Magic Burns (22 page)

I spat, trying to wipe away enough goo to open my eyes and only getting more goo onto my face. I tasted blood sharp with my magic on my lips. A nosebleed. Shit. I fumbled for the gauze, or I’d have to set the whole scene on fire to hide my magic. I pulled it blindly from my pocket and wiped my face, finally clawing my eyes open.

The bloodsucker lay broken, its chest a mess of crushed ribs, a trail of wet, soft clumps that used to be its heart leading from its body to Derek, who sprawled on his back, unmoving.

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The reeve hovered over Derek’s prone form. Her hair bound his throat. At least forty feet separated us.

I would not make it in time.

The Shepherd’s whisper emanated from the reeve’s mouth. “Surrender or it dies.”

I dropped the gauze and slid my hand up my thigh to the throwing dagger on my belt.

“It dies!” the Shepherd hissed.

I hurled the dagger. The blade bit into the reeve’s head, popping her eye like a ripe grape. The impact knocked her back and I threw the shark teeth at her, one after another. The short triangular blades punctured her throat and cheeks. She rocked forward, stared at me with the gaping hole of her eye socket, and broke into water.

I ran to Derek, and I put my head on his chest. Heartbeat. Strong, solid heartbeat.

The vamp’s blood smeared his whole head. I couldn’t tell if he was hurt.

“Derek! Derek!”God, whoever you are, I’ll do anything, please don’t let him die.

His eyelids trembled. Monstrous mouth opened. He sat up slowly.

“Where does it hurt?” I nearly slapped myself. Only the most accomplished of the shapeshifters could speak in half-form. Derek wasn’t one of them.

“Everrrryear.” The word came out mangled but recognizable.

“Everywhere?”

He nodded. “Okray.”

“You’re okay?”

He nodded again.

I wanted to cry with relief. My chest felt heavy like it was full of lead. “You can speak in half-form.”

“Yeahhh. Veen praaasing.”

“Been practicing. That’s good.” I laughed a little. “That’s real good.”

He grinned. Bloody shreds of vampiric meat stretched from between his crooked fangs, wet with drool, and I nearly lost my lunch. “Come on, pretty boy, before this place swarms with People, or we’ll never get out of here.”

I found my gauze, grabbed the horses, and we took off down the street just as the first smear of necromantic magic announced the arrival of the vampiric scouts.

DEREK FAVORED HIS LEFT SIDE. HIS HORSE REFUSEDto bear him. I couldn’t blame the horse. I wouldn’t want his demonic, undead-blood-smeared, wolf-smelling ass riding me, either. But it made us slow.

Three blocks away I commandeered a rickety buggy from an old woman. Commandeered was too strong a word—I flashed my ID and promised her far more money then I had at my disposal.

Considering that I still had my sword out and my hair and face were decorated a lovely brown shade of drying blood, she decided arguing too much wasn’t in her best interests. In fact, she told me I could have the buggy if I didn’t hurt her.

I told her to bill the Order, packed Derek into the buggy, hitched the horses to the back, and drove the big dappled draft horse to the Order.

Within five minutes Derek fell asleep. His skin split, shivered, and a huge gray wolf lay in his place. The beast-form took a lot of concentration to maintain. Left to its own devices, a shapeshifter’s body went either man or animal in a hurry. I guess with the flare, the animal must’ve taken less energy. And that was the trouble with shapeshifters. They were psychotic, fanatically loyal to the Pack, and they needed a nap or a dinner every time they exerted themselves.

But then if I went up against an aged vampire gone berserk, I’d want a nap, too. He killed a vampire. By himself. No help, no magic, just his teeth, and claws, and raw determination. Bloody amazing. I had the next wolf alpha in my buggy. Here’s hoping he’d remember me when he made it into the big leagues.

The sunset burned down to nothing. The magic crashed again, hard. Not a trace of it remained, yet the city knew it was there, waiting like a hungry predator in the night, ready to pounce.

My head pounded. My ribs ached with every breath, but nothing seemed to be broken. Thank the Universe for small favors.

Gradually my brain started up, at first slowly, like a rusted watermill, then faster, trying to sort through the nonsense the Shepherd spouted. He had said something about the Great Crow leading the host. A host of reeves could do a lot of damage. I didn’t want to dwell on the full implication of that mental picture.

So a host of reeves with the Great Crow in the lead. The Great Crow could stand for Morrigan, except that Bran turned a reeve by the pit into a porcupine, and Bran served Morrigan. Only a man worried about offending his patron goddess would’ve balked like he did at the idea of swearing by her name.

So Morrigan and Bran on one side, and the Fomorians and the Great Crow on the other. So far we had stayed strongly in the realm of Celtic mythology. I couldn’t recall any Great Crows in Irish mythology other than Morrigan. Esmeralda had all those books in her trailer…maybe one of them would mention this Great Crow.

It would only take fifteen minutes to detour to my apartment. Derek’s breathing was even, he wasn’t bleeding, and he didn’t seem in distress. I wanted to check on Julie, but fifteen minutes wouldn’t make that much difference.

Why did the Fomorians attack me in the first place? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

First they attacked Red, who had stumbled onto them, or at least so he claimed. Then they attacked Julie. Now they attacked me. Why? What would make them risk a confrontation with a vampire and a werewolf, not taking into account the fact that I had already made three reeves into wet and smelly spots.

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Revenge? The Shepherd didn’t strike me as a hotheaded, “revenge at all costs” type. He was more of a calculating, “friz-ice in his veins” kind of enemy.

I replayed the chronology of the events in my head, trying to find some form of connection. First, Red got jumped by reeves and had his neck scratched. Next, he and Julie went to look for her mother at the Sisters’ gathering place. From there, I took Julie home. Red followed us and gave Julie a monisto. The reeves attacked Julie. Then I left Julie in the vault and the reeves attacked me.

That last bit made no sense. An attack on me and Julie in my apartment I could understand. Then, the odds were clearly in the Shepherd’s favor. But attacking me the second time, when I had a werewolf and a vampire with me? And out in the open? It’s almost as if he had been desperate.

And how did they find me? They didn’t track me by scent. Atlanta’s streets are too polluted to provide a good scent trail. They didn’t track me by sight, either. They would’ve had to be close to do so, and Derek would’ve smelled them.

The only way they could have tracked me was by magic.

Red had said that reeve hair grabbed like a lasso. The hair was only active during a magic wave. Then the reeves attacked my apartment, also during the magic wave. And finally, they struck at me just when the magic wave had ended. It was as if an invisible magic scent somehow stained Red, then Julie, then me, and the reeves followed it like hounds.

Red, Julie, me. Was there a pattern here? What could’ve connected us all? Perhaps Red became polluted with some weird residual magic. Julie touched Red, and I touched Julie, transferring the traces onto myself. But residual magic usually didn’t survive technology, and the magic had been shifting like crazy.

Maybe I was thinking about it wrong. Maybe the reeves were tracking something specific. Something that exuded a definite power signature. Something that only acted up during the magic waves, a beacon like Whomper. Something that passed from Red to Julie and from Julie to me. But what?

The monisto. Red gave it to Julie, and Julie gave it to me.

I pulled the necklace out and tried to examine it, glancing at the road once in a while. A simple cord, knotted together from dirty shoelaces. There were probably two dozen coins on it. Let’s see, a Kennedy half-dollar, a quarter, a twenty-peso coin, a Georgia peach quarter—wow, rare, a token from the mall carousel with a little horse on it, a Chinese coin with a square hole in the middle—where did he get this one? A miniature, dollar-sized CD marked Axe Grinder III, a video game maybe? A rough disk with a loop in the center to pass the cord through. A Republica NC Pilipinas coin, Philippines? A little triangular charm with a loop on top, inscribed with an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol. A round coin, too worn to determine if anything was on it originally. A square bronze charm with a rune on it. A Jefferson nickel…

One of those was special. Which one? It would have to be one of the older-looking ones. Of course, with my luck, the Shepherd could be a crazy numismatist just dying for a Kennedy fifty-cent piece.

Maybe I could set a trap with a handful of change. Here, Shepherd, here boy, look, I have a Susan B.

Anthony dollar, you know you want it.

I put the monisto away. I could stare at it all night trying to pinpoint the reeve magnet, or I could just ask Julie, the human m-scanner extraordinaire, which one felt weird to her. If I was right.

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I felt no protective spells on the monisto. Perhaps Red found something that belonged to the Shepherd, a charm, a magic trinket. More likely, he stole it and added it to the monisto to hide it. Unfortunately, the object emitted magic, and whoever carried the monisto became an instant reeve magnet. If I was right, Red had realized he was being tracked, and he handed that thing to Julie knowing that the reeves would return to claim it. He didn’t give it to her to protect her. He gave it to her to shift the focus off himself, to point them to a new target. Kid or not, that was a lousy thing to do.

By the time I pulled up in front of my apartment building, I was pissed enough to thrash him. Red was a problem. Julie loved him beyond all reason, and he pretty much used her whichever way he wanted. I tied the reins to one of the posts in a metal row set up for precisely that purpose. Something was seriously wrong with Red. I understood why: because he was on the street, alone, hungry, bullied, left to fend for himself. But I’d known street kids that grew up into people with a decent moral code. I had a feeling Red’s moral code consisted of one line: Red does best for Red.

I ran up three flights of stairs to my apartment only to find a solid door blocking the way. I had no key.

I ran down to the first floor and banged on the super’s door. “Mr. Patel?”

Mr. Patel was the nicest super I had ever had to deal with…and also the slowest. Brown like a walnut, with sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, he moved with luxurious leisure, too dignified to accelerate. Trying to nag him into hurrying up would slow him down to the speed of chilled molasses. It took him a good five minutes to find the key ring, after which he proceeded to climb the stairs with venerable decorum. By the time he finally opened the door and deposited the right key into my palm, I was dancing in place with frustration.

I ran into the apartment, grabbed Esmeralda’s books, ran out, slapping the door shut behind me, and rushed down the stairs, passing bewildered Mr. Patel on the way.

THE VAULT DOOR STOOD AJAR.

A single bulb illuminated its round contours, and the door shone with reflected light at the bottom of the narrow stairwell, like an enormous metal coin.

It should’ve been locked tight.

I descended the gloomy stairs, one at a time, saber in hand. I had smelled wolfsbane out front.

Wolfsbane was used to throw shapeshifters off track. Somebody knew I had Derek with me. If it was directed at me, that is.

Derek slept securely on the landing. I had meant to carry him into my office, but I was tired and he’d been eating his Wheaties. He probably weighed close to one fifty in wolfform. I gave up midway.

Two drops of blood stained the step in front of me. Another glistened two steps lower. I smelled gunpowder. Andrea had fired. Her bullet must have only grazed him, otherwise there would be a body, not just blood droplets. Andrea never missed.

I conquered the stairs on soft feet and stopped with my back to the wall. An odd hoarse breathing echoed through the vault, like a dull saw being drawn against the wood.

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I leaned and glanced through the doorway.

A mangled body curled on the floor among shreds of clothes. Deformed or battered, it lay crumpled in a grotesque heap of mismatched limbs, a patchwork of raw beef, red and mud-brown. Another hoarse breath sent tiny echoes scurrying into the corners. Julie was nowhere in sight.

As I stood there, the body turned its head. I saw a clump of blond hair and a single blue eye, the other hidden by a flap of flesh.

Andrea.

I closed the distance between us in a single leap. The dirty patches on her limbs weren’t grime. They were fur. Short brown fur, with traces of spots dappling the skin.

Her chest was misshapen, too flat. The skin on her stomach ended abruptly, not torn or cut, but simply falling too short of its goal, as if there wasn’t enough of it. The coils of her intestines glistened through the opening. Her left leg melted into a paw, while her right stretched too long, twisting backward. Her jaws protruded, mismatched, her lips way too short, her fangs puncturing her cheeks.

Dear God. The Lyc-V got her after all.

Andrea’s left eye focused on me, her iris baby-blue. A long gurgling sound broke free of her throat.

“Heeeeelp.”

This was beyond me. I’ve never seen a shapeshifter stuck between forms.

I had to find someone who could help her. Doolittle. But he was back at the Pack Keep. It would take me hours to reach it. Her skin had taken on a sallow, pale gray tint that meant the shapeshifter’s body was scraping the last of its reserves dry. Andrea might not have hours.

Wait. Doolittle was loyal to Curran. He’d give her up in a minute. And then the Pack would test her to ensure she wasn’t a loup and then she would have to confront Curran. You can’t be loyal to Curran and the Order at the same time. The second her shapeshifter status was discovered, she’d be expelled from the Order. Andrea lived and breathed the Order. I might as well let her die.