I’d wanted olfactory disguise; I’d gotten olfactory disguise. I smelled like garbage, cat piss, and somebody else’s blood. Couldn’t have asked for a better cover. A nicer one, yes. But better? Not in a river full of sewage. And I was pretty sure that not even Bonnie would be looking for two people stumbling along the shore like a couple of drunk hobos. She was looking for sporty-me, rich-girl me, long-coat-and-running-shoes me. Not wet, smelly, old- ski-coat-and-half-dead-guy me.
Things were looking up.
Except I was freezing, sweating, worried, stinking, and tired. Hells, I was tired. If even one of the mattresses scattered across the rocks didn’t look like a whorehouse reject, I would have taken some time to sit, lie back, rest. Dead guy, cat pee, or no.
It occurred to me, however, that I hadn’t a clear idea of where the shore went exactly. My theory was to follow it away from certain death and toward the police in shining armor. But as for how long that might take in reality, in crappy weather with a half-dead guy at my side, nope. Not a clue.
I was pretty sure the kid wasn’t going to hold up much longer. He blacked out more than he stayed conscious, and I spent as much time dragging him as shaking him to wake up. I scanned the shoreline looking for another decent tumble of rocks to climb (shudder) or maybe, (please, please, please) a road or alley that wound up to the streets above.
So when a slope of cliff to my left made mostly of flat-topped boulders appeared, I shook the kid awake again and headed toward land.
It was not easy dragging him up the boulders along the embankment, but I managed without doing much more damage to either of us. The going got easier once we got to the top. A narrow gravel road wended away from the river, blackberries and other brambles crowding it on both sides. I could hear cars and buses growling somewhere ahead of us. The constant cry of gulls faded as the road took a bend, leaving the river to the right of us and the rest of civilization somewhere to the left.
Even though I was breathing hard, and the kid wasn’t breathing nearly hard enough, I could smell the oil and dirt of the city, the salt and hickory of hot dogs getting the grill, the pineapple and smoke of chicken and teriyaki.
I could smell something else too—the copper and lye of magic being cast, spoken, chanted, channeled, used, like a blanket that smothered the city, every crack, every brick. There wasn’t a building or person in the city that wasn’t touched, coated, and shaped by the force of magic. It was in our soil, in our air, and in our blood. We breathed it, we ate it, we used it. And even though it used us back, we wanted more.
In my opinion, the fine line between advancement and addiction had been crossed years ago.
I was close to the edge of the city. Close to the train track that divided North from the rest of Portland. Close to magic.
The wind changed directions again, and I caught the black-pepper smell of lavender. Bonnie. Or another woman who smelled a lot like her. And since I couldn’t draw on magic to investigate the nuances of that smell, I had to assume it was probably Bonnie coming to shoot me.
I stopped trudging along and wondered how much I smelled like me. Maybe I smelled enough like garbage, cat pee, and blood to hide in plain sight. Maybe she wouldn’t expect me to be dragging an injured boy along with me.
There had to be something smart I could do. But the only thing that came to mind was getting myself and this kid to a hospital or police station quick. Quick meant car or cab on the other side of the railroad tracks. Quick also meant walking straight over the top of Bonnie if she tried to get between me and a reliable set of wheels.
We were at the end of the line here—the brambles stopped, and a clear and open road continued between some warehouses and into a mix of small businesses and apartments.
I shook the kid. “Hey. Cody. Come on, kid. We gotta get going.”
His head lolled to one side, and I shook him one more time, shifting his weight from where I held him propped by one arm over my shoulders, and my other arm around his waist, thumb tucked tight in his belt loop.
He exhaled, and I swear it rattled like he had just blown bubbles in a cup of milk.
Shit. Maybe he was worse off than I thought.
I lowered him as gently as I could and went down on my knees beside him, taking a hard look at his face. Oh, not good. Not good at all. He was white heading toward a horrible pale blue. His eyes rolled into his head and his eyelids flickered. He jerked spastically, his limbs moving like a puppet’s on a string.
“Hey now, you’re going to be okay. Hang in there, guy.” I pulled off Zayvion’s coat. The kitten dropped off my shirt and did not land on her feet, but rather pitifully tumbled onto her side, on top of the kid, and then fell down next to his arm. I tucked my coat over his chest.
What were the emergency things you were supposed to do when someone was dying? A hundred scenes from movies and TV shows flashed through my mind, most of them involving someone beating on a prone person’s chest and screaming at them not to give up.
Old information from high school came back to me, and I pulled off my sweater, leaving me in a tank top, and balled the sweater under his head. I didn’t have anything to wedge between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue, and I debated the wisdom of that, anyway. He looked like he needed all the room he could get just to breathe.
I put both hands on his chest and tried to press his body down gently, tried to still the spasms racking through him.
What the hell was I was doing trying to dodge a Hound, get to the cops, and take someone to a hospital all on my own?
What choice did I have? My father was dead and this kid might know who did it. Might know who I could make pay for killing the man I wanted dead and somehow couldn’t handle living without.
I wanted to scream, but Bonnie was still out there. If she heard me, she would find me and shoot me. It was enough to make a girl paranoid. Or furious.
I decided to go with furious.
But unless I wanted to pull on magic, there wasn’t anything else I could do. It wasn’t like I could turn bullets if someone pulled a trigger.
This would all be a hella different if I had a damn cell phone.
Or if my father hadn’t died.
Or if I had taken his advice and finished school and gone to work for him.
Or if this kid and his cat hadn’t gotten stabbed.
“P-please,” the kid rasped.
I about jumped out of my jeans. I thought he was way past being able to talk.
“I’m right here, kiddo. Hang in there, you’re going to be okay.”
“H-hand,” he said.
I didn’t know what he wanted, but took both of his hands in my own.
“M-magic.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I couldn’t. Sure the magic was close enough, maybe a couple blocks away at most. But I couldn’t draw on the magic to do so much as add pressure to his wound or make the air he breathed richer in oxygen because Bonnie would spot me. And I certainly didn’t have enough medical experience to save him, with my hands or with any of the spells that could ease pain at an exorbitant cost to the caster. If I drew on magic at all, I was screwed. I could smell Bonnie and the reek of lavender getting stronger by the minute.
“P-please?”
Hell. Screw Bonnie. If she was so determined to kill me, she’d just have to get in line and wait her turn. This kid didn’t have any time left.
I took a calming breath, even though I was freezing and soaked through my tank top and really freaked out. I set a Disbursement spell, deciding, even though I didn’t like it, I should take a long and slow pain this time so I could remain functional—maybe something along the lines of a bad sore throat or a recurring stomachache over the next couple weeks. I held tightly to the kid’s hands and thought about the soil beneath us, and below the soil, beyond the train tracks, to the magic pooled there deep under the city, caught and held by ironworked conduits.
I spoke a mantra, a jingle from a cereal commercial, and called for the magic to come over to this side of the
