Mags had the clean-slate cheer of the dim-witted. He crouched there serenely, certain that I would solve this little problem for us. That I would roll her over and discover some ancient cash, or jewels, or discover that she wasn’t dead at all. Mags’s faith in me was sometimes invigorating, more often exhausting. Mags could survive on rage and profanity; he didn’t need to eat. I thought of him as a pet sometimes, a monstrous kitten I’d picked up and let sleep in my pocket one night, and now—when I looked at his plump, blood-engorged face and twitchy, murderous hands, I felt a stab of horrifying affection—Mags was my responsibility.
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 a 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 down and resisted the urge to put my forehead against the cool porcelain 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 I knew 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 his collar.
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 toward 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 the door and finding us—and whoever had marked her was a fucking deep well of trouble for any Trickster or normal person caught here.
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’d come; the important thing was to not be here anymore.
In the hall, I spun and pulled the door shut behind us, my fingers still 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.