Magic to the Bone

by Devon Monk

  Heal, I thought. And the magic soaked through him, filled up his wounds, and followed my will, my intent, my glyph, my spell.

  The boy gasped, and part of me wondered if this might kill him, and whether it might kill me too since I’d never channeled so much magic before, and sure as hells had never tried to play interior tattoo artist with it. But if I stopped, or worse, if I freaked out, I wasn’t sure what the magic would do. Would it stop, collapse, explode? I was pretty sure it would do more damage to him than it was doing now.

  I worked on creating an end to the spell. But magic rushed through me like a river raging free of its banks. I didn’t know how to cut the ties of magic between me and the ground, or me and the kid. How did you stop something you didn’t know how to do in the first place?

  I didn’t want to disengage too quickly, in case the wild rush of magic lashed back on the kid and left nothing but a burned and charred mess. But I had to let go soon. My ears were ringing and the sheer force of channeling so much magic had gone from feeling good to making me dizzy. I couldn’t feel the wind anymore, couldn’t feel the rain, couldn’t smell the garbage.

  This was bad.

  I tried tying the strands of magic into knots, to stem the flood, but magic still rushed up through the ground, into me, then out of me into the kid, and then completed the circle by exiting him and wrapping around my hands again. My fingers were getting full, stiff with magic that tangled and wrapped and constricted.

  Clearly, I sucked at this. That was no surprise since I had no friggin’ idea what I was doing. Knots unraveled, twisted, tangled. I caught at strands of magic and wound them around my fingers, through my fingers, to try to hold them all. But no matter how fast I spooled up the magic, it came faster, rushing up through the soil, through me, into the kid, healing, painting muscle, bone, sinew, his and mine, and then back out through him to wrap around my hands again.

  I was about to be in a world of hurt. I could not control this much magic. The magic pouring out of me and the magic pouring out of him collided in my hands, tangled, and burned. I jerked away from the kid, rocking back on my butt, but I wasn’t fast enough. Magic crackled, hot, bright. It burned up my right arm like fire in my skin following lines of gunpowder.

  I held my right arm away from me and turned my head away from the heat and pain coming closer to my face. Heat licked across my jaw, up my ear, and arced across my temple. I yelled, ‘‘Stop, stop, stop!’’

  A wild thought of stop, drop, and roll before my hair caught on fire flashed through my mind. I flung myself to the side, not caring that wet gravel and blackberries were the best landing I could hope for.

  But before I hit the gravel, I hit a very solid chest. A set of arms closed around me and held me tight, my burning arm tucked between them and me, the heat of the fire lessening, cooling, leaving not heat, but pain behind.

  I couldn’t tell who held me, couldn’t smell who held me—as a matter of fact, I couldn’t smell anything. I freaked out about that, then freaked out when I realized I also could not see.

  Well, not completely true. I could see something. Everything was really, really white, like someone had just dumped a mountain of snow all around me, or set off a bomb. As a matter of fact, I felt cold and numb, like I was buried in snow, which annoyed me. I’d thought a little bit about how I wanted to die, and freezing to death in an avalanche wasn’t even on my top-ten-favorite-ways-to-bite-it list.

  Ten involved chocolate and sex. Not one in one hundred involved snow.

  And I seemed to remember that I was not in the mountains surrounded by snow, but in the city surrounded by rain. With the kid. Doing magic.

  My brain turned over like a cold engine, gave up, and went blank. Then I tried to think again. I was doing magic. Wasn’t I trying to avoid magic? Why was that?

  ‘‘Allie?’’ A man’s voice spoke through the white and I tried to answer, but couldn’t feel my lips or tongue.

  But the man’s voice had punched a hole through the whiteness so I could hear again. Sounds of a city. Sounds of a man breathing hard, like he’d been running. Sounds of rain falling against concrete.

  I knew these things should smell like something too, and hoped I might smell the man who was speaking and get a clue of who was with me, but all I smelled was a sort of germ-free disinfectant odor that masked everything.

  This was beginning to worry me. I tried to move my hands, tried to blink my eyes, tried to focus.

  ‘‘Don’t fight me, Allie. It’s hard enough as it is. Relax.’’

  And that last word brought back to me the owner of the voice. Zayvion.

  Color me equal parts amazed and confused. I did not remember being with him. But I had been with a man. A boy. The kid. Cody. I wondered if he was buried in the snow too.

  Like a industrial flamethrower in the blizzard of my brain, the memory of Cody and the magic I had used on him burned through my semiconscious mind. I had, or he had, done a substantive draw on magic. I had tried to use it to heal him while a Hound was tracking me. Wasn’t that clever of me?

  I had to tell Zayvion. He should know a crazy blonde with a gun was headed this way.

  ‘‘Bon—’’ And that was all that came out. After that single syllable, my mouth stopped working and I felt like an explosion, or thunderclap, or something loud and nasty had gone off just inches away from my face. That loud nasty sound drenched me in the prickly cool of mint. I could suddenly feel my body again, smell again, see again, think again, and what I thought was that everything hurt.

  ‘‘Can you stand?’’ Zayvion asked.

  Oh, hells no. With prompting, and some support, I might be able to puke.

  I blinked until I could make out his face above me and gave him the dirtiest glare I could muster.

  Zayvion scowled. Then he looked up, away from me, and the muscle where his jaw and ear met tensed and his nostrils flared, like he was scenting the wind.

  Yes, I was hurting. Yes, I felt sicker than the worst hangover I’d ever had. That didn’t keep me from appreciating the fact that Zay was stepping in to help me, and the kid with me, probably at great risk to himself. Plus I couldn’t help but notice that Zayvion was a good-looking man. If I’d been up to it, I might even have licked the edge of that jaw to see if he tasted like mint, or what he would do if I bit his ear.

  ‘‘We have to go, Allie.’’ He looked back down at me. His eyes were brown and warm and understanding. They were also flecked with gold, like back at the diner when he’d Grounded me. I had never seen anyone’s eyes look like that, and wondered if it was magic or me that caused it.

  I wanted to tell him not to worry. We’d make this work out somehow. I had a good feeling about us.

  Had I just said that out loud?

  Zayvion’s eyebrows notched upward and he lost the serious Zen look. ‘‘I do too,’’ he said quietly. ‘‘But tell me about that later. We have company.’’

  He pressed his fingers into the back of my neck and the minty feel of his touch rolled down my body in ever-warming waves until I could really and honest-to-goodness feel myself again.

  ‘‘Mmm,’’ I said. I felt a hundred times better. What was it with those hands of his? ‘‘Better,’’ I said. I stretched and yawned.

  Zayvion was back in scowling mode, unimpressed by my appreciation. ‘‘Now, Allie. Hounds.’’

  Okay, that got through my amazing stupidness. Hounds. Bonnie-with-a-gun. With Zayvion’s help, I sat away from him.

  ‘‘We can’t leave him,’’ I said. It came out kind of slurred, but Zayvion nodded.

  ‘‘Fine. My car’s over here. Come on.’’ He stood, helped me stand, something I needed and wasn’t proud of, then more or less supported me to his car. I noticed he was limping a bit and was sure I could feel bruises forming beneath his skin on his arms, stomach, and back. If I could draw magic and paint it through the kid’s bones, think of what I could do for a few bruises on a guy I really liked. One little lick of magic should take the sting out of what
ailed him. I whispered a poem and told magic to run down Zay’s chest, like warm water, like oil, soothing, heating, mending, and leaving health behind.

  ‘‘Not now, Allie.’’ Zay dumped me in the front seat and slammed the door, breaking my concentration. By the time I had formed a snappy response, he had shut the back passenger’s door and was sliding in behind the wheel.

  ‘‘Wait,’’ I said. ‘‘The kid.’’ So much for snappy.

  ‘‘Got him,’’ Zayvion said. ‘‘The cat too.’’ Then he put the car into gear and got us going forward fast.

  I rubbed at my eyes with stiff, swollen fingers. I hurt, but in a distant way, as if the hurt wasn’t moving fast enough to catch me yet. I looked at my hands. My right hand was an angry scarlet color, like I’d gotten a bad sunburn that went all the way up to my elbow before splitting out into forks of red lightning up to my shoulder. I wondered if I was red all the way up to my temple, where my skin felt burned. I wondered if I had any hair on that side of my head.

  My other hand was normalish color except for the knuckles, wrist, and elbow where bands of black seemed to be forming.

  ‘‘Are you okay?’’ Zayvion asked.

  I pulled myself together and tried to think through the last few events. The afterimages of the magic I had directed, the colors and textures of it painting against bone and flesh—and more, the feel of it coursing through me, filling me and the kid—distracted me for a bit, but I managed to pull my thoughts back. Back to the car, to the rumble of the engine, to the stink of too much garbage in too small a space.

  ‘‘I’m fine. I think.’’

  ‘‘Your hand is burned.’’

  I wiggled my fingers. ‘‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just red.’’

  ‘‘Are you sure?’’

  ‘‘Not really. How is the kid?’’

  ‘‘Breathing. Unconscious. What did you do to him?’’ He glanced over at me, but I didn’t know exactly what I should tell him. Our very strange relationship wasn’t making a lot of sense to me right now. Why was he helping me?

  Come on, Allie. Think it through. Your dad was killed and you need to go to the cops. Just stick with the simple stuff.

  Besides, what I had done to the kid—if I remembered correctly—was heal him. I know I’d tried to needle a permanent image of health and healing on his bones with magic. A lot of magic.

  No one used magic to heal someone like that. The amount of magical energy it took to actually heal flesh came at such a high price that it usually killed the user before the patient recovered. Add to that the horrifically failed attempts through the years that had left people maimed, dead, and insane, and magical healing was as much a pipe dream as floating cities.

  All of which meant what I’d done wasn’t exactly impossible, it was just very, very unlikely.

  Zayvion was still waiting for an answer, so I gave him one. ‘‘I found him, by the river.’’ I cleared my throat and put a little effort into voice projection so I could be heard over the engine. ‘‘Someone stabbed him in the chest. He needs a doctor.’’

  ‘‘I didn’t see any wounds—blood, but no wounds. I looked.’’ Zayvion geared down, slowing the car. ‘‘Are you sure you’re okay?’’

  The stink in the car seemed to be getting worse. My eyes watered and I wondered if I had enough fine motor skills to roll down the window.

  ‘‘I’m fine,’’ I said. ‘‘Tired. Cold. But that kid needs a doctor, that cat needs food and probably a rabies shot, and I need to get to the police.’’

  ‘‘Now’s not a good time for you to be anywhere in the public eye.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘Because your friend Bonnie spent some time talking to the police. She said she was hired to Hound the hit on your dad.’’

  ‘‘So he was killed by magic?’’ Even though he had told me that might be the case, I did not know how it could actually happen. The idea of my very careful father being touched, much less harmed, by the magic he had been so influential in regulating made zero sense to me. ‘‘How? No one can get through his defenses.’’

  ‘‘Someone did.’’

  ‘‘Who?’’

  Zayvion glanced at me, those warm eyes still burning with gold. He had tiger eyes, I decided, burning bright.

  ‘‘Who?’’ I asked again. ‘‘Who could get through to my dad?’’ Who could match his magical prowess? Who would he even let his guard down for?

  ‘‘You,’’ he said softly. ‘‘Bonnie said it was your signature on the hit.’’

  That was a slap in the face. I was very awake now. ‘‘What? Oh hells, she didn’t. Who hired her? The cops?’’

  He shook his head. ‘‘His ex-wife.’’

  That narrowed it down to five women. ‘‘Which one?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know.’’

  I scowled. ‘‘Bonnie’s full of crap. She’d do anything to make my life miserable.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘Because she and I are in a very competitive business and the last time we went head to head, I won. Also she’s a crazy, petty bitch.’’

  He glanced at me, then back at the road. He was taking us through the downtown neighborhoods, heading south toward the highway. I was glad it was still raining. It kept most people occupied with umbrellas and hats and trying to stay dry, instead of looking for a woman on the run.

  ‘‘The police wouldn’t be looking for you if there weren’t reasonable suspicion, Allie.’’

  ‘‘Do you believe that?’’

  ‘‘Can you convince me to believe your story instead?’’

  I punched him in the shoulder. ‘‘Ow!’’ I yelled. Stupid, stupid. That hurt. My hand was killing me.

  Zayvion acted like he hadn’t even noticed I’d touched him.

  ‘‘Hitting me is not the best way to convince me you are not capable of violence,’’ he said, and I was sure I heard laughter beneath his disapproving tone. ‘‘I don’t think it would go over well with the police either.’’

  ‘‘I did not kill my father. You were there when I last saw him. I accused him of being a jerk, of putting the hit on Boy. I told him I’d go to court to testify against him, and I worked blood magic to make him tell the truth. That was all.’’

  Zay was busy navigating the road. ‘‘Even so, the police are looking for you. And they’ve put out the Hounds to hunt you down and bring you in.’’

  ‘‘Why is that a bad thing? I need to go to the cops. I need to tell them what happened. I’m innocent, Zay. I don’t want to hide.’’

  The car stopped, and I looked up. We were at a stoplight, and a crowd of people streamed across the intersection through the rain and gray.

  ‘‘The police have orders to shoot, if necessary, Allie. You’re considered armed and dangerous. You were right about one thing—it took a hell of a lot of magic to knock your dad down. More to kill him. Unprecedented,’’ he added quietly.

  The light changed and Zayvion moved the car through the intersection, only to slow for traffic ahead. ‘‘The Hounds have been approved to Proxy as much magic use as they need to drag you in.’’

  ‘‘All the more reason for me to surrender peacefully. I have information that will clear me.’’ I was getting into that uncertain how-much-could-I-trust-him territory. I didn’t want to tell him what the kid had told me. That he might know who killed my dad. That he might have been there when it was done. Or at least that’s what I thought the kid had said. But until he was conscious and could answer questions, telling him Cody might be a part of it was only hearsay.