said. “I can find my own way home.”
Like magic, a cab appeared out of nowhere and pulled up to the curb.
Zayvion turned to face me. We stood almost eye to eye. I was tall but he still had an inch or so on me. “You might be a good Hound, Allie,” he said. “And you might have your dad figured out, but you got me all wrong.” He grabbed my wrist, turned my hand over, and pressed cab fare into my palm.
Instead, I took one step closer. I don’t know what I was thinking—okay, I did know what I was thinking—I liked him, was drawn to him, despite my reservations, like a magnet pulled to steel. A jolt of hot, electric pleasure sparked through my body as I pressed against his warm, strong chest, hip, thigh. The smell of his cologne and the musky male scent of him filled me. Warm waves of need rolled beneath my skin. I could not think. I did not want to think. And I did not want to let him go.
So I kissed him.
I think he was surprised. Frankly, I was a little surprised too. But I was not disappointed.
What I thought would be a quick kiss stretched out into a lingering moment of discovery. His lips were soft and thick, and I sucked at them gently, pleased when his mouth caught mine in an even deeper embrace. I bit, but not hard, and he answered by drawing the tip of his tongue so slowly along the bottom of my lip that I could feel the echo of it vibrate through every pore of my being.
But he pulled back, pulled away, and suddenly the rain, the noise, the city, and the world returned.
“Be careful,” he whispered. He walked away, hands in his coat pockets, stocking-capped head bent against the falling rain. It took a blink, two, before he was swallowed by the crowd, hidden from my sight, gone. It took several more before I could think again.
The cabbie powered down the passenger-side window. “You want a ride, lady?”
I opened the back door and got in. “Fair Lead Apartments,” I said.
The cab pulled out into traffic, and no matter how hard I looked out the rain-fogged windows hoping to catch a glimpse of Zayvion, he was not there.
Chapter Four
My apartment building is a dump. When it rains, it is not just the appearance of the building that reeks. It is also the walls.
I was halfway up the climb to my fifth-story apartment. With each step the smell of old magic got worse. Thirty years ago, when the technology was being developed to harvest wild magic, people thought all it took was a lightning rod—well, a Beckstrom Storm Rod—and some copper tubing to channel the magic throughout the city.
That could not have been further from the truth. Channeling magic through anything but iron, lead, and glass pipes that had each been carved and molded with very specific kinds of glyphing and holding spells made the channel useless, rotten, and dangerous.
This old building was lousy with rotten magic. The useless copper tubing was set inside the walls, as was the fashion thirty years ago. The idea was people wouldn’t want to live in a building that looked like a birdcage. The result was having to tear the building down to access the tubing and not only reglyph the holding spells, but also replace the copper with something expensive and patent-permit laden. The owners of the Fair Lead didn’t go out of their way to replace lightbulbs. So we dealt with the smell that always got worse when it rained.
By the time I reached my room on the fifth floor, I had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from smelling, and worse, tasting the wet, rotten magic seeping out of the walls. It was a health hazard, I was sure of it, but if a few cockroaches could be ignored by greasing the right palm, then so could old magic. Even though it’d been thirty years, the law hadn’t caught up with the use and misuse of magic.
I walked down to my apartment, put my key in the lock, and opened the door. The smell was twice as bad here. So bad that my eyes started watering.
Great.
A small flash of green halfway across the room told me there was a message on my answering machine. I crossed the room and pressed play.
“Hi, Al!” My best friend in all the world, Nola’s warm, happy voice piped out of the machine. “Happy birthday! When are you coming out to the farm to visit me? I sent you a birthday present. Check your bank balance. There should be enough there for you to come out for a week. Leave a message at this number and let me know if you take the train or bus, and I’ll meet you. I mean that. Oh, and Jupe says hi!”
The machine beeped and the sudden silence, along with the heavy smell, was just too much.
This birthday sucked.
But it was still my birthday. Three o’clock. I rubbed at the back of my neck. If I weren’t feeling so bad, I’d go out, see a movie, maybe take some of Nola’s gift money and treat myself to a pedicure. But it would be at least the rest of the night before the magic stopped hurting in me, and despite Zayvion’s insistence that I go see a doctor, I knew a nice long bath and ten hours of sleep would get me through the worst of it. And that wouldn’t cost me money I didn’t have. But the smell in the house was unbearable.
Come on, Allie. Time to think smart and find a warm, odorless place to sleep for a few hours.
My hand hovered over my phone. Who could I call? Nola’s farm was in eastern Oregon near Burns, a town almost three hundred miles away, at least a five-hour drive from here, so that wouldn’t do. Who else did I trust? Ex-boyfriends came to mind, but there was a good reason each of them was an ex. I hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from college, and being both unemployed and doing freelance Hounding jobs, usually at night, hadn’t exactly created a close-knit social network. Sure, I knew a few of the other Hounds—Pike, for instance. But I didn’t think an ex-marine who Hounded for the cops would put up with my whining. Other than Pike, not a single person came to mind.
I had to laugh. There were times when being a sour, distrustful, jaded young woman didn’t make my life easy.
I could call my dad.
Not in a million months of never.
Mama. Though I didn’t love the idea of ending up right back where I’d started the day, I figured she’d let me stay late at her restaurant, might even offer me a cot to sleep on if I paid her, or did dishes or something. Or maybe we could trade the Hounding job I did on Boy for a bed. Besides, I wanted to know if Boy was okay. Wanted to know if she’d called the police and what they were doing about the hit. They might even need to talk to me.
I picked up the phone and dialed Mama’s number even though I knew she never answered the phone. Still, maybe this once. When the phone rang for the twentieth time, I gave up. If she said no, maybe I’d just get a cab to the bus station, and head out to Nola’s. Fresh farm air sounded good right now. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was a plan.
I grabbed a backpack—a hideously pink and green thing with a cow on it that Nola had given me years ago— and packed a change of clothes, an extra sweater, my tennis shoes, a brush, deodorant, and toothbrush. I left the apartment and the building as quickly as my swollen feet could take me down the stairs.
I caught a cab, told him to take me to the nearest ATM machine, and checked my balance while the meter was running. I was expecting maybe fifty dollars from Nola, but she had sunk three hundred bucks into my account. Maybe things were looking up.
I knew she made pretty good money for selling her certified nonmagically grown alfalfa. The horse-racing circuit considered any magical influence into the sport—including spells for pest removal, mold retardant, or growth enhancement on the alfalfa that fed the horses—to be as illegal as performance-enhancing drugs. Still, it wasn’t like Nola was rolling in the dough. A hard rain at the wrong time could ruin a year’s worth of work on a field, and the nonmagic eggs she raised didn’t make up for those sorts of things. This was a generous gift and I owed her big- time.
I pulled out a hundred and got back in the cab. I hugged my jacket closer around me and watched the city fall apart the closer it got to St. John’s. The ache in my head was getting downright migrainal. Even more fun was that
