Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer Read online

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  IT SHOULD HAVE WORKED. It did work, right up until it didn’t.

  “You got your trained bear on a leash, Vonnegan?”

  I looked up and stared at Heller, his shaved head flaking into drifts of off-white skin that settled on the shoulders of his black fur coat. The big oversized sunglasses were studded with rhinestones, some of which had fallen off. He looked like he probably smelled, but I wasn’t going to test the theory. He didn’t appear to be wearing a shirt under the coat, though I was fucking relieved to see pants emerging from under its hem. Two kids, Asian and skinny and smoking cigarettes, stood on either side of him. Heller didn’t go for muscle. Heller went for speed.

  Next to me, I heard Mags literally growling. I reached up and put a hand on his shoulder. I was slowly starting to realize that Mags had somehow bonded to me in unholy matrimony, and I was beginning to make long-term life plans that involved him.

  I took a deep breath. “Listen—”

  Heller held up a hand. “Save the bullshit, Vonnegan. You owe me thirty thousand fucking dollars, and you told me you’d have it tonight.”

  I leaned back in my chair and let my hand slip off Mags’s shoulder. I decided that if the big guy went nuts and killed Heller by accident, I would allow it. Around us, Rue’s Morgue flowed and buzzed, populated by a big group of slummers from uptown who’d somehow found the bar. The extra humidity and noise was straining the environment beyond its capabilities, and everything had become smoky and dense, the air getting thicker as more drinks were poured.

  I’d never had much energy for bullshit. When I started a lie, it got heavier and heavier until I couldn’t hold it up anymore. So I just went for brutal honesty.

  “I don’t have it,” I said, spreading my hands. “I had a line on something, but it . . . didn’t work out.”

  I pictured the ustari who’d brought me to this state, her and her lone Bleeder. She was a bottom dweller, going after her own kind. And that meant I wasn’t even a bottom dweller. I was fucking underground.

  Heller smiled. His teeth were little green pebbles in his mouth, and I didn’t like looking at them, but I forced myself to smile back. We were equals, I told myself. I’d had ten years of apprenticeship that had gotten me nowhere, and a lot of the . . . people, the magicians, who hung out at Rue’s were way ahead of me, but I was learning fast. Heller acted like he was some sort of fucking Lord of the Shitheads, and I told myself that was an illegitimate position: No one had elected him.

  “I don’t give a fuck what worked out or didn’t work out: You owe me fucking money and you don’t have it.” He nodded, once, as if coming to a sudden decision. “Go touch your fucking gasam for it, right? Enough screwin’ around.”

  Thinking of Hiram and his hot, musty apartment and his tendency to believe that verbal abuse was a fine motivator, I shook my head. Gasam had been one of the first Words I’d learned: teacher, Master. The implied bondage in the Word hadn’t sat well with me. That should have been a sign it was all going to hell sooner rather than later.

  I shot my cuffs and thought. Anything to not have to crawl back to that fat little thief and beg him for help. Anything. In service to the grift, I’d even tried to improve my look by investing in a fifteen-dollar suit from St. Mary’s thrift store; it fit like it had been made for show and possibly out of cardboard. But thirty thousand dollars, I’d recently discovered, was a lot more money than I’d thought. It was turning into an impossible amount of money.

  Keeping my smile in place, I shook my head and pursed my lips. “Isn’t come to that yet, Heller,” I said. “Give me a couple more days.”

  Heller’s smile widened and he gestured, vaguely, in the air, with one hand. Rings glinted on his wiry fingers. I had a second of anxiety, then the weird sense of blood in the air. Then I was being pushed down into my chair by an invisible force, so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  “I could Charm ya out of it,” Heller said, stepping over to take hold of an empty chair and dropping it next to me. I could move my eyes but nothing else. Someone behind me, casting spells.

  My heart was pounding. Next to me, I could hear Mags, caught the same as me, straining against the spell, trying to launch himself from the chair. I hated Heller, suddenly. He’d seemed vaguely ridiculous before, running his games, dressing like a porn producer from the 1970s. But now I owed him thirty thousand dollars, and I hated him. And I’d come so close to getting out from under him, too.

  It should have worked. It did work. Until it didn’t.

  GASSING UP MONEY was harder than it seemed. When I’d made the break with Hiram, the round man yelling, telling me I was making a mistake and that when I came crawling back it would be too late, I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to make a living. When you could cast a Charm, gas up a dollar to look like a hundred, blind someone—all with a slash of blood and a few Words—how could you lose?

  It was simple: Blood plus the Words made things happen. Magic. It didn’t have to be your blood, but for me it always was.

  But Charms faded, and when they faded, people came looking for you. And if you misspoke one Word, shit fell apart and you got a feedback smack for your trouble. If you bled over and over again, cutting yourself to fuel the spell—because magic was greedy, magic was the universe taking your life and spending it elsewhere, using up your lifeblood and aging you prematurely—you wound up half dead, too weak to stand. The more blood; the bigger the payoff. And if you fucked it all up, no one was amazed. If you fucked it up, they came looking for you just like any other grifter losing his touch.

  And if you decided to just try and find another ustari, begging them to take you in and show you a few more things, just to get some polish, they took one look at you and told you they could see your still-intact bond of urtuku and refused to have shit to do with you. The other ustari wouldn’t teach you one fucking Word if you were bonded to another one of them.

  So you had to be creative to survive. I was proud of the scheme. As far as I knew, none of the other grifters that hung around Rue’s had ever thought of something like it. It was fucking elegant. It wouldn’t take much gas, and if it was labor-intensive, why not? I had time on my hands. Best of all, it didn’t require Pitr Mags to do much. The success or failure of any scheme, I was coming to realize, depended inversely on how much Pitr had to do to make it work.

  The idea of ditching the big man had occurred to me. It was the smart thing to do. Pitr made it impossible to be inconspicuous, he was expensive to feed, and if I relaxed for a second he tended to inflict property damage. He whimpered in his sleep and followed me around with a single-minded intensity that made me think that I was going to someday wake up to find him cheerfully killing me in preparation for using my skin on some sort of Lem Vonnegan–shaped doll. He went through periods of asking me endless questions I couldn’t answer; he seemed to have the idea that I’d become his gasam somehow—that Hiram had given him to me. Hiram had certainly scraped Mags off his shoes in my general direction, and so skillfully I hadn’t even noticed him doing it. I didn’t recall a bill of sale or a deed being transferred; leaving him would have been smart.

  But I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t just the fear that an irate and betrayed Pitr Mageshkumar would track me down and crush me—weeping uncontrollably the whole
time, of course—and would then carry my skeletal remains around like some sort of lucky charm for the rest of his life. Alone, Mags would die. From simple fucking loneliness. And when I imagined him sitting sad and alone somewhere, shrinking, I couldn’t just walk away from him.

  So anyway: the suit. Black, shiny at the elbows and knees, two mismatched buttons—but it was the first suit I’d ever owned, or worn. Like a sign from fucking god, there had been a matching one that just about fit Mags. Not really fit. You could hear the seams groaning and protesting every time he moved—but close enough. As a man who’d dreamed and then confirmed that magic was real, I was ready and willing to pay attention to signs.

  I didn’t have a cute name for the scheme. A lot of the con artists—the Tricksters, the idimustari, or “little magicians”—that hung around Rue’s had stupid names for every con they pulled. The Hail Mary. The False Friend. The With Two You Get Robbed. Every single con they pulled, they had a playbook for it. Whole conversations, fucking mystifying.

  I hadn’t bothered with the cute name. I was just proud of the mechanics. The same way I’d been proud when I’d put together my first spell, making a pencil float off Hiram’s desk with a pin in my index finger and two Words, just three syllables, and Hiram looking at me with something that was almost respect. Or, if not respect, newfound interest.

  It worked like this: Hit the newspaper want ads and the internet boards, look for house sitting. High end, nice places—but not so nice the owners weren’t nosing around to save themselves some fees and stay away from a service. Show up and nail the interview, maybe a little gas in the air to smooth things out. Or, if you’re hungover, unshaven, and smell a little bit like you’re living in an abandoned car with your oversized platonic companion, bleed out a lot of gas. Then, once you’re living there and the mark is out of the country or wherever, you rent the fucking place. Two months in advance. Cash. From as many people as you can herd in there.

  We’d found our mark easy enough. Four HOUSE SITTERS WANTED ads and finally there he was: the Fat Man. Overfed and soft, out of shape, and of the opinion that expensive clothes hid it. Cut as well as clothes could be cut, they did hide his gut through the simple expedient of his jacket hanging like a fucking muumuu, though this also made him seem to glide across the floor as he moved. He had ridiculously tiny feet, too, like little pegs at the end of his legs, which he encased in wasted Italian shoes, beautiful little things that creaked and split under their load. I loved him. He walked into the coffee shop and I sliced my palm, but as I was making him fall in love with me, I was falling in love right back. He had an apartment in Hoboken. Nice place. Two thousand square feet of cherry floors, marble countertops, and polished nickel handles. Six dogs, who needed to be kept alive during the two weeks he would be out of the country. I bled and smiled and Mags hovered, unnoticed, and the Fat Man pursed his slippery lips and considered my grooming and elocution. And then he offered me two thousand dollars for the job, plus, of course, full use of the apartment and the building amenities. Payable when he returned.

  I could have poured the gas on and gotten everything up front. I didn’t want to be greedy, and I didn’t know how much blood I could spare, given my half-starved state.

  Mags didn’t quite understand the idea. For three days he had a frown of Intense Concentration on his face as we waited around town, scarves tight about our necks, hands in our pockets, the fucking suits I’d been so proud of as costuming to impress our marks proving too thin for the winter making me shiver all the time. My shoes were new, at least, the soles thick and the leather shiny, strapped on my feet like they had been made custom, and these gave me hope, made me feel like I had time to figure it all out. Hiram had told me I was going to come crawling back, but my shoes said otherwise.

  I walked Mags through it over and over. But he didn’t quite get how we could rent a place we didn’t actually own. When the day came and we collected the keys and went on up to begin our work, I told him to hide in the second bathroom with the dogs, with the door locked. I knew he would fall asleep. And he did, the animals curled up next to him on the floor.

  I did the whole Realtor thing. I put a tube of cookies in the oven. I set out some flowers. I tidied up. I cut myself to get a good bleed going and cast a soft, diffuse sort of Charm. The Charm Hiram had taught me had been a blunt instrument, focused squarely on an individual, and the only control you had with it was the amount of gas you poured into it. But casting, I had figured out, was all in the Words. If you swapped out the specifics for the general—if you cut it and cut it until it was a fucking Zen koan that meant whatever the fuck you wanted it to—you could soak the whole place with an easygoing Charm, and everyone who walked in was your friend.

  They started coming five minutes later. Mags chased the first couple away by emerging from the bathroom to inquire after the cookies he smelled. I plopped the whole half-baked roll into his hands and he retreated to his hiding spot, tossing it from hand to hand and hissing at the pain.

  The next couple went without a hitch. Two guys, young, maybe gay. Who the fuck knew, and who the fuck cared? They hadn’t brought any cash, but after a tour through my haze of Charm (I kept the wound open on my hand with a flex every few minutes, a whisper sending a jolt back into the universe to keep the Charm fresh), they were positively eager to promise to go to an ATM and bring back a few thousand dollars. While they were out, two more couples came. No one had brought any cash. It was a cashless world, and I’d never rented an apartment before in my life. Or had a job.

  None of them came back. So I called Mags out of the bathroom. He was sticky, so I cleaned him up with a dish towel. I gave him a job, and he started escorting potential renters to their ATM machines, feeding out a little Charm of his own.

  From that point on we had a system worked out. I gave the tour, their eyes glazed. Mags walked them to the bank and returned with a few grand in an envelope. We went through five groups, forty-five minutes.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s cut our losses before someone sobers up and comes back.”

  Mags grinned, patting his coat pocket where the cash resided, and then, from behind us, a voice.

  “Aw, shit, this was just gettin’ interesting.”

  I looked at Mags, whose eyes had bugged out of his head. Fucking useless. Arms the size of tree trunks and I’d seen him use them for real violence, but if you scared him even a little bit he went limp. Not for the first time, I wondered what in hell I was feeding him for.

  I turned, and there was a man and a woman in the living room.

  She was sitting in the deep easy chair, black leather so soft and dimpled it looked like it was snoring softly there on the deep-pile cream carpet. She was neither old nor young, an in-between face that was tight and lined but not precisely elderly. She wore too much makeup, applied inexpertly, like someone had loaded a shotgun with cosmetics and taken a shot at her. She was wearing what looked like a formal party dress, black and torn, and a smart-looking half jacket. Her yellow hair was piled up on her head in a mass of curls that was either complex or sloppy.

  The man was fat, tall, and wearing a gray sweat suit, loose and stained. He was bald, and his head was one single puckered mass of scar tissue. Scars on scars, fat pink lines of cuts, his face so swollen and distorted he looked almost blind. In one slack hand he held a simple folding penknife, poised over his bare forearm.

  “He your Bleeder?” She thrust her chin in Mags’s direction. “He’s big enough. But he won’t beat Terrance to the draw.”

  I blinked, looked from her horrible face to Terrance, who stood there with all the expression and intelligence of a load-bearing column.

  She sighed. “Okes, this was fun. We dummied up invisible when you walked in, wanted to see what you were running. Interesting grift. Like it. But here’s your lesson for the day, kiddo: Always make sure you’re actually alone in a clamshell like this, or someone’s gonna take your pear
ls. Dig?”

  My blade was in my front pants pocket, an old razor attached with electrical tape to a toothbrush. I gave Terrance the slow look. He didn’t seem fast, but he had only one inch of space to cover. Behind me, the front door of the apartment beat at my back like a black wind, and I imagined I could feel all our suckers storming the elevators, their Charms faded, coming with bulls in tow to make us hurt.

  “Mags,” I said slowly, “if that little piggie cuts himself, throw him through the window.”

  I prayed Mags didn’t look entirely moronic. All I needed was blank-faced and his single angry line of eyebrow would do the rest. I wondered if I’d managed to clean all the cookie dough off his face.

  Our interloper looked him over for a long moment, and hope leaped in my heart. She couldn’t be certain, I could see that. Mags was terrifying if you didn’t know him. If he didn’t speak. If nothing startled him. And then sometimes he was actually terrifying, almost murdering people by accident. Sometimes I felt like I’d been given a bear fresh from the forest and been told to teach him to dance, without having my arms torn off in the process.

  Then she snorted. “Come on, then, hand over the kosh and we part friends, okes? Play dumb and I’ll teach you a lesson, you fucking idimustari.”

  Little magician. I hated the fucking words.

  I pushed my hand into my pocket.

  Terrance slashed his arm.

  The woman sang out a song of Words.

  Literally, a song, melodic, a fucking earworm, her voice light and pretty. I had a feeling I would remember that song for the rest of my life. I had my blade in my hand when the feeling of peace and happiness settled on me, soaking into my skin and filling me with a warm sense of satisfaction.

  “Tha’s better,” the blond said with a smirk that was adorably cynical. “Now, laddie, the kosh, so we can be on our way.”