Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer Read Online Free Page A

he had a thousand expressions, all of which meant the same things, like hungry or confused . This one looked more like scared .
    “There’s something wrong here,” he said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear.
    I nodded and looked back at the container. Nothing about it looked unusual at all, but I was filled with a sense of heavy foreboding. As it hovered framed against the gray sky, I tracked it as it rose up and up and then sank down and down, and my heart pounded, my stomach turned. I’d had the same feeling once or twice when I was looking at something with a spell cast on it. Like I could sense the magic but not see it. Hiram had told me it took training to see Runes and Wards and the like; he’d taught me a “witchlight” for the time being, which lit up magical things in an eerie glow like a black light. I remembered being amazed by how much of the world had been marked by magic.
    I stared at the container as it hung, suspended in the air.
    A moment later a vehicle approached the loading area. It wasn’t the bizarre tractor that had collected the previous containers. This was a full-on tractor trailer, a truck ready for the highways.
    “Mr. Heller made arrangements,” Charlie said. “Got a crew and everything. See, they’re standing ready to pull the pins and get it secured to the bed.”
    There were four big guys in orange overalls standing ready, smoking cigarettes and talking among themselves. Heller had a fucking empire rolling here. The swelling ball of anxiety in my belly got a little bigger with each breath, but I couldn’t justify it. I watched Heller’s container slowly lower to the truck bed, and as the four men in orange stepped forward to work on it, I started walking. “Mags, with me,” I said.
    “Not cool!” Charlie shouted, leaping in front of me and slapping his hand against my chest. “It’s—”
    Mags took hold of his arm and with an almost casual yank sent him skidding face-first across the wet concrete. As we walked, Mags stared back at Charlie, his unibrow menacing, and I reflected that there were advantages to having him around. I hadn’t had to exert myself in a long time. As I walked, I tugged at my coat sleeve, blinking rain out of my eyes.
    “I’ll do it, Lem,” Mags said, twisting his torso to remove his own jacket.
    “The fuck you will,” I snapped. “You bleed one drop and you can go fuck yourself.”
    “No, I—”
    “We talked about this, Magsie,” I said. “We fucking talked about it.”
    “I know, I just thought—”
    “Do me a favor and don’t .”
    Mags had been just as horrified as I was at the whores Hiram had hired to bleed. But Mags was as afraid of Hiram as he was afraid of everything, and he’d forgotten most of it by the next day, requiring me to remind him every time: If he cast off someone else’s blood, we were not friends anymore. You could get Mags to do just about anything by simply threatening to not be his friend anymore.
    I gritted my teeth, took my little toothbrush razor, and slashed my arm just deep enough. Blood and pain burst out of the wound.
    “Back up!” I shouted at the four guys. Three of them stopped to look at me. The fourth guy, who appeared to have eaten a fifth guy earlier in the day, turned to me, his face scummed with beard, his nose flat and crooked from about a dozen punches.
    “Who the fuck are you?” he asked in a thick accent.
    I thought about that for a step. “I’m the Fixer,” I said. I put five Words in my head. They weren’t complex.
    Scum Beard hesitated as I walked past him. I didn’t know if Heller had used the word Fixer to him or if it was the sheet of blood coursing down my arm. The gas in the air was easy to sense, a sizzling band of instantly fading energy, there and gone.
    “Step the fuck back, buddy.”
    I saw Scum Beard in my peripheral vision. Pulling at the gauzy threads of gas like Hiram had taught me, I spat out my five Words, felt the bitter drain of the spell using me