Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (8 page)

Not always, Julius thought, casting another skeptical look at the house’s sagging foundations. He didn’t want to be insulting, though, and it wasn’t like
he
was going to be living here, so he followed Marci down the steps and into the basement without a word.

Given the state of the house above, he’d braced for the worst, so Julius was shocked when he stepped through the basement door into a neat, well-lit space. It was still a basement with a cement floor and ground-level windows set high on the cracked brick walls, but unlike anything else he’d seen in this place, it was immaculately clean. Or, at least, part of it was.

The basement was as huge as the house above it, but only half of it was nice. The half by the door was bordered by a strip of yellow plastic caution tape covered in spell scribbling. On their side of the plastic line, it was a clean, orderly space that smelled faintly of artificial lemon. On the other side, it was chaos.

Beyond the line made by the yellow tape, filthy, sodden trash lay in huge piles. Julius couldn’t even see far enough back to spot the stairs that led up to the house itself. His view was blocked by mountains of discarded boxes, old clothes, broken furniture, stacks of old magazines, and cats. Uncountable cats, their eyes gleaming from the shadows as Marci clicked on the tall parlor lamp sitting on top of the mini fridge in the corner.

“Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at the caution tape. “The cats can’t get through the ward. It keeps out the smell, too. You would not believe what this place was like when I got here.”

Julius believed it just fine. “Free or not, why would you live down here?”

If he’d thought better of it, he wouldn’t have put the question quite that way. Fortunately, Marci didn’t seem offended.

“It fit my needs,” she said with a shrug. “My father died suddenly Tuesday night, and I ended up having to move in kind of a hurry. I haven’t had time to pick up my Residency ID yet, and I don’t have a stable source of income, which makes it kind of hard to get a lease even in the DFZ. I’ve just been trying to roll with the punches and make do.”

She’d certainly done that, Julius thought, looking over the tiny island of order and cleanliness she’d carved from the vast, disgusting sea of trash and cats. In addition to the mini fridge and the lamp, she’d acquired a couch and a gigantic wooden wardrobe that looked like it might contain Narnia. There was also a large, open square of floor off to the side that was covered in chalk casting circles, which he assumed must be her workspace. Not bad at all for someone who’d only been here…

“Wait,” Julius said. “
Tuesday
? Like, three days ago?” When she nodded, he cursed himself for an insensitive idiot. “My condolences for the loss of your father.”

Marci’s face fell for a split second, but then she was right back to business, throwing open the doors of the huge wardrobe to reveal, sadly not fur coats and a snowy forest with a lamppost, but a neatly organized collection of magical paraphernalia, which was far more useful at the moment. “Thanks,” she said. “I miss him a lot. But hey, at least I haven’t had time to dwell on it, right? Hard to be sad when you’re under an endless siege of cats.”

Her voice was bright and cheery, but Julius’s ears were tuned for dragons, and he could hear the falseness of her words clear as a bell. But it was neither his problem nor his place to call out her deception, so he let it go. He had to, anyway, because Marci was shoving an intricately carved wooden box into his face. “Hold this a sec.”

He did, using both hands when the box proved much heavier than it looked. It was also vibrating slightly, the little motions making the paper seal on the lid flutter like a flag in a high wind. Julius grimaced and moved the box to arm’s length. Family competition aside, this sort of creepiness was the other reason he’d stayed away from serious magic.

“So,” he said as Marci climbed up into the wardrobe to grab a meticulously labeled box of multicolored casting chalk off the top shelf. “You’re from Nevada?”

“Las Vegas,” she said proudly. “My dad and I used to have a magical solutions business there.”

That explained her card. “What kind of solutions?”

“All kinds,” Marci said. “Though we specialized in curse breaking. Las Vegas is a vengeful town, and that makes good business for both sides of the curse market.” She paused. “I was also going to school at UNLV for my doctorate in Thaumaturgical theory, but I had to quit when my dad died.”

“That’s too bad.”

She shrugged. “Nothing to be done. It was probably for the best, though. I was getting tired of the limits of academic magic.”

The false ring in her voice was back again when she said this, and again, Julius ignored it. He didn’t think she was lying outright this time, more like telling only half the story. That was still enough to make him uneasy, but considering he hadn’t told her a hundredth of his story, it was far simpler to just let it lie. He kept his mouth shut as he followed her over to the interlocking magical circles she’d drawn on the cement.

“Give me a moment to redraw these and we’ll get started,” she said, grabbing a dry mop from the corner and using it like an eraser, scrubbing the circles off the cement with a few deft strokes.

“What was wrong with the old ones?”

“Totally inappropriate initial casting parameters,” Marci said, putting the mop away and selecting a fresh piece of gold-colored chalk from the box she’d pulled out of the wardrobe. “Is this your first time watching Thaumaturgy in action?”

This was his first time watching a human cast anything, but before he could say as much, Marci charged right ahead.

“Thaumaturgy is the best form of magic,” she said in the bright, excited tone of someone getting a chance to explain something she truly loved. “It’s the process of using logical spell notation to create detailed instructions that tell the magic how to behave. Watch, it all starts with a circle.”

She grabbed a metal folding chair leaning against the wall and taped the stick of chalk to its leg. Before Julius could ask why, she unfolded the chair halfway, stamped the back leg down, and then, using the half-folded chair like a protractor, she touched the foot with the chalk taped to it against the cement floor and spun the chair like a top, drawing a perfect circle. Julius watched, dumbstruck. Apparently, Marci Novalli’s ability to make do extended to all sorts of things.

“There,” she said, setting the chair back against the wall. “Now we have a place for the magic to gather before we use it, sort of like a holding tank.” She looked up expectantly, which Julius took as his cue to nod. This earned him a brilliant smile and the resumption of the impromptu lesson. “So, now that we’ve got a place for the magic to pool, it’s time to put down the instructions that will tell it what to do.”

She retrieved her chalk as she said this, kneeling at the circle’s edge to begin writing a line of Greek symbols, numbers, and abbreviated words along the inner curve. “I use Socratic notation because it’s the most precise and I like it the best, but there are several other spellwork languages that all do basically the same thing. The idea is to create a progressive series of algorithms that tell the magic how to behave, kind of like writing a computer program. Once the spellwork is finished, all I have to do is pull the magic through the circle and
voila
, the spell is cast.” She glanced up at him. “Speaking of which, have you decided what kind of mage you want to be?”

He considered the question. “Well, it’s a shaman party, so probably a shaman of some sort. Preferably something quiet.” Because if anyone actually tried to talked to him about magic, he’d be revealed as a fraud in no time.

Marci thought for a moment, and then bent back over her circle. “I’ve got a good one,” she said, clicking chalk across the cement floor in deft strokes. “Just let me get it down and we’ll be golden.”

Julius nodded and settled in to wait, watching in fascination as Marci worked. He’d always thought of magic symbols as just that: random mystical shapes that controlled magic. Now that she’d explained what those long lines of spellwork actual did, though, he was surprised to see it really did look like code. Parts of it even looked almost readable. He was about to kneel down for a better look when something cold brushed against his leg.

He jumped before he could stop himself and glanced down to see a large, fluffy white cat. And then he jumped again, not just because this cat was inside the ward where cats weren’t supposed to be, but because this cat’s body was
transparent
. It was glowing, too, shining with its own strange, blue-white light, almost like a—

“Ghost!”

He looked up to see Marci kneeling with her hands on her hips and a furious scowl on her face. “You know you’re not supposed to bother customers,” she said firmly, pointing at the far side of the basement. “Go on! Get out of here!”

The transparent cat gave her a disgusted look and stalked off toward the couch. He turned his back on them when he got there, silently grooming his paws like this relocation business had been entirely his idea.

“Marci,” Julius said, very slowly. “Why do you have a ghost cat?”

“Technically, he’s not a ghost,” Marci said, going back to her spellwork. “That’s just his name. He’s actually a death spirit. You probably noticed Mrs. Hurst had a bit of a cat problem?”

Julius glanced over at the wall of reflective eyes peering at them from the shadowy mountains of trash on the other side of the yellow plastic ward. “I noticed.”

Marci shook her head. “Nice old lady, but way too soft-hearted. She told me she couldn’t stand to turn away strays but never had the money to get them fixed, so naturally the house began to fill up. They’ve had the run of the place for years, which sadly means a lot of dead cats hidden in the garbage, and dead bodies bring death spirits.”

Julius looked at the transparent cat sitting on the couch with a cold shudder. “You’re saying
he’s
the job you did for the lady who owned this place? The one you traded for free rent?”

“Yep,” Marci replied. “I was going through the public job boards when I saw this listing from an old lady who swore that a ghost cat was trying to kill her. I don’t normally take crazy jobs, but no one else had answered it and I needed the money bad, so I told her I’d come over and check it out. When I arrived, I found Ghost there sitting on top of my future client’s chest. He’d nearly sucked her dry by that point, and I ended up having to bind him just to make him detach.”

Julius recoiled. “That’s horrific.”

“You’re telling me,” Marci said, laughing. “I had to dodge furious cats the whole way in, and that was before I knew I’d be doing a binding.”

“But
why
did you bind him?” Julius asked. “Why not banish him?” He didn’t know much about human magic, but he knew binding was a serious commitment that tied spirit and mage for life. That didn’t sound like the sort of thing you did on the fly with something as openly hostile as a death spirit.

“I thought about that,” she said. “But if I banished him, he’d just come back again and bother someone else. Besides, he’s a bit of a rare specimen. It’s been hypothesized that cats have more natural magic than other domesticated animals, but this is the first time I’ve seen or heard of a death spirit specific to the species. He’ll be a great thesis topic if I ever get a chance to go back and finish my doctorate.”

Julius stared at her, mouth open, an expression that was rapidly becoming his default around Marci. “You mean you bound a
death spirit
to yourself for all time on the off-chance you can write a paper about him if you go back to school?”

“Well, he’s also pretty useful,” she said, brushing the chalk off her hands as she stood up. “When I can get him to obey, that is. Would you hand me the box, please?”

Julius did as she asked, silently handing her the shaking wooden box he’d brought over from the wardrobe. The soft rattling stopped when Marci broke the paper seal, and she reached inside to pull out something long, black, and slightly ridged, like an animal horn. “What’s that?”

“Chimera tusk,” Marci said proudly, holding the black object out for him to see. “And before you ask, it’s from a licensed humane farm in Canada. I don’t buy from factory mills. It taints the magic.”

Julius hadn’t been about to ask, mostly because it had never even occurred to him there would be chimera farms in Canada. He was, however, suddenly feeling very uneasy about this spell. “Why do you need a chimera tusk?”

“Well, I don’t
need
it,” Marci said, placing the tusk squarely in the center of her palm. “But it takes a lot of magic to do two illusions thick enough to trick a room full of mages, and since I’m pretty sure you don’t want to stand around here all night waiting while I pull down that much power manually, I thought I’d employ an outside source. Think of it as using a battery.” She looked down critically at the tusk in her hand. “Besides, this one’s getting kind of old. Better to use it up now than wait and risk losing potency, you know?”