Wayfarer by Lili St. Crow
Her entire body trembled. She was wet with sweat, and good luck sleeping tonight, even though exhaustion weighed on her like lead.
So much for allies, or friends, or anything else.
Bitch.
EIGHT
ZIGZAGGING SOUTHKING STREET WAS AT ITS LIVELIEST on weekends. You couldn’t park anywhere near, even on Highclere, which meant Ruby did her bargain hunting elsewhere when school wasn’t in. That was just fine, anyway, since Ellie didn’t want either of her friends seeing what she did when she could escape the four-spired house on Perrault Street on a Saturday. There was a list of chores as long as her arm to come back to, no doubt . . . but she could steal a little time.
Girls of a certain social strata didn’t ride the bus in New Haven. Which was why she was always careful. For one thing, she never wore her school blazer, even if it was old and ratty enough to be secondhand. And never, ever a white button-down with a rounded turndown collar, since that was a dead giveaway. No maryjanes, no jangles of silver on her feet, no ultra-thin headbands holding her hair back.
Instead, it was a sloppy gray-washed T-shirt under a jacket she’d traded a spinning gemcharm to a lizard-skinned jack for, a rough denim thing splattered with paint and with a faint odor of burning clinging to its creases. Jeans frayed at the knees, and a pair of battered trainers she’d done outside chores in for years, pinching her toes but still reasonably held together with dull gray tougher-than-titon-skin charmbind tape. She couldn’t do anything about the ring. Leaving it anywhere inside the house wasn’t a good idea.
Laurissa sometimes stared hungrily at the star sapphire, though it kept itself dull and dead in her presence. It always had. It was far more active nowadays, though, and sooner or later something was bound to happen.
Anyway, Ellie turned the stone toward her palm before she caught the bus at Perrault and 42nd, so that only the silver band showed. It could have been any metal, really, and she was safe enough.
The bus lurched and swayed all the way up 42nd to Grimmskel, and then lumbered toward Deerskin Station. It was stuffed with cabbage-reeking jacks—feathered and furred, those born twisted by Potential into odd shapes, full of anger and confined to the lowest-paying jobs—and a shapeless mass of non-charmers, some smelling of alcohol and some of nicotine, all of desperation.
Often Ellie wondered if she gave off the same invisible aroma.
She hopped off the lumbering silver beetle of a bus at Deerskin and set off for Southking without incident, which was a blessing. The first few times, she’d been terrified one of the jacks was going to eat her. There’d been a scuffle at the back of the bus, and a baby screaming, too.
Before they’d moved to New Haven, Ellie had foggy memories of things discussed in hushed tones, adults dropping their voices when they noticed a child was present. It took her a short while to figure out that if you shut up and didn’t ask questions, they would drop other hints. Especially because of Dad’s work—he knew, often enough, the stories that hadn’t made it into the papers and tabloids.
Stories about jacks with a taste for charmer flesh, or charismatic Twists who gathered more than one gang of the dispossessed and allowed criminal hungers free rein inside the blight of the core. There were other dangers, especially for young Potential-carrying girls. Lots and lots of them.
Money and connections bought safety, and that safety came with a hedge of restrictions. Only an idiot wouldn’t draw the conclusion that the restrictions wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a high chance of something going awfully, terribly wrong.
Her usual spot on Southking, right next to what used to be a small bodega and was now a red-curtained shop called Alterative Boutique, as if that wasn’t a name that would give anyone the shivers, was taken by another scruffy charmer in a long blue denim coat hawking popcharms and eyegrabbers, so she headed against the flow of traffic, uphill.
The hawkers and buskers were out in full force today, a press of tattered velvet, denim, and cheap glinting metal, singing their sell-songs.
“Pret-ty silver, buy some sweetsilver, Miss?” Shaking a fistful of chiming, thread-thin charmsilver bangles.
Waving a blood-red flower as big as a fist. “Pe-onies for a penny, three days guaranteed!”
A jack with a high gray bone crest on the back of his head snapped his long spidery fingers, his nails clicking in time to his cry of “Buy some fresh goffcharms, two for a credit!”
On the corner of Southking and Bastir, where the latter curved north toward the market part of town, there was a young man playing a violin, his shock of russet hair under the bright spring sunshine matching the red in his coat, clashing with his yellow jeans. The bow trembled as he drew it across the strings, a small charm to make the music audible further away resonating within varnished wood and catgut. A delightful little shiver went through her as she passed, the charm’s simplicity and power perfectly married to its function. Nice work. Except there was a brittle undertone to the music that made her think of sharp teeth and beady eyes, a nasty smell like wet fur, so she hurried past.
Further up, there was a space—a bodega’s brick wall, covered with an intaglio of graffiti. Nothing that looked likely to give her any trouble, but Ellie still spent a few moments leaning against the wall, her felt hat pulled down low to hide her hair and shade her eyes. When nobody moved to shove her along, she shook her fingers out. The sapphire was a comforting warmth against her palm, and she began searching the faces passing by.
Non-charmers with net shopping bags, jacks with feathers or fur or other odd mutations, carrying backpacks or canvas slings. All with sneaking sidelong glances, credits changing hands in corners, kept down low out of the sightline. You couldn’t quite get everything on Southking, not the way you could in Shake’s Alley or nearer the core where the Twists and black charmers, half-Twisted themselves, sold nasty, expensive, brutal charms for poison, death, curse.
But you could get a lot.
No formal or informal apprenticeship or she’d be producing in a workroom and selling in an atelier. No membership in a charm-clan, producing work under a clan’s sigil even if she wasn’t powerful enough to have a personal one. She obviously didn’t have any sort of license either, or she’d be in a tent over on Rampion or in the Market District proper. It was clear she was too young to have her Potential settled, so any charm she gave might have an unpredictable side-effect, but it was likely to be cheap as well as powerful. There were some valuable things unsettled Potential could do, even if some of the High Charm Calculus equations went into a tangle of weird inconstant values as soon as someone whose Potential wasn’t settled enough worked at them. The intersection of math and magic was never static; it kept responding to every breath of chance and Potential.
Still, you had to at least have been exposed to Calc before your Potential settled. It inoculated you a little bit against Twisting.
A lean, short jack, bone spurs on his cheeks slicing out through the suppurating, too-thin skin on his stretched face, grinned and slunk a little closer. His laboriously multicolored jacket marked him as one of the Simmerside Tops; that particular jack gang was pushing into Southking on weekends to take a cut from those too weak to resist—or those who didn’t want trouble.
The edge of Ellie’s Potential sparked, a hard sharp dart of light describing the arc of her personal space. Back off, bottom-feeder. “Cryboy.”
“Bluegirl.” The weeping fluid on his cheeks, where the bone rubbed through, glistened. He’d called her a number of things, trying to make her twitch, before finally settling. Now on Southking, she was slightly known. “You been gone a while.”
“Busy.” And you’re not getting any protection money from me. Mithrus, you’re a sucking hole.
“This is a nice spot. Really nice.” Another smirk. What would it be like to have your cheekbones cut that way, to feel the proof of mutation on your face? Every time you looked in the mirror, to be reminded of a difference you couldn’t hide?
Not like the Strep. Nobo
Ellie’s fingers tensed. The rest of her stayed loose, her heart skipping along a little too quickly, but that was okay. It wouldn’t show. Not to him, anyway. She’d popped a dartcharm at him the first time he tried to squeeze her for a credit or two, and proved she had enough Potential to give him serious trouble if he pushed harder. Since then he’d just hung around, like a jackal.
As long as Ellie kept him where she could see him, in the middle of a daylight crowd, there wasn’t much he would do. If he caught her near dark, or alone in a lonely place, well, that would be different. “Thanks for the compliment. Now run along, jack. You’re blocking my sunshine.”
“Sure thing, charmer girl.” He spat it like the jack insult it was, all hot air and halfway to Twist. Ellie restrained the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she just watched him drift away along the tideline of the crowd.
Business picked up after that. A steady stream of memorycharms to kids her age, two credits a pop. System flushes inscribed on cheap brass discs to get feyhemp or milqueweed out of their bodies before the public schools did another round of quick-release blister testing, five credits. One skinny, rumple-haired, middle-aged woman who handed over a fistful of crumpled paper credits and walked away with a small colorless glass vial of charged sylph-ether Ellie had taken the risk of stealing. The woman’s hurrying became an almost-drunken stagger as she vanished, probably running back to her doss where a lamp and a few lumps of tarry poppy extract waited.
Charged sylph-ether gave an extra kick to the poppy tar’s high; the woman wasn’t far enough along the curve of addiction to start burning it with whatever taper was to hand.
Ellie almost left after that one. Ice and vagrant’s tears were hardcore addictions, but they left Potential alone. Feyhemp could burn you for a little while, and milqueleaf made you stupid. Charmweed could addict you if you didn’t have Potential; if you did it would just give you a lethargic hangover. But poppy tar fucked you right up, and burned any Potential you might have out of you.
As much as she hated High Charm Calc, there was no way Ellie would do anything to irrevocably damage her ability to work with Potential. It was, after all, her only ticket out of Perrault Street. She ran it over and over in her head and came up with the same thing each time. Good luck getting an apprenticeship if a Sigiled charmer dropped a hint that you were unstable or lazy, and good luck getting into a charm-clan when your stepmother was a stranger in town who had made no friends with her avid social climbing.
Most high-powered charmers liked a bit of friendly rivalry, but there were those that took it too far. Funny how nobody seemed to think that maybe Laurissa wasn’t a nice person at home, considering how she jostled and elbowed for clients so hard.
That was adults for you. They didn’t think about you until you turned old enough, unless they wanted something. Even Dad hadn’t thought very hard about Laurissa, or maybe she charmed him right into forgetting everything but her. Who knew?
Even Mother Hel seemed to think everything was just peachy now. Or she was too busy to keep an eye out for Strep-related bruises.
In any case, the only escape possible was saving up, getting into Ebermerle College, and keeping her head attached in the process.
An afternoon’s steady work got her a ringing-empty head and a pocket full of crumpled credits, as well as a gnawing belly. It took physical energy to control and contain Potential, especially when you had to be extra careful of it slopping over the sides of the charm and sparking into chaos.
Still, nobody’d had any complaints about her work so far. Stealing the sylph-ether had been an inspired choice, and she was already planning how to grab more. Today had been a good day; being careful until she learned enough to plan for everything had paid off. She’d almost doubled her stash, and all it had taken was a little forethought.
Her gaze flicked through the crowds, and she calculated her exit stroll. She’d learned, after having been chased by Cryboy and his gang of low-level jacks one afternoon, not to shout that she was going anywhere in particular. And especially not to relax.
It was just like being at home, really.
She was halfway to Highclere and the beginning of her circuitous route toward the bus station that would let her catch the 151 to Perrault when someone shouted behind her.
“Hey!”
Every inch of Ellie’s skin tingled. She didn’t stop to wonder if the shout was for her—when your Potential sparked like that, it was best to move first and ask questions later. She didn’t know if it was Cryboy pounding the pavement after her, except it wasn’t like him to yell unless he was pushing his prey toward his fellow bottom-feeders.
So she took off in the last direction a pursuer would expect—a three-quarter turn to her left, darting across Southking’s four lanes. Brakes screeched, someone laid on the horn, but on a Saturday afternoon everything was crowded enough around here to mean she wouldn’t get squashed under someone’s imported hunk of gas-burning junk or a straining pedicab.
“Wait!” whoever it was yelled, but Ellie had no intention of making it any easier on him. She jagged down an alley she’d scoped out a long time ago, scrambling for a fire escape hanging on rust-eaten screws. It shuddered and yawed alarmingly, but it held her all the way to the top, and she streaked across the roof of the warehouse that was now Beaman’s Emporium—shampoo only half a credit per bottle, if you didn’t mind the risk of your hair turning into seaweed, and smokes two per packet if you didn’t mind them being cut with whatever some jack in some Eastron factory had to hand that day—and clattered down the stairs on the opposite side.
A stitch grabbed her side with sharpclaw fingers, and her entire midriff seized up. She found herself on hands and knees in the Emporium parking lot, staring at pointed glitters of broken glass and a few foil-bright candy wrappers. To her right loomed a huge junker, a rust-colored Porsline truck that had to be almost as ancient as the Reeve itself. To her left was a plain of weed-cracked, open pavement, but there wasn’t a single thing moving on its broad, bumpy back.
The Emporium closed at four on Saturdays. Why, nobody knew. Some said it was run by fey, but then everyone who had ever known a flighty-ass Child of Danu laughed themselves sick. Fey weren’t supposed to be good at business. They had weird ideas about profit and loss, too.
Still, it would explain a hell of a lot. Ow. Oh, God, ouch.
When she could breathe again, she blinked back tears and carefully heaved herself up into a crouch. Nothing was stirring in front of the Emporium, and she hadn’t scraped her hands too badly. Her jeans would need more patching, and bright drops of blood welled on her knees and palms.
At least she still had her credits.
It was there, her back to a ginormous ugly-stupid orange truck, that Ellie was startled into laughter again. Ruby wouldn’t have run with her—she would have turned around to fight whatever was chasing them. Cami would have tried her best to drag Ruby along, being more of the live to fight another day persuasion. While they were arguing, it would be up to Ellie to make a plan and solve the damn problem.
It was ridiculous to think of her friends here, but Cami at least would have understood the sudden burst of dark hilarity.
After all, Ellie had lost her stupid hat. It had flown away during the scramble, and good luck finding it now.
NINE
GETTING BACK TO PERRAULT WAS ANTICLIMACTIC.
“She’s been gone all day.” Rita was as colorless as ever, hunched on a wooden stool at the breakfast bar. Her scabbed knees peeped out from under the brown plaid skirt, and she’d laced her hands protectively over her middle.
The kitchen for once wasn’t a trap. Instead, it was warm and bright, full of Antonia’s humming, the cook lowering her hefty self down to peer into a cupboard.
“Saturday. Spa day.” Ellie dropped onto her usual slightly unsteady three-legged stool. Rocked back and forth a little, just to feel the familiar movement. “She goes to Bianca’s downto
“There you are.” Antonia cast a dark-eyed glance over one broad shoulder. Today her big shapeless dress was pale much-washed blue, with huge splotches of yellow flowers like cancerous growths. She still wore a black band around her left arm in mourning for Mom, part of her wardrobe for years now. She probably didn’t dare to wear one for Dad. “Shame on you, Miss Sinder, running around in that getup. Little hoyden.”
“I didn’t know anyone used that word anymore.” Ellie grinned, running her fingers back through her hair. I never liked that hat anyway, but I’m going to have to find something to cover this up. The pale blonde was too distinctive. “What’s up, Miz Toni?”
Antonia had been Ellie’s last au pair, hired before they moved to New Haven. Mom and Dad had arranged for her to get a cook’s certification afterward, sending her to Candide Culinary on a full scholarship with references. Keeping her was keeping status among Laurissa’s fellow charmers, especially if the Strep wanted to throw parties during the social season—or, God forbid, put in the winning bid to host the Charmer’s or Midsummer’s Ball.
It was almost a relief to think Ellie wouldn’t have to go to a ball this year. Dad would have gotten the invitations for Ruby and Cami as well, because Ell would wheedle him into going and using both of their guest slots. If Ellie hadn’t had Potential, Mom’s death could have closed the charm community to them both.
It was never difficult for him to get extra tickets for her friends, but Family and Woodsdowne weren’t strictly allowed in. They could charm, sure . . . but they weren’t quite, well, they weren’t jacks or Twists, but they were different.
Like fey. You didn’t invite them home.
“Pickles,” Antonia grumbled. “Pickled this, pickled that. Well, a pregnant woman, Mithrus bless her. You get beef and barley soup, just the thing for growing girls. Perk you up, pale and peaked as you are.”