Why he was following me around made me suspicious as hell.
I thought about drawing on magic to find out if he was tied to someone’s magical strings. Even though St. John’s was a dead zone, Hounding wasn’t impossible to do here. It just meant having to stretch out to tap into the city’s nearest lead and glass conduits that stored and channeled magic, or maybe reach even deeper than that and access the natural magic that pooled like deep cisterns of water beneath all the other parts of Portland.
But I had sworn off using magic unless necessary. Losing bits of one’s memory will make those sorts of resolutions stick. I wasn’t about to pay the price of Hounding a man who was more annoyance than threat. Still, he deserved a quick, clear signal that he was wasting his time.
“Listen. My social life consists of shredding my junk mail and changing the rat traps in my apartment. It’s working for me so far. Why mess with a good thing?”
Those soft brown eyes weren’t buying it, but he was nice enough not to say so. “Some other time maybe,” he said for me.
“Sure.” I started walking again and he came along with me, like I had just told him we were officially long lost best friends.
“Did Mama call you?” he asked.
“Why?”
“I told her Boy needed an ambulance, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
I didn’t bother asking why again. I jogged the last bit to the restaurant and took the three wooden steps up to the door. Inside was darker than outside, but it was easy to see the lay of things. To the right, ten small tables lined the wall. To the left, another three. Ahead of me, one of Mama’s Boys—the one in his thirties who spoke in single-syllable words—stood behind the bar. The only phone in the place was mounted against the wall next to the kitchen doorway. Boy watched me walk in, looked over my shoulder at Zayvion, and didn’t miss a beat letting go of the gun I knew he kept under the bar. He pulled out a cup instead and dried it with a towel.
“Where’s Mama?” I asked.
“Sink,” Boy said.
I headed to the right, intending to go behind Boy and the bar, and into the kitchen.
I stopped cold as the stench of spent magic, oily as hot tar, triggered every Hound instinct I had. Someone had been doing magic, using magic, casting magic, in a big way, right here on this very unmagical side of town. Or someone somewhere else had invoked a hell of a Disbursement spell to Offload that much magical waste into this room.
I tried breathing through my mouth. That didn’t make things better, so I put my hand over my mouth and nose. “Who’s been using magic?”
Boy gave me a sideways look, one that flickered with fear.
Mama’s voice boomed from the kitchen, “Allie, that you?” and Boy’s eyes went dead. He shrugged.
I pulled my hand away from my mouth. “Yes. What happened?”
Mama, five foot two and one hundred percent street, shouldered through the kitchen doors, holding the limp body of her youngest Boy, who had turned five about a month ago. “This,” she said. “This is what happened. He’s not sick from fever. He hasn’t fallen down. He’s a good boy. Goes to school every day. Today, he doesn’t wake up. Magic, Allie. Someone hit him. You find out who. You make them pay.”
Mama hefted Boy up onto the bar, but didn’t let go of him. He’d never been a robust child, but he hadn’t ever looked this pale and thin before. I stepped up and put my hand on his chest and felt the fluttering rhythm of his heart, racing fast, too fast, beneath his soccer T-shirt. I glanced over at Zayvion, the person I trusted the least in the room. He gave me an innocent look, pulled a dollar out of his pocket, and put it on the bar.
What do you know, he did have money.
Boy, the elder, poured him a cup of coffee. I figured Boy could take care of Zayvion if something went wrong.
“Call an ambulance, Mama. He needs a doctor.”
“You Hound him first. See who does this to him,” she said. “Then I call a doctor.”
“Doctor first. Hounding won’t do you or him any good if he’s dead.”
She scowled. I was not the kind of girl who panicked easily, and Mama knew it. And she also knew I had college learning behind me—or what I could remember of it, anyway.
“Boy,” Mama yelled. Another of her sons, the one with a tight beard and ponytail, stepped out of the kitchen. “Call the doctor.”
Boy picked up the phone and dialed.
“There,” Mama said. “Happy? Now Hound him. Find out who wants to hurt him like this. Find out why anyone would hurt my boy.”
I glanced at Zayvion again. He leaned against the wall, near the door, drinking his coffee. I didn’t like Hounding in front of an audience, especially a stranger, but if this really was a magic hit, and not some sort of freak Disbursement-spell accident, then the user should be held accountable for Boy’s doctor bills and recovery.
If he recovered.
I pressed my palm against Boy’s chest and whispered a quick mantra. I didn’t want to stretch myself to pull magic from outside the neighborhood. So instead, I drew upon the magic from deep within my bones. My body felt strange and tight, like a muscle that hadn’t been used in a while, but it didn’t hurt to draw the magic forward. Four years in college had taught me that magic was best accessed when the user was close to a naturally occurring resource, like the natural cisterns beneath the west, east, and south sides of the city, or at an iron-and-glass-caged harvesting station, or through the citywide pipelines.
What Harvard hadn’t taught me was that I could, with practice, hold a small amount of magic in my body, and that other people could not. People who had tried to use their own bodies to contain magic ended up in the hospital with gangrenous wounds and organ failure.
But to me, holding a little magic of my own felt natural, normal. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have the deep, warm weight of small magic inside me. When I was six I’d asked my mother about it. She told me people couldn’t hold magic like that. I believed her. But she was wrong.
I whispered a spell to shape the warm, tingling sense of magic up into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and wove a simple glyph in the air with my fingertips. Like turning on a light in a dark room, the spell enhanced my senses and my awareness of magic.
No wonder the stink of old magic was so heavy in the room. The spell that was wrapped around Boy was violently strong, created to channel an extreme amount of magic. Instead of a common spell glyph that looked like fine lacework, this monster was made out of ropes as thick as my thumb. The magic knotted and twisted around Boy’s chest in double-back loops—an Offload pattern. This spell was created to transfer the price of using magic onto an innocent—in this case, a five-year-old innocent. It was the kind of hit that would cause an adult victim’s health to falter, or maybe they’d go blind for a couple months until the original caster’s use of magic was absolved and the lines of magic faded to dust.
This was no accident.
Someone had purposely tried to kill this kid.
That someone had set an illegal Offload bothered me. That they had aimed it at a child made me furious.
The Offload pattern snaked up around Boy’s throat like a fancy necklace, with extra chains that slipped down his nostrils. I could hear the rattle of magic in his lungs. No wonder the poor thing’s heart was beating so fast.
I leaned in and sniffed at his mouth. The magic was old and fetid and smelled of spoiled flesh. A fresh hit never smelled that bad that fast. Boy hadn’t been hit today. He probably hadn’t even been hit yesterday. I realized, with a shock, that the little guy had been tagged a week ago, maybe more.