Embrace the Night
Page 15

Tami was a low-level null herself, which had helped her to keep the Misfits safe and the chaos to a minimum, at least when she was at home. And her abilities ensured that any runaways she took in didn’t have to worry about registering on a magical tracking spell. Which made it strange that, after so many years, the mages had caught up with her now.
“Okay. I’m relieved to hear that.” And I was. Astrid’s presence might help tone things down, but she couldn’t be everywhere, and there were seven kids to watch besides the baby. I needed to know what I was taking on. “But we both know that not everyone here is a null.”
Jesse kicked concrete with his heel and said nothing. “Jesse.”
“I’m a fluke, okay?” he blurted, in the same tone someone might once have used to say “leper.”
“That doesn’t tell me much.” “Fluke” is a catchall term for magical oddities dealing with what humans call luck. Not good luck, not bad luck, just…luck.
A famous example, even among norms, is the odd experience of the French writer Émile Deschamps. In 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fortgibu, at a Paris restaurant. Ten years later, he saw plum pudding on the menu of another establishment and tried to order some, only to have the waiter tell him that the last dish had just been served, to a customer who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Much later, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered plum pudding at a restaurant. He laughingly told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the cycle complete—and a moment later de Fortgibu showed up.
Of course, what the history books don’t say is that de Fortigbu was a fluke. His magic associated certain things with particular people, places or events. Every time he saw one of his cousins, for instance, she was wearing blue; the scent of oranges accompanied every visit to his favorite bookseller; and if he got within a few yards of Deschamps, pudding invariably appeared.
Most humans claimed that events like these were mere coincidence. Magical healers, on the other hand, speculated that they were somehow linked to memory. Images of people or places are stored in everyone’s brain in connection with some type of sensory data. A flower a man’s grandmother liked, for example, might make him think of her whenever he saw one. Being a mage, de Fortgibu had simply carried that to a new level: his malfunctioning magic insured that when one cue appeared, the other also did.
But not all flukes had magic that manifested itself in the slightly batty but mostly nonthreatening way of de Fortgibu’s. One young man caused massive undertows whenever he got within five miles of the shore and had to be banned from any access to the beach. Another caused seismic activity and was restricted from going anywhere near an active fault line. That particular group of flukes was memorable enough to deserve their own name: jinx.
A jinx was basically a walking Murphy’s Law, with “accidents” caused by out-of-control power cropping up on a regular basis. And unlike the random stuff that most flukes caused, a jinx’s actions were invariably harmful. There was a time, a few hundred years back, when they’d been killed on sight. I really, really hoped that wasn’t what I was dealing with here. Not that Jesse was likely to admit it, if it was.
“How strong are you?” A jinx of any type was dangerous, but a strong one would be a walking disaster. Literally.
“Not strong,” he assured me fervently. “Not strong at all! And I’m the only one. The others are…pretty harmless.”
“Uh-huh.” None of the kids, most of whom appeared to be around seven or eight, had looked like a threat. But, then, neither had Lucy. “Define ‘pretty harmless.’”
“If you’re gonna throw me out, just do it!” Jesse said furiously. “But the others are okay. I’ll clear out if you’ll let them—”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to leave! I just want to know what I’m dealing with here.”
Magical children didn’t fall through the cracks for no reason. It was almost a certainty that the kids all had some kind of talent that made them persona non grata in the magical community. Yet Jesse would admit only to a null, a fluke and a seer, swearing that the other five were just scrims, the current PC term for mages with little ability. I had my doubts. Scrims formed the largest population of magical runaways, but Tami hadn’t concentrated on them when I knew her because they didn’t have handicaps that could benefit from a null’s calming influence. They could also pass for norms, avoiding the magical community and its laws altogether if they chose. That was not an option for people like Lucy.
But doubts or no, I couldn’t force him to tell me the truth. And with Astrid around, hopefully it wouldn’t matter anyway. Her power should negate the kids’ abilities, whatever they were, as long as they stayed close. Giving me time to find out what had happened to Tami.
I decided to change the subject. “How did the mages find you?”
Jesse shook his head. “I don’t know. They just busted in one morning and Tami screamed at us to run. Astrid tried to drain them, but there were too many and they had guns. She didn’t stand a chance.”
“But she got away.”
“’Cause they didn’t want her. They were all about Tami. They hardly even looked at the rest of us until they caught her.”
“Why?”
Jesse fidgeted with the sleeves on his god-awful pea green sweatshirt. “Uh, I don’t know?”
“That sentence would work a lot better without the question mark at the end,” I said dryly.
When he stubbornly stayed silent, I sighed and gave in—for the moment. If and when he learned to trust me, his memory might improve. Any lies now would only make it that much harder for him to admit the truth later.
“I’ll see if I can find out what happened to Tami,” I told him. “I know a few people who may be able to tell me if the Circle has her.” Jesse’s expression clearly said that he didn’t give much for my chances. Knowing the Circle, neither did I.
We got up to rejoin the others, but were stopped at the door by a small parade. A line of little bird bodies was climbing out of a large trash can and slowly lurching inside. They’d obviously been in the trash for good reason: no feathers, skin or even flesh was in evidence, just brittle bones held together by cartilage and, apparently, thin air.
Jesse said a word I’d have preferred he didn’t know at his age, and looked at me fearfully. “He doesn’t do it all the time, only when the baby’s fussy or…or something.”
I followed the trail of pigeon corpses inside, where they joined a bunch of others, who were doing an odd shuffling motion on the floor around Miranda. I finally realized it was supposed to be a dance. The baby was happily waving a sauce-covered spoon at them, while a maybe eight-year-old Asian boy grinned proudly.
“Necromancer?” I asked softly.
Jesse scuffed a shoe over the now quite filthy tile. “I forgot about him.”
“Uh-huh.” I wondered what else he’d “forgotten.”
I explained the situation as well as I could to Miranda. “Yesss, okay,” she hissed, wiping a lump of sauce off the baby’s chin. “Yum, yum, yum.” The little girl burbled at her and Miranda bared her fangs in the closest she could get to a smile. I gave up.
I cautioned Jesse to see that everyone stayed out of sight and close enough to Astrid to decrease the likelihood of any accidents. Then I went looking for my partner. I needed to clear a few things off my to-do list before I had to start keeping it in volumes.
Chapter 7
Finding Pritkin wasn’t difficult. He and one of his buddies were where they’d been most of the week—holed up a storeroom in the lower levels of Dante’s, poring over ancient tomes. When I opened the door, he looked up from a giant volume with the trapped expression of a hunted animal. His hair, which usually defied the laws of physics, was hanging in dispirited clumps and a smear of red decorated his forehead and one cheek, courtesy of the book’s disintegrating leather binding. I’d gotten the impression that research wasn’t his favorite thing. Maybe because he couldn’t beat up the books.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Show was canceled.”
Nick looked up from the middle of a ring of books, scrolls and, incongruously, a modern laptop. He appeared harmless, a bespectacled redhead with so many freckles that he almost had a tan, his hands and feet too big for the rest of him, like a Great Dane puppy. But the gangly young man was actually a mage, and since he was a friend of Pritkin’s, he was probably a lot more dangerous than he looked.
He took in my ensemble, which had settled on a watery gray afternoon. A few random orange blossoms scattered across the silk intermittently, as if blown by gusts of wind. It looked a little tired. “Any particular reason?”
“It’s raining.”
Nick’s eyebrows drew together. “I thought you were showing in the ballroom.”
“Frogs,” I clarified.
The small doll-like creature perched on a stack of books at Nick’s elbow finally bothered to acknowledge my presence. “Did you say frogs?”
“Kinda put a damper on things.”
Nick glanced at Pritkin, who sighed. “Go.” Nick didn’t need to be told twice. Maybe he was tired of research, too.
His diminutive companion rolled her eyes and went back to ostentatiously ignoring me. The pixie, named Radella, was a liaison from the Dark Fey king. By “pixie” I mean a tiny, foul-tempered creature who made even Pritkin look diplomatic, and by “liaison” I mean spy. She was here to do two things: drag Françoise back into slavery and make sure I didn’t cheat on the deal I’d cut with her king. He wanted the Codex, too, and figured I was the gal to get it for him. The pixie looked like she was starting to have her doubts.
She wasn’t the only one. I’d agreed to the king’s proposal for a number of reasons. I’d been in his territory and under his control, so saying no might have been very unhealthy. I’d needed room and board for a friend, a vampire named Tomas, in the one place where even the Senate’s long arms couldn’t reach. And the king had promised me help in solving the biggest riddle of my life.