Blood magic was not something I wanted to deal with. Not today. Not any day. Time to cut out and call it good.
I walked toward her. Since I am a tall woman, six feet barefoot, and since I also had on three-inch heels, I towered over Lulu, who probably clocked in at about five-five and maybe a hundred pounds. I had the physical advantage, which meant I had the power of intimidation on my side.
Hooray for me.
“You’re Lulu,” I told her.
She did the one thing I didn’t expect. She whispered a soft mantra-a jump-rope rhyme-and moved her left hand in an awkward zag. She might be an awkward caster, but she was fast. I didn’t even have time to pull magic, much less a defense, before she and I were surrounded by some sort of sound-dampening spell. The clatter of dishes and Mama’s constant yelling weren’t gone, they just sounded very far away.
A sheen of sweat spread across Lulu’s face and dripped down her chest. Along with the smell of sweet cherries, I caught a whiff of a vanilla perfume that wasn’t doing any good to cover up the stink of her terror.
“He already told you, didn’t he? Sent you to find me?”
Great. She was one of the crazy ones.
“No one’s sent me anywhere. I’m not going to take the job,” I said. “Get yourself another Hound-try the phone book and the net.”
Her eyes, which were so brown they were almost black, narrowed. “You don’t even know what the job is.”
I didn’t answer. I actually did know what the job was-or rather I knew what she had told me it was over the phone. Her dog had been lost, she thought kidnapped, maybe by an ex-roommate. I thought it would be easy money. I thought wrong.
“I’m out.” I said. “Nice meeting you.” I tried to move past her, which shouldn’t be a problem because even though we were in a quiet zone, it wasn’t a solid sort of thing and would unravel as soon as I got out of her range. But she was quick, that crazy Lulu.
She took my hand and pressed her palm to mine. Her hand was hot-fever hot. I felt the cool press of paper, maybe a photo, between us. Lulu smiled, shook my hand as though we were old friends, and let the spell drop away. She wavered, just slightly, and I wondered if I was going to have to catch her before she passed out.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” she said. And there was more she didn’t say, in her body language, in her eyes. There was “please help me.”
Sweet hells. Nobody should love their dog that much.
I gave her a noncommittal nod and walked out the door, but not before sticking the photo in my pocket.
I hit the night air-humid and too hot for a Northwest summer-and headed into the city at a brisk walk. Evening was just coming on. Streetlights sputtered to life and cast an orange glow that only made the night feel hotter. I wanted some distance, like maybe half a city, between Lulu and me. I cut across a few streets, mostly to make sure no one was following, and ducked into a bar to use the bathroom. Only there, with the bathroom door closed, the overhead fan humming, and the lock set, did I pull out the photo.
It was not a dog in the photo, it was a woman. Maybe twenty years old with short, dark curly hair and a white, white smile against her maple-honey skin. She wore a t-shirt, looked as if she should be in college and wasn’t, and had Lulu’s eyes.
A sister maybe. Too old to be a daughter. She might be the roommate Lulu thought kidnapped the dog. But Lulu had said something about a man, about “he” already telling me something.
Let her be the roommate, let her be the roomate. I turned the picture over. Written on the back, in very small, very neat handwriting was a name: Rheesha Miller, her age: fifteen, and the last place she’d been seen: at a convenience store on Burnside.
A chill ran down my neck even though it was hotter in the bathroom than it had been outside. I’d seen this girl’s picture on the news. Missing person, no leads. Disappeared in broad daylight. One minute she was on the street. The next, she went into the store and never came out. The owners, an elderly Asian couple, hadn’t seen her come in, nor was there any trace of her on the store’s security camera. Strange, to be sure, but the Hounds who freelance for the police hadn’t picked up any traces of magical wrongdoing. It was a runaway or a kidnapping, straight up, no magic.
There was nothing I could do about this. Nothing.
I committed her face to memory, just in case, then tore the edge of the picture, intending to flush it down the toilet. A chemical and fertilizer smell rose up from the photo. I held very still. There was a trip spell on the photo. Maybe it was for tracking where the photo went. Maybe it was supposed to make sure the photo couldn’t be damaged. Or maybe it was set to trigger an explosion spell. Damn, damn, damn. I knew I shouldn’t have taken the photo. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten involved in this mess.
I took a deep breath and tried to think calm thoughts, because magic is a bitch and you can’t cast it when you’re angry. I whispered a mantra until I calmed down a little. Then, while carefully holding the photo in my left hand, I drew a quick Disbursement spell with my right. I’d have a migraine in a day or two, but at least I’d be alive. I drew upon the magic stored deep in the ground below the building and traced two spells, Sight and Smell.
Magic flowed into the forms I gave it, and my vision shifted. Like turning on a single light in a dark room, I could now see the traceries of spent magic and old spells hanging like graffiti in the air. And since I was a Hound, and good at it, I could smell even more than I could see: the too-sweet cherry stink of Blood magic mixed with drugs, the slightest hint of Lulu’s vanilla perfume, and something else-a subtle spell that stank of hickory and smoke.
I leaned forward until my lips were almost touching the photo and inhaled. I got the taste of the spell on the back of my throat, the smell of it deep in my sinuses. Not an explosive. A tracker. Someone had gone through an awful lot of trouble to know exactly where this photo was going-or maybe where I was going. This was a complicated spell. One that took a hard toll on the caster. And I knew the signature of the man who put it there. A Hound named Marty Pike. He freelanced mostly for the cops. I was pretty sure he was ex-Marine.
I let go of Sight and Smell, and the room settled back to normal. Except for the fact that I was sitting in the bathroom stall of a bar being tailed by an Hound who worked for the police, I wasn’t in any danger, hadn’t done anything wrong, and could still back out of this job by flushing the photo down the commode.
But here’s the thing. Lulu had said “he.” And right this minute, I’d take bets that “he” meant Pike. There hadn’t been any real reason for Lulu to put the quiet on our conversation back at Mama’s, there hadn’t been anyone but a few regulars at the tables. If Pike thought she was going behind his back and hiring a second opinion on her sister’s disappearance, then I could see her wanting to keep it quiet. Cop Hounds don’t much like it when freelancers take a piss in their sandbox. Hell, Cop Hounds don’t much like freelancers, period.
So I could either believe that Pike didn’t want Lulu going behind his back, or maybe that he was counting on her to do just that. To hand off the picture to some sorry sucker-say me, for example-and that I’d… what? Find something he hadn’t or couldn’t find? Come up empty-handed? That didn’t make any sense.
Well, screw this. I was not going to be used for anyone’s patsy. I kept the photo and headed out into the bar. Tracking spells don’t work over great distances, so Pike should be close by. I scanned the crowd, a humorless bunch of hard drinkers who were watching the game and ignoring everything else. It was a small enough place there wasn’t anywhere for Pike to hide.
Plus, I couldn’t smell him.
Outside then. I made a point of leaving the door open nice and wide and stood there for a couple of extra seconds, just so he’d know I knew he was following me. Sure enough, the familiar short and shaved figure of Pike emerged from the shadows between a couple of parked trucks and started across the parking lot toward me. I’d heard from someone down at the city that the cops had nicknamed him Mouse. That was before his first case with the police. It was a high profile situation, and bloody. He saved a couple of guys on the force and did some other medal-worthy things that fell into the above-and-beyond-the-call category. Ever since then, the cops just called him Pike.