Trickster (5 page)

“Step away from my car,” he said, his voice cracking with strain. He was shaking all over, and high as a fucking kite. My eyes flicked to his arms. A shirt cuff poked out from his left sleeve, but not his right, and I imagined he’d been in the back bedroom of Heller’s All Night Circus of Death shooting up. Smack was a bitch, and it had made plenty of people tie girls up in their trunk.

“Step away,
please,
” he said, face crumpling into a mask of pain and horror. “
Please
.”

I started to say something, to act on the welcome information that the Skinniest Fucker I’d Ever Seen did not actually
want
to kill me, but as I took in breath to speak he started having a conversation with himself while staring at me.

“What? Yes. No! No.
Please
. What?” He squinted at me. “I see. No.
Idimustari
.”

Mags and I both jumped at the word. It meant, in a language I barely understood myself, Trickster. Little magician. Which meant Mags and me; short spells for short cons. It was a word you didn’t hear out in public. There were others:
ustari,
a step up from us, or
a truly powerful mage called
saganustari
. There were also
enustari,
Archmages, but there were damn few of those, and when you heard that word, it was usually your cue to find a good hiding place.

“
Please, no.
Please, I’m begging. I’m . . . No!”

I slowly folded the fingers of my left hand against my palm, the sizzling pain stretching and yawning, waking up. I pressed my fingers into the crusting wound and spread it apart again, pain blooming. I kept my face blank. My heart, pumping fumes and dust in lieu of blood, danced alarmingly in my chest. I felt the warm smear on my fingers and prepared, mind bringing up the syllables, the simple Cantrip—simple was what I lived on, only what I could fuel myself.

The man suddenly shut up, stiffened, and pulled the trigger.

At the same moment, I snapped my hand out and shouted. A sudden flare of sunlight, pure and unfiltered, burst from the palm of my hand. The Skinny Fuck cried out and staggered back, turning his head away, and Mags, faithful Mags, crashed into him like a runaway bus as the flare died away, leaving us in deeper dark than before. Confident that my tank-sized friend could handle anything short of mechanized troops, I spun and looked back at the girl, who stared back up at me, frozen, a bubble of snot blooming and fading in one nostril as she hyperventilated. My hand still slick with my own tired blood, I whispered again, and the eerie bluish light spread over my hand as before. I had
a sickening hunch, and knew better than to dismiss it. Even before the spell finished, I could see the symbols on her—just like the girl in the tub, she was covered from head to toe in runes.

I extinguished my light and stared down at the girl for another moment. “Fuck
me,
” I whispered, and for a moment I almost expected that to be the world’s shortest Cantrip, and something amazing would happen.

Behind me there was another shot. I jumped and spun, noting in passing that people were already crowding out of Heller’s room, making their escape. They would fade into the night for a few hours, then creep back. This wasn’t the first time someone’d been shot at one of his parties. There was a protocol.

Mags leaped back from the Skinny Fuck like he’d been stung.

“Jesus fucking
Christ,
” I shouted, stepping forward and spinning Mags around, checking him. He pushed me away and staggered back a few more feet, hands on his head.

“Shot himself, Lem,” Mags said. “I was just beatin’ him a little, and had a hand on his wrist, but I was . . . I was
pushing
the gun away, you know? Away from
me
. And then . . . he started talking to himself again, and just put the gun to his head and . . . oh, fuck . . .”

I walked over to Mags and put my hands on his shoulders. He sounded like he was about to cry. “You did good, Maggie.
Good
.”

He blinked at me and dragged an arm across his nose. “Yeah?”

I nodded, so tired I knew if I closed my eyes I’d fall asleep standing. “Yeah. Not your fault.”

A little smile twitched onto his dark face, and I spun away. I could hear Heller’s distinctive roar from inside the motel, and people were moving past us in small groups, cars starting up. As soon as he could get out past the crowd bottlenecked at the door, Heller was going to beat the living shit out of us. Twice. I knelt down by the Skinny Fuck and examined him. I thought about giving him the old faerie light, check for runes, but instinct told me not to bother. Instinct also told me this was a man marked, though, a man in the grip of magic—the kind of magic I’d felt creeping up behind us back in the apartment.

His nothing-eyes were staring up at the sky, the gun still in his hand, loose. Skinny’d put the barrel of the gun against his temple, and the top of his head had exploded outward, a flap of skin hanging down over his forehead. A trail of yellow-red brains limped away from him on the pavement. His other hand was on his chest, and I stared at it. He’d been fighting with Mags, but his hand was on his chest like he was clutching a cross or something. I leaned forward and pushed it aside, his arm thin as a stick. I tore open his shirt and stared.

Nestled on the bony ridge of his sternum, dangling from his neck by a simple leather loop, was a tiny chip of green stone. Visually it was just a dull chip, puke in color, rough and jagged. I felt something push up from it against my face, though. Invisible light, cold heat.

Fucking magic.

Under it, the skin of his chest was an angry red.

Panic filled me, like someone with a panic pump had connected one hose to my ass and put it on full speed a-fucking-head. This was an
artifact
. This had been made by a Fabricator, an
ustari
with skill beyond anything I’d ever seen. This was the sort of thing only an
enustari
fucked with, and if Mags and I had stepped in an Archmage’s shit for the second time in a week, we were completely and irrevocably
fucked
.

I stood up, vision dimming, and turned back to Mags. “Get his feet.”

Mags blinked, still looking dopey and happy that he hadn’t fucked up, looking around at the dissolving party with idle curiosity. “What?”

What
was, of course, the second word in Mags’s limited vocabulary. I moved to the Skinny Fuck’s head and knelt down again, trying to find some hidden reservoir of energy as I slipped my hands under his moist shoulders. “Get. His. Feet,” I repeated, nodding at the pair of shined, expensive wing tips. “We have to get out of here
immediately
.”

Mags ambled over and we lifted the Skinny Fuck. I wobbled a little and almost passed out, but managed to hang on. I indicated the Beamer, and we dragged the body to it. I peered over the edge of the trunk and locked eyes with the girl again.

“Sorry about this,” I said, and we swung the bloody corpse forward and on top of her as her muffled screams spiked in volume. I slammed the trunk closed
and started for the driver’s-side door, pressing my fingernails into my wound again. As I popped the lock, I scanned the night, feeling doom everywhere. I sat down behind the wheel, and got her started with another drop of me and a whisper.

“Where?” Mags asked. He sounded tired.

I hit the headlights and jumped in my seat. Two men were standing in front of the car.

“Lem?” Mags said, his voice once again small and unsure, a little boy’s voice.

“I know,” I said, mouth dry. The minute I’d seen the Bleeder, I knew we were dead men.

T
he man on the right was the most handsome bastard I’d ever seen in my life. He was black and well built and wore the
hell
out of a black suit and expensive overcoat. His haircut had cost more than the gross national product of a small island nation, and he practically glowed with the kind of good health only the truly rich and powerful enjoyed—the sort of health insurance they didn’t sell to schlubs, or even presidents, the sort of health insurance where you bought new organs on a regular basis and had them sewn into place as needed.

The man on the left was none of these things. He was a corpulent white blob of a human, so fat he probably had trouble walking. He was wearing a simple suit, also black, but cheaper; it didn’t fit him well. He was covered in scars. His face was a pink web of them, his hands, his throat. I knew he would have scars all over his body, everywhere. Bleeders always did.

“Gentlemen!” the dandy said, smiling. “You have something of mine.”

I didn’t know if he meant the girl or the Skinny Fuck.

“
Lem,
” Mags hissed.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said slowly. “And don’t fucking move. This is firepower, okay? This is a
saganustari
.”

Mags breathed in and out. “Fuck,” he said, stretching it out into an expression of wonder. You didn’t meet a mage of that level every day—at least, Tricksters like us didn’t. For a moment I wished I was Normal and didn’t know any better. Could walk past a guy like this in the street and not shiver, not spend the rest of the day looking over my shoulder.

The dandy spread his hands. “Step out of the car, please. Let’s discuss your situation.”

My knuckles were white on the wheel. I didn’t know who this was, but if he was what I guessed,
saganustari,
he was one of the most powerful men in the world, and I’d fucked with one of his little projects.

He rolled his eyes, and without any obvious signal his Bleeder whipped out one arm and rolled the sleeve up with automatic, practiced ease. A second later the fat man had a small knife in one hand, poised right over his forearm. I leaped in my seat and my hands flew up, all my cuts throbbing. Panic flooded me—I’d seen what a
saganustari
could do when they had a Bleeder, an entire human’s supply of fresh blood to work with, all the gas you needed for some serious fucking fireworks. Bleeders were shitty mages. They
had the spark, but they generally couldn’t cast worth shit. It was like anything else—some folks had a way with it, some folks could spend their lives studying with a
gasam
and get nowhere. The Bleeders were the latter, but instead of just living with being shit magicians, they dedicated their lives to their masters, offering up their blood on demand. You could see the light of demented worship in most of their eyes. Most of them, you got the feeling they
wanted
their masters to kill them, hoping each day was the day they got bled to death. Sometimes they lived a long time and lived well on their master’s dime, sometimes they died off pretty young. It all depended.

That much blood offered freely and the dandy could blow the whole motel to bits, or put a
geas
on me that would have me licking his hand like a dog for weeks, or turn me into stone, a monument to failure. That much blood and you could do plenty.

I wasn’t tired anymore. Fear had made me sharp as a razor and I hit the gas and yanked down on the gearshift simultaneously. The car made a grinding noise that reverberated up through my spine and made my teeth click together and then surged forward with a screech.

The dandy whirled to the side like a dancer and we slammed into the Bleeder, who disappeared from view, transformed into a bucking speed bump as we crashed over the curb onto the deserted highway. I mashed the gas pedal down to the floor and leaned forward, tense over the wheel. The dandy had his
blood ready, sure enough—his Bleeder had just been mown down by a car—so we had to put some space between us before he could send something on our trail we wouldn’t enjoy.

I glanced at Mags. The dim-witted bastard was
smiling
.

“Where we going, Lem?”

I sighed, my arms and hands shaking again, filled with more adrenaline than blood. “Hiram’s,” I said. There was nowhere else.

•   •   •

Pulling up outside his apartment always reminded me of the first time I’d walked up the crumbling stone steps and rung the bell.

I’d been watching him for weeks, struggling to get the courage together to approach him, terrified. In those weeks I’d seen Hiram Bosch do some amazing things—small tricks, I now knew, tiny Cantrips that required a drop of blood and no more. At the time they’d seemed impossible.

Every spell I’d seen him cast in those weeks involved petty theft.

A blueberry muffin floated from behind a diner counter into his waiting hand when no one was looking. A newspaper box popped open without receiving any coins. Taxicabs paid off with blood-smeared dollar bills and told to keep the change without any sense of irony.

Hiram Bosch was a hustler.

He was a
rich
hustler, though; he never spent a dime if he could spend a drop of his blood instead, and he made money by the truckload turning small bills into big and charming people with a Cantrip here, a
geas
there, basically running short cons on a daily basis and coming home every night with marginally more cash in his pocket than when he’d left in the morning. He was also an
ustari,
a fully ranked magician. We made no distinction of purpose or behavior; you could either make the Words do what you wanted or you couldn’t, and what you
could
do determined how you were styled. An
ustari
could do some amazing things, but mostly small-scale stuff. They might be capable of something big if they tried. Hiram rarely tried.