Magic to the Bone Read Free

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 mistake—I knew it was Zayvion Jones.
     
     
    He was new to town, maybe two months or so, and so unpretentiously gorgeous that even the ratty ski coat and knit hat couldn’t stop my stomach from flipping every time I saw him. I knew nothing else about him except that he liked to hang around the edges of North Portland, didn’t appear to be dealing drugs or magic, or doing much of anything else, really. Since he’d shown me no reason to trust or distrust him yet, out of convenience I distrusted him.
     
     
    ‘‘Morning, Ms. Beckstrom,’’ he said with a voice too soft to belong to a street thug.
     
     
    ‘‘Not yet, it isn’t.’’ I glanced at him. He had a good, wide smile and a high arch to his cheeks that made me think he had Asian or Native along with the African in his bloodline.
     
     
    ‘‘Might be better soon,’’ he said. ‘‘Buy you breakfast?’’
     
     
    ‘‘With what? The fingers in your pocket?’’
     
     
    He chuckled. It had a nice sound to it.
     
     
    My stomach flipped. I ignored it and kept walking.
     
     
    ‘‘Maybe dinner sometime?’’ he asked.
     
     
    Mama’s place was a squat two-story restaurant with living space on the top floor and eating space on the bottom. It was just a couple blocks down, a painted brick and wood building hunkered against the broody sky. I stopped and turned toward Zayvion. Now that I looked closer, I realized he had good eyes too, brown and soft, and the kind of wide shoulders that said he could hold his own in a fight. He looked like somebody you could trust, somebody who would tell you the truth no matter what and hold you if you asked, no explanation needed.
     
     
    Why he was following me around made me suspicious as hell.
     
     
    I thought about drawing on magic to find out if he was tied to someone’s magical strings. Even though St. John’s was a dead zone, Hounding wasn’t impossible to do here. It just meant having to stretch out to tap into the city’s nearest lead and glass conduits that stored and channeled magic, or maybe reach even deeper than that and access the natural magic that pooled like deep cisterns of water beneath all the other parts of