Magic to the Bone

Chapter Four

My apartment building is a dump. When it rains, it is not just the appearance of the building that reeks. It is also the walls.

I was halfway up the climb to my fifth-story apartment. With each step the smell of old magic got worse. Thirty years ago, when the technology was being developed to harvest wild magic, people thought all it took was a lightning rod—well, a Beckstrom Storm Rod—and some copper tubing to channel the magic throughout the city.

That could not have been further from the truth. Channeling magic through anything but iron, lead, and glass pipes that had each been carved and molded with very specific kinds of glyphing and holding spells made the channel useless, rotten, and dangerous.

This old building was lousy with rotten magic. The useless copper tubing was set inside the walls, as was the fashion thirty years ago. The idea was people wouldn’t want to live in a building that looked like a birdcage. The result was having to tear the building down to access the tubing and not only reglyph the holding spells, but also replace the copper with something expensive and patent-permit laden. The owners of the Fair Lead didn’t go out of their way to replace lightbulbs. So we dealt with the smell that always got worse when it rained.

By the time I reached my room on the fifth floor, I had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from smelling, and worse, tasting the wet, rotten magic seeping out of the walls. It was a health hazard, I was sure of it, but if a few cockroaches could be ignored by greasing the right palm, then so could old magic. Even though it’d been thirty years, the law hadn’t caught up with the use and misuse of magic.

I walked down to my apartment, put my key in the lock, and opened the door. The smell was twice as bad here. So bad that my eyes started watering.

Great.

A small flash of green halfway across the room told me there was a message on my answering machine. I crossed the room and pressed play.

“Hi, Al!” My best friend in all the world, Nola’s warm, happy voice piped out of the machine. “Happy birthday! When are you coming out to the farm to visit me? I sent you a birthday present. Check your bank balance. There should be enough there for you to come out for a week. Leave a message at this number and let me know if you take the train or bus, and I’ll meet you. I mean that. Oh, and Jupe says hi!”

The machine beeped and the sudden silence, along with the heavy smell, was just too much.

This birthday sucked.

But it was still my birthday. Three o’clock. I rubbed at the back of my neck. If I weren’t feeling so bad, I’d go out, see a movie, maybe take some of Nola’s gift money and treat myself to a pedicure. But it would be at least the rest of the night before the magic stopped hurting in me, and despite Zayvion’s insistence that I go see a doctor, I knew a nice long bath and ten hours of sleep would get me through the worst of it. And that wouldn’t cost me money I didn’t have. But the smell in the house was unbearable.

Come on, Allie. Time to think smart and find a warm, odorless place to sleep for a few hours.

My hand hovered over my phone. Who could I call? Nola’s farm was in eastern Oregon near Burns, a town almost three hundred miles away, at least a five-hour drive from here, so that wouldn’t do. Who else did I trust? Ex-boyfriends came to mind, but there was a good reason each of them was an ex. I hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from college, and being both unemployed and doing freelance Hounding jobs, usually at night, hadn’t exactly created a close-knit social network. Sure, I knew a few of the other Hounds—Pike, for instance. But I didn’t think an ex-marine who Hounded for the cops would put up with my whining. Other than Pike, not a single person came to mind.

I had to laugh. There were times when being a sour, distrustful, jaded young woman didn’t make my life easy.

I could call my dad.

Not in a million months of never.

Mama. Though I didn’t love the idea of ending up right back where I’d started the day, I figured she’d let me stay late at her restaurant, might even offer me a cot to sleep on if I paid her, or did dishes or something. Or maybe we could trade the Hounding job I did on Boy for a bed. Besides, I wanted to know if Boy was okay. Wanted to know if she’d called the police and what they were doing about the hit. They might even need to talk to me.

I picked up the phone and dialed Mama’s number even though I knew she never answered the phone. Still, maybe this once. When the phone rang for the twentieth time, I gave up. If she said no, maybe I’d just get a cab to the bus station, and head out to Nola’s. Fresh farm air sounded good right now. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was a plan.

I grabbed a backpack—a hideously pink and green thing with a cow on it that Nola had given me years ago—and packed a change of clothes, an extra sweater, my tennis shoes, a brush, deodorant, and toothbrush. I left the apartment and the building as quickly as my swollen feet could take me down the stairs.

I caught a cab, told him to take me to the nearest ATM machine, and checked my balance while the meter was running. I was expecting maybe fifty dollars from Nola, but she had sunk three hundred bucks into my account. Maybe things were looking up.

I knew she made pretty good money for selling her certified nonmagically grown alfalfa. The horse-racing circuit considered any magical influence into the sport—including spells for pest removal, mold retardant, or growth enhancement on the alfalfa that fed the horses—to be as illegal as performance-enhancing drugs. Still, it wasn’t like Nola was rolling in the dough. A hard rain at the wrong time could ruin a year’s worth of work on a field, and the nonmagic eggs she raised didn’t make up for those sorts of things. This was a generous gift and I owed her big-time.

I pulled out a hundred and got back in the cab. I hugged my jacket closer around me and watched the city fall apart the closer it got to St. John’s. The ache in my head was getting downright migrainal. Even more fun was that I dozed off, or maybe blacked out. When the cab came to a stop I slugged out from under the lead blanket of sleep that weighed me down.

“Here it is,” the cabbie said in a halfhearted stab at English. “I stop here.”

I rubbed my eyes and still had trouble focusing. It looked like the right part of town. The problem was, every time I blinked it felt like it took forever to open my eyes again. All the running around in the rain, jogging of stairs, and most of all, the stupid payback for not setting a Disbursement spell, were finally catching up to me.

Either that, or Zayvion had poisoned my soup.

“Sixteen bucks,” the driver said.

“Sure.” I looked down at my hands, hoping for a purse or something, and realized I had a wad of bills clenched in my fist.

Smart like a rock, I am. My hands were the color of steamed grape leaves. Nice bruise, that. Then the driver’s voice cut through the fog again.

“Sixteen dollar. This is the end.”

And wow, that sounded really ominous, like if my life were a movie, this would be the part where the cabbie turned into a serial killer, pulled out the knife and hockey mask he kept in his glove compartment, and did me in. But not, of course, before he collected on his fare.

I giggled at that, and a small part of my mind, perhaps my common sense, started to worry. I was not thinking so straight. That was a bad thing to do anywhere in the city, and really bad—the dead kind of bad—in this neighborhood.

“Here.” I put my money in my jacket pocket and gave the driver a twenty. He watched me from the rearview mirror. “No round trip,” he said.

“Right. Thanks.” I opened the door, got out into the rain. I tugged my neon backpack onto my shoulder, but didn’t do it very well, because it made me really dizzy.

I staggered and caught myself on the edge of a trash can.

Lovely. I probably looked like a drunk just waiting for someone to roll me.

Come on, Allie, I thought. Suck it up. It’s not that far. Just a couple blocks. I needed a bed in the worst way. Maybe I should have just put up with the stink back in the apartment. It was no worse than the stink coming out of the trash can I was holding on to. Too late to go back to my apartment now. There was no way I’d make it that far without passing out. But if I had anything to say about it, I wasn’t going to sleep in the trash can either.

I lifted my head and held still as vertigo rocked the street beneath my feet like a hammock in a strong wind.

Just a couple blocks. I could do that.

I pushed away from the trash can, pulled my shoulders back, and took a deep breath. Even though my vision was spotty at best, my nose was still working. I caught the fish-and-salt stink off the river, the rust and oil from the train track and river traffic, and the pungent barf smell coming from, oh, I don’t know—everywhere. The sweet smell of tobacco and charcoal, hinting of a wood fire down on the shoreline, wafted through the air. Along with all that, I could also smell the acrid tang of magic being used behind me, from the city proper. To get to Mama’s all I had to do was walk toward the smell of old wood and hot grease and something kind of dirty, like wet dog and barf. Those smells.

I knew better than to show how bad I was feeling. So I set a confident stride, kept my head up, and looked around enough to signal to any circling predators that whatever they wanted from me, they were going to have to fight me for it.

I made it to Mama’s without having to risk my life over my crummy backpack, walked up the three wooden stairs, and was winded like I’d just done a few record-breaking laps through quicksand.

Boy, behind the counter, watched me walk in. He frowned, glanced over my shoulder, then brought his hand up empty from where it had just been on the gun he kept there.

“Is Mama in?” I asked.

He nodded, but didn’t do anything else for me.

Nice.

I walked the rest of the way into the restaurant. I eyed the spindly wood tables to the right and left and considered sitting down. But I knew, once I stopped standing I wouldn’t be doing it for at least twenty-four hours.

“Listen,” I said as I leaned my elbow, carefully, on the counter in front of Boy. Leaning felt good. Felt real good. Maybe I could just put my head down on the counter and let Boy figure out the rest of it. Surely I couldn’t be the first woman who’d passed out on this counter. Probably wasn’t even the first woman to do so this week.

I blinked, my chin dipped, and it took effort to fight my way up out of the quicksand that was dragging me down, especially since I was pretty sure I was still wearing my lucky lead coat.

Boy had a funny look on his face. Something between amusement and disgust.

Oh, good loves. I knew what he was thinking.

“I’m not drunk,” I slurred.

Fabo. That sounded convincing. “I’m . . . I’m hurt.” And I hated saying it, hated admitting it, hated hurting in front of him, in front of anyone. “I need a place to stay. Does Mama have a cot I could rent for the night? I have cash.”

He raised his eyebrows and a wicked glint lit his eyes.

Oh, good going, Allie. Tell a man who is never three inches away from a gun that you have cash in your pocket.

“Not much,” I amended, “but I could pay something.” He just stared at me. Said nothing. I tried to remember if this Boy was mute. “Is Mama here?” I asked.

“I’m here,” Mama’s voice said from somewhere to my left.

Oh, it was going to take a lot to actually move my head. I weighed my options, and decided to go for broke. I turned my head and the room blurred. Little silver sparks wriggled like tadpoles around the edges of my vision moving in closer and closer until Mama and the whole wide world were far, far away at the end of a tunnel. Wow. Who needed drugs?

“Allie girl. Who does this to you?” Mama strode over to me. She reached up and gripped my face, her small, cool fingers on either side of my jaw. “This bad. A hit? Someone hit you?”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I need a place to sleep. I can’t go home.”

She gave me a long, steady stare. I wondered what she was looking for in my eyes. Didn’t know if it was there. Didn’t much care. The room was going black, the tadpoles well on their way to full frogdom, and the pain in my head and bones sort of rattled through me in waves.

Mama’s touch was like a cool rag on a fever. Like Zayvion’s fingers. No, not like that, more like what I’d always hoped my own mother would do for me—be caring and soft and make the pain go away when I hurt. Mama’s hands created a wall between me and the pain, and I wondered if the pain wouldn’t mind staying away for a while so I could get a little shut-eye.

Before I actually dozed off, Mama got tired of looking in my eyes. She lifted her hands from my face and nodded. “You hurt. Stay here. Upstairs. You think you can go upstairs, Allie girl?”

“Sure,” I said. It came out a little slurred and slow, but true to my word, I pushed off the counter and let Mama, and her strong hand on my elbow, then her strong arm around my waist, lead me across the room and through the door to a narrow hallway where a zag of wooden stairs laddered up.

I remember taking the first step. The rest of the climb got fuzzy after that, and the next thing I saw was Boy—the one with the beard and ponytail who is usually in the kitchen—looking down at me. I was apparently flat on my back, and I hoped I was in a bed.

“What?” I said. Then Boy moved back and Mama was there. For reasons I didn’t really want to analyze, I was really glad she was around right now.

She looked down toward my feet, which I thought rather odd; then she was back in my line of vision and something thick and soft was pulled up over me. A quilt. Oh, loves. It was almost enough to make a distrustful, jaded girl like me weep. Almost.

“You sleep now, Allie girl,” Mama said firmly. “You sleep. Mama’s here.”

I had never been so happy in all my life to do exactly what someone told me to do.

Happy Birthday to me.