The Collected Christopher Connery (14 page)

“Ever heard of ‘thank you?’” Gail asked when the door had
closed behind Xavier and she began trying to work Connery’s arms free of her
coat.

“Who
was
that?” Arthur demanded, disappearing into
the bathroom to wash his hands before tending to Nia.

“An old friend. He plays with a band sometimes. I forgot
they worked hotels. Don’t worry, he won’t spread any rumors.” Bracing her foot
on the center of her coat, she yanked back hard on the arms and they slid free
of the sleeves, leaving her standing in the center of the room with a severed
arm in each hand. She sighed and made them wave at her. “Hi, Connery, I still
hate you.”

“I don’t know how you can stand to touch those things,”
said Arthur with revulsion as he strode from the bathroom, drying his hands on
a towel.

Gail shrugged as Arthur set to work cleaning Nia’s
injured hand with a sharp-smelling cotton swab. “They’re a bit gross I guess,
but they’re not bleeding everywhere or anything.” She made one wave at Arthur
too. “Hiya.”

“I’d say they’re more than just ‘a bit gross,’ but that’s
not the issue.” He frowned down at Nia’s hand, gently pressing on the angry red
skin with the cotton swab. “This could use stitching, but since she’ll probably
fix it when she wakes up, I’ll just wrap it for now.”

“What is the issue then?” Gail asked curiously as Arthur
began winding clean white bandages around Nia’s hand. “With the arms I mean.”

“There’s magic coming off of them. I don’t know what
Connery did to them to keep them from – going off, but it must have been
something foul, because –” He actually shuddered. “It’s cold. And I bet it
would taste awful if I could taste anything besides aniseed.”

Gail laughed. “Is that still going on?”

“I imagine it will be until Nia wakes up and takes the
spell off.” Arthur rolled his eyes, but his hands were gentle as he carefully
taped the bandages onto Nia’s hand and moved on to the wound on her upper arm.

Pursing her lips, Gail studied the arms in her hands
carefully. “I don’t feel anything.”

“You’re a layman. Though if I had to guess, I bet Nia
doesn’t feel it so strongly either, because she knows how to block it out. I’m
not a full magician, so I never learned. Lucky me.”

Nia made a soft sound in her sleep and her arm twitched
away from Arthur’s hand as he peeled the blood-soaked cloth from her skin.

“Sorry, Ni,” he murmured.  

Gail watched Arthur delicately clean dried blood from the
wound before realizing she was still holding Connery’s arms.
Guess these
might as well go under the bed. Dunno where else we’d hide them.
She bent
down, lifted the bed skirt, and almost had a heart attack when she saw a pair
of eyes staring back at her. Then she realized who it had to be. Getting down
on her hands and knees, she reached under the bed and pulled out Connery’s
head.

“Looks like he didn’t go anywhere after all. You must
have hid him under here before you left the room.”

“I really don’t remember doing that,” Arthur replied,
“but I guess it’s good we found him.” He turned to get more bandages from the
case on the bedside table, but paused to give Gail an exasperated look. “Can
you please put him away?”

“Right. Yeah, sure.” A little sheepishly, Gail rolled
first the head and the arms back under the bed.

Arthur finished wrapping the wound on Nia’s arm then
glanced at Gail. “I’m sorry if I was rude to your friend.”

Gail waved it off. “Xavier won’t care. I’ll introduce you
both properly sometime if you like.”

She got a small smile in response, then Arthur said, “I’m
going to change her clothes and put her to bed.”

Some surprise must have shown on her face because, he
gave her an exasperated look. “I’m her half-brother and a doctor. You don’t
have to look so scandalized.”

“I wasn’t – wait, you’re only her half-brother?”

Arthur made an unmistakable
shit, you weren’t supposed
to know that
face, but didn’t try any bullshitting. “Yes, technically. We
have the same father – well, more accurately, the same preserved genetic sample
was used to fertilize our mothers’ eggs. Illuminator Graves – Nia’s mother, I
mean – carried us both to term, so we share her name, but she and I had no
genetic connection. Technically, Nia and I are both twins and half-siblings.”

Gail had heard a bit about that. The Academy saved the
genetic material of especially gifted magicians to spice up the gene pool if
future kids got a little lackluster.

“We actually have several other half-siblings,” Arthur
continued, “but since Nia and I were born together, we grew up together. We
slept in the same cradle until we were four. It was only after –” This time he
caught himself before spilling the beans and Gail, not wanting to pry into
family business, let it lie.  

“I gotcha. Mostly, anyway.”  Gail stretched her arms
over her head, feeling her spine creak in protest. “How about I go get washed
up while you take care of her? I’ll come back after, though. I’d like us to
stay together at least until she wakes up, just in case anything else goes
nuts.”

Arthur nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

Gail took one last look at Nia, still dead to world and
looking awfully small slumped against the mass of pillows.
Well, she got us
out of that mess, but it doesn’t look like it came easy.
Maybe this awful
adventure would convince the Illuminator that this investigation was a bad
fucking idea, but Gail had already learned not to be optimistic. Despite looking
like she ought to be wearing flowers in her hair and reclining on silk
cushions, Nia was stubborn as a brick wall. Like it or not, Gail had a feeling
she’d be looking for Connery tomorrow too.

Lucky her. At least the case seemed to be moving quick.

When she got back to her room, she sat down hard on the
bed and pulled out her tight braid. She winced as she ran her fingers through
her hair. Her scalp had that tight achy feeling it only got when she forgot to
take her hair down before falling asleep. She glanced at the clock. Almost
noon. And judging by her aching head, they hadn’t been gone less than an hour.

“Damn it, we lost a whole day.” She wondered how she was
supposed to explain that in her report to the Academy. Actually, on second
thought, forget explaining anything. Gail would just write “and then some magic
bullshit happened” and leave it at that. If they wanted more details, they
could ask Nia.

Shoving herself up, she made herself plod to the
bathroom, though she wanted nothing more than to flop face-first on the bed and
catch up on sleep. She tried to undo the buttons of her shirt, but her fingers
were trembling with hunger and lack of sleep, so she gave up and yanked it over
her head.

She felt a bit more human after a shower, though she could’ve
still probably slept for a year. But she stood by what she had said to Arthur;
they had to stay together, just in case Connery wasn’t done with them. She
could catch a nap in the Graves’ room if she really needed to. She got dressed
in another set of work clothes, making sure to buckle her holster tightly
around her waist.

“Better safe than sorry,” she murmured.

She braided her hair over one shoulder and returned to
the bathroom to grab her toothbrush, just in case she had to spend the night on
the magicians’ floor.

Nothing like the glamorous life of a PI.
As she
dropped the toothbrush and a washcloth into her bag, her eyes caught on her
reflection.

There was blood on her cheeks.

She blinked and it was gone, but the split-second vision
was enough to send her rushing out of the bathroom.

You’re just imagining things,
she told herself as
she strode across the hallway.
You’ve had a long day with no sleep and no
food, and now you’re imagining things.

But she couldn’t quite stop herself from brushing her cheek
with the back of her hand, testing for blood.

Someone was singing.
No,
Nia thought through the
haze of fading sleep.
No, I got us out. No, no, no.
But the singing only
grew louder and there was something heavy holding her down. When she tried to
push it away, fingers closed on her wrist.

The ocean of hands grabbed at her, trying to break her
body like they had broken Arthur’s. Soon she would be crushed into that
lurching flesh golem dragging itself across the ground on a hundred grasping
fingers.

No. No.
She wrenched herself free of the squeezing
fingers and pushed herself up to find – that she was sitting in bed. The thing
weighing her down had been two layers of hotel comforters and the hand holding
her wrist had belonged to Arthur. And judging by the way that hand was now
pressed to his cheek, the arm she had knocked aside had actually been his face.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry, Arthur.”

“It’s fine.” He prodded his bottom lip with a finger. “Am
I bleeding?”

“Arthur!” Nia huffed. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”

“I was the one who was hit, I think I would know better
than you.” But he was smiling as he sat on the edge of the bed. “How are you
feeling? I’m sorry for startling you, but you seemed to be having a nightmare.
I was trying to wake you.”

The singing.
Nia looked around the room. “I
thought I head singing.”

“That was me.”

Nia turned her head and saw Gail sitting on the other
side of the room, a newspaper open in her lap.

“Well, not
me,”
she corrected. “I turned on the
radio, but there was nothing worth listening to, so I switched it off. Sorry if
I woke you.”

“No, no, it’s all right.” Nia rubbed her eyes. “How long
have I been asleep?”

“About ten hours,” Arthur answered.

Nia stared at him. “Ten hours?”

He nodded. “We got back to the rooms at noon –”

“We were wandering around in Connery’s illusion for about
a day,” Gail added. She held up the paper. “I checked the date on here to be
sure.”

“And now it’s about ten at night.”

Nia sat back against the headboard. “Why didn’t anyone
wake me?”

“You needed the rest. Anyway, nothing’s happened. We’ve
just been sitting here, taking turns napping, and waiting for you to wake up.”

“Hm.” Nia’s eyes closed again in spite of her. Even after
sleeping for almost half a day, she felt groggy. Too much magic she supposed.
It had worn her out. Then something else occurred to her and her eyes flew
open. “Connery’s arms, did you –”

“Under the bed,” Gail answered. “With his head.”

“So we did it!” Despite her exhaustion, Nia couldn’t help
beaming.

Gail nodded, returning the smile with some reluctance.
“We did it, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. We need to get some rest before we
do anything else.”

“Oh, of course, of course.” Nia waved a hand agreeably,
but she was flushed with success. “We obviously need to wait until morning at
least, but we’ve found two parts in three days! That’s a remarkable success
rate. If this continues, we will be done by the end of the week!”

They were not done by the end of the week.

By the time Saturday rolled around, Nia had yet to locate
any more pieces of Connery, and not for lack of trying. Every morning, she
would come to breakfast beaming and declare that she had finally determined
Connery’s location, but then they would drive out to the place she had marked
on her map and find an empty lot, a narrow alley, or one of the magically
protected groves of Academy trees. But they never found a single disembodied
limb or even a whiff of magic.

Sure, the meant Gail had lots of free evenings to share
drinks with Xavier at the bar while Nia scribbled out spell after spell in her
room, but that wasn’t exactly what she was getting paid to do. Even so, she’d
invited the magicians to join her more than once, figuring they could use a
break now and then too, but Nia always wanted to stay in with her spells, and
Arthur seemed reluctant to leave her alone. Or maybe he wasn’t allowed to leave
her alone. It was hard to tell.

Either way, it’d been nice to see Xavier again. He was
one of those rare people she could go for months without seeing and still hold
a conversation with when they met up again. There had been just one
uncomfortable moment when Xavier’s shirtsleeve had pulled back while he reached
for his glass, revealing the stippling of scars on the inside of his arm.
Needle marks.

“Goddamn, Xavier, you’re not –”

Xavier blinked at her in confusion then looked down at
his arm. “No! Hell, Gail, I’ve been getting sick a lot this year, that’s all.
Last time I went whining to him, Doc Simmons gave me some medicine to help me
stay better. And unfortunately this is the best way of taking the stuff. You
can’t think I’d –”

“No, no.” Gail held up her hands in apology. “I’m not
accusing you of anything. I just – I know life isn’t always easy in Gracetown.
You can’t blame me for worrying.”

Xavier smiled at that. “No, guess I can’t. But you don’t
have to worry about me. Anyway, if I was shooting that much vernix, do you
think I’d be upright talking sense to you now?”

Gail chuckled as she picked up her own drink. “No,
probably not. You’re pretty much done talking sense after two whiskies.”

Probably to prove her wrong, Xavier bought himself a
third and was stumbling up to bed by nine, much to Gail’s amusement.

Anyway, nice as it was to catch up with Xavier – it sounded
like his little Gracetown school was finally getting a trickle of city funding
though he still had to play with the band a few weeks a year to keep it afloat
– Gail had a feeling this wasn’t how the Academy wanted her spending her time.
It sure as hell wasn’t getting her any closer to finding Connery.

“It must be moving!” Nia wailed when the fourth attempt
to pin down the next bit of Connery ended exactly the same way as the first
three.

“How can it be moving?” Arthur demanded. Apparently
waking up at the crack of dawn four days in a row to drive aimlessly around the
city didn’t suit him. The thermos of coffee in his hand wasn’t having any
noticeable effect on his mood.

Gail didn’t much care for the early starts either, but
she hadn’t been sleeping well lately anyway. She kept having strange dreams
that jolted her awake with her heart trying to escape through her throat,
dreams she could only remember fractured pieces of. A bloody floor. The shrieks
of a terrified animal. A pile of chalk-stained books. A child screaming as
something froze inside his chest.

Well, that’s what she got for sleeping away from home,
she guessed. Regardless, by the time Nia knocked on her door each morning, she
was usually wide awake and glad to have something to occupy her.  

“Maybe they strapped part of him to a rat,” she suggested
to Nia with a sidelong grin as they stood in another empty lot. Rats were
pretty much the only animals that could survive in large numbers on the streets
of New Crossbridge. They hid in their holes whenever the rain came down and
made their nests near the underground water treatment tanks, which meant they
got more good water than the average Gracetowner.

“Don’t be silly,” Nia snapped. “No rat is big enough to
carry a human body part. And even if they were someone would have noticed.”

“Sarcasm, Nia.” Arthur took a long swallow of coffee. “Or
joke, I suppose, in this case, but the point still stands.”

“Oh.” Then, “Well, it wasn’t funny.”

Gail grinned. “It was a little funny.”

Nia’s scowl deepened. “I thought you were the one who
wanted to be finished with this as soon as possible.”

“No, I’m the one who didn’t want to do this at all, but
was tempted by the irresistible call of money.”

Shooting her another dark look, Nia went back to combing
over that day’s abandoned lot. While Arthur was preoccupied fussing with the
lid on his thermos, Gail stole a glance at the sky. So far it had been a dry
day, but the slate gray sky and the chilly breeze promised rain and soon. The trash
that littered the alley – abandoned bikes, piles of old magazines wrapped in
twine, and one forgotten car – was already suffering the wrath of the rainy
season. Some of the bikes had been eaten away to almost nothing. Their rusted
skeletons made Gail shiver.

Nia made a sharp frustrated sound and actually threw her
hat on to the ground. After a moment, she reconsidered the dramatic gesture and
picked it up again, fretfully brushing dirt from the brim. “This doesn’t make
any sense.” She kicked at a bit of rotten tire. “How could the hiding place
change so drastically from day to day?”

“Are you sure you’re doing the spell right?” Gail held up
her hands before Nia could actually set her on fire with that glare. “I’m just
asking.”

“Yes, I am absolutely, completely, unquestionably
certain. I double-checked the spell three times this morning and got the same
result each time. It should be here.”

“But it’s not.”

Nia sighed. “But it’s not. It absolutely, completely,
unquestionably is not.”

“How much longer do we have to stay here?” Arthur called.
He had moved to the entrance of the lot as an unsubtle hint. “I don’t want my
car to get rained on.”

“Why do you care?” Gail called back. “It’s just an
Academy car, right?”

Arthur crossed his arms and glowered. “While we’re out
here, it’s my car.”

Gail had a feeling the Academy wouldn’t see it that way,
but she guessed she understood the sentiment. She looked to Nia for an answer
to Arthur’s question, but she had already moved a few steps away to stare sadly
at a wall.

The wind picked up a little, catching stray strands of
Gail’s braided hair and blowing them into her eyes. She slipped her hand under
her coat, which she had gotten laundered by the hotel at the Academy’s expense,
and nervously gripped the handle of her umbrella. She had left her stiff
cumbersome poncho in the car, figuring this would be another quick look around,
but Nia didn’t seem like she was going anywhere fast. Sighing heavily, Gail
went to wait with Arthur.

Arthur looked sideways at her as she leaned back against
the wall beside him. “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?”

Gail forced a smile. “I hope not.” She watched as Nia
removed her tan coat, folded it over the cleanest bit of trash she could find,
then rolled back the sleeves of her dress to dig around under the hood of the
abandoned car.

“Is she always like this?”

 Arthur laughed. “Worse. I’ve known her to stay in
the Academy labs for so long that when she comes out she has to ask what day it
is. She’s always giving people fits with her experiments. They’re always loud,
messy, and unpredictable. Once she turned her hair magenta for a week. I don’t
even know what she was trying to do, but she must have succeeded because she
was happy even with the hair.”

The image wrung a true smile out of Gail. “That had to be
a sight.”

“Her work is brilliant, though, very innovative.” Arthur
suddenly stiffened, looking at Gail narrowly from the corner of his eye. “But
also entirely in line with Academy regulations and moral constraints, of
course.”

Gail raised an eyebrow. “Sure, I wouldn’t have doubted
it. Anyway, that’s the Academy’s business, not mine.”

“I wasn’t telling you for the Academy,” Arthur replied
seriously. “I was telling you for her.” It must have been clear from Gail’s
face that she wasn’t following, because he sighed and ran a hand through his
hair. “She likes to do things by the book. It’s important to her.”

“The Academy has a book?” From what Gail had seen Academy
magicians seemed to follow extremely loose procedure. In fact, as far as she
could see, the only rule seemed to be, ‘try not to kill or mangle any innocent
bystanders, but we understand that sometimes these things can’t be helped.’

“A very thick one,” said Arthur. “There are so many rules
that not even Nia could recite them all by heart, but there are really just two
main principles every Academy magician is supposed to live by.”

Gail waited, curious despite the impending rain. Though
she’d lived in the city her whole life, she, like most laymen, was still kept
mostly in the dark about the magicians who ran it.

“One,” said Arthur, sounding like a school kid reading in
front of the class, “protect those weaker than you and never abuse them.”

“Guess no one told Connery that one.” Another gust of
wind ruffled Gail’s hair and she pulled out her umbrella.

“Two, never use unbound magic. Ever.”

Gail stopped fiddling with her umbrella – cheap piece of
shit; she really needed to invest in a better one – and looked over at him.
“Unbound magic?” Something Nia had said to her when they had first met floated
back into her mind:
“He’s a bound ward of the Academy.”

Arthur’s eyes darted toward Nia, but she was still
digging around in the corpse of the car. “You don’t know the difference between
bound and unbound magic?”

“Nope, I’m just a stupid layman.” Gail failed to keep the
irritation out of her voice, though if she were honest, she hadn’t tried very
hard. If the Academy wanted her to stand around in the rain being patient with
condescending magicians, they should pay her more.  

Arthur opened his mouth then closed it again to scowl at
her. “I didn’t call you stupid. I was just surprised they don’t teach you about
it in school since it’s foundational to the Academy’s philosophy.”

Gail didn’t feel like admitting that the two schools she
had attended before the police academy had been a one-room charity school run
by a half-deaf woman in Gracetown and an overcrowded classroom in the
children’s home where the poor teachers who tried couldn’t make up for the ones
didn’t. So all she did was shrug and say, “Well, I’ve never heard of it. I can
recognize a few spells from chasing after Connery for all these years, but I
don’t know which ones were bound or not.”

“No, no, that was all –” Arthur chewed pensively on his
bottom lip for a moment, then said, “All right, you’ve seen Nia do plenty of
magic. How does she do it?”

Was that a trick question? “She draws it. What else would
she do?”

But Arthur was shaking his head. “The circles aren’t the
magic, they’re simply the medium.”

“What?”

“They make it easier to get the effect you want. Magic
can be unpredictable, but if you give it a specific path to follow, you can
predict the outcome. You can also control the power of the magic, increasing or
limiting its strength based on the size and complexity of the circle.” He still
sounded like he was quoting from a book, but there was something bitter at the
back of his words.

“So that’s… bound magic then?”

Arthur nodded.

“And there’s another kind?” Gail had never seen any magic
done that didn’t involve drawing pictures. Even Connery always had his magic
scratched out everywhere in chalk and ink.

“Like I said, the circles aren’t the magic, they just
make it easier to do. Any magician can do magic without them. It’s more
powerful and creative that way, not to mention faster, but it’s also much more
dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“The circles tell the magic what you want it to do. Even
a stupid or weak magician knows what they’re getting when they use one. While a
spell might fail if the magician isn’t strong enough to power it, it won’t go
wrong. But unbound magic requires great strength of mind and if the magician
loses control for even a moment, things – well, things can go very wrong.”

Gail tried to imagine magic going wrong and quickly decided
she didn’t care for the idea at all. Hell, she usually didn’t like it when
magic went right. “So doing unbound magic is illegal?”

“Yes.”

“I guess that’s a good thing. Better safe than sorry,
right?”

“Sure.”

Gail glanced at Arthur, but he just kept glaring straight
ahead.

“So,” she tried, “what – oh, hell!” She started violently
as the first raindrop touched her hand. Logically, she knew that short-term
exposure couldn’t hurt her, but she swore she could feel her skin burning even
after she wiped the drop away. Snapping her umbrella open, she squeezed herself
underneath it. “Please tell me she’ll be done soon.”

Arthur studied her curiously as he opened his own
umbrella. “You don’t like the rain.”

“Does anyone like the rain?” Gail muttered, hunching her
shoulders against the wind that sprayed water against her face and neck.

For a moment there was silence, then something prodded
her elbow. Looking over, she found Arthur holding out a folded poncho. “I don’t
need it,” he explained. “I’m fine with just my umbrella.”

“You sure?” When Arthur nodded, Gail took it gratefully
and managed to slide it over her head without putting down her umbrella. “Next
time I won’t leave mine in the car.”

Arthur watched Nia poke and prod at something on the
ground for a minute then turned back to Gail. “You’re right, no one likes the
rain, but you
really
don’t like it.”