Trickster (19 page)

I
startled awake. The bus had been our home for so long, I wasn’t sure how we’d adjust to life without it. Mags had gassed up twelve dollars and fifty cents into a small fortune, passing bloody bills with reckless abandon, buying tickets and hamburgers and bottles of water. Three days with nothing to do but sleep and eat and be horrified at the bathroom haunting the rear of the bus. I was starting to feel almost normal.

Across the aisle, Claire sat in the outer seat. Pitr Mags was folded up on his side, his head resting in her lap, sleeping soundly. She was stroking his hair absently as we rumbled through Hill Country. I was deeply in love with her for stroking Mags’s hair. She noticed I was awake and turned her head to look at me.

“So your man Hiram,” she said drowsily. It was the continuation of one giant conversation we’d been having for days.

Outside, it was dark. Featureless, black. We might
have been in some sort of experiment, a vehicle on casters, sound effects, paid extras in the seats around us.

“My
gasam,
” I said. “My Master, in the sense of having an apprentice.”

She nodded sleepily. I liked the blurry way she got when she was tired. We’d been talking for hours, on and off. Packets of words. I felt like I knew things about her no one else knew, and I liked that, too. “How do you know he’s dead?”

I waited a few seconds. I didn’t know how I felt about Hiram. I hadn’t
liked
him, really. Had barely known him in that way you’re supposed to know people you have a thing with. Had found him irritating on more than one occasion. But he’d taken Mags in before me, which argued in his favor. And he’d just been a part of things. Always there. I realized, the second it had been severed, that I was always subconsciously aware of my magical connection to him. Now, when I noticed the absence, I felt incomplete.

“I know. We had a . . . bond.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that, as we’d left the city, I’d been surprised and a little saddened not to have felt the slight, uncomfortable tugging in my gut that was that bond. It had always been there, increasing in degree with distance. A
gasam
could choose to invoke the bond, use it like a leash to tug his apprentice back, but Hiram had just let it sizzle, always there, like a fishhook in my back that had healed over.

“Why was he so angry at you?”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how much
Claire remembered from her few minutes in Hiram’s house with us, especially the first time.

“Because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And that was?”

She was looking at me with her sleepy eyes, her serious face. She was the sort who didn’t let things go—gentle, but persistent. She had perfect lips, a little pink bow. Even in the cheap new clothes Mags had bought her, baggy tan pants and a heavy shirt, a thick gray sweater, the world’s cutest wool cap, she had a shape and grace to her I wanted to stare at.

I sighed. “Hiram thought I had potential. Magic. That I could be something special.” I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe he’s even right. I remember the spells easy, I can see how to improve them, little shortcuts. I can even make up my own, which Hiram can’t.” I paused. “Couldn’t. But I won’t bleed other people for it. I get by on what I can gas myself and that’s it.”

“Fuck, why
blood
?”

“I don’t know. No one does, I don’t think. Something primeval, right?”

The bus hummed along. We hummed along in it.

“This guy we’re heading to,” she said after a moment.

“Gottschalk,” I said. “Faber Gottschalk.”

“He can get these runes off me?”

I nodded. “He’s
enustari
.” She frowned at me, and I shook my head. “A big fucking deal. Right up there with the woman who wants to slice you open and bleed you like a pig.” I shrugged again. “Powerful.”

My Rolodex was not exactly filled with
enustari
. I
knew exactly three names: Mika Renar, Faber Gottschalk, and Beni Aragaki—and I only knew Aragaki’s
name
.

“Why is Gottschalk going to help me?”

“I don’t know. We’re going to have to come up with a reason.”

She chewed on that.

I reviewed what I knew about Faber Gottschalk. This didn’t take long. I knew he’d been Hiram’s
gasam
for ten years. That they’d parted ways amicably. That despite that, Hiram had always made fists without realizing it when he mentioned Gottschalk’s name.

Claire went on in a small voice. “Why does it have to be
me
? Why chase after me? Just find someone else.”

I wanted to reach across the aisle and touch her. Seconds went by, marked by the sway of the bus and the soft sounds of half-asleep people. The bus was alive, and we were just the cilia of its lungs, swaying with each inhalation and exhalation, absorbing oxygen.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said softly, trying to remember how Hiram had explained things and say it all differently. “The word is
biludha,
ritual. Everything involved in it has to be done in a specific, precise way. They marked you, so you have to die in your proper place. Right now all the power expended in the rite is up in the air, suspended. If you don’t die exactly when you’re supposed to, the next girl won’t die, or the next one. No one after you will, and the rite falls apart. They mark up someone new, the rite falls apart.”

She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment. I studied
her face. Imagined her as a kid in school when I’d been in school, both of us chafing to get away, imagining that cigarettes were part of the fare out of our lives. I suddenly regretted using the phrase
slice you open and bleed you like a pig.

I thought of all the other girls. The ones the Skinny Fuck had snatched before Claire. The ones who looked like Claire from future moments she might never get, each one a little older than the last.

Mags snorted and twisted, slumbering, and wound up with his nose planted directly in Claire’s crotch. She opened her eyes and looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

“He
is
asleep, right?”

I smiled. “Mags doesn’t have a creepy bone in his body. He’s a puppy.”

Looking down at Mags’s head, she continued stroking his hair, pushing it around gently. “How’d you pick him up, anyway?”

“I ran away from home when I was seventeen. Nothing dramatic: I got tired of Dad showing up outside school now and then and kidnapping me—literally—and then coming home to Mom pissed off at
me
for being kidnapped, you know? Nothing dramatic. I got fed every day and had clothes and my own room, no one was beating me up or anything, but I just . . . left.”

I didn’t tell her about the old man in the parking lot. It wouldn’t make sense without all the backstory. She leaned toward me slightly, out over the armrest of
her seat. I let my eyes run down the curve of her neck, the sharp, pleasant line of her collarbone. I couldn’t see the runes on her, because I wasn’t trying and there was no gas in the air to help me out. Her skin looked perfect to me. She smelled like clean laundry. When she spoke, her voice was soft and ten years younger, and it was like we were having a sleepover, curled up with each other on someone’s carpeted basement floor, listening to records.

“I ran away from home, too,” she said quietly.

I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“I came to New York looking for a Hiram. Not
Hiram,
because I didn’t know he existed, but someone like him. Someone who could teach me how to do things.”

Hiram, gesturing with a bandaged hand and making a muffin float across a diner to his waiting hand. Hiram sitting at the counter eating it while he read a newspaper like nothing unusual had happened. Hiram stealing the fucking salt and pepper shakers from the counter when he left.

“Hiram already
had
Mags. Mags was basically Hiram’s Oddjob when I showed up. He wanted Hiram to apprentice him, but Hiram wouldn’t, because he regarded Mags as Too Stupid to Live.” I considered. “Which isn’t far short of the truth. Anyway, I adopted Mags, he fell in love with me, and we’ve been nonbreeding life partners ever since.”

“He’d take a bullet for you.”

“And me him. Be careful, he’ll adopt
you
.”

We stopped talking. Slowly spread apart like we were floating in jelly, tugged this way and that, the sudden intimacy shattering and leaving us just two people sitting in separate seats. The overwarm bus rumbled and rattled, the emptiness scrolling past us, and after a few minutes of pondering Claire Mannice and the neat way she’d folded her legs under herself on the seat, I fell asleep.

•   •   •

It was colder than I would have expected in Texas. We crept off the bus like stumblebums, stiff and squinty, unshowered and crusty. The bus had pulled over outside the library, of all places. A small park sporting an ice rink was across the street. It was literally called Main Street, wide and pretty heavily trafficked at ten in the morning.

Claire stood next to a street sign and began stretching, pulling one ankle up toward her head as she balanced, one hand on the signpost. I stared, breath steaming in front of me.

“What’s our bank account?” I asked Mags without taking my eyes from her.

“Seven dollars,” he said. He paused, as if checking his grade-school addition skills, and then repeated it. “Seven dollars.”

It wasn’t unexpected or even uncomfortable. I’d been living on an eternal seven dollars for years now. I took stock. I was hungry—starving, but I’d been starving for ten years and it was normal to me. I felt
good. Rested. Probably still down a pint but no longer on the verge of just passing out. I had a tremendous appetite, but not just for food. I wanted cigarettes, and whiskey, and I wanted to bleed a bit and Charm the pants off Claire Mannice, literally. She’d been twelve inches away for three days and I had memorized her smell.

I clapped Mags on the shoulder. “Breakfast. You up for a Beauty Queen?”

He nodded sleepily. “Sure, Lem. I’ll cast the Compulsion, you cast the Charm.”

“What’s a
Beauty Queen
?” Claire asked. Somehow she was standing right next to us, a fucking cat in need of a bell.

I looked around. Only a handful of people had gotten off the bus; we had a few feet of sidewalk all to ourselves. I took Claire’s arm and urged her to walk with us toward what looked like the busy part of Main Street.

“You are,” I said. The sun was high and bright, but the air was crisp and cold and I was shivering a little. “It’s a spell, a scam we run, a combination of two spells. You can work it as one spell, but then you’ve got to give the gas for something big. Split it into two components and two people can cast it without passing out. You game to be our
beauty
?”

Some people weren’t. Some people didn’t see it as survival.

“What do I do?”

“Stand around, look pretty,” Mags said with a grin.

Mags was a wonder of science. He walked next to me stretching as he went, twisting his arms back, his neck down, arching his back. His joints popped like gunshots. He was big and brown and his hair was getting girlishly long again, curling around his face. I’d never been to Texas before, much less what felt like the fucking exact center of the state, all dust and wildflowers and yellow stone buildings with German names. I didn’t know how many Pitr Mags types existed in the
world,
though my cautious estimate was seven. I doubted any of them had passed through Texas before.

Claire scowled. “
And
?”

I sighed. I wasn’t used to explaining spells to people. “One, we cast a reverse Charm on you, make every man in the world think you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, okay? Then we wait for someone useful to show up, and when he’s on your hook, trying to impress you, we cast a Compel on him, make him do anything you tell him to. Compulsions on their own are dicey—they wear off fast if you try to get people to do shit they normally wouldn’t do. Combine it with a Charm—much better.”

I looked at her. She had a sleepy, scrubbed look to her face I liked, her hair standing up in cute ways everywhere.

“And what then? When we have some poor idiot on the
hook
.”

I shrugged. “He buys us breakfast. He gives us a ride out to Gottschalk’s place. He provides local cover
and information so Mags here isn’t put in a cage and sold to the circus folk.”

Mags choked a little. “What?”

“Then we cut him loose. The Charm fades and he goes home, goes back to being a shitkicker. No real harm.”

We walked in silence for a few seconds. She nodded. “Okay, fine.”

“Good.” I paused and gestured at the place we were passing. “In here works.”

It was called the German Bakery and was full of what looked like the entire population of a retirement home, old fogies nursing coffees and muttering. It had a good diner buzz to it, with no decor to speak of. It felt greasy, like the air itself would never be clean again. We made our way to an empty table in the back, Formica and plastic benches, and sat down, Mags facing Claire and me. The place smelled like coffee, good and strong.

“Well?”

I shook my head at her while I passed out the plastic menus. “Give it a few minutes. We need to pick our mark and fade into the background a little.”

We faded. The waitress, a stringy woman of indeterminate age and unnatural hair color that most closely resembled red, came by and gave Mags a bit of the yellow eye. Mags didn’t notice. Half the world hated Mags on sight but he maintained his cheerful disposition through the simple expedient of not paying any attention—Mags wouldn’t realize the villagers
hated him until a mob with torches was gathered outside his house. She took our coffee order cheerfully enough, though. We sat in a tense silence. I didn’t light a cigarette because there were No Smoking signs everywhere and fading required a little patience. I just sat there and let my eyes roam around the place. By the time the coffee arrived, I’d picked out our Mark.

He was a kid, a big one. Blond, jeans, flannel, work boots. So hungover I could smell him from where we sat, nursing a miserable cup of coffee and staring down a mostly uneaten plate of pancakes and sausage, looking like life was the deck of the
Titanic
right before it split in two and went down and he had but one finger hooked on something, hanging on.