Magic to the Bone Read Free Page B

had college learning behind me—or what I could remember of it, anyway.
     
     
    ‘‘Boy,’’ Mama yelled. Another of her sons, the one with a tight beard and ponytail, stepped out of the kitchen. ‘‘Call the doctor.’’
     
     
    Boy picked up the phone and dialed.
     
     
    ‘‘There,’’ Mama said. ‘‘Happy? Now Hound him. Find out who wants to hurt him like this. Find out why anyone would hurt my boy.’’
     
     
    I glanced at Zayvion again. He leaned against the wall, near the door, drinking his coffee. I didn’t like Hounding in front of an audience, especially a stranger, but if this really was a magic hit, and not some sort of freak Disbursement-spell accident, then the user should be held accountable for Boy’s doctor bills and recovery.
     
     
    If he recovered.
     
     
    I pressed my palm against Boy’s chest and whispered a quick mantra. I didn’t want to stretch myself to pull magic from outside the neighborhood. So instead, I drew upon the magic from deep within my bones. My body felt strange and tight, like a muscle that hadn’t been used in a while, but it didn’t hurt to draw the magic forward. Four years in college had taught me that magic was best accessed when the user was close to a naturally occurring resource, like the natural cisterns beneath the west, east, and south sides of the city, or at an iron-and-glass-caged harvesting station, or through the citywide pipelines.
     
     
    What Harvard hadn’t taught me was that I could, with practice, hold a small amount of magic in my body, and that other people could not. People who had tried to use their own bodies to contain magic ended up in the hospital with gangrenous wounds and organ failure.
     
     
    But to me, holding a little magic of my own felt natural, normal. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have the deep, warm weight of small magic inside me. When I was six I’d asked my mother about it. She told me people couldn’t hold magic like that. I believed her. But she was wrong.
     
     
    I whispered a spell to shape the warm, tingling sense of magic up into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and wove a simple glyph in the air with my fingertips. Like turning on a light in a dark room, the spell enhanced my senses and my awareness of magic.
     
     
    No wonder the stink of old magic was so heavy in the room. The spell that was wrapped around Boy was violently strong, created to channel an extreme amount of magic. Instead of a common spell glyph that looked like fine lacework, this monster was made out of ropes as thick as my thumb. The magic knotted and twisted around Boy’s chest in double-back loops—an Offload pattern. This spell was created to transfer the price of using magic onto an innocent—in this case, a five-year-old innocent. It was the kind of hit that would cause an adult victim’s health to falter, or maybe they’d go blind for a couple months until the original caster’s use of magic was absolved and the lines of magic faded to dust.
     
     
    This was no accident.
     
     
    Someone had purposely tried to kill this kid.
     
     
    That someone had set an illegal Offload bothered me. That they had aimed it at a child made me furious.
     
     
    The Offload pattern snaked up around Boy’s throat like a fancy necklace, with extra chains that slipped down his nostrils. I could hear the rattle of magic in his lungs. No wonder the poor thing’s heart was beating so fast.
     
     
    I leaned in and sniffed at his mouth. The magic was old and fetid and smelled of spoiled flesh. A fresh hit never smelled that bad that fast. Boy hadn’t been hit today. He probably hadn’t even been hit yesterday. I realized, with a shock, that the little guy had been tagged a week ago, maybe more.
     
     
    I didn’t know how he had hung on so long.
     
     
    I resisted the urge to lick at the magic, resisted the urge to place my lips briefly against the ropes that covered his mouth. Taste and smell were a Hound’s strengths, and I