We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (2 page)

I was thirty-three years old and I was wearing the sum total of my worldly possessions, and recently decisions I’d made when I was fifteen didn’t seem so fucking bright anymore. We all thought we were special—all of us, every fucking Trickster all the way up to the fucking
enustari
—we all thought we had the edge. And maybe we did. But here I was, dopey from blood loss and begging the universe for a handout.

I stood up and fished my switchblade from my pocket, pressing the button and hearing the familiar, horrible
snick
of the blade flashing out.

“What—” Mags said, barking the word like he meant it as declarative:
What!

I unfolded my left hand and drew the blade across my palm, just deeply enough to draw a thick, slow ooze of blood. The pain, as always, shivered through me like poison, and I sucked in breath, tensing. I’d cut myself millions of times. I had faint white scars on both hands, my
arms, my legs, and even my stomach. I did it immediately and without thought, letting my underbrain run the show.

Blood dripped from my clenched fist as a hot icy rash of fire spread over my palm. Closing my eyes, I imagined the glow, saw the faint blue light in my mind, and on the beat of my heart I whispered the spell. The blood sizzled away midair, consumed, and my wound was dry and open, aching.

A wave of dizzy weariness swept through me. As a damp line of blood oozed into place on my palm, my hand was engulfed in a soft blue glow that made Mags look like he was made of shadows. Puke mounting in my throat, I knelt and resisted the urge to rest my forehead against the cool porcelain of the tub. I stretched out my arm to hold the eerie light over her. Instantly, a complex pattern of symbols, like invisible tattoos, faded into visibility on her skin, covering all of her. I knew without checking that they were under her hair, too, inside her earlobes, on the webby skin between her fingers.

“Fuck,” Mags breathed, the word now a plaintive exclamation. “She’s marked.”

I stared down at the runes for another second. They were complex, and I didn’t have time to pick through them and compare them to my memories, to what my
gasam
had taught me. I knew a few things right away: I knew the runes would ward her from any other magic I might try to cast, resisting all but the most bloody and powerful spells, and this meant she was part of something way out of my league.

I studied her face. Sixteen? Twenty? It was hard to tell. Curled up in the tub, she looked peaceful. Young. There were old bruises on her arms. A crust of snotty blood around one nostril. I looked at her feet. Was relieved she was barefoot. For a second I remembered canvas tennis shoes, pink marker. The sound of a girl shivering, her bare arms bruised just like that.

I pushed the memory away, angry at myself. I hadn’t bled this girl. I hadn’t done anything.

I looked at Mags. His big flat face was crunched up in thought, and
I knew I had to get him out of here before whoever had done this came back. I snapped my hand out like I was throwing something and the blue light sizzled away, leaving us in the faint light of the candle. I reached down and dragged him up by the collar.

I thought back to standing outside the door, half an hour before. I’d thought about turning around. A moment of crazy affection for Mags outside the door, and I’d thought maybe sleeping out in the open one more night wouldn’t be the worst thing ever. Now I knew what the Worst Thing Ever looked like. Or at least the tip of that black iceberg.

“Come on,” I said, pushing him towards the door. Mags could fold me into complex patterns and not break a sweat, but he was tame.

“What’s up, Lem?”

I kept pushing him, urging him to go faster, imagining the owner of that corpse walking in and finding us—and whoever had marked her was a fucking deep well of trouble.

We are not good people.

We rushed through the hall and back into the first room, as sealed and stultifying as ever, the candle guttering in front of us and throwing odd shadows everywhere. My heart was pounding as I urged the big cocksucker forward, almost throwing him through the door. I didn’t bother putting things back the way they were; the important thing was to not be there anymore.

In the hall, I spun and pulled the door shut behind us, my fingers throbbing. I squeezed my sliced hand again and opened my palm to reveal a nice smear of greasy blood; I wrapped my hand around the doorknob, took a deep breath, and whispered a Cantrip to replace the wards we’d broken and not noticed in our haste to get inside, the syllables—not words, really, just sounds—welling up automatically from memory. It was all about patterns, rhythms. You could find ways to cut the Words down, just like any language. You could say
Please pass me the salt
or you could say
Pass the salt
and they meant the same thing. It was the same with magic. You could cast a spell with fifty words, you could cast the same spell with five words, if you knew what you were doing.

I’d always had a way with the Words.

Another wave of tiredness settled into my bones, and I staggered a bit, holding on to the doorknob. When I’d steadied, I took my hand away. The door looked exactly as it had when we’d arrived. No one walking by would ever notice anything out of the ordinary . . . unless they had a trained eye and specifically knew to look for something.

I took a deep breath. My heart was ragged in my chest, and I felt shaky and light. I reached into my jacket and extracted an old soiled handkerchief and started wrapping it around my hand.

“C’mon, Mags,” I said, turning for the stairs.

He hustled to walk beside me. “What’s the matter, Lem?”

I didn’t pause. I could hear thick leathery wings in my head, too close. “Deep magic, Mags,” I said, pushing open the door to the stairs. “Deep fucking magic.”

2
.
RUE’S MORGUE WAS A BAR.
Popular with Tricksters. Most nights you could find a lot of lightweight talent in there, scheming. It was off-limits to our usual cons: No one gassed up dollar bills in Rue’s, and no one used a bit of Charm on the bartenders or any unsuspecting civilians who wandered in. The Normals were fair game everywhere else, but you don’t shit where you plot, and everyone needed a place where there were rules. Even low-rent grifters like us. The owner was a fat man named Kenny who’d inherited the dive from his mother. He was soft and cranky and didn’t like us much, because we didn’t spend a lot when we had to use our own money.

“I don’t understand a fucking thing any of you say,” he said like a mantra, several times a night. “We used to get a better class of customer.”

Kenny never had any idea how right he was. Tricksters. We were the bottom. There was a general rule against fucking with Kenny—who, so
far, had lived in peaceful ignorance of having a hundred Tricksters in his bar every night—but sometimes it was impossible to resist. Mags bumped into me as I stopped just inside. Bounced back like a parade float and hovered there. The place was fucking empty. I looked at the bartender.

“Neilsson been in?”

It was a Thursday, so the bartender was Sheila. Tall. Skinny. Fake tits. Black jeans, white shirt, black vest. Dull hair, dull eyes. She got better-looking as the night went on, usually.

She looked at me. Red eyes. Hungover. Had the best fucking job in the world right up until it became the worst fucking job in the world. Shook her head.

I sighed. Stepped over to one of the wobbly wooden tables and dropped into a chair.

“Get us a couple of shots, Magsie.”

All of my scars throbbed. I adjusted the fresh bandages and contemplated the black hole that was following me around. It had started off as a pinprick of absolute doom and grown slowly. Now it was man-sized, and the gravitational pull was adding five seconds to every move I made. I had no money and now no prospects. I had Mags. I supposed I could train him to dance and stand behind him, clapping, while people threw coins into a hat.

Maybe with a bit of gas, a creative Cantrip to spice it up . . .

Mags came back with two big shot glasses. They were empty.

“Sheila says we hit the cutoff last week and just didn’t notice.”

I nodded. Mags sat down. We always had blood. There were always guppies out there who would fall for a stupid trick. All was not lost. I was so fucking tired. All my cuts throbbed in time with my ragged heartbeat.

“We could go find Heller,” Mags said. “Hook in to that circus.”

I blew breath out of my mouth. “We could, sure.” I thought about that scene, a fucking Manson family of grifters. Heller was an
idimustari
who didn’t have any rules. About anything. “He’s in Jersey.”

Mags snorted. “
Fuck
.”

I nodded. Thought about the girl in the tub. This did not help my mood. I hadn’t killed her, but the runes meant someone who knew the Words had. Marked her up for a major spell, a Rite, and sucked her dry to cast it. I pictured her. No more than twenty. Maybe younger. Curled up in that ancient tub, she’d looked like a little kid, sleeping.

I wanted to chat with Neilsson about it. He’d been sitting on that apartment like a hen on a jeweled egg. Maybe he knew if we were in trouble or not. Maybe he’d sent us there on purpose, throwing heat our way. Maybe all that time we’d spent shining him on and gassing him, he’d been gassing
us.

Sitting there with my empty glass and Mags panting next to me, jingling his collar, I thought better of it. I was glad Neilsson wasn’t around. I didn’t really want to know any more than I already did about the girl.

Jersey maybe wasn’t a bad idea, I thought. Get out of town. Out of circulation. In case anyone noticed the broken wards on that door, the hastily re-created ones.

“My boys!”

I twisted around to glance back at the entrance to the private-party room. Eyed the short, thin man in the patched overcoat emerging from it. Kept my face neutral.

“Hey, Ketterly.” He was older than us by some unknowable amount. He wore thick square glasses and always looked slovenly. Graying hair. Too much of it. Mustache. Sloppy old suit, sloppy stained overcoat. No bandages on his fingers; Ketterly liked to blend in with the Normals. He was the sort of cheerful you couldn’t trust because it was constant.

Ketterly always looked like he was enjoying himself, which made him a fucking liar. He worked a paranormal detective grift, sifting small coin from idiots using a few easy Cantrips to locate lost items or drum up a few poltergeists, claim he was contacting the dead. You
could
contact the dead, of course, assuming you had a few dozen
bodies to drain for the effort. Ketterly just put on a show, occasionally found something to make it look good.

He did other work, too, when he could. He was the sort who did anything he got paid to do.

He dropped into the chair across from me and waved at the bartender. I felt a thrill. “Give us three drops, dear,” he said breathlessly. I could sense Mags’s excitement.

Ketterly grinned at him.

“You want a trick, kid?”

Mags nodded. “Yeah!”

Ketterly entertained Mags like you entertained strange children met by chance. Toys. He always had little showy Glamours to teach Mags: short, dirty spells that were colorful and loud, harmless and easy. Pitr Mags loved it, and if he hadn’t had the memory of a chipmunk, he would have had hundreds of them squirreled away by now.

Sheila brought three full glasses. Sullen. She’d expected an easy afternoon shift filled with napping and coffee, regret and self-loathing. Instead, she had us.

When she left, Mags sliced his palm as Ketterly started giving him the Words. Too many syllables; I got the gist of what he was doing right away and saw where he could have cut half of it away. Bending light and air, most of it was repetition. Ketterly was a sloppy writer. Most of us were; most of us were taught a spell and just repeated it exactly like we’d been taught, forever and ever, amen. Mags was excited and cut too deep, blood welling up from his hand in a rush. I could smell it. Feel it in the air. Sheila was behind the bar again, eyes closed. No one else around. Mags started repeating Ketterly’s spell.

I studied Ketterly. I wondered why he was here. He sometimes did real work for people. Small-time, Tricksters like us. Anyone who needed people found, things buried. I thought of the girl in the tub, then thought of Ketterly sitting in the back room as we walked into the bar. A man who did dirty jobs, a man who found people. I scanned the sleepy room: sawdust on the floor and the empty tables, glossy with varnish and
marked with the repeating pattern of water stains, circles on circles on circles. Nothing seemed threatening or even unfamiliar. But I was itchy, staring into Ketterly’s smiling face. The man was a hound, and when he walked into a room he was searching for something or someone.

Told myself I was paranoid. I probably was. Ketterly was
idimustari
just like me, and the Archmages of the world didn’t waste their time hiring bottom-feeders like him to find other bottom-feeders like me. They had blood-soaked spells for that.

I felt the swell of power in the room. Gas building up, being focused and shaped. Mags casting the stupid trick, pulling the energy from his own open wound. Too much for what he was doing, I could tell. He needed just a pinch for this bullshit, but he had a free flow going. If you pulled too much for a small spell, you got an exaggerated version of it: too bright, too loud, too big, too whatever.

A Trickster didn’t worry much about that, though. I only knew one spell of sufficient power and complexity to be dangerous if overpowered or unfinished, and I’d never cast it.

I saw the girl in my head for a moment. A different girl. Younger. Shivering. As always, I saw her sneakers. Perfect in my memory. Every flower. Every heart. Every instance of her fucking name. I’d seen her once, ten years ago, for fifteen minutes. I could close my eyes and see every pore still.

I shook myself, got rid of her. Put myself back into the moment.

Thing was, Ketterly didn’t
like
the Normals. We were all Tricksters. Everyone I knew. We all preyed on regular people, people who didn’t believe in magic. Who didn’t
know
. We weren’t a guild, we didn’t have rules, but there was a code, a loose agreement. We kept each other’s secrets from the others, people who could be fooled easily because they didn’t think what we did was possible. I never thought it made me better than them, though. I knew a secret they didn’t know. You couldn’t win a game if you didn’t know the rules.