Free Guard Dog? by Phoebe Matthews

 
      Mudflat magic is inherited, and with each generation the magic weakens. Or sometimes the magic remains powerful but the brain that controls it is   weaker.
     
    GUARD DOG?
      Seattle is a city of back alleys in the old neighborhoods. As I am usually traveling on foot, running to a bus stop, they are my freeways, shortcuts uncluttered with car traffic. This alley was in a small commercial district, behind office buildings, the short type that have realtors and hair dressers on the first floor and accountants and dentists on the second.
      As this was Sunday, the alley was empty of people. Just the usual dumpsters. A couple of old cars pulled up tight against the concrete block walls. Flowering weeds pushing out of the cracks in the blacktop.
      At the far exit, a BMW stood at the curb. It was parked, all right, and not actually moving, but somehow a BMW never quite looks stopped or parked. It always looks like a criminal about to make a dash for it. Or is my opinion of a BMW distorted because I know who owns one?
      Between tinted windows and normal light glare, I couldn't see who was in it, although I could see the shadow shape of a head. I knew Darryl Decko’s car way too well. If he was sitting at the curb, I didn’t want to go running past. For me, the Decko brothers are bad news.
      Darryl is the one with money, always in some hotshot job somewhere. Rock is the one with the magic, not a lot, but enough to get himself in trouble. The deal is this. Like me, the Deckos grew up in Mudflat, a neighborhood in Seattle where old magic lives, trailing its way through the Mudflat families like a hopscotch game, making one kid a witch, another a ghost-talker, and then it would skip a generation and a grandchild would suddenly turn out to be a spellcaster. The magic keeps trailing, getting a little weaker as it drifts down through the families’ gene pools.
      I inherited a bit, not much, just enough to make me a painfully accurate fortuneteller, which also makes me a target for Darryl Decko who would like me to forecast stuff he can make bets on. That’s forbidden for a whole lot of   reasons, none of which matter here, except that you’ll understand now why I avoid him. Larceny is his hobby.
      What keeps either of the Decko boys out of jail is a puzzle.
      I slowed, then came to a standstill, waiting for that BMW to pull away. That’s when I noticed the open back door in a two-story cement block building.   Okay, I noticed it because it wasn’t simply open, it was shredded, hanging sideways on broken hinges,
      The younger Decko, Rock, is a smash wizard, the only one in the city because smash wizards are territorial and competitors disappear. His skill is limited. Rock isn't the brightest bulb, but he has that smash thing down pat, all except the self-control part. He can hit a board with the side of his hand and the board doesn’t just break in two, the way some athletes do it, it actually disintegrates into a million pieces.
      If he hits a door too hard, it ends up looking like the door in front of me.
      Decko car in the alley, Decko damage to a building, gee, I didn’t need to be a fortuneteller to figure out that the two were connected. As Rock wasn’t the brother who scared me, I went to the broken door and took a step inside to a short, dark hallway that faced two more doors, one intact, the other not.
      Something exploded, not fire cracker size. Major. It sounded like somebody’d been lugging a refrigerator up a staircase and it got away from them and went crashing. If the building were twenty stories taller, the crash could even be a broken elevator cable.
      “Rock?” I called softly. When I didn’t get an answer, I shouted. “Rock? Hey, Rock, you in here?”
      Have I mentioned that seven years ago, when I was sixteen, I dated Rock Decko?
      No, I did not know that he had an older brother who was involved in a lot of illegal stuff, and I wouldn't have cared. Rock in black leather