Magic Dreams (2 page)

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

He surged off the floor, dark eyes pissed off. “You were gone. Dali Harimau, where were you?”

I stood up and crossed my arms over my chest. It wasn’t much of a chest, so crossing my arms was easy. “I was out. You’re not my daddy, Jim. I don’t have to check in with you before I leave my house.”

A green sheen rolled over Jim’s eyes. “Dali, where were you?”

He had pulled the alpha card. You didn’t argue when his eyes lit up. “I was racing on Buzzard. There. Happy now?”

He exhaled. “Good.”

Good? Since when was my racing good? “You’re not making any sense.”

“You didn’t check your messages?”

“No, I just got home.”

“So you didn’t go to the house?”

“What house? I told you I just got home.”

Jim’s eyes dimmed. He rubbed his face with his hand, as if trying to wipe something off. “I need your help.”

*

JIM SAT IN
my kitchen, staring at a cup of hot ginseng tea like a demon was hiding inside.

“Drink it. It’s good for you.”

Jim gulped it down. “It tastes awful.”

If I were a guest and turned up my nose like that at the tea my hostess served me, my mother would tell me I had shamed the family. “It’s as though you have no manners. I offer you a gift of tea and you make funny faces at it.”

“Do you want me to lie and tell you it tastes great?”

“No, I want you to say ‘thank you’ and tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m not sure.” Jim’s face was grim. “The northeastern office on Dunwoody Road didn’t report in on Tuesday. I was out doing other things, so Johanna waited twenty-four hours and sent a scout in to check on them. He came back disturbed. I talked to him this morning. He claimed ‘something bad’ was in the building and he wasn’t going near it.”

“Who was it?”

“Garrett.”

Garrett was lazy, but he wasn’t a coward. Maybe there was something bad in the house. “You went there yourself, didn’t you?”

Jim shrugged. “I had to go that way for an errand anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “You didn’t take anybody with you?”

He looked at me like I had insulted him. Mr. Badass didn’t need anybody to go with him, oh no.

“What happened?”

“I went to the office. The place looked empty. The windows were covered with dirt, like nobody had been there for years.”

Jim and I looked at each other. The Pack had seven offices in Atlanta and the surrounding area and every single one of those would have clean windows. Normal people looked at us like we were filthy animals. The animal part was true, but most of us were sensitive about the filthy part. If you wanted to insult a shapeshifter, you told him he stank. We kept ourselves and our offices clean. Besides, you can’t see angry mobs with pitchforks and torches coming at you through a dirty window.

“I went up to the door.” Jim looked at his cup. “The place smelled wrong. A weird scent, dusty, pungent, and bitter, not something I’ve ever come across before.”

“Like herb dust?”

“No, that wasn’t it. Not anything I recognized. And it was too quiet. There should’ve been four people at the office. Not a damn whisper, no sigh, no sound, nothing.”

Roger worked at that office. And Michelle. I liked Michelle; she was nice.

“I opened the door and smelled blood. The place was empty. There was a symbol on the floor in magic marker.”

“What kind of a symbol?”

He shook his head. His eyes turned distant. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was confused, except Jim didn’t get confused.

“A Chinese symbol,” he said slowly.

“Like a sinograph? Hanzi?”

Jim gave me a blank look.

“Did it look like Chinese writing, Jim?”

“Yes.”

I got up and brought him a piece of paper and a pen. “Draw it for me.”

He picked up the pen and looked at it.

“Jim?”

He growled under his breath. “I can’t remember.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. Jim didn’t have perfect recall, but he was very close. He practiced, because remembering details was a useful skill for the chief of security. I once watched him draw a complicated tribal tattoo he saw for two seconds completely from memory. He got it nearly perfect. A hanzi character on the floor in the middle of an office smelling of blood—he should’ve remembered it. The symbols weren’t that complicated. Something had fried his memory.

“What was next?”

“I called you.”

We both looked at my answering machine. The screen was dead—the magic had taken down the electricity. No way to tell if Jim had called me.

A green glow sparked in his irises and vanished. Frustration rolled off Jim in a hot wave. He was acting like a person with a concussion, but Lyc-V cracked concussions like nuts. I ought to know, I had gotten enough of them. Thirty seconds, and your brain was like new. Still …

“Do you think someone might have whacked you on the back of the head?”

Jim looked at me for a long moment.

“Sometimes trauma to the head results in short-term memory loss.”

“Nobody traumatized my head. Nobody quiet enough to sneak up on me would be strong enough to knock me out. I wasn’t knocked out, I passed out.”

Huh. “Passed out?”

“Yes.”

“What do you remember before passing out?”

“The magic wave hit. I saw a woman.”

“A woman?” Great, now I’ve turned into a manga character who repeated everything everyone said.

“I saw her in the house.”

“What did she look like?”

“She was very beautiful.”

It stung like a slap. “Jim!”

“What?”

Yes, what, Dali? What exactly? “When did you see her? What was she wearing? Concentrate.”

He shook his head. “I was in the doorway. I looked up and she was standing at the back of the room. She was wearing some sort of a long robe or gown. The fabric was almost transparent, like a negligee.”

And he probably took a second to look at her boobies. Awesome.

“She had long dark hair. I told her to come outside. She said, ‘Help me.’”

“In English?”

He nodded. “She started backing up into the house and I went after her.”

“Four shapeshifters are missing, the office smells like blood, you see some weird woman in a transparent gown who clearly shouldn’t be in the building, and you run after her?”

“It’s my job to run after her.”

“Without backup?”

“I
am
the backup.”

I waved my arms. “Fine, what happened next?”

“I remember my legs getting heavy and thinking that something was wrong. Then I woke up in the middle of the floor.”

“How long did you sleep?”

“Eighteen minutes. I woke up tired as hell. I knew I’d pass out again if I didn’t leave, so I got up, locked the door, and got the hell out of there. I knew I’d called you and I thought you might go to the house. The magic was up, so I ran over here, got inside with my key, but you were gone. I went to the bedroom to see if your calligraphy kit was still here, because I knew you would’ve taken it, and then I don’t remember.”

And then he’d fallen asleep on my bedroom floor. “Do you feel any different?”

“I feel tired.”

“Right now? Even after sleeping?”

He nodded.

Jim could go forty-eight hours without sleep and still be as sharp as his claws. That was one of the fun gifts of Lyc-V: improved stamina, immunity to diseases—and crazy homicidal rage, just to spice things up. Something was seriously wrong. If it had been a typical curse, my magic would’ve purged it by now. He had to go to the medic. “We need to see Doolittle.”

“No. No Doolittle.”

“Jim, you keep falling asleep.”

“Doolittle is a surgeon.” Jim bared the edges of his teeth. “If he can’t cut it out or stitch it back together, he doesn’t know what to do with it. I have no symptoms. Pulse rate is normal, temperature is normal. I just fall asleep. You’re Doolittle. I come to you with this story. What’s your first move?”

“Lock you up for observation.”

“Exactly. I don’t need to be locked up.”

“How do you know something isn’t interfering with your regeneration?”

Jim pulled a knife from his waist sheath so fast I barely saw it. The bluish metal flashed, slicing across his forearm. Blood swelled. The scent hit my nostrils, sending goose bumps over my arms. As I watched, the cut knitted itself back together, the skin and muscle flowing to repair the damage. Jim wiped the blood from his skin and showed me his forearm. The thin line of the scar was already fading.

“I’m not sick and my virus is working. Whatever this is, it’s magic. Four of our people are missing, and you’re the only magic user I have. I can’t just leave them in there.”

“They might be dead.”

“If they’re dead, we need to know.” He leaned forward, his brown eyes looking straight into mine. “Help me, Dali.”

He had no idea, but when he looked at me like that, I would’ve done anything for him. Anything at all.

I got up. “Let me get my kit. We need to go see that house.”

*

THE NORTHEASTERN OFFICE
of the Pack sat on Chamblee Dunwoody Road, well back from the road behind a carefully cut lawn. Tall pines framed it on three sides, with four picturesque trees shading its parking lot. To the right, another copse of pines bordered a large open field converted into pasture. To the left, behind the buffer of greenery and a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, rose short stubby apartments. The guard at the gate gave us a nasty look as we thundered on by and clutched at his crossbow just in case. Silly man.

I steered the Prowler up the curving drive to the office’s lot, parked, and shut off the vehicle. The enchanted water engine took at least fifteen minutes to warm up, but leaving it running made no sense. The engine made so much noise I had trouble thinking. Besides, Pooki’s top speed during magic barely scraped fifty miles per hour, and if we had to bail, both Jim and I could run much faster than that.

We stepped out into the night. Painted an ugly olive color, the office looked like two separate buildings had been jammed together: The left half resembled a ranch house while the right was a two-story Queen Anne with green shutters.

The wind brought with it a salty metallic scent that burned my tongue. Blood. Jim bared his teeth at the building.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to sense the magic. In my head, the house turned dark. Long translucent tentacles of magic slivered from inside it, sliding back and forth over the walls, out the windows, over the roof, clutching at the siding and tiles.

I pushed a tiny step farther. The closest tentacle rose, hovered above the roof for a long moment, and snaked over to us. Magic lashed at me in an icy wave, fetid, terrible magic. I didn’t know what it was, but every cell in my body shrank from it. My eyes snapped open and I jerked back.

Jim caught me from behind. “What is it?”

The house looked mundane again, just a drab olive building. I swallowed. “We’re going to need protection. Lots of protection.”

I set my wooden box on Pooki’s hood and flipped it open. Jim peered at the calligraphy set inside. Most shapeshifters didn’t do magic, because we were magic enough as it was, and most didn’t trust magic. I totally understood why. Magic was iffy, but claws and fangs produced the same result every time. However, I was born to a long line of magic users, so concerned with tradition that they passed on their knowledge and rituals even when technology was at its strongest and almost no evidence of magic remained. My family took my education very seriously.

Half of the time my magic didn’t even work, but Jim had seen me pull it off once or twice. It’s not that he was impressed—he was far too cool for that—but Jim treated my talent with respect. He was in trouble and he trusted me to get him out of it. I had to step it up.

Jim nodded at the house. A pale yellow light appeared in one of the upper-floor windows, as if someone held a candle up to the glass.

“Isn’t it cute,” I murmured. “It’s saying hello.”

Jim smiled at the light. The only time a jaguar showed you his teeth was when he was about to sink them into you.

I pulled two thin strips of
hanshi
paper out, dipped my brush into the ink, and wrote the string of characters for general protection on each piece.

The ink shimmered a little in the moonlight. I held my breath.

Please work. Please, please, please work.

The magic snapped, sparking through the paper. I exhaled and tossed one strip at Jim. The paper sliced through the air, stiff like a blade, and stuck to his chest. He stared at it.

“Don’t mess with it. It’s a defensive spell.” I tossed the other piece of paper in the air, stepped toward it, and it adhered to me, over my left breast. “Let’s go.”