Trickster

by Jeff Somers

  I spun for the window and followed Mags’s ass out onto the rusting fire escape. I bent over the railing and saw Claire a floor below, climbing like a monkey for the alleyway. Mags and I started down, the rungs of the ladders leaving our hands a curious red-brown color. Halfway down, there was an explosion behind us. The whole building shuddered, and the fire escape rattled and shook beneath us like it had been leaned against the wall a few years ago and never attached. The last bits of glass still clinging to the frames came raining down and I jumped the last six feet and hit the asphalt hard, head spinning, legs weak.

  Claire was already running for the street, and I staggered after her. She wouldn’t be safe. She didn’t understand. Amir and Renar would find her. Runes or no runes, they would find a way. It was magic. Anything was possible. She couldn’t understand that from watching Mags cast the firebird once.

  I almost caught up with her. Then a car roared into the alley, an unmarked Crown Victoria, lights flashing. Cops. Cops I knew, I found out a moment later, when Holloway emerged from the passenger’s-side door, badge in one hand, gun in the other.

  Claire stopped on a dime, stumbling back into me. She pinged off me like I’d goosed her, spinning around. Her eyes were shining, her face red. She was fucking terrified.

  “Mother-fucker!” she shouted.

  I felt a presence. Mags was hiding behind me, as he sometimes did when people yelled.

  “Evening, Mr. Vonnegan,” Holloway said with a grin that held no humor. “Looks like you know our girl after all, huh?”

  I stared, mind racing, and then there was a second explosion up above us. The ground shook. Something heavy landed in the alley with a cracking noise and I felt a sudden stabbing ache in my belly.

  It flashed through me, turning cold as it reached the extremities, passing out of me with a physical sensation. Like outgassing. I started shivering.

  And I knew, as the bond between us was violently severed, that Hiram Bosch was dead.

  12

  I hated cars. They reminded me of my father, of being picked up at random moments and driven for hours, stopping at bars, starving, bored, angry. And then the ride home with Mom, eventually. Her silent chain-smoking, somehow convinced it was my fault, that I was arranging things with Dad. That my idea of a good time was being imprisoned in a drunk’s car as he drove around the fucking desert, absorbing all the fucking Bushmills in a given area.

  “I don’t know anything good,” Mags whispered intently. “You do. You gotta let me bleed, Lem.”

  I shook my head. We were in the backseat of a squad car, lights still flashing around us. It was dark and cold. Just Mags and me; Holloway and Marichal had put Claire into their own unmarked car and disappeared into Hiram’s building for some time but now were standing around talking to each other, looking at us every now and then.

  “I don’t cast on anyone’s blood but mine,” I said. “You fucking know that, Magsie.”

  “I’m offering, Lem,” he said quietly. “I’m fucking volunteering.”

  I could imagine the roar of Pitr Mags filling me up. The man was like three men compressed and mashed down into one more or less normal-sized human. I imagined touching his blood would just fry me up, make me explode. My hands clenched with the desire to feel that energy. I was so tired. My stomach flipped.

  “Shut up.”

  The driver’s-side door of the patrol car opened, and a uniformed cop slipped into the driver’s seat. Holloway and Marichal climbed into their own car, and a moment later we were moving.

  “Lem,” Mags hissed in my ear.

  We followed the detectives. I thought about Claire. She’d tried to run. She’d given Holloway the slip, skipping past him without much trouble. But then Marichal had popped out of the car and taken hold of Claire by the arm. She’d spun, spitting and kicking.

  Spirit. The girl had spirit. It didn’t do her any good this time, but I liked watching her fight and twist. She knew cops, you could tell; she was neither awed nor afraid, and she knew that once they got the cuffs on you, or you were stuffed into their backseats, you were halfway to jail. They weren’t arresting her. They thought they were rescuing her, even though they were really slitting her throat.

  I shut my eyes for a moment. Mine, too.

  Even a Trickster like me was due some courtesy, and so Renar hadn’t treated me roughly, up until now. That was done. We’d stolen from Renar, we’d attacked Amir.

  Amir wouldn’t hesitate to kill me next time. I had no doubt Amir had survived.

  I didn’t let my mind touch on the fact of Hiram’s death. I hadn’t seen Hiram often over the last few years. We’d avoided each other, and usually fell into the same old argument when we did run into each other, like a deep, sad groove. But he’d been there, in the background. Omnipresent in his way, if only through the deep magical bond between us.

  For a moment I probed the empty sense of sudden freedom that had replaced that bond. I couldn’t imagine living without constantly feeling Hiram there, part of me.

  I looked at the cop driving the car. Just one cop, without a partner. Or maybe the partner was still back at the apartment. Which was still kind of strange. He was a young guy, blond, slim. I looked at the rearview mirror for a few seconds, but he never glanced at it. He just stared at the car in front of him.

  My eyes moved to his hands. He was wearing black gloves. Good, expensive leather ones. I stared at them for a moment, and then closed my eyes again. I’d seen a pair just like them just half an hour before.

  My heart began pounding in my chest, a crazy, irregular beat. If you’re trying to appear to be someone else, after all, it was easier and more effective to dress in their clothes and concentrate on their face when painting yourself with a Glamour.

  You gotta let me bleed. The idea of using Mags’s blood to gas my spell left a yellow ball in my stomach. I tried to think my way around that, but Mags didn’t know anything useful here. A Charm . . . maybe. You could Charm anyone, even the most powerful enustari, but people like us knew the feeling. We could taste it, the gas in the air, the feeling creeping over us. Amir was on alert. It would take some gentle prodding, subtlety, to put him under my thumb. I didn’t have that kind of time.

  They have been compensated, I heard Hiram say, years ago. He’d slashed her on the arm and she’d cried out, a sharp, instant noise, immediately swallowed. Expertly muted. A kid who’d learned young to keep quiet no matter what. And she’d stood there. She’d started shivering, her breathing becoming rough, but she’d stood stock-still and stared straight ahead. A girl used to being hurt.

  I’d started whispering the spell. I’d memorized it easily enough. Hiram had described it as the limits of his ability, but even back then I’d seen three ways it could be truncated without losing any effectiveness. The first few syllables spilled out, and immediately I’d felt it: power, flowing from the girl. Flowing into me. It began as a pleasant sensation of fullness, of being well rested and ready for action. Slowly, it had built inside me, swelling, beautiful, glorious. Like the last time you had woken up feeling refreshed, rested, a perfect night’s sleep preceded by a perfect restful day. Then the feeling doubled, tripled. I could feel it building inside of me with every whispered word.

  And it was sour.

  Something underneath the golden, shimmering surface of it, something cold and green and infected, also inside me. Wrapped up within the sense of power and energy, mostly insulated from me, but there nonetheless. Like finding a roach in your dinner and eating around it, pondering the possibility of eggs and larvae with each subsequent bite. Or mixing booze with brown, silty water from a gas station sink, hoping the alcohol kills everything it touches. I felt incredible, powerful, healthy, and I was nauseated, my teeth falling out of my head, my organs turning black inside me. All at the same time.

  The girl’s shivering had turned to shaking.

  Taking a deep breath for the next line, I paused. Felt the power hovering there, waiting, in stasis, like sunlight trappe
d in a bottle.

  I’d looked at her. Never look at them.

  Her shoes first, the girlish pink flowers and stylized letters: SD. Her initials, I guessed. Her hands: shaking at her sides, open, her fingernails just disasters, bloody and torn. Her face. Blank. Staring. Tears in her eyes but not falling out, just jiggling there like they’d been turned to jelly on contact with the air.

  I’d swallowed my words and looked away. The feeling of power, of energy, stayed for a second, as if somehow intelligently judging whether I’d paused or stopped, and then burst within me, draining away and leaving behind a desolate, cold emptiness.

  The explosion was typical: a flash of heat and light. Wind tearing through the room like a tornado had been summoned. Everything flying off Hiram’s shelves and smacking into us, smashing against the floor and walls. Tiny fires catching on the drapes and rugs. The girl had gasped and stumbled back, falling hard on her ass, her teeth clicking on her tongue. More blood—I remembered being able to feel it, the additional gas suddenly present. Her arm had stopped bleeding, as wounds always did when the casting was finished, and was just another scar on her that would never disappear.

  I imagined pulling this rotten golden power from Mags, and my stomach flipped.

  Amir was enustari and he walked around like a rooster with his Bleeders everywhere—I doubted if he’d bled for his own spells in decades. Guy like him, he would bleed small. A shivering vein of giggling good humor swept through me at the thought of Cal Amir using mu, being a Trickster for five minutes because Hiram had toasted his Bleeders and he didn’t want to spend too much of his own precious blood. Playing it safe, just bleeding enough for a cut-rate Glamour to make him look like a cop and allow him to keep tabs on Claire. Until he could find himself some real blood to work with. Someone else’s blood.

  I had a bad feeling he meant that blood to be mine.

  Swallowing bile, I ran through my spells again, trying to pick one I could spit out fast and have an effect with. We needed to take control of the car, or at least knock Amir on his ass—if Claire was locked in a room at One Police Plaza, and Amir walked in looking like a cop, she was as good as taken, which was as good as dead. I figured our one advantage here was that Amir thought we’d been fooled. He had relaxed.

  I watched the red taillights up ahead, leading us on like swamp gas, like faerie lights, steady and hypnotizing. My mind raced. I had to save her. I had to save her while somehow not killing Mags and myself. I stared at the wide square trunk of the unmarked police car ahead of us until it suddenly swerved hard to the right, then, jerking back, righted itself.

  For a few heartbeats, it rolled on ahead of us again, steady.

  Then it fishtailed, the trunk wiggling in front of us like it was dancing, sluicing to our left and then our right as the brakes went bright red, then dimmed, then right again.

  “Fuck!” Mags whispered next to me.

  Silently, the unmarked car went into a spin. Mags and I were tossed up against the grate as the patrol car braked, hard, and for a second the other car was facing back toward us. It continued to spin, moving horizontally, until it slammed into a telephone pole, the noise sudden and loud, then gone.

  We zoomed past it. Amir hit the brakes hard again and jerked the wheel, sending us crashing into a herd of garbage cans on the curb. He was out of the car in a second, leaving Mags and me trapped in the backseat in sudden quiet, the engine ticking loudly, cold air rushing in.

  “Fuck,” Mags said, resigned to his fate.

  I twisted around and peered through the back window. Amir, still glammed up as a cop, walked toward the unmarked car. Steam poured from under the hood. One wheel was bent in an unfortunate way.

  I twisted back around and closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Pictured puppies playing in a warm grassy field. Reared back as far as I could and rammed my head into the grill between the front and back seat. There was a bright red flash behind my eyes. No pain. A concerning numbness, a sense of floating. The pain came a second or two later, a deep, rusty throb.

  I got lucky. I felt blood, warm and fast, dripping down my face. A deep ringing had settled into my head and made my thoughts skitter sideways for a second. Like walking on a sinking boat. Head wounds bled like hell. Spraying blood everywhere, I muttered a quick Cantrip, and the cuffs sprang open, a wave of dizzy, helpless weakness passing through me. My vision went dark and for a second everything got distant and dim, slowly fading back to clarity as I breathed deeply. Changing one syllable, I repeated a version of the Cantrip and the car door snicked open. I pushed at it and fell onto the damp street, catching myself with my hands. I stared dumbly at the ground for a moment. Two fat drops of blood landed under me with audible plops, unneeded by the universe.

  I pushed myself back onto my knees and looked up. Amir had reached the unmarked car; the rear passenger door was open. He was leaning down and peering into the car through the rear driver’s-side window.

  Claire Mannice was creeping up behind him.

  She was a little unsteady. She looked thin and cold in her T-shirt and jeans. She was limping, and had lost a shoe, but otherwise looked okay. She was not, I suddenly noticed, wearing handcuffs, but did have a standard-issue nightstick in her hands.

  My whole body was quaking. I heard Mags getting out of the car behind me. I decided it wasn’t a bad idea to just rest a moment and see what she did with the nightstick, so I knelt there, breathing hard, hands on my thighs. She moved closer, stealthy.

  Amir turned, fast, flipping around. Just as I thought about the blood dripping from my head he hissed something, throwing a hand at her in a dramatic, useless gesture. Claire sailed up into the air and flew backward about five feet, landing hard on her ass, the nightstick flying out of her hands and clattering on the asphalt a few feet away. I felt nothing. He hadn’t drawn on me, but there was gas in the air now that I felt for it. Holloway and Marichal, I thought, not so lucky. I tried to think of something worse than being bled dry while unconscious, and couldn’t.

  Amir sprang for her, the Glamour melting away: Amir in his expensive suit, face snarling.

  I had an old chestnut, a little spell I used when running from cops, from security guards, from irate folks resistant to your standard Charm Cantrips. I spat it out, tasting blood.

  My vision blurred again as Amir’s feet went out from under him as if he’d stepped on a banana peel. He went horizontal and hit the ground hard, head bouncing.

  Claire leaped up and retrieved the nightstick. She was mesmerizing to watch, lithe and graceful, her hips cocking this way and that as she prowled over to Amir. She raised the stick, but as she brought it down with crushing force he rolled a few inches to the side and snarled another quick spell. He was pretty good at combat. A quick thinker. She flew backward again, slamming into the ruined car with a grunt and sliding to the ground. I thought about Renar telling me the runes on Claire bent the Words, deflected them. Reached back dreamily to my lessons with Hiram, the difference between a spell being cast on someone, and the results of a spell merely affecting someone. Amir was casting spells that affected the air, turned it solid, moved it like a hammer. Claire was just in the way. This was details, but enustari lived in the grooves of details. The words were complex, the grammar rich. You could do a lot with tiny bits, here and there.

  There were sirens in the air, distant. Coming closer.

  Amir got to his feet in slow, shaky stages, muttering as he did so. There was blood in the air, and he was burning it for his own spell; I could feel him tugging at me, leaching my strength through my forehead. I started speaking the first trick that came to mind. I croaked out three syllables. Amir switched to a different spell in mid-sentence. Part of me swooned in admiration—that took skills. The new spell was a quick, nasty piece of work I admired as a piece of compact writing—my voice cut off mid-word. I tried again, pushing air through my larynx, though no sound emerged. Stalking toward Claire, Amir resumed his previous spell as if he’d never stopped reciting it.

/>   I was outclassed. Mute, I started to wheeze and gasp my way to my feet anyway.

  I was used to being outclassed.

  Pitr Mags stepped in front of me, slashing his blade down his arm without a wince. Black moonlit blood welled up in a heavy flow. In a clear, loud voice he recited the fucking glowing bird dazzler so quickly, Amir had just turned toward the noise when the bird, huge and bright—bright like the fucking sun out in the nighttime—swooped in from nothing, coalescing into a blinding golden-red illusion and diving right for his face.

  He hesitated just a second. Just one second to process the stupid cheap Glamour, to see around it. To ignore it as a harmless trick.

  Waving it away in contempt, when his vision cleared, Claire was in front of him again, bloody and shaking. With one quick shot of the nightstick, she knocked him cold.

  He spun like a dancer and collapsed onto the street gracefully. She turned and tucked the stick into her waistband, walking over to me.

  Sirens, much nearer. Two blocks.

  Blood had smeared itself over the top part of her face. She looked like she was wearing a mask. I watched her walk over to me and wondered what I looked like to her, my head bleeding, slumped on the street, Mags behind me like a trained bear.

  She squatted down beside me. She was breathing hard, and she was beautiful. Her dark hair was sticking out in odd ways, but her eyes were bright and wide, excited.

  “All right, Chief,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  I smiled back at her. “We have to break the ritual. We have to get the glyphs off you.”

  “I’m all for getting these fucking things off me, and I know I’m no magician or whatever, but shouldn’t that be step fucking two? As in, step one: Get the fuck far away from here?”

  I shrugged, feeling dreamy. Like I was falling into a hole. Gravity had disappeared but the bottom wasn’t visible yet, so you could imagine it was just limbo, just falling and falling forever.