weight that moved and stretched beneath my skin.
Even though my right arm didn’t itch anymore from the magic flowing through me, my left arm, banded black at my elbow, my wrist, and at each knuckle, was always a little cold and numb when I used magic too much.
I wasn’t sure what all of it meant-because no one I’d talked to had ever seen anything like this, like me. People who try to hold magic in their bodies die from it. Horribly. And I’d done my best to stay away from doctors who might be curious enough to want to take me apart to find out why I wasn’t dead yet.
I rubbed my arm-the right with the whorls of colors-and scanned the street below.
Rain and wind? Yes. Ghosts? No.
The last room to check was the kitchen. There were no windows in the kitchen, so I picked up a candle in a glass jar and paused in the entryway to the kitchen. My apartment door stood to the right of me, my kitchen lost in shadows ahead of me. I lifted the candle. Yellow light pushed aside blocks of shadow. Nothing.
The phone rang. I jumped so hard, wax sloshed over the candle’s wick and smothered the flame.
The phone rang again, and a wash of cold sweat slicked my skin. It was just the phone.
It rang again.
I didn’t want to answer it.
Another ring.
Could ghosts use the phone?
Okay, now I was being ridiculous.
I put the candle down on the half wall between the kitchen and foyer and jogged to the phone in the living room. Caught it on the fourth ring.
“Hello?” I said, my voice a little too high.
“Allie Beckstrom?” a low male voice asked.
I recognized that voice. Detective Makani Love had spent a good deal of his childhood in Hawaii and still hadn’t lost that particular rhythm to his words. Plus, I could hear the ring of phones behind him and then another voice, female, and likely his partner, Lia Payne. I think the police department had stuck them together for a laugh- Love and Payne-but they’d turned into such a good team, they hadn’t asked to be reassigned.
“Hey, Mak,” I squeaked.
“Is everything okay? Are you okay?”
I swallowed and worked hard to get my voice down an octave or so.
“Yes. I’m fine. Just, uh… kind of startled when the phone rang. Is the power out over there?”
“No,” he said. “But we heard part of town was down. You dark?”
The lights flicked back on, and my computer on the desk in the corner hummed back to life.
“Not anymore,” I said. “It just came back on. So, what’s up?”
“We need you to come down to the station to give your statement regarding the death of your father.”
Oh.
I’d never filed an official report. See, I’d been there the day my father died. I may even have been the last one who saw him alive-except for his killer. But since I’d spent the next several days being chased by the people who killed him, I hadn’t had a chance to actually talk to the police about the last time I’d seen him.
Well, the last time I’d seen him alive.
I wondered if Mak believed in ghosts.
“Can it wait until later? I haven’t had breakfast yet and was hoping to hunt down some leads on Hounding jobs this morning.”
“No. It’s been long enough, yah? You’ve been back in town, what, a week now, almost two? That’s patience on our side, you know. We need you this morning. Can you get here in an hour?”
“Will there be any decent coffee in the building?” Love and I weren’t best buddies, but I usually ended up going to him when I worked Hounding jobs that involved someone doing something illegal. He and Payne were two of the few police officers I knew who were cross-trained to handle magical crime enforcement.
“Oh, sure. Best coffee in the city, yah. Dug a pit this morning, roasted it with my own hands over the fire. Fresh just for you.”
“Right.” I glanced out my living room window and through the bare tree limbs that spread across my view of the street and buildings on the other side. It was six o’clock on a late-November morning and still dark. Rain gusted sideways past the window, flashing like gold confetti in the headlights of slow-moving traffic crawling toward downtown Portland, Oregon, and the freeway beyond. The police station wasn’t all that far from my apartment, but I didn’t have a car. The bus ran every half hour and would take me straight to the station doors.
It was doable.
“I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”
“Good. And, Allie?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t leave town. And be careful.”
A chill ran down my arms. Why would he say that? I wouldn’t skip town. And I was always careful. Well, as careful as the situation allowed. “I’ll be there in forty-five.”
I hung up the phone and scowled at it. Okay, maybe he had a reason to worry about me not showing up. I’d gotten myself into some weird stuff a few months ago, not that I remembered much of it. My friend Nola, who lived three hundred miles away on a nonmagical alfalfa farm in Burns, had taken me in afterward. She tried to tell me what she knew about the days I no longer remembered and the weeks that had gone by while I’d been in a coma. But her information was sketchy too.
The one thing that had become abundantly clear to me was just how much memory I had lost. It still gave me nightmares.
I glanced over at the table by the window. The blank book where I wrote everything just in case magic took my memories was there. I walked over to it, flipped it open. The most current pages were the basic itinerary from the last few days-me settling into my new apartment, the phone messages from my father’s accountant I hadn’t returned. The sandwich shop I discovered a couple streets over that made really good paninis (I give the salmon rosemary five stars), and the name of a song I liked on the radio.
But as I flipped back toward the front of the book, I found the blank page. The corner of it was worn from me going back to it so often in the last few weeks. Right there on that blank page I should have written everything that had happened to me between when I last saw my father alive and when I woke up at Nola’s farm a month later.
Blank.
No matter how hard I stared at it, the notes I should have written were not there.
Things I really wish I could remember, like what had happened between me and a man named Zayvion Jones. I remember him hanging around St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland. I remember him asking me out for lunch, and I remember him going with me to see my father.
What I didn’t remember-the things my friend Nola had said happened-was falling in love with him, so much so that I’d sacrificed myself to save him.
It just didn’t sound like me.
Slow to trust, slower to love, I couldn’t figure out how I had fallen for him so completely in such a short time.
I shut the book and pressed my fingers against my forehead. Magic is not for sissies. Sure, it can do a million good things-keep cities safer and hospitals going, and even just make a bad paint job look good-but it always comes with a price.
Sometimes magic makes me pay a double price-pain for using it, and loss of memory. Yeah, I’m just lucky that way. It was almost enough to make me want to give it up altogether. Almost.
The phone rang again, and I looked through my fingers at it, trying to decide if I really wanted to talk to anyone else this morning. It might be a Hounding job, which would mean money, or, heck, Nola checking in on me.
I picked it up.
“Hello?”
