His face lit up, then collapsed. “But I gotta pee.”
“Hold it,” I offered, “and I’ll throw in french fries.”
A complex series of expressions danced across Mags’s face as he struggled with this dilemma. That the huge man had a bladder the size of a golf ball I’d learned the hard way shortly after adopting him from Hiram, but he could also be induced to do almost anything with an offer of food. Watching an unstoppable force and an unmovable object do battle was fascinating.
“So what’s the story, D.A.?” I asked, turning from Mags’s expression of intense concentration as he attempted to seize control of his bodily functions.
Ketterly rocked on his heels and exhaled loudly. “Well, old Mrs. Landry is an old customer o’ mine, kid. I found more cats for her than you’d believe. How she loses ’em remains a mystery for the universe.”
Most likely explanation, I thought, was that Ketterly magicked the cats away so he could find them the next day and collect his fees, but I wasn’t going to queer his play.
“Anyways, she calls me this morning and says she has a much bigger problem. Says her husband’s gone crazy. He’s a different person, she says. Ranting, raving, smashing things. So she locked him in the guest bathroom and called me.”
“Not the cops?”
Ketterly made a face. “Me and old lady Landry, we got a relationship, kids,” he said. “She wanted my counsel.”
I wasn’t sure how finding lost cats equated marriage counseling, but then I strongly suspected at the bottom of that train of thought was a deep, dark well involving Ketterly seducing elderly ladies, and I fervently didn’t want to gaze down into it.
“So why are we here?”
He shrugged. “Believe it or not, Vonnegan, you’re my muscle.”
I glanced at Mags; I believed it.
The elevator dinged, and we stepped onto the twenty-fourth floor. It was silent and felt insulated, with a hum in the air that hinted at a hermetic seal, like a hotel at night, a world unto itself. The carpet was an aggressively dark green that looked black out of the corner of your eye, making me unsteady as we walked toward 24E. I felt like each step was taking me into thin air.
When we were about ten feet from the door, we stopped. The door was smashed, the lock busted out, and the whole thing hanging loose in the frame.
“Ah, shit,” Ketterly muttered, looking back over his shoulder and trying to decide if we were the type of Tricksters who would support a decision to just turn around and leave.
“We gotta at least take a look,” I said, envisioning forty dollars bursting into flames while Ketterly jetted off in his humongous car. “Old lady, right?”
I could tell Ketterly’s commitment to the Rules of Civilization was weak as he stared longingly at the elevators for a full beat before seeming to collapse slightly, shrinking. “Fine.”
I produced my switchblade and snapped it open, slicing into my palm with a practiced movement, shedding just enough blood for the job at hand. I spoke two Words and a blue witchlight enveloped my fist, feeding off the gas. I walked up to the door and held up my hand, feeling the sickening tug in my belly as the universe drank my life energy in exchange for the spell, and then I froze.
“Ah, shit,” Ketterly said. “Time to fucking go.”
The door was glowing brightly, the witchlight revealing the residue of some serious magical energy. Someone with some power—saganustari, maybe—had been here recently and laid down some heavy spells.
I hesitated. I wasn’t a powerful mage, slitting throats and casting major rituals. I bled to kite checks and confuse people so they left their wallets behind. I bled to steal PIN numbers and get free meals. I bled and bled and bled because I wouldn’t bleed anyone else, and so I was half alseep and exhausted all the time. Walking into a saganustari’s situation was an easy way to get burned, and Mags and I were one step away from ruin as it was.
“She might be hurt,” Mags said, his voice small and hesitant. “D.A. said she was old.”
I closed my eyes and heard Ketterly curse under his breath. We were going in with him or without him, and since Landry was his client, it was coming back on Ketterly anyway.