magic?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Be put in jail?”
Still nothing.
“What, Zayvion? They decide if magic users should be-”
“Killed,” Zay said softly.
Holier shit. Magic vigilantes. Worse-secret magic vigilantes.
I took a deep breath and waited for my heart to start beating again.
“Are those people watching me?”
“Yes.”
Holiest shit. I really was going to need to start a Kill Allie Here line.
“Are those the people you’re working for?”
He didn’t say anything.
I took that as a yes. My mind spun with possibilities of who could be spying on me, waiting for me to use magic wrong, use it too much, or make one bad choice. Violet, Grant? Pike, Stotts? Zayvion? How secret were these secret magic vigilantes?
“I want you to promise me you won’t go anywhere in this city alone,” he said. “I want you to promise me you won’t go looking for your father’s body. And that you won’t use magic more than you have to.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“Allie. Listen to me. These people don’t see the world in any manner but black and white. If you fall anywhere near the gray, they will not hesitate to-”
“Kill me. Yeah, I got that part. Holy crap, Jones. You could have told me.”
“When?”
I opened my mouth to answer him, but maybe it was the blur of movement that caught my eye. Whatever it was, both Zayvion and I took that exact moment to look away from each other and back at the street. More precisely, to look at the red light we were running. And the crosswalk. And the man striding across it.
A man wearing a dark business suit with a lavender hanky in his pocket. He was tall like me, looked a lot like me, but had gray hair. He strode across the middle of the crosswalk, headed right for us, right in front of the car.
My father.
“Stop!” I yelled.
Zayvion slammed on the brakes. I put my hands on the dashboard to brace for impact.
Then I screamed as Zayvion ran over my dead dad.
Chapter Nine
Time has a weird way of slowing down when I’m in high stress situations. I had plenty of time to study my father, to note that, yes, indeed, that was a lavender handkerchief in his pocket; yes, indeed, he turned so he could see into the car; and yes, indeed, he wasn’t looking at Zayvion but at me.
He didn’t look particularly surprised that I was killing him. He just looked very, very disappointed in me.
And then he was close, his face right in front of my face, much closer than should be possible with all the metal and glass between us. And yet he was still standing as if even a speeding car wasn’t enough to knock him down.
I yelled and didn’t hear the thunk of his body hitting metal, didn’t hear anything but the brakes locking up and tires screeching as my dad slipped down somewhere beneath my line of vision, beneath the hood, beneath the tires.
Or maybe I just couldn’t distinguish him from the blur of the city outside the window. I tasted leather and wintergreen on the back of my throat, felt the stink of it smack my skin like a cold sweat.
I heard him, I swear I heard my father’s voice, close as my own thoughts: “The gates open, seek death.” Words that bore the push of Influence, the magical knack we Beckstroms were known for using on people to make them do what we wanted them to do. Influence forced those words into my head until my stomach clenched with the need to follow, to do as he said, even though I was still yelling and had no idea what he meant.
All that, as the car came to a stop in the middle of the intersection.
“What the hell?” Zayvion yelled.
“You hit him! You hit my dad!” I fumbled with my seat belt, the door latch, and then was out into the cold and rain, running back, cars honking and swerving around me, back to where my father must have fallen as we ran over the top of him.
There was no one there. Not a mark across the pavement except for the car tires, not a splash of blood against the rainy, dirty asphalt, not a body. Not so much as a single lavender hanky thread.
I blinked and blinked and could not believe what my eyes were telling me. My father was not on the ground, not wedged beneath the car (yes, I turned and looked), not anywhere.
“Shit,” I whispered.
Zayvion was beside me now, standing just out of swinging range. “Allie?”
I couldn’t stop staring at the pavement. Couldn’t unsee what I know I had seen.
“You need to get out of the street,” he said.
Maybe my eyes couldn’t see what I knew must be there, but I had other ways to sense. Other ways to see.
I took a deep breath and drew a glyph for Sight, Taste, and Smell, and let the magic that pooled in me slip up through my bones, my veins, my flesh, and into my fingers to fill that glyph. Magic pulled like a hood over my eyes and senses.
The world broke open in a wild storm of smells, tastes, colors, and shades.
Old lines of magic cobwebbed the buildings. As cars drove around us I could see smaller spells attached to them like vibrant jellyfish, tendrils trailing behind to link to the people in cars. Sharp-edged geometric glyphs pulsed on the light posts, doorways, edges of alleys.
And there, at the corner of my vision, were the watercolor people. They had no magic tied to them, maybe because magic can’t tie to someone who is translucent-I don’t know. They walked along the street, through buildings and cars, as if the city itself did not exist.
They all paused and looked at me.
Again.
Seriously, I just don’t think I’m that interesting. They moved toward me in slow underwater steps, homing in like sharks scenting blood.
I stayed calm, because magic cannot be cast in high states of emotion. I didn’t flinch, didn’t doubt.
Go, me.
But in my hands that glowed with magic, hot on the right, cold on the left, the Reveal spell intensified the world, showing the hard edges of black, white, color, shape, angle, shadow.
Everything was stripped down. Paint seemed to be composed of hundreds of layers, individual raindrops were sharply outlined, and the tread marks from the tires turned into a mosaic of rain and stone and heat.
I looked at my hands.
Wow.
My right hand was luminescent, glowing with fire in neon colors. When I moved my fingers, magic poured out in ribbons, hovered in the air, and then floated back down to wrap around my fingers, where it sank in, beneath my skin, coursing through the heavy swirls of colors up my arm, my chest, to the silk-slender neon threads at the corner of my eye.
