Dead Drop (3 page)

Tau strolled to the kitchen table and sat with his back to the sink. Maddy sat at the table, too, and pointed at the chair across from Tau. Wallace sat because what else was she going to do? Palla leaned against the counter like he wanted to be anywhere but here. At last, she and Palla had something in common. Tau was keeping quiet, but occasionally she saw his pupils go from black to a wavy, streaky magenta, and then back to normal. Normal for a human. Which he was not.

The kitchen was quiet now. So was the rest of the house. Street noise competed with the sound of the pool pump kicking in. She looked between Tau and Maddy, and wondered if they were a couple. Beautiful people tended to pair up. Maybe she was involved with Palla, and they were playing it cool. She liked to think Maddy had better taste than that.

Maddy waved a hand, and though she spoke in even, pleasant tones, there was no ignoring the undercurrent of tension. “I’m not going to make excuses for Randi. There are many, many times I’ve wished talent came with being a decent, fair, person, but that just isn’t the case.” Maddy was talking as if there weren’t two demons here ready and willing to lay down the penalty for breaking the rules. The witch crossed one leg over the other and reached down to flick at something on her shoe. “I know she’s been giving you a hard time. You’re not the only one, but it’s worse for you. You seemed to be handling it okay.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She did not like this. Not at all. She stared at the floor tiles, smooth sandstone. Granite counters. Gleaming wood cabinets. Must be nice to have the money to indulge your tastes. No way was Maddy seeing Palla.

“Please don’t
yes, ma’am
me.”

“Okay.” She looked at Maddy, with Palla an unsettling threat in her peripheral vision. Across from her, Tau sat with his eyes going all weird at regular intervals. She wondered which one of them would take her out. She hoped it was Tau because she figured Palla for a sadistic bastard. Whichever way it went, she wasn’t going to cry or beg. Calm. Nothing but peace and calm. If she was lucky, if she could just keep everyone calm, she might walk out of here and never have to come back.

“I’m guessing Randi was digging at you when none of us could see.” When Wallace didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sorry. I should have been paying closer attention.”

She looked Palla straight in eye, because why not go out with at least of couple of points scored? “I didn’t do anything.”

“Fuck that shit, human.”

“What did Randi do?” Maddy placed her hands on the table. Palla was the only one here who wasn’t some shade of brown. She wondered if that worried him. Probably not. “We need you to be honest. Please.”

She hated the way she lapsed into old habits of sullen silence. She looked around the room, didn’t like what she saw, and concentrated on Maddy. “I was thirsty. I thought she was in the bathroom, or I wouldn’t have come in.” If, by some miracle, Maddy let her leave, she’d never be back. If not? Well, either way, there was no reason to soft peddle the truth. “I got my water, and she tried to set it on fire.”

Tau’s eyebrows drew together. Palla still had his
fuck you all
glare, but it was trained on her at the moment. Maddy was thoughtful.

Wallace really, really wanted to go home. She said, “She thinks that shit is funny.”

Maddy spread her fingers. “And your reaction was?”

“I got tired of pretending I don’t know she hates me.”

“You broke the rules,” Palla said.

“I did not. And even if you think I did, so did she. And
she
got to go home.”

Maddy sent an exasperated look in Palla’s direction. “What he meant to say, Wallace, is we know we’re working with people who often don’t have command of their abilities.”

“I said exactly what I meant.” Palla’s sneer was pure evil.

“I’d already be dead if I’d done something really bad.” She looked at Palla. “Am I right?”

Palla didn’t answer. When Wallace flicked a look in Tau’s direction, he lifted his hands. “I have been given no directive.”

She could not believe this. Could not. Randi got a pass, and she didn’t? “Respectfully, I’d like to go home. Please.”

Of all the witches working with Maddy these last weeks, she was the only one originally from East Oakland. The token. And she was the one getting kicked out. The no-talent token who proved people like her couldn’t do magic worth shit. She tried a smile, but it didn’t work very well.

Maddy shot another look in Palla’s direction. “We don’t sanction witches who are practicing here.”

Sanction.

Her stomach dropped to her toes, and she got lightheaded again even though she was more hopeful than before that Palla was going home disappointed.
Sanction
was a scary word coming from someone like Maddy.
Sanction
was the word the local warlord’s people used when they meant the warlord had authorized a murder. Call it whatever you want, the fact was a sanction meant taking a life.

“Do you have a directive from Nikodemus?” Tau didn’t look at Palla, but it was clear who he was asking.

“I have broad discretion.”

“But no directive, yes?”

Palla laughed, and the sound sent a chill through her. He took his phone from his pocket and set it on the table. “I can call right now and get some direction.”

“Did you dead drop Randi?” Maddy didn’t sound like she thought it was possible.

Wallace glanced at Maddy, Tau, and then Palla. She was dying of thirst. Dying. Dry as a bone. “All I know is the water did not go up in flames. If there was magic involved in that, I don’t see how it could have been from me.”

Maddy reached across the table and touched her fingers. A tingle of magic swept along her arm. “Nothing like that has happened before?”

“Well, sure.” Panic streaked through her when Tau’s attention shot to Palla. She shifted on her chair so she could see both of them. If she was going to die, she wanted to know it was coming. “It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not magic. It’s just. . .me.”

“Meaning?”

“The two things aren’t related.” Could this get any more absurd? “The water and that dead dropping thing. They can’t be.”

“Why is that?”

Tau stood, and she flinched. But all he did was walk to the sink. She’d be sick to her stomach if Tau had a psychic hook in her. At least, she thought so. Maybe not with him. “I make people stop arguing. Make all the emotion go away. I’m the person in the room making everyone else calmer. That’s a thing. A real thing.”

Tau returned with a glass of water. He set it in front of her. As if he’d read her mind. She hadn’t felt him trying to get a link going.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” His voice was pure melted sugar. He reclaimed his chair, and if he was rooting around in her mind, she couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t letting on. Maybe she’d just looked thirsty.

“It is. A thing.” Maddy pushed her long, black, naturally straight hair over her shoulder. “Am I right that until I made contact with you, if you were around the magekind or demonkind, you didn’t know?”

“I can’t tell who’s what.”

“Is it fair to say that until today you’d not calmed anyone down, to use your term. While you were here.”

“Yes.”

Palla snorted. “Fucking liar.”

“No, sir. I am not lying.”

Maddy lifted a hand. “If she was, she didn’t know.”

“You’re always giving the witches a break.”

Maddy stayed cool as ice. “Are you saying, Palla, that you know she used, and you didn’t tell anyone?”

“I thought it was fucking obvious.”

Wallace’s pulse skipped off on its own for several seconds.

“You should have shared your observations.”

He grunted.

“So, Wallace.” Maddy’s voice returned to gentler tones. “You don’t know what effect you might have on a magic user? Is that right? Demon or magekind.”

She took a drink of water and set the cup down too hard. The razor-blade pain in her stomach came back. “Look, if something happened, I didn’t do it on purpose. If I did anything at all. And I didn’t. It felt like what I do normally, only this wasn’t a normal situation, that’s all. Because Randi is a witch.” She looked at the others. The rules weren’t applied the same for everyone, and nobody who wasn’t dark-skinned ever wanted to admit that money and color made a difference. She hoped Maddy understood. “Fire is no joke.”

“It’s not.”

“I was and am sick and tired of her picking at me. I know I’m no good at this. She doesn’t have to remind me and the rest of the world every ten seconds. I put up with enough shit as it is.”

Maddy tapped a finger on the table. “If you paid attention to anything I’ve said here, you know there are people whose power manifests in ways we think of as unusual.”

She settled down. She was good at that. Keeping an even keel when everything was going to hell. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you do it again?”

She shook her head, not because she couldn’t but because she wondered if Maddy was being thick on purpose. “Make somebody calm, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Wallace shrugged. “It’s the reason I’m not dead.”

This time, Maddy, Tau, and Palla all looked at each other, and the pain in her center flared. Palla growled. The asshole. Tau’s eyebrows arched, and Maddy, she looked more thoughtful than ever.

“Could you now?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what would happen if I didn’t feel like it was necessary. Nothing, most likely.”

Maddy clasped her hands on the table. “That’s intriguing.”

“Not really.”

“Do you think you could come here on Mondays and Tuesdays instead of Fridays? Same time? I’d like to work with you in private.”

Six Mondays later, Wallace sat on Maddy’s couch, sick to her stomach and limp as a noodle. It was nine o’clock, an hour-and-a-half past the usual stopping time. If she didn’t find the energy to move, she’d miss the last bus and have a hell of a long walk home. Or else she’d have to spend the rest of her cash for the week on a cab; money she wouldn’t be able to spend on food. Her job did not pay well enough for cab fare, not with rent, utilities, and student loans to cover.

Six weeks and not much had changed. The answer to the intriguing question about what happened when she did her thing was still “nothing.” She could not start a fire, move a coffee cup, or make pretty sparkles in the air. Just like before. All the basic magics were beyond her ability. She didn’t understand why Maddy didn’t send her home with twenty bucks and a thank you very much.

This Monday was worse than usual because–hello–Monday, and because Tau wasn’t here, and because the three other witches here had left going on two hours ago. The only one left besides Maddy was Palla, and he didn’t know when to give it a rest. Ever. For whatever reason, Maddy had asked Palla to come here on his own time. She had no idea why he’d agreed. Probably for the chance to make her life hell.

She lifted her head off the back of the couch when he came back from the kitchen with two beers. He was a horrible person. Demon. He was rude and impatient and seemed to think she was being deliberately incompetent. “Go away. I can’t do magic.”

Palla handed one of the beers to Maddy. He took a long pull from the other. She was so, so thirsty, and a beer would taste so good right now. He gave her his usual stink-eye.

Fuck you, too, asshole
.

His faded jeans did a lot of favors for a girl who liked big guys. And that blue tee-shirt that fit close to his torso? That was a favor to connoisseurs of the male form the world over. Even though she hated him, he was fine. A very, very fine man. White as can be, though.

“Don’t get discouraged, Wallace.” Maddy sat on one of the chairs opposite the couch. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

She held out her hand, thumb and finger raised to her forehead in an L shape. “This is me. A no talent loser.”

Palla stood behind Maddy’s chair, a malign, beautiful presence. If you liked a pale man with dark hair, green eyes, and a killer face and body.

“You’re very interesting to us. Isn’t that right, Palla?”

“No.”

“I collect soup cans. That’s what’s interesting about me.”

Palla, because he lived to make her life miserable, was plenty smug about everything. And that was why today had been so awful. They’d worked on her linking up with Palla, that psychic connection demons could make with others. They lived a whole other existence on a psychic level. Trying to link up with a demon made her nauseous. With Palla, her problem was even worse. She couldn’t maintain a link with him for longer than ten seconds before she was dry heaving. For two and a half long hours, he’d made her try again and again and again.

She preferred the sessions with Tau. In his own quiet way, Tau was as exacting as Palla, but he wasn’t an asshole about it, and he didn’t make her feel like a piece of shit when things didn’t go well, and they never did. He was never anything but unreasonably gorgeous, deadly quiet, or insanely polite. Sometimes he was all three. Tau made her want to be better and work harder. He made her feel like she was better. She wasn’t, but he made her feel like it. Today, she had Palla to fail with.

She despised Palla and his green eyes. She hated his
we both know you’re incompetent
sneer with the fire of a thousand burning suns. She hated him so much she’d rather die than fail, and she failed every single time. She was the only street witch she’d seen who was African American, and every single failure might as well be a big neon sign that said,
black girls are no good at magic
.