Devon Monk: Magic In the Blood

For my big, crazy, wonderful family.

I couldn’t do this without you. Thanks for

believing in my dream and helping me

to make it come true.

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

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

“Ow, ow, ow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not alone.

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

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

Angry at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seek,” he whispered against my cheek.

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

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

Holy shit.

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad?” I asked.

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

Yeah, well, that felt real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rain and wind? Yes. Ghosts? No.

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