Pokrewne

Start
Detektyw Monk 03 Detektyw Mon Goldberg Lee
Bob Blink [Ancient Magic 02] Into the Ruins (epub)
Barker Abarat 2 Days of Magic, Nights of War (r
Dragonlance Tales 01 The Magic of Krynn # edited by
B. V. Larson Haven Series 01 Amber Magic
Ashwood, Sharon Dark Magic 01 Hexenlicht
Black Blade Series 3 Bright Blaze of Magic
Brooklyn O'Bannon Angel Magic (epub)
Annie Barrows The Magic Half (epub)
Artifact Cycle 1 The Brothers Magic the Gathering

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Mama wouldn’t answer the phone.She was convinced it was tapped, though I couldn’t think of anyone who would be interested in the life of a woman who lived in North Portland, in the broken-down neighborhood of St.John’s, a neglected and mostly forgotten place cut off from the magic that flowed through the rest of the city.I tipped my head back, stared at the ceiling, and exhaled.Okay.I’d go and make sure Boy was all right.I’d try to talk Mama into calling a doctor.I’d check for any magical wrongdoing.I’d look for rats.I’d bill her half price.Then I would go out for a late birthday breakfast.A girl could hope, anyway.I walked out the door and locked it.I didn’t bother with alarm spells.Most single women in the city thought alarm spells would keep them safe, but I knew firsthand that if someone wanted to break into your apartment badly enough, there wasn’t a spell worth paying the price for that could keep them out.I took the stairs instead of the elevator, because I hate small spaces, and made it to the street in no time.The mid-September morning was gray as a grave and cold enough that my breath came out in plumes of steam.The wind gusted off the Willamette River and rain sliced at my face.Portland lived up to its name.Even though it was a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had that industrial, crumbling-brick-warehouse feel of the working port it still was, especially along the banks of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.The Willamette River was practically in my backyard, behind the warehouses and the train and bus stations.Without squinting I could see four of the mismatched bridges that crossed the water, connecting downtown with the east side of the city.Over that river and north, close to where the Willamette and Columbia met, was Mama’s neighborhood.I zipped my coat, pulled up my hood, and wished I’d thought about putting on a sweater before I left.A bus wouldn’t get me to Mama’s fast enough.However, the good thing about being a six-foot-tall woman was that cabs, few and far between though they may be, stopped when you whistled.It didn’t hurt that I had my dad’s good looks, either.When I was in the mood to smile, I could get almost anyone to see things my way, even without using magic.True to the Beckstrom blood, I also had a gift for magic-based Influence.But after watching my dad Influence my mother, his lovers, business partners, and even me to get his way, I’d sworn off using it.It wasn’t like I had wanted to go to Harvard.I had Juilliard in mind: art, not business; music, not magic.But my dad had severe ideas about what constituted a useful education.I waved down a black-and-white taxi and ducked into the backseat.The driver, a skinny man who smelled like he brushed his hair with bacon drippings, glanced in the rearview.‘‘Where to?’’‘‘St.John’s.’’His eyes narrowed.I watched him consider telling a nice girl like me about a bad side of town like that.But he must have decided a fare’s a fare, and a one-way was better than none at all.He pulled into traffic and didn’t look back at me again.In the best light, like maybe a sunny day in July, the north side of Portland looks like a derelict row of crumbling shops and broken-down bars.On a cold, rainy September day like today, it looks like a wet derelict row of crumbling shops and broken-down bars.Crawling up from the river, the neighborhood had that rotten-tooth brick-and-board architecture that attracted the poor, the addicted, and the desperate.Unlike most of the rest of Portland, it stood pretty much as it had been built back in the 1800s, except it had one other thing going against it—there was no naturally occurring magic beneath the streets of North Portland.The city had conveniently forgotten to add the fifth quadrant of town into the budget when running the lead and glass networks to make magic available, so now the rest of the city largely ignored the entire area, like a sore beneath the belt everyone knew about, but no one mentioned in polite company.The driver rolled the cab to a stop just on the other side of the railroad track, and I couldn’t help but smile.He must have heard of the neighborhood’s rules and rep.Outsiders were tolerated in St.John’s most days [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]