Gunmetal Magic (48 page)

I shook my head. “No, I won’t.”

“Call me.” Jim hung up.

I turned to the door and watched Andrea walk through it. Behind her, the jellyfish squeezed through the doorway on its own. I blinked. The jellyfish kept coming. It cleared the door, turned, and I saw Curran carrying it in his hands, as if the three-hundred-pound mass of flesh was no heavier than a plate of pancakes. It’s good to be the Beast Lord.

When had he arrived and what was he doing here, anyway?

“Where to?” he asked.

“Back room,” Andrea said. “Here, I’ll show you.”

I followed them and watched Curran pack the jellyfish into the biohazard container. He slid the lid in place, locked the clamps, and closed the distance between us. I held my slimy arms out to keep him from getting covered in ooze, leaned forward, and kissed the Beast Lord. He tasted like toothpaste and Curran, and the feel of his lips on mine made me forget the lousy day, the bills, the clients, and the two gallons of slime drenching my clothes. The kiss lasted only a couple of seconds, but it might as well have been an hour, because when we broke apart, it felt like I had come home, leaving all my troubles far behind.

“Hey,” he said, his gray eyes smiling at me.

“Hey.”

Behind him, Andrea rolled her eyes.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

Curran almost never came to visit my office, especially not in the evening. He hated Atlanta and its teeming masses with all the fire of a supernova. I didn’t have anything against Atlanta in theory—sure, it was half-eroded by the magic waves and it caught on fire with alarming frequency—but I had a thing about crowds. When my workday was over, I didn’t linger. I headed straight for the Keep, where the Atlanta shapeshifter Pack and His Furry Majesty resided.

“I thought we’d go to dinner,” he said. “It’s been a while since we’ve gone out.”

Technically we had never gone out to dinner, just the two of us. Oh, we had eaten together in the city but usually it was accidental and most of those times had involved other people and frequently ended in a violent incident.

“What’s the occasion?”

Curran’s blond eyebrows came together. “Does there have to be a special occasion for me to take you out to dinner?”

Yes. “No.”

He leaned in to me. “I missed you and I got tired of waiting for you to come home. Come grab a bite with me.”

Grabbing a bite sounded heavenly, except Andrea would be stuck here by herself. “I have to wait for Biohazard to pick up the jellyfish.”

“I’ve got it,” Andrea offered. “Go, there’s no reason for both of us to sit here. I have some stuff I need to take care of anyway.”

I hesitated.

“I can sign forms just as well as you,” Andrea informed me. “And my signature doesn’t look like the scratches of a drunken chicken in the dirt.”

“My signature is just fine, thank you very much.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go have some fun.”

“I need a shower,” I told Curran. “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

It was Friday, eight o’clock on a warm spring night, my hair was brushed, my clothes were clean and slime-free, and I was going out with the Beast Lord. Curran drove. He did it very carefully, concentrating on the road. I had a feeling he’d learned to drive as an adult. I drove carefully too, mostly because I expected the car to fail on me at any second.

I glanced at Curran in the driver’s seat. Even at rest, like he was now, relaxed and driving, he emanated a kind of coiled power. He was built to kill, his body a blend of hard, powerful muscle and supple quickness, and something in the way he carried himself telegraphed a shocking potential for violence and a willingness to use it. He seemed to occupy a much larger space than his body actually did and he was impossible to ignore. The promise of violence he carried used to scare me, so I’d bait him until some of it came out, the same way people afraid of heights would rock climb to cure themselves. Now I just accepted him, the way he accepted my need to sleep with a sword under my bed.

Curran caught me looking. He flexed, letting the carved muscles bulge on his arms, and winked. “Hey, baby.”

I cracked up. “So where are we going?”

“Arirang,” Curran said. “It’s a nice Korean place, Kate. They have charcoal grills at the tables. They bring you meat and you cook it any way you want.”

It figured. Left to his own devices, Curran consumed only meat, punctuated with an occasional dessert. “That’s nice for me, but what will your vegetarian Majesty eat?”

Curran gave me a flat look. “I can always drive to a burger joint instead.”

“Oh, so you’d throw a burger down my throat and then expect making out in the backseat?”

He grinned. “We can do it in the front seat instead, if you prefer. Or on the hood of the car.”

“I’m not doing it on the hood of the car.”

“Is that a dare?”

Why me?

“Kate?”

“Keep your mind on the road, Your Furriness.”

The city rolled by, twisted by magic, battered and bruised but still standing. The night swallowed the ruins, hiding the sad husks of once mighty, tall buildings. New houses flanked the street, constructed by hand with wood, stone, and brick to withstand magic’s jaws.

I rolled down the window and let the night in. It floated into the car, bringing with it spring and a hint of wood smoke from a distant fire. Somewhere a lone dog barked out of boredom, each woof punctuated by a long pause, probably to see if the owners would let him in.

Ten minutes later we pulled into a long, empty parking lot, guarded by old office buildings that now housed Asian shops. A typical stone building with huge storefront windows sat at the very end, marked by a sign that read
ARIRANG
.

“This is the place?”

“Mhm,” Curran said.

“I thought you said it was a Korean restaurant.” For some reason I had expected a
hanok
house with a curved tiled roof and a wide front porch.

“It is.”

“It looks like a Western Sizzlin.” In fact, it probably used to be a Western Sizzlin.

“Will you just trust me? It’s a nice place…” Curran braked, and the Pack Jeep screeched to a stop.

Two skeletally thin vampires sat at the front of the restaurant, tethered to the horse rail with chains looped over their heads. Pale, hairless, dried like leathery jerky, the undead stared at us with mad glowing eyes. Death had robbed them of their cognizance and will, leaving behind mindless shells driven only by bloodlust. On their own, the bloodsuckers would slaughter anything alive and keep killing until nothing breathing remained. But their empty minds made a perfect vehicle for necromancers, who telepathically navigated them like remote-controlled cars.

Curran glared at the undead through the windshield. Ninety percent of the vampires belonged to the People, a weird hybrid of a corporation and a research institute. We both despised the People and everything they stood for.

I couldn’t resist. “I thought you said this was a nice place.”

He leaned back, gripped the steering wheel, and let out a long growling, “Argh.”

I chuckled.

“Who the hell stops at a restaurant in the middle of navigating undead?” Curran squeezed the wheel a little. It made a groaning noise.

I shrugged. “Maybe the navigators got hungry.”

He gave me an odd look. “This far away from the Casino means they’re out on patrol. What, did they suddenly get the munchies?”

“Curran, ignore the damn bloodsuckers. Let’s go and have a date anyway.”

He looked like he wanted to kill somebody.

The world blinked. Magic flooded us like an invisible tsunami. The neon sign above the restaurant winked out and a larger brilliant blue sign ignited above it, made from handblown glass and filled with charged air.

I reached over and squeezed Curran’s hand. “Come on, you, me, a platter of barely seared meat…it’ll be great. If we see the necromancers, we can make fun of the way they hold their forks.”

We got out of the car and headed inside. The bloodsuckers glanced at us in unison, their eyes like two smoldering coals buried beneath the ash of a dying fire. I felt their minds, twin hot pinpoints of pain, restrained securely by the navigators’ wills. One slipup and those coals would ignite into an all-consuming flame. Vampires never knew satiation. They never got full, they never stopped killing, and if let loose, they would drown the world in blood and die of starvation when there was nothing left to kill.

The chains wouldn’t hold them—the links were an eighth of an inch thick at best, good for restraining a large dog. A vamp would snap it and not even notice, but the general public felt better if the bloodsuckers were chained, and so the navigators obliged.

We passed the vampires and entered the restaurant.

The inside of Arirang was dim. Feylanterns glowed with soft light on the walls, as the charged air inside their colored glass tubes reacted with magic. Each feylantern had been handblown into a beautiful shape: a bright blue dragon, an emerald tortoise, a purple fish, a turquoise stocky dog with a unicorn horn…Booths lined the walls, their tables plain rectangles of wood. In the center of the floor four larger round tables sported built-in charcoal grills under metal hoods.

The restaurant was about half full. The two booths to our right were occupied, the first by a young couple, a dark-haired man and a blond woman in their twenties, and the second by two middle-aged men. The younger couple chatted quietly. Good clothes, relaxed, casual, well groomed. Ten to one these were the navigators who had parked the bloodsuckers out front. The People’s headquarters, known as the Casino, had seven Masters of the Dead and I knew them all by sight. I didn’t recognize either the man or the woman. Either these two were visiting from out of town or they were upper-level journeymen.

Both of the older guys in the next booth were armed. The closer one carried a short sword, which he had put on the seat next to him. As his friend reached for the salt shaker, his sweatshirt hugged the gun in his side holster.

Past the men in the far right corner, four women in their thirties laughed too loud—probably tipsy. On the other side a
family with two teenage daughters cooked their food on the grill. The older girl looked a bit like Julie, my ward. Two businesswomen, another family with a toddler, and an older couple rounded off the patrons. No threats.

The air swirled with the delicious aroma of meat cooked over an open fire, sautéed garlic, and sweet spices. My mouth watered. I hadn’t eaten since grabbing some bread this morning from a street vendor. My stomach actually hurt.

A waiter in plain black pants and a black T-shirt led us to a table in the middle of the floor. Curran and I took chairs opposite one another, where I could see the back door and he had a nice view of the front entrance. We ordered hot tea. Thirty seconds later it arrived with a plate of pot stickers.

“Hungry?” Curran asked.

“Starving.”

“Combination platter for four,” Curran ordered.

His hungry and my hungry were two completely different things.

The waiter departed.

Curran smiled. It was a happy, genuine smile and it catapulted him from attractive into irresistible territory. He didn’t smile very often in public. That intimate smile was usually reserved for private moments when we were alone.

I pulled the band off my still-damp braid and slid my fingers through it, unraveling the hair. Curran’s gaze snagged on my hands. He focused on my fingers like a cat on a piece of foil pulled by a string. I shook my head and my hair fell over my shoulders in a long dark wave. There we go. Now we were both private in public.

Tiny gold sparks danced in Curran’s gray irises. He was thinking dirty thoughts and the wicked edge in his smile made me want to slide over next to him and touch him.

We had to wait. I was pretty sure that having hot sex on the floor of Arirang would get us banned for life. Then again, it might be worth it.

I raised my tea in a salute. “To our date.”

He raised his cup and we clinked them gently against each other.

“So how was your day?” he asked.

“First, I chased a giant jellyfish around through some
suburbs. Then I argued with Biohazard about coming and picking it up, because they claimed it was a Fish and Game issue. Then I called Fish and Game and conferenced them in on the Biohazard call, and then I got to listen to the two of them argue and call each other names. They got really creative.”

“Then Jim called,” Curran said.

I grimaced. “Yes. That, too.”

“Is there a particular reason you’re avoiding our chief of security?” Curran asked.

“Do you remember how my aunt killed the head of the Mercenary Guild?”

“Not something one forgets,” he said.

“The Guild is still squabbling over who should be in charge now.”

Curran glanced at me. “That was what, five months ago?”

“My point exactly. On one side there are the older mercs, who have combat experience. The other side is the support staff. Both groups have roughly an equal share of the Guild as a result of Solomon’s will and they hate each other. It’s getting into death threat territory, so they’re having some sort of final arbitration to decide who’s in charge.”

“Except they are deadlocked,” Curran guessed.

“Yes, they are. Apparently Jim thinks I should break that tie.”

The Guild’s now-dead founder was a closet shapeshifter, and he had left twenty percent of the Guild to the Pack. So as long as the Mercenary Guild remained deadlocked, nobody was getting paid and the Pack alphas wanted that income stream to start flowing again. They put pressure on Jim, and Jim put pressure on me.

I had done enough years in the Guild to be viewed as a veteran. Jim had as well, but unlike me, he had the luxury of having kept his identity semi-private. Most mercs didn’t know he was high up in the Pack.

I had no privacy. I was the Beast Lord’s Consort. It was the price I paid for being with Curran, but I didn’t have to like it.

His Majesty drank his tea. “Not looking forward to settling the dispute?”

“I’d rather eat dirt. It’s between Mark, Solomon’s longtime assistant, and the veterans led by the Four Horsemen, and they
despise each other. They aren’t interested in reaching a consensus. They just want to throw mud at each other over a conference table.”