BEING BLED FOR ANY spell that was more than a small Cantrip, a mu, was disconcerting. You felt the weird green drain of the universe sticking its proboscis into you and feeding. You felt every bit of it, all that life force, all that energy—your very existence—being siphoned off.
Hiram had bled me. One of the few actual requirements of being urtuku or apprentice to an ustari—in point of fact, pretty much all you got to do for the first six months or so—was to bleed for them. I’d left home the moment I could and spent weeks wandering the city; I didn’t even know what to look for. When I saw the old man stealing donuts by making them float over to him, I didn’t think about consequences. I signed up, and Hiram, the old bastard, handed me a knife on my first day and told me to cut myself to get used to the pain.
I knew what it was like to bleed: It was slow death. The first time Hiram had insisted I bleed someone else, I’d walked away, and I still thought about her and her pink sneakers. And every time I thought of her, I felt like an asshole.
I felt like an asshole and I hadn’t bled her.
The worst thing about being bled was having someone incompetent speaking the Words. You’re there bleeding, and they’re hemming and hawing through ten unnecessary syllables, wasting it. The second Ketterly opened his mouth, I knew we were in trouble. The man spoke the Words like he’d learned them long ago, in translation.
We were back in the old bookshop, kneeling on a sheet of plastic, me and Mags, with our right arms extended. Ketterly had never bothered cleaning the place out, and it was crowded with dusty books that hadn’t been moved in years. He’d simply swept the stuff off the small wooden desk in the front, put a bottle of bourbon in one drawer, and declared D. A. Ketterly Investigations—slogan: Miracles Achieved!—to be in business.
We’d cut pretty deep, because a Finding spell needed a lot of gas in a city the size of New York, and Ketterly’s sloppy, greedy spell sucked every drop from my wound, making me feel like the jackass was going to bleed me to death, roll me up in the plastic, and ship me out to Staten Island.
“For fuck’s sake, Digory,” I said, using his given name because he hated it. “Didn’t you grab something personal from the home to use as calibration? I don’t want to die in your crappy office because you don’t know how to cast a kigni.”
Ketterly glanced at me, still reciting, and extended his middle finger. I had to give him that much credit: He didn’t pause. Hesitation on a spell caused it to collapse, often spectacularly. If the spell was big enough, if enough blood was fed into it, not tying it off with a cadence could result in an explosion that would do real damage. Ustari had been killed.
I offered my own middle finger back, hand shaking as I held it up. Sweat dripped onto the plastic; the blood was absorbed by the spell. I listened intently, following each Word choice. I could see where he was going with the kigni, the Searcher spell, and it wasn’t half bad: He would be able to follow his instincts and know exactly where Mr. Earl Landry was at any given moment. A lesser ustari would have wasted blood and energy on something fancier, something that told you where Landry was so you could race over to his precise location. Except then, Landry might move, and you’d have to try again, and either way you were racing around. Ketterly’s spell combined the racing with the locator, killing two birds and all that jazz. It was a clever idea wrapped in a bloated spell; I could have accomplished the same thing in half the Words, using half the gas, if only I were willing to bleed other people. As it was, I waited impatiently for the son of a bitch to finally get there.
When he spoke the final Word, I sagged as the universe took the last bit of me. Head spinning, I turned to check on Mags, who was marveling—as usual—at his instantly healed wound, studying it intently with a slight grin. I swallowed a smile. Mags was a moron, but he was my moron.
“Well?” I croaked, trying to hide how much Ketterly’s shitty spell had taken from me.