Devon Monk - Magic to the Bone

Cody stopped rocking and looked at me. His eyes were still summer blue, but they were narrow, as if he were trying to see me through a thick fog.

“The Snake man told me to. I was you. You killed him.”

I cannot even explain the weird-creepy chill of hearing him say that. I tried to keep my voice level and soft. “I killed him? Or were you using magic to forge my signature when he died? How did you access that much power, Cody? Where were you? When did you do it? Who is the Snake man? Is he out there?”

Hells. I had pushed too hard.

Cody’s eyes went wide with panic. He grabbed at his stomach, over his scar.

“Ow, ow.” He moaned. “No, no, no.” He looked like he was going to scream or cry. He pulled the kitten close to his chest, dodged past me, and threw himself at the kitchen door. It banged open and Cody ran outside.

I was right behind him.

He ran down the porch stairs, one hand still on his stomach.

I smelled lavender, sweet and peppery. Nola didn’t have lavender plants. I hit the stairs running and made a grab for Cody, but that boy moved fast. He was out of reach, outpacing me, heading toward the middle of the yard running, wild, scared.

“Cody, wait!” I ran after him.

The yard was as wide as the house and stretched out half an acre before it reached the road. There were no trees in the yard, no place for someone to hide.

Jupe tore out of the house, snarling and barking. But I didn’t need his warning, because I’d seen it too. A flash of light in the air, silver hot cooling to a burning gold, struck like lightning. But instead of fading, the air where the strike had sliced filled with a flurry of black ash—like a cloud of black butterflies had suddenly appeared. A woman stepped through that wall of flying ash. Solidly built, blond, and stinking of lavender, it was Bonnie. She was reciting a mantra and moving her hands in a very un-Hound-like spell.

Cody ran right toward her. He threw his arms out to his sides and yelled, “Run! Run fast!”

Jupe pounded past me. Even though I had long legs and was in good enough shape to run, that dog was all muscle and instinct. He was gaining on Cody. But Bonnie wasn’t standing still; she was headed for Cody too.

I heard footfalls and hard breathing coming up behind me. Risked a glance over my shoulder. It was Zayvion.

“Don’t, Allie,” he yelled.

Don’t what? Catch the only person who knew how my father died? Don’t try to outrun Jupe, who was still snarling and barking and about to tear Bonnie and/or Cody into pieces? Don’t pound into Bonnie like she was a lump of clay that needed a whole lot of my knuckle prints?

Bonnie reached Cody before me. Bonnie caught him in her arms, and even though he struggled, she chanted a mantra—hard, guttural words—held her fist high in the air, and a flash of copper lightning struck again, struck Bonnie, struck Cody, and sent Jupe skittering back from the wall of ash, growling and yelping.

It was a flash, a slice of heartbeat. Bonnie and Cody were there. Lightning struck. Bonnie and Cody were gone.

Black ashes drifted down like raven feathers and shadowed a perfect circle on the ground where they had just stood.

“What the hell?” I jogged the last few feet to where Cody and Bonnie had disappeared. Disappeared! No one could vanish in a flash. No one. I didn’t care what kind of spells they knew. The scientific improbability of moving that much mass—and the payment for pulling on so much magic in a nonmagical zone so that it shot like lightning from a calm sky—freaked me the hell out.

I tried to pull on the store of magic deep in my bones, but I was too agitated, too angry, too damn scared to think of a mantra, much less speak one. People magically snapping from one place to another was fairy-tale stuff. This couldn’t happen. And for the good of the world, I didn’t think this should be able to happen. This kind of power in the wrong hands could change the way magic was used and abused. In the wrong hands—and as far as I could tell, Bonnie was the wrong hands since she’d just kidnapped a guy from out of nowhere—this ability would make for dark, dark years ahead.

“Holy crap,” I said. “Holy crap, holy crap!”

I was shaking, breathing too hard. But I was thinking fast. Maybe Bonnie and Cody weren’t really gone. Maybe she’d just found some sort of way to confuse light so I couldn’t see them. For all I knew, they might still be standing right there in the middle of the yard in front of me.

Zayvion came up to one side of me.

“What?”

I held up my hand to tell him to be quiet. And he did. Okay, there were some things I really liked about that man. I tipped my head to one side and listened for breathing other than his and my own. I watched Jupe, who sniffed at the black circle of ashes, but didn’t step into them. I inhaled, smelled something like burned wood—the charcoal smell of ashes, fresh air, and a hint of chicken fertilizer.

Zay took a cautious step forward, and he was quiet, working his way around the circle of ashes.

I mentally intoned a mantra, calming, centering, set a Disbursement, then pulled on the magic from my bones. A flare of heat winged from my right hand up my arm to my eye. The magic followed the path of the marks on my arm—but it wasn’t a painful sensation. It was a comfortable heat, like thrusting that limb into a warm bath. My left hand felt cool, and that was nice too. Magic, no longer small inside me, sprang from my body quicker than it ever had before, and I had to do some fast maneuvers to keep hold of it, keep focused, and draw it into my senses, especially my sense of smell.

The world exploded into smells. The greasy tang of ashes hit my sinuses and made me choke, coupled as it was with the dusty stone scent of pavement, the thick smell of mosses and rot and fungus from the field, decaying leaves, and decomposing organics from the distant chicken coop. Grass was green, bitter, oily, textured with the cold scent of dew. I could smell the river, tart and rushing with a silty mix of minerals, and I could smell Zayvion, the heavy pine of his cologne warmed and complicated by the stinging potency of his sweat, his fear, his anger.

And his shock.

I glanced at him. He was watching me with as close a look to awe as I’d ever seen on someone.

Oh, right. Magic. This was a dead zone. A magic-free zone. The only way to tap into magic here was to access the network that didn’t reach this far—that didn’t cross the river.

No one could do that. Unless they carried magic in their body. And no one I’d met could do that, except me.

“Allie?” he breathed.

“Later,” I said.

I Hounded the traceries of the spell Bonnie had cast and smelled the copper-burn stink of spent magic coming from the circle of ashes.

The glyph of Bonnie’s spell lingered in the air, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. Not just a cabled line of intricate linked spells, this glyph was jagged, knotting back into itself to form a circle, like an incredibly intricate spider’s web, with a black, black hole into which all the threads fell and stopped completely.

This spell wrapped in on itself. There were no trailing lines leading back to the caster. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that Bonnie had been the one to cast this spell, I would have absolutely no clue who had cast it, where it had come from, or what it had done.

And knowing those things was my job.

“Holy crap,” I said again, quieter.

The one thing I did know was that Bonnie and Cody were not still standing in the yard.

“What do you see?” Zayvion asked.

“It’s a spell, feeding into itself, and leaving no trailing lines. They aren’t here, Zayvion. I don’t know where they are, but they are not here.”