Magic to the Bone

Chapter One

It was the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, and all I wanted was a decent cup of coffee, a hot breakfast, and a couple hours away from the stink of used magic that seeped through the walls of my apartment building every time it rained.

My current fortune of ten bucks wasn’t going to get me that hot breakfast, but it was going to buy a good dark Kenya roast and maybe a muffin down at Get Mugged. What more could a girl ask for?

I took a quick shower, pulled on jeans, a black tank top, and boots. I brushed my dark hair back and tucked it behind my ears, hoping for the short, wet, sexy look. I didn’t bother with makeup. Being six foot tall and the daughter of one of the most notorious businessmen in town got me enough attention. So did my pale green eyes, athletic build, and the family knack for coercion.

I pulled on my jacket, careful not to jostle my left shoulder too much. The scars across my deltoid still hurt, even though it had been three months since the creep with the knife jumped me. I had known the scars might be permanent, but I didn’t know they would hurt so much every time it rained. Blood magic, when improperly wielded by an uneducated street hustler, was a pain that just kept on giving. Lucky me.

One of these days, when my student loans were paid off and I’d dug my credit rating out of the toilet, I’d be able to turn down cheap Hounding jobs that involved back-alley drug deals and black-market revenge spells. Hell, maybe I’d even have enough money to afford a cell phone again.

I patted my pocket to make sure the small, leather-bound book and pen were there. I didn’t go anywhere without those two things. I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to remember who I was when things went bad. And things seemed to be going bad a lot lately.

I made it as far as the door. The phone rang. I paused, trying to decide if I should answer it. The phone had come with the apartment, and like the apartment it was as low-tech as legally allowed, which meant there was no caller ID.

It could be my dad—or more likely his secretary of the month—delivering the obligatory annual birthday lecture. It could be my friend Nola, if she had left her farm and gone into town to use a pay phone. It could be my landlord asking for the rent I hadn’t paid. Or it could be a Hounding job.

I let go of the doorknob and walked over to the phone. Let the happy news begin.

“Hello?”

“Allie girl?” It was Mama Rossitto, from the worst part of North Portland. Her voice sounded flat and fuzzy, broken up by the cheap landline. Ever since I did a couple Hounding jobs for Mama a few months ago, she treated me like I was the only person in the city who could trace a line of magic back to its user and abuser.

“Yes, Mama, it’s me.”

“You fix. You fix for us.”

“Can it wait? I was headed to breakfast.”

“You come now. Right now.” Mama’s voice had a pitch in it that had nothing to do with the bad connection. She sounded panicked. Angry. “Boy is hurt. Come now.”

The phone clacked down, but must not have hit the cradle. I heard the clash of dishes pushed into the sink, the sputter of a burner snapping to life, then Mama’s voice, farther off, shouting to one of her many sons—half of whom were runaways she’d taken in, all of whom answered to the name Boy.

I heard something else too, a high, light whistle like a string buzzing in the wind, softer than a wheezy newborn. I’d heard that sound before. I tried to place it, but found holes where my memory should be.

Great.

Using magic meant it used you back. Forget the fairy-tale hocus-pocus, wave a wand and bling-o, sparkles and pixie dust crap. Magic, like booze, sex, and drugs, gave as good as it got. But unlike booze and the rest, magic could do incredible good. In the right hands, used the right way, it could save lives, ease pain, and streamline the complexities of the modern world. Magic was revolutionary, like electricity, penicillin, and plastic, and in the thirty years since it had been discovered and made accessible to the general public, magic had done a lot of good.

At first, everyone wanted a piece of it—magically enhanced food, fashion, entertainment, sex. And then the reality of such use set in. Magic always takes its due from the user, and the price is always pain. It didn’t take people long to figure out how to transfer that pain to someone else, though.

Laws were put in place to regulate who could access the magic, and how and why. But there weren’t enough police to keep up with stolen cars and murders in the city, much less the misuse of a force no one can see.

Things went downhill fast, and as far as I can tell, they stayed there.

But while magic made the average Joe pay one painful price each time he used it, sometimes magic double dipped on me. I’d get the expected migraine, flu, roaring fever, or whatever, and then, just for fun, magic would kick a few holes in my memories. It didn’t happen every time, and it didn’t happen in any pattern or for any reason I could fathom. Just sometimes when I use magic, it makes me pay the price in pain, then takes a few of my memories for good measure.

That’s why I carried a little blank book—to record important bits of my life. And it’s also why four years at Harvard, pounding tomes for my masters in business magic, hadn’t worked out quite the way I’d wanted it to. Still, I was a Hound, and I was good at it. Good enough that I could keep food on the table, live in the crappiest part of Old Town, and make the minimum payment on my student loans. And hey, who didn’t have a few memories they wouldn’t mind getting rid of, right?

The phone clattered and the line went dead.

Happy birthday to me.

If Boy had been hurt by magic, Mama should have called 911 for a doctor who knew how to handle those sorts of things, not a Hound like me. Suspicious and superstitious, Mama always thought her family was under magical attack. Not one of the times I’d Hounded for her had her problem been a magical hit. Just bad luck, spoiled meat, and, once, cockroaches the size of small dogs (shudder).

But I had done some other jobs since I’d set up shop here in Portland. Every one of those sent me sniffing the illegal magical Offloads back to corporations. And nine times out of nine, even that kind of proof, my testimony on the stand, and a high-profile trial wouldn’t get the corporation much more than a cash penalty.

I rolled my good shoulder to try to get the kink out of my neck, but only managed to make my arm hurt more. I didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t just ignore her call, and there was no other way to get in touch with her. Mama wouldn’t answer the phone. She was convinced it was tapped, though I couldn’t think of anyone who would be interested in the life of a woman who lived in North Portland, in the broken-down neighborhood of St. John’s, a neglected and mostly forgotten place cut off from the magic that flowed through the rest of the city.

I tipped my head back, stared at the ceiling, and exhaled. Okay. I’d go and make sure Boy was all right. I’d try to talk Mama into calling a doctor. I’d check for any magical wrongdoing. I’d look for rats. I’d bill her half price. Then I would go out for a late birthday breakfast.

A girl could hope, anyway.

I walked out the door and locked it. I didn’t bother with alarm spells. Most single women in the city thought alarm spells would keep them safe, but I knew firsthand that if someone wanted to break into your apartment badly enough, there wasn’t a spell worth paying the price for that could keep them out.

I took the stairs instead of the elevator, because I hate small spaces, and made it to the street in no time. The mid-September morning was gray as a grave and cold enough that my breath came out in plumes of steam. The wind gusted off the Willamette River and rain sliced at my face.

Portland lived up to its name. Even though it was a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had that industrial, crumbling-brick-warehouse feel of the working port it still was, especially along the banks of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. The Willamette River was practically in my backyard, behind the warehouses and the train and bus stations. Without squinting I could see four of the mismatched bridges that crossed the water, connecting downtown with the east side of the city. Over that river and north, close to where the Willamette and Columbia met, was Mama’s neighborhood.

I zipped my coat, pulled up my hood, and wished I’d thought about putting on a sweater before I left.

A bus wouldn’t get me to Mama’s fast enough. However, the good thing about being a six-foot-tall woman was that cabs, few and far between though they may be, stopped when you whistled. It didn’t hurt that I had my dad’s good looks, either. When I was in the mood to smile, I could get almost anyone to see things my way, even without using magic. True to the Beckstrom blood, I also had a gift for magic-based Influence. But after watching my dad Influence my mother, his lovers, business partners, and even me to get his way, I’d sworn off using it.

It wasn’t like I had wanted to go to Harvard. I had Juilliard in mind: art, not business; music, not magic. But my dad had severe ideas about what constituted a useful education.

I waved down a black-and-white taxi and ducked into the backseat. The driver, a skinny man who smelled like he brushed his hair with bacon drippings, glanced in the rearview. “Where to?”

“St. John’s.”

His eyes narrowed. I watched him consider telling a nice girl like me about a bad side of town like that. But he must have decided a fare’s a fare, and a one-way was better than none at all. He pulled into traffic and didn’t look back at me again.

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 before. 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.”

“I already called,” a deep voice behind me said.

I stopped and looked over at Zayvion, who was still leaning against the wall, coffee in his hand.

“Before you got here,” he said. “They’re on the way.” As if to illustrate his point, the distant siren grew louder.

Convenient, that. But should I take his word for it? I opened my mouth to say something. Mama beat me to it.

“You have no right here, Zayvion Jones.” Mama’s voice was sharp, and heavy with that muddy accent I could not place. She was more than angry. She was furious. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never seen her so mad, not even when she’d been robbed for the third time in a month. “My family. My home. My street. Not yours, Zayvion Jones. Not one of your kind.”

Zayvion stiffened for the briefest moment. He suddenly seemed much less the harmless drifter and much more a figure of authority. He shot a look at me, those brown eyes calculating something. Maybe trying to decide if I was friend or foe. I don’t know what he came up with, but he leaned back and that edge of authority—of power—was gone, leaving him just a harmless drifter again.

He shrugged. “Then you can tell them to leave when they get here. Tell them there’s nothing’s wrong with your son.”

“No,” I said, not wanting Mama’s anger to override her reason. “The ambulance is a good idea. He needs a doctor—someone who can break an Offload pattern or set a Siphon to bleed away the strength of this spell.” I walked back over to Boy, the youngest, and rested my hand on his too-quickly beating heart.

I wanted to help the kid, wanted to tear the ropes of magic from him. But the magic fed off him as if he were the caster. That is the power of an Offload: it makes someone else pay for magic they have not used. I did not have the training to break such a strong spell without risking Boy’s life.

“Who, Allie?” Mama asked again.

I shook my head, angry at my father and his company for thinking they could get away with something like this, and worried that Mama might do something stupid—like send out a half dozen of her Boys with guns to even the score. I didn’t want her to do that. Not until I had a chance to do it first.

“It was a corporate hit—an Offload for magic used in the city. A lot of magic. For something big. I’m going to trace it back to the caster. I’ll let you know when I find out for sure. Call the cops and tell them.”

I strode to the door, angry and a little dizzy. I hoped the Boys would take care of things and see that Boy the youngest got to a doctor, even if Mama was too angry or too stubborn to do so.

“I want them to hurt, Allie,” Mama demanded. “I want them to pay for my poor boy. Tell them we’ll go to court, go to news channels, tear them down. Tell them they will pay.”

“They’ll pay,” I said as I brushed past Zayvion and straight-armed the door open.

I was half a block away when the ambulance turned the corner and headed straight to Mama’s. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Mama standing on her front step, waving them down.

Maybe Boy still had a chance.

Anger took me a long way, down the street and five more blocks before I hailed a cab. Anger made me not care it was raining, made me not care Zayvion followed me and held the cab door open and slid across the vinyl seat next to me. Anger even made me tell the cabbie to take me to Beckstrom Enterprises as quickly as he could.

“You okay?” Zayvion asked. When I didn’t answer, he put his hand on my arm—the one with the scars. And his hand felt good there, soothing and warm like winter mint.

I pulled away. I didn’t much trust him, though I had to give him points for calling the ambulance back there. Boy could very well have died if he hadn’t. “I’m fine.”

He frowned. “Allie, your neck. It’s bruising.”

Great. I’d forgotten to set a Disbursement spell when I cast magic to Hound Boy. That meant I didn’t get to choose how magic would make me pay for using it.

Lovely.

“It’s fine.” I pulled my coat collar closer to my jaw. I hated being around people when I hurt. But I’d done this to myself. I always paid my own price for using magic, mostly because I didn’t want to be indebted to a Proxy. If I had remembered to cast a Disbursement spell, I could have chosen how the pain would manifest: a two-day migraine, a week of insomnia, even flulike sickness—something fairly dramatic that I could get over quickly. I hated the slower Disbursement route some Hounds took. Sure it made for a less immediately painful price, but one that lasted much longer and took a harder toll. I’d seen too many Hounds end up blind, deaf, and insane. That is, if the pain pills, booze, and drugs didn’t kill them first.

I glanced at the back of my hands as new bruises darkened, and tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t because of the sharp pinch of pain beneath my ribs. Great. I was probably bruising inside and out, and wouldn’t be able to move in about an hour.

The good news just kept coming.

Zayvion made a small tsk sound. “You didn’t forget to set a Disbursement, did you?”

“Bite me.”

The cab screeched around a corner and I realized I had forgotten something else. I had forked over my last ten bucks for the cab ride to Mama’s and was now completely and totally broke.

Fantastic.

I licked my lips, which also hurt, then looked over at Zayvion. He watched me with a Zen sort of expression. He didn’t say anything. Just sat there like he had all the time in the world to wait for me to say something.

So I said something. “That dinner you asked me about.”

He tipped his chin down and raised an eyebrow.

My stomach did that flip again.

“Yes?”

“You think you could spring for cab fare instead and we’ll call it even?”

“Will you tell me who put the hit on Boy?”

“Are you related to Mama?” I asked. “Are you a cop? Do you have her permission to receive that information? Then no. My work is confidential. I don’t even know why you’re in this cab with me.”

“Maybe I’d like to get to know you better.” He gave me that nice smile again, and it did more than just make my stomach flip. Even though he was wet and slouched against the grimy seat of a cab, and even though I had just told him to mind his own business, I found myself thinking about what that soft mouth of his would taste like.

What could I say? I was a sucker for guys who made solid decisions during a crisis, and weren’t afraid to step up and help people, especially little kids. But what I couldn’t figure out was what stake he had in this.

When I didn’t say anything, Zayvion looked out the window, calmly watching the streets whiz by at an alarming speed. We were heading downtown fast, the buildings going from gray concrete to glass and iron and steel.

“I’ll figure out who did it when we get to wherever we’re going, you know,” he said.

“Maybe. But why do you care? Do you think you can cash in on this somehow? Are you a reporter slumming for dirt?”

“No.”

“Are you one of Mama’s Boys?”

“No.”

“A cop?”

The cab swerved, laid on the horn, and made a nauseating left-hand turn. I brushed my hand over my forehead, wiping away sweat. I suddenly wasn’t feeling so good. Not nearly good enough to be stuck in a cab that smelled like curry and gym socks with a guy I couldn’t get a good read on.

“Allie?”

“Listen,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “It doesn’t matter who I’m going to see. I could be picking up my dry cleaning for all you know.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“There is no ‘we’ in this, Zayvion.”

He shrugged. “That could change.”

Great. A guy who liked girls who played hard to get.

“Is this how you usually pick up women?”

That made him smile again. “Why? Is it working?”

If I weren’t feeling so sick, and so mad at my dad, I might actually enjoy this sort of situation. But not today. Today I had to face a man I hadn’t seen since I was eighteen and had suddenly found myself leaving for Harvard. My father is good at magic. Very good. It took me two years to shed the mind-numbing grip of Influence he had cast. Two years of attending the school he wanted me to attend, learning the skills he wanted me to learn, and becoming the thing he wanted me to become. Two years of being his puppet. And now I was going to stand up to him and tell him I wasn’t going to let him get away with hurting a little kid.

“I’m just not interested right now, okay?”

The cab stopped at a light, gunned through the green, and jerked to a stop double-parked across the street from a high-rise. The building was forty-eight floors of rough, black stone and dark, reflective windows. Elaborate lines of iron and steel twisted like gothic vines to web the entire structure. At the very top of the building was a spire supporting a massive gold-tipped Beckstrom Storm Rod. There was absolutely no mistaking that the entire building was a harvesting station for the rare storms of wild magic that hit the city.

“Leave the meter running,” I said. “I’ll be right back out to pay.” I pulled on the door handle, opened the door, and groaned. I felt like I’d just lost a fight with a bulldozer.

The cold air felt good, then it felt too cold. Shivering made my entire body hurt. Still, I made it through the lead-lined glass front doors, across the cavernous lobby, sparsely decorated with wedges of black marble against white marble, and to the elevator without drawing much attention from the business-suited comers and goers within. Maybe my bruising wasn’t as bad as Zayvion said it was.

My father’s office was, of course, the entire top floor of the building. And Zayvion, for no reason I could understand, followed me across the lobby to the elevator.

“What part of not interested don’t you get, Zayvion?”

He held up a hand. “I have an appointment on the top floor. I also paid for the cab. You owe me ten bucks.”

“How thoughtful,” I drawled. “And the top floor? Isn’t that interesting?”

The elevator door opened on a polished wood interior—a warm contrast to the rest of the Art Deco marble and iron decor of the lobby. Zayvion put his hand out and held the door. He waited for me to enter the elevator.

I hesitated. What if he was part of the hit on Boy? He didn’t smell of old magic, but right now, hurting and angry, my Hound instincts were seriously off. Even if he wasn’t part of the hit, getting in an empty elevator with someone who might turn out to be only an everyday sort of stalker, wasn’t exactly on my “good girl, you get to live” list of smart choices.

Cripes. I could take him. Even sick. Even sore. Even in an elevator.

I walked in and pressed the button for the top floor. Zayvion made a little “what a surprise” sound and stood on the other side of the elevator, his hands folded in front of him.

The door slid closed and suddenly the elevator seemed way too small for the two of us. I took a good deep breath, trying not to think about the walls closing in, the ceiling pressing down, the floor mashing up, until there was no air, no space. My palms were wet with sweat.

This was not working. Think of happy. Think of good. Coffee was good, even though I hadn’t had any yet today. Flowers were good—flowers in big open fields. Big open fields like Nola’s farm were good. It had been too long since I’d seen her. I’d only been to her big open farm with big open fields twice since her husband, John, died.

Death was not good. My chest tightened. That wasn’t good either, so I went back to thinking about flowers and big open fields, and the coffee I wished I’d had this morning.

I hated that I had to see my dad. It had been seven years since he and I had been in a room together. I wished it could be seven more. And having to see him like this—because of what he had done to Boy—made me really mad.

The one thing Harvard got right was this: anger made using magic impossible. For everyone. No exception. It was good because it simplified some things, like whether or not murder via magic was premeditated. Quick answer: always.

I worked on thinking calm thoughts and whispered a mantra, drawing upon the remaining magic within me. This time I intoned a Disbursement, and traced the glyph in the air with my fingertip. Magic was invisible to the unaided eye. And unless you were really good at reading finger motions—a lot like reading lips—you never knew what people were up to, so I wasn’t worried about Zayvion seeing that, in about two days, I’d pay for this little magic jaunt with a doozy of a headache. Right now, all I wanted was ten minutes of my father’s time. And maybe his blood.

The elevator door opened.

I escaped the coffin on pulleys and walked across the lush burgundy carpet to the single rosewood reception desk, where a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old D cup manned the phone behind a sleek computer console.

“May I help you?” she asked.

I leaned down and put my hand on the edge of her desk, which hurt, but also got me a clear shot at eye contact, something essential for Influencing. “I hope you’re having a wonderful day.” I smiled and mentally intoned a boost of magic into my words.

Her eyes were light brown and lined with green makeup that looked really nice on her. She was pretty, innocent-looking, and with that hint of Influence behind my words, she already resembled a deer caught in a floodlight. No wonder why Dad hired her. He always picked the ones who were easy to bamboozle.

“I’d like to see Mr. Daniel Beckstrom now,” I said. “Please show me in.”

“Of course. This way.” She gave me a giddy smile and practically skipped down the hallway—no easy feat in heels on carpet—eager to please under the sway of Influence.

Hells. How could I go months resisting the lure of using Influence, and as soon as I was in the same building with my father, it was the first thing I did? I swore and tried to do some damage control.

“Are you sure he has time?” I asked. “I could wait to see him.”

“Oh, no. Of course he has time for you.” She glanced over her shoulder and nodded, and I worried that she might run into a wall. “This is it.” She looked forward again, and managed not to hit her head on the wide, dark wood door of my dad’s office. She held the door open for me and smiled like I was a rock star on tour.

“Thanks,” I said.

She practically gleamed.

I stepped into my dad’s office.

Time, seven years, to be exact, can change a lot of things. The furniture, all steel, wrought iron, and smoked glass, had been upgraded, maybe the carpet had too, but there was still an acre of black marble desk spread in front of the panoramic view of the city, including the river and mountain, when it wasn’t raining so hard. And standing behind that desk, immaculate in a suit that cost more than the building I lived in, was my dad.

My height or better, my dark-hair, pale-skin looks or better, he held a cup of coffee in one hand and seemed genuinely startled to see me walking toward him. I was going to play that advantage for as long as I had it because the man hadn’t gotten to the top of the magic harvest and refinery technology business thinking slow on his feet.

“Allison,” he breathed.

“You’re killing a five-year-old kid in North Portland with an Offload the size of a small city. If you don’t pay for a doctor to mitigate a Disbursement spell, set a Siphon, and everything else, including hospital stay, rehab, and mental and emotional damage for the boy, then his family is going to drag you through court and publicly expose Beckstrom Enterprises’ reckless Offloading practices. My testimony will be in their favor.”

He blinked a couple times, then looked away from my face to the rest of me, slowly taking in my cheap clothes and bruised hands. The corner of his lips tightened like he’d just bitten into something sour.

I’d seen that look on his face ever since I turned nine and told him I wanted to play jazz tambourine when I grew up.

“What happened to her?” he asked someone behind me. I looked back, and who should stroll in through the door but my old buddy Zayvion.

“She Hounded a hit and forgot to set a Disbursement spell,” he said.

I put two and two together and shook my head in disgust. “You bastard. You work for my father?”

“One contract.” He held up his hands like maybe I was going to hit him. He had good instincts. “I did one contract for him.”

“For what? To spy on Mama?”

“To look out for you, Allison,” my dad said.

Oh.

What girl doesn’t want to hear those words? What girl doesn’t want to believe her daddy is always going to be there to look after her and keep her safe?

But I could taste the honey-sweetness of magic and Influence behind his words, could smell the bitter tang of something that was not sincerity in his tone. He wanted me to believe him. Too much.

“Really,” I said.

“I heard you had been Hounding up on the north side of town,” he said. “There have been so many cases of illegal Offloads over there, I was worried you’d get hurt.”

He sounded sincere. He looked sincere. This, from the man who had manipulated and Influenced every choice I’d ever made in my life. For all I knew, a man who still believed he could continue doing so.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Save it for the court, Mr. Beckstrom. I’ll see you there.” I intended to spin around and exit dramatically, but I hurt too much. Even the bottoms of my feet were swollen. So I settled for a long, dignified stroll toward the door.

“Allison,” my dad said gently. “It is the truth, even if you are too stubborn to believe me. It has been a very long time since you’ve seen how things work around here. Laws have been passed—you know that. There are more checks and balances and outside watchdogs Hounding the details of business and magic transactions than there ever were before. We use magic sparingly at this company—at all levels—and Proxy the Offload through approved channels, such as the penitentiaries and prisons.”

I wasn’t buying it. I just couldn’t fit the idea of a kinder, gentler man inside the skin my father owned. I kept walking.

“If it would help you to believe what I’m saying,” he said, “you have my permission to draw Truth from me.”

That sort of magic involved blood, and drawing Truth, in particular, only worked between people who carried the same bloodline. I hated blood magic. Then again, I felt a powerful need to stab somebody right about now, and a girl shouldn’t turn her back on opportunity.

“Fine.” I walked back to his desk and held my palm out for a needle. I hoped he wouldn’t have one on him because the ornate letter opener on his desk looked more my speed. He must have caught some hint of that in my gaze. He raised one eyebrow and pulled a very thin, very gold straight pin out of his lapel and dropped it onto my hand.

I held it with my fingers and intoned the mantra for Truth. I placed my other hand on the desk. The desk frame was iron and carved with the patterns that allowed access to the magic held in the building’s storage network. I intoned a mantra to call the magic up through his desk and into my hand, and felt the electric tingle of magic against my palm. I pricked my middle finger, wove a glyph in the air with my bleeding finger, careful not to let the blood fall, and said a few more words. Then I took hold of my dad’s hand and pricked his finger. He leaned across his desk and so did I. We were both tall enough that we could place our fingers together, palm to palm, blood to blood.

This was the closest to him I’d been in the last fifteen years. It was the longest he’d actually touched me too. He smelled of wintergreen and something musky and pleasant, like leather. The scent of him triggered memories and feelings from a time when I was young enough and stupid enough to believe he was a good person. A time when I thought he was my hero.

“Did you, or your company, Offload into North Portland or onto a child during the last six months?” I asked.

“No.” His gaze held mine, and that word vibrated in my chest as if I were the one who had spoken it. He was telling the truth as he believed it.

“I don’t want to believe you,” I said.

He nodded, feeling my truth as I had felt his.

“I’m sorry, Allie.” His regret, of things between us, things neither of us could find a way to speak of, filtered back through our blood. Other memories stirred within me. Memories of his infrequent and surprisingly deep laughter, of his hand briefly touching my forehead when I was sick, of the time he made pancakes on Sunday morning.

I pulled my hand away from his. The spell broke. That was as much truth as I could stomach.

I stuck my bleeding finger in my mouth and felt like I’d just lost a game of chicken.

My father pulled a soft white handkerchief out of his suit jacket. He offered it to me. I shook my head. There was no way I was going to leave any more of my blood with him. Truth was the mildest of the blood magics.

I squeezed my thumb tight against my bleeding finger and put my hand in my coat pocket.

Dad pursed his lips again, disapproving, and pressed his finger against the cloth.

“I don’t know how you rigged a Truth spell,” I said, “but I know your signature. I Hounded it on that Offload. I don’t make mistakes.”

“Come now,” he said. “You are not infallible. None of us are.” He smiled, but there was no warmth in his eyes.

“I am reporting you and Beckstrom Enterprises to the authorities,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.” He tossed his handkerchief on the desk between us. “But I’d like you to reconsider. You’ve had your fun, Allie. You’ve proved you can survive on your own without any help from me. And you’ve had time to cool off—we’ve both had time. There is still a place for you in this company. I think you should think about where your talents and training can best be used and applied.”

He smiled again and those light green eyes of his sparkled. He was happy, his voice comforting, encouraging, safe. I wanted to hug him and tell him I missed him and ask him why he couldn’t just be my father instead of my boss. I wanted to let him make all the hard things in my life go away. And something felt very wrong about that.

“Come home, honey,” he said, with the unmistakable push of Influence behind his words.

I was tired, hungry, cold. I hurt, inside and out, and yeah, I woke up every day afraid I might have lost a little more of my memory, and that magic was taking a harder toll on me than I thought, and that I wasn’t going to make rent on my crummy apartment. Maybe my dad knew all that. Knew I was broke, and scared, and alone. But what he didn’t know was that I would happily endure fear and uncertainty, and even pain, if it meant I could live my life free from his manipulation.

“No. Thanks.” It took everything I had to say those two words, to push them past the weight of Influence he’d just used on me.

And those two words were enough.

His face flushed dark, angry. “I have asked you politely, Allie. Don’t think I won’t force the issue.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.” I dropped the pin on his desk.

“There are legal actions I can set into motion. If you agree to come back to the company now, it will save us both a lot of time and effort.”

I nodded. My dad was all about efficiency. And things going his way. I’m sure he knew exactly how he was going to make my life miserable since I’d said no to him. “See you in court.”

I walked across the room, past Zayvion, to the door. Made it this time. Got all the way to the receptionist’s desk, then across the half mile of burgundy carpet to the elevator that was wooden and small, too small, far too small, but fast, and even a fast coffin was better than my slow feet right now.

Once I hit the lobby, I broke into a jog, needing to be through the lobby in a hurry and gone from here, away from my father who seemed to have found a way to lie in a blood-to-blood Truth spell—something I’d never thought possible. I wanted away from the memories of what I wished he could be, and away from the reality of what it meant to fight him for my life. Again.

I pushed through the big glass-and-iron doors and stopped outside the building, under a dark awning that caught the rain. The cab was not waiting, and I remembered Zayvion told me he’d paid the guy.

Great.

I couldn’t decide where I should go next or what I should do.

The police sounded like a good idea, if I could find someone who wasn’t bought off by my dad. A lawyer sounded like a good idea too, but had the same drawback.

With any luck, Mama had already called the cops and told them I was Hounding the hit back. With any luck, they would already be starting their investigation.

Someone had put a hit on Boy, and I knew my dad’s signature was on it. His real signature, not a fake. He had a part in this regardless of the Truth spell.

Maybe I hadn’t asked the right question. Maybe someone had erased his memory of what he’d done. Memory manipulation was against the law, and deservedly so for how dangerous it was. No, I couldn’t imagine him ever letting someone mess with his mind.

He must have found a way to lie, to manipulate the Truth spell so even blood magic couldn’t detect it.

That terrified me, but I believed he could do it.

He was good at magic, my dad. One of the best.

I couldn’t figure out what he would gain from putting such a heavy hit on such a little kid, though. It didn’t make sense.

Zayvion strolled up and stopped next to me, standing so close we were almost touching. His heavy pine cologne smelled really good now, not nearly as strong as before. People wrapped in dark coats and scarves moved around us in a hurry. Zayvion didn’t say anything, didn’t move. Just stared out at the muddied traffic and hazy gray rain like I did. Strangely, knowing my father hired him to tail me made things a little easier—at least I understood why he was following me around.

“Still on the clock?” I asked.

“Nope. Quit today.” He held up a check, tucked it in his coat pocket. “I don’t get involved in family disputes.”

“Right,” I said.

He was quiet, still, patient. I decided I liked that about him.

“Buy you lunch?” he asked.

“Not hungry.”

More quiet, except for the traffic and constant city sounds. A cab pulled up, and it made sense I should take it home. Instead, I just stood there while a short blond woman in a dark green trench coat appeared from the next building and scurried into the backseat. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where I might have seen her before. I clenched my fist around the little book in my pocket where I wrote the things that I didn’t want to forget. I needed to record the hit on Boy and the meeting with my dad so I could add them to my files.

I stopped trying to place where I’d seen the woman and instead watched the cab drive away.

Zayvion said nothing.

My whole body was stiff, and standing in the cold wasn’t making anything better. I couldn’t bring myself to give up and go home to my empty apartment. Not yet.

Could I have been mistaken about my father’s signature? No, I just felt vulnerable right now because dear old Dad had used Influence, and Influence always made me jumpy. I was not going to let him get the best of me like that. Besides, it was still my birthday.

I looked over at Zayvion. Okay, so he worked for my father. We all make mistakes. At least he had the sense to quit. And he was standing here, beside me right now, not in there with my dad. That suddenly meant a lot to me.

“How about we get a cup of coffee?” I said.

He looked a little surprised, then smiled that nice smile. “How about we do.”

I tucked my hands in my pockets and we headed down the sidewalk toward a deli I knew about. The coffee wouldn’t be as good as Get Mugged, but it would be hot and dark. Right now that was all I needed.

While we were there I might even have a chance to find out what Zayvion knew about my father. I owed it to Mama and Boy to follow this trail as long as it was fresh. Going out with Zayvion was all about following the trail, I told myself. This was not a date.

At the crosswalk, I glanced at Zayvion and decided he looked good in profile too. A strong nose to go with those high cheekbones, and an angle to his jaw I found intriguing. Okay, maybe it really was a little bit like a date.

He caught me looking. “What are you thinking, Ms. Beckstrom?” he asked.

My stomach flipped.

“Nothing,” I lied. And we walked the rest of the way in silence.