Devon Monk - Magic to the Bone

I stopped trudging along and wondered how much I smelled like me. Maybe I smelled enough like garbage, cat pee, and blood to hide in plain sight. Maybe she wouldn’t expect me to be dragging an injured boy along with me.

There had to be something smart I could do. But the only thing that came to mind was getting myself and this kid to a hospital or police station quick. Quick meant car or cab on the other side of the railroad tracks. Quick also meant walking straight over the top of Bonnie if she tried to get between me and a reliable set of wheels.

We were at the end of the line here—the brambles stopped, and a clear and open road continued between some warehouses and into a mix of small businesses and apartments.

I shook the kid. “Hey. Cody. Come on, kid. We gotta get going.”

His head lolled to one side, and I shook him one more time, shifting his weight from where I held him propped by one arm over my shoulders, and my other arm around his waist, thumb tucked tight in his belt loop.

He exhaled, and I swear it rattled like he had just blown bubbles in a cup of milk.

Shit. Maybe he was worse off than I thought.

I lowered him as gently as I could and went down on my knees beside him, taking a hard look at his face. Oh, not good. Not good at all. He was white heading toward a horrible pale blue. His eyes rolled into his head and his eyelids flickered. He jerked spastically, his limbs moving like a puppet’s on a string.

“Hey now, you’re going to be okay. Hang in there, guy.” I pulled off Zayvion’s coat. The kitten dropped off my shirt and did not land on her feet, but rather pitifully tumbled onto her side, on top of the kid, and then fell down next to his arm. I tucked my coat over his chest.

What were the emergency things you were supposed to do when someone was dying? A hundred scenes from movies and TV shows flashed through my mind, most of them involving someone beating on a prone person’s chest and screaming at them not to give up.

Old information from high school came back to me, and I pulled off my sweater, leaving me in a tank top, and balled the sweater under his head. I didn’t have anything to wedge between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue, and I debated the wisdom of that, anyway. He looked like he needed all the room he could get just to breathe.

I put both hands on his chest and tried to press his body down gently, tried to still the spasms racking through him.

What the hell was I was doing trying to dodge a Hound, get to the cops, and take someone to a hospital all on my own?

What choice did I have? My father was dead and this kid might know who did it. Might know who I could make pay for killing the man I wanted dead and somehow couldn’t handle living without.

I wanted to scream, but Bonnie was still out there. If she heard me, she would find me and shoot me. It was enough to make a girl paranoid. Or furious.

I decided to go with furious.

But unless I wanted to pull on magic, there wasn’t anything else I could do. It wasn’t like I could turn bullets if someone pulled a trigger.

This would all be a hella different if I had a damn cell phone.

Or if my father hadn’t died.

Or if I had taken his advice and finished school and gone to work for him.

Or if this kid and his cat hadn’t gotten stabbed.

“P-please,” the kid rasped.

I about jumped out of my jeans. I thought he was way past being able to talk.

“I’m right here, kiddo. Hang in there, you’re going to be okay.”

“H-hand,” he said.

I didn’t know what he wanted, but took both of his hands in my own.

“M-magic.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I couldn’t. Sure the magic was close enough, maybe a couple blocks away at most. But I couldn’t draw on the magic to do so much as add pressure to his wound or make the air he breathed richer in oxygen because Bonnie would spot me. And I certainly didn’t have enough medical experience to save him, with my hands or with any of the spells that could ease pain at an exorbitant cost to the caster. If I drew on magic at all, I was screwed. I could smell Bonnie and the reek of lavender getting stronger by the minute.

“P-please?”

Hell. Screw Bonnie. If she was so determined to kill me, she’d just have to get in line and wait her turn. This kid didn’t have any time left.

I took a calming breath, even though I was freezing and soaked through my tank top and really freaked out. I set a Disbursement spell, deciding, even though I didn’t like it, I should take a long and slow pain this time so I could remain functional—maybe something along the lines of a bad sore throat or a recurring stomachache over the next couple weeks. I held tightly to the kid’s hands and thought about the soil beneath us, and below the soil, beyond the train tracks, to the magic pooled there deep under the city, caught and held by ironworked conduits.

I spoke a mantra, a jingle from a cereal commercial, and called for the magic to come over to this side of the tracks, coaxed the magic, invited the magic into my body and into my hands.

To my surprise, the kid managed to pull my hands, still clasped with his, down upon his stomach, over his wounds.

Kneeling next to him, I was close enough to see his eyes, blue, unfocused, looking at me, or maybe through me, close enough to see his lips and see that he, too, was chanting.

Holy hells. Soft as a whisper or the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the kid reached out for the magic I drew upon, and used me like a channel, like an ironworked conduit. He pulled the magic he wanted through me, not through the ground or through the channels. That shouldn’t be possible. People were not conduits of magic. Magic killed the people who held it inside their body for any length of time. Magic could only be channeled by lead, glass, iron, and glyphs.

And, apparently, me.

Like a breeze stoking a flame, the small magic I carried within me flared to life and the magic the kid drew upon mixed with it. I filled with magic, more magic than I’d ever held before. Like an artist mixing paint beneath my skin, the kid guided the magic to blend and move, connecting the magic beneath the city to my flesh, to my bones.

This couldn’t be good.

But it felt good, very good. Magic shifted and changed in me, and I realized my eyes were closed. Instead of darkness, I saw lines of magic that pulsed in jeweled colors, connected in contrasts of sharp angles, and softened like a watercolor. I could suddenly see so many possibilities in magic, so many things I could use it for. Things I’d never thought of. Like a balm to soothe pain, or a thread to stitch flesh.

“Oh,” I whispered. I didn’t know it could be so easy to heal someone with magic.

But I did now. I used one hand and drew a glyph for health—the sort of thing that might reduce the effects of a head cold, or revive a wilted plant. I could see how the glyph would fit around the kid, and how it would sink inside him, like a tattoo of color and magic on his bones. It would stay there too, supporting him, healing him. I worked the magic inside of me out into the glyph and then directed the glyph down over his body—inking it above him from his skull to his toe, magic that urged healing, health, life.

I’d never seen anyone use magic like this before. I’d never seen anyone try. But I could do it. Of course I could do it.

So I did.

Magic spooled out of me and into the glyph. I let go of the kid’s other hand so I could catch the power and guide it, weaving and bending the force of it like ribbons of light, of heat, some rough, some slick and smooth, all fast, faster, falling out of me and into the glyph, then over him, then into him, wrapping around his bones, webbing through his muscles, arcing across his tendons.