Devon Monk - Magic to the Bone

I took a slow, deep breath and the sick in my stomach let up a little more.

“Good,” he said. “Now exhale.”

I did that too, and moaned again as the nausea drained away, leaving me tired, achy, but functional. Then his fingers were gone, the cool wash of mint gone. I felt stiff and bruised, inside and out, but not as bad as before he touched me.

Zayvion sat on the other side of the table and picked up a cup of coffee I hadn’t seen him bring over.

He glanced out the window, his eyes narrowing against the gray-white light, and took a drink.

“Thanks,” I said.

He tipped the cup away from his lips. His eyes were brown, flecked with a gold I don’t remember seeing before. “Sure,” he said. “Any time.”

I put my hands on the table and discovered there was a second cup of coffee and, next to that, a little saucer of individual cream pots and packets of sugar. I picked up the coffee and took a sip of it. Black and bitter, it washed the sour taste of spent magic out of my mouth and filled my sinuses with a sharp but pleasant burned smell.

“Nice trick,” I said.

Zayvion blinked once, slowly. “Trick?”

“You set a Siphon to mitigate some of the pain from the price I’m paying for not setting a Disbursement spell, right?”

“Ah,” he said. “That trick.” He followed up that nonanswer with a Zen-like look.

But his eyes. Gold flecks burned where there had only been brown before, and an intensity flickered through his calm gaze. He had done something, something more than setting a Siphon—not that setting Siphons was easy. It took two full years of specialized education to be able to cast and set channels that slowly bled used magic back into the raw magic that pooled beneath the city. And not everyone who studied hard and practiced harder mastered that trick. The few who did were usually into the more advanced fields of body-magic integrations, people like doctors and the regulators who set tolerance levels for legal Proxies.

I’d seen Siphons set. I put a year of study into it myself before my professor told me I might as well waste my time failing at something I enjoyed. But I remember the basics. Enough to know that Zayvion had not set a Siphon. He’d done something else. Something that took even more skill.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “You Grounded me.”

Grounding was another matter altogether. It was equivalent to acting as a lightning rod for someone else and was usually done while the original caster was drawing on magic. It allowed a larger amount of magic to be accessed, and a smaller price to be paid by the original caster. The Grounder often bore a heavier burden of the pain—trying to match another person’s magical style and ability was very difficult and dangerous. As so was using Grounding to mitigate the pain of using magic.

Zayvion’s eyebrows went down and he tipped his chin to one side. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“What are you?” I asked. “Master’s level?”

He shook his head and took another drink of coffee. “I didn’t go to college for magic.”

“What did you go to college for?”

“The women.” He smiled. “Oh, we aren’t being that honest? Economics.”

“So you’re an economist who stalks people for money and just happens to have mastered the rare art of Grounding?”

“What can I say? I’m a complicated man. And I didn’t Ground you.”

I took another drink of coffee. He was so lying. “All right. Let’s go with that. If you didn’t set a Siphon, and didn’t Ground me, how come I feel better?”

“Acupressure,” he deadpanned.

“Acupressure?”

“Pressure points. It’s a kind of massage that helps with muscle tension.”

“I suppose you went to college for that too?”

“No, but maybe I should have. I’ve been told, on more than one occasion, that I have good hands.”

I gave him back what I hoped was one of his blank stares. “Do you really expect me to buy that?”

That got a smile out of him, and damned if it didn’t make me smile back. “Well, you don’t have to buy it, or lunch,” he said. “Both are on me. I’ve already ordered and paid, so no argument.”

As if on cue, a girl came over with a platter that held two bowls of soup—beef vegetable, with what looked to be real chunks of fresh vegetables floating in the thick broth—and a side of sourdough bread.

My mouth watered so hard I had to swallow.

“Anything else?” the waitress asked as she put down the soup, bread basket, and two sets of napkin-rolled cutlery.

“Some water,” Zayvion said. “For both of us, please.”

She left and I stared down at my soup like I’d never seen food before.

“It’s soup,” Zayvion said. “Beef and vegetable. Oh. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

“I love soup.” Then I remembered he probably already knew that. He’d been working for my father and following me around for I didn’t know how long. He probably knew a lot of things about me. Probably even knew what kind of underwear I wore.

Which begged the question. Was he a boxer or brief kind of guy?

Come on, Allie, I thought. Stop being such a sap-head. This wasn’t a date. Zayvion wasn’t a friendly neighbor. He was someone to dig information out of. Information about the hit on Boy. Information about why my dad was suddenly so interested in pulling me back into the company and under his control.

I sat up a little straighter and unrolled the napkin and spoon. Zayvion might be a liar, a snitch, a stalker—whatever. I wasn’t going to turn down a free meal or a chance to find out what he knew.

“How long have you been following me?” I said it as if the meeting had just been called to order and his sales performance were under review.

He already had his spoon in his hand and had taken a big bite of soup. He left the spoon in his soup, reached for the sourdough, broke off a fist-sized section, then dipped it in the broth. So he liked his bread without butter. Not really the kind of information I had hoped to get out of him.

“About two weeks.”

Better.

I thought back on what had happened in the last two weeks and scooped broth in my mouth. Oh, good loves. It was perfect, salted and thickened with tomato and hints of basil and peppers. I wanted to lick the spoon, lick my fingers, then dive in face-first and lap up the entire bowl. Zayvion did not appear to be watching me. He was already through his first piece of sourdough and moving fast for a second.

I reached over for the bread, got there just before he did, and pulled the soft and warm center piece out of the loaf.

“Ha!” I held up the chunk of bread with the tips of my fingers. “Still warm.” I snatched up a foiled pat of butter and spread it over the bread with my finger.

He didn’t look concerned at my victory. “Only half a loaf left? I suppose we could split it. Oh, wait.” He took the remaining bread, dropped it in his soup, and smiled. “Maybe I’ll just eat your share.”

“What, no more Mr. Nice Guy?”

“Nobody gets between me and fresh sourdough.”

“Bread fetish?”

“How about less talking, more eating?” He didn’t wait for my reply before digging into his soup.

I took a bite of the buttered bread and then I didn’t care what Zayvion did so long as he didn’t get between me and the soup and bread. I put my spoon into action and devoured the soup. Hounding always makes me hungry—using any kind of magic usually makes me hungry—and I’d been cutting it pretty tight on grocery money lately. Actually, now that I thought about it, this was the first meal I’d had in the last month that wasn’t a cold sandwich, cold cereal, or cold microwaved pizza.

But even hungry, I kept an eye on the door, and the people who came in and out of the deli in a steady stream. I didn’t think my dad would go so far as to send the police to haul me in, but I wouldn’t put it past him.