Cursed

I turned a page. “I don’t sell spells, and I don’t sell tricks. I don’t carry illusions or marked cards or weighted coins. I can not sell you an endless purse or help you win the lottery. I can’t make that girl you’ve got your eye on fall in love with you, and I wouldn’t do it even if I could. I don’t have a psychic hotline to your dead relatives, I don’t know if you’re going to be successful in your career, and I don’t know when you’re going to get married. I can’t get you into Hogwarts or any other kind of magic school, and if you even mention those stupid sparkly vampires I will do something unpleasant to you.”

“…Ookay?”

“Good. Now that’s settled, what do you need?”

“You’re Alex Verus, right?”

“That’s me.”

“Hi, good to meet you.” A hand appeared above my book. “Martin.”

I looked up and got my first good view of Martin. He was twenty-four or twenty-five, slim, with small blue eyes and dark blond hair that was spiky from gel and swept in a fashionable style from left to right. I guessed most women would have found him good-looking. He was wearing a button-down shirt and trousers, with a coat slung over one shoulder, and moved with a sort of casual confidence that made me think of money.

I disliked him on sight. I probably would have disliked him anyway, but the haircut made it a lot easier. I said, “Hey,” and reached out to shake his hand.

In the fraction of a second before our hands touched, I focused on Martin with my mage’s sight. The technique isn’t really sight—it’s a whole other sense, separate from the five—but for whatever reason sight seems to be the way all mages interpret it. It lets you perceive magic directly rather than just the vague feelings a sensitive or adept gets, all the wisps and auras and strands that make up the currents in the world around you. Most are so faint you have to strain to see them but anything really powerful, like a mage’s spell, is dazzling. If you’re good—and I’m very good—you can pick out what the spell does, how long it’s been there, and even the nature of whoever cast it. I didn’t need any skill to recognise the silvery mist around Martin though. It was Luna’s curse, and it meant he’d been close to her. The mist was only a thin layer swirling gently around his skin. Despite all the time I’ve spent around Luna I’ve rarely seen her curse in action, and I wasn’t sure how long it would have taken for Martin to pick this much up. I didn’t think it was enough to put him in serious danger, but it might be.

My hand clasped on Martin’s and the moment was gone. I couldn’t feel the silver mist over Martin’s skin but I could see it. It didn’t spread from him to me; that’s not the way the curse works. “Great to finally meet up,” Martin said as he shook my hand. “Luna’s told me a lot about you.”

“She’s not supposed to.”

“Not— Oh, ha-ha! Yeah, I see what you mean. Don’t worry, I won’t spread it around.”

I had my doubts about that. “Looking for something?”

“Yeah, I really wanted to have a look at some focuses and one-shots. They’re over there behind the rope, right? Mind if I have a root through?”

“You don’t want to mess with those things unless you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s fine, I know the score. Besides, you can tell me what they do, right?”

I really wanted to say no. But the aura on Martin confirmed he was the guy Luna had been talking about and I didn’t have a good reason to tell him to get lost. Reluctantly, I walked over as Martin unhooked the rope and started looking through the contents of the shelves, asking me questions all the while.

In between answering Martin’s questions, I asked a few of my own. According to Martin, he’d grown up here in London, moved away for university, then moved back to get a place of his own. He was a musician and played in a band. He was vague on the details of exactly how he’d learnt about the magical world. He’d just picked things up, he said. He’d been trying to break into mage society but was finding it difficult. He’d met Luna through a mutual friend. She’d mentioned my shop to him and he’d wanted to learn more.

I learnt other things about Martin too, not so much from what he said as how he said it. He had charm, knew how to be funny, and knew how to flatter. He was clever, though maybe not as clever as he thought. Although he didn’t come out and say it, he knew I was a mage. He knew the basics of how magic worked but couldn’t use it himself—he was only a sensitive. That was the only point at which his smile slipped a little. It was only for a second, but enough to make me wonder if it was a sore spot. Maybe he’d just made friends with Luna to take advantage of her connection to me.

And maybe I was just being jealous. I didn’t like Martin, but if I was being honest with myself I had to admit I didn’t have a good reason for it. He was pleasant, charming, and probably the only new friend Luna had made in months.