Trickster by Jeff Somers Page A

pile to have riding on your hip. Mags yappedaround me, happy and energetic. He’d already forgotten we were in trouble. I decided not to remind him.
    He started to recognize the neighborhood and got even more excited, this week turning out to be one of the best of Mags’s entire fucking life so far, at least for the moment. We’d pulled a grift normally too ambitious for us in terms of bloodletting and dangerous publicity, worked it perfectly, and now we were going to Digory Ketterly’s office.
    •   •   •
    Ketterly usually went by “D. A.” because he disliked the singsongy alliteration of “Digory Ketterly.” He thought it made him sound weak and poofy. He was right.
    I didn’t trust Ketterly. No one trusted D. A. Ketterly. But I was the walking wounded, exhausted, literally drained. Finding spells wasn’t my specialty in the first place, but when you added in the complication of the runes and their effect on magic, I needed help. I’d surveyed my vast circle of friends and acquaintances and decided I was just going to have to risk putting a little faith in Ketterly, or else I was going to risk bleeding myself into a coma.
    His office was a basement affair in Chelsea, six steps down, and instantly you felt damp, imagining the sewage seeping up from below. A glass storefront that still read OLYPHANT BOOKS | U SED | N EW | E STATE S ALES . The door had a yellowed piece of copy paper taped to the glass that read D. A. K ETTERLY , I NVESTIGATIONS: M IRACLES A CHIEVED .
    We pushed our way into the dark, dense interior, the rusty bell attached to the door ringing as we did so, and were immediately enveloped by gloom. A cave. The bookshelves and books were still exactly where they’d been decades before, covered in dust, the hand-lettered section signs still clinging to the wood: F ICTION, R EFERENCE, M USIC . It smelled like paper and dust and cigar smoke.
    The whole place was just one room with a tiny washroom in the back that beat at us with the heat of its smell, a terrible green odor that had heft and mass and clung to you. The center of the room had been cleared out and a large green metal desk installed. There was one chair, a huge cracked leather one on wheels that creaked and sighed with every move Ketterly made. He leaped up in a cloud of cigarette smoke and threw his arms out.
    “Is that Pitr fucking Mags?” he shouted. “Hey, watch this.”
    He waved his hands in the air theatrically, and I caught the barest glint of light on his tiny blade. Ketterly liked to use a sharpened penknife for his Cantrips—it was unobtrusive. He liked to astound and amaze the rubes; an obvious knife and a bleeding hand ruined the effect. I didn’t notice his lips moving as he spat out the syllables. Ketterly worked public, so he’d taught himself to almost throw his voice, a barely audible whisper without moving his lips. When he was finished he barked out a nonsense word enthusiastically, making Mags jump as a fiery, glowing bird appeared in the air between us.
    “Aw, shit, that’s fucking cool, ” Mags hissed, his eyeslocked on the bird as it swooped around the room lazily. “You’ll teach it to me?”
    I snorted. Every time Mags learned a new spell, he forgot an old one.
    “Sure, sure, if you concentrate this time and not blow up my shop, huh?” Ketterly pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it in his hand. His suit was an old, well-cared-for one. Up close, I knew, it would show a million repairs, all done with careful stitches and good thread. From three feet away all the work was invisible. Ketterly was a miser. He wasn’t making a mint with his detective business, but he salted away every dime he screwed out of idiots who’d never heard of a Seeking Rite. I’d never seen D. A. Ketterly on the street with more than pennies in his pockets.
    He sat down in his squeaky chair and crossed his short little legs, fussing with his overlong black-and-gray hair. He looked at me as he leaned back, dim