Fiction River: Hex in the City by Fiction River Page B

duty, and wanted to stick it in her SEP file. Somebody Else’s Problem. If the kid, because it was probably some stupid kid, was over twenty-one, he or she would be fined and have to register in the Spell Offender list. Cameras would catch anything they did, since charms like that only really worked on the human eye, and not perfectly.
    At her stop, she walked past the blurred shape of the kid to exit the bus.
    “You overpaid for that spell, idiot,” she said over her shoulder.
    Her building was a new high-rise, part of the “urban renewal” effort a few blocks from One Detroit Center. Half the floors had been designated as affordable housing, with a break for government employees. Which meant that no one bothered to renew charms against leaks, breakages, outages, and anything else, or do the manual labor half the time. Tiny HOA fees, tiny benefits.
    At least Ruby was always happy to be inside the dingy walls. This was her favorite time of day. Home meant pineapple treats and videogames on the giant touch-screen television that Verity had sunk three month’s overtime into.
    Images of Ruby’s favorite matching game, red, blue, green, and purple squares with simple shapes on them, flashed through Verity’s mind. The moment she had the door open to her tiny one bedroom, Ruby leapt free of her pocket and raced across the oatmeal-colored carpet to the TV, reaching up to push the power button. Then she danced in tight circles, her leash trailing and tangling in her long, scaly tail, sending her desire to play across the mind link.
    “Let me get my shoes off. And your harness. Brat.” Verity smiled, unable to maintain her exhausted, annoyed mood in the face of this after-work ritual.
    She turned on the game and unbuckled Ruby’s harness, some of the tension draining out of her shoulders as the familiar dings and beeps from the game came on. The tattoos that let her and Ruby share senses and communicate in basic ways were visible on the large rat’s body, showing black through her snow-white fur. Verity had the same tattoos in the same places, on her back, ribs, and down her scalp from top of head to base of spine, though her thick black hair had grown back in to hide it.
    No one else at the academy had wanted the runty albino rat. Their loss. Ruby, which Verity called her due to the rat’s bright red eyes, had excelled as a magic sniffer and their link was stronger than normal, flowing both ways instead of just from rat to human handler. She and Ruby had more collars than anyone else who had graduated from the Detection program.
    Spells had a smell, each one subtly or not so subtly different. Once people had figured that out, they’d started trying to train animals to detect magic, same as they used them to detect land mines, drugs, and some kinds of disease. Her, and Ruby’s, job was to sniff out magic, sorting the legal from the illegal and signaling her enforcer partners to take down those who broke the law. Her guideline was that if it was a magic that could harm someone or be used to invade privacy, like the bus kid’s invisibility charm, it was probably on the books as illegal.
    Not that it matters , she thought as she pulled herself away from watching Ruby match shapes and colors to see to her own needs. The late twenty-first century’s war on magic was about as effective as the last century’s war on drugs. No one knew why all the magic had, well, magically started working. No one knew how to turn it off. So they tried to control it, and when that didn’t work very well, they regulated the hell out of it. The laws of what was and wasn’t allowed in the States changed almost daily it seemed, with both the lawyers and the criminals getting fat on the results.
    Just a job to Verity, though she wouldn’t give up Ruby for anything. She stuck to it, though the exciting new car smell was long gone. Ruby made up for a lot of disappointments in life.
    She opened the fridge and grabbed a small bottle of orange