Devon Monk - Magic In the Blood

He didn’t show any change of emotion. Just nodded. “Come to the meeting, and we’ll talk.”

“How about I skip the meeting and we talk anyway?”

“Nope.”

I rubbed at my face. I didn’t care what he said. Nothing could convince me meeting up with a bunch of Hounds would make my life any kind of easy.

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked.

Pike’s eyes widened. I was pretty sure this was the first time I’d ever seen him surprised. “Don’t believe in them,” he said, dead flat and poker-faced.

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked down at his shoe, his body language turning inward, as if trying to dodge an old pain. When he straightened and squared his shoulders, he was nothing but steel cold killer again. “Can’t live as long as I have without seeing things.”

“Like ghosts?”

“You want to talk, call the number and come to the meeting.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “When did you give up on talking straight?”

The light changed; traffic stopped. My bus had pulled up on the other side of the street. Passengers were getting on. I really wanted some coffee and a chance at being warm and out of the wet. I took a step, but Pike did not follow. I glanced over at him. He had already turned and was walking away, back the way we’d come.

“What? You giving up on coffee too?” I yelled.

“Call the damn number,” he yelled back without turning.

I shook my head and then jogged across the street before the light changed again. I didn’t care how many times he ordered me to do something. I wasn’t going to join his little club.

I got to the other side of the street but not soon enough. My bus pulled away from the curb, gunned the engine, and rolled through the yellow light, leaving me behind.

“Damn it!”

And all I heard was Anthony’s shrill laughter.

Okay, so far today I’d been haunted, stabbed, strong-armed by an ex-con, interrogated by the police, hired by a cursed criminal-magic-enforcement guy, and threatened and/or invited by a Hound to join a secret union/army/tea party/club thing.

And I’d missed my bus.

I hated missing my bus. That, most of all, officially put me in a pissy mood.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and strode off toward Get Mugged. The coffee shop was maybe eight blocks away. Against the wind, of course.

I kept a steady pace, not worrying about getting there fast-it didn’t matter now because I couldn’t get any wetter-but instead working on getting there in one piece. I watched the people moving around me, looking for Trager’s men; breathed through my nose, smelling for Trager’s men; used all my nonmagical observation skills to stay aware of Trager’s men. But seriously? Trager’s men could be anyone, anywhere.

The few other people tromping through the crappy weather didn’t make any strange moves. No one paid any attention to me. No one even made eye contact. My teeth started chattering, so I picked up the pace, hoping faster would make for warmer.

By the time I’d made it to Get Mugged’s cross street, I was wetter and warmer, which is not as sexy as it sounds.

I turned down the street and spotted the roofline of Get Mugged. The neighborhood had gone through some heavy reconstruction. Buildings had been torn down, leaving behind dirt, concrete, and gravel. There were two buildings left standing: Get Mugged and an empty warehouse with boarded-up windows.

Get Mugged held down the corner of the block, a coffee-scented old broad wearing too much paint and plaster to cover her age but still turning over clients like a dime-store hooker. The warehouse looked like Get Mugged’s meth-mouthed sister, broken, rotting from the inside out, spongy, and frail.

For years, people had wanted to turn this area into boutique shopping. A building would go up, something would move in, and before there was time to hang curtains, the business would bankrupt. Enough of that had left the whole block looking a little like an unmade bed. Nothing seemed to survive here for long. Except Get Mugged.

I jogged across the street and walked beside the empty gravel lot, heading toward Get Mugged on the far corner. On this side of the street there were no awnings to keep me dry and no buildings to block the wind coming up off of the Willamette River. I was tired, and the cold, wet, and weirdness was catching up with my lack of stamina.

Neat.

A flash of color caught my eye.

One windowless wall of the empty warehouse faced the gravel lot. Magic glyphs I’d never noticed before were painted across that wall, running from the second story’s rusted gutters to disappear somewhere behind the piles of dirt at the foundation.

I slowed. The glyphs were strange, bright whorls of color ribboning from one spell into the next. I couldn’t read them, not exactly, which was a little weird. It was like there was too much rain between me and the wall, even though I was only about half a block away from it. The glyphs looked washed out, faded. The bricks cut ridges through them like ribs stretched beneath pale skin.

My gut told me they were protection spells, warnings of some kind. I blinked, wiped rain out of my eyes, and squinted to see them better. No, not exactly wards and warnings. The glyphs were a study in opposites. Several glyphs for Healing and Thrive and Life were painted on the wall. But what caught my eye was the glyph repeatedly drawn around all the others.

Death.

Over and over again.

Death by magic. A glyph and spell no one ever drew, and never cast, since the price for casting it was death not only to the target but also to the caster.

Sure, you could trace it out, but if you so much as flicked a speck of magic on it, Death would ricochet back on you so fast you wouldn’t even have a chance to swear before you were done breathing. I can’t believe someone hadn’t complained about the glyph on the wall, hadn’t demanded the city or the property owner take it apart, paint over it.

That glyph was bad luck. Dangerous.

To say the least.

But as I came closer to the wall, I realized why the glyphs looked so strange.

They were in the style of my dad’s signature. All of them. The Healing and positive glyphs and even the Death glyph were written in his hand. Written by him.

And just as my brain did a nice double somersault to try to wrap some logic around all this-that somehow my stern, corporate father had become a graffiti artist in his spare time four months ago when he was still alive-the glyphs were gone.

Gone. As in one blink they were there-pale water-colored lines of spells two stories tall, with no magic behind them-and the next blink, nothing but brick wall and rusted gutters.

Holy shit.

A chill dug nails under my skin as I realized there wasn’t even a hint of color on that wall. I am not stupid. Slow, sometimes, but not a complete idiot. Something really weird had just happened.

I scanned the empty lot, looked behind me at the sidewalk, the street, and the buildings beyond. A few people moved through the rain, but except for a steady stream of cars on the street, I was alone out here. I inhaled deeply, my mouth open, to try to smell if someone were near enough to cast magic-Illusion, maybe-to make me think I saw those glyphs.

Nothing but the stink of the city and the sour bite of my own sweat and fear.

I walked the rest of the way to the wall, smelling, tasting the air. The wall looked like an old brick wall of an old brick warehouse.

Nothing, the world around me seemed to be saying, had happened.

But I knew better.

I stopped close enough that I could touch the wall if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. Not yet.

Then I did something I do not love doing: I cast magic in public. Now that I carry magic in me, it takes a lot of concentration not to let it get out of hand. And I hate the idea of someone sneaking up on me while I’m in the middle of a spell. What if I lost control and hurt them? Casting magic also points me out to every other Hound in the city. To a Hound, cast magic is as clear as if the user ran around with a paintbrush and wrote: Allie Beckstrom was here at seven o’clock in the morning, freezing cold and freaked out, so she decided to cast a Sight spell.