Table Of ContentMagic on the Hunt
Allie Beckstrom [6]
Devon Monk
Penguin (2011)
Rating:
★★★★★
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction
Fantasyttt Generalttt Fictionttt
Product Description
In the secret lockup of the Authority, the council that decides what can and can't
be done with magic, an undead magic user has possessed one of the prisoners.
He wants his freedom-and then some. Now Allie Beckstrom and her lover,
Zayvion, are the first line of defense against the chaos he's about to unleash on
the city of Portland...
Product Description
In the secret lockup of the Authority, the council that decides what can and can't
be done with magic, an undead magic user has possessed one of the prisoners.
He wants his freedom-and then some. Now Allie Beckstrom and her lover,
Zayvion, are the first line of defense against the chaos he's about to unleash on
the city of Portland...
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter One
It was the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, and all I wanted was a
decent cup of coffee, a hot breakfast, and a couple hours away from the
stink of used magic that seeped through the walls of my apartment building
every time it rained.
My current fortune of ten bucks wasn’t going to get me that hot
breakfast, but it was going to buy a good dark Kenya roast and maybe a
muffin down at Get Mugged. What more could a girl ask for?
I took a quick shower, pulled on jeans, a black tank top, and boots. I
brushed my dark hair back and tucked it behind my ears, hoping for the
short, wet, sexy look. I didn’t bother with makeup. Being six foot tall and
the daughter of one of the most notorious businessmen in town got me
enough attention. So did my pale green eyes, athletic build, and the family
knack for coercion.
I pulled on my jacket, careful not to jostle my left shoulder too much.
The scars across my deltoid still hurt, even though it had been three months
since the creep with the knife jumped me. I had known the scars might be
permanent, but I didn’t know they would hurt so much every time it rained.
Blood magic, when improperly wielded by an uneducated street hustler,
was a pain that just kept on giving. Lucky me.
One of these days, when my student loans were paid off and I’d dug my
credit rating out of the toilet, I’d be able to turn down cheap Hounding jobs
that involved back-alley drug deals and black-market revenge spells. Hell,
maybe I’d even have enough money to afford a cell phone again.
I patted my pocket to make sure the small, leather-bound book and pen
were there. I didn’t go anywhere without those two things. I couldn’t. Not if
I wanted to remember who I was when things went bad. And things seemed
to be going bad a lot lately.
I made it as far as the door. The phone rang. I paused, trying to decide if I
should answer it. The phone had come with the apartment, and like the
apartment it was as low-tech as legally allowed, which meant there was no
caller ID.
It could be my dad—or more likely his secretary of the month—
delivering the obligatory annual birthday lecture. It could be my friend
Nola, if she had left her farm and gone into town to use a pay phone. It
could be my landlord asking for the rent I hadn’t paid. Or it could be a
Hounding job.
I let go of the doorknob and walked over to the phone. Let the happy
news begin.
‘‘Hello?’’
‘‘Allie girl?’’ It was Mama Rossitto, from the worst part of North
Portland. Her voice sounded flat and fuzzy, broken up by the cheap
landline. Ever since I did a couple Hounding jobs for Mama a few months
ago, she treated me like I was the only person in the city who could trace a
line of magic back to its user and abuser.
‘‘Yes, Mama, it’s me.’’
‘‘You fix. You fix for us.’’
‘‘Can it wait? I was headed to breakfast.’’
‘‘You come now. Right now.’’ Mama’s voice had a pitch in it that had
nothing to do with the bad connection. She sounded panicked. Angry. ‘‘Boy
is hurt. Come now.’’
The phone clacked down, but must not have hit the cradle. I heard the
clash of dishes pushed into the sink, the sputter of a burner snapping to life,
then Mama’s voice, farther off, shouting to one of her many sons—half of
whom were runaways she’d taken in, all of whom answered to the name
Boy.
I heard something else too, a high, light whistle like a string buzzing in
the wind, softer than a wheezy newborn. I’d heard that sound before. I tried
to place it, but found holes where my memory should be.
Great.
Using magic meant it used you back. Forget the fairy-tale hocus-pocus,
wave a wand and bling-o, sparkles and pixie dust crap. Magic, like booze,
sex, and drugs, gave as good as it got. But unlike booze and the rest, magic
could do incredible good. In the right hands, used the right way, it could
save lives, ease pain, and streamline the complexities of the modern world.
Magic was revolutionary, like electricity, penicillin, and plastic, and in the
thirty years since it had been discovered and made accessible to the general
public, magic had done a lot of good.
At first, everyone wanted a piece of it—magically enhanced food,
fashion, entertainment, sex. And then the reality of such use set in. Magic
always takes its due from the user, and the price is always pain. It didn’t
take people long to figure out how to transfer that pain to someone else,
though.
Laws were put in place to regulate who could access the magic, and how
and why. But there weren’t enough police to keep up with stolen cars and
murders in the city, much less the misuse of a force no one can see.
Things went downhill fast, and as far as I can tell, they stayed there.
But while magic made the average Joe pay one painful price each time he
used it, sometimes magic double dipped on me. I’d get the expected
migraine, flu, roaring fever, or whatever, and then, just for fun, magic
would kick a few holes in my memories. It didn’t happen every time, and it
didn’t happen in any pattern or for any reason I could fathom. Just
sometimes when I use magic, it makes me pay the price in pain, then takes
a few of my memories for good measure.
That’s why I carried a little blank book—to record important bits of my
life. And it’s also why four years at Harvard, pounding tomes for my
masters in business magic, hadn’t worked out quite the way I’d wanted it to.
Still, I was a Hound, and I was good at it. Good enough that I could keep
food on the table, live in the crappiest part of Old Town, and make the
minimum payment on my student loans. And hey, who didn’t have a few
memories they wouldn’t mind getting rid of, right?
The phone clattered and the line went dead.
Happy birthday to me.
If Boy had been hurt by magic, Mama should have called 911 for a
doctor who knew how to handle those sorts of things, not a Hound like me.
Suspicious and superstitious, Mama always thought her family was under
magical attack. Not one of the times I’d Hounded for her had her problem
been a magical hit. Just bad luck, spoiled meat, and, once, cockroaches the
size of small dogs (shudder).
But I had done some other jobs since I’d set up shop here in Portland.
Every one of those sent me sniffing the illegal magical Offloads back to
corporations. And nine times out of nine, even that kind of proof, my
testimony on the stand, and a high-profile trial wouldn’t get the corporation
much more than a cash penalty.
I rolled my good shoulder to try to get the kink out of my neck, but only
managed to make my arm hurt more. I didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t just
ignore her call, and there was no other way to get in touch with her. Mama
wouldn’t answer the phone. She was convinced it was tapped, though I
couldn’t think of anyone who would be interested in the life of a woman
who lived in North Portland, in the broken-down neighborhood of St.
John’s, a neglected and mostly forgotten place cut off from the magic that
flowed through the rest of the city.
I tipped my head back, stared at the ceiling, and exhaled. Okay. I’d go
and make sure Boy was all right. I’d try to talk Mama into calling a doctor.
I’d check for any magical wrongdoing. I’d look for rats. I’d bill her half
price. Then I would go out for a late birthday breakfast.
A girl could hope, anyway.
I walked out the door and locked it. I didn’t bother with alarm spells.
Most single women in the city thought alarm spells would keep them safe,
but I knew firsthand that if someone wanted to break into your apartment
badly enough, there wasn’t a spell worth paying the price for that could
keep them out.
I took the stairs instead of the elevator, because I hate small spaces, and
made it to the street in no time. The mid-September morning was gray as a
grave and cold enough that my breath came out in plumes of steam. The
wind gusted off the Willamette River and rain sliced at my face.
Portland lived up to its name. Even though it was a hundred miles from
the Pacific Ocean, it had that industrial, crumbling-brick-warehouse feel of
the working port it still was, especially along the banks of the Willamette
and Columbia rivers. The Willamette River was practically in my backyard,
behind the warehouses and the train and bus stations. Without squinting I
could see four of the mismatched bridges that crossed the water, connecting
downtown with the east side of the city. Over that river and north, close to
where the Willamette and Columbia met, was Mama’s neighborhood.
I zipped my coat, pulled up my hood, and wished I’d thought about
putting on a sweater before I left.
A bus wouldn’t get me to Mama’s fast enough. However, the good thing
about being a six-foot-tall woman was that cabs, few and far between
though they may be, stopped when you whistled. It didn’t hurt that I had my
dad’s good looks, either. When I was in the mood to smile, I could get
almost anyone to see things my way, even without using magic. True to the
Beckstrom blood, I also had a gift for magic-based Influence. But after
watching my dad Influence my mother, his lovers, business partners, and
even me to get his way, I’d sworn off using it.
It wasn’t like I had wanted to go to Harvard. I had Juilliard in mind: art,
not business; music, not magic. But my dad had severe ideas about what
constituted a useful education.
I waved down a black-and-white taxi and ducked into the backseat. The
driver, a skinny man who smelled like he brushed his hair with bacon
drippings, glanced in the rearview. ‘‘Where to?’’
‘‘St. John’s.’’
His eyes narrowed. I watched him consider telling a nice girl like me
about a bad side of town like that. But he must have decided a fare’s a fare,
and a one-way was better than none at all. He pulled into traffic and didn’t
look back at me again.
Crawling up from the river, the neighborhood had that rotten-tooth brick-
and-board architecture that attracted the poor, the addicted, and the
desperate. Unlike most of the rest of Portland, it stood pretty much as it had
been built back in the 1800s, except it had one other thing going against it
—there was no naturally occurring magic beneath the streets of North
Portland. The city had conveniently forgotten to add the fifth quadrant of
town into the budget when running the lead and glass networks to make
magic available, so now the rest of the city largely ignored the entire area,
like a sore beneath the belt everyone knew about, but no one mentioned in
polite company.
The driver rolled the cab to a stop just on the other side of the railroad
track, and I couldn’t help but smile. He must have heard of the
neighborhood’s rules and rep. Outsiders were tolerated in St. John’s most
days. Only no one knew which days were most days.
‘‘Want me to wait?’’ he asked, even though he probably already knew my
answer.
‘‘No,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ll bus home. Will ten cover it?’’ He nodded, and I
pressed the money into his hand. I pushed the door open against the wind
and got a face full of rain.
I stepped onto the sidewalk and got moving. Mama’s wasn’t far. I took a
couple deep breaths, smelled rain, diesel, and the pungent dead-fish-and-
salt stench off the river. When the wind shifted, I got a noseful of the
sewage treatment plant. Then I caught a hint of something spicy—peppers
and onions and garlic from Mama’s restaurant—and grinned.
I didn’t know why, but coming to this part of town always put me in a
better mood. Maybe it was a sick sort of kinship, knowing that other people
were holding together while everything was falling apart too. There was a
certain kind of honesty in the people who lived here, an honesty in the
place. No magic to keep the storefronts permanently shiny and clean, no
magic to whisk away the stink of too many people living too close together,
no magic to give the illusion that everyone wore thousand-dollar designer
shoes. I liked the honesty of it, even if that honesty wasn’t always pretty.
Or maybe it was just that I figured it was the last place my dad, or
anyone else who expected me to do better by myself (read: do what they
wanted me to do) would ever expect to find me. There was something good
about this rotten side of town. Something invisible to the eye, but obvious
to the soul.
Except for piles of cardboard and a few rusting shopping carts, the street
was empty—a hard rain will do that—so it was easy to spot the motion
from the doorway to my left. I didn’t even have to turn my head to know it
was a man, dark, an inch or two taller than me, wearing a blue ski coat and
black ski hat. From the stink of cheap cologne—something with so much
pine overtone, I wondered if he had splashed toilet cleaner over his head by
Description:In the secret lockup of the Authority, the council that decides what can and can't be done with magic, an undead magic user has possessed one of the prisoners. He wants his freedom-and then some. Now Allie Beckstrom and her lover, Zayvion, are the first line of defense against the chaos he's about t
