Magic Bites (9 page)

His lips parted, releasing a snarl. I swung my blade, judging the distance between us.

If we fought, and if I survived, I'd never find out who killed Greg. The Pack would tear me to shreds.

This was getting me nowhere. I had no choice but to lose face. I stopped and lowered my blade. The words didn't want to leave my mouth, but I forced them out anyway. "I'm sorry. I'd love to play but I'm not my own person at the moment."

He smiled.

I did my best to ignore the condescension I saw in his face. "My name is Kate Daniels. Greg Feldman was my legal guardian and the closest thing to a family I've had for many years. I want to find the scum who killed him. I can't afford to fight you and I won't show off my magic. I just want to know if the Pack had something to do with Greg's death. Once I find the killer, I would be more than happy to indulge you."

I offered him my hand. He halted, studying me, and then the fur melted away, absorbed through the follicles that produced it. The Beast Lord took my hand in his human palm and shook.

"Fair enough. Right now I'm not my own person either," he said. Being a Beast Lord, he probably never was.

The gold in his irises shrank to mere flecks. His control was unbelievable. The most adept of shapechangers could choose between three forms: human, animal, and beast-man. To change a part of your body into one form while keeping the rest of it in another, as he had, was incredible. Before this night, I would have said it couldn't be done.

The Beast Lord sat down on the dirty floor. I had no choice but to follow, feeling like an idiot for dusting my jeans off earlier.

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"If I prove to you that the Pack had no interest in removing the diviner, will you share?"

"Yes."

He reached into his sweatshirt, produced a black leather folder zipped shut, and offered it to me. I held my hand out, but he retracted it before my fingers touched the supple leather. I wondered if he was quicker than me. It would be interesting to find out.

"Between us," he said.

"Understood."

I took the folder and unzipped it. Inside were photos. Shots of corpses, some human, some partially animal, mangled and bloody. The bright, awful crimson dominated the images, making it difficult to analyze them. I looked over the photographs anyway. Corpse after corpse after corpse, torn, disemboweled, drenched in their blood. It made me ill.

"Seven," I murmured, holding the pictures by their edges as if the blood on them would stain my fingers.

"Yours?"

"Every one." He reached over to tap one of the shots. "This one. Zachary Stone. The alpha-rat. Tough, vicious sonovabitch."

I tried to see beyond the blood, focusing on the injuries. "Something chewed on him."

"Something chewed on five of them. And would have chewed on the other two as well if it wasn't scared away."

A little light went off in my head. "Greg was working on this."

"Yes. And keeping it quiet. The People want power. They lust after it the same way their vampires lust after blood. They see us as rivals and they'll attack any weakness. To admit that we can't take care of our own is a weakness. Nataraja would cream his jeans if he knew."

"You think they are responsible?"

"I don't know," he said, his face grim. "But I'm going to find out."

It made sense. The Order had little love for the Pack, which was too organized and dangerous for their liking, but faced with a choice between the People and the shapeshifters, the Order would side with the Pack. Greg could have been tailing a vampire when something killed him, preventing him from revealing what he saw or was about to see. The vampire could have been caught in a struggle. Or the vamp could have been following Greg when something killed him because he was getting too close. Or…

"I would like to speak to Corwin," I said.

His face showed no reaction. "Is he a suspect?"

There was no point in lying. "Yes."

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"Done," he said. "You'll have your talk. On our premises."

"That's fine."

"I did my part," he said.

I took the m-scan I stole from the morgue and spread it in the dirt.

"What am I looking for?" he asked.

"These." I pointed to the yellow lines.

"Looks like a scanner malfunction."

"I don't think so."

He frowned. "What would register yellow?"

"I don't know. But I know an expert who might."

"You have something more to go on, besides that?"

There was the hair, and I considered not telling him about it. Forewarned is forearmed. And he didn't give me anything that I couldn't have gotten from the knight-protector. Theoretically. Still, the Beast Lord saved me a lot of work and I doubted the texture of Corwin's hair could be altered so severely that DNA mapping would not match it to the sample.

The Beast Lord looked at the photographs, shifting through them with marked slowness. He looked almost human. I realized that I was biased. Biased against Nataraja and his college of death-devotees, with their clinical indifference to tragedy and murder. For them, a dispatched vampire and a comatose journeyman equaled a loss of an investment, costly and inconvenient, but ultimately not emotionally painful. The man in front of me, on the other hand, had lost friends. They were people he knew well and they had placed themselves in his charge. The Pack leader's ultimate duty was to protect his Pack—and he had failed them. As he looked at the snapshots of their deaths, his face reflected determination and anger, cold crystallized anger, born of guilt and grief. There was an old word for that kind of anger.

Wrath.

This I understood. I felt it every time I thought of Greg. I'd have to be very careful from now on, because I was no longer neutral. If the Beast Lord did kill Greg, I would have to work harder to convince myself of his guilt.

To think that I had found a kindred spirit in the Beast Lord. How touching. Greg's death was making me lose my mind. Perhaps I could hack off the murderer's head while the Beast Lord held him down.

"Several hairs were found at the scene," I said. "The medical examiner's office doesn't know what to make of them. They contain fragments of both human and feline genetic sequences. It's not any kind of shapechanger that the ME's analysts have seen. It's weird as hell and no, I don't have the exact printout of the base pairs."

"Does Nataraja know?"

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"I think he does," I said. "One of his journeymen gave me Corwin's name. He didn't say they thought he did it, but it's obvious they do."

A small muscle twitched in Beast Lord's cheek, as if his face wanted to twist into a feral snarl. "Figures."

"Are you satisfied?" I asked.

He nodded. "For now. I'll call on you."

"I won't come here again," I said. "Unicorn Lane makes my skin crawl."

His eyes shone again. "Really? I find it relaxing. A scenic location. Moonlight."

"I never was much for scenic locations. Next time I'd like an official invitation."

He put away the snapshots.

"Can I keep those?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No. It's enough that they exist."

I turned to leave and paused before the gap in the ruined wall. "One last thing, Your Majesty. I'd like a name I can put into my report, something shorter than typing out 'The Leader of the Southern Shapechanger Faction.' What should I call you?"

"Lord."

I rolled my eyes.

He shrugged. "It's short."

This was turning out to be a difficult night, and it showed no signs of being over. I climbed out, over the heap of rubble. Jim was gone.

Something touched my shoulder. I whirled and saw the Lord of Beasts looking at me from the gap ten feet away.

"Curran," he said, as if granting me a boon. "You can call me Curran."

He melted into the darkness. I waited for a moment to make sure he was gone. Nobody jumped me from the shadows.

Beyond the Unicorn, I could see the blue feylanterns of the city. Time to take the m-scan to my expert.

He rarely minded late night visits.

CHAMPION HEIGHTS WAS AN EASY PLACE TO FIND. It was about the only high-rise still standing. Once it was called Lenox Pointe, but it had undergone so many renovations, and changed hands so many times that its old name was all but forgotten. Nestled among the artfully pruned evergreens, the seventeen-story building of red brick and concrete loomed above the shops and bars of Buckhead like a mystic tower. Pale haze clung to its walls and balconies, blurring the crisp man-made
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edges, as a web of wards worked tirelessly to convince the very magic which fed it that the high-rise was nothing but a large rock. A distortion, the side effect of the spells' labor, spread unevenly across the structure, and sections of the high-rise looked like portions of a steep granite cliff.

The enchantment must have cost a small fortune, and although it had kept the high-rise standing so far, there was no guarantee it would continue to do so. I thought it would. The entire setup had that bizarre illogic peculiar to complex magic. Understanding it required a mind with a specific twist—just like quantum physics. Whatever the future held for Champion Heights, the owners had already recouped their investment several times over. Many couples would be happy to retire on what they charged for a year's rent.

I parked Karmelion in a lot among the Cadillacs, distinguished Lincolns, and bizarre mechanisms designed to transport their drivers during the magic waves. There was no convenient way to carry an m-scan, so I folded it and slid it between the pages of my Almanac. The night wind came, bringing smells from far away: a touch of wood smoke, the aroma of seared meat. I crossed the lot and made my way up the concrete stairs, flanked by some picturesque shrubbery, to the revolving glass doors. Enchanted glass lost a little of its transparency, but I had no trouble making out the heavy metal grate barring the lobby and the small cage with the guard who leveled a shock crossbow at me.

I reached to my left and pressed the button of the intercom. It hissed.

"Fifteenth floor, one fifty-eight, please."

His voice came back, distorted by the static. "Code, please."

"Forth he fared at the fated moment, sturdy Scyld to the shelter of God." Without the code he would keep me outside while he queried one fifty-eight and even then I wouldn't get in without being frisked and surrendering Slayer. Parting with my saber was not an option.

The metal grate slid aside. "Proceed."

A revolving door admitted me to the lobby, flooded with the light of feylanterns. My steps, loud on the tiled floor of polished red granite, sent little echoes scurrying into the corners. I approached the elevator.

The magic was still up, but I'd visited Champion Heights in the middle of a magic fluctuation before. Their elevator worked no matter the circumstances.

A luxurious green carpet lined the fifteenth floor. The pile was thicker than some mattresses I've seen.

Sinking into it, I made my way to the metal door marked 158, pressed the button of the bell, and knocked in case the magic had short-circuited it. Nobody home.

The metal box of an electronic key card reader, about six by three inches, secured the door. Like all things in Champion Heights, the lock was not what it seemed, magic masquerading as tech. Slayer whispered as it left its sheath, and I slid its blade into the narrow slit of the key card reader.

Concentrating on the saber, I put my hand onto the blade. A jolt of magic pulsed from my fingers.

Open!

The lock clicked and the heavy door gave under the pressure of my palm. Retrieving Slayer, I stepped inside and locked the door behind me.

Reaching for the feylantern, I turned the round handle and a wide tongue of blue flame flared into
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existence, illuminating the apartment. I would never make a living as an interior decorator. My home was a comfortable chaos, my furniture mismatched but highly functional. The esthetic properties of any given piece were secondary to its convenience, and luxury for me meant having a small table by my couch to support a reading lamp and a mug of coffee.

Not so here. The moment I stepped into this apartment, it was clear that its owner had crafted his environment with a deliberate goal in mind. I was looking at years of selective purchases made by a person for whom the word "sale" held no meaning. The furnishings, the carpet, the spare decorations—all blended to present a distinctive whole, and looking at it produced the same feeling as viewing the reconstruction of an African savannah in a zoo. It was a harmonious but alien habitat of glass, steel, and white plush, all ellipses and curves. Three doors led from the room, one to the bedroom, another to a bathroom with a double sink and a walk-in shower, and the third to the lab.

The spell-haze did not affect the view from the inside and huge windows offered a vision of midnight Atlanta under the endless black sky. The weak light of the single feylantern caressed the window glass, rendering it invisible, and permeated the darkness outside as if the apartment itself was but a piece of midnight sky, defined by glass and stone but not separated from the world outside. If I stood very close to the window, I could imagine that I was flying high above the city…

As I watched, the tech hit. Thousands of tiny lights sparked into existence, like jewels among the folds of black velvet and the street lamps flooded the avenue below me in man-made sunshine. The feylantern flickered and died, and bright electric lights came on inside the apartment, murdering the illusion and separating me from the infinite blackness. The glass became impenetrable, and I stood confined by it as if locked in the middle of a transparent cage. Suddenly I felt vulnerable so I turned off the lights, all but a single reading lamp of steel and opaque glass.

I washed my face and arms up to my elbow, dried them with a fluffy white towel I found hanging on a hook near the sink, and took up residence on the ultramodern couch. Curran's question nagged me: why would the knight-protector give Greg's investigation to a no-name merc? On the surface, it made no sense. I finally managed to look past my own ego. One of the Order's own was dead, a well-known man of substantial power. They wouldn't handle it themselves. They would bring in a crusader.