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

as kindling, and didn’t bother to turn and watch him punch backwards with a grunt of pain, hitting the slick concrete and rolling into a ball. I didn’t watch him lay there moaning, either.
    I looked at one of the others. “I said: Back up.”
    They backed up. I was getting used to that look when people saw magic for the first time. Hiram had repeated the lesson over and over again: We survived by staying in the shadows. Ustari couldn’t survive if the whole world came after us. As powerful as some Archmages were, as easily as we tricked everyone around us, if the whole straight world came after us in force, we’d be plowed under. The old saying: You can’t cast your way past a bullet . I felt exposed. I felt eyes on me, and I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. But I had thirty thousand dollars hanging around my neck. And something was tickling me with the idea that I wasn’t going to be paying off that debt anytime soon.
    Stepping close, I worked the wound on my hand open again. They always healed up, shallow and burning, but closed. Somehow when you pulled the gas out of yourself you healed up halfway, although a lot of times you still got an infection, angry and red. Tearing the thin scab open, a fresh wave of warm, thick gas hit the air: myself, dwindling away.
    I stood there for a moment, running my eyes over the surface of the container, somehow seeming smaller and more manageable up close. And there, along the top and the bottom, almost lost among the black lettering, small holes about the size of a dime each.
    I remembered, twenty years before, my father. Coming home with that box with holes all along the top and the bottom, and I remembered thinking there was a puppy inside. Or a kitten. Dad had gotten me a puppy or a kitten. Or a turtle. Dad had gotten me something and it was alive and therefore needed air holes. For days I waited patiently for Dad to give me whatever it was. The box never moved, and I eyed it covetously from the kitchen table, where Mom served us meals in silence and Dad sat stewing in hangover fumes, renewed daily. And I worried that he wasn’t feeding it, whatever it was, that he wasn’t taking care of it. And so one night I crept downstairs in the dark and went into the kitchen and opened the box. And inside was a scrap of newspaper acting as a lining, and absolutely nothing else.
    That was Dad. Drunk all the time, he did shit that made no sense and forgot about it five minutes later. My childhood was littered with bullshit like that: rides out to the middle of nowhere, being told to pack a bag at three in the morning, all of it resolving to nothing. I remembered the box because of the moment of hope it had given me, and I remembered those air holes, and they had looked exactly like these.
    I stepped back and gestured at one of the other guys in orange. “Open it up.”
    The three guys still standing exchanged looks, then turned to look at the first one, back on his feet. I noticed Charlie had disappeared. The first guy studied me uncertainly for a moment, obviously unsure. Then shook his head while rubbing it with one hand. “We got orders,” he said. “We got clear instructions: Do not fucking open anything.”
    I nodded and smiled, mumbling softly. When using a Charm, it was best to do some of the heavy lifting by being nonthreatening. The Charm itself was six syllables, my own invention, and it settled on Baldy like syrup, smoothing out his face and slumping his shoulders.
    “Come on,” I said, still smiling. “Let’s just take a peek.”
    Baldy smiled, a twitchy thing that flickered, died, and then bloomed on his face. In an instant he became a teddy bear, shy and gentle. He nodded, then looked past me. “It’s all right, boys, we’re just gonna take a look.”
    The other two looked at each other again, then stepped back, wanting nothing to do with it. Rain was getting inside the collar of my coat and making its freezing way down my back, and my hands had gone