Trickster (28 page)

He renewed his attack on the nearest
dimma
. I watched for another heartbeat and turned and ran.

They were all already in Daryl’s truck. Our pet hick was shaking, eyes all white and wide as he fumbled with his keys, dropping them on the floor of the cab. As I crashed up into the seat, practically in Mags’s bloody lap, I snarled two words and the engine roared into life.

“Go!”

The ease of just throwing the Words around—of being able to cast without feeling the drain, without paying the price—was intoxicating. I imagined a life without the minor annoyances. Everything solvable with a few words. I pictured Gottschalk swathed in sheets, a man who hadn’t gotten out of bed in years.

Daryl slammed the truck into gear and it leaped forward, throwing us back into the seats. Behind us, I heard something almost like an explosion. A rain of pebbles scattered across the roof and windshield.

Then, suddenly, it was just the inky, silent night and the buzz of the engine. I could hear all of us panting. I could hear the grit of the tires on the pavement.
I could hear the tap of Daryl’s ring on the steering wheel as his hands shook while he drove.

“Jesus fucked,” Ketterly finally whispered. “What in hell is going on?”

I swallowed dust. “They’re going to fucking end the world,” I said. “I told you.” I turned to look at him. “If you’re going to murder everyone, there’s no point in
subtlety
now, is there?”

“Lem,” Mags said quietly. “Lem, what do we do now?”

I turned to look forward again. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know how to find out.”

T
he yellow and black police tape barring Hiram’s front door wasn’t a problem. The unmarked police cars right out in front of the building and sitting in the ink-dark back alley were.

I was surprised to see them, and stood for a moment in the shadows, nonplussed. I wasn’t used to cops giving two shits about me or mine. People like Hiram and me, to the rest of the world we were seedy assholes. They could smell it on us, the short cons, the desperation. The cops hassled me plenty, but that was it. The idea that they might take an interest in Hiram’s death amazed me for a second, and then I remembered the two cops who had died, too: Marichal. Holloway. The rest of the city might be burning to the ground, but the cops were gonna keep a team sitting here, just in case.

I didn’t worry about it. There wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved with the application of enough
blood. I didn’t have to hesitate, to take stock of my physical condition. I didn’t have to worry about the last time I ate, or whether I was going to pass out before completing the spell, causing an explosion.

A glance at Mags and he was bleeding.

I made up a spell on the spot. It was easy. Some of us had to memorize spells, could only cast what we’d committed to memory. The real trick was to memorize small things, then link them together. If you knew one Cantrip that bent the light, and another Cantrip that fooled the ears, you could put together any sort of illusion fast, on the fly, just by changing a few words. Quick and dirty. Hacking, Hiram had called it. But it could be complex and elegant, too, if you worked at it.

I cast, and felt Mags’s life passing through me, gloriously repellent.

“Come on,” I said, and started walking.

We passed right in front of the car. The two cops inside stared through us.

At the crime scene tape, I nicked my own thumb and gave it fourteen syllables, and Mags and I stepped through it without breaking it. Fourteen syllables but the spell didn’t cost much, and I barely felt the drain. I was high-energy anyway, topped-up. I thought maybe my body had created
too much
blood, running on overdrive because it was used to being in a state of emergency all the time. We could have just torn them down, because what did I care if the police returned, sniffing around endlessly because two of their detectives were dead? But I was getting back into the swing
of longer spells. More complex spells. I was remembering bits and pieces of things I’d learned along the way. Things from Hiram. Things from other people. It was like flexing muscles.

The door fell inward when I pushed on it. Just leaned backward and sent up a cloud of soot when it landed. I was glad I’d told Daryl and Ketterly to go back to Ketterly’s office and wait it out. I didn’t want strangers in Hiram’s home.

The apartment had burned for a long time. The windows were all shattered, and the weather had been getting in. The floors were a sticky mess of black mud. Wallpaper still clung to the walls, peeling slowly like dying leaves, drooping down toward gravity. The whole place smelled like smoke. It was choking. Almost like a syrup diffused into the air.

“Fuck,” Mags breathed, then spasmed into coughing.

We walked through the place slowly. The kitchen was the least destroyed. The table and chairs were still there. The wall shared with the living room was blackened and bubbled, but the wall shared with the hallway outside and the exterior walls were all intact. The cabinets and appliances still sat in their usual places. The room felt dead. There was no power. It was dark. Freezing. All of Hiram’s forks still in his drawers. His dish towels folded on a shelf. Microscopic layers of Hiram himself smeared onto the walls, the floors. Microbes of him, carbonized, in the air. A film of grit lay on top of everything, damp and muddy. The chairs
and table were still in the positions we’d left them in, chaotic and . . . out of place. It felt like we were walking into some sort of spell, frozen time, everything held in place. Like if I gave a chair a shove, it would remain stubbornly in place or sail off without gravity, in slow motion.

“
Fuck,
” Mags hissed.

We made for the study. Everything else had burned. There were charred fragments of things everywhere, melted globs of things. Some of the shelves still clung to the walls, unfamiliar shapes bumped along their wobbly, heat-warped lines. I stopped for a moment and looked around. All of Hiram’s shit. Every bauble he’d stolen, every carving he’d gotten in payment for some tiny scam, every small artifact he’d commissioned had been destroyed. Eaten up by Cal Amir.

Who certainly had not considered for even a moment what it was he might be burning.

On the floor I found the hard black sphere Hiram used as a worry stone. Unscathed, gleaming with the same polish, perfect and eternal. I picked it up and held it in my hand, feeling its perfection, its weight. Then I set it back on the floor carefully, in the same spot.

I stepped into the small closet office. It had been burned to ash as well, a damp mess. The carpet still clung to the floor like some sort of stubborn life-form. I knelt down and tore at it, getting the soaked, sticky weave stuck to my hands, under my fingernails. My freshly cut thumb sizzled with irritation. After a few minutes I’d revealed the top of the floor safe embedded
there. No physical lock, but several layers of magical Wards were laid on it, including a Glamour that made anyone not aware of its exact location simply not see it.

Even as I squatted there, if I turned my head it disappeared from my peripheral vision.

Amir hadn’t come back. I imagined after suddenly finding Claire right in front of him, the adventure with the cops, and then the hurried trip south to deal with us, his original mission at Hiram’s had slid down the list of priorities.

“Mags,” I said, my voice tight and scratchy. “You ready?”

“Fuck it.”

I closed my eyes, gave him a second, and recited twenty-four more syllables. Six to deal with the Glamour, just because it was irritating me, bending the light back into its normal path; in effect, two spells existing at once, which was the oldest trick in the book. It took more blood and more Words and more trouble to
remove
a spell than it did to just
negate
a spell. Four syllables for the first Ward, six for the second, and four more for the last, each group of words appended to the ends of Hiram’s spells—which was the other trick,
altering
the existing spells instead of trying to undo them outright. Like a virus. I opened my eyes and yanked the lid off the safe. It was fire rated, and looked to have survived in good shape. It was deep. It looked like Hiram had simply dumped things into it, without any attempt at organization. There were packets of papers with spells scrawled on them in that skinny, unreadable handwriting
of his, his personal cipher. Unmarked boxes that were heavy and warm as I pulled them out. Dozens of trinkets—charms and other Fabrications. Two thick wads of cash in rubber bands. And then, buried under the rest of the trash, the sliver of oily green stone attached to a leather strap.

“Hiram,” I muttered, “you thieving bastard.”

I lifted the
udug
from the safe by the strap and leaned back on my feet, holding it up in front of me. It had the same wet look. My skin crawled as I looked at it. Years ago, maybe centuries ago, some Fabricator had spent a lot of blood to create it. That kind of energy was never
good
energy, and it somehow got stronger as time went on, amplified. Hiram had discussed the phenomenon with me, back when he was still trying to teach me. He had no explanation for it. But I’d understood immediately. There was suffering tied in to everything we did. And suffering
lingered
.

I looked around, tears suddenly stinging my eyes. There had been moments over the previous years when I’d wished for nothing more than to be free of Hiram and his stupid, claustrophobic apartment, his ridiculous stolen trinkets, his endless condescension, and his violent temper. But now, I had lost it all.

I stared down at the floor. I’d lost this place. It had been my home. Even after I’d left it, Mags and I had never had anywhere permanent to live. We’d roamed. We’d slept on the streets, in cars, wherever we could squat. But Hiram’s house had never stopped being my home.

I’d lost Hiram.

I’d never expected to miss the fat old asshole, but I was suddenly filled with an aching, yawning chasm of regret. I would never hear his booming, actor’s voice again. I would never watch him steal a glass figurine from a shop window. I would never get to tell him what a prick he could be.

I would never get to apologize to him. I would never get to show him what I was finally able to do.

I looked down at the
udug
. And I thought I was about to lose even more.

“Mags?”

“Yeah, Lem?”

I swallowed hard. “Let’s go get a drink.”

•   •   •

It was a dingy place. Filled with old men. Serious about their drinking. Mags and I found a table in the back, in the shadows. I had a double, then got another, which I let sit on the table. I dropped the
udug
on the table between us and stared at it. It seemed to absorb all the light. It seemed to be sinking into the wood of the table, like it was the heaviest thing in the universe. Like it was bending light around it.

I didn’t feel the first drink at all. I took the second one and held it up. “To Hiram. A fucking asshole, but
our
fucking asshole.”

Mags looked miserable. He lifted his own glass. “To Hiram,” he said.

I swallowed the second drink. Felt nothing. I stared
down at the
udug
. Remembered its slithery voice in the Skinny Fuck’s mind. Whispering. Maybe the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life, and that had been an
echo,
a memory from a dead man.

“Don’t do it, Lem,” Mags said.

I shook my head. “I have to. They could be starting the ritual at any moment. Might have
already
started it.” I didn’t think so, though. I thought when a spell of that magnitude started cranking, every mage in the fucking world would feel it. Hundreds of us, spread thin across the globe, stopping in our tracks and looking up.
Feeling it.
Feeling the world being murdered. “All those women. In that . . . thing Fallon built. Going to be killed. And we can’t even know where she is in the fucking queue, even if we were willing to just let a few dozen people die.”

“We have the plans to the place. We don’t need that fucking thing to tell us.”

I snorted. “What, you, me, and Daryl are going to just drive up there, sneak in, and . . . what? Just fucking
imagineer
our way through?” I shook my head again. “If we had time, Mags, sure. If we knew when they were going to start the
biludha,
we could take our fucking time. But we don’t. We need to know what to do right now.”

I wanted another drink. It wouldn’t do me any good. I had a feeling I could drink a whole bottle and still sit there rock-steady sober.

I couldn’t do it alone. Alone I had Mags and Daryl and a truck and maybe D. A. Ketterly. And maybe
not Daryl and his truck, if the Charm he’d been operating under faded away. That had turned out to be the record-setting Charm of all time. I suspected it had something to do with the glyphs on Claire’s body, which Renar had said affected spells, bent them, deflected them. Poor Daryl was the recipient of an unintentionally aggressive Charm, and I was starting to wonder how much work—how much blood—it was going to take to set him free.