by Devon Monk
“Twenty.”
“Ten.” He slapped a bill in her hand. “You tired of robbing me yet?”
“Just look at it as my way of keeping that superhero collection of yours under control.”
“Superhero?” I asked. “Which one?”
“Deadpool,” Love said.
“Who?”
“See?” Payne said. “No one even knows him.”
Love just shook his head. “He’ll be bigger than Batman, I’m telling you. People love him.”
Payne drank her coffee and gave him a level stare. “People love Batman because he’s a good guy.”
“Really? You read him?”
She blinked a couple times like that was the stupidest thing she’d heard all day. “I don’t read comics.”
“See how she is?” Love shook his head sadly. “No heart for the art.”
I took another drink of my coffee. Winced at the horror of it. “I think it’s the coffee. It could make anyone mean.”
Payne did not smile, but her eyes twinkled. She pocketed the cash and sat at her desk. “Yah,” Love said, “That’s why I drink the cocoa. Keeps me sweet.”
Payne just raised one eyebrow.
Love thumbed the recorder back on. “State your name, please.”
I did so. Love took a nice, noisy slurp of his cocoa and wrote something down on the yellow legal pad in front of him. Then he asked me to state where I was the day my father died and to tell him what happened in as much detail as possible.
So I did. The entire statement didn’t take longer than fifteen minutes. I’d Hounded for Mama Rossitto a hit that was killing a five-year-old out in St. Johns. I thought the magical Offload was my father’s signature and had taken a cab to my dad’s office, where I told him I was advising Mama to contact the police and then sue my father for illegal Offloading practices.
I told Love my dad denied that he or his company had Offloaded on the kid. I told Love I stabbed my dad’s finger—and my own—with a straight pin and worked a blood magic Truth spell at his request. Even under the influence of Truth, my father had told me he and his company were not involved with the Offload.
“Were you angry?” Payne, who was also taking notes at her desk, asked.
Okay, here’s where I realized it might have been smart to have an attorney come in with me. Hells, how stupid could I be?
Still, honesty was the best policy, right?
“Yes, I was angry. I thought my father had Offloaded a huge magical price onto a five-year-old kid and that the kid was dying.”
“Was that the only reason you went to see your father that day?” Love asked.
I knew what he was getting at. I’d managed to avoid seeing my dad for seven years before I’d gone storming into his office. And on the one day I did go see him, he was killed. It was a pretty hard coincidence to swallow.
“That was the only reason.”
Love nodded. “Did you see anyone else while you were there?”
“His receptionist. I . . . uh . . . cast Influence on her so she would show me into my dad’s office without making me wait.”
Love’s eyebrows went up. Influence came naturally to my family. With a smile and just the barest whisper of magic, a Beckstrom could make almost anyone do almost anything. Still, any spell cast legally on another human being had to be done with their consent. That was a damn hard thing to actually enforce, but the spirit of the law ruled in magic-related cases.
Cases like murder.
“Did you Influence anyone else in the building?” Love asked.
“No.”
“So other than your father, his receptionist was the only other person you spoke to while in the building,” Love said.
“No. Zayvion Jones was there too.”
This time it was Detective Payne who gave me the weird look. She held so very still I realized she had the bones to make a lovely marble statue. Then she looked down at the pad of paper in her hands and wrote something.
But it was more than just the weird look that had me wondering what the big deal was about Zayvion. It was the sudden scent of surprise, lemon sour, and something else—a confusion of anger or maybe just worry—that radiated off of her. She knew Zayvion. Or knew something about him.
Wasn’t that interesting?
“Do you have contact information for Mr. Jones?” she asked.
“No. If I did know where he lived, I don’t now. I don’t have his phone number either.”
She nodded and went back to writing. News of my coma had been all the rage while I’d been sleeping it off. There probably wasn’t anyone in Portland who wasn’t up on the latest disaster in the Beckstrom family.
“Okay, then,” Love said. “That’s it. Thank you, Ms. Beckstrom.” He turned off the tape recorder and made another note on his paper. “So. You seen Zayvion Jones since then?” he asked without looking up at me.
“From what I can remember, I’ve talked to him once since I’ve been back.”
“How long ago?” He still wasn’t looking at me, still had his pen on the paper, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t actually writing anything, just going through the motions. No more sunshine and sandy beaches. Makani Love was nothing but rain-cold police procedure now.
My personal life was none of the police’s business. Except, of course, when it was.
Zayvion had been noticeably absent. It was possible he didn’t want to see me anymore. Possible he had changed his mind about us. I wouldn’t blame him. My life was full of complications. And so far, it didn’t look like it was getting less complicated anytime soon.
I had seen him this morning—on the street, watching the bus go by. Or at least I thought it was him. But maybe I was just seeing something, someone, I wanted to see in the rain and darkness.
“The last time I spoke to him was about two weeks ago, when I first got back to town.”
Love looked up from his paperwork. No smile this time. “If you do see Zayvion Jones, we’d appreciate knowing about it.”
“Why? Is he in trouble?”
“No. We just need him for some paperwork. Nothing serious.”
Right. It didn’t take a Hound to know he was lying.
“Okay,” I said. “Is that it? Can I leave now?”
Love looked over at Payne, and she closed the pad she’d been writing on.
“How much do you know about the Magical Enforcement Response Corps?” she asked.
I knew nothing—didn’t even know the police had a separate department to deal with magical crimes. I just thought some of the police officers were cross-trained to deal with magic, like Love and Payne. “Have we talked about it before?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
Love grunted and took another slurp of his coffee. “We don’t go out of the way to make the MERC public, yah?”
“So why tell me?”
They didn’t say anything. I looked between them, at Love’s wide, usually happy face, at Payne’s thin, perpetually scowling one.
“Is there a case you need my help with? A Hounding job or something?”
Love sat back a little, his chair groaning. “You’ve had some problems with magic, yah?”
Besides blowing my brains out with magic and doing a three-week coma? I thought. Besides these lovely colorful tattoos down my right arm and bands across my left? Besides carrying magic in me instead of just drawing on it from the stores beneath the city like sane people? Besides Trager stabbing my leg for a syringe full of my blood and the magic it contained, and of course, that freaky visit from my dad’s ghost this morning? No, no problems at all.
“Define problems,” I said.
“We want you to know you can call us—any of us—if something goes wrong again,” Love said. “The law is here to protect you.”
“What makes you think I need protection?”
“In this city, everybody needs protection.” He smiled, but it was the grim look of a man who had seen the worst of
what people could do—with and without magic.
Here was where I should lay my cards on the table and tell them about Lon Trager on the bus. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. And it wasn’t some sort of Silence or Choke spell.
I hesitated because if I told them Lon Trager wanted Pike, I’d end up whisked out of town under police custody, thus killing any chance of me convincing Pike he should come to the police to make sure they could take care of Trager aboveboard and legally. I did not want Pike to go vigilante and get himself killed or thrown in jail.
And if the police didn’t rush me out of town, they might just tell me to take out a restraining order on Trager, which wouldn’t do me any good if one of his unrestrained “people” decided to kill me. Barring those two options, Love and Payne might decide instead to tail me 24/7, which I would hate. I don’t like people watching me.
I took another drink of coffee to cover my pause. Pike. First I’d talk to him, find out what the old Hound knew. Then I’d drag his stubborn hide down here to the police to make sure he was protected from Trager right along with me. If I was getting whisked out of town by the cops, Pike was coming with me.
“So, just in case you need protection,” Love continued, “we want you to meet a few people on the MERC force. You have time now, yah?”
“I guess.”
“Good. Come on this way.”
He stood, filling the free space in the room, and I stood too because even with the door propped open, the room suddenly felt much too small for the three of us. I stepped aside so Mr. Island Warmth could walk past me, and then grabbed my coat and exited the room right behind him. Payne followed, a blade of dark shadow on our heels.
Love led us through the maze of cubicles again, and the tightness in my chest squeezed harder. Getting out of that room hadn’t done much good for my claustrophobia. Even here it seemed too small for so many people, and so many desks, and so many walls. There wasn’t enough air.
I gritted my teeth and thought calm thoughts about big open fields and big open oceans and big open skies, where there was plenty of room and plenty of open and plenty of me breathing slowly and smoothly and not hyperventilating like a moron.
Then we were out into the lobby, into high ceilings and echoes and room to breathe, and no more hyperventilation. A hall to the left took us to another door that was card-locked and also had a hell of a Diversion glyph on it. Most people probably wouldn’t even see the door with that big of a Diversion operating. Behind the door was a stairwell. We went down at least two flights, the only sound the squeak of Love’s right sneaker, the clomping of my boots, and the ghostly hush of Payne’s sensible loafers.
Love stopped on a landing and turned toward a wall with a peeling paint job. It smelled strange here, a weird blend of hot epoxy and dill. Love pulled a card out of his pocket and held it waist high—as if there were some sort of scanner embedded in the flaking paint.
And look at that, there was.
A laser read his card, and then he fingered the motions to a glyph, which I couldn’t see since he was wide enough to block his hand and most of the stairwell from my view. He unlocked the Diversion glyph, and the wall with a crappy paint job became a wall with a door.
“Buckle up, Beckstrom,” he said as he stepped through the open door. “You must be this tall to ride the ride.”
I strolled into the room. Payne stepped in and locked the door behind us. I smelled the burnt epoxy stink of the Diversion spell snapping back into place as the door closed. Someone was doing a lot to keep this room beneath people’s notice.
For good reason. The room was large, windowless, and crammed full of so much magic and magical equipment, I literally felt it like a punch to the gut. An ant-bite rashy tingle washed over my skin and made me want to scratch every inch of my body.
As if that weren’t enough, magic twisted inside me, pushing against my bones, my muscles, my skin. My ears started ringing and the edges of my vision shaded. I took a deep breath and cleared my mind of the panic that was coming on fast. Panic was bad. Panic would make me lose control of the magic inside me.
I am calm. Calm as a river. Calm as blue sky. I held still, intent on my own breathing. Inhale, exhale. I did not need to lose control of the magic inside me right here in front of the police. They’d have me locked up in a glyph-warded room faster than I could say hocus-pocus.
That is, if I didn’t burn the whole place down first.
I am a river, river, river.
“You okay?” Love asked.
“Good,” I lied. I even put on a smile. It must have been close to convincing. He nodded. Magic inside me twisted, pushed to get out, to be used, licking hot along the whorls of color from my shoulder to my fingertips, cooling each band on my left hand and arm. It begged to be used. It would be so easy to draw on magic and cast it—not that I even knew what I’d cast it for. And then I’d pay the price.
No way.
Magic turned again, pushed at my skin. I did nothing. Nothing. And magic slowly ebbed.
Go, me.
“So here’s where a lot of it takes place.” Love waved his hand, gesturing at the room as a whole. I had no idea what he was talking about.
He did not step forward. The room stretched back farther than I could see, but as though I were looking through a fishbowl, I could not focus enough to actually make out the back wall. They had heavy Diversions in the room, probably some Glamour or Illusion, keeping my eyes believing what they wanted me to believe.
There could be an entire three-ring circus back there, elephants and all, and I wouldn’t see it through those spells. It was the most effective magical version of a one-way mirror I’d ever seen.
“All what takes place?” I asked.
Love pointed to my left. “Watching the city for magical crimes. Over there we have surveillance equipment in the most heavily populated areas of the city.” He pointed to my right. “Over there we have a magic-blocked holding cell, and back there”—he pointed at the fuzzy end of the room—“are restrooms.” He smiled.
Restrooms. Right.
“Okay, so you’re equipped to detect magic and crimes dealing with magic. Why show me?”
“Because, Ms. Beckstrom,” a new but familiar voice said from the fuzzy side of the room, “we need your permission to let us keep you safe.”
Paul Stotts, my bus buddy, appeared like, you know . . . magic, out of a thick fog that was the other side of the room. Well, well. He really was a cop. Let the show begin.
From Love and Payne’s body language, I figured he must be the boss here and maybe not a very well-liked man. Something about him made them uncomfortable. Something I just wasn’t getting.
Three people walked up behind him. Of the two men, one looked like an aging hippie gone bald with a pigtail of hair at the nape of his neck, and the other was about four feet tall and sandy-haired. He gave off a clean-cut accountant vibe. The woman was heavy and looked like she’d just come in from working as both fry cook and bouncer at a truck stop. They were all dressed in street clothes. Like everything else in the room, their scents were overpowered by the strong smell of magic.
“This is part of the team from Magical Enforcement Response Corps,” Stotts went on. “Officers Garnet”—the hippie nodded—“Julian”—the accountant smiled—“and Richards.” The woman held up one hand. “They have all been specially trained in magical abuse investigation, control, and regulation.”
“Nice to meet you all.”
Stotts walked forward. The rest of the MERC team went back to the fuzzier side of the room, chatting quietly amongst themselves where I could not hear what they said.
“I asked Detectives Love and Payne to bring you here after you gave your statement so you would better understand the lengths we will go to make sure you are safe.”
There it was again, people thinking I was in danger. “Are you telling me I need you to look after me?” I did not like people telling me I couldn’t handle myself or my life. Hells, I’d been
mauled by my father’s ghost just this morning and managed to come out of that okay.
“Not at all,” he said smooth and nice-like. “I am asking for your help.”
Well. I had not expected that. My witty retort about not needing bodyguards or babysitters died on my lips.
“Excuse me?”
“We’d like to hire you to Hound a case we’re working on.”
“Why me?”
“It involves magic.”
If he had said it involved juggling ostriches, I wouldn’t have been more confused. All Hounding jobs involved magic. He wasn’t smiling, but I could tell he was enjoying himself. I gave him a dirty look and tried again. “Why not hire Martin Pike or one of the other Hounds who contract with the police?”
