A Criminal Magic (10 page)

“Joan, if you're here, you deserve to be here,” Grace says softly. “I told you, we Dunes, we've got the gift of forecasting.
We can see things, sense things that aren't apparent to the naked eye. And I get this real sense that you're something special.”

I look up at her, silently curse myself for crying. “Please don't bullshit me.”

“Joan, look around. Look where we are. What the hell is my incentive to lie?” She nods with purpose. “Come on, let's start with a simple image, all right? I'll show you by mining into your mind first. All you need to do is think of one image. Imagine it as clear and detailed as possible. Then hold it, relax, and breathe,” she says. “Magic is a
skill
too, Joan. You can learn new tricks. You can practice, and get better.”

I wipe my eyes with my sleeve, close them, focus. Ruby jumps into my mind almost immediately. I picture her wild blond hair, her little nose, her mouth making her silly face. . . .

“Ruby again,” Grace says. “She's doing this strange thing with her mouth this time. This chomping thing.”

I give a release of a laugh and open my eyes. “That's her silly face,” I say, and add, “Ruby's my sister.”

“I sort of figured.” Grace smiles. “She's adorable. You miss her?”

“I miss her even when I'm with her.”

Grace's smile becomes heavier, and she drops her gaze. “Your turn, all right? I'm going to think of an object. I want you to come searching for it inside my mind. It's easier if you close your eyes.”

I shuffle-step, settle in, ready to attempt what she says.

“Everyone's got their own method,” Grace whispers, “but when I mine another's mind, I picture floating over to the person on a wave, seeping into them, then flooding right around their thoughts.” She gives a laugh. “And I used to think of a dam going up in my mind when I wanted to keep my family out. You can manipulate the space between us, Joan, a heck of a lot more than it seems. It just takes practice.”

I concentrate, try to picture myself smaller, tiny, floating . . . like a boat in an invisible sea between us, a grain of sand in a wave.

But nothing happens.

“Just relax, be patient, Joan,” Grace says. “Every sorcerer has a different way of tapping into their magic. That just works for me. Trust yourself.”

So I let my mind go blank, and wait.

And then something falls over me, something tall and dark as a long shadow. It pulls me forward through a wide, charged space, like I'm walking through the pressure between two magnets. I'm led into a dark, wide, empty theater, right in front of an abandoned stage. And I realize,
somehow
, that I'm inside Grace's mind. A spotlight beams down quickly, paints a pool of light onto the center of this stage. Soon, something fuzzy and gray is birthed inside the spotlight. I wait for the image to grow bolder, crisper, fully emerge—

A toy train. Down to every last detail inside Grace's mind—the little blue caboose, tiny black wheels, detailed etchings of
RAILROAD CO.
along the side of it.

But then the train begins to move. It chugs slowly around the circle of light, bending and flexing at the connections between the toy cars—and chugs right into a small hand. The rest of the body connected to the hand comes into form slowly, carefully, like Grace is sketching it and I'm watching over her shoulder.

Ruby
. Like some silent movie playing inside Grace's head, Ruby takes the train, smiles delightedly, and then bends down to run it in a circle around herself on the floor of Grace's mind.

I gasp, tears coming to my eyes, and the mental connection between us pinches out. I open my eyes to find Grace smiling at me.

“I've never experienced anything like that.”

“Me neither. Maybe Gunn's onto something,” she says. “I've never been able to imagine something like Ruby from virtually nothing. You want to try again?”

And I do. Instead of feeling stretched, exhausted, I weirdly feel invigorated. “We'll start inside your mind this time.”

So after a quick break, we run through five more image volleys, finding the image in the mind of the first sorcerer and then building on it in the mind of the second, like we're creating a mental bridge, image by image, connection by connection. I'm slow to start, but by the third round, I feel comfortable walking inside Grace's theater, knowing where to find her stage. And before I know what hit me, Gunn's calling out to the crowd, “Supper time!”

“Thank God, I'm starving.” Grace stretches her arms over her head. “Come on, it's been a long day.”

But I'm not ready to stop. It's like someone's cracked open a long-locked door, given me a glimpse of a room that glitters inside, started a ticking clock for proving myself worthy of entering. “It's all right, you go on, I'll catch up.”

“You serious?” She studies me. “Joan, you've got to give yourself a break.”

“So I'll break when I deserve one.” When Grace just looks at me doubtfully, I say, “I'm fine, honest. I'm not even hungry. Trust me, I just need a little more time.”

“All right,” Grace says. “But don't burn yourself out on the first day.”

She filters out of the clearing with the rest of the crowd, past Gunn and Dawson and back into the woods. But before the gangsters turn to go, Gunn spots me, alone in the corner. He approaches, no sound but his loafers tramping over the grass. “Supper time, Joan,” he reminds me.

I take a deep breath. “I thought I'd spend a little bit more time practicing alone, sir, if that's all right.”

He stops in front of me. “Did my teamwork demonstration not register?”

“It did,” I say slowly, remembering that this man stole two lives here in the clearing this morning. But I'm not ready to stop sorcering. I need every minute I can get. I need to become stronger,
better
. So I carefully give his words back to him. “But a team's only as strong as its weakest player.”

Gunn studies me for a long time, a smile in his eyes that never quite touches his lips. “Very well.”

He walks out of the clearing, and I turn back inside myself, hungry to try another trick, one that I spotted some of the Carolina Boys attempting earlier. I focus on my hand, on willing it warm, and imagine my palm heating, igniting. I close my eyes and whisper, “
Spark and fire
.”

It takes a second, and then another, but then I feel a sharp, stinging burn, like a snapped match against my palm. I gasp. And there, jumping and throbbing against my palm, like a captured frog from a lake, is a small sphere of orange fire.

NEW ALLIANCES

ALEX

I've been at Lorton Reformatory for three weeks, two days, and four hours of my six-week sentence for “attempting to sell magic contraband,” booked under the guise of running some of Danfrey Pharma Corp.'s remedial magic inventory around town. I'd swear it's been three years, but that's impossible, because I've been keeping track of everything. Twenty-two breakfasts staring at rows of inmates in sad gray jumpsuits hunched over metal trays. Twenty-two long mornings of making clay batter and shaping bricks in Lorton's brick-making unit. Forty-four hours toiling around in the crisp fall air in the quad, waiting for someone to offer a smoke or a handshake.

But no one does. Because I'm an island here. An island in a foreign, treacherous sea. A sea I'm constantly treading, because if I relax for a second, I might find myself with my face to the floor. It's minimum security, mind you—no one in here's doing hard time for hard crime—but that somehow makes it worse. As if everyone's out to prove to the underworld that they're on their way to bigger, badder things.

Despite how much I despise these thugs, I need to transform myself into one of them. Like Frain said, I need to embrace my
story—become my father's legacy. Walk inside his underworld, turn it upside down, and destroy it.

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten the chance. The cell mate that Agent Frain arranged for me to bunk with—my supposed “door” to the Shaw Gang—hasn't looked at me twice since I was booked into his room, and he sure as hell hasn't addressed me. Guy's name is Howard Matthews,
Howie
, a second-­generation Irishman prone to tall tales and grandiose ideas, one of those self-important greaser types who thinks he'd be running the Shaws already if people would just sit up and start paying ­attention. He's uncomfortable to look at, and in an eight-foot-by-eight-foot cell, it's impossible to look at anything else: matted hair that grows past his ears, wide eyes, a lean, jittery torso that looks like it thrives on sorcerer's shine but has been denied it for weeks. In short, someone
I
wouldn't look at twice, if the Feds weren't holding me over a barrel to do it.

Day in, day out, I hear Howie at mealtimes, holding court around the small-time Shaw men who have been busted for petty crimes and burglaries, telling different versions of the same stories about his adventures running with his bigwig cousin Win Matthews, some hard-boiled Shaw underboss, from what I can gather. Howie knows who I am, I'm sure of it, as the prison guard who brought me in made a big show of introducing us, I guess hoping that the inherent tension between Richard Danfrey's son and an up-and-coming Shaw might result in some future entertainment. But Howie didn't bite.

“You in here for running too?” I finally attempted conversation several nights ago from my bottom bunk, when the darkness and the silence between us grew so heavy, I started to feel like I was getting crushed underneath it.

Just more silence.

“You're a Shaw boy, right? Smuggling for Boss McEvoy?”

No answer from Howie but breathing.

“How long you in here for, chap—”

“What's that buzzing sound?”

My heart started hammering—
nervously? hopefully?
—at the sound of his voice. “
Buzzing
sound?”

“That right there, a buzzing, like a fly,” he said.

“Sorry, chap, are you—”

“God, there it is again,” he said to himself, apparently. “Sounds tinier than a fly, actually. Pesty, like a flea.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz
.”

Then it was my turn to be silent.

“Much better,” Howie mock-whispered to himself. “'Cause if that flea starts flitting around again, I'll have no choice but to swat it.”

That was nearly a week ago, and I haven't said another word to Howie since. Now it's back to hard eyes and sideways looks between us, awkward dances around each other for the toilet, a forced, silent fox-trot as we climb past each other into our cots.

The dull fear that's always festering inside me is starting to grow into genuine panic, gnaw at me from breakfast until bed. I'm more than halfway through my sentence with nothing to show for it: if I can't get in with Howie by the time I leave, I come out on paper as a small-time magic runner with a record. The Prohibition Unit has officially discharged me since my “arrest,” and Frain's threats are always echoing in my ears.

There is no safety net in this situation.

So I need to win this Howie over soon.

I'm debating the “how” during lunchtime, the meal a variation of the one from yesterday and the day before that, a plate of potatoes, Broadway-bright carrots, and a dark, unidentifiable meat. So I look around the room, debating, watching, listening. We've separated ourselves in the long, windowless mess hall like students in a high school cafeteria: the D Street Outfit and Italian small-timers keep to the front left. There're the Mexicans and the blacks near the windows, and on the right—the first few
tables nearest to the kitchen—the junior Shaws and their Irish hangers-on. Then there's a wide sea of unprotected men, who bob along like fools tossed overboard who didn't think to buy a life raft.

This is my territory. I've eaten alone every day since I got here.

I run through my options as I sit, stirring my mushy carrots. Sorcering a trick for Howie—a rabbit out of my ass with no context—seems almost juvenile, forced. Like I talked about with Agent Frain when he drove me down to the station a few weeks back, for as moronic as Howie might read on paper, he's got street smarts. And a guy showing up in his cell, trying to wow him with magic when Boss McEvoy just lost his right-hand sorcerer? Too convenient.

But provoking a fight with him, showing him I've got balls, that I'm not afraid of a rumble? That could backfire.

A voice interrupts my thoughts with, “Seat taken?”

Across from me, perched over the opposite side of the table, stands a large man in his forties. He's got a tough face that's seen far too many long days, and a head of hair that's thick and thinning in all the wrong places. I've seen him hanging on the bleachers in the prison quad with the D Street Outfit crowd: the gang that used my father up and sold him down the river. I don't recognize this goon from my days of working with my father, but it doesn't matter. My hatred for D Street doesn't discriminate.

The guy doesn't wait for my answer, just lifts one of his legs over the bench and settles in across from me. “Ronny Justi.” There's no handshake with the introduction. “Don't worry, we already found out who you are.”

His use of “we” prompts a thick, hard lump to form at the top of my throat. I'm not surprised D Street put two and two together, obviously—it was only a matter of time before one of
those goons got wind of who I am, and what I supposedly did to land myself in here.

I just thought I'd be under the Shaws' protection by the time they put it together.

“You're Richard Danfrey's son.” Ronny leans over the table, mock-whispering, like we're just a couple of chums sharing a secret. “A bunch of us heard the guards talking about you in the yard this morning. Didn't know we had a celebrity among us commoners.”

I turn back to my iridescent carrots and start picking at them.

“What, cat got your tongue?”

I steady my voice. “Just not in the mood for conversation.”

“Loner type, eh? I can respect that.” Ronny leans in closer. “But it's a funny thing I heard those guards talking about, turns out. Some of them were saying you were in here for running magic contraband.” He keeps up with his mocking tone, that dance between chummy and threatening. “But I thought, that can't be right. Because any son of Richard Danfrey would be smart enough to check in with his daddy's D Street keepers before distributing any inventory around.”

Daddy's D Street keepers
. As if my father was just a D Street pet, or a joke. And the worst part, the part that bugs me more than anything else, is that at the end of the day, this thug's right.

But I don't want to show Ronny that he's getting to me, so I don't even look at the bastard. I keep my eyes on my lunch, imagine becoming bigger, stronger, like I'm transforming myself into steel and nightmares, something Ronny can't touch.

“Fact, we've been over there talking about you since this morning, friend,” Ronny adds. “A big debate on what we should do with you.”

The mess hall has gotten a little quieter, as we're right in the middle of the room, like a goddamned circus stage. So without
having to look, I can bet that Howie's table is listening. I can practically feel the Shaws' eyes on me.

But maybe that's not a bad thing—Christ, maybe
this
is the chance I've been waiting for, to show Howie where my allegiance lies, and where it doesn't. It's a risk, a huge risk, antagonizing this D Street gangster in the hopes of catching the eyes of the Shaws—but I'm running out of time, and out of options.

So I force myself into the deep, dark water, and plunge in. “‘Keepers' is sort of a misnomer, isn't it?” I say slowly, finally meeting Ronny's eyes. “Because ‘keepers' implies that someone's watching out for you, and taking care of you. And your D Street operation let my father get sold out to the Feds. He's in for three decades,
friend
, maybe more. So ‘keepers'?
That's a joke.”

At this, Ronny gives a spit of a laugh. Then he raises his hands a bit—a begrudging concession. “You know what? Boss Colletto might agree with you. Hell,
I
agree with you. Our entire outfit had Loretto and Mongi's numbers for what they did—caving to the Feds, selling a prime asset like your father down the river to save themselves a couple years in jail. It was wrong. Boss Colletto wanted to make things right.
Lots
of folks wanted to make things right. Trust me,” he says flatly, “things have been righted.”

I don't give this thug any kind of nod or indication that I agree. I'm sure Loretto and Mongi, the two goons who rattled off my father's laundry list of crimes to the Feds this past spring when they were caught with fifty gallons of remedial spells marked
DANFREY PHARMA CORP.
in the back of their Model T—I'm sure they're riddled with holes right now. Stuffed into some Dumpster or floating at the bottom of the Potomac for thinking of their own skins over the future of D Street. But that doesn't do anything for me. That doesn't give my family our lives back, doesn't erase the year of pressure and threats that Colletto wielded over my father. And so even though my heart's so wound up on fear it might spring out of my chest,
there's something else ticking inside me too. Relief. Maybe even excitement. Because this is a moment I've actually dreamed about—a chance to tell Colletto's gang how much I despise them. Regardless of what's for the Feds, this moment—this is also for
me
.

Ronny gives a big, put-on sigh and looks back to his table of D Street cronies in the corner. “Look, I understand your . . . hesitation to make amends, Baby Danfrey.” He shifts in his seat. “But it's time to let bygones be bygones. You understand? You let the past go.” He drops his voice, I assume so the guards can't hear. “You work for us until your father's debts are paid.”

I stare at Ronny for a long while, way too long. It's definitely more uncomfortable for me than for him, but I make myself do it. “I'm not ready for that.”

The corners of Ronny's mouth start twitching. “I urge you to rethink that, 'cause your father had an arrangement with Boss Colletto. And that final shipment of spells he owed us? That was paid for in advance, check signed, sealed, and delivered. So as far as we see it, anything you're trying to sell on your own in DC should fall back to us. And any way you slice it, you running magic is something Boss Colletto needs to know about. We own you, till you make it right.”

“No.”

Ronny grabs my hand across the table, ending my meal. His face has started to flush, and there's a thin coat of perspiration seeping from his patchwork hairline to his brow. “Excuse me, did I just hear a
no
? This isn't a negotiation.”

I force myself to look him in the eye again. “You're right”—I wedge the words past the lump in my throat—“we're done here. I'm finished with your guinea operation.”

Ronny tightens his grip around my wrist, twists his neck a bit, and slowly leans forward. “What did you just call me?”

I've gotten into tons of fights before, but nothing like this.
I'm trying to push a gangster past the brink. A gangster from a gang that kept my father drenched in sweat and nightmares. A gangster almost double my size.
Howie better be watching
.

“You heard me.” I focus on keeping my voice steady and my lunch in my stomach. I pop an overcooked carrot in my mouth and push it to the side with my tongue. Then I add with a bite, “Guinea.”

An odd, thick vein in Ronny's forehead starts pulsing, and his face begins to redden. He's big, but he's fast—he lets go of my wrist and grabs my tray with both hands in one jerky motion, then throws it right in my face. The dull metal edge knocks me in the chin, and the last of my potatoes hits my forehead with a thick, wet
thwap
.

I don't let myself pause to wipe my eyes.

I spring out of my seat like a jack-in-the-box, lunge for Ronnie, and grab his collar. Then I send his head crashing onto the table.

The mess hall goes wild, and the D Street boys in the corner shove away from their benches and start running toward my table to aid their man, shouting, fists up and ready. I can feel their advance, I can see them out of the corner of my eye—and if Howie and his dirty Shaw men don't decide to hop and come to my rescue, I'm going to get pulled apart.