Read Online A Criminal Magic by Lee Kelly - Free Book Online

on the other side.
    Nerves on fire, I force myself to tiptoe around the minefield of sleeping sorcerers and lie down as quietly as possible on the empty cot. The thing’s all coils and sharp edges, but I just close my eyes, wrap myself around my knapsack, and pray for a sleep as deep and dark as sleep can get.
    Long ago there was a sorcerer who walked to hell for her family, and in the pits of fire, the devil saw her remorse and let her walk back —
    But I can’t fall asleep. I’m too wound up. One of the men a few feet away shifts with a squeak in his cot, and I give a gasp before I can help it. Another wheezes— whispers? —while a nearby cough nearly sends me jumping off my mattress.
    I turn over, close my eyes, pinch out the warehouse. I need to calm down . I need to cut my fear out, bottle it, and put it on a shelf.
    But then I feel something warm and soft slip up against my neck. I give a startled yelp and whip my head around. “Who’s there?”
    No answer. And no one has moved. But I feel it again, this time on my arm, that brush of softness like a large paintbrush. No, softer, almost—almost like fur , and then the quickest slap of something else, like the whip of a tiny tail.
    Out of the darkness molds something half the length of my forearm and twice as wide, whiskers prickling my skin, little feet pattering over my fingers. Fur. Tail. Rat .
    I push the animal away as hard as I can, and the thing goes squealing, flying to the border of the next cot, but it doesn’t skitter away. Instead it comes back at me again, bounds forward like a hell-spawned rodent and starts climbing over my right leg. I sit up, kick at it, hear myself whimpering. Do not cry Joan do not cry Joan —
    I attempt to push it into the fuzzy dark that swallows the back of the warehouse, but the slippery bastard manages to squirrel out of my fingers, bounds up my arm, and races over my stomach, its dirty paws pressing into my shirt as it attaches itself to my other arm. I writhe away, swat at it as it runs over my shoulder, into my hair. “Get off!” I command the small monster. As soon as I say it, I hear a soft, muffled chuckling.
    And then, to my immediate right, a woman’s voice: “Leave her alone, Stock.”
    â€œMind your own business, Dune, I’m just having some fun with her. She’s as jumpy as a cricket.” But the rat disappears, like dust in the wind. My shoulders relax, but that creepy-crawly feeling that came with the rodent still needles me under my skin.
    The woman in the cot on my right side sits up, facing away from me. “Tell me if this is fun, Stock,” she says flatly. Then she whispers so soft I can barely hear her, “ Breathe and slither .”
    A boy in a cot a few beds down immediately leaps out of his bed and lands bum-first on the floor, swatting and cursing. He gets onto all fours and starts scrambling away from his cot. “Knock it off, hell, Grace, stop !”
    Under the patch of light the moon casts onto the floor, I make out something shimmery and fluid. A snake , three inches wide, about two feet long, slithers through the puddle of moonlight, its green and gold scales glistening under the light, before it retreats into the darkness. The snake, just like the rat, I guess, the work of sorcery. Even though the rat and snake are gone, they leave behind a larger, far more unsettling fear.
    â€œYou’re such a wet blanket, Dune,” says my rat-tormentor, Stock. “Skirts stick together, is that it?”
    The woman—Grace Dune, I take it—says, “Just save the magic for Gunn. You keep sorcering in here, and we’re all likely to blow each other up.”
    Some of the other sorcerers have roused awake from the hushed argument, and there starts a chorus of “Shut it,” “Come on, it’s late,” “Enough bickering,” before the whispers finally fade, like the rat and the snake, into