exactly who it is. Expensive sessions. I'd never done that, even when money had been more than tight. I might cheat casinos out of desperation, but I never mocked my gift. Most of the mages at Tony's, however, had put down any of my Seeings that came true to coincidence, and wanted little to do with me.
Vamps, of course, have an innate magic of their own, and I don't mean just the power that animates them. Most gain useful abilities if they survive long enough, and some of those can be pretty spectacular. I'd seen vamps levitate themselves and others, strip the skin off a body from across a room, and rip a beating heart out of a chest with little more than a thought. But the kind of magic the mages do is beyond them, and magic workers lose their ability if turned, so there are no vamp mages.
I think I learned more that afternoon about magic than ten years at Tony's had taught me. It started when Pritkin stripped back down to let Mac finish the tattoo, and I asked why he was bothering with that now. I was mainly asking to focus my attention on something other than his body, which was suddenly a lot more attractive than it should have been. I really hoped the side effects from encountering incubi were going to wear off soon.
"Like yours, my magic will not be reliable in Faerie," Pritkin said. He sounded like he'd rather tell me to go to hell, but since we'd just agreed to be allies, he had to play nice. I decided to press the advantage while it lasted, which I suspected wouldn't be long.
"What, you're going to flash your manly tattoo at the Fey?”
Mac laughed, but even though Pritkin's head was turned away from me, I could tell he was scowling. His shoulders tensed, and that tightened things further down in an interesting way. I got up to get another Coke.
"It's a special tattoo," Mac told me cheerfully, picking up something that looked like an electric toothbrush without the bristles. "If I do this right, it should imprint his aura- his magical skin-as well as the physical. When he throws his shields up, it'll manifest as a real weapon. And, as we learned the technique from the Fey, it should work in Faerie even better than here." He put the head of the toothbrush thing to the top of the sword and started to ink it in. Pritkin didn't flinch, but the muscles in his arms stood out a bit more. I sipped Coke and gave up trying not to watch him.
"I'm not getting it," I said after a minute. "You have weapons"-a serious understatement-"why not rely on them?”
Mac answered, although his attention remained on his victim's back, where he paused to wipe away some blood.
"Regular weapons won't do much against the Fey. You need magical stuff to hold up against the sort of thing they can dish out, but like John said, our magic doesn't work in Faerie." He went back to inking, and this time Pritkin did flinch slightly. "At least, most of it won't, and the sort of stuff that will, we don't have access to.”
"What sort of stuff?”
"Oh, different things," Mac said, his little tool humming as it tore through Pritkin's skin. He paused to consult the large grimoire he'd propped on the stool next to him, then muttered something over the partly finished tattoo. The image gleamed for a moment, then died back down. Mac grunted and went back to work. "What would really help would be some null bombs. Only they're hard to come by, and it's a death sentence to use them without authorization. And even were we willing to risk it, for some reason the Black Market doesn't trust us-too many years putting them out of business, I guess.”
"What are null bombs?”
"Wicked things, but good to have anywhere there's magic you don't know how to counter. No one knows who invented them, but they've been around for centuries. Dark mages take a null-a mage born with the ability to disrupt magic- and drain his life force into the sphere. It kills the mage but traps his lifetime's ability in one extremely potent package. If it's exploded, including in Faerie, all magic ceases or goes haywire for a while. How long depends on the strength of the null, and how many years of life he had left when he was drained.”
"Interesting." I felt vaguely sick. "What do