We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (18 page)

I forced myself to move. To prove I
could
move. There was a strange crackling noise; at first I felt frozen, glued in place. Then, suddenly, I was free and able to move. I stared around. I looked through the half-open doors. The platform beyond was similarly frozen.

“Why is time stopped out there, too?”

Hiram scowled, unrolling his sleeve. “Time is not
stopped,
Mr. Vonnegan. It is relative. Either we are moving incredibly quickly through time, or everyone else on this train car is moving incredibly
slowly
. Since our perception is what determines reality, Mr. Vonnegan, it appears to us that the platform—the entire world—has been affected. It has not. If we cross outside the affected area of the spell, we will rejoin the normal flow of time. If we were standing on that platform right now, we would observe no change in the world—except perhaps that you and I have just disappeared. We are still here, but moving through time differently.”

I shook my head. “I’ll never fucking understand that.”

Hiram laughed, a booming, theatrical laugh. It was the first thing I’d liked about him.

“You do not have to, Mr. Vonnegan. Perception. Volume. That is all you need to remember. In time I will teach this spell to you. In time you will cast it and bleed another.”

I felt so tired. I recalled the terrible feeling of that power, being pulled through you like you were an opening that was slightly too small for a monstrous thing, being torn open and stretched to accommodate it. I thought of doing that to someone else, and kept imagining a monstrous mosquito, six feet tall, pinning you down and jabbing its stinger into your belly. That memory of smothering, that awful feeling of being
drained
—I couldn’t inflict that on someone else. It would be impossible. And what did you do with something like this? I wondered. To affect a useful space, like this, you needed a lot of blood. If I bled out two pints of my own, I doubted I’d be able to do anything afterwards.

But to
slow down time
 . . . To be able to slip out of the moment and walk between moments . . . a man who could cast that kind of spell could do just about anything.

“Attend to me, Mr. Vonnegan,” Hiram said, stepping past me. “This will not last long, from our perspective.”

Moving was strange; I once again heard the strange crackling noise and felt at first like I’d been nailed to the floor. Then I seemed to
snap
free in a sense and was able to move. Everything around me was absolutely still but seemed to shimmer. The slightest, tiniest bit of movement, I thought. Almost imperceptible.

I followed Hiram, feeling drained. Exhausted. I watched dully as he went up to the nearest person, a man in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, caught in the act of stumbling. As I watched, dumbly, Hiram began going through the man’s pockets.

We worked the entire car. I took one side, Hiram the other. We took cash, but Hiram was most intent on the jewelry, examining every watch, ring, bracelet, and chain briefly but with steady, practiced eyes. He left some of the pieces and took the others. By the end, he was humming happily. He looked tired, but was in the best mood I’d seen him in since coming to New York.

“Come, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, holding up the wad of cash. “Time for some dinner. And a good bottle of Malbec.”

The car doors had, in fact, closed slightly farther in the time we’d spent robbing the car. Perhaps half an inch. We approached, and Hiram put a hand on my chest, stopping us.

“Be prepared,” he said seriously. “The transition is sudden.”

He nodded, turned, and stepped through the doors. Vanished.

I stared. One second he’d been moving, right in front of me. Then he was gone. Swept forward into the normal stream of time.

I stepped forward and . . .

14.
I STARTLED AWAKE. THE BUS
had been our home for so long, I wasn’t sure how we’d adjust to life without it. Mags had gassed up twelve dollars and fifty cents into a small fortune, passing bloody bills with reckless abandon, buying tickets and hamburgers and bottles of water. Three days with nothing to do but sleep and eat and be horrified by the bathroom haunting the rear of the bus. I was starting to feel almost normal.

Across the aisle, Claire sat in the outer seat. Pitr Mags was folded up on his side, his head resting in her lap, sleeping soundly. She was stroking his hair absently as we rumbled through Hill Country. I was deeply in love with her for stroking Mags’s hair. She noticed I was awake and turned her head to look at me.

“So, your man Hiram,” she said drowsily. It was the continuation of one giant conversation we’d been having for days.

Outside, it was dark. Featureless, black. We might have been in some sort of experiment, a vehicle on casters, sound effects, paid extras in the seats around us.

“My
gasam,
” I said. “My Master, in the sense of having an apprentice.”

She nodded sleepily. I liked the blurry way she got when she was tired. We’d been talking for hours, on and off. Packets of words. I felt like I knew things about her that no one else knew, and I liked that, too. “How do you know he’s dead?”

I waited a few seconds. I didn’t know how I felt about Hiram. I hadn’t
liked
him, really. Had barely known him in that way you’re supposed to know people you have a thing with. Had found him irritating on more than one occasion. But he’d taken Mags in before me, which argued in his favor. And he’d just been a part of things. Always there. I realized, the second it had been severed, that I was always subconsciously aware of my magical connection to him. Now, when I noticed the absence, I felt incomplete.

“I know. We had a . . . bond.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that, as we’d left the city, I’d been surprised and a little saddened not to have felt the slight, uncomfortable tugging in my gut that was that bond. It had always been there, increasing in degree as distance increased. A
gasam
could choose to invoke the bond, use it like a leash to tug his apprentice back, but Hiram had just let it sizzle, always there, like a fishhook in my back that had healed over.

“Why was he so angry at you?”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how much Claire remembered from her few minutes in Hiram’s house with us, especially the first time.

“Because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And that was?”

She was looking at me with her sleepy eyes, her serious face. She was the sort who didn’t let things go—gentle but persistent. She had perfect lips, a little pink bow. Even in the cheap new clothes Mags had bought her, baggy tan pants and a heavy shirt, a thick gray sweater, the world’s cutest wool cap, she had a shape and grace to her I wanted to stare at.

I sighed. “Hiram thought I had potential. Magic. That I could be something special.” I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe he’s even right. I remember
he spells easy, I can see how to improve them, little shortcuts. I can even make up my own, which Hiram can’t.” I paused. “Couldn’t. But I won’t bleed other people for it. I get by on what I can gas myself, and that’s it.”

“Fuck, why
blood
?”

“I don’t know. No one does, I don’t think. Something primeval, right?”

The bus hummed along. We hummed along in it.

“This guy we’re heading to,” she said after a moment.

“Gottschalk,” I said. “Faber Gottschalk.”

“He can get these runes off me?”

I nodded. “He’s
enustari
.” She frowned at me, and I shook my head. “A big fucking deal. Right up there with the woman who wants to slice you open and bleed you like a pig.” I shrugged again. “Powerful.”

My Rolodex was not exactly filled with
enustari
. I could remember three, maybe four, from Hiram’s sketchy lecturing: Carith Abdagnale if she qualified, which I wasn’t certain she did; Mika Renar; Faber Gottschalk; and Beni Aragaki, and I only knew Aragaki’s
name
.

“Why is Gottschalk going to help me?”

“I don’t know. We’re going to have to come up with a reason.”

She chewed on that.

I reviewed what I knew about Faber Gottschalk. This didn’t take long. I knew he’d been Hiram’s
gasam
for ten years. That they’d parted ways amicably. That despite that, Hiram had always made fists without realizing it when he mentioned Gottschalk’s name.

Claire went on in a small voice, “Why does it have to be
me
? Why chase after me? Just find someone else.”

I wanted to reach across the aisle and touch her. Seconds went by, marked by the sway of the bus and the soft sounds of half-asleep people. The bus was alive, and we were just the cilia of its lungs, swaying with each inhalation and exhalation, absorbing oxygen.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said softly, trying to remember how Hiram had explained things and say it all differently. “The word is
biludha,
ritual. Everything involved in it has to be done in a specific, precise way. They marked you, so you have to die in your proper place. Right now all the power expended in the Rite is up in the air, suspended. If you don’t die exactly when you’re supposed to, the next girl won’t die, or the next one. No one after you will, and the Rite falls apart. They mark up someone new, the Rite falls apart.”

She sighed, closing her eyes. I studied her face. Imagined her as a kid in school when I’d been in school, both of us chafing to get away, imagining that cigarettes were part of the fare out of our lives. I suddenly regretted using the phrase
slice you open and bleed you like a pig.

I thought of all the other girls. The ones the Skinny Fuck had snatched before Claire. The ones who looked like Claire from future moments she might never get, each one a little older than the last.

Mags snorted and twisted, slumbering, and wound up with his nose planted directly in Claire’s crotch. She opened her eyes and looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

“He
is
asleep, right?”

I smiled. “Mags doesn’t have a creepy bone in his body. He’s a puppy.”

Looking down at Mags’s head, she continued stroking his hair, pushing it around gently. “How’d you pick him up, anyway?”

“I ran away from home when I was seventeen. Nothing dramatic: I got tired of Dad showing up outside school now and then kidnapping me—literally—and then coming home to Mom pissed off at
me
for being kidnapped, you know? Nothing dramatic. I got fed every day and had clothes and my own room, no one was beating me up or anything, but I just . . . left.”

I didn’t tell her about the old man in the parking lot. It wouldn’t make sense without all the backstory. She leaned towards me slightly, out over the armrest of her seat. I let my eyes run down the curve of her neck, the sharp, pleasant line of her collarbone. I couldn’t see the runes on her because I wasn’t trying, and there was no gas in the air to help me out. Her skin looked perfect to me. She smelled like clean
laundry. When she spoke, her voice was soft and ten years younger, and it was like we were having a sleepover, curled up with each other on someone’s carpeted basement floor, listening to records.

“I ran away from home, too,” she said quietly.

I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“I came to New York looking for a Hiram. Not
Hiram,
because I didn’t know he existed, but someone like him. Someone who could teach me how to do things.”

Hiram gesturing with a bandaged hand and making a muffin float across a diner to his waiting hand. Hiram sitting at the counter eating it while he read a newspaper like nothing unusual had happened. Hiram stealing the fucking salt and pepper shakers from the counter when he left.

“Hiram already
had
Mags. Mags was basically Hiram’s Oddjob when I showed up. He wanted Hiram to apprentice him, but Hiram wouldn’t, because he regarded Mags as Too Stupid to Live.” I considered. “Which isn’t far short of the truth. Anyway, I adopted Mags, he fell in love with me, and we’ve been nonbreeding life partners ever since.”

“He’d take a bullet for you.”

“And me him. Be careful, he’ll adopt
you
.”

We stopped talking. Slowly spread apart like we were floating in jelly, tugged this way and that, the sudden intimacy shattering and leaving us just two people sitting in separate seats. The overwarm bus rumbled and rattled, the emptiness scrolling past us, and after a few minutes of pondering Claire Mannice and the neat way she’d folded her legs under herself on the seat, I fell asleep.

IT WAS COLDER THAN
I would have expected in Texas. We crept off the bus like stumblebums, stiff and squinty, unshowered and crusty. The bus had pulled over outside the library, of all places. A small park sporting an ice rink was across the street. It was literally called Main Street, wide and pretty heavily trafficked at ten in the morning.

Claire stood next to a street sign and began stretching, pulling one ankle up towards her head as she balanced, one hand on the signpost. I stared, breath steaming in front of me.

“What’s our bank account?” I asked Mags without taking my eyes from her.

“Seven dollars,” he said. He paused, as if checking his grade-school addition skills, and then repeated it. “Seven dollars.”

It wasn’t unexpected or even uncomfortable. I’d been living on an eternal seven dollars for years. I took stock. I was hungry—starving, but I’d been starving for ten years and it was normal to me. I felt good. Rested. Probably still down a pint but no longer on the verge of passing out. I had a tremendous appetite, but not just for food. I wanted cigarettes and whiskey, and I wanted to bleed a bit and Charm the pants off of Claire Mannice, literally. She’d been twelve inches away for three days and I had memorized her smell.

I clapped Mags on the shoulder. “Breakfast. You up for a Beauty Queen?”

He nodded sleepily. “Sure, Lem. I’ll cast the compulsion, you cast the Charm.”

“What’s a
Beauty Queen
?” Claire asked. Somehow she was standing right next to us, a fucking cat in need of a bell.