Old information from high school came back to me, and I pulled off my sweater, leaving me in a tank top, and balled the sweater under his head. I didn’t have anything to wedge between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue, and I debated the wisdom of that, anyway. He looked like he needed all the room he could get just to breathe.
I put both hands on his chest and tried to press his body down gently, tried to still the spasms racking through him.
What the hell was I was doing trying to dodge a Hound, get to the cops, and take someone to a hospital all on my own?
What choice did I have? My father was dead and this kid might know who did it. Might know who I could make pay for killing the man I wanted dead and somehow couldn’t handle living without.
I wanted to scream, but Bonnie was still out there. If she heard me, she would find me and shoot me. It was enough to make a girl paranoid. Or furious.
I decided to go with furious.
But unless I wanted to pull on magic, there wasn’t anything else I could do. It wasn’t like I could turn bullets if someone pulled a trigger.
This would all be a hella different if I had a damn cell phone.
Or if my father hadn’t died.
Or if I had taken his advice and finished school and gone to work for him.
Or if this kid and his cat hadn’t gotten stabbed.
‘‘P-please,’’ the kid rasped.
I about jumped out of my jeans. I thought he was way past being able to talk.
‘‘I’m right here, kiddo. Hang in there, you’re going to be okay.’’
‘‘H-hand,’’ he said.
I didn’t know what he wanted, but took both of his hands in my own.
‘‘M-magic.’’
I bit the inside of my cheek. I couldn’t. Sure the magic was close enough, maybe a couple blocks away at most. But I couldn’t draw on the magic to do so much as add pressure to his wound or make the air he breathed richer in oxygen because Bonnie would spot me. And I certainly didn’t have enough medical experience to save him, with my hands or with any of the spells that could ease pain at an exorbitant cost to the caster. If I drew on magic at all, I was screwed. I could smell Bonnie and the reek of lavender getting stronger by the minute.
‘‘P-please?’’
Hell. Screw Bonnie. If she was so determined to kill me, she’d just have to get in line and wait her turn. This kid didn’t have any time left.
I took a calming breath, even though I was freezing and soaked through my tank top and really freaked out. I set a Disbursement spell, deciding, even though I didn’t like it, I should take a long and slow pain this time so I could remain functional—maybe something along the lines of a bad sore throat or a recurring stomachache over the next couple weeks. I held tightly to the kid’s hands and thought about the soil beneath us, and below the soil, beyond the train tracks, to the magic pooled there deep under the city, caught and held by ironworked conduits.
I spoke a mantra, a jingle from a cereal commercial, and called for the magic to come over to this side of the tracks, coaxed the magic, invited the magic into my body and into my hands.
To my surprise, the kid managed to pull my hands, still clasped with his, down upon his stomach, over his wounds.
Kneeling next to him, I was close enough to see his eyes, blue, unfocused, looking at me, or maybe through me, close enough to see his lips and see that he, too, was chanting.
Holy hells. Soft as a whisper or the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the kid reached out for the magic I drew upon, and used me like a channel, like an ironworked conduit. He pulled the magic he wanted through me, not through the ground or through the channels. That shouldn’t be possible. People were not conduits of magic. Magic killed the people who held it inside their body for any length of time. Magic could only be channeled by lead, glass, iron, and glyphs.
And, apparently, me.
Like a breeze stoking a flame, the small magic I carried within me flared to life and the magic the kid drew upon mixed with it. I filled with magic, more magic than I’d ever held before. Like an artist mixing paint beneath my skin, the kid guided the magic to blend and move, connecting the magic beneath the city to my flesh, to my bones.
This couldn’t be good.
But it felt good, very good. Magic shifted and changed in me, and I realized my eyes were closed. Instead of darkness, I saw lines of magic that pulsed in jeweled colors, connected in contrasts of sharp angles, and softened like a watercolor. I could suddenly see so many possibilities in magic, so many things I could use it for. Things I’d never thought of. Like a balm to soothe pain, or a thread to stitch flesh.
‘‘Oh,’’ I whispered. I didn’t know it could be so easy to heal someone with magic.
But I did now. I used one hand and drew a glyph for health—the sort of thing that might reduce the effects of a head cold, or revive a wilted plant. I could see how the glyph would fit around the kid, and how it would sink inside him, like a tattoo of color and magic on his bones. It would stay there too, supporting him, healing him. I worked the magic inside of me out into the glyph and then directed the glyph down over his body—inking it above him from his skull to his toe, magic that urged healing, health, life.
I’d never seen anyone use magic like this before. I’d never seen anyone try. But I could do it. Of course I could do it.
So I did.
Magic spooled out of me and into the glyph. I let go of the kid’s other hand so I could catch the power and guide it, weaving and bending the force of it like ribbons of light, of heat, some rough, some slick and smooth, all fast, faster, falling out of me and into the glyph, then over him, then into him, wrapping around his bones, webbing through his muscles, arcing across his tendons.
Heal,
I thought. And the magic soaked through him, filled up his wounds, and followed my will, my intent, my glyph, my spell.
The boy gasped, and part of me wondered if this might kill him, and whether it might kill me too since I’d never channeled so much magic before, and sure as hells had never tried to play interior tattoo artist with it. But if I stopped, or worse, if I freaked out, I wasn’t sure what the magic would do. Would it stop, collapse, explode? I was pretty sure it would do more damage to him than it was doing now.
I worked on creating an end to the spell. But magic rushed through me like a river raging free of its banks. I didn’t know how to cut the ties of magic between me and the ground, or me and the kid. How did you stop something you didn’t know how to do in the first place?
I didn’t want to disengage too quickly, in case the wild rush of magic lashed back on the kid and left nothing but a burned and charred mess. But I had to let go soon. My ears were ringing and the sheer force of channeling so much magic had gone from feeling good to making me dizzy. I couldn’t feel the wind anymore, couldn’t feel the rain, couldn’t smell the garbage.
This was bad.
I tried tying the strands of magic into knots, to stem the flood, but magic still rushed up through the ground, into me, then out of me into the kid, and then completed the circle by exiting him and wrapping around my hands again. My fingers were getting full, stiff with magic that tangled and wrapped and constricted.
Clearly, I sucked at this. That was no surprise since I had no friggin’ idea what I was doing. Knots unraveled, twisted, tangled. I caught at strands of magic and wound them around my fingers, through my fingers, to try to hold them all. But no matter how fast I spooled up the magic, it came faster, rushing up through the soil, through me, into the kid, healing, painting muscle, bone, sinew, his and mine, and then back out through him to wrap around my hands again.
I was about to be in a world of hurt. I could not control this much magic. The magic pouring out of me and the magic pouring out of him collided in my hands, tangled, and burned. I jerked away from the kid, rocking back on my butt, but I wasn’t fast enough. Magic crackled, hot, bright. It burned up my right arm like fire in my skin following lines of gunpowder.
I held my right arm away from me and turned my head away from the heat and pain coming closer to my face. Heat licked across my jaw, up my ear, and arced across my temple. I yelled, ‘‘Stop, stop, stop!’’
A wild thought of stop, drop, and roll before my hair caught on fire flashed through my mind. I flung myself to the side, not caring that wet gravel and blackberries were the best landing I could hope for.
But before I hit the gravel, I hit a very solid chest. A set of arms closed around me and held me tight, my burning arm tucked between them and me, the heat of the fire lessening, cooling, leaving not heat, but pain behind.
I couldn’t tell who held me, couldn’t smell who held me—as a matter of fact, I couldn’t smell anything. I freaked out about that, then freaked out when I realized I also could not see.
Well, not completely true. I could see something. Everything was really, really white, like someone had just dumped a mountain of snow all around me, or set off a bomb. As a matter of fact, I felt cold and numb, like I was buried in snow, which annoyed me. I’d thought a little bit about how I wanted to die, and freezing to death in an avalanche wasn’t even on my top-ten-favorite-ways-to-bite-it list.
Ten involved chocolate and sex. Not one in one hundred involved snow.
And I seemed to remember that I was not in the mountains surrounded by snow, but in the city surrounded by rain. With the kid. Doing magic.
My brain turned over like a cold engine, gave up, and went blank. Then I tried to think again. I was doing magic. Wasn’t I trying to avoid magic? Why was that?
‘‘Allie?’’ A man’s voice spoke through the white and I tried to answer, but couldn’t feel my lips or tongue.
But the man’s voice had punched a hole through the whiteness so I could hear again. Sounds of a city. Sounds of a man breathing hard, like he’d been running. Sounds of rain falling against concrete.
I knew these things should smell like something too, and hoped I might smell the man who was speaking and get a clue of who was with me, but all I smelled was a sort of germ-free disinfectant odor that masked everything.
This was beginning to worry me. I tried to move my hands, tried to blink my eyes, tried to focus.
‘‘Don’t fight me, Allie. It’s hard enough as it is. Relax.’’
And that last word brought back to me the owner of the voice. Zayvion.
Color me equal parts amazed and confused. I did not remember being with him. But I had been with a man. A boy. The kid. Cody. I wondered if he was buried in the snow too.
Like a industrial flamethrower in the blizzard of my brain, the memory of Cody and the magic I had used on him burned through my semiconscious mind. I had, or he had, done a substantive draw on magic. I had tried to use it to heal him while a Hound was tracking me. Wasn’t that clever of me?
I had to tell Zayvion. He should know a crazy blonde with a gun was headed this way.
‘‘Bon—’’ And that was all that came out. After that single syllable, my mouth stopped working and I felt like an explosion, or thunderclap, or something loud and nasty had gone off just inches away from my face. That loud nasty sound drenched me in the prickly cool of mint. I could suddenly feel my body again, smell again, see again, think again, and what I thought was that everything hurt.