by Jeff Somers
I waited a few seconds. I didn’t know how I felt about Hiram. I hadn’t liked him, really. Had barely known him in that way you’re supposed to know people you have a thing with. Had found him irritating on more than one occasion. But he’d taken Mags in before me, which argued in his favor. And he’d just been a part of things. Always there. I realized, the second it had been severed, that I was always subconsciously aware of my magical connection to him. Now, when I noticed the absence, I felt incomplete.
“I know. We had a . . . bond.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that, as we’d left the city, I’d been surprised and a little saddened not to have felt the slight, uncomfortable tugging in my gut that was that bond. It had always been there, increasing in degree as distance increased. A gasam could choose to invoke the bond, use it like a leash to tug his apprentice back, but Hiram had just let it sizzle, always there, like a fishhook in my back that had healed over.
“Why was he so angry at you?”
I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how much Claire remembered from her few minutes in Hiram’s house with us, especially the first time.
“Because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And that was?”
She was looking at me with her sleepy eyes, her serious face. She was the sort who didn’t let things go—gentle but persistent. She had perfect lips, a little pink bow. Even in the cheap new clothes Mags had bought her, baggy tan pants and a heavy shirt, a thick gray sweater, the world’s cutest wool cap, she had a shape and grace to her I wanted to stare at.
I sighed. “Hiram thought I had potential. Magic. That I could be something special.” I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe he’s even right. I remember he spells easy, I can see how to improve them, little shortcuts. I can even make up my own, which Hiram can’t.” I paused. “Couldn’t. But I won’t bleed other people for it. I get by on what I can gas myself, and that’s it.”
“Fuck, why blood?”
“I don’t know. No one does, I don’t think. Something primeval, right?”
The bus hummed along. We hummed along in it.
“This guy we’re heading to,” she said after a moment.
“Gottschalk,” I said. “Faber Gottschalk.”
“He can get these runes off me?”
I nodded. “He’s enustari.” She frowned at me, and I shook my head. “A big fucking deal. Right up there with the woman who wants to slice you open and bleed you like a pig.” I shrugged again. “Powerful.”
My Rolodex was not exactly filled with enustari. I could remember three, maybe four, from Hiram’s sketchy lecturing: Carith Abdagnale if she qualified, which I wasn’t certain she did; Mika Renar; Faber Gottschalk; and Beni Aragaki, and I only knew Aragaki’s name.
“Why is Gottschalk going to help me?”
“I don’t know. We’re going to have to come up with a reason.”
She chewed on that.
I reviewed what I knew about Faber Gottschalk. This didn’t take long. I knew he’d been Hiram’s gasam for ten years. That they’d parted ways amicably. That despite that, Hiram had always made fists without realizing it when he mentioned Gottschalk’s name.
Claire went on in a small voice, “Why does it have to be me? Why chase after me? Just find someone else.”
I wanted to reach across the aisle and touch her. Seconds went by, marked by the sway of the bus and the soft sounds of half-asleep people. The bus was alive, and we were just the cilia of its lungs, swaying with each inhalation and exhalation, absorbing oxygen.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said softly, trying to remember how Hiram had explained things and say it all differently. “The word is biludha, ritual. Everything involved in it has to be done in a specific, precise way. They marked you, so you have to die in your proper place. Right now all the power expended in the Rite is up in the air, suspended. If you don’t die exactly when you’re supposed to, the next girl won’t die, or the next one. No one after you will, and the Rite falls apart. They mark up someone new, the Rite falls apart.”
She sighed, closing her eyes. I studied her face. Imagined her as a kid in school when I’d been in school, both of us chafing to get away, imagining that cigarettes were part of the fare out of our lives. I suddenly regretted using the phrase slice you open and bleed you like a pig.
I thought of all the other girls. The ones the Skinny Fuck had snatched before Claire. The ones who looked like Claire from future moments she might never get, each one a little older than the last.
Mags snorted and twisted, slumbering, and wound up with his nose planted directly in Claire’s crotch. She opened her eyes and looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“He is asleep, right?”
I smiled. “Mags doesn’t have a creepy bone in his body. He’s a puppy.”
Looking down at Mags’s head, she continued stroking his hair, pushing it around gently. “How’d you pick him up, anyway?”
“I ran away from home when I was seventeen. Nothing dramatic: I got tired of Dad showing up outside school now and then kidnapping me—literally—and then coming home to Mom pissed off at me for being kidnapped, you know? Nothing dramatic. I got fed every day and had clothes and my own room, no one was beating me up or anything, but I just . . . left.”
I didn’t tell her about the old man in the parking lot. It wouldn’t make sense without all the backstory. She leaned towards me slightly, out over the armrest of her seat. I let my eyes run down the curve of her neck, the sharp, pleasant line of her collarbone. I couldn’t see the runes on her because I wasn’t trying, and there was no gas in the air to help me out. Her skin looked perfect to me. She smelled like clean laundry. When she spoke, her voice was soft and ten years younger, and it was like we were having a sleepover, curled up with each other on someone’s carpeted basement floor, listening to records.
“I ran away from home, too,” she said quietly.
I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.
“I came to New York looking for a Hiram. Not Hiram, because I didn’t know he existed, but someone like him. Someone who could teach me how to do things.”
Hiram gesturing with a bandaged hand and making a muffin float across a diner to his waiting hand. Hiram sitting at the counter eating it while he read a newspaper like nothing unusual had happened. Hiram stealing the fucking salt and pepper shakers from the counter when he left.
“Hiram already had Mags. Mags was basically Hiram’s Oddjob when I showed up. He wanted Hiram to apprentice him, but Hiram wouldn’t, because he regarded Mags as Too Stupid to Live.” I considered. “Which isn’t far short of the truth. Anyway, I adopted Mags, he fell in love with me, and we’ve been nonbreeding life partners ever since.”
“He’d take a bullet for you.”
“And me him. Be careful, he’ll adopt you.”
We stopped talking. Slowly spread apart like we were floating in jelly, tugged this way and that, the sudden intimacy shattering and leaving us just two people sitting in separate seats. The overwarm bus rumbled and rattled, the emptiness scrolling past us, and after a few minutes of pondering Claire Mannice and the neat way she’d folded her legs under herself on the seat, I fell asleep.
IT WAS COLDER THAN I would have expected in Texas. We crept off the bus like stumblebums, stiff and squinty, unshowered and crusty. The bus had pulled over outside the library, of all places. A small park sporting an ice rink was across the street. It was literally called Main Street, wide and pretty heavily trafficked at ten in the morning.
Claire stood next to a street sign and began stretching, pulling one ankle up towards her head as she balanced, one hand on the signpost. I stared, breath steaming in front of me.
“What’s our bank account?” I asked Mags without taking my eyes from her.
“Seven dollars,” he said. He paused, as if checking his grade-school addition skills, and then repeated it. “Seven dollars.”
It wasn’t unexpected or even uncomfortabl
e. I’d been living on an eternal seven dollars for years. I took stock. I was hungry—starving, but I’d been starving for ten years and it was normal to me. I felt good. Rested. Probably still down a pint but no longer on the verge of passing out. I had a tremendous appetite, but not just for food. I wanted cigarettes and whiskey, and I wanted to bleed a bit and Charm the pants off of Claire Mannice, literally. She’d been twelve inches away for three days and I had memorized her smell.
I clapped Mags on the shoulder. “Breakfast. You up for a Beauty Queen?”
He nodded sleepily. “Sure, Lem. I’ll cast the compulsion, you cast the Charm.”
“What’s a Beauty Queen?” Claire asked. Somehow she was standing right next to us, a fucking cat in need of a bell.
I looked around. Only a handful of people had gotten off the bus; we had a few feet of sidewalk all to ourselves. I took Claire’s arm and urged her to walk with us towards what looked like the busy part of Main Street.
“You are,” I said. The sun was high and bright, but the air was crisp and cold, and I was shivering a little. “It’s a scam we run, a combination of two spells. You can work it as one spell, but then you’ve got to give the gas for something big. Split it into two components, and two people can cast it without passing out. You game to be our beauty?”
Some people weren’t. Some people didn’t see it as survival.
“What do I do?”
“Stand around, look pretty,” Mags said with a grin.
Mags was a wonder of science. He walked next to me, stretching as he went, twisting his arms back, his neck down, arching his back. His joints popped like gunshots. He was big and brown and his hair was getting girlishly long again, curling around his face. I’d never been to Texas, much less what felt like the fucking exact center of the state, all dust and wildflowers and yellow stone buildings with German names. I didn’t know how many Pitr Mags types existed in the world, though my cautious estimate was seven. I doubted any of them had passed through Texas before.
Claire scowled. “And?”
I sighed. I wasn’t used to explaining spells to people. “One, we cast a reverse Charm on you, make every man in the world think you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, okay? Then we wait for someone useful to show up, and when he’s on your hook, trying to impress you, we cast a Compel on him, make him do anything you tell him to. Compulsions on their own are dicey—they wear off fast if you try to get people to do shit they normally wouldn’t do. Combine it with a Charm, much better.”
I looked at her. She had a sleepy, scrubbed look to her face I liked, her hair standing up in cute ways everywhere.
“What then? When we have some poor idiot on the hook?”
I shrugged. “He buys us breakfast. He gives us a ride out to Gottschalk’s place. He provides local cover and information so Mags here isn’t put in a cage and sold to the circus folk.”
Mags choked a little. “What?”
“Then we cut him loose. The Charm fades and he goes home, goes back to being a shitkicker. No real harm.”
We walked in silence for a few seconds. She nodded. “Okay, fine.”
“Good.” I paused and gestured at the place we were passing. “In here works.”
It was called the German Bakery and was full of what looked like the entire population of a retirement home, old fogies nursing coffees and muttering. It had a good diner buzz, with no decor to speak of. It felt greasy, like the air itself would never be clean again. We made our way to an empty table in the back, Formica and plastic benches, and sat down, Mags facing Claire and me. The place smelled like coffee, good and strong.
“Well?”
I shook my head at her while I passed out the plastic menus. “Give it a few minutes. We need to pick our mark and fade into the background a little.”
We faded. The waitress, a stringy woman of indeterminate age and unnatural hair color that most closely resembled red, came by and gave Mags a bit of the yellow eye. Mags didn’t notice. Half the world hated Mags on sight, but he maintained his cheerful disposition through the simple expedient of not paying any attention—he wouldn’t realize the villagers hated him until a mob with torches was gathered outside his house. The waitress took our coffee order cheerfully enough, though. We sat in a tense silence. I didn’t light a cigarette because there were NO SMOKING signs everywhere, and fading required a little patience. I just sat there and let my eyes roam around the place. By the time the coffee arrived, I’d picked out our mark.
He was a kid, a big one. Blond, jeans, flannel, work boots. So hungover I could smell him from where we sat, nursing a miserable cup of coffee and staring down a mostly uneaten plate of pancakes and sausage, looking like life was the deck of the Titanic right before it split in two and went down and he had but one finger hooked on something, hanging on.
I stood up, looked around. The bathrooms were behind us, through a swinging door. Perfect. I nudged Claire, delighting in this illicit, uninvited touch. “Let’s go.”
She waited a second, giving me a flat stare. I remembered the cop car fishtailing, crashing, Claire popping out with a fucking nightstick in one hand. Then she stood up, gave Mags a pat on the shoulder, and followed me through the swinging doors. I tried both the men’s and women’s rooms. Both empty, so I pushed the men’s room door open and gestured.
“In here.”
She looked at the bathroom, then at me. We stayed like that for a moment. Then she stepped inside and I followed, locking the door behind me.
It was the tiniest bathroom in the universe and might have been impossible to actually use as a bathroom. We were pushed up against each other, her lean and warm, me gritty and sucking my gut in like some nervous middle-schooler. I rolled up my sleeve.
“How’d you find this Gottschalk guy?”
I pushed my sleeve up past my elbow. She looked down at the pink rivers of scars and left her eyes there. “I told you. He was Hiram’s gasam. Long ago.”
“I thought you fellows mated for life.”
“You can be released. Usually when the gasam feels they have nothing more to teach you.”
“But Hiram wouldn’t release you because you wouldn’t do like he wanted.”
I nodded, pulling out my switchblade. The room was filled with Claire. She was young and pretty enough, and I hadn’t slept with a woman, or had a soft conversation in the dark with a girl, or generally been in the company of a female, in a long time. The years felt heavy on me.
She watched me examine the blade and then my forearm, looking for a good, healed area to cut. “Why are we so fucking scared, Chief? That guy Amir—okay, kind of scary. But shit, if I’d been paying more attention, I would have beaten his brains in, no problem.”
I paused with the knife hovering right over the meaty part of my arm and looked up at her. “First, Amir was sloppy. He brought Bleeders, but he wasn’t expecting trouble. He figured he’d make a show of force and we’d fall on our knees to suck his cock and beg forgiveness.” I smiled. “He didn’t expect Hiram fucking Bosch to show up hurling fireballs. When he caught up with us after—after, he was on his own and didn’t have much gas to work with.” I winked. “Trust me, dearie, Amir shows up loaded for bear with a dozen Bleeders in his retinue, knowing he can’t trust a fucking Trickster farther than he can throw him—a lesson we fucking taught him right good, didn’t we?—then you’ll find out how fast a fucking saganustari of his caliber—an Archmage in the making—can fuck you up.”
It was a long speech.
She looked at me, biting her lip. “Is he really dead? Hiram?”
I nodded, thinking of Hiram standing in his study, sleeves rolled up, mixing drinks. I swallowed thickly and nodded. “You sucker-punch saganustari, you better fucking kill them.”
I slashed the blade down precisely, and blood, thick and dark, welled out of the wound. I began reciting my Charm. Claire stared back at me, swallowing hard, but said nothing more. In the mirror behind her, the glyphs on her skin glowed softly.
“YEAH, I SEE HIM,” Mags said, studying the hayseed’s reflection in the napkin dispenser. “Fucking hick.”
He took a deep breath. Spreading his hand palm up on the table, he took his little penknife, the blade now thin and worn down, its edge still sharp as a razor, and dragged it across his palm, shutting his eyes and reciting.
“Wow,” Claire whispered. “He looks like he’s taking a dump right there in his seat.”
I smiled, feeling my arm throb with the familiar old burning. Claire had the whole room’s attention. Old men who hadn’t had a hard-on in decades were staring at her. The waitresses struggled against simultaneous urges to slap her and stroke her hair, call her honey. Claire was bearing it pretty well. I had a feeling she bore most things pretty well. Or maybe was used to entire roomfuls of people wanting to get it on with her.
Thirty seconds, Mags was done. His wound was dry, the universe’s sole gift to us. Grimacing a little, he took a napkin and wiped down his blade.
“Shit,” Claire hissed. “He’s looking at me.”
I leaned in, put a hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy. He’s under control, don’t forget that.”
She shook her head, her eyes hard. “Ain’t no such thing, boss.”
“He’ll be a puppy dog. He’ll do whatever you tell him, so tell him hands off, tell him to be polite. Okay?”
It was the first time I’d ever seen her nervous. She nodded, staring at the guy across the room. “Okay. Oh, shit.”
Our hayseed was crossing over to our table, eyes locked on Claire. I could understand her worry; his expression was . . . focused. If I saw him coming towards me and didn’t know he’d been gassed up by a couple of starving Tricksters, I’d have been alarmed, too.
When he got to us, he just stood there awkwardly. He looked at me. He looked at Mags a little longer. Then he looked at Claire. And kept looking. Behind him, a pair of old codgers in denim overalls sat chewing on toothpicks with wet, obscene lips, also staring at Claire. Behind them, the big front window looked out on Main Street, people passing by in small groups. Inside, all I could smell was sour coffee and grease. The floor sucked at our guy’s boots as he shifted his weight, making small sticky tearing noises.
