Trickster (13 page)

I’d met Mika Renar. She’d bled someone dry just to
threaten
me. I didn’t want to think about what she’d do with all
this
blood.

Holloway pointed at me again. “You sure you haven’t seen her?”

I swallowed bile and guilt and imagined what an Archmage could do to me—there were terrible spells out there,
biludha
that could turn a man inside out or curse him for life. Voices laughing at you for eternity. People hating you, wanting to murder you on sight for no reason. Worse things than a paltry bolt of lightning from the sky or a simple execution.

“No,” I said, not looking at anyone.

There was a beat of silence, and then Marichal’s voice, softer. “Jim, give me a minute alone here.”

They’d been partners for a while, I guessed, because he just stood up and exited the room, the metal door banging open and shut. Not a word. No discussion or protest; they knew how each other liked to work.

She leaned toward me, shampoo and cigarettes. I looked up at her.

“These girls,” she said softly. “They’re dead. We don’t know that, but we know it. They disappear, they never turn up again. We had a lead on the bastard, but he’s disappeared, too. We don’t know if he killed
them right away or not. We don’t know if this girl, Claire”—she pushed the other photos aside and put Claire Mannice back in front of me, tapping one long nail on her face—“is still alive or not. Or maybe a couple of them. We don’t know.”

She kept tapping on the photo, and I found I couldn’t look away. I remembered her in the tub at Hiram’s. I remembered the open window, and I hoped she’d kept running.

“You’re not a bad guy,” Marichal said gently. “A low-life, sure, kind of an asshole. But you don’t want this girl hurt. I can tell just by looking at you. You’re scared, okay, I get that. We can help. You help us, we can protect you.”

A laugh bubbled out of me. I regretted it immediately. Looking up, I found a dark shadow had spread over Marichal’s face. She stood up.

“Think about it. In fact,” she said, glancing down at her watch as she pushed away and headed for the door, “you got another twenty-one hours to think about it.”

I kept my eyes on the table, where she’d left her pen, and listened. The moment I heard the door slam shut, I lunged forward and took the pen, flicking the cap off and awkwardly rolling up the sleeve of my jacket. Without hesitation—because hesitation would have allowed me to imagine the pain, the burning and achy pain spiraling up my arm and slamming into my head—I dragged the point along the unhealed scab of the gash, pushing in hard as I did so. The scab tore open and blood welled up again, pouring out in a rush.

I began whispering the Words.

The same spell I’d cast on the ATM mark—my Charm spell. Second inversion, a few bits flipped here and there to make it an
anti
-Charm spell. Clever, I thought. Dangerous, too. Making yourself invisible was difficult and would take the blood of two, three people to fuel, to put enough energy out to bend the light itself around you. This was easier; same spell, but worked backward, made people subconsciously despise you so much they literally didn’t see you. Just edited you out, the most unpleasant thing they’d ever seen. And thus decided they
had not
seen you.

I felt the terrible, sagging weakness sweep through me, and I stumbled a bit, my vision going gray. Usually it passed in a few seconds and I was just tired, but although my vision cleared I couldn’t shake the heavy, soaking-wet feeling that hung on me. I leaned over the table with my palms flat on its surface for a moment, my arms shaking, and sawed breath in and out of my lungs.

Trembling, I moved over toward the door and leaned against the wall.

Then I waited.

I looked up and studied the spots where the cameras were hidden; I didn’t know how the spell would work through them. I didn’t know if anyone looking at a monitor would be affected or if the technology would filter everything, deliver my image unchanged. I didn’t think it mattered. No one sat there watching the monitors; they recorded everything and watched it later, if ever.

The silence had a hum to it. I fought the urge to rest my eyes and blinked endlessly. I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to jolt myself awake. My arm was dry; as always when casting the spell had left it dry and angry, the bleeding stopped. I didn’t know how or why that happened. I hadn’t stayed with Hiram long enough to advance my education.

Outside, I could hear the muffled bustle of the station. Doors slammed. Phones rang. People shouted.

The door to the interview room banged open, and Marichal stepped into the room, two cups of coffee in her hands. I blinked awake, startled, and stared at her for a moment. She spun around, eyes everywhere, and looked right at me for a second, a brief expression of disgust twisting her face, and then looked on, cursing under her breath.

Heart lurching, I slipped through the doorway just before the heavy door banged shut, and pushed myself flat against the wall out in the hallway.

Around me, the station buzzed and flowed. People walked past me, looked right at me through a series of office windows, but they all just edited me out, preferring, thanks to the power of the spell, not to notice me.

The door to the interview room banged open again, and Marichal hustled out, turning right and heading away from me at a trot. I shut my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to steady my pulse and dredge up some hidden reserve of energy. My limbs felt like they were wrapped in lead. I forced my eyes
open and turned to follow Marichal toward the exit. The yellow paint on the walls was peeling and the floor had soft spots that gave under my weight; after a few steps everything seemed to roll and swirl, color oozing off the walls.

The station was jammed full of people: cops in their terrible cheap shirts and pants, too tight or too big. Their leather holsters the only things that fit them. People handcuffed to random furniture and fixtures, napping, and I wanted to sit down next to them and doze off myself.

There was no alarm. At first I thought there might be, but then I remembered Marichal and Holloway hadn’t arrested me, and might prefer no one know I’d just walked out on them. They might even be outside, scanning the street for signs of me, and I relaxed a little.

Walking wasn’t easy. I wasn’t invisible, so I didn’t have the invisible’s problem of being walked into and jostled by people who couldn’t see me; people instinctively avoided me, in fact. But I had to keep my distance anyway. Best not push it.

Just past the lobby was a break room. A filthy place with a small table, a microwave, a dorm fridge, and Hell’s coffee machine, crusted in dark brown sediment. The history of the place in ancient coffee film. The room smelled like some of the roaches certainly living in the microwave had been accidentally nuked recently, but there was a box of donuts sitting on the table. I stared at them. There were four left. Two jelly
with powdered sugar, two cream puff. No fucking chocolate ones, of course.

My mouth watered on sight. I stepped in and started grabbing them, stuffing them into my pockets. The smell of the donuts was almost suffocating.

I turned and stopped. A young uniformed cop, his sharp Latino face folded into a frown that appeared to be alien to his open features, stood in the doorway. He stared right at me.

You,
I thought,
are a fucking moron.
This with powdered sugar on my fingers, the sure sign of the intelligent criminal.

Moving slowly, I stepped back from the table and tried to get out of his field of vision. I pressed myself up against the wall. Held my breath. Mainly so I wouldn’t have the maddening smell of donuts in my nostrils. After a few seconds he stepped into the room and leaned over the table to inspect the now-empty donut box. Snorted. Turned and left. I counted to five and spun out after him.

Threading my way through the lobby, I had to wait for a stream of uniformed officers to walk through the door behind the front desk. I swayed on my feet as each one stepped through, looked right at me, and with a slight wincing expression looked away. I tried to time it so that the final one had passed me by and the door was still hanging open, then followed at the last second.

A fat, sweating officer was trailing the others, talking cheerfully over his shoulder in a booming voice you could hear in the next fucking state, and I rammed into
him, hard. He stumbled back and I stumbled with him like I was caught in his fat-man gravity. We danced, me forward, him backward, and he spun around to see what the hell had just rocketed into him. His eyes skittered off me like everyone else’s for a second, and then he did a double take, and
saw
me.

And didn’t like what he saw.

I pushed back from him and we both found our feet again. I felt hot and stood in the middle of the crowded lobby sweating and breathing hard, my heart still a dried-up marbled rattling around in my chest. Sticky donut jelly bleeding through the fabric of my pockets. The fat cop stared at me, his face twisting into a mask of hatred as the spell worked on him, and around us the room went quiet as everyone
else
saw me. And everyone
else
didn’t like what they saw, either.

Only problem with an
anti
-Charm spell: If you fucked up and got noticed, you got noticed in a
bad
way.

The fat cop’s pudgy hands curled into fists.

I willed myself to move, but nothing happened. I stood there vibrating, watching him bring his hands up, and behind him, behind me—all around us—I had a sense of movement. I ordered my limbs to move and my limbs just hung at my sides. I had exactly one trick left, and when he swung at me I used it: I gave in to gravity and dropped. His fist sailed through the air and he stumbled forward, tripping over me and crashing to the floor.

I sat up on my elbows and looked around. The
whole room, cops, criminals, lawyers, civilians—they all stared at me with restrained hate, horrified at the sight of me and deeply confused as to
why
. I had seconds before they broke through the hesitation, the latent socialization, and succumbed to the spell. Dove for me as a mob. Beat the tar out of me. Worse.

I took a deep breath, the crowd seemed to bulge outward for a second, and then . . . and then Pitr Mags swept into the room, a fucking tank. He crashed through the swinging front doors with a snarl and was on top of me instantly. Stood over me with his fists by his waist, crouched down low. Someone charged him and he tossed them aside almost casually, effortlessly taking hold of them and flinging them away. Another body crashed into him from behind, but Mags just grunted. Twisted his torso around, flipped the newcomer up and over so they landed on their back. It was a cop in uniform, a woman who stared up at the ceiling in a dreamy way that hinted at concussion.

Time to go,
I thought slowly, stupidly.

This,
I then thought,
was our motto.
Mags and I should have T-shirts made that read TIME TO GO on the front, and wear them everywhere.

As if he heard me, Mags leaped aside and clawed one hand into my shirt collar. Dragged me along the floor.

I watched the fluorescent lights flick by as my vision got blurry and soft: one, two, three, daylight.

I
woke up to Hiram’s face, upside down, his smile a scowl. You couldn’t trust Hiram’s smiles anyway. He smiled a lot. It didn’t mean anything.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve
got
to take better care of yourself.”

I pushed myself up onto my elbows, sinking down into the couch cushions. My head throbbed and my arms trembled. I was back in Hiram’s study. Hiram himself standing over me in a pair of shabby khakis, a crisp white shirt that strained to contain his belly, and a pair of black suspenders. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. In one hand he carried a large black sphere that gleamed in the room’s soft light, a heavy marble I knew he sometimes carried as a worry stone. He breathed like he had to think about each individual breath and brace himself for it.

Strangely, this made me feel better. I’d spent a year of my life, more or less, in this study. I wouldn’t do it
again, but it was familiar, and sleep had done me good. I knew this room better than any other physical location in the world. I knew the weight and feel of everything on the tightly packed shelves. The tiny chess pieces carved from jade, the size of your fingernails. The windup dolls that would march from one end of the shelf to the other, knocking everything else off in their path. The books, dry and yellowed and smelling like libraries. And snow globes. Hiram had not met a snow globe he could resist. They appeared in his pockets on a regular basis as he moved through the city. Large globes with brass bases, containing St. Patrick’s Cathedral; small globes made of plastic, tiny plastic children laughing as they sledded down a generic country scene. They dotted all the shelves, glinting at me in familiar patterns.

I swung my feet onto the floor and sat up. “How long?” My voice was deep and clogged, rusty.