I picked up the badge case, weighing it in my hand. It stillfelt good there. A badge. My badge. Icould get used to having one again. Get used to it, real easy.
But I had to earn it. I tucked it back into my jacket pocket,remembering the good comforting feel of it there,and swiveled around and stared out the window at pigeons. City birds.
Sandy kept a feeder shelf on one window of her apartment. Herein the city, she mostly got pigeons and starlings and house sparrows, junk birdinvasive species.
Still, every now and then a sharp-shin or Cooper’s hawk wouldswoop by, picking off a fast-food snack. She’d babble about that for daysafterward. She loved birds, even pigeons and sparrows and starlings. I thinkshe wanted to fly away with them. I know this story doesn’t show her off thatwell — racist language and blind violent rages and borderline alcoholism.
Borderline alcoholic. Pot calling the kettle black, or ittakes one to know one? Yeah, I drink too much. You probably would, too, if you’dseen the things that Sandy and I had seen.
I sat and watched pigeons. And then I reached my mind out tothem, focusing on one bird, mottled gray and white with the sun strikingiridescent green from its head, a white ring around its red eye, my touchweakened and filtered by the shielding in the window, and asked it to move. Itbobbled along the cornice stone. I asked it what it saw. I asked it to fly. Itflew.
That was illegal magic, all of it, dangerous magic to me andothers, and I dropped it after a few seconds. Still, I remembered it from thatold case, remembered the how and what and why of that touch. If someone’s catdragged home a dead pigeon with my signature on it, I’d just say that thefeathered rat had been bobbling and cooing on my window sill all morning,annoying me, and I zapped its little pink scaly toes to chase it off.
I wondered where Kratz walked and ate and slept, under thecity sky with its thousands of unnoticed pigeons.
Dangerous and illegal magic — that one was both. Some kinds ofmagic are just illegal, like the theft that landed Maggie in the slammer. Somekinds are just dangerous. Some magic has an uncertainty principle, observerinteracting with observed, and more than a whiff of Schrödinger’s Cat. I knowways to use that mental touch I used on the pigeon to kill someone, maybeillegal or maybe not, depending on the circumstances. As I told you, I had beentrying to kill Kratz, that day long ago.
But say I tried to cause a blood vessel to burst in his brain— that particular spell or manipulation of the forces, the way I’d merge myenergies with his, I wouldn’t be sure whether that stroke would fall on him orme. Tossup. That protects the world from people like us, more than any laws ofGod or man.
I took some serious risks, tracking and fighting him before.Maybe I’d have to take them again.
Empty speculation, empty morning. I walked down to the cornerfor lunch, a small snack of sixteen-ounce prime sirloin rare and baked potatowith mounds of sour cream and fresh chives, came back to the office and staredat the note and the pigeons and puffed on my pipe, and then gave up about thesame time the sun gave up on us for the evening. No strokes, either brain orbrilliance.
Then I walked home, keeping wary eyes and nose and ears onshadows and alleys as I went, the morning’s sweet clean chill replaced bydiesel and dust, and hoisted myself up the stairs again, sniffing for Kratz allthe way, and smelled something else instead once I reached my floor.
A promise of lentils and sausage wafted through the air,savory with beef kielbasa and onion and cloves and bay and red wine. I knewthat recipe a hundred yards off, using beef stock instead of water for cookingthe lentils and a butcher-shop smoked kielbasa instead of some factory product.Sandy. Sandy was back and had gotten over her mad. She knew me, knew that wasone of my all-time favorite dinners. That aroma was her unique way of saying, “I’msorry.” I probably could have smelled it and read the message before I reachedour building, if I hadn’t been searching for Al Kratz.
XI
The next morning we went bird-watching. I owed Sandy sometime and attention, and I had my usual ulterior motives lurking in the shadowydepths of whatever I use in place of a soul.
I didn’t need to borrow just any random set of eyes if Idecided to dabble in the black arts — I didn’t know what Kratz looked like,this time around. I doubted that he wore the face I remembered. He wouldn’teven need magic to change that. Justmoney, which he never had any trouble stealing.
I needed that othersense that sets wizards apart from normal humans. Some animals can sense magic.Pigeons can’t. I’d proved that, long time past. They wouldn’t hang aroundoutside my office if they could. Cats cansense magic, that’s one reason why you find them on the edges of so many of theold tales about witches. You won’t see me trying to fit into a cat’s head,though. I have a strong suspicion that the cat would take over my life, ratherthan the other way around. Cats are like that.
But those old tales tie other animals to magic, as well. Owls.Wolves. Orcas and ravens and coyotes, in Native American lore. I even seem torecall a magical shark in Polynesian legend, back in the anthropology of magiccourses in college.
The lore talks most about hunters, anyway, the animals withsharp eyes and sharp noses, sharp edges and sharper appetites. Sometimes they “smell”it or “taste” it, sometimes it comes through as something strange in sight orhearing. Depends on how the
