Magic Stars (Grey Wolf Book 1) (6 page)

“Is there any cheese left?”

“Swiss?”

He wrinkled his nose. Swiss stank.

“Picky, picky, picky.”

He liked cheese in general. Mozzarella was best. He snagged a piece of Swiss and held it on his tongue inside his mouth to see if the taste would make up for the smell. It didn’t.

Julie leaned over. “The water is receding. Another half an hour and we can go.”

A shadow dropped from the sky. He lunged forward, pulling Julie out of the way. A basketball-sized rock smashed into the pillar, a foot from her legs. He looked up in time to see a black bird shadow block out the moon and sickle-sized talons aimed for his face. He jumped to his right and up, punching into the bird from the side. It whipped around, huge wings beating, enormous yellow beak coming down on him like an axe. Talons tore at him in a flash of blinding pain. He locked his left hand on its throat, his right on its left leg, and pulled, trying to rip the huge raptor apart. It screeched, the high-pitched shriek nearly deafening him.

Julie screamed behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder. The rock was empty. Fear bit at him with icy teeth. He looked up and saw her dangling from a second huge bird twenty-five feet in the air.

He hurled the bird away from him, sinking all of his strength into the throw.

Julie fell.

Desperation propelled him into an insane leap. He caught her in midair, relief shooting through him as his arms locked around her, and then he twisted, trying to land on the pillar. The rock punched his feet. He landed hard, the shock reverberating through his legs, and fell backward, trying to keep them from hurtling over the edge. She landed on him. For a tiny moment they were face-to-face, and then she jumped off him. “The bag!”

He rolled to his feet. The two birds soared above them, melting into the night sky. He squinted and saw Julie’s backpack hanging from the right bird’s claws.

“They have the rock! And the sample! Damn it.” Julie stomped on the pillar. “Damn it!”

She’s alive, he told himself. Relax. She made it.

“They’re flying northeast,” he said. “That’s the opposite way from the Warren and Adams’ base. Can you see anything?”

She stood up and walked to the very edge of the rock and stood an inch from falling, looking into the city as if it were an endless indigo ocean and she was searching for that one sail at the horizon. She turned slowly and pointed. “There.”

“Another glowing rock?”

She nodded.

Predictably, he couldn’t see anything. “Where?”

She pointed northeast, in the exact direction the birds flew. “Maybe five, six miles.”

He glanced behind them. “The Warren is there.”

She turned and looked at the Warren. “Nothing there. If the birds belong to Adams, then he took what he had over there, or else the birds belong to someone else, and Adams knows how to hide his rock.”

He searched the dark city. “And you haven’t seen it before?”

“No.”

“Let’s say I’m Caleb. I want the shiny rock, but I don’t like getting my hands dirty. I send some assholes to retrieve the two pieces of the rock. They get one from Luther, but they botch the other job, kill people, and cops are called. So I hire some idiot shapeshifters to go get the rock for me and bring it here. I break the linked ward guarding this place, so the fucked-up mermaids will eat the shapeshifters.”

“Then, when it’s daylight, the lobasti will hide and I’ll come and get the rock,” Julie said. “Easy.”

“Except that if I were Caleb, I’d want to make sure that everything went according to the plan.”

“You’d stay and watch.” Julie’s eyes narrowed. “You’d see us kill the lobasti and then hide on the pillar. You’d know we would be trapped up here for at least an hour. Plenty of time to make a new plan, summon some birds, and take the rock away from us. And then have them take it there?” She pointed to northeast. “Why?”

If Caleb watched, it was from afar, because Derek hadn’t smelled him. He could’ve hidden in any one of the ruins around the place. Tracking him down was pointless—he’d left already, gone northeast with his own chunk of the magic rock. He would expect they would follow. He had all the time he needed to set a trap.

“Two possibilities. Either he has to do something with the rock over there, or he has figured out that you can see it. We keep interfering and screwing up his plans. He could be baiting a trap.”

Derek wished he knew what the rock did.

Julie was looking into the distance, probably at the glowing rock, with a pinched expression on her face. She knew a lot more about witches than he did. Kate was related to one of the three witches on the Witch Oracle. Her name was Evdokia, and Julie had lessons with her every Tuesday.

“What do you know about Adams?” he asked.

“He’s a warlock.” She said the word as if it tasted bitter.

“A male witch.” He knew that much. He also knew that Adams was feared. People didn’t like mentioning his name.

“No.” She shook her head. “He isn’t a witch.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A witch strives for balance. For a witch, everything is connected. Everything is a tangle of binding thread; pull on one end too hard and you could make a knot nobody can untie. If you’re sick, a witch will heal you, because plague is imbalance, but if you come to the same witch asking to give you another year of life through magic, he’ll turn you down, because you’re asking for something unnatural and there is always a price. The word
witch
comes from Old English
wicca
, an ancient word meaning a practitioner of magic. There are words similar to it, like
wigle
or
wīh
in Old German, and they always mean things like divination, or holy, or knowing. Caleb Adams isn’t a witch. He’s a warlock. That word comes from Old English
wærloga
. It means traitor, liar, enemy. Oath-breaker. He cares only about his own gain, and he’ll cut every thread he can to get what he wants. That’s why they cast him out of the coven. He broke his covenant. There’s no limit to the fucked-up things he’ll do to get his way. Evdokia hates him. Every time she mentions his name, she spits to the side.”

A man like that would want the magic glowing rock for only one reason—power. Adams had already killed for it once. He would kill for it again, and if he obtained it, he would use it to keep killing. Derek thought of the Iveses. Of the bloodstains and blood scent, sickening because he knew the people it belonged to and because it called to him, threatening to wake up something he kept chained deep inside.

“There is only one thing to do,” he said.

She looked at him, her face apprehensive.

“Let’s go get the rock back,” he told her.

Julie bared her teeth. She wasn’t a shapeshifter, would never be one, but right now, under the light of the moon, she smiled like a wolf.

CHAPTER 3

HE JOGGED NEXT TO PEANUT as Julie steered her down the overgrown street. They were moving northeast on Lawrenceville Highway, heading into Tucker. Since the city was now his territory, he took the time to learn about it. After the first Shift, when planes no longer worked and highway travel became dangerous, the industries looked to railroads for shipping. With buildings in Atlanta falling left and right, Tucker became the industrial hot spot for about fifteen years, growing fast until the newly built factories also decayed and fell. This was all ancient history, as far as he was concerned. Now Tucker stood abandoned, all but claimed by the wilderness, as the people pulled in to the heart of the city.

All around them dark ruins stabbed through the growth. A flock of school buses rusted, abandoned in some old parking lot. The remnants of a gas station, all but swallowed by dense kudzu, hunkered down to the right. Two owls sat on the remnants of the Exxon sign, waiting for some hint of movement. This would’ve been an ugly place without the green, Derek reflected. Sharp, rusted, trashed. The plants softened it, hiding the disfigured land underneath the happy leaves. Even the old power lines, dead for years, looked cheery, wrapped in vines and dripping small white flowers like garlands.

A creek had broken free of man-made restraints, flooding the road as it found an easy path down the paved highway. The water ran only a couple of inches deep, three at most, but he didn’t like to get his feet wet, so he moved on the right side, where debris and soil deposited by the water formed a natural shore. Tiny fish darted in the clear stream. He smelled deer. A few moments later he saw them, too, drinking from a stream: a group of three does. Two were pregnant. They raised their heads, looked at him and Julie, and took off.

“Cute,” Julie said.

She’d turned grim after they left Pillar Rock. He decided to yank her tail. “Delicious.”

“Seriously?”

“Mhm. Later on I’ll come back here and eat all of the deer babies. I’ll be big and fat.” No werewolf or human hunter would kill a pregnant doe or a doe with fawns. Do that often enough, and you risked your food supply. Then come winter, where would you be?

“If this is you trying to be funny, stop.”

He grinned at her. “You wanted jokes.”

“What kind of a joke is that?”

“Wolf kind.”

“You really need a girlfriend.”

Not that again.

“What about Celia?”

It took him a moment to figure out which Celia she was talking about. The Pack had four, and he interacted with three of them. It had to be the redheaded Celia. Before he separated from the Pack, she’d developed a persistent habit of thrusting herself into his daily routine. He could explain to her that every time Celia encountered him, he registered her noting his face with a calculated satisfaction. She scrutinized his scars and judged him to be disfigured enough to be desperate. Celia craved power and safety. In her head he was perfect because he would stay, and be faithful, and he would let her hold the reins, since nobody else would have him. The single time they’d spoken in private confirmed it. She’d told him that unlike most women, she didn’t mind the scars and that he didn’t have to be alone. That she would have him, even if other women wouldn’t. He’d stepped into her space then and held her stare. It was the dominating look of an alpha, and it communicated everything without words: He was neither weak nor desperate. She’d told him that if he touched her, she would scream, and she’d fled. He’d let her go. That had ended that.

“Celia is pretty.”

“No.” That was explanation enough.

“Then Lisa?”

He had to cut this short. Of all the topics she could’ve picked, this was the last conversation he wanted to have with her. He’d spent months learning to read people’s emotions. He knew exactly what to say. He forced a smile. “You’re a sweet kid, Jules, but don’t worry so much. When you grow up, it will make more sense.”

Her expression shut down, like someone had slammed a window into her closed. He’d drawn a line between a child and an adult and rubbed her nose in it. She would be mad at him for a while now. It was still better than discussing his love life.

The road took them deeper into Tucker. He smelled a skunk, raccoons, two roving bands of dogs, feral cats, and a big male bobcat that happily sprayed around. He didn’t smell humans. Nobody had passed this way for quite some time. If Caleb Adams had taken the rock into Tucker, he hadn’t come this way to do it or he’d had a giant bird carry him.

They traveled in silence for half an hour, when Julie turned off the road and steered her horse to the remains of a three-story building. She stood up in her saddle, grabbed the crumbling brickwork, and pulled herself up. He took a running start; jumped ten feet in the air; bounced from some rebar; ran across a narrow, half-rotten beam; and offered her his hand to pull her up. She gave him a look studded with broken glass. Right. Still mad.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re wasting time.”

She ignored his hand and pulled herself over the edge onto the rotten remains of the third floor. He gave her space.

She raised her hand and pointed to an area in the distance. “There. It’s in the center of that place.”

He peered at it. Remains of some industrial complex, and a large one—at least two dozen big buildings, maybe more, some almost whole, others down to broken stretches of walls connecting to nothing. An accidental urban labyrinth. The soil around it was darker, the texture of it different, rougher somehow. Odd shapes rose among the ruins, some glowing with pale pink and blue. He couldn’t quite make them out.

His instincts told him the place was unlike anything he’d seen before. And it felt bad. Pillar Rock made him wary, but this place felt worse. He didn’t want to go in there, but most of all he didn’t want her walking into it.

 Like the dark soil around the ruins, Adams was a blight, a corruption that had already cost the Iveses their lives. The blight had to be purged. Curran had told him once, “Every time you see a problem and walk away from it, you set a new standard.” The problem was right there, and letting Caleb Adams butcher a family to get his hands on a magic rock wasn’t a standard he cared to set. They would take care of it. It was time to cut the warlock’s little power trip short.