by Sarah Fine
“So who’s this agent person Zhi told you about?”
Asa’s eyes met mine. “His name’s Reza.”
Reza. Where had I heard that name before? “Wait—that was who Zhi said—”
Asa nodded. “He’s a well-known operator.” He scanned his escape routes again as he fiddled with his unused straw. “Never met him personally. Don’t really want to.”
“But you’re not even sure that’s who took Ben.”
“No. But it’s as good a lead as any.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Or a good excuse to get me to go with you to Denver.”
He smirked. “Mattie, you’re hurting my feelings. Don’t you trust me?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Whether you trust me?”
“Whether I’ll do the job. It’s been a long night.” And right now all I wanted was sleep. “Can we go home now?”
Asa nodded as he waved down the waitress and paid the check. As he signed the receipt, I looked at his face, realizing that there were dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there earlier this afternoon. “You did well tonight,” he said quietly as he set down his pen. “I should have said that earlier.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You flatter me, Mr. Waxruby.”
He bowed his head, laughing. “Dammit, Mattie.”
“What?”
He shoved himself back from the table and got to his feet. “Nothing. Let’s go. We should make an early start tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t say I was going with you.”
“Yeah, but you will.” He gave me a bright grin that was sharp as a razor blade. “I’m your dealer, baby. I’ve got what you want.” He headed for the door.
I stepped outside the restaurant to find him flagging down a cab. “Hey, I didn’t buy that stick thingy from you. You gave it to me.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” A cab pulled up. “It’s hope, Mattie. You’re an addict. And I know a thing or two about addicts. You’re gonna chase that high all the way to the end.” He opened the door of the waiting car and gestured inside.
I glared at him, a lump forming in my throat. And then I slid into the cab.
CHAPTER TEN
I woke to the sound of a door closing and sat up in a panic. I had no idea where I was. Then it came back to me. Daria’s guest room was charming and funky, like the rest of the apartment. The paintings that hung on the walls in this room were all of the Chicago skyline, but the style and colors were strikingly different in each. It reminded me of that emotion magic we’d shared yesterday—a prism of feelings.
That pretty much described this insane odyssey so far. I had no idea how to feel or think about it. But as much as I hated to admit it—and never would out loud—I knew Asa had been right. The hope that I would reach Ben again, that we would go back to Sheboygan, get married, and resume our perfect life, would drive me forward. I was nowhere near giving up on him. I needed to look him in the eye. I needed to ask him why he had manipulated me, why he had lost himself in magic, why he had hidden this whole secret life from me. And then I needed to feel his arms around me again, to lay my head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat, restored and healthy and healed. The thought of him suffering and hurting was so painful that I had to shove it away every time it reared its head. And the thought of him dead?
Rubbing away the tightness in my chest, I took a quick shower, pulled my hair back into a messy twist, and padded out to the kitchen, where Daria was slicing apples. On her table were several shopping bags from the local grocery. She smiled when she saw me. “Asa asked me to pick up a few things for your road trip.”
I peeked into a few of the sacks. Raw, unsalted nuts. Dried unsulfured apricots, a package of grape tomatoes and another of washed and sliced mushrooms, a large bag of carrot and celery sticks, apples and bananas, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and several packages of sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. “No Pringles?” I poked at a few other bags. “No Twizzlers?”
Daria laughed and pushed a plate of sliced apples toward me. “Not if you’re traveling with Asa.”
“This is unacceptable,” I muttered. At least there was coffee. I gratefully accepted a cup and sank into a chair.
Daria began to chop kale and stuff it into a blender on the counter. “He’s kind of precise about what he puts into his body.”
“He could stand to gain a few pounds.” Asa wasn’t exactly skinny, but he looked nothing like his brother. Ben prided himself on his physique and worked out every day. Both brothers had broad shoulders and lean hips, but Asa was all angles where Ben was thickly padded with muscle.
“I doubt he cares much about that.” Daria tilted a cutting board and slid a few cored apples into the blender. “He’s been like this for as long as I’ve known him.”
“How long is that?”
“We first worked together . . . almost ten years ago? It’s been a while.”
“You must know him well, then.”
Daria looked at me. “I don’t think anyone could say they know Asa well.”
“Everyone certainly seems to know his name. And he seems to get chased a lot.”
Chuckling, Daria scooped some coconut oil into the blender, then added a few spoonfuls of some kind of seed, a bunch of chopped celery, a peeled cucumber, several sections of grapefruit, and half a mango. “He’s built a reputation. I don’t know how he’s survived, though.”
She hit the “Puree” button on the blender, and I watched its contents churn into a thick green smoothie. When it fell silent, I said, “He’s lucky he hasn’t gotten shot or something.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Daria got out a large plastic bottle and poured the smoothie into it. “I’m talking about what he is.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “How did you two get together?”
I sat back. “We’re not together. Not at all. Not in any universe.”
Daria’s brow furrowed. “Honey, that’s obvious. I meant your partnership. Your business partnership.”
“Oh.” I fiddled with a crease in one of the paper sacks. “He’s helping me find someone, and I’m helping him . . . do some jobs.” I didn’t want to tell her about Ben. I was afraid she’d be yet another person blaming my fiancé for what had happened to him. “We kind of met by accident. I didn’t even know I was a reliquary until two days ago.”
Daria put the smoothie in the fridge and turned to face me. “So you’re basically strangers.”
I nodded. “Any advice for how to deal with him? He kind of drives me crazy.”
She gave me a wistful look. “Let Asa be Asa.”
“Do I have a choice?”
She looked down at her hands. “Allowing someone to be who they really are, on their terms, instead of expecting them to be who you wish they were—that’s always a choice.” She looked up at me through thick black lashes. “And I have a little experience with that kind of thing.”
I looked at her striking face and remembered the moment Asa had tucked her fake breast back into her bra. I smiled at her. “Some people are easier to accept as they are.” I cast a glance down the hall toward Asa’s room. “Some are a little trickier.”
She chuckled. “Oh, honey. Give him some credit. He’s survived in this business longer than most. He’s figured it out. But like I said, I don’t really know how he stands it.”
I remembered Grandpa saying pretty much the same thing. “Because he’s a magic sensor, you mean?”
Daria nodded. “Magic sniffers aren’t all that common. And they usually aren’t . . . healthy.”
“I think we met one last night in Chinatown.”
“Who, Tao? He belongs to Zhong. Most of the major bosses have a sniffer, assuming they can snag one.”
“You make it sound like the bosses own them.”
She popped a chunk of mango into her mouth. “The most sensitive ones are really valuable. More than any other kind of sensor. If you’ve got magic on you, then they can feel you com
ing. They can find you. They know where you hide your relics. They know if you have any juice of your own and how much. The only way to hide magic from them is . . .” She gestured at me. “But even then, if they get close enough, they might feel it in you.” She shivered and ran her hands down her arms. “But there’s a price to that kind of sensitivity.”
“Asa didn’t seem that sensitive, though,” I countered. “Yesterday, this manipulator named Mrs. Wong actually stuck her hand under his shirt, and he seemed totally fine.”
Daria whistled. “Maybe it seemed that way, but trust me, that had to be excruciating.”
I stared down at my apple slices, which were slowly going brown. I remembered the strain in Asa’s voice when he defied the manipulative old lady. “I guess it didn’t look fun.”
“That’s what I mean about magic sniffers. It’s not easy for them.”
“Tao looked like a zombie. He seemed like he could barely walk under his own power.”
“He’s high on Ekstazo magic most of the time, I imagine, just to keep him going.”
Maybe that was what he was doing with whatever was in his pocket. “Is that how Asa survives?” He certainly had a crapload of stuff in those pockets of his.
Right then a door down the hall opened, and Gracie’s toenails clicked on the hardwood. Asa’s voice, low and sweet in that tone he used only with her, reached me. “Go say ‘thank you’ to Daria. Go on, girl. I’ll be out in a minute.”
She came running into the kitchen. I heard the shower come on as Daria knelt to receive Gracie’s wriggling gratitude. Her eyes met mine as the pit bull licked her face. “I think Asa’s found his own way of surviving. But whatever you guys are doing, it involves some pretty powerful magic. Even when he makes it look easy, just think about what it’s really costing him.”
I thought back to the night before, to the sweat soaking his T-shirt, the circles under his eyes, the way he massaged his temples. “I think you might be right.”
“But he knows what he’s doing, Mattie. You just have to trust him.”
A few hours later, after we’d passed the magic in the coaster through Daria and into me, Asa and I hit the road. I was feeling a little euphoric, probably an aftereffect of the healing magic, but Asa was quiet, sipping at the green smoothie as he got on the highway heading west. Every once in a while, Gracie crept up from her bed in the back to lick at his elbow, and it would draw a quick smile to his face.
“How long will it take us to get to Denver?” I asked when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.
“We’ll stop in Kansas City tonight. I have business along the way.”
I groaned. “You might be in fabulous shape, but my muscles are aching like nobody’s business. I’m not sure I can run for my life again so soon.”
His gaze was darting from the rearview mirror to his side-view mirrors every few seconds. “You probably won’t have to.”
A surprised laugh burst from my mouth. “Probably?”
“No promises.”
Asa munched on tomatoes and blueberries and carrot sticks, and managed to look only mildly offended when I ducked into the first gas station we stopped at to get myself some Twizzlers. “These are vegetarian,” I said. “Want one?”
“I’m not that kind of vegetarian.”
I slid a little lower in my seat, cradling the package. “More for me, then.”
As we got back on the highway, I asked, “Can we listen to the radio?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My ride, my rules.”
My ride, my rules. He must have said that to me at least half a dozen times before we arrived at our first stop, in a town called Bloomington. I sat in the van with Gracie as Asa grabbed one of his toolboxes and went into a bookstore, emerging fifteen minutes later with a spring in his step. I eyed him as he got back into the driver’s seat. “Are you about to ask me to open my vault so you can make another deposit?”
“Nope. You’re only for special jobs. Most of my business is dealing. There are a lot of small towns the bosses ignore, and I can move product without having to worry about them coming after me, looking for a cut.”
“So you’re selling . . . those sticks?”
“That’s a pretty popular item, yeah.”
“You must need a lot of conduits to get the magic into them.”
He shook his head as he pulled out of the parking lot. “No conduits for the party items. This is surface magic, not infused magic.”
“Huh?”
He sighed as he got on the interstate again. “Infused magic is what we’ve been working with. If you infuse an object with manipulation magic, for example, the user can draw on that power to influence others.”
“Like an actual Knedas.”
“Yup. Except it gets used up, depending on how much magic is put into the object.”
“Okay, so how is that different from surface magic?”
“That’s when the magic is just on the surface of the relic rather than inside it. And in that case, the user doesn’t have the power—the power acts on them.”
I thought back to Franz and his pen, the way he had been sucking on it. That must have been what all the people in the magic dens were doing with their objects. Same with the Silly String and the floss. “If you don’t need a conduit for that work, how do you do it?”
“You dip the objects in the juice.”
“Dip them in . . . you know, suddenly I’m not sure I want to know what you mean by ‘juice.’”
He chuckled. “It could be any bodily fluid, but usually it’s plasma.”
“So naturals just donate their fluids on the regular?”
“They’re making money off it. It’s quite the commodity, depending on how potent they are. Some of the bosses have major juicing operations.”
I put my half-eaten bag of Twizzlers down, feeling a little queasy. Gracie’s head popped up, sniffing at the food, but Asa gently shoved her head into the back again. “Don’t even think about it,” he said to her, then reached into his console and pulled out her pumpkin treats. “Can you give her a few of those?” he asked me.
I took the sack and tossed the treats at Gracie—who happily caught them—then spent a few minutes watching Asa. “Do you use any magic yourself?”
He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “No.” He looked away. “Not anymore.”
I bit my lip. “Did you used to be addicted?”
“Yeah. For a little while I was.”
“How old were you?”
“You interested in my life story now?” He let out a bitter chuckle.
“I think it’ll help me understand what’s going on.”
“I wasn’t very old when I knew I was different,” he said after a solid minute of silence. “But I had no idea what was happening to me. I would just get these feelings, like something was coming my way, and it was good or dangerous or scary as fuck, but I wouldn’t know what it was.”
“Magic,” I murmured.
He nodded. “I thought I was crazy, and I had no one to talk to about it. My mom was long gone, and my dad . . .” His hands tightened around the steering wheel. “So by the time I hit high school, I was just trying to hold it together. I would have done anything to be normal.”
I watched the muscles of his arms flex as he changed lanes. “You self-medicated.”
“I guess that’s what you’d call it. I just wanted to make it go away.”
It felt as if I were walking on the thinnest ice. One wrong word from me and he’d clam up. And to find out more about his childhood was to find out more about Ben. “Were you around magic that much? Is it really that common?”
He gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “There’s more out there than you would ever know, but that wasn’t the only . . .” He shook his head as if he’d thought better about what he was about to say. “There was enough going on that I wanted to be numb.”
“So you got into drugs, right?”
“Sounds like so
meone dug up my record.”
Oops. I’d given that bit away. “It was just part of the investigation into Ben’s disappearance.”
“Weed, mostly,” he said after a few more miles of quiet. “Some Oxy. But I kept getting deeper, and then . . .” He sighed. “Anyways, I’m clean now. I don’t touch any of it.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “Didn’t I see you pull a bag of weed out of your pants yesterday?”
He smirked and opened his thigh pocket, then pulled out the bag I’d seen and tossed it into my lap. “Try smoking that, then. Have fun.” His voice was dripping with amusement. “We’ll see if we can get you some rolling papers at my next stop.”
I opened the bag and gave it a sniff. It was dried kale. “You are so not what I was expecting.”
Asa was smiling now. “Are you talking to my kale?”
“No, you jackass,” I said, giggling. “You. The way Ben talked—”
His smile disappeared in an instant. “Oh, yes. Tell me what he said.”
I flinched. “Not much, really.”
“Oh no you don’t. Now it’s your turn. What did my dear baby brother tell you about me?”
I scooted away, my back to the window. “He just said you were unlikely to be sober.”
“Don’t sanitize it for me.”
“He said you were . . . angry.”
Asa laughed. “Can’t imagine why I would have been angry, seeing as I had it so easy. Come on, this is fun. What else?”
“Asa . . .”
“Tell. Me.”
“He said you were a criminal, okay?” I blurted out. “And he said you were—” My mouth clamped shut, and I stared out the window at a cornfield. Here we were, driving across the country to try to save Ben, and I was stirring up terrible memories for the guy I was depending on to help me.
“Spill it, Mattie.”
“He said you were jealous of him,” I added quietly.
Asa rolled his eyes. “Of course he would think that. Of course he would.”
“And you weren’t?”
“Jealous of him? Fuck no.”
“But he was normal, wasn’t he? He didn’t have to deal with the things you did.”
“I was glad for him,” Asa said, his voice suddenly hoarse. His face was turned away, but I could see the rigid edge of his jaw. “I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone, especially him. And I didn’t want him involved in any of it.”
