by Jeff Somers
“Neilsson been in?”
It was a Thursday, so the bartender was Sheila. Tall. Skinny. Fake tits. Black jeans, white shirt, black vest. Dull hair, dull eyes. She got better-looking as the night went on, usually.
She looked at me. Red eyes. Hungover. Had the best fucking job in the world right up until it became the worst fucking job in the world. Shook her head.
I sighed. Stepped over to one of the wobbly wooden tables and dropped into a chair.
“Get us a couple of shots, Magsie.”
All of my scars throbbed. I adjusted the fresh bandages and contemplated the black hole that was following me around. It had started off as a pinprick of absolute doom and grown slowly. Now it was man-sized, and the gravitational pull was adding five seconds to every move I made. I had no money and now no prospects. I had Mags. I supposed I could train him to dance and stand behind him, clapping, while people threw coins into a hat.
Maybe with a bit of gas, a creative Cantrip to spice it up . . .
Mags came back with two big shot glasses. They were empty.
“Sheila says we hit the cutoff last week and just didn’t notice.”
I nodded. Mags sat down. We always had blood. There were always guppies out there who would fall for a stupid trick. All was not lost. I was so fucking tired. All my cuts throbbed in time with my ragged heartbeat.
“We could go find Heller,” Mags said. “Hook in to that circus.”
I blew breath out of my mouth. “We could, sure.” I thought about that scene, a fucking Manson family of grifters. Heller was an idimustari who didn’t have any rules. About anything. “He’s in Jersey.”
Mags snorted. “Fuck.”
I nodded. Thought about the girl in the tub. This did not help my mood. I hadn’t killed her, but the runes meant someone who knew the Words had. Marked her up for a major spell, a Rite, and sucked her dry to cast it. I pictured her. No more than twenty. Maybe younger. Curled up in that ancient tub, she’d looked like a little kid, sleeping.
I wanted to chat with Neilsson about it. He’d been sitting on that apartment like a hen on a jeweled egg. Maybe he knew if we were in trouble or not. Maybe he’d sent us there on purpose, throwing heat our way. Maybe all that time we’d spent shining him on and gassing him, he’d been gassing us.
Sitting there with my empty glass and Mags panting next to me, jingling his collar, I thought better of it. I was glad Neilsson wasn’t around. I didn’t really want to know any more than I already did about the girl.
Jersey maybe wasn’t a bad idea, I thought. Get out of town. Out of circulation. In case anyone noticed the broken wards on that door, the hastily re-created ones.
“My boys!”
I twisted around to glance back at the entrance to the private-party room. Eyed the short, thin man in the patched overcoat emerging from it. Kept my face neutral.
“Hey, Ketterly.” He was older than us by some unknowable amount. He wore thick square glasses and always looked slovenly. Graying hair. Too much of it. Mustache. Sloppy old suit, sloppy stained overcoat. No bandages on his fingers; Ketterly liked to blend in with the Normals. He was the sort of cheerful you couldn’t trust because it was constant.
Ketterly always looked like he was enjoying himself, which made him a fucking liar. He worked a paranormal detective grift, sifting small coin from idiots using a few easy Cantrips to locate lost items or drum up a few poltergeists, claim he was contacting the dead. You could contact the dead, of course, assuming you had a few dozen bodies to drain for the effort. Ketterly just put on a show, occasionally found something to make it look good.
He did other work, too, when he could. He was the sort who did anything he got paid to do.
He dropped into the chair across from me and waved at the bartender. I felt a thrill. “Give us three drops, dear,” he said breathlessly. I could sense Mags’s excitement.
Ketterly grinned at him.
“You want a trick, kid?”
Mags nodded. “Yeah!”
Ketterly entertained Mags like you entertained strange children met by chance. Toys. He always had little showy Glamours to teach Mags: short, dirty spells that were colorful and loud, harmless and easy. Pitr Mags loved it, and if he hadn’t had the memory of a chipmunk, he would have had hundreds of them squirreled away by now.
Sheila brought three full glasses. Sullen. She’d expected an easy afternoon shift filled with napping and coffee, regret and self-loathing. Instead, she had us.
When she left, Mags sliced his palm as Ketterly started giving him the Words. Too many syllables; I got the gist of what he was doing right away and saw where he could have cut half of it away. Bending light and air, most of it was repetition. Ketterly was a sloppy writer. Most of us were; most of us were taught a spell and just repeated it exactly like we’d been taught, forever and ever, amen. Mags was excited and cut too deep, blood welling up from his hand in a rush. I could smell it. Feel it in the air. Sheila was behind the bar again, eyes closed. No one else around. Mags started repeating Ketterly’s spell.
I studied Ketterly. I wondered why he was here. He sometimes did real work for people. Small-time, Tricksters like us. Anyone who needed people found, things buried. I thought of the girl in the tub, then thought of Ketterly sitting in the back room as we walked into the bar. A man who did dirty jobs, a man who found people. I scanned the sleepy room: sawdust on the floor and the empty tables, glossy with varnish and marked with the repeating pattern of water stains, circles on circles on circles. Nothing seemed threatening or even unfamiliar. But I was itchy, staring into Ketterly’s smiling face. The man was a hound, and when he walked into a room he was searching for something or someone.
Told myself I was paranoid. I probably was. Ketterly was idimustari just like me, and the Archmages of the world didn’t waste their time hiring bottom-feeders like him to find other bottom-feeders like me. They had blood-soaked spells for that.
I felt the swell of power in the room. Gas building up, being focused and shaped. Mags casting the stupid trick, pulling the energy from his own open wound. Too much for what he was doing, I could tell. He needed just a pinch for this bullshit, but he had a free flow going. If you pulled too much for a small spell, you got an exaggerated version of it: too bright, too loud, too big, too whatever.
A Trickster didn’t worry much about that, though. I only knew one spell of sufficient power and complexity to be dangerous if overpowered or unfinished, and I’d never cast it.
I saw the girl in my head for a moment. A different girl. Younger. Shivering. As always, I saw her sneakers. Perfect in my memory. Every flower. Every heart. Every instance of her fucking name. I’d seen her once, ten years ago, for fifteen minutes. I could close my eyes and see every pore still.
I shook myself, got rid of her. Put myself back into the moment.
Thing was, Ketterly didn’t like the Normals. We were all Tricksters. Everyone I knew. We all preyed on regular people, people who didn’t believe in magic. Who didn’t know. We weren’t a guild, we didn’t have rules, but there was a code, a loose agreement. We kept each other’s secrets from the others, people who could be fooled easily because they didn’t think what we did was possible. I never thought it made me better than them, though. I knew a secret they didn’t know. You couldn’t win a game if you didn’t know the rules.
Ketterly thought regular people were stupid. He was a bootstrap magician. Had figured it out on his own, to an extent—had seen things when he was a kid that had convinced him magic existed. He’d deduced it. Like a math proof in his head. Had sought out mages on his own, figured things out on his own. He thought, since he’d done that, everyone should be able to. People like me, who’d needed to actually witness magic before believing in it, he thought were merely slow-witted. People who never figured it out, he thought were fucking cretins. He had no compunction about robbing them blind. Charming them. Hurting them from time to time.
I picked up my glass and sniffed it. Cheap stuff. Beggars can�
�t be choosers, so I tipped my head back and tried to bypass my taste buds completely. Direct to the throat, let it slide down. It got warm in my belly and I put the glass down. Hated owing Ketterly something. I’d worked with Ketterly before. Used him a couple times tracking people down—he did have a talent for it. But I didn’t like him. Or trust him.
Mags suddenly coughed. A fucking earthquake. Two hundred fifty pounds of dumb Indian convulsing.
The spell he’d been building dissolved. Collapsed on top of us, all that gas in the air suddenly set free.
I heard Ketterly hiss, “Oh, shit.”
There was a flash and I was blind. A second of implosive silence, like the sound had been sucked away, and then fire in the air around us. Hot and bright, raining down, disappearing before it hit the floor. I was lifted up, chair and all, and thrown backwards, crashing into a table and chairs that collapsed beneath me, sticks of wood everywhere. I sat up, head throbbing, scars aching. Sheila was staring, shocked, behind the bar. Ketterly was on the floor, too, struggling up onto his elbows. Mags was still in his seat, but he’d been blown back into the next table and sat back with his elbows on it.
It was what happened when you didn’t complete a spell. It always happened. Someone knew why, but it wasn’t me. My education had been incomplete.
“Fucking hell, Mageshkumar!” Ketterly shouted. “Who the fuck taught you how to fucking recite? You can’t fucking stop in the middle!”
That was basics. Anyone who got apprenticed, who went through urtuku, knew that much. I’d heard rumor of the occasional Normal who figured something out on their own, a single Word plus a bleed and causing havoc. But mages clamped down on that shit. Some kid causing grief with single-Word bullshit got scooped up and bonded as urtuku to learn a few things, or he disappeared. It was a rough business. And no one knew how permanent being apprenticed to an ustari was better than me.
Mags blinked around at us. Eyes wide and damp. Near tears. He could kill someone by accident. Could crush you to death like a kitten when he was hugging you for joy, just fucking accidental homicide. But he didn’t like to be yelled at.
He started bawling. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Looked at me in appeal. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, climbing to my feet. Grabbing a chair and setting it right. “It’s okay, right, Digs?”
Sheila was still staring at us, alarmed. Unsure what she’d just seen. Past experience had taught me that the best way to handle it was to ignore her, let her think what she would. They almost never thought, Magic.
I glanced at Ketterly. Didn’t like the hint of bitter disdain I felt.
Ketterly looked at me, then at Mags. Finally nodded, getting up. No fucking cheer now. All frowns and fuss. “Sure, sure. Okay. No problem. Listen, Vonnegan, I’ve been waiting here for you. Figured you’d come in here eventually. Neilsson asked me to look you up.”
I winced, waiting for it.
“He wanted me to tell you: Stay away from that place he discussed with you. He made an error in judgment. You shouldn’t get involved.”
I nodded, anxiety seeping through me. I’d understood that Neilsson didn’t want us knowing about the apartment, but I’d assumed that was because it was worth something. Now I figured Neilsson knew what was in there and who had put her there. I didn’t want to get involved.
I gave Ketterly a smile as he brushed himself off, throwing Mags a glare that almost got the big guy crying. “No problem. Tell Neilsson we’re gonna leave it. Probably shouldn’t have coaxed it out of him in the first place.”
Ketterly nodded. “Good.” He looked up, tried to reconstruct his cheerful mask. “My work’s done, then, eh? Come around the office sometime soon, boys. I’ll teach you a new one then, eh?”
Mags nodded eagerly, smiling shyly. “I’m awful sorry, Digs.”
Ketterly shrugged. “We all make mistakes, kid,” he said. Looked at me steadily. “All that matters is how we react to them.”
I nodded. Ketterly waved and turned and left. I sat down. Mags dragged his chair back over without standing up and sat next to me like a dog that had just been kicked.
“Heller in Jersey,” I said slowly, unhappy. Resigned. A good idea to get the hell out of Manhattan. A bad idea to mess with Heller, ever since my Fixing days. I looked at Mags. “Let’s get out of the city for a few days and go join the circus.”
3. PLAYING CARDS AT ONE OF Heller’s parties, room 37 of the Starlight Hotel—a desolate hole on Route 1 and 9 in New Jersey—I felt hot and weak. I’d been bleeding myself a lot, and half the cash piled up in front of me on the table was speckled with my blood: singles, gassed up to look like twenties, fifties, hundreds. Most of the blood boiling away as I cast, leaving behind crumpled dollar bills. I was pushing it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. The booze wasn’t helping; I was thin and half the liquid pushing through my veins now was liquor, light brown, searing.
The room was crowded. Massively crowded. Heller lived his whole life this way, moving around, motel to motel, always seedy and off the highways, always cheap. He set up shop and threw a party. His customers came to score some weed or coke, meth or ecstasy, and they brought friends. Working girls showed up like magic, like fucking magic, like there was a wireless network only whores could see that announced things like drugged-up assholes in a motel. More likely, Heller passed the word for a cut of the action. Music played softly, a throb at the edge of perception, bubbling under the fuzz of voices. The room had been transformed. The beds removed, tossed into the parking lot. Tables brought in for cards, chairs set up. Heller went all out for his High Rollers, who followed his game. The whores followed the High Rollers, and the Tricksters, we followed everyone. That was the natural food chain.
People moved constantly. As I sat there trying to concentrate through the distant pounding of surf in my head, the crowd beyond swirled and shifted. Girls in short skirts and torn stockings, their makeup reapplied so many times this one night that they looked like ghouls, their hair stiff and their hands papery from hand sanitizer. Guys who didn’t blink, their pupils the size of pins, still nodding at something they’d heard an hour before, leather jackets steamy and skin red and angry. The swells, in their ugly, expensive suits. The dealers, in their sneakers and jeans and fanny packs. It all swirled around. It smelled like feet in the place. Smoke and sweat and vomit and blow jobs all swirled together into something you didn’t want to breathe in.
The Bar Kids worked the room on an honest tip. Or semi-honest. They ran around taking orders. They were Heller’s kids, recruits. Mostly Hispanic and Arabic kids from his home neighborhood. They came with him and did waiter service and made more money in three nights than they could in a month at any straight part-time job. Then on Monday they were back in school, tired and wired but flush. Everyone left the Bar Kids alone and let them earn their tips and steal as much as they could without being obnoxious about it.
And in the midst of it all were my people. Idimustari. Some of us were just as bad off, just as tweaked out, and just as desperate. But most of us were better off. A little sallow and anemic, maybe, but clear-eyed and sharp, our little weasel noses twitching, smelling money. All the Normals were our marks. If you couldn’t smell the gas in the air, if the Words didn’t make you prick up your ears, heart pounding, then we worked you, and worked you hard. Some of us worked the whores. A Charm Cantrip was good for a lot of things. A freebie, if you didn’t mind being ninth in line that hour. Bleed a bit more and put a few more Words into it and she’d be tithing her take up to you all night long, slipping you half of what she got every time she went to the bathroom with some guy.
Some of us worked the High Rollers. Like me and Mags, playing cards. Prick your thumb under the greasy table and you could win every hand. Be a little creative and lose every hand but somehow end up with the pot anyway. Go easy all night and no one would notice. They were all used to losing anyway.
Some of us worked the dealers, some of us worked the bodyguards,
some of us worked the adventurers who’d found their way in by accident. We all worked somebody.
No one worked Heller. Heller was one of us. He was just organized. And the booze was free.
This particular motel reminded me of my father, picking me up from Cub Scouts one night after I hadn’t seen him in months, kidnapping me. Literally. He was waiting outside the meeting and didn’t smile when he saw me, just gestured me over and told me to get in the car. I was excited, I was happy. Looking back now, I could see he was drunk. We drove for hours, hours and hours, and I gave up being happy halfway through and just sat glumly in the front seat.
“Hey, hey,” the fat guy across the table from me barked, snapping his fingers at my face. “You fucking sleeping? It’s fifty bucks to you.”
I blinked, my eyes feeling like they were shrouded in sandpaper, and made a show of looking at my cards. “You snap your fucking fingers at someone, they might get bitten off, Magilla.”
I glanced up in time to see him grin and snap his fingers at me one more time. I nodded, letting my cards drop back down. I tossed a real fifty on the pile. “Call.”
I was using a Glamour I’d learned a few years ago to win. It was a nifty little spell, compact and efficient, and didn’t need much gas to keep at a simmer, though I was keeping the wound on my left palm open under the table to feed it. The beauty of it was, you didn’t try to make every card look like what you needed, or try to make every hand look like a winner. It was similar to a Charm Cantrip: You made everyone at the table think you won, and let them supply the details. They just saw whatever winning hand they preferred. It was elegant. Elegance was lost to most of us. Most of us learned rough spells that got the work done but took too long to say, wasted the gas with inefficient rambling. It didn’t take much to study the logic of it, the patterns, and find faster ways. Elegant ways.
The bet went around again, and my mind wandered like smoke. There were six of us, aside from the Bank. The Bank had been the only constant in the game since we’d gotten there, an old man with deep bags under his eyes, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and paint-splattered work pants. He didn’t appear to be breathing. His big spotted hands dished the cash in and out of the strongbox in front of him, and he never twitched or blinked or seemed to care who won or lost.