Gunmetal Magic(145)

Morning brought a call from Doolittle. When we arrived at the medward, Roderick was sitting on the cot, the same owlish expression on his face. The necklace had lost some of its yellow tint during the night. Now it looked slightly darker than orange rind.

I crouched by the boy. “Hi.”

Roderick looked at me with his big eyes. “Good morning.”

His voice was weak. In my mind the necklace constricted around his fragile neck. The bone crunched…

We had to get a move on. We had to get it off him.

Doolittle led us toward the door and spoke quietly. “There is a definite change in the color of the metal. He’s beginning to experience discomfort.”

“So that thing is getting hungry,” Curran said.

“Probably.” Doolittle held up a small printout. A pale blue stripe cut across the paper. The m-scan. The m-scanner recorded specific types of magic as different colors: purple for the undead, green for shapeshifter, and so on. Blue stood for plain human magic—mages, telepaths, and telekinetics all registered blue. It was the basic human default.

“Is that the necklace or Roderick?” Curran asked.

“It’s the boy. He has power and it’s obscuring whatever magic signature the necklace is giving out.” Doolittle pointed to a point on the graph. I squinted. A series of paler sparks punctured the blue.

“This is probably the necklace,” Doolittle said. “It’s not enough to go on. We need a more precise measurement.”

We needed Julie. She was a sensate—she saw the colors of magic with more precision than any m-scanner. I stuck my head out into the hallway and called, “Could someone find my kid, please, and ask her to come down here?”

Five minutes later, Julie entered the medward. When I’d first found her, she’d been half-starved, skinny, and had had anxiety attacks if the protective layer of grime was removed from her skin. Now at fourteen, she had progressed from skinny to lean. Her legs and arms showed definition if she flexed. She was meticulously clean, but recently had decided that the invention of brushes was unnecessary and a waste of time, so her blond hair looked like a cross between a rough haystack and a bird’s nest.

I explained about the necklace. Julie approached the boy. “Hey. I’m going to look at the thing on your neck, okay?”

Roderick said nothing.

Julie peered at the metal. “Odd. It’s pale.”

“Pale yellow? Pale green?” Any tint was good.

“No. It looks colorless, like hot air rising from the pavement.”

Transparent magic. Now I had seen everything.

“There are very faint runes on it,” Julie said, “hard to make out. I’m not surprised you missed them,” she added.

“Can you read them?” Curran asked.

She shook her head. “It’s not any runic alphabet I was taught.”

Doolittle handed her a piece of paper and a pencil and she wrote five symbols on it. Runes, the ancient letters of Old Norse and Germanic alphabets, had undergone several changes over the years, but the oldest runes owed their straight up-and-down appearance to the fact that historically they had to be carved on a hard surface: all straight lines, no curves, no tiny strokes. These symbols definitely fit that pattern, but they didn’t look like any runes I’d seen. I could spend a day or two digging through books, but Roderick didn’t have that long. We needed information fast.

Curran must’ve come to the same conclusion. “Do we know any rune experts?”

I tapped the paper. “I can make some calls. There is a guy—Dagfinn Heyerdahl. He used to be with the Norse Heritage Foundation.”

The Norse Heritage Foundation wasn’t so much about heritage as it was about Viking, in the most cliché sense of the word. They drank huge quantities of beer, they brawled, and they wore horned helmets despite all historical evidence to the contrary.

“Used to be?” Curran asked.

“They kicked him out for being drunk and violent.”

Curran blinked. “The Norse Heritage?”

“Mhm.”

“Don’t you have to be drunk and violent just to get in?” he asked. “Just how disorderly did he get?”

“Dagfinn is a creative soul,” I said. “His real name is Don Williams. He packs a lot of magic and if he could have gotten out of his own way, he would be running the Norse Heritage by now. He’s got a rap sheet as long as the Bible, all of it petty stupid stuff, and he’s the only merc I know who actually works for free, because he’s been fined so many times, it will take him years to get out of the Guild’s debt. About two years ago, he got piss-drunk, took off all of his clothes, and broke through the gates of a Buddhist meditation center on the South Side. A group of bhikkhunis, female monks, was deep in meditation on the grounds. He chased them around, roaring something about them hiding hot Asian ladies. I guess he mistook them for men, because of the robes and shaved heads.”