by Jeff Somers
“Mr. Vonnegan, the man himself!”
I turned, blinking in the bright sunshine, shrugging my tattered old overcoat onto my shoulders.
“Looking good, Detective James,” I said. “That’s definitely your color.”
He grinned, glancing down at his purple suit. It was well made, a lush, dark shade of the color that looked good on him. Detective Stanley James was a fucking dandy, but he was too big and too good with his hands for anyone to call him that to his face. He was also one of the few non-mages who knew his way around us. Who even knew we existed. I suspected he had some high-level dealings with some serious power, enustari.
He swept one arm at his Charger. “Let’s take a ride, Vonnegan.”
“I MAYBE DON’T have the magic y’all do,” James said conversationally, driving in the relaxed way some people do, like the car was an extension of their nervous system. “But you got to understand, Vonnegan: nothing happens on the East Coast involving a crime that I don’t hear about.” He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “You should have come to me first, paid a tax, smoothed things out.”
James was a greedy fuck. You took one look at his clothes, the gold ring on his hand, and you knew he wasn’t making do with a detective’s salary. He’d once said to me that when you saw behind the curtain and realized people could cheat with magic, playing by any sort of rulebook was just pointless. I thought he had a point.
“It’s not my caper,” I said, watching the crowded streets slip past outside the window. “I’m just a contractor. And anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
James laughed, his voice deep and throaty. “You goddamn Tricksters, you always think you got the rest of us by the short hairs.” He gestured at the rearview mirror. “But I got friends, too.”
Dangling from the mirror was a thin silver chain, a crude wooden disc affixed to it. It was just a sliver of balsa, on which someone had traced a simple Ward. I could tell at a glance it was designed to make casting more difficult, and it was kind of clever, if not particularly powerful. Anyone trying to cast in the car would find themselves tripping over their own tongue, would find pronunciation difficult. All it would take to overcome it would be some conscious effort—the piece wasn’t strong—but it was probably enough to stymie most idimustari (most of whom weren’t called Little Magicians for nothing), and it was even enough to trip up a more powerful mage if they weren’t paying attention—at least the first time they tried to cast.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
James laughed again. “Shit, Vonnegan, I’m doing you a favor here. If I know about a plan to steal something from some heavy hitters, you think the heavy hitters in your weird little club don’t know about it? Maybe not right now, at this moment, but it’s a matter of time. One thing police work teaches you: you can’t rely on criminals. If you got more than just you in the meetings, you got to assume one of your little gang is going to give you up.” He shrugged. “You ain’t on some Archmage’s shit list yet, Vonnegan. Because I haven’t shared this particular bit of information. But you gotta figure, whether it’s me or someone else, you’re gonna be on that list sooner rather than later.”
I hated to admit it, but what he was saying was reasonable enough. Ustari as a whole couldn’t be trusted not to murder each other for the blood in their veins.
Watching the street scroll by, doused in water and sunlight, I pondered. James wasn’t on my side, but he’d always been honest. Honest and ruthless, sure, but honest. One of those guys who would happily tell you precisely who was paying them off, who was having you beat to hell, who had dropped a dime on you. He wasn’t a friend, but there was something curiously reliable about him.
As we passed a row of town houses, every doorway had a woman peering out at me. The same woman, glimpsed for a fraction of a second a dozen times, like watching a flickering movie. She was pale and dressed in black, her dark lips pulled in a wide-eyed smile.
I shuddered, and she was gone.
“Vonnegan? You listening, kid? You go near that bank, you’re in for a load of trouble.”
“I hear you.” I had no intention of going near the place again. I would write Murray’s spells. I’d spin up any spell he needed. I probably had most of them there already, up in my head, ready to be trotted out.
“All right,” he said. “I done my duty.” James steered the car to the curb and toggled the rear locks. I put my hand on the door handle and then paused.
“Which enustari?” I asked.
“Huh?”
I studied the beautiful red fabric of his suit. “The Archmage you think I’m gonna be in trouble with, you get a name?”
“Sure, sure. Renar. Mika Renar. You know her?”
I shook my head as my heart leaped in my chest. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and my vision swam a little.
“No,” I said, fighting to stay calm. “Heard the name. Maybe was in a room with her once, I’m not sure. Thanks for the tip.”
“You owe me one, that’s all. Put it in the bank, I’ll tap you for the withdrawal someday.”
He left me standing on the sidewalk a long way from my squat, but that was okay. I didn’t want him to know where I was actually sleeping anyway. One thing was for sure: if Detective James had tracked me down to deliver a little friendly advice, it meant someone had wanted me to hear it.
People pushed past me. I was sweating. I started walking and knew the worst takeaway from the whole conversation was simple: an Archmage knew my name.
3.
I WOKE UP, twisted in the scratchy sheets. The room was bright, light scattered from the window, the tree outside waving in the wind and making strange patterns on the walls. You could feel the light against your skin like a needling rain.
I lay and stared up at the ceiling, old tin work that had been painted a hundred times. I thought about the dream I’d been having. My father. Of course, as usual, inevitably. I didn’t dream often, but when I did, it was usually about good old Hilly Vonnegan, and we were usually in a bar somewhere on Route 1, some dark and windowless cave where he would order me a soda and then make his way through an entire bottle of Jim Beam one shot at a time, a glass of water sitting there at his elbow, untouched. He’d start off conversational, chatty, driving the bartender crazy, but as he drank more, he’d lose his words and start with the music, staggering over to the jukebox, shouting.
“Let’s be fucking merry, Lemuel,” he would say. “We wanna hear the boom bands play!”
It was from a book he’d read to me when I’d been small. Smaller. He was fond of the phrase.
I sat up awkwardly, because my arm had gone numb again. A dull ache throbbed somewhere deep inside, as if someone had shoved something sharp and unhappy deep into the bone, but it buzzed with that numb sizzling, and I had to lift it with my other arm. It was strange to will my fingers to move and have no response at all.
As I waited for my arm to wake up and return to me, I thought about Dad. The last time I saw him had been in the hospital. He told me he was dying, and I’d shrugged it off. Hilly had been telling me he was dying for so long, it didn’t mean anything. He got drunk enough, eventually he stopped singing songs and telling me about the boom bands, and started getting maudlin, telling me he wasn’t well.
He died three days later. Mom didn’t tell me until a day after that. I didn’t go to the funeral. I turned eighteen four days later and left home. I hadn’t seen my mom since, either. I wondered, briefly, if she was still alive.
OUTSIDE, IT WAS the sort of cold that the bright sun seemed to have no effect on. It was bitter, and I could feel the wind stabbing into the holes in my shoes, my feet going numb as I stood on the corner, smoking and stomping around in a futile effort to keep warm.
The bank was still there, still looked like the sort of place where you had an illegal rave, not a bank where the world’s most power
ful magicians stored their artifacts and grimoires. The songbird was still there, too, sounding like she was just around the corner, singing the same strangely fascinating song, just an endless loop of warbling, shaking syllables.
Just when I thought maybe I’d gotten the meeting details wrong, the rest of my team showed up: Redix, Reggie, Bella, and Lorie. One by one they turned the corner and joined me across the street from the secret bank. Reggie had brought coffees for everyone like a real human being, and I gratefully accepted a boiling-hot cup. We all stood for a moment, watching.
“Step one,” Reggie said, “is to get in for some recon.”
“Fucking waste of time,” Lorie said from behind her sunglasses. She looked like every awkward girl I’d ever gone to high school with: flat-chested and skinny and uncertain if that was just who she was and therefore something to embrace, or if it was prelude to something new. A kid who woke up every morning and checked herself for boobs, for hips, for clearing skin. She glanced at me. “We need three spells: deflection, charm, and something to bust the safe-deposit room’s door. Then you just walk in, grab the box, and walk out.”
“Kid,” Bella Grace said, her voice smoky and burned, “anyone can see that building has enough Wards on it to snuff any spells you cast.”
“Blood sponge,” Reggie said. “Anyone bleeds, it sucks it up before you can cast on it.”
Lorie scowled and didn’t say anything for a moment. “If that’s right,” she finally said, “how do we do it?”
Reggie grinned. “Step one,” he said again, “is to get in for some recon.”
“I’ll do it,” Bella said, rolling her neck. “Just gotta look like I belong. What’s enustari look like?” She looked around at us. “A female enustari,” she added. “I don’t do guys.”
I thought about it. I’d met a few. “Man or woman: rich,” I said, and everyone murmured agreement. “Confident. Like, rich, but not too rich, because most of ’em don’t give a shit what you think, or what they look like.”
Bella nodded, her broad, plain face pensive. “All right. I got the idea.”
“Has to be an actual Archmage,” Reggie said. “They all fucking know each other. It’s a tight little club.”
I nodded. That lined up with my own experience; Ev Fallon seemed to have a mental database of every Archmage in the whole goddamn world. If our Face was going to impersonate someone who belonged in that bank, it would have to be an actual enustari. None of us liked that idea, though. It was dangerous. Archmages held grudges. No one knew that better than me; I had the fucking scars to prove it.
I cleared my throat. “You need a script?”
She shook her head. “Not for this. This is what I do.”
Behind me, I heard Redix sigh. “But you’ll need a bleed.”
“It’s what you signed up for,” Reggie said, sounding unamused.
“I know that,” Redix snapped back. “But every time I cut, the return on investment here gets a little worse.”
None of us had anything smart to say to that.
“So, who knows a real, live Archmage I can mimic?” Bella finally said.
I nodded. “I do. Mika Renar.”
Everyone exchanged a glance. “You’ve met Mika Renar,” Lorie said incredulously.
Reggie looked my worn suit up and down. “No offense.”
“I’ve been in the same room as her,” I said, feeling a strange nervous energy pulsing through me. Every time I thought of Mika Renar I got agitated, uncomfortable—it was almost as if I was terrified on some level, even though I’d never really interacted with her. Like I’d said to James, I’d been in the same room as her maybe twice. And yet I thought of her a lot, and when I thought of her my heart raced and a light sweat broke out all over my body and sometimes I dreamed of her and heard screams, chains rattling, someone calling my name desperately, as if across a vast distance.
“All right,” Bella said, tugging on one ear. Her ears were the prettiest thing about her, delicate little seashells, perfectly formed. “Tell me about lookin’ like Mika freakin’ Renar.”
“You don’t look like her. You look like her Glamour.”
I COULD SENSE the car creeping along next to me. The rain belted down and was just a constant sizzling noise, a blurry veil stretched between me and the world. Before he spoke I knew it would be my newest haunt, Detective James.
“Mr. Vonnegan! Get in the car.”
I slid into the back again and the door locks clicked. “If we’re dating now,” I said, “you should start bringing me flowers.”
“Just takin’ an interest,” the detective said, steering the car into traffic. “Even if you’re ignoring my advice.”
“You didn’t actually give me any advice. You just offered a series of ominous statements.”
James sighed, sounding, for a moment, very, very tired, as if he spent his days running about offering sound advice to people who then routinely ignored it. “Honestly, Vonnegan, you should know that just hearing the name Mika Renar in a sentence is generally all someone should need to be inspired to immediately check for the exits.”
That, I had to admit, was true enough. I had only rumors: Renar was ancient, a hundred years old, and had spent most of those years confined to her wheelchair, tended by her urtuku, a slick pretty boy named Cal Amir. She used her encyclopedic knowledge of our vocabulary freely, indicating she had plenty of Bleeders on call and didn’t seem to mind murdering a few along the way. In fact, she always spoke and interacted with people using her Glamour—an illusion of herself as a young, beautiful woman—and having seen that Glamour, I suspected it took enough blood to kill a person every day to maintain the level of detail and verisimilitude. It was by far the best Glamour I’d ever seen. It was the most terrifying Glamour I’d ever seen, although I wasn’t sure I could explain why.
“Well,” I said, lamely casting about for a comeback that papered over the fact that I knew Detective James was absolutely right, “some of us have to work for a living. You follow me around just to warn me again?”
“Actually, Vonnegan, today we’re going to the station to have a chat about something else entirely.”
I studied the little charm hung over his rearview mirror and wondered if I’d be able to bleed enough to overcome it. Tricksters were used to dealing with the police with a little bleed here and there, magical sand in the eyes while we ran the other way. But James was the worst kind of police: clued in.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I just got one question for you, Vonnegan,” he said, checking me in the rearview. “Where’s Mags, Lem? I think we got to find Mags.”
Everything went still. The car seemed to have stopped. “What?”
James twisted around to peer back at me, smiling slightly. “Your pal. Your buddy. All these years we been rubbing up against each other on the street, I’ve never seen you without Pitr Mags trailing behind you like a shadow. You’re basically one person. I’m police. Maybe I’m not the straightest arrow in the department, but I’m police and when someone just stops bein’ around, it raises questions.” He shrugged. “Question number one: Where the hell is Mags, Lem?”
I tried the door, but it was locked. My arm had gone numb again, and ached with the same hollow pain I’d woken up with. With my left arm I punched the door ineffectually.
“Open up,” I said, my voice shaking. “Let me the fuck out or I’ll blow every window out, make your eardrums pop. Open up!”
For a moment he watched me pounding the door, his expression kind of frozen in a half smile. Then he shrugged.
“As you wish, Master Vonnegan,” he said, and the door locks snapped up. “But my advice? The next couple of days you should be asking yourself, where the fuck is Mags? You need to find Mags.”
I poured out of the car, falling to my knees on the snowy pavement, heart pounding a crazy, inconsistent b
eat in my chest. My right arm was still numb and collapsed under me, bending the wrist in a weird way I figured would hurt when the feeling came rushing back in. I rolled onto my back in a puddle of cold water, feeling it soak into me, and stared up at the gunmetal-gray sky.
“All this bullshit, Vonnegan,” James said, putting the Crown Vic back into gear. “Just distraction. You need to find your friend before I figure it out, you dig?”
I watched the car pull off, sending up plumes of water from the slushy puddles in the street. I sat up awkwardly, feeling slowly seeping back into my arm, and with it the dull throb of a sprained wrist—maybe even a hairline fracture. When you lived out in the open, on the street, with just a few dollars and your own gas between you and everything bad, you got to be pretty good at self-diagnosing. Careful of my wrist, I got to my feet and started walking.
4.
I WOKE UP, twisted in the scratchy sheets. The room was dark and had an insulated feel, like it had been wrapped in fabric for shipping somewhere. Everything was quiet. Peaceful. Smothered. I lay and stared up at the ceiling, old tin work that had been painted a hundred times. I thought about the dream I’d been having. My father. Of course, as usual, inevitably. To this day, I woke up some nights convinced that old Hilly Vonnegan was shaking me awake, having found his way into the house again despite Mom’s best efforts.
“Come on, Lemmy, life’s short. Let’s go find a boom band, live a little.”
Carried on his shoulder in my pajamas, half-asleep, smelling cigarette smoke and gasoline in his denim jacket, then waking up in the broad backseat, the car rumbling and shaking, the sun up, weak and hesitant, as Hilly’s search for live music turned into a search for a tavern as far from my mother as possible.
These were, essentially, my only memories of my father: terror in the night, the slow lull of the road, sawdust, and stale beer.
