Magic to the Bone

I heard footfalls and hard breathing coming up behind me. Risked a glance over my shoulder. It was Zayvion.

“Don’t, Allie,” he yelled.

Don’t what? Catch the only person who knew how my father died? Don’t try to outrun Jupe, who was still snarling and barking and about to tear Bonnie and/or Cody into pieces? Don’t pound into Bonnie like she was a lump of clay that needed a whole lot of my knuckle prints?

Bonnie reached Cody before me. Bonnie caught him in her arms, and even though he struggled, she chanted a mantra—hard, guttural words—held her fist high in the air, and a flash of copper lightning struck again, struck Bonnie, struck Cody, and sent Jupe skittering back from the wall of ash, growling and yelping.

It was a flash, a slice of heartbeat. Bonnie and Cody were there. Lightning struck. Bonnie and Cody were gone.

Black ashes drifted down like raven feathers and shadowed a perfect circle on the ground where they had just stood.

“What the hell?” I jogged the last few feet to where Cody and Bonnie had disappeared. Disappeared! No one could vanish in a flash. No one. I didn’t care what kind of spells they knew. The scientific improbability of moving that much mass—and the payment for pulling on so much magic in a nonmagical zone so that it shot like lightning from a calm sky—freaked me the hell out.

I tried to pull on the store of magic deep in my bones, but I was too agitated, too angry, too damn scared to think of a mantra, much less speak one. People magically snapping from one place to another was fairy-tale stuff. This couldn’t happen. And for the good of the world, I didn’t think this should be able to happen. This kind of power in the wrong hands could change the way magic was used and abused. In the wrong hands—and as far as I could tell, Bonnie was the wrong hands since she’d just kidnapped a guy from out of nowhere—this ability would make for dark, dark years ahead.

“Holy crap,” I said. “Holy crap, holy crap!”

I was shaking, breathing too hard. But I was thinking fast. Maybe Bonnie and Cody weren’t really gone. Maybe she’d just found some sort of way to confuse light so I couldn’t see them. For all I knew, they might still be standing right there in the middle of the yard in front of me.

Zayvion came up to one side of me.

“What?”

I held up my hand to tell him to be quiet. And he did. Okay, there were some things I really liked about that man. I tipped my head to one side and listened for breathing other than his and my own. I watched Jupe, who sniffed at the black circle of ashes, but didn’t step into them. I inhaled, smelled something like burned wood—the charcoal smell of ashes, fresh air, and a hint of chicken fertilizer.

Zay took a cautious step forward, and he was quiet, working his way around the circle of ashes.

I mentally intoned a mantra, calming, centering, set a Disbursement, then pulled on the magic from my bones. A flare of heat winged from my right hand up my arm to my eye. The magic followed the path of the marks on my arm—but it wasn’t a painful sensation. It was a comfortable heat, like thrusting that limb into a warm bath. My left hand felt cool, and that was nice too. Magic, no longer small inside me, sprang from my body quicker than it ever had before, and I had to do some fast maneuvers to keep hold of it, keep focused, and draw it into my senses, especially my sense of smell.

The world exploded into smells. The greasy tang of ashes hit my sinuses and made me choke, coupled as it was with the dusty stone scent of pavement, the thick smell of mosses and rot and fungus from the field, decaying leaves, and decomposing organics from the distant chicken coop. Grass was green, bitter, oily, textured with the cold scent of dew. I could smell the river, tart and rushing with a silty mix of minerals, and I could smell Zayvion, the heavy pine of his cologne warmed and complicated by the stinging potency of his sweat, his fear, his anger.

And his shock.

I glanced at him. He was watching me with as close a look to awe as I’d ever seen on someone.

Oh, right. Magic. This was a dead zone. A magic-free zone. The only way to tap into magic here was to access the network that didn’t reach this far—that didn’t cross the river.

No one could do that. Unless they carried magic in their body. And no one I’d met could do that, except me.

“Allie?” he breathed.

“Later,” I said.

I Hounded the traceries of the spell Bonnie had cast and smelled the copper-burn stink of spent magic coming from the circle of ashes.

The glyph of Bonnie’s spell lingered in the air, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. Not just a cabled line of intricate linked spells, this glyph was jagged, knotting back into itself to form a circle, like an incredibly intricate spider’s web, with a black, black hole into which all the threads fell and stopped completely.

This spell wrapped in on itself. There were no trailing lines leading back to the caster. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that Bonnie had been the one to cast this spell, I would have absolutely no clue who had cast it, where it had come from, or what it had done.

And knowing those things was my job.

“Holy crap,” I said again, quieter.

The one thing I did know was that Bonnie and Cody were not still standing in the yard.

“What do you see?” Zayvion asked.

“It’s a spell, feeding into itself, and leaving no trailing lines. They aren’t here, Zayvion. I don’t know where they are, but they are not here.”

Zay took a deep breath and rubbed at the back of his neck.

“What?” The scent of him had changed, and with my übersharp Hounding senses, I knew his level of fear and anger had just spiked. “Good love, Zay. If you know anything about this, will you just come clean with me? That kid knows who killed my father.”

His scent changed again, back to the sugary wash of surprise. He looked up at me from across the black ash circle. I don’t know what it was, instinct maybe, but neither of us wanted to touch the ashes.

“He knows who killed your father?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you who?”

Served me right. If I was demanding he had to level with me, it was only turnabout-fair that I tell him what I knew. Lovely.

“He wasn’t very clear, but he mentioned a snake man, and that it was done with magic, and that I did it, or he did it as me.” If I hadn’t still been hyped up on magic, I was pretty sure I’d feel naked-at-the-table vulnerable for placing my last chip in Zayvion’s palm. As it was, I just wanted him to give back as good as he got.

“So he was involved in the hit.”

“Sounded like it to me, but before I could get anything more specific, he ran out here.”

Zay went back to rubbing his neck. He muttered something and stared at the horizon for a second, long enough for me to consider kicking him in the shins until he talked.

“Allie, I’m breaking a lot of rules talking to you about this, but it seems stupid at this point not to.”

“Good. Tell me.” I was getting a little tired from holding the level of concentration needed to keep my Hound senses open, but what surprised me was that I did not feel a decrease or lack of magic pouring from within me. The small magic in my bones was a limited quantity, a small flame, and was usually depleted pretty quickly. Not this time.

“I don’t know what she did—I don’t even know who that woman was,” Zayvion said.

“Bonnie.”

“Really? Okay. So I don’t know what Bonnie did, but I do have an idea what she used to do it.”

Anyone could tell she used magic. “Spill it.”

“It’s a technology your father was developing. A way to make magic portable.”

Holy shit. Portable magic would change the world. If magic could be carried in some easy little package,