Alex looked up and bit her lower lip, considering. Technically the two gangs were allies, but after Crowe’s last encounter with the Rolling Sixes, the peace was fragile at best. We shouldn’t be stirring up crap with them. But Alex automatically hated all of Crowe’s girlfriends, and I did, too, because… well, there were reasons.
Again with the hypocrisy. I tried another tack. “What if she tells the Syndicate?” I asked. “We can’t use magic in front of drecks!” That was our word for non-kindled people—who were all around us right now.
Alex rolled her eyes. “Really? If Syndicate agents are coming, their focus is going to be on the real action at the festival, not a prank at a mall.”
Now I was starting to feel ill, and not just because of the sight and sound of mixing magic. “Maybe you’re right, but if anyone finds out—”
Alex shrugged as she peered between two mannequins standing in the storefront partially concealing our position. “We’ll use something innocuous. Come on. Look at how smug she is. I bet she’s telling everyone she got into his pants.”
I followed Kat’s progress down the corridor, her dark hair shining like oil in the light. I couldn’t help but picture Crowe’s fingers sliding through it and the thrill it would have given her like it had once given me. “Fine,” I said.
Alex smiled, baring her teeth in a way that was more maniacal than pleased. She dropped to the floor so she could get a better look into the bottom of her purse. “Aha. This will work.” She held up a small plank of red wood, about the size of a stick of gum. Scrawled across the length of it in silver sharpie was SMELL: BAD.
The wood plank was called a cut, or charm, and I could immediately tell that it’d been created by Thom Flynn because of the handwriting, and because it was so unadorned. Most kindled created cuts like they were art, etching them with rune symbols or hand-drawing their labels in heady oil paints. Flynn’s cuts were like Flynn: simple and straightforward.
“Why do you have a bad-smelling charm?” I asked, and got a weird look from a passing guy. I pressed my lips together. We weren’t supposed to talk about magic in front of drecks, either.
“You never know when a stench will be called for,” Alex answered. “I like to be prepared for anything.”
Once activated, cuts were easy to use directly, like for protection or as tools—or weapons. It was a little trickier to use them remotely, on a target that wasn’t close by, but Alex was a pro at by-proxy magic.
“Do you know what the smell is?” I asked, nerves creeping in once again.
“No.” Alex was crouching just inside the entrance to the store. “But knowing Flynn, I’m sure it’s uproariously foul.” She set the charm in the palm of her hand and whispered the short incantation, giving it a target. As she stood up, I shifted behind her and grabbed the bar of a nearby clothing rack, just in case. Even though I wasn’t the magic’s target, I never knew how the scent and sight of it would affect me, and I didn’t want anyone to know it could affect me at all.
The wooden cut glowed green with Flynn’s inlusio magic, and despite the fact that it had been created to give off a bad smell, my nose filled with the scent of autumn leaves and cigar smoke—the smell of the inlusio magic itself. Emerald filaments laced my vision, and I clamped my eyes shut in the hope of clearing them away.
“Hey, you okay?” Alex asked.
I forced my eyes open. “What? Oh. Yeah. Headache.”
“Again?” She lifted the charm from her hand, and the light burned out. Once again, it looked like nothing more than a normal sliver of wood. “Want me to—”
“No,” I said quickly as she started to reach for me, ready to use her own venemon magic to heal. “I’m fine.” There was enough magic in the air already.
“Oh, here we go,” she whispered, peering at Kat.
I followed the line of her gaze with a mixture of dread and giddiness. This was the way of our relationship. Alex always did the dirty work, and I always let her. She had enough power and caused enough trouble that there was almost never pressure on me to use my own magic, for which I was very thankful.
The first to catch a whiff of the curse was the shorter girl at Katrina’s left. Her nose wrinkled and she brought a hand up to cover it. “Ewww,” she said. “What is that smell?”
Kat caught on next, and her mouth turned down at the corners as she tried to wave the smell away. “I don’t know. God, that’s awful.”
The dark-haired girl trailing behind Kat said, “I don’t mean to be a bitch, but I think it’s you.”
“Of course it’s not me, you idiot.” Katrina scowled. “I showered this morning.”
“Oh God, it smells like rotten tuna,” another girl said.
Alex barked out a laugh.
Katrina’s head turned, and her eyes immediately found us hunched in the entrance of the clothing store.
“Shit,” Alex said.
“I told you!” I said.
“Go!” Alex pushed me out the door.
“You haven’t paid for the dress!”
She threw it over the shoulder of the nearest mannequin and gave me another shove. “I’ll come back for it later.”
“Alexandra!” Katrina yelled. “Jemmie! I will kill you!” She stormed toward us, her sleek ponytail whipping behind her.
Shoppers slowed to watch our drama. A cluster of dreck girls from Hawthorne High held up their phones, ready to film if a fight broke out.
“Faster!” Alex gave me another shove.
“Don’t push me!” I said over a shoulder.
Kat was gaining ground on us. “Goddamn it, you two! Undo it!”
“Not a chance!” Alex said.
“Hey! Ladies! Stop right there!” A mall cop stepped into our path, his hands held up like he was trying to soothe a bucking horse. Or, more likely, stop a suspected shoplifter.
People pressed up against the storefronts, throwing protective arms around their children like we were first-rate criminals. Laughter bubbled up my throat.
Alex snapped her fingers, and her magic, sweet and smoky and shimmering with golden flecks, hit my senses in an instant even though, once again, I wasn’t its target. She dodged to the left, yanking me with her as I stumbled. The cop—who was the target—doubled over, his face waxen.
Just as Katrina was running past the cop, he straightened and puked all over her. The gathered onlookers took a collective breath. Katrina froze, vomit dripping down her leg and sloughing from her billowy tank top.
“Time to go,” Alex whispered just as Katrina snapped back to life and let out a demon-like snarl.
Alex and I laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed until we were far away from the mall and Katrina Niklos.
“I definitely need to trade for another of Flynn’s cuts,” Alex said.
She turned her car off Reddman Road and onto a graveled one-lane. The woods hugged the drive that wound back to Sable River, and the little cottage that sat on its shore. We were officially on Medici property now, which made us safer than almost anywhere else.
“Because that has got to be the second-best revenge strike we’ve ever put in motion.”
“I think you mean you,” I corrected. “I get dizzy if I even try to cast like that.”
Alex blew out a breath. “It takes practice, Jemmie,” she said quietly. “Don’t tell me you can’t do it. Remember that time Crowe was chasing after us in the woods and you put up that barrier—?”
“We were eleven. I was scared. It was a reflex.” And I’d gotten so dizzy from the rush of my own magic, plus the intensity of the sight and smell of it so close by, that I tripped and fell on my face a second later. Crowe was after us because he’d discovered us in his room and threatened to pull our lungs out through our nostrils—a threat I actually took seriously. But he bounced off my barrier right after I fell. He landed on his butt, already laughing about the instant karma while I wiped mud from my face on the other side.
“That was one seriously badass reflex, my friend,” Alex replied.
I turned toward the window, thinking of what had happened the very next day, how it had changed my life forever, how it had cemented my decision to avoid using magic whenever and however I could. “It was a fluke.”