“This is done.” Zayvion made it sound like a ritual, an ending, a prayer.
He motioned for us to walk away from the cars. There was enough room on the road that we could all walk shoulder to shoulder. Next to me was Zayvion, then Chase, then Shamus. As soon as we were a yard away from both cars, all three of them flicked their fingers, like flicking away a bug or, in Shamus’s case, tapping ashes off a cigarette.
With that one small motion, they each set a spell-I couldn’t tell which one-but I could tell exactly what it did. Instead of looking like three people armed for war, marching around in broad daylight, they looked. . normal. Average. Zay was his ratty-jacket-wearing, street-drifter self. Shamus passed for goth poser, and Chase looked like the kind of woman who chopped her own firewood, grew her own food, and didn’t take any flack.
None of them looked like they were carrying weapons, and I couldn’t even smell magic on them. I took a deep breath and all I smelled was Zay’s pine, Shamus’s cigarette smoke and cloves, Chase’s vanilla perfume, and the wet, green, rain-drenched soil and trees around us.
“Might want to put that away,” Shamus noted.
“What? Oh.” I belatedly tucked the knife I’d been holding like my life depended on it-ha, not funny-inside my coat, where it fit pretty well behind my belt and lay against my hip.
Zay turned to face the cars for a second. He wove a spell and knelt. His middle finger and thumb were pressed together. He opened his fingertips, and pressed his fingers into the wet gravel. I smelled the wash of a spell, slightly buttery and sweet. Then the cars were covered with leaves, and looked like they’d been there awhile, like maybe they were one of the neighbor’s cars or belonged to someone staying overnight.
The amazing thing about that simple spell was that it not only gave a visual camouflage, but it also gave off an emotional ping-that the cars belonged there and weren’t anything for anyone to take much note of. Subtle and natural, no one-not even the best Hounds-would think there was magic going on here.
“Wow,” I said.
Zayvion stood and gave me a short nod. “Thank you.” We walked to the end of the road and turned toward the park. It wasn’t far, but before we got there, Shamus touched my arm.
“Let’s get some coffee while they start,” he said.
“Don’t you need me to show you where I saw the gate and the Hungers?”
“No,” Chase said.
I looked at Zayvion. “We can tell. It’s about midpark, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “But I saw them while I was driving out of the parking lot.”
“We’ll go to the origin point,” he said. “Close the gate. Track out from there.”
“You mean the gate might still be open?” It had been hours since I’d been there. If the gate had been left open this entire time, there could be dozens, hells, hundreds of the Hungers on the street.
“Gates don’t Close on their own,” he said. “Someone always has to Close them.”
He and Chase continued walking, and Shamus tugged on my elbow again. He started walking uphill into the neighborhood and toward the main street. “Let them do this part. You and I can scout to find the Hungers’ nest.”
“They nest?”
Shamus shook his head. “Your da, he didn’t tell you a damn thing about magic, did he?”
And it was strange, now that we were a good distance away from Chase and Zay, I could feel the weight of my father in my mind again. Could feel the scratch behind my eyes that was going to drive me bat-shit crazy pretty soon.
“No.” I pressed at the bridge of my nose to keep from rubbing my eyes out. “Want to give me a quick rundown on procedures?”
“Easy. Z and Chase will stroll into the park clothed in Camouflage spells. Zay will close the gate-he’s the guardian; closing gates is his shtick. There are specific cancellation spells that you use for gates. They are hard as hell to cast and take a shitload of training and magic to work. Good Closers can use some of the magic that is suspended in the gate itself to fuel the spell, but still, it takes balls to shut those things out here in the dead zone. Probably another reason Tomi cast it out here. Harder to close.
“But as you intimately know,” he added, “Jones has balls. When it comes to magic.”
“Do you even listen to yourself?” I asked.
“And ruin the surprise? Once he closes the gate,” he said without breaking verbal stride, “the Hungers will know it. That’s where you and I come in. The Hungers should be nested, waiting for dark. We kind of hit the shiny side of luck with that one. If these things cross in the night, there’s no nesting. They’re everywhere. Get your workout trying to run one of these bastards down. Coffee?”
We’d made it up a couple blocks and a coffee shop was just across the street.
“We have time?”
“How fast can you drink?”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Lucky for us, there wasn’t anyone in line. I ordered a cup of house brew, black. Shamus ordered half a cup of house brew. Then he proceeded to fill the cup up the rest of the way with milk and sugar. Lots of sugar.
“Sure you got enough milk in your sugar?” I asked as we strolled out of the shop and headed south.
He flipped me off. “You drink your coffee your way, and I’ll drink my coffee the right way.”
And we did. Quickly. My cup was almost empty and my throat almost burnt by the time we reached the end of the next block. We threw our cups in the garbage, and kept walking downhill toward the river and Cathedral Park, the St. Johns Bridge to our right.
“What do we do when we find the nest?” I asked.
“Kill them. As many as we can. You know how to set a Drain, right?”
“Let’s pretend I do.”
“Okay, in that case, you stand back like Zayvion said. I’ll set the Drains. Too bad you and I haven’t cast together before. If we were Complements or Contrasts, you could pour magic into the spells I throw.”
“We could try now,” I said. My dad, behind my eyes, fluttered and scratched. I don’t know what he was all worked up about.
“Why not?” Shamus ducked into the mouth of an alley and leaned against the wall. “I’m going to weave a simple Light spell, right?” He did so, quickly. Watching him made me feel like I was all thumbs. “A little magic.” He exhaled, and the Light spell glowed soft white in an orb the size of a golf ball.
Even though I was watching, I was pretty impressed with his reach. Magic did not pool naturally beneath St. Johns. He had to access it about five miles out, over on the other side of the train tracks where the city had stopped laying the networks and lines.
“Now you,” he said, “make it bright.”
The spell was tiny. Even if my way of casting and his completely clashed, the worst we’d probably get would be a flash and then nothing. Like fragile wire, the glyph he cast wouldn’t hold very much magic before it self- destructed.
I cleared my mind, set a Disbursement, and thought about how I could best feed magic into his spell.
, my father said. And I knew the way to cast the magic, almost with a flick of my wrist, so that the magic would catch and wrap naturally, matching the pulse of Shamus’s spell.
And sure, I could have ignored my dad. Could have decided he was just trying to screw me up. And sure, I thought about it.
, my father sighed.
I ignored his comment. If I were ever going to listen to him, this seemed like a fairly harmless time to do so. The light would either get brighter, or it would go out. No lives on the line with this spell.
So I cast magic the way he had shown me, pulling just the barest amount of it out of my flesh and bone and into Shamus’ spell.
The orb glowed brighter, doubling in intensity, but did not burn out.
“Sweet,” Shamus said. “Might be Complements, you and I.”
“I thought I was Complements with Zayvion.”
