by Devon Monk
I blinked, my chin dipped, and it took effort to fight my way up out of the quicksand that was dragging me down, especially since I was pretty sure I was still wearing my lucky lead coat.
Boy had a funny look on his face. Something between amusement and disgust.
Oh, good loves. I knew what he was thinking.
“I’m not drunk,” I slurred.
Fabo. That sounded convincing. “I’m . . . I’m hurt.” And I hated saying it, hated admitting it, hated hurting in front of him, in front of anyone. “I need a place to stay. Does Mama have a cot I could rent for the night? I have cash.”
He raised his eyebrows and a wicked glint lit his eyes.
Oh, good going, Allie. Tell a man who is never three inches away from a gun that you have cash in your pocket.
“Not much,” I amended, “but I could pay something.” He just stared at me. Said nothing. I tried to remember if this Boy was mute. “Is Mama here?” I asked.
“I’m here,” Mama’s voice said from somewhere to my left.
Oh, it was going to take a lot to actually move my head. I weighed my options, and decided to go for broke. I turned my head and the room blurred. Little silver sparks wriggled like tadpoles around the edges of my vision moving in closer and closer until Mama and the whole wide world were far, far away at the end of a tunnel. Wow. Who needed drugs?
“Allie girl. Who does this to you?” Mama strode over to me. She reached up and gripped my face, her small, cool fingers on either side of my jaw. “This bad. A hit? Someone hit you?”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I need a place to sleep. I can’t go home.”
She gave me a long, steady stare. I wondered what she was looking for in my eyes. Didn’t know if it was there. Didn’t much care. The room was going black, the tadpoles well on their way to full frogdom, and the pain in my head and bones sort of rattled through me in waves.
Mama’s touch was like a cool rag on a fever. Like Zayvion’s fingers. No, not like that, more like what I’d always hoped my own mother would do for me—be caring and soft and make the pain go away when I hurt. Mama’s hands created a wall between me and the pain, and I wondered if the pain wouldn’t mind staying away for a while so I could get a little shut-eye.
Before I actually dozed off, Mama got tired of looking in my eyes. She lifted her hands from my face and nodded. “You hurt. Stay here. Upstairs. You think you can go upstairs, Allie girl?”
“Sure,” I said. It came out a little slurred and slow, but true to my word, I pushed off the counter and let Mama, and her strong hand on my elbow, then her strong arm around my waist, lead me across the room and through the door to a narrow hallway where a zag of wooden stairs laddered up.
I remember taking the first step. The rest of the climb got fuzzy after that, and the next thing I saw was Boy—the one with the beard and ponytail who is usually in the kitchen—looking down at me. I was apparently flat on my back, and I hoped I was in a bed.
“What?” I said. Then Boy moved back and Mama was there. For reasons I didn’t really want to analyze, I was really glad she was around right now.
She looked down toward my feet, which I thought rather odd; then she was back in my line of vision and something thick and soft was pulled up over me. A quilt. Oh, loves. It was almost enough to make a distrustful, jaded girl like me weep. Almost.
“You sleep now, Allie girl,” Mama said firmly. “You sleep. Mama’s here.”
I had never been so happy in all my life to do exactly what someone told me to do.
Happy Birthday to me.
Chapter Five
Cody used to like rocking best of all, but now he liked sitting very still and watching Kitten play. Kitten wasn’t very good at walking yet, but she could find the plate of water Cody put on the floor for her, and could stay quiet when the guard came by to look inside his room every day and night. She slept under his chin, and he liked that. She was warm, and good, and fun. She was the best friend ever.
Cody didn’t know how long he and Kitten had been friends, but the cut on his stomach still hurt and, if he moved the wrong way, it felt hot and stiff like maybe it would bleed again. It didn’t feel like it was getting better, and that worried him. But he was shy, so the guard didn’t care that he undressed all by himself before taking a shower, and the guard didn’t mind when he took a little extra meat from lunch or dinner and hid it in his pocket for Kitten.
Except that he still missed the sun and sky and his friends back at the home, things were really good.
Kitten was sniffing at the bottom of the door that would not open while Cody sat in the middle of the floor, holding very still, watching her. She mewed and ran across the floor to Cody. She still wasn’t very good at running, and she tripped and slid.
Cody laughed.
Then he stopped laughing. The lock on the door that would not open clicked, and the doorknob moved. Someone was coming. Not a guard. Not a friend.
The Snake man, the older, smarter part of him said. Hide Kitten. Hold still.
Cody scooped Kitten off the floor and put her inside his shirt. She wriggled and poked him with her claws, but Cody bit his lip and did not move.
The Snake man was coming. Coming to get him.
The door opened and the Snake man walked in. He smiled and his dark snake eyes were shiny. He looked happy on the outside, but inside he was excited. Excited to kill.
Cody wanted to cry.
Oh, the older, smarter part of him said. Go away, Cody. Fast. Think about the sunshine. Think about the sky.
And Cody tried to. He tried to think about how nice the sunshine was, how warm and pretty. He thought about how it was yellow sometimes, and orange, and red, and white. He thought about the sky, but couldn’t remember if it was blue or white or gray. He was scared. Really scared. He held his arm over Kitten, who was under his shirt. She stopped squirming.
The Snake man didn’t say anything. He didn’t lock the door behind him. Cody knew why. Someone was in the doorway. A big man, bigger than Cody had ever seen.
Death, the older, smarter part of him said.
And Cody knew he was right. That man, that big man was death. And in his pocket were bones, little children’s bones full of bad magic. Bones like the one Snake man had used to hurt him.
Cody whimpered.
The big man walked into the room. Just one step. Just one. He looked at Cody for so long that Cody started crying. The big man did not come any closer, but Cody could feel the big man’s hands move over his skin, squeezing him to see if he was ripe.
“Well?” Snake man asked without looking away from Cody.
“No,” the big man said. “Broken as a shattered jug. Won’t be nothing left in him to use. That’s a shame. A damn shame. You were someone once, boy. Someone.” Then the big man turned and walked away.
But the Snake man did not turn. The Snake man did not walk away. He came closer. And he was smiling.
He pulled a coin out of his pocket—a magic coin—and a little bone. He had something shiny in his other hand too, but it was not a coin. It was a knife.
The Snake man smiled more. “Good-bye, Cody. It’s been nice doing business with you.”
Cody didn’t know which thing would hurt him more, the knife or the magic in the coin or the magic in the bone.
All of it, the older, smarter part of him said. Reach for me.
But it was hard to reach to the older, smarter part of him. He had tried to do it a lot before, and never did it right.
The knife flashed up, the Snake man intoned a mantra that was so bad, so very bad. The coin filled the Snake man’s words with power and the bone changed it into something worse. Into death. Cody knew he was going to die. In the dark, without sunshine.
No! The older, smarter part of him said. Reach for the coin, for the magic in the coin.
Cody was crying now. He didn’t want to die. Didn’t want Kitten to die. So he reached for the coin, for the warm, pretty magic there. And he took some of it. H
e took it and the older, smarter part of him reached out for it too, and reached out for him.
Hang on, the older, smarter part of him said. Don’t let go, no matter what.
Cody held on. Held on while the Snake man finished the angry, bad magic. Held on while the knife came down. Held on while the pain shot through him and made him scream. Held on to the older, smarter part of him, while the older, smarter part of him held on to him and to something else—the magic in the coin. Cody wished he could have said good-bye to Kitten.
The knife pushed under his skin again.
He wanted to scream, but couldn’t hear anything except the older, smarter part of him chanting soft words that moved the magic in a different way, painting a picture of sunshine and sky. Then the pain was so big that it covered up the sunshine, it blacked out the sky, and Cody was squished into a dark box where he couldn’t see or hear anything anymore, not even the older, smarter part of himself.
Chapter Six
There are reasons why I like to sleep in my own bed. One, I have good pillows. Even though the mattress is too hard, as long as I have enough pillows, I don’t care. The other reason I like sleeping in my own bed is because gorillas with baseball bats don’t come in the room and bash in my head while I’m asleep.
So when that sudden, explosive pain hit, I knew right off that I wasn’t at home. I groaned, opened my eyes, and tried to match where I was to places where I might fall asleep. It was a narrow room lit by a small yellow-shaded lamp in the corner. The walls were painted in we-didn’t-even-care-the-first-time-we-painted-it beige. A white and blue quilt spilled over onto a wood floor that had been so worn down it looked more like bark than wood.
But the quilt was clean, thick enough that I suspected feathers inside, and looked homemade. I leaned over, almost lost my lunch to the pounding pain inside my skull, and with much careful breathing pulled the quilt off the floor and back onto the bed with me.
Sweet hells, I hurt. But it was not the same pain I’d been in from using magic. This was different. Deeper. It made me feel really sad and really alone.
Then, as fast as it had hit, the pain was gone. I wiped at the wet on the corners of my eyes. That had been the worst headache I had ever experienced. I took a couple of breaths, and was relieved that really, all the rest of me was feeling pretty good. But the headache, or maybe the haunting absence of that sudden pain, left me feeling horrible in a different way. I was crying, actually crying, like I hadn’t since I was ten. But why?
The wispy fragments of a dream brushed across my thoughts; someone was gone, missing. Hopelessness washed over me like when I’d been told my mom had left the country. I wanted to curl up under the quilt and never come out.
I’d just lost someone or something important to me. But I didn’t know why I thought that. I must be tired. Just tired.
I wiped my face on my sleeve and took a look at my hands. Still a little yellow from the bruising, but not the angry black and purple-red they’d been last time I’d looked at them.
The digital clock next to the bed read five a.m. I’d slept over twelve hours. I had better write down the details of the hit on Boy and the meeting with my father in my little book while I had the chance. When I got home, I’d take some time and transfer the notes to my computer.
It was strange to have my entire life, or at least the important bits I didn’t want to forget, recorded by hand and backed up electronically. It made sense to do it for the jobs I Hounded, but sometimes when going through the book I ran across a detail, like “always take the right trail in the park” or “parrots don’t work” that were obviously personal experiences I no longer retained.
Sometimes I felt like a ghost in my own life.
I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. Mama had left me in my jeans and tank top and put my extra sweater on me, and had draped my coat over the foot of the bed. I tugged the coat up to me, and dug the leather-bound journal and pen out of the pocket.
The first page of the book had my vital information. My name, birthday, blood type, medical allergies, things of that manner. So far I hadn’t forgotten those things, but it was a grim and very real possibility that one day I might. I didn’t like to think about it, but it would be stupid to not take what precautions I could.
I thumbed back to a blank page and started with the date and time of Mama’s call.
It didn’t take me long. I’d had lots of practice, in college and otherwise, to make my notes as short, clear, and concise as possible.
I tucked the book back in my coat and turned out the lamp. But instead of drifting back to sleep for maybe another hour, I tossed and turned, the lingering sadness and loss from the dream filling my thoughts.
For no reason at all, I kept thinking about my father. Not about his anger and manipulation, but about the feel of his blood and mine joined, his regret when he said, “I’m sorry,” and how genuine that felt.
I should have stayed away. Stayed away for another seven years.
I finally got up and walked across the dark room to the window. I tugged back a corner of the curtain, not sure I was ready for actual sunlight yet. I needn’t have bothered being so cautious. It was not daylight out, not even close. The sky was black as a hangover, and the alley below the window didn’t have a light anywhere along it. I was on the second floor, so I could see around one building with windows that were broken out, and there was plenty of light from the other streets, lights that burned brighter the farther away from St. John’s they were.
St. John’s wasn’t like what I expected from this vantage. This early in the morning, it carved a strong ebony edge against the burning yellows and blues of the city, like the mountains against sunrise. And there was a kind of haphazard sense of power in the short, strong buildings that were still standing, a squared-off victory over time, over manipulation, over magic. It survived despite the changing world.
St. John’s had power to withstand poverty, neglect, pain. Maybe that was what I liked about it. Because there were people in these buildings who hadn’t given up, hadn’t tried to be anything other than what they were, hadn’t tried to conform to what the world expected them to be. There were other people too, the kind who migrated here like rats to garbage. Even so, good people remained—people like Mama and her Boys. Those deep roots made this dump feel more like home than the penthouse condo of my childhood.
A motion at street level caught my eye. A big, heavy man in a dark trench coat moved down the street, stepping around piles of what I hoped were just garbage and cardboard. He was coming from somewhere farther north, moving out of deeper shadow into faint streetlight.
A chill ran over my skin. There was something about the big man that gave me the creeps. I watched as he strolled along, trying to figure out what bugged me about him.
He was almost out of my line of vision, moving in front of the building that blocked my view farther down the street. I shifted on my feet, curling up so I put some weight on the side of my foot. I drew the curtain back a little more.
The man stopped. It was like watching an old movie where a mime runs into a glass wall. He threw a hand in front of him and looked over his shoulder. But instead of looking back into the darkness, he looked up. At me.
Like I said before, it was dark out, dark in the room, and I hadn’t brought a night-light with me. There wasn’t a single way he could see me, standing behind a dark curtain, in a dark room, wearing a dark sweater and jeans.
But his face was tilted up toward me. I saw his mouth open, as if he had just said the word no. I could see the shadow-smudged thumbprints where his eyes should be, and I knew he saw me. I stared right back at him, because if there’s one thing I won’t do it’s back down once I’m spotted.
My heart beat hard, and I wished I had on my boots, my running shoes, anything. Instinct told me to run. Instinct told me he was dangerous.
I could handle dangerous. Dangerous and me went back a long way. We did lunch when dangerous was in town.
The m
an lifted a hand toward me and I felt, very clearly, his fingers, like heated oil, slide down my spine, thump over each vertebra, and then squeeze.
I caught my breath because it felt really real. And it creeped me the hell out.
I let the curtain drop and stepped away from the window. Groping someone without their permission was against the law, magic or no magic. Breaking the line of vision was usually enough to dispel that kind of spell. But just in case, I backed away to the door and made a warding gesture. The sensation of his hand down my back had already faded, so I didn’t invoke a spell or draw any magic into that ward, but I rubbed my hands up and down my arms trying to rid myself of the sense of violation.
His touch might be gone, but my heart was still pounding. That had been familiar. That man down there, whoever he was, had touched me before.
I tried to draw up a memory that he fit. A client? An acquaintance? Someone from college? An associate of my father’s? But where there should be a name, or a defined face in my memory, all I found was black static.
A chill rattled under my skin and I clenched my hands into fists, then shook them out. That man touched me, bone deep, without my consent. He knew me. And he knew I was here, up here, in this room.
“Oh, hell,” I whispered.
There was no way I was going to just sit here. For all I knew, he was on his way up now. I didn’t know why, but getting away from him, shaking the scent of him—rot, and something like licorice or honey mixed with the faint whiff of formaldehyde—had become the top item on my agenda for the day.
Okay, I wanted out, out of here, out fast.
I looked for my backpack and found it on the wooden chair by the bed. I picked it up, took the time to shove my feet into my shoes and tie the laces so I wouldn’t trip. I pulled on my coat, patting my pocket to make sure the book was there.
The other pocket had money, so I pulled out a twenty and threw it on the mattress. Mama’s generosity was a bridge I didn’t want to burn.