Can you do that?”

Oh sure. And after that maybe I’d show him my amazing high-wire trapeze act.

“Just keep looking at me.”

I blinked, but this time I could open my eyes again.

“Good. I’m going to talk you down into a trance, all right? I’ll be right here. You’ll be safe. You’ll be warm. Comfortable. You’re safe with me.”

I listened as he droned on, and every so often reminded me to breathe. And then he guided me to feel every part of my body from the top of my head to the soles of my feet and told me to exhale and envision all of the magic pouring out of me into the ground.

I did. And I was awake. For real this time.

Zay was still above me, still sweating, still shaking, and still looking a little sick around the edges.

“Hey,” I tried to say. It came out breathy and all vowel.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling, babe?”

Oh, like I could do cartwheels uphill.

“Bad,” I said. “Turd.” I’d meant to say “tired” but it didn’t come out right. Zay didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s okay. That’s good,” he said. “I’m going to help you sit, then get you to bed. Ready?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. The room spun. Eventually I figured out it was me moving, sitting up, and not the world doing a lazy Susan.

Smart, I are.

Zay sat there with me, anxiously brushing my hair away from my face until I looked back into his eyes again.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Help me up.”

With him doing most of the heavy lifting, I was on my feet and, with his arms supporting me and his voice a constant babble of encouragement, I was across the living room, down the hall, and lying back thankfully, so very thankfully, on Zay’s bed. The strange thing was I didn’t have on any clothes.

He fussed with my pillows, and I realized some of the moisture on his cheeks wasn’t sweat. It looked like he had been crying.

“Zay?”

“I’m here.” He lowered closer to me.

“What’s wrong?”

His face went blank, still, frozen. Then he hung his head. “Nothing,” he said. He laughed, choked, then looked back up at me. “Everything’s okay.”

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “Zay. I don’t remember.” I hated saying it, but I had a really bad feeling I had missed out on something big.

“You were shot. Do you remember that?”

I remembered pain. I remembered terror. Anger.

“Right here.” Zay gently cupped my left side, just beneath my ribs. “I think the bullet went all the way through, but I haven’t gone looking for it yet. You bled pretty hard.”

“Bled?” It seemed that unless Zay had stitched me up or cauterized the wound, I should still be bleeding.

He nodded. “You healed. Like you did to Cody, I think. Magic closed the wound. Does it still hurt?”

I felt his finger brush downward from the top of my rib cage, lost feeling for some time, then felt his finger again toward my hip bone.

“It’s numb,” I said. As a matter of fact, I was feeling a bit numb myself.

“Who shot me?”

“A hit man named Dane Lanister. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?”

I raised my eyebrows. “As sure as a part-time amnesiac can be.” Oh, good, the shock was wearing off.

Zay grinned. He leaned down and kissed me, not hard. I tried to kiss him back, but was too damn tired. He tasted like salt, sweat, tears, and the bitter tang of fear. Even so, he tasted good, familiar.

“Did you catch him?” I asked when he had pulled away.

“No,” Zay said. “You were pouring magic at him in a spell I have never seen before. Do you remember that?”

I shook my head.

“I had cast a Holding spell at the same time.” He gave me a long, level stare, like maybe that should mean more to me.

“And what happened?”

“Do you remember Bonnie disappearing with Cody?”

“In the field?”

“Right.”

“So Dane—the man who shot me,” I said, “disappeared?”

“Yes.”

Which meant either Zay and I had created just the right combination of spells to physically move mass—a preposterous notion—or he had one of those stolen disks, a less preposterous notion.

“Who is he?” I asked. “Who does he work for? How do you know him?”

“I don’t know who he’s working for right now, but I’m guessing it’s the same person Bonnie’s contracted with.”

The person who has the disks. The person who has Cody—the only person who saw who killed my father. The only person who could clear my name.

“How do you know him?” I asked again.

Zay stood and walked over to his dresser. He dug out a sweater and pulled it on over his long-sleeved T-shirt. “I’ve seen him off and on in my . . . career.”

“How magnificently vague of you.”

Zay tugged a stocking hat down over his head. “Thank you.”

“He tried to kill me. I deserve a better explanation.”

“There are more than one faction of magic users who do not follow the law, Allie. You’ve run into some—you’ve Hounded long enough to know what some people are willing to pay in exchange for power. The kinds of things they are willing to do.”

“Cut to the chase. We both know there are creeps and hustlers out there. Are you talking about black-market magics?”

Zay pulled his coat off a chair. “More than that. Dane runs with a pretty influential group. I’m not going to tell you their name.”

“Why? So in case I’m captured they can’t torture the information out of me?”

He gave me a long, silent stare.

“Oh. Well, isn’t that nice. So you’re talking serious psychopaths? Why would they want me dead?”

“I don’t think it’s only about you, Allie. It’s about who gets to control the tech—or maybe who gets to control your father’s company, which controls the tech. You just happen to be in their way.”

“Violet isn’t involved in this, is she?”

“If she is, she’s on our side.”

“We have a side?”

“Damn right we do.”

I pushed the covers off my legs and broke out in a sweat. Hells, I was tired. Still, I pushed up so I was sitting, and the covers slipped off. Oh yeah. I was naked. I tugged the blanket up over my chest and held it there. I was suddenly very dizzy. That was enough aerobics for the moment.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To call in a few favors. You can’t stay here long. Not after the amount of magic you poured out. I set some Diversion spells, which should confuse anyone hunting you for about an hour.” He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. “This won’t take me long. Rest. When I come back, we’ll need to leave on foot. Think you’ll be able to do that?”

“Which part? Resting or running?”

“Both.”

“Is there an option C? Take a vacation somewhere sunny, and drink a lot of rum until the world unfucks itself?”

Zay paced over to me, pulled the covers back over my legs, leaned down, and kissed me. He was trembling a little. Tired, I figured, or hurting. I wasn’t the only one who had thrown a lot of magic around.

“It’s good to have you back. Be here when I come home.” Then he turned and left the room.

Even tired, even burned out, I could feel spells unweave as Zay left the room. I heard the dead bolts on the door snick shut.

I suppose he meant well. My knight in ski-coat armor and all that. But I was not about to stay here and wait for him to find some way to save me. Because as soon as that Diversion spell wore off, anyone looking for me wouldn’t have to wonder where I was. They’d know, because I glowed.

I was tired of running. I wanted to be one step ahead of this problem for a change, instead of a mile behind. And the only thing I had on my side was Cody. If he had indeed seen who killed my father. Instead of waiting here to get found out, I was going to do a little hunting of my own.

First, though, I needed clothes.

It took a while, but I put on my bra and jeans, a sweater of Zay’s, and a pair of his socks too. While I was at it, I borrowed a stocking hat out of the half dozen he had in his sock drawer and put that on.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and indulged in my new hobby of breathing heavily and waiting for the room to stop spinning.

C’mon, Allie. Suck it up and get moving. I bullied myself to my feet, waited for the vertigo to pass, and walked out into the living room.

Blood. Everywhere. Blood covered the carpet in a wide, wet pool. Blood painted the wall and the side of the couch.

Holy shit.

I pressed my hand over my side, couldn’t feel the pressure, but could feel the edges of a scar. So much for wearing a bikini again.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I wanted to cry. There is nothing so freaky as seeing your own blood poured out like spilled cans of bargain-basement paint. There is nothing more sickening than realizing that your world has changed so much that people have actually tried to kill you. It made me feel vulnerable, and threatened to freeze me with fear. Where could I go that I would be safe? There was nowhere in this world I couldn’t be found. Not here. Not my apartment. Not even Nola’s. At any moment, around any corner, there could be someone with a gun pointed at my head.

I stared up at the ceiling and inhaled and exhaled, fighting down panic. I was good at fighting panic—I rode elevators—and had a healthy aptitude for denial.

When panic stopped squeezing my throat and I could breathe more evenly, I looked away from the ceiling. I refused to look at the floor or walls or furniture covered in my blood.

I was light-headed but I walked over to where the coat I had borrowed from Nola hung, checked it to make sure it was clean and that it had my little book in the pocket, then put it on.

I buttoned it up and went around the other side of the couch to avoid getting my shoes wet. I paused at the door. Zay had cast a hell of a spell. It practically vibrated out of the walls. He’d walked through it. There had to be a way to unweave it enough so I could get through it without breaking it, because if I broke it, I’d be a kill-me-now neon sign.

The very idea of drawing on magic, even a thin tendril of it, made my stomach turn. Every inch of me felt raw and empty. I was pretty sure the ability to cast magic had been blown out of me. I didn’t know how long it would take me to recover from that.

Using magic to unlock the glyph was out of the question. Maybe he had it set so that anyone crossing it from the outside in would be stopped, but anyone crossing it from inside the room to outside would be okay.

Nothing to do but try. I put my hand on the doorknob, unlocked it, slid the dead bolt. Turned the handle. The door opened. I couldn’t sense a change in the spell. I put my fingertips in the doorway, didn’t feel any changes, put my whole hand, then my arm through so my hand was over the threshold. Nothing.

The ward was set outside in, bad. Inside out, good.

Thank you, Zayvion Jones.

I stepped through to the hall and shut the door behind me. The building didn’t smell so good anymore; the heavy odors of people living too close together hit my sinuses and made me feel like choking. It was probably just an aftereffect of channeling so much magic—my senses were blown open. The lights in the hall seemed too bright, and a moth in the ceiling light sounded like a jumbo jet.

Of course, for all I knew, I could be running a fever, or bleeding internally from the wound. Just because the hole had closed didn’t mean the healing had worked any deeper. I pressed my arm against my side, trying to decide if it felt squishy, or in any way like there was more fluid under the skin. Swollen, which, I supposed, was to be expected. Internal bleeding?

How the hell should I know? I was not a doctor.

But I was walking okay, tired, dizzy, but not in excruciating pain. That had to count for something, right?

The doors on either side of the hall were shut and I didn’t hear any noise through them. Even though I couldn’t remember the moment I was shot, I figured gunfire would stir a few people out of bed. Unless they had all gone to work already. Or maybe Zay had fancy noise-dampening spells too.

Possible.

There were two doors at the end on the hall. The stairwell and the elevator. I had to pick one. I wanted to go down the stairs. But I didn’t want to wear myself out. Hells. Elevator, for the win.

I could do this. I’d done elevators a lot lately. I was great at elevators. And not one had sent me plummeting to my death. Yet.

I pressed the button and walked to the side of the doors, so I could see someone getting off the elevator before they saw me. The bell dinged and the doors opened. I waited for someone to step out. Listened for movement. The door started to close again, so I got moving and stuck my hand against it to hold it open. The door reopened and, sure enough, the elevator was empty.

I stepped in. The coffin closed down around me.

Strange how it never mattered how badly you hurt, you could still feel another pain—like the morphine needle when you’d broken a bone. And no matter how tired I was, I could still manage enough adrenaline to freak out in an elevator.

I pressed L for luck and leaned against one wall, the brushed bronze of it cool against my cheek. I stared at the numbers as they slowly blinked downward, broke out in a sweat, inhaled through my nose, exhaled out my mouth. The sound of my breath was accompanied by a high, panicky moan. I thought about calm rivers, summer days, soft sunlight. It didn’t work.

I wanted to run out the doors when the elevator opened to the lobby, but I couldn’t move that fast. Like wading through a bad dream, I pushed myself to walk across the elevator floor and finally, finally made it into the lobby.

My heart pounded too fast for so little exertion. Panic probably had something to do with it. I gritted my teeth to keep from making any sound. I could do this. I just needed to get outside. To get some fresh air.

I heard sirens and didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the door and get outside. The door was glass and iron and let in the cool gray light of a slate-sky morning. Seeing that cloudy light made me feel better. The world—the real world with sun and wind and cars and people who didn’t break into apartments with guns—was right out there. I pushed through the door, out into the cold, out into the wind, out into spaciousness with no walls and no ceiling and no guns I could see, and took deep, gulping breaths. I shivered and wiped the sweat off my face. Eventually I realized the sirens were growing louder.

The sirens were real. There were more than one. There must have been a bad accident. I glanced around to get my bearings, and checked out the name of the apartments: Cornerstone. The building and street weren’t familiar. Sirens kept getting closer, louder. Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was the gunfire and somebody had reported it. Maybe they were coming for me.

I kept my hands tucked in my pockets and my head down as I walked toward the street corner. The cross street was Stark, and that helped some. I knew which side of town I was on—the east, on the other side of the river from my apartment and downtown.

But I wasn’t planning on going to my apartment. I was planning on Hounding Cody. I just needed to sit for a couple of minutes and get my strength back.

I waited on the corner, watching traffic go by as sirens grew louder. I did not want to be standing on a corner if those sirens really were out looking for me. I either needed to get walking, duck into a building—all of which looked to be shops, offices, or apartments—or I needed to catch a ride.

I dug in the coat pockets. Nola had stuffed some money in them, bless her heart. I hailed a cab, got one to stop on my third try, and ducked in just as the blue and red lights of a police car—two, no, three—came down the street. The cab waited for the police to pass before pulling away from the curb.

“Where to?” he asked.

I had no idea where to go, but I knew the one place I could hide better than anywhere in town. The one place Violet had said their leads had sent them when they were looking for the disks.

“St. John’s.”

As he turned into traffic, the sirens stopped. I glanced back. Sure enough, they had turned up the street toward Zayvion’s apartment.

Maybe someone had reported the gunshots.

Maybe Zayvion had lied and turned me in. A chill rolled over me. Would he do that? Hells, I might do that if someone bled all over my rug and left bullet holes in my walls. He might be telling the truth about working for a secret society, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t human. There was bound to be some sort of reward for my capture. If not on public record, then somewhere, behind closed doors, with the corporations that wanted the tech, and the people who wanted me out of their way to get it.

Could I be more suspicious? It made me feel guilty thinking Zay might do something like that, but I’d been used, influenced, tricked, and betrayed so many times in life, it was hard to trust.

He’d been there for me, my conscience whispered. Every time things had gotten really bad, Zay was there. And now I was breaking my promise to stay put and wait for him.

Maybe I was pushing him away like Nola said.

Well, if those police were looking to arrest me for killing my father, then maybe it was better I didn’t drag Zayvion down with me. I didn’t think our relationship was far enough along to be in the aiding and abetting stage.

Or maybe that excuse was just another way to push him away. Push away a man who’d put his life on the line for me. Someone who’d nearly gotten shot because of me. Someone who was trying to look after me.

I rubbed at my forehead. It made my head hurt. I didn’t know what the truth was, didn’t know how my life had spiraled out of control so quickly. What I did know was that I needed to find Cody. And since this whole thing had started when I Hounded the hit on Boy, that’s where I was going. To Mama’s. If my dad really had set an Offload on Boy, then there was something going on between Mama and my father, or maybe Beckstrom Enterprises and Mama, that Mama was not sharing with me. And I wanted to know what that was. I wanted to know if maybe she too had played me for a fool and tried to use me to get at my dad.

It occurred to me that she could have agreed to let Boy be hit, agreed to call me to Hound him, and been pleased to send me on to my father’s office in a rage. I had thought Mama’s anger and fear were real—that she was truly concerned Boy would die. I thought the news of my father being behind the hit had been a surprise to her. I thought I’d read her right.

But it was a hell of a coincidence that the one day I visited my father in seven years was the day he was killed. And whoever killed him knew I’d be there, and forged my signature on the hit. Mama was one of the people who knew I’d been there. So was Zay.

I was the queen of suspicion today. Go, me.

Raindrops, fat and heavy, splatted on the cab’s windshield, then a few more fell. Pretty soon morning had dipped into a darker gray and it was raining pretty hard. I was really happy I’d taken one of Zay’s hats. Really happy I had a warm coat. And as soon as the cab crossed the North Burlington railroad track, I could have sworn I’d just taken a painkiller. My shoulders relaxed, my neck stopped hurting. I didn’t know what it was, but I always felt better coming up to this side of town. And even that was making me feel suspicious right now.

“This is it,” the cabbie said.

“Thanks.” I pressed a ten into his hand and got out of the cab.

Rain bulleted down, and I impressed myself by jogging across the street. I kept close to the buildings, taking advantage of their overhangs as much as possible. The air smelled of oil, the rot off the river, and the chlorine-clean smell of rain doing no good to wash away the musky decay of wood and asphalt and sewage.

What I didn’t smell were the spices and grease of Mama’s restaurant. What I didn’t see were lights in her windows. What I didn’t hear were the sounds of her voice, hollering orders at her Boys.

Maybe barging in her front door wasn’t the best way to go about this. Time for Plan B.

I ducked into the alley beside her restaurant and took a minute to think about what I should do. Maybe Mama’s was closed. Maybe she was visiting the youngest Boy, at the hospital. Maybe I needed to come up with a plan that was something more than “demand Mama tell me the truth and find Cody and get him to the cops.”

One thing I definitely didn’t need was to stand out here in the cold and rain much longer. Hat and coat didn’t mean I was pneumonia proof.

The dark clouds were going black fast, and the wind was starting to gust. The rain shower picked up speed and the temperature dropped. I could see my breath. We were in for a hell of a storm. The change in air pressure, or maybe temperature, made my right arm ache, and stung in the old blood magic scars on my left arm.

I heard the subaudible growl of thunder in the distance, and felt a strange echo of it in my bones. I felt like a string resonating to a distant orchestra. There was magic in that storm—wild magic—and it was coming fast.

The wind shifted, coming hard off the river. A gust filled the alley with a strong peppery odor. I sneezed and looked over my shoulder. I needn’t have bothered. I knew who was standing there, smiling at me, drenched in lavender. Bonnie.

And yes, this time she had her gun out for show and tell.

“Allie! It’s so great to see you. We’re gonna go take a walk, ’kay?” She smiled her bright, cheerleader smile and waved her gun like a pom-pom at me. My stomach clenched and my legs felt weak. Looking at that gun was like getting a drink of the hooch responsible for the hangover from hell. I might not have a good memory of being shot, but my subconscious did, and my body did too—a sensory memory of the smell of metal and gunpowder, of someone standing in front of me with a rod of cold steel in their hand, of pain, of terror.

I seriously needed to figure out why I thought going to North Portland was ever a good idea.

“Bonnie,” I said, trying to get my voice down an octave. “How’s it been going?”

She looped her arm in my arm, and locked down tight, so we were side-by-side like the best girlfriends ever. She held the gun in her right hand, waving it around while she talked. All she had to do was bend her elbow and the muzzle of that gun would be buried in the ribs I had not been shot in yet.

“Oh, it’s just been fine. Just fine,” she said, like we were talking kids and husbands in the aisle of a supermarket. “Got some new clients right now, and the office boy is working out. Oh, I did a little job that the police are very happy about.” She leaned her head in toward me, so she could lower her voice and press the gun against my jacket. “A murder case. Very high profile. Crime of passion. Between family members. It’s been all over the news. Maybe you’ve heard about it?”

“I haven’t had time to keep up with current events.”

She chuckled and started walking toward the back of the alley, and I had no choice but to go with her. “It is so good to see you. And how about you? Where have you been keeping yourself, rich girl?”

“Around,” I said as she marched me down to the back end of the alley. “Tried to take a little vacation in the country, but that went to hell.”

“I love the country! Fresh air, cute animals.” Wave the gun, jam it in my ribs. “Your friend Nola sure has a nice place, don’t you think? Hope she’s doing okay.”

A thinly veiled threat. At least we’d gotten that out in the open. And while I was scared, I was also feeling morbidly pleased about the situation. I had a feeling Bonnie was going to take me to where Cody was—or at least I hoped so. She was the last person I’d seen with him.

I decided it was the perfect time to work on my optimism and look at Bonnie as one psycho bitch of a silver lining. I couldn’t get Cody and his testimony to the police, or a lawyer, or maybe the FBI, if I didn’t know where Cody was.

And if she wasn’t leading me to Cody, she was either dragging me off to the police, where at least I’d get my one phone call—and I figured I’d use it to call Violet and see if she could release some of Dad’s blood-hungry lawyers—or she was taking me to whoever hired her to find me in the first place.

“I’m sure you know all about the country,” I said as lightly as I could. “Didn’t you just make a special trip out there?”

Bonnie laughed, and I mean she threw her head back and cackled up into the rain.

They say it only takes a tablespoon of water to drown a person. I was hoping they were right. But Bonnie didn’t drown, which was an amazing shame considering the size of her mouth.

“Sure I did! I took a special trip just to go see an old cow farm.”

Chicken farm, but I didn’t bother to correct her.

She turned down the road less used that ambled up behind Mama’s place. I figured the place had a back door, but had never felt the need to go snooping for it.

The truth of the matter was, I was getting pretty tired. I was cold, wet, hyperaware of every smell, texture, color, and change of light. The storm was looming, heavy as a migraine closing in. I just wanted to sit down somewhere quiet and dark and warm, and wait for the storm to pass. So when she turned toward the back door of Mama’s, I was grateful.

“Now, we’re going to take care of you real nice. Promise. We’re just so excited you came by.” She opened the back door, and the spell woven over the door hit me like a barrel full of bricks. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was walk through that door. I hadn’t felt a threshold spell that strong since Zayvion’s place.

“Come on in. Don’t be shy,” a man’s voice said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I swallowed blood and blinked hard. I knew that voice. And when he turned on the lamp next to him, I knew I shouldn’t be surprised, but damn it, I was.

James, Mama’s slick-as-a-snake Boy stood there, grinning at me. But what surprised me more was that next to him stood another smiling man. And that man was Zayvion Jones.