Free Magic Steals by Ilona Andrews

that.
    Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.
    â€œYou okay?” he asked quietly.
    â€œI’m okay,” I told him.
    For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.
    â€œWe thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It’s not. It’s curse based, Jim.”
    He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.
    â€œMost magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn’t also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can’t be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”
    He nodded. “Yes.”
    â€œSo when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knewit was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”
    â€œLogically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.
    â€œThat’s what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don’t know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It’s not a mythological being. That’s something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”
    â€œAmanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”
    â€œThis magic isn’t spell based or talent based. It’s curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn’t met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let’s say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”
    Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”
    I waved my hands at him. “That’s not the point.”
    â€œNo, that’s the kind of information I need to know.”
    â€œOkay, probably I could.”
    Jim’s expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
    â€œJim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can’t get it anyway; you’re a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”
    â€œCan cats be affected by human gonorrhea?”
    â€œNot necessarily, but the curse would still try to infect the cat. If I wanted to make a curse more specific, I would define it as ‘any creature with only one leg,’ which would spare the three-legged cat. Even more specific: any man with one leg. There is a limit to how specific you can get. Back to our current situation. I believe someone has cursed these people to fall prey to their worst fear. I am not sure exactly how this curse was structured, but I think it manifests the irrational fears they had since childhood. The curse relies on them tosupply it with the details of their worst fears. Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots, so she got a giant swarm. Dobrev was afraid of a hag, so it gave him a hag. And when it came to Amanda’s fears, it made a living car. That’s what Amanda saw in her mind when she worried about her son.”
    â€œMakes sense,” Jim said. “But wouldn’t that take a lot of