Binding the Shadows

by Jenn Bennett

  Lon stopped the car a half-block away. “I’m parking here,” he explained. “If this kid can lift cars, I don’t think I want to give him any weapons.”

  I glanced around, doing my best to push down rising anxiety, wondering how much time we had before someone busted one of Lon’s windows to perform a little hot-wire surgery.

  He patted the dash in answer to my worries. “Fort Knox.”

  “What about Telly? What if he’s hanging out with some other Earthbounds who have amped-up knacks? We could be walking into a hornet’s nest.”

  “Good thing you’ve got an early detection system.” Yeah, I did feel safer knowing he could sense sudden changes in emotion. He reached across my lap and stuck his hand between my knees.

  “Hey!” I said, but it came out a little too hopeful to be a proper protest.

  “You wish. Move.” His hand dove beneath my seat and surfaced with the sawed-off vintage Lupara.

  “I distinctly remember telling you not to bring that thing,” I complained.

  “Felt like you were daring me.” The thin lines around the outer corners of his squinty eyes tightened as his mouth quivered.

  “Better than your full-sized shotgun, I suppose. At least you can hide this one.”

  “You’re welcome. Come on.”

  We trekked down a sidewalk webbed with cracks, my jeans brushing brittle, dead grass. The bridge running parallel had seen better days. Its concrete was marred and crumbling, girders rusted. The underbelly arching over the dry creek bed was hidden in shadow. If someone was down there, we couldn’t see them . . . but they couldn’t see us, either.

  Lon stopped me where the sidewalk ended and the dusty slopes of the creek bed began. After a few moments, he glanced around and removed the Lupara from the inside of his jacket. He held up two fingers and nodded toward the shadow under the bridge. Okay, two against two. Hopefully it wasn’t two gigantic lunkheads with Merrimoth’s amped-up temperature knack. But as we took quiet, careful steps down the steep grade, following a well-worn path through dry grass, we didn’t see muscle-bound fire-breathers, or monsterific trolls waiting to collect a toll. Just three tattered camping tents lining the creek bed, a few lawn chairs, and two boys, shooting the shit and laughing.

  One was dark-headed, but his back was facing us. The other was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hard to tell. I could only see his profile. But he was husky and animated and begging the dark-haired one for something.

  “Come on, let me just see it.”

  The thought crossed my mind that we were about to break up some seedy yet kinda hot street punk blowjob exchange. In that case, maybe we should, you know, just wait until it was over. No sense in ruining a good show. Lon looked askance at me. I shrugged. Guess I was the only filthy-minded person, because the boy wasn’t trying to get in the other guy’s pants, he was tugging on a bag.

  “You can’t have any. Forget it.”

  “One drop.”

  “You got three hundred bucks buried under the tent? I don’t think so. But if you wanna be my wingman, you can earn it.”

  While the boy hesitated, the other one, the boy in charge, shifted the bag out of reach. It could’ve been any old backpack. And it was hard to tell if his hair was merely short or if he had a buzz cut, but he did have a blue halo. I homed in on his voice as Lon and I crept closer.

  “You want me to help you sell it?”

  “My supplies are running lower than I’d like, so I need to replenish. I want you to help me get a little more cash.”

  “I thought you took it. Why don’t you just steal some more?”

  “There are only two places I can get this, and the person I ganked it from . . . I just can’t go back there. Besides, he only had a little more, and I’m not interested in small-time stuff. I want to go straight to the source this time, and this guy’s got major security. So I’m gonna need money for some new equipment to get around it. I’m talking James Bond shit—plasma cutters, C-4 plastic, hacking software. All that costs. So I want you to help me clean out a few safes and registers.”

  “I thought you and Noel were done with that.”

  Mother trucker.

  “Noel was a pussy. You want to help me, or not?” He reached inside his backpack and retrieved something. After peeling off a cuff of bubble wrap, he held it up for the other kid’s inspection. It was a small, clear bottle with a cork stopper, filled with bright red liquid. It looked exactly like some of my medicinal jars.

  “Whoa,” the boy cooed, practically salivating. “How much is that worth?”

  He wound the bubble wrap around the bottle and stuck it back in the backpack. “Five grand. Twenty-five doses of bionic juice,” he said proudly as he zipped the bag closed and set it on the ground behind his chair. As if he wanted to put just a little more distance between it and the chubby boy with the greedy eyes. “Enough to amp up twenty-five ordinary knacks.”

  Bionic juice.

  I glanced at Lon. It was a fucking medicinal. An elixir. Had to be. The old-fashioned bottle screamed I-was-brewed-by-an-occult-magician! My blood was boiling. I was done being stealthy.

  A cloud of dust rose around my feet as I charged down the embankment, not giving a shit whether they heard me or not. There wasn’t much of anything with enough heft to be worth tossing our way—tents, cardboard, lawn chairs? No cars in the immediate vicinity. My blood practically sang with the urge to draw a shit-ton of current and zap him in the balls.

  The boys looked up, startled, when I came barreling toward them. Both leapt from their chairs. Lon’s Lupara clicked beside me.

  “Where’s my money, you little prick?” I shouted.

  Telly leveled a look at me that was wholly unafraid.

  “You have it stashed in a hole under one of these tents? Or was Noel Saint-Hill holding it for you when you smashed him under a fucking car?”

  The second boy made a noise. His gaze flicked nervously to Telly’s.

  “Was he the first person you’ve killed with your new trumped-up knack? Does injuring women not do it for you anymore? Because you fucking broke my partner’s bones with that stupid paint stunt you pulled in my bar.”

  “If you wanted to take me down, maybe you should’ve brought her out here,” Telly said in an even, taunting voice. “Because you’d have a better chance with her fear knack than some long-haired beach bum with a gun.”

  A shot exploded. The boys lunged to the side as a mushroom cloud of dust flew up from the cracked dirt near Telly’s feet.

  “Holy fuck!” the second boy shouted as he backed into a lawn chair that overturned.

  “Bullet trumps knack,” Lon said as my ear rang from the blast.

  Telly’s face flashed deep red. He was pissed. He flicked his hand to the side and Lon’s arm followed the motion. He clung to the gun even as Telly was trying his damnedest to pull the thing away—the same thing the boy had done to me in the bar with my caduceus, only Lon wasn’t caught off guard like I was. He strained to keep his grip on it as Telly grunted in frustration. The whole thing looked like a bad mime act.

  But just when I thought Lon was going to win the tug-o-war, the Lupara flew across the riverbed and landed in a pile of weeds on the opposite embankment. Why did he give it up? A second later, I had my answer. A familiar unearthly sensation went through me like a herd of stampeding horses. Light burst around Lon’s shoulders as his halo doubled in size and flamed up into a fiery golden oval that covered his shoulders. Twin, ruddy horns spiraled out of his hairline above his temples, curling around his ears.

  Both boys froze, eyes bugging. A dark spot spread over the crotch of the husky kid’s jeans. Telly’s mouth fell open.

  “Wiped that cocky smile off your telekinetic face, didn’t it?” I said. “No juice required.”

  Before he could reply, the boy who’d pissed his pants whipped around and booked it, racing up the opposite embankment. I briefly considered running him down, but we didn’t need him. Right now I wanted to focus my attention on the main
problem.

  “Your friend bailed on you, Telly,” I said. The sound of his name in my mouth made him flinch, just barely. “Maybe you’ll just kill him, too, when you catch up with him later.”

  He ran a jerky hand over his buzzed hair.

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked. The backpack lay on the ground a few feet away from Telly.

  “Seems you already know,” he answered.

  “Who’d you steal it from?” Lon asked.

  Nervous eyes darted in Lon’s direction, but Telly didn’t answer. Stupid piece of shit didn’t know Lon could read his mind at this point. He spoke to me instead. “I’ll give you your money back.”

  “Yes, you will. But what are you going to do about the damages to my bar? The lost income? And you broke my partner’s bones.”

  “I didn’t do anything. Not my fault she was clumsy.”

  Fury and adrenalin rushed through my chest. “You’re going to pay for that, you little shit.”

  Reaching out for electricity, I marched toward him, closing the distance between us. He was a twitchy trapped rabbit, muscles tense, wanting to bolt. But he couldn’t leave the backpack. It lay between us, and I saw the desperate longing in his face when he glanced at it. I tapped into current somewhere above the bridge and pulled. Prickly heat blossomed inside my cells.

  I heard Lon bark my name behind me, but I was so close. Telly and I lunged for the backpack at the same time. We both got our hands on it. Only, my hands were a little more dangerous than his. I pushed kindled Heka through them, sending a lash of it through the metal zipper I was white-knuckling.

  Like many other gifted magicians, my body was resistant to electrical voltage. At least, coming in. Going back out was another story. I needed graphite to even out the release, because once it bonded with Heka, it went a little haywire.

  I had no graphite.

  The shock sent Telly flying. With a yelp of pain, he slammed into the ground and skidded. Exactly the result I wanted. Only, the kickback from the release hit me, too. I knew the moment it happened. Knew I was in for pain and some hair singeing.

  My fingers froze around the zipper. Hot pain buzzed through my cells as my body made a closed circuit with the metal. For a moment, the pain was so excruciating, so jarring, that all I could see was white light. My mind emptied. The world dropped away. Everything just . . . rebooted.

  I’d done this before. Just had to let it happen and survive it. Wait for the nightmare to end. Would only take a few seconds, though they seemed an eternity. And as the shock lessened, I felt a weird, silent rumble. Like I was standing in the middle of an earthquake. We were in California. It was possible. And I knew the rumbling wasn’t coming from me.

  The muscles in my hand were nearly at the point of unclenching. I felt the change when it happened. When the pain shifted. Electric Heka still coursed through me. It was a horrible feeling, but not bright and debilitating like the actual shock. My bones turned to jelly. And as I felt my legs begin to buckle, I smelled Lon. How funny was that? I smelled him. Not his shampoo or his cinnamon gum or his leather jacket. Just him. The scent I could identify underneath all the other stuff. The one I smelled when I woke up in bed and his arm was curled around my waist.

  And that’s where his arm was now. He yanked me against him as the world roared back.

  Not more than a yard away, an enormous black shape fell from the underbelly of the bridge. When it hit the ground, it sounded like a bomb exploding. My bones rattled. Teeth clacked together. An enormous cloud of dust and dirt shot into the air. A tidal wave. Lon shoved my face into his chest and covered me with his body.

  We coughed up dust. It stung my eyes, coated my lips. And after a few moments, when it began to settle and clear, I was able to see what caused it all: a thick plate of steel, maybe twenty feet long, five feet high, lay across the creek bed, crushing one of the tents and two lawn chairs, whose bent pipe legs jutted out from beneath it like the legs of a dead roach under a boot.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand and looked up. A huge section of the outer girder lining the railroad bridge was missing. That telekinetic asshole had used his magically enhanced knack to somehow pull the side of the bridge loose.

  I surveyed the area. No sign of Telly. He’d pulled a tidy smash-and-run. If I wasn’t hacking up dirt, I might’ve cried in frustration. But then I smelled something burnt and glanced down at my hand. Scorched from my Heka unload and streaked with a line of red paint, his bionic-juice-filled backpack dangled from a strap looped around my wrist.

  In the distance, a couple of people were gravitating toward the bridge, looking for the source of the horrific crash that had echoed around the dying neighborhood. We took the backpack and hustled back to where we parked. For a moment, I freaked out when a dark sedan sped past us. The windows were too dark to make out anything inside; it could’ve been anyone. I was being paranoid. No one was following me. I couldn’t start suspecting every dark car I saw or I’d go insane.

  Once we got back to the SUV, we slammed the doors shut and stared at each other.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lon said, “the boy who wasn’t able to get a safe through the Diablo Market counter a few days ago has sure acquired some strength.”

  “No joke.”

  “You okay?” He’d already asked me that twice. “You’re shaking.”

  “Electrocution by Heka can’t be good for my heart. Almost worse than being struck by lightning.”

  He swiped his thumb over my eyebrow, brushing dirt away. I patted dirt out of his hair. And after we’d cleaned each other like monkeys, I rifled through the backpack. Inside, I found: a single bottle of red liquid, a box of sugar cubes, a glass dropper, a high school chemistry book, and a zip top bag filled with quarters. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were quarters from Tambuku’s register. But of course there was no identification. Nothing of interest but the medicinal.

  We took turns holding it up to the light, peering through the glass.

  Lon said, “I wonder if the kid was taking multiples doses to increase his knack to that point, or if one dose is progressive?”

  “In my experience, a dose is just going to wear off. My bet is that Telly’s been dosing regularly to build his strength.”

  “Ever seen a medicinal this color?”

  “Can’t say I have. Probably a few books back at my place I could thumb through, see if I could cross-reference it. But, you know, if I’d seen a recipe for ‘Bionic Knack Juice,’ I think I might’ve remembered.”

  “I probably have all the same books in my library,” he mumbled, shaking the liquid around.

  No doubt. I glanced out the window, warily watching the street. “Telly said his supply of the potion was running out, so maybe his strength will start waning and he won’t be so out of control.”

  “If this bottle is all he’s got, he’ll try to get it back from you.”

  Oh. I hadn’t considered this.

  “He knows who you are,” Lon said. “He knows the bar. He’s killed someone already. Would’ve damn well killed us if we were a standing a few feet north.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing the bar’s closed.”

  “When is your artist coming to repaint the binding triangles?”

  “She’s in Colorado for the holidays, so not until after New Year’s. I thought about opening for a few days before then, but maybe that’s not smart. If it were just me—”

  “But it’s not just you. You need to think about the rest of your staff. Customers.” He handed the potion back to me and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “What’s your best guess on how long the potion lasts?”

  “Most of my medicinals only last a few hours—a day, max. Never seen anything that stretched beyond that.”

  “So he’ll be looking for more,” Lon said.

  “He said there are only two sources of this: one big, one small.”

  Lon nodded. “The maker and the distributor.”

  “Would make sense. And if Tel
ly needs money to break into the maker’s stash—”

  “He might rethink his plans and go for the smaller source after all,” Lon finished.

  “The nosey neighbor said Telly didn’t live here in the city—said he might be from La Sirena or somewhere on the coast. If that’s true, the distributor might be, too. After all, Merrimoth got it from someone.”

  “But the crime spree’s been happening here,” Lon countered. “And Telly couldn’t have committed every robbery. Too many of them happening the same night, too many different knacks.”

  I nodded. “More dealers in Morella.”

  “Easiest way to find a normal drug dealer is to track down people who use and learn where they bought it.”

  “Follow stories about bionic knacks. See if someone will tell us where they bought it.”

  “Exactly,” Lon said.

  “And in the meantime, maybe I can find out more about the potion. How long the effects last, and all that.”

  “I can help you research potions.”

  “Sure, we could do that. . . . Or, we could try something a little more direct. I do know a drug dealer.”

  Lon turned his head to the side and mumbled a string of curses.

  “Now, now. Hajo’s been on his best behavior since we took the vassal potion back from him. I could call him. Maybe get him to meet me somewhere.”

  Lon grunted. He may not like it, but he knew I was right. If anyone was dealing the bionic drug in Morella, Hajo would be get us a name.

  “I’ll call him after dinner tonight,” I said, hearing cop sirens in the distance. “Right now, we better get out of here.”

  • • •

  I got my Jetta out of Kar Yee’s parking garage and followed Lon’s SUV back to Chez Butler, pulling in right at five. “Don’t be late,” Jupe had insisted, and we barely made it.