by Devon Monk
“We think you would be the best person for the job.”
Okay, there was more behind that. They wanted to either keep an eye on me, keep me in the city, or what? Maybe all the other Hounds were busy. Maybe I was being called in for a second opinion. That happened a lot—using several Hounds on one job to make sure the results were the same.
And here’s the deal: I hadn’t done any Hounding jobs for weeks. If I was ever going to make a living at it again, I needed to stop being afraid of what might happen if I lost control of the magic inside me and take the damn job. Plus, I needed the money.
“You know my rates?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Then okay. I’ll take the job. What is it? Where is it? Who is it?”
“Before I get into those things, we need your permission to tag you.”
“What?” I said a little too loudly. “No. Absolutely not.” Tags were the polite way to tell someone they were going to be under constant police surveillance. Spied on. Wired. Well, wireless. Magic had brought some amazing advancements into the spy biz too. Which would also mean someone was going to have to Proxy the price of the magic used to follow me around.
There was no way in hell I was going to let someone spy on me.
Stotts looked like he’d expected that. He rubbed at the edge of his jaw.
“Ms. Beckstrom,” he said, all business now, “because of the volatile nature of this case, the police feel it would be in your best interest for us to know where you are and who is with you at all times while you are on the job. We will be able to respond much faster to any threat, whether it be a common crime or magically based. We will be able to keep you safe. It would be a smart move on your part to let us do this for you, and you would also be doing the MERC a favor.”
“By giving you permission to spy on me?”
“By helping us find the criminal we’re looking for.”
“If I find whoever is doing whatever, I will report it to you. I don’t need to be tagged. As a matter of fact, tagging me might interfere with my ability to Hound.” For one thing, I wouldn’t be able to get the stink of their spell off me, and that would make me trackable to more people than just the police.
Magic twisted in me, pressed up, out, wanting to be used. My right arm itched, stung. I held still and held Stotts’ gaze. I forced my thoughts to quiet, settle, become smooth like glass. He couldn’t make me do this. That was also against the law.
Magic pushed, so I let it pour up from where it was held in deep natural cisterns beneath the city, into my feet, bones, body, rushing up my right side, webbing out beneath my skin, then like a loop, a battery, let it flow out of my left hand’s fingers to fall back into the ground again.
I knew no one could see the magic flowing into me. Magic is fast, invisible to the naked eye. Which was why Hounds were needed to trace back the burnt remains of spells.
And all the time that we stood there glaring at each other, I didn’t draw on it, didn’t mutter one mantra or wiggle so much as a single pinkie.
I was a frickin’ poster child of self-control today.
And this poster child was done with the stare down.
“Good-bye, Detective Stotts. Thanks for the offer.” I turned and headed to the door. Got there too. Payne had her hand on the handle and turned it for me.
“Okay,” Stotts said.
I looked over my shoulder. “Okay what?”
“Okay, we won’t tag you, although I’m strongly against it. Will you still take the job?”
I thought he’d put up more of a fight about the whole tagging thing. Still, the money would be good, and I would be back on my feet, Hounding again. I liked that idea. “Yes.”
“Good.” He walked over to me. “I’ll take you out to the site tonight.”
This was the part I didn’t like about Hounding for the cops. To not contaminate evidence or influence a Hound’s opinion in any way, the cops kept you in the dark until you were actually on the job.
“Can it wait that long?” Spells got cold pretty fast, which was why so many Hounds were on call for the police.
“For what you’re looking for, yes. Can you be back here by five?”
I paused like I was thinking that out. It was an old habit. My social calendar hadn’t been booked in years. Oh, wait. I actually did have a dinner planned with Violet. Hounding usually left me pretty tired, even more so if it involved something the police were interested in. Like dead bodies.
I’d have to call Violet and reschedule. I nodded. “I can do that.”
“Then meet me here,” Stotts said.
“Right here?” I pointed at the floor.
“Outside.”
“All right. See you then.”
Love, who had been silent through this, cleared his throat. “ ’Kay, then. Anything else, Detective Stotts?” he asked.
“That’s it. Thanks for coming by, Ms. Beckstrom.” He didn’t offer to shake my hand, which I thought was pretty smart of him. I was not going to carry around the scent of the cop who was sending me in on a job. Just because Hounds worked for the police didn’t mean they didn’t work for anyone else. And I was getting the feeling there might be people in town other than the police who were interested in keeping an eye on me.
“I’ll see you in a few hours,” I said. I turned just as Payne unlocked the Diversion spell.
I looked at Love. The big guy didn’t seem worried, but he wasn’t his happy self either. He nodded and pointed at the door. I followed his cue. Payne leaned against the open door, scowling like normal.
“Thanks.” I strolled through the doorway and took a deep breath on the other side. The prickly ant-bite rashy tingle I’d felt from the moment I stepped into that room eased up. I didn’t care who was watching—I scrubbed at my right shoulder and down my arm, trying to relieve the ghostly itch.
Love came through the doorway, and Payne followed and locked it all up again so that it looked like a wall full of bad paint. That was a hell of a spell. Really masterfully cast. If I had the time, I would totally want to Hound it and see how it was made.
“You think that was smart?” Love asked.
“What? Taking the job?”
“Not the job,” Love said. “You’re a good Hound. I mean going into it without being tagged.”
“Do you know which investigation he’s hiring me for?”
“Classified,” Payne said. “MERC doesn’t have to share files with city police.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know that, but it wasn’t what I had asked. “Has he told you what the job is?”
“No,” Love said. “But Stotts doesn’t tag every Hound he uses. Just the ones who might be in danger working his cases.”
“Like who?”
“Piller.”
“I don’t know a Hound named Piller.”
“ ’Cause he died six years ago,” Love said. “Hounding for Stotts.”
“Listen,” I said. “Hounding is risky—with or without the police or MERC involved. One death in six years isn’t enough to make me let people spy on me.”
“Sixteen,” Payne said.
“What?”
“Sixteen Hounds have died in the last six years. All of them were working for Stotts.”
Whoa. That was suddenly a whole different thing. How could I not know about that?
I could not know about that because Hounds are insular, solitary, suspicious people who didn’t talk to one another, didn’t help one another, and didn’t want to be around one another for any reason. Not even to talk about their own dead.
“Is he making them walk through fire or something?”
Payne scowled, and I had the feeling she wasn’t in the mood for a smart-ass.
Luckily, Love answered me instead.
“It’s like bad luck, yah?” He walked up the stairwell, his shoe squeaking. “When it comes to Stotts, he’s got more bad luck than good. Bad magic, bad cases, bad survival odds. He’s cursed.”
“Is that supposed
to scare me?” I asked. “Maybe you don’t know the kind of men I’ve dated. Or—oh, here—did you ever meet my dad? How about all those fabulous women he married? Cursed doesn’t even begin to cover my life.”
Love grunted and called me some name in Hawaiian I didn’t understand.
I followed him up the stairs. “I’m not going to let him spy on me,” I said. “Do you know what being tagged would do for my business? People won’t hire me if they think the police are watching me. A girl has to make rent.”
“Thought you had your daddy’s fortune,” Love said.
“Well, don’t believe everything you read.” The fact was I did have some money from his estate, but there were so many legal complications and roadblocks to me actually getting my inheritance, I was still living pretty much month to month. And on top of that, I had some hefty guilt about using money my dad had earned by twisting, manipulating, and destroying lives.
Call me a softy.
“Hard to collect a paycheck when you’re dead,” Payne said quietly behind me.
“Fine.” I stopped walking. Both of them stopped too and looked at me. “Tell me what I’m getting into and convince me it’s worth getting tagged and ruining my reputation.”
Payne crossed her arms over her chest and leaned one shoulder against the wall. “Stotts gets involved in some heavy stuff. Dark magics.”
“Like blood magic?” I asked, resisting the urge to rub at the scars on my left shoulder. Those scars had been the result of some cranked-up gutter trash jumping me with a blood magic spell and a knife a few months ago. “I can handle that.”
She shook her head. “Not just blood and drugs, Allie.”
“How about giving me some specifics?”
She just gave me a hard look and said nothing.
Great.
“I’m a big girl. I know how to take care of myself.”
“Yah, Tita, we know.” Love didn’t sound convinced.
Nice. Where was the love when a girl needed it?
“You have a cell we can reach you at?” He started up the stairs again, and Payne and I fell into step behind him.
“I did,” I said over the echo of our footsteps. “I will. I’m getting it replaced today.” Again, I thought. Ever since I’d turned into a walking receptacle for magic, cell phones worked for about a day, and then the battery burned out and the wires fused, or melted, or just quit working. It made me a little jumpy about other things failing—like elevators, or, hells, car engines. But so far it was just the cell phones and wireless connections that went belly-up on me.
“That’d be good,” he said. “Make sure you call in and give us the number, okay?”
“Sure.”
“And you have your will in order, right?” he asked.
“Ha-ha. Funny.”
He looked down over his shoulder and gave me a wide smile. “Naw, we won’t let anything happen to you. This job will be a piece of cake. You help Stotts this once, walk away alive, and maybe find some other way to make rent, yah?”
“I like Hounding. It’s what I do best.”
Love reached the top of the stairs and paused before carding open the door. “You can be strong as you like, Tita, be the best Hound there is, and still get your ass kicked in this town.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll call you when I get a new phone. Promise.”
Love smiled, and it was all sunshine and breezy beaches again. “That’s all we ask.” He slid his card through the reader, unwove the Diversion spell—this one much smaller than the one on the bottom floor—and opened the door for me.
I walked out into the brighter fluorescent-lit hall, the smells of too many people coming in out of the rain, the sounds of too many people in too small a space closing in on me. I needed fresh air. Now would be good.
“See you soon,” I said to Love and Payne.
“Be careful,” Love said.
I intended to do just that. Which meant I needed food and a decent cup of coffee to keep my strength up. I knew the perfect place to get both—Get Mugged.
I pulled my scarf closer around my nose and chin. Time to leave the secret police, magical crimes, and cursed dead Hounds behind me. At least for as long as I could.
Chapter Four
Outside the station, I took a deep breath and got a noseful of diesel, fish cooking in hot grease, and the wet concrete and mold that pervades Portland from October through May. The wind gusted, pushing hard between buildings and bringing me nothing except the smell of rain and cold.
Daylight was making some progress against the cloud cover, washing the sky in steel gray light. In the strange half-light and rain, everyone looked a little surreal and ghostlike, their forms and features lost to the haze.
I headed down the stairs and strode toward the bus stop that would take me nearer the river and my favorite coffee shop, Get Mugged. After a morning like this, I wanted some real coffee, good coffee, dark coffee. Then I’d start looking around for Pike. I made it all the way to the curb before a man stepped up behind me.
“Allie.”
The scent of hickory overtones and soap—not French cologne, just plain soap—rolled on the wind to me, and I knew who it was without even turning. Perfect timing.
“Morning, Pike,” I said. “Want coffee?”
Martin Pike and the guy with him stepped up beside me, and we all crossed the street together. Pike was shorter than me by at least six inches. His gray hair was shaved down to a tight buzz, and the lines etched at his eyes, cheeks, and forehead mapped all the wars he’d served in. Former Marine, I’d always assumed, and a damn good Hound who did a lot of work for the police.
The other man I’d never met. He had a head of black hair and had a pencil-thin mustache beneath a nose that had been broken more than once. He was younger and slighter than Pike, and wore a jacket that reminded me of the gangs out on the east side of town.
“No, thanks,” Pike said, his words carrying a hint of the South, where I thought he’d grown up. “This is Anthony Bell, Hound.”
“Hey,” Anthony said around a piece of gum.
I nodded. He smelled like sweet cherries—which meant blood magic and drugs. For the split second he managed to hold eye contact, I noted his pupils were pinpricks. Raging high.
That was the easiest way to spot a Hound. Nine times out of ten, a Hound was whacked out on painkillers, booze, drugs. Anything to cut the pain of using magic for a living.
“So how’s your granddaughter?” I asked Pike.
“She’s dead.”
I stopped. Turned. Pike stopped too and faced me. Anthony got one step farther down the sidewalk and then glared at us. He shifted from foot to foot like holding still hurt. He swore and then shrugged the hood on his light gray jacket farther over his eyes.
“She committed suicide,” Pike said. “Couldn’t handle life after . . . that.” His voice was emotionless, but his eyes narrowed in anger or grief—it was hard to tell with him. Pike never let much show. And even though I thought he was a good Hound, there were moments—moments like this—when I wondered if he Hounded for the money or for the killing thrill of the hunt.
I swallowed against a knot of nausea. She had been so young. Strong. I thought she had a chance. People can shake blood magic addiction. People can pull themselves up from abuse. But Lon Trager had done more than abuse her. She’d been tortured. Raped. Broken.
“I’m sorry, Pike.” Then I did something Hounds don’t do. I reached over and touched his hand. Physical contact meant leaving some of your scent on someone else. Not a desirable thing if you didn’t want to get tracked down via the people you’d been around. Like I said, Hounds have a fierce need to keep their scents to themselves.
He nodded and pulled his hand away. But not before I noticed gauze wrapped around the edge of his wrist. Not before I smelled the slight tang of his blood.
I tipped my head toward his hand. “What’s that all about?”
Anthony stopped pacing and looked over at us, suddenly
interested in our conversation.
“It’s nothing,” Pike said.
And that was a lie. Okay, fine. He didn’t want to talk about his wounds. I didn’t want to talk about mine yet either.
He said, “Lon Trager is out of jail.”
