Free We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) by Jeff Somers

All of them. I still had the Skinny Fuck’s memories, some more distinct than others. I could see the girls clearly. I shut my eyes and tried to will them away, delete them.
    Big-time mages, people like Cal Amir and his boss, Renar, cast big-time spells. The bigger the spell, the more blood you needed. There had been spells cast back in history that had required thousands of people to bleed out simultaneously—it wasn’t easy. Even if you had thousands of servants who could run through thousands of people on cue, it wasn’t easy. And civilization made it harder. So what you did was you set up a domino effect: You took a manageable number of people—say, a hundred. You slaughtered them to cast a smaller spell, which in turn would slaughter a thousand people, doing the dirty work for you, and then you used the blood generated by those deaths to cast the real spell.
    We are not good people.
    The girl in the old apartment had been runed up the same way as Claire. But that one had been drained and dumped. The ritual probably required the body to be preserved, so they couldn’t burn her or dump her in the river. But she hadn’t been part of the main ritual—she’d been preliminary. Her blood had been used for something connected to the ritual but not the ritual itself. My head ached thinking about the possible uses of six quarts of healthy, inked blood. For the main ritual, whatever it was, the sacrifices had to be done together, because as each one died, her blood would fuel the next link, killing the next one. One missing girl fucked everything up. And we had one missing girl, sitting in Hiram’s bathroom.
    “Well,” the old man said. “We know what we have to do, then.”
    “What’s that?” I spat onto his rug. There was no making the stain worse , I figured.
    “Give Renar back her property. As quickly as possible.”
    My heart leaped in my chest and I sat up. “What?”
    Hiram had his blasé face on, the blank look he adopted when he assumed he was smarter than you. “Mr. Vonnegan,” he boomed, still impressive after fifteen years. He’d taught me everything I knew, and he’d been eager to teach me more, to teach me how to go beyond him. But I’d left, and he’d never forgiven me. “Mika Renar can burn the two of us out of existence, do you understand? She could remove us from history, she is that powerful. All that limits her is blood, harvesting enough.”
    Harvesting. I was reminded, abruptly and forcefully, why I’d left.
    Since Hiram had not released me from my apprenticeship, I could not seek another teacher, nor could he take on another apprentice. We were locked in a cold war.
    He smiled. “And if you were removed from history, where would your dim-witted friend here be?”
    Mags looked up, realizing he’d been referred to, working through the last few words to try to get the context. He grinned at me, sheepish.
    “He’d be dead,” I said flatly. Mags had the spark, he could work a spell. But he couldn’t remember much and fucked up the half he did remember.
    I was idimustari, a Trickster, by choice. Mags would never be anything but. And he’d never survive on the streets alone.
    Hiram nodded. “So we return Renar’s property. Immediately. Before she has to come find us.”
    I shook my head. “She’ll be slaughtered. Along with who knows how many others.” I pointed at the body. “This asshole has been collecting them for Renar for months now. We return the missing link, we’re condemning them all to death, Hiram.”
    I saw the girls again. They were of a type, twins upon twins. Darker-skinned, thin. I flipped through the Skinny Fuck’s greasy memories. The first girls had been in their thirties. Over time they’d gottenyounger and younger, until we got to Claire in his trunk, the youngest yet.
    “Lemuel,” Hiram said, pushing his hands into his pockets and pushing his little round belly at me. His voice was cold now, authoritative. Hiram was no joke; he kept his magicks small,