Sunshine

Maybe I should have been thinking about tattoos myself, but there’s a real big drawback to them. Any charm can be turned against you, if you run into the thing it’s supposed to be protecting you from, and the thing is enough stronger than the protection. A powerful enough demon adept or magic handler can overwhelm one too, although that’s serious feud stuff and not common. A tattoo feeds itself on you, so tattoos do tend to be a lot more stable and longer-lived than the ordinary charms you set around and hang up, including the ones you wear next to your skin; but a charm that isn’t living off you can be destroyed a lot more easily if it does go—or is sent—rogue. A rogue tattoo can eat you up. It happens occasionally. Before five months ago I didn’t figure I needed any heavy warding. Now that I did, tattoos were the last thing I was going to try.

“Charlie,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone else either.” Not Mel. Not me.

“Not Mrs. B,” said Mel, smiling. “Sunshine, I don’t like metaphysics unless I’m drunk, it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon, and I’m working tonight. What’s up?”

If Mel had really been trying to pass as a motorcycle hoodlum, his tattoos wouldn’t be as beautiful or as elaborate. Lots of sorcerers go in for a superabundance of tattoos, but they mostly keep them hidden—they’re harder to rogue that way. Hence the long enveloping robe and deep hood technique with inked-up sorcerers when they’re actually handling magic. (For day-to-day, walking-the-dog, doing-the-shopping use, a lot of sorcerers disguise the real shape of their tattoos with cosmetics. Long sleeves and high collars are hot in the summer—and there are favorite sorcerer tattoos that go on your lips and cheeks and forehead too. But—I love this—magic can apparently be a bit perfunctory about certain things in the heat of a transaction. Any tattoo a sorcerer wants working while he or she handles magic can’t be distorted with face paint or pancake foundation because it may turn out to be the apparent figure that performs. Or doesn’t.)

My dad didn’t have any tattoos. That I remembered. But I didn’t remember my dad very well, and not all sorcerers have tattoos.

But sorcerers are sorcerers. Tattooists mostly make their livings punching charms in leather, not live skin, and they’ll try to talk an ordinary member of the public out of it if you already have, say, three magic-bearing tattoos, even little boring ones, and they’ll tell you why. In vivid detail. It isn’t just the rogue possibility: a lot of magic-bearing tattoos can sort of unbalance you. You start not being quite sure where the real-world lines are with a lot of tattoos whispering in your dreams. Of course having lots of magic-bearing tattoos is one way of saying you’re a tough guy—first because the implication is that you need all that charm and ward power, and second because you’re hardy enough to bear the drain and the disorientation.

But there are better ways of showing you are a tough guy than having lots of tattoos, partly because no tattooist who wants to keep his or her license is likely to cooperate, and the ones who don’t have licenses are too likely to make a mess of it. There is only one small secondary quarter-circle’s difference between a ward against drunkenness and another one against eyestrain, for example, and the latter won’t get you home safely with a load on. And that’s one of the common, simple wards, and most of Mel’s tattoos weren’t common or simple. But they were magic bearers, not ornamental. You could smell it, like ozone when a storm is coming. And besides, nobody who had any pretensions to hanging out with a biker gang would dare have ornamental tattoos. Ornies are for wusses.

Mel couldn’t be a sorcerer—sorcery isn’t something you can successfully hide for long—but he did have a lot of tattoos. It was typical of him too that when he had come to talk to Charlie about a job the first time he had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and his shirt open at the neck, in spite of the fact that it was January and freezing. Although maybe he just had a good take on Charlie, who in his affable, openhearted way, enjoys Charlie’s reputation as a place slightly on the edge.

I said, “Mel, who are you?‘’

Mel picked up both my hands and kissed them. His lips were warm. When he laid them back on the table he didn’t let go. I watched the sunlight twinkle among the fine hairs on the backs of his hands, and the red and gold and black of the tattoos there. Both the hairs and the tattoos had an unusually bright red edge, as if there was firelight on them. Or in them. His hands were warm too. Human temperature. The temperature of the fire of human life. Speaking of metaphysics. “I’m your friend, Sunshine,” he said. “Everything else is just static on the line.”