could give her.
“Then we sue,” she said. “I have lawyer.”
“A good one?”
“Good, bad.” She shrugged. “I just need hungry.”
“Then you shouldn’t have a problem.” I shifted the weight of the backpack straps again. “I’m going out of town for a while, a week at most. You filed a report with the police, right?”
“I take care of it.”
Which meant she probably hadn’t. I’d need to stop by the station and file a Hounding report. But not before coffee.
“You really need to contact the police about this, Mama. It will make a difference when you go to court.”
“I take care of it.” She picked up the gun. “You do good for Mama. I do good for you.” She walked over to me, the gun balanced in the palm of her hand, grip toward me, like she was offering it to me.
“No thanks. I don’t do guns.”
She scowled. “Did I say I give you gun? Think with your head.” She said it in the same tone she used with her boys, and for no reason at all it made me happy she would be so gruff with me.
“You are good Hound, Allie,” she said, “but you can be more. Better. I see it here.” She pressed her fingertips against my sternum. Warmth spread out from her fingers and dug down deep, like roots looking for water. I felt magic—it had to be magic, though I didn’t know Mama had ever learned to cast—branch out through my veins, wrap my bones, and then drain away, down my arms, stomach, hips, legs, dripping out my fingertips and the bottoms of my feet.
I felt refreshed. Awake. And suspicious as hell. That magic didn’t feel like anything I’d experienced before— too clean, too soothing—and it was gone so thoroughly, it was like it had never happened. I couldn’t even catch a scent from it. It certainly didn’t feel like the magic stored within the city. Didn’t feel like the magic harvested from the wild storms.
But there was no other kind of magic in the world. If there were, it would have been exploited. And if a new kind of magic were going to be found in the world, it sure wouldn’t be here, in the rundown section of Portland, a city where every tap of magic was carefully regulated, monitored, and doled out in billable minutes. And it wouldn’t be discovered by a woman who, as far as I knew, didn’t even have a high school education, much less a higher ed in magic, called all her kids the same name, and wore clothes scrounged from the women’s shelter.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I say if you try hard, you be better. Here.” This time she poked my chest, and all I felt was her bony fingers. “And here.” She tapped my forehead. “Think with your head. Get a real job. No more Hound.”
I rubbed at my forehead. “What else?” She knew what I wanted to know. What kind of magic had she touched me with. Or what kind of spell or glyphing had she cast. I wasn’t an expert. There were spells I’d never experienced before. “What about that magic you just used on me?”
Mama scowled. “No magic. If I had magic, would I be poor? Would my Boy be in hospital dying? Would I live here?”
I gave her a noncommittal shrug. Mama was smart and tough. Tough enough to take a few hits, or live with less if it meant hiding what she had from those who would want to take it. She was also smart enough not to wave magic around in front of someone she didn’t know very well—me.
“I don’t know what you’d do if you had magic,” I said quietly. “Maybe you would be poor and Boy would still be hurt.”
I was very aware of the gun in her hand. And of the fact that she and I weren’t exactly best-buddy girlfriends.
“No magic,” Mama repeated, flat. Final. But she didn’t smell right. I didn’t think she was telling me the truth—or at least not all of it.
The door handle rattled behind me. A key slipped into the first lock and the dead bolt snicked.
I moved to one side of the door. Mama tucked her gun into the pocket of her robe.
“Boy?” she yelled.
“Yes, Mama,” said a man’s voice. “It’s me.”
Mama seemed happy with that, but I wasn’t feeling nearly as confident. I could smell the man, a heavy musk and spice odor.
I thought I knew all of Mama’s Boys, but the man who walked through the door was a stranger to me. Lighter hair than the other Boys I’d met, his dark eyes glittered in the low light, hard and glassy against the deeper tone of his skin. He looked more like Mama than most of her boys. I was pretty sure he was actually her son and figured he was older than me by maybe ten years. He looked like he’d recently taken a shower, and was clean-shaven and polished in a casual corporate way, all the way from his button-down white shirt, dark tie, and gray khakis to his loafers. He smiled and there was a smooth, slick coldness about him that made me think of reptiles. Or politicians.
“I didn’t know we had company.” He extended his hand. “James.”
It took everything I had to put my hand out. I might have been raised by wolves, but I still had social graces. I shook his hand and pulled mine away as quickly as possible. His hands were cold and smooth, and I had a real desire to wipe my palms on my jeans.
“I was just leaving,” I said. So what if I didn’t give my name. Sue me.
His eyes narrowed and the smile slipped. “That’s too bad. You look familiar . . . have we met?”
I got that question a lot, and I had zero intention of telling him I was Daniel Beckstrom’s daughter. But here’s the thing. He didn’t look familiar to me at all. His voice wasn’t ringing any bells and neither was his face. But his scent was familiar. I may not have met this man before, but I had been around him. Close enough and long enough that the smell of him—musky to the point of being sour and peppery—was imbedded in my memory. He carried other odors too—he’d been somewhere with organic death, like at the edge of the river, among fish and rotted things. He smelled of sweat too, like he’d recently done something very physical. What creeped me out was that he also carried the slightest stink of formaldehyde, very faint, like he’d brushed against someone or something that carried that scent. Maybe the big man in the street?
Despite the overriding smells, I knew I knew him. Or had known him. But I couldn’t remember him.
This is where the extra hit—the random double price magic sometimes takes out of me—really sucks. And there was a bad stretch in college where it happened every time I used magic—pain plus memory loss. I shrugged it off at the time, and yeah, I’d turned to booze and drugs to try to handle it. But it didn’t change anything. Unless a person was very diligent about always Offloading to a Proxy, magic left marks. It scarred. And I hated coming face- to-face with my own failings. Knowing I was missing memories, maybe even days or weeks of my life, was the sort of thing that gave me nightmares.
Not to mention the fact that I did not like this man, Mama’s Boy, or no.
“No, we haven’t met,” I said. “Unless you went to Harvard.”
He did a fair job of looking surprised and confused. “The college?”
Right. So we weren’t going to really find out how we knew each other. I’d had enough of this. “Listen, I don’t care what your game is, but tell your buddy out there to keep his hands and magic off me or I will report you both to the police.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Mama stiffen. James’ face flushed with a fury he dampened with aplomb. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. I’ve been alone tonight. And there is no magic here. Not in this part of town.”
“No magic,” Mama repeated firmly. “You go now, Allie girl. Go.” She shoved me toward the door, and opened it for me.
“No magic,” she said. Mama was sweating even though the air outside was cold enough to sting my eyes. She was afraid, or lying. I glanced back at James. He stood with his hands in his pockets, relaxed, cool on the outside and burning on the inside, watching me watch him. He was hiding something. I figured Mama knew too, but for her own reasons didn’t want to admit it. I also figured she had a gun and it was time for me to go.
I stepped through the door. Mama closed it so quickly behind me that the doorknob literally hit me in the hip. Every lock snapped into place.
“You go to those men again?” Even through the thick wood door I could hear her yelling at James. “Those
