Hard Magic. Laura Anne Gilman
cooling hand of the other figure slumped in the passenger seat.
one
The dream was back. It always came back when I was stressed.
The site was deserted; I sneaked through the fence and into the house. Lucky for me the alarms hadn’t been turned on yet.
As usual, my brain was telling me that it was only a memory; that I already knew what I would find, that it was okay for my heart to stop pounding so fast, but the dream was in control.
The door called to me. I could feel it, practically singing in the rain-filled dusk. My flashlight skittered across the floor, allowing me to pick my way around piles of trash and debris. No tools left out; the carpenter’s daughter approved.
“Hello, beauty,” I said to the door. Or maybe to the woman in the door: in the darkness, in the beam of light, she was nakedly apparent now, a sweet-eyed woman who gazed out into the bare bones of the room with approval and fondness.
Even now, the beauty of Zaki’s work astounded me, and I mourned again for that loss.
“Who are you, then? That’s the key to all this. Who are you?”
The door, not too surprisingly, didn’t answer. But I knew how to make it talk.
Or I thought I did, anyway.
It was all instinct, but J had always told me that instinct was the way most new things were discovered—instinct and panic.
I held my hand over the door the way I had with the tools, carefully not making physical contact with it, and touched just the lightest levels of current, like alto bells sounding in the distance.
The woman’s hair stirred in a breeze, and her face seemed softer, rounder, then she disappeared behind the leaves again.
I hated her, this woman I’d never known, never met. Hated her for being the reason my father was dead.
Zaki really had been an artist, the bastard. I could feel him in the work. But I didn’t know, yet, what he had been feeling.
*evidence doesn’t lie*
Shut up, I told the voice. I’m working.
I touched a deeper level of current, bringing it out with a firm hand and splaying it gently across the door so that it landed easily, smoothly.
Oh, how I love her, such a bad woman, such a wrong woman, and I cannot have her, but I will show her my love….
Zaki, melancholy and impassioned, his hand steady on the chisel, his eyes on the wood, sensing even through his distraction how to chip here, cut there, to make the most of the grain. He was concentrating, thinking of his object of affection, the muse who inspired him.So focused, the way all Talent learned to be, that he never saw the man coming up behind him, the man who had already seen the work in progress, and recognized, the way a man might, the face growing out of the wood.
I knew what was about to happen, in my dream-mind, and tensed against the memory.
The blow was sudden and sharp, and the vision faded.
No, I told my current. More.
It surged, searched, and found…nothing. No emotions from the killer. No residue of his actions. It had been too long, or he had been too good, too quick. Or I needed to be better, sharper.
You were a kid, I wanted to tell my then-self. You did what you could, and you did as well as you could. But you can’t talk back to memories, only relive them.
“Damn it.” My flashlight’s beam dropped off the door; I was unwilling to look at the face of the woman who had cost my father his life.
*there is always evidence*
The voice was back. And probably right. I let the beam play on the floor, unsure what I was looking for. Scan, step, scan. I repeated the process all the way up to the door, then turned around and looked the way I had come.
“There.”
On the floor, about two feet away. A spot where the hardwood floor shone differently That meant that it had been refinished more recently than the rest of the floor, or been treated somehow…. Zaki would have known. All I knew was that it was a clue.
I touched it with current, as lightly as I could. Something warned me that a gentle touch would reveal more than demanding ever would.
“The killer’s actions, I beg you wood, reveal.”
J’s influence: treat current the way you would a horse; control it through its natural instincts. Current, like electricity, illuminated.
A dent in the floor, sanded down and covered up. The point of a chisel stained with blood? No. The harder end, sticking out of a body as it landed, falling backward …
Oh, Zaki, you idiot was all I could find inside myself, following the arc of the body. For a woman? For another man’s woman when you had Claire at home?
And then I saw it, the shadow figure of the killer, indistinct even in his own mind—shading himself. That meant the killer was a Talent, if of even less skill than Zaki. Had that been a factor? The man—the foreman, I knew now—jealous not only of the carpenter’s attraction to his wife, but of his skill to display it, driven to murder?
The chisel was removed, wiped down, and …
I still flinched, even years and dreams later.
The blood alone flared bright in the pictorial, a shine of wet rubies in the shadows as the foreman dipped the chisel into a cloth still damp with the blood, laying the trace for me to find, a week later.
Find, and be unable to do anything about, save live with the knowledge that my father had been murdered, and the murderer still walked, unpunished ….
I woke up, and the still-powerful sadness of dream faded, although it never really went away. Zaki had been dead for three years, though, and I’d learned to live with it. My depressing reality was more immediate: three months out of college, and I still didn’t have a job.
I thought about putting the feather pillow over my face until I turned a proper shade of blue and suffocated. Even knowing that it was the overblown act of a spoiled five-year-old didn’t stop me from contemplating it, running through scenarios of who would find me and what they might say or think or do. Eventually, though, I shoved the pillow to the side and stared glumly up at the ceiling.
No, I wasn’t quite that desperate. But it was close.
Nobody wanted to hire me. It wasn’t that I didn’t have brains. Or enthusiasm. Or dedication, for that matter. I just … didn’t know what to do with any of what I had. I guess that was showing up in my interviews, because nobody was saying “welcome aboard.”
Something had to break soon, or I was looking at a short-term career goal of flipping burgers or, if I was lucky, pulling beers at a semidecent pickup bar.
“Oh, the hell with that.” I got out of bed and stripped down my sweat-soaked T-shirt and panties, replacing them with my sweat-dried gym clothes, fresh socks, and my sneakers, and headed down to the hotel’s gym. The only way to interrupt a self-pity party was with a good hard run.
I got back to my room, feeling only a little bit better, just in time to take possession of my breakfast order. I let the room-service guy in and tipped him, the door barely closing behind his back when the phone rang. I dropped the receipt on the table and picked up the phone, telling myself not to make any assumptions or unfounded leaps of hope. This early, though, it might be good news. Did people