Black Goat Blues Read online

  Focusing my attention draws his aura into my Sight. It slithers around him and, now that I’m paying attention, I can hear it like leather rubbing leather. The flavor in my mouth goes bad, tasting like worm dirt now, and I have to fight to not spit. Watching him is unsettling; my eyes want to move on. He sits at a high-top table with a bottle of water clutched in his hand. Dirty hair that’s meant to be black hangs in shags and jags along the edges like he hacked it off himself; the bangs sweep low over eyes set in circles so dark that for a moment I think he’s wearing a mask.

  He keeps licking his lips.

  He’s watching people on the dance floor as they move, eyes wolf-tracking like they’re sheep in a field. He looks to be focused on one couple in particular. The man tall and rangy, boxy shoulders and ropey arms in a plaid shirt that I can see the buttons shine on, legs poured into dark denim jeans with a crease starched sharp enough to cut paper. The man swings a girl in a circle of a dance, her big fluffy hair and big fluffy skirt swirling around a cute face and the thighs of a figure skater.

  My brain automatically tries to decipher which one of them the kid is wolf-tracking when, from the other side, by the bar, a flare of magenta draws my attention.

  At the end of the bar sits a girl about my age.

  Did I ever look that young?

  A mass of hair worn natural perches on her head. There are brassy chestnut strips of it that catch the neon lights inside the bar. Cowl neck sweater pulled low around her shoulders, she doesn’t have much up top, but it’s all on display. She’s short and thick, nicely defined calves showing at the tops of slouchy boots, and she’s smiling, smiling, smiling so big it makes hard lines at the corners of her eyes that I can see from across the room. She’s gleaming in a haze of hot pink, her aura pulsing with excitement and desire.

  But she’s not the thing that caught my eye.

  Standing next to her is something that looks human.

  It leans on the bar, back to me, wearing a nice suit and a wide-brimmed hat. Long and lean and full of angles, it leans conspiratorially toward the girl, as if whispering all the secrets of the universe in her dainty ear.

  It looks human.

  The girl thinks it is human.

  It has no colour.

  It’s a dead space in the kaleidoscope room, an empathic suck in a three-piece suit.

  The girl stares at it as a long-fingered hand slips up to her face, gently taking hold of her jaw. In my magick-filmed eyes it looks like the hand of a mummy, desiccated and dry, sticks covered in cracked parchment. Under its elbow I watch its other hand moving over the girl’s drink, the fingers rubbing together. Some sort of dust—no, it’s heavier than dust, separated into grains, sand—sand falls into her drink.

  Gotcha.

  I shift my weight, heading toward them when the coat around me grows tight, pulling away.

  Pulling toward the young man by the dance floor.

  I look and what I see makes me draw in my breath.

  5

  A GUN.

  A clunky, square semi-automatic that looks huge in his bony hand.

  He’s holding it low by his hip and he’s still seated, but his whole body is tense, so tense he’s vibrating. Cords stick out on his neck as he leans forward and the movement makes his bottom lip curl down and pull back in a snarl. His aura has blasted into a crackling blue and I can feel it against my skin even though I’m two dozen feet away.

  I don’t think, don’t consider, I call my magick and make a wish.

  And I blink out of existence.

  It feels like a drop into a well, making my stomach lurch as if I’ve been shoved forward. A hard line of pain blossoms around my throat as the collar there constricts, but I’m ready for it. I’m ready for the drop. I’m ready for the wet rain feel against my skin. I’ve had practice.

  And I have the coat. It protects me.

  It’s over in a nanosecond and I’m across the room, standing beside him. My hand clamps on his arm, the one holding the gun, and it makes his head jerk around toward me.

  His mouth drops open and he’s going to yell, to scream, to exclaim some shock, some fear, some amazement, something loud enough to draw attention, but before he can I tap my magick harder and make another wish.

  It wraps tight around my chest and yanks me forward, dragging me into the raw red. My vision goes black and I flail out with my free hand toward where the kid is. My fingers find something soft, something fluttery like moth wings.

  Hair.

  I wrap my hand in it and close the fist, knuckles buried to his scalp, and pull him close. I hear him cry out, a harsh choke of sound against my shoulder, and I feel the coat stretch to cover us both before the wish completes.

  We both blink out of existence.

  6

  THE TRIP IS longer this time. I wished us far away from the club, away from people.

  Thankfully Arizona has a lot of open space.

  We blink back into existence and I shove the kid away from me. He stumbles with a cry, jerking the gun up and around to point at me.

  I don’t move, holding myself upright even on shaky knees.

  Wait for it.

  The kid shakes his head, the gun rocking back and forth in his trembling hand. Greasy sweat coats his skin.

  His eyes are glassy, slick surfaced like they’ve been coated in oil.

  I know that look. I saw it the first time I wish-zapped Daniel.

  “Lean forward, kid; otherwise you’ll get it all over your—”

  He lurches, hands flying to his mouth as his cheeks puff out. The gun hits the sand about one second before the contents of his stomach do.

  Interdimensional teleportation is murder on your stomach until you get used to it.

  It’s amazing what you can get used to.

  While he pukes in the sand and grit I look around.

  We’re in the desert. I have no idea where in the desert we are but it is the desert nonetheless, all sand and rock and nothing much else. I didn’t have time to wish specifically and I don’t know shit about Arizona anyway. In hindsight, I guess I’m lucky my magick didn’t send us to the moon. Now that I’ve had the thought, it does look a little like the surface of the moon, or maybe Mars, except the moon hangs high above us, looking large enough and close enough to tumble down and crush us. It’s a big malevolent thing in the night sky, very nearly sinister as it paints the rolling dunes of silica in tones of lavender and blues. It’s empty and desolate and I can’t feel anything but the coat against my skin.

  It’s like I’ve been unplugged.

  The magick in my bone and blood subsides from a screaming gale to a fragile murmur.

  Other than the ragged breath of the kid at my feet as he pulls his shit together it is silent.

  Silent.

  In my ears.

  In my head.

  I take a deep breath and the air is clean in my lungs for the first time in a long time, so cold it feels like ice crystals spreading in my chest.

  It feels bright. Pure. Untainted.

  God, I could sit down in this peace forever.

  The kid scrambles back from his sick, kicking sand with ratty shoes. His head jerks around, eyes white all around pupils so dark brown they look black in the moonlight. “Who … what…?”

  I watch him try to comprehend how we got to the desert. I didn’t think before zapping us there; I just acted on instinct. In the bar, through his aura, he looked pure evil, but here, in the cold light of the moon, he just looks scared.

  And jackrabbit small.

  He isn’t much taller than me and I might actually outweigh him, because he’s all arms and legs. His pants are too big for him, belted across his hips instead of his waist, his shirt a long-sleeved thermal going ragged at collar and cuffs. Hard cheekbones plane down to a narrow chin, which makes his eyes look bigger than they are. His upper lip is dark, the beginnings of a mustache, but the rest of his face is preteen smooth.

  He sticks that narrow chin out at me, trying to
look hard even though he’s still sitting on his ass. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I don’t take the bait. “Why are you trying to kill people?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He stands up. “How’re we in the desert?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He stares at me. I stare back.

  I should leave him here.

  He glares at me and I can see in his eyes the calculation of whether he is going to hit me or not. He wants to lash out, it vibrates off him, but something, probably being off-balance by the situation, is keeping him in check.

  Or, maybe, he’s just not prone to hitting women.

  I’m going to leave him here.

  I don’t know where here is. It could be one mile out of town. It could be one hundred.

  He was going to shoot people.

  He doesn’t look scary anymore. He looks scared.

  He was going to shoot people.

  I take another breath of that cold, clean air to clear my head and call up the magick inside me. The coat shifts around me in response and I blink, bringing my eyes back into magick sight mode.

  The kid’s aura has changed dramatically.

  The blue is still there, crackling electric jags of fear, but now they zip through a nimbus of bright orange. The coat trills in my head, singsonging reassurance, liking what I see. I’m still not sure how much in my head the damn thing is, but that’s what it feels like it’s doing.

  “What now?” the kid asks.

  I shake myself into normal sight. “Hell if I know.”

  “You gonna leave me out here?”

  “Actually, I’m trying to figure that out.” The image of that girl and that thing flashes across my mind. I need to get back there.

  He was going to kill people.

  The Mark on my right palm grows warm.

  His eyes shift past me, widening at something behind me.

  I spin, the coat flaring around me.

  Standing there is a dog with no skin.

  There’s distance between us, too much distance for him to close the gap in one leap, not enough to call us safe. His feet have sunk into the sand, grains of it stuck in long streaks up the legs. The moonlight paints his raw musculature the colour of uncooked liver, exposed knobs of bone and ribbons of tendon shining, reflecting the moonlight. The spine of him juts in a ridge of vertebrae that creaks slightly as he pants, rocking side to side in time to the whipcord tail swinging to and fro, to and fro, to and fro.

  The sight of him makes me want to reach up, touch the top of my ear where the cartilage is frayed and torn, more gone than there. The skinhound chewed that off the first time we met. I keep my hand down, leave my hair over the ear, not going to give the damned thing the satisfaction of seeing the battle scar he gave me.

  Why does this damned thing keep following me?

  Since I left Daniel’s side this skinhound has shown up time and time again. Getting a little closer and a little closer each time.

  This is the closest he has come.

  “That is one fucked-up-looking coyote.”

  The kid has moved up beside me. Close. Not close enough to touch. The coat moves, the bottom of it slithering sideways to brush against his leg.

  Hey, knock it off.

  The skinhound tilts his skull, watching us through one lidless yellow eye set in a socket like a hard-boiled egg. The other socket is a black hole, empty and blind.

  I did that the first time I met this thing, took his eye.

  An eye for an ear.

  The kid raises the gun he had. Sand sticks from where he puked on it. “You want me to shoot him?”

  I raise my hand. “Put the gun down.”

  He doesn’t listen, still pointing the gun at the skinhound. He holds the gun like he’s in a video game, turned on its side, barrel pointed down at the end of an outstretched arm.

  I remember the lessons I took long ago, Sensei O’leary clamping her wide hands on my arms, making me hold the gun upright and proper. Her husky voice echoes through the memory, honey-Irish accented and soothing. If you hold your pistol like some kind of eejit, sideways like a rap video, you get a faceful of spent casings and you can’t hit a damn thing. Don’t. Be. An eejit.

  “Put down the damn gun.”

  “You crazy, chica. I’m gonna shoot that thing.”

  Watching the skinhound, I shake out my right hand, pushing magick down into the Mark there. It was warm already, but now it begins to glow red and crackle. I pivot and clamp down on the kid’s arm near his wrist. I feel the backlash of the jolt I send; it’s not much, but it’s enough to make his hand convulse, dropping the gun.

  Before he can say anything I open my mind, find what I’m looking for, and make another wish.

  7

  SPRING WARM RAIN sensation and a topsy-turvy jumble through what might be outer space and we blink into a dark, dank alleyway. The second our feet are solid on the trash-covered street I let go of the kid’s wrist. The metal ring around my throat expands, loosening from skintight to lying on my collarbones as the wish-magick fades. My head swims just a second and I’m fever hot and my skin has gone all prickly under the coat. Three wish jumps in a short time and some other magick in between.

  I’m pulling too much. Using too much reserve.

  The coat shrinks, wrapping me tightly. Its weird, alien music/voice surges in my mind and I can feel it giving me a charge up. It’s not healed all the way from where it rebelled and fought against its previous wearer, the Man in Black, the chaos god who started all of this. Maybe it would be if I stopped using magick and let it rest, but I keep pushing. I have to find that son of a bitch. For Daniel I do. For the last month the coat has lent me its strength, acting as a magick booster when I do too much.

  I have magick inside me, but I’ve learned it can run out, get weak, get too low to use. I don’t know if I could use so much of it I lose it, just burn out, burn up, and it be gone. When this all first started I would have welcomed that. Now the thought of losing it sends chills down my spine. But a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, so I push it to the limits. When I do that it makes the magick look for other places to take energy from. For a while I used Daniel as a battery without knowing it. Now I use the coat. Yes, it is my magick. Yes, it is a part of me. No, I am not completely in control of it.

  As soon as the wooziness passes I shake the coat loose from me.

  The kid is sitting on a filthy milk crate that looks like it has been in this alley for a few weeks. He’s trembling, muscles jumping under his clothes. My diabetic cousin does the same thing when his blood sugar plummets, mini convulsions. There’s a small puddle next to him where he threw up again. I think it is anyway; it could be leakage from the Dumpster beside him.

  Or someone else’s sick that was already there.

  The air reeks. Heavy, thick stink of rotting food and flyblowing even in the chill air. It lies inside my nostrils like a clot of rotting bacon and spoiled milk. I’ve worked in restaurants. Nothing stinks like those Dumpsters.

  The kid shakes his head and rubs his arms. If he notices the stench he doesn’t act like it. “Don’t do that again. I’mma turn inside out you do.”

  His choice of words slaps me, triggering the memory of what I’d done to Tyler Woods.

  He didn’t mean it. He didn’t. He doesn’t know about that.

  It still makes me snarl. “You don’t know what it looks like to be turned inside out, punk.”

  Organs on the outside of bones, slick traceries of veins still plump with blood, lungs like soggy sponges lying over the glistening python coil of intestines.

  It’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen.

  One of the most horrible things I’ve ever done to another human.

  Made more horrible by how I feel no guilt over it.

  But the memory of how it looked like a pile of meat and offal, how it smelled like hot pennies, and how the moist warmth of it felt against the skin of my face still swims i
n the deep water of my dreams like a hungry shark trailing my bleeding psyche.

  I’ve got to get away from this kid, get back on task. “Stay there,” I growl, and begin looking for the thing I was hunting before.

  The alley is long and straight, made from the back of the bar and a smooth cement retaining wall. It’s cluttered, filled with junk besides the Dumpster, and a ratty van is backed across one end of it by a roll-up steel door and a ramp. The lighting is sparse, provided by the moon and intermittent square lamps mounted high on the back of the bar. It’s a place of long shadows and inky pools of darkness.

  A place for things to hide.

  The band is still playing, their music coming through the wall of the bar like it’s being smothered to death. It bounces between the sides of the alley, a slow-moving ghost, brushing against me with each step, dragging on my shins as I walk.

  My eyes are jumpy, straining as I peer into every shadow. I can feel the thing from earlier here. I could use magick, but that would be like shining a spotlight on it. It would know I’m here, that I’m not just human and I’m hunting it. It might come after me. It will probably run. I don’t want this thing getting away.

  So I walk and I look.

  And I hope it’s not behind me.

  The coat pulls at my arm, trying to make my hand rise, to reach inside, to go where it wants. I shrug it off.

  Not yet.

  Up ahead I see a pulsing line of light. Against the wall of the club, it’s not bright, but it keeps going from so thin it almost disappears to a wide rectangular flash.

  It takes me a second to realize it’s from a door to the club that has been left cracked and is moving in the night breeze. There are four concrete steps going down from it. Deep shadows fill the area past it, on the other side of the light.

  Moving shadows.

  I quicken my pace, not caring if I’m heard.

  Swinging wide, I come around until I can see inside the shadows. The thing in the suit and hat is hunched over the girl from earlier. Her head and shoulders loll to the side in a slump. She’s perched on a pile of compressed cardboard, loose limbed and slack jawed. She’s unconscious.