Magic Stars (Grey Wolf Book 1) (3 page)

Five, six.

“You’re going to kill him,” Julie warned.

“No.”
But he won’t be smiling at any girls for the next three months.

“Derek?”

“Yes?” One more.

Suddenly he was aware of her standing next to him. A metal chain dangled in his view.

The cat’s body deflated. The fur melted back into human skin. His face looked like raw hamburger. By morning the skin would be back to normal. The broken jaw and the three teeth he’d knocked out would take a couple of months to heal and grow back.

Julie shook the handcuffs at him.

“Fine.”

He took the handcuffs, flipped the woozy cat over, pulled his arms over, and locked them on the cat’s now-human wrists. The handcuffs were a shapeshifter edition: Each band was lined with silver spikes. Trying to snap the chain by pulling the cuffs apart drove the spikes into the skin. Silver burned like fire. He was sure the cat would stay put.

Derek tilted his head. The jackal lay on his back in a puddle of his own blood, trussed up like a hog, wrists and ankles tied together. The wound on his chest looked deep, but Julie had missed the heart. Knowing her, on purpose. He would heal.

Derek tilted his head and looked at the remaining wolf. He knew his eyes glowed, reflecting the moonlight.

“We were at a bar,” the wolf said. “Eli and Nathan are new to the city, so I took them to the Steel Horse. A guy came up to us and asked if we were up for making a quick five hundred bucks.”

There was no such thing as a quick $500, especially not in Atlanta after dark.

“He gave us the address of this house. We’re supposed to go in and sniff out a rock.” The wolf lifted his hands, holding them apart, fingers almost touching. “About this big. Glows in the moonlight. We went into the house and smelled the blood. We were trying to decide what to do when you showed up.”

“Four hours ago someone killed the human family who lived in this house for that rock,” Derek said. “Husband, wife, two kids.”

“I didn’t know,” the wolf said, his voice pleading. “I swear I didn’t know. You’ve got to believe me.”

Julie squinted at the house. “Is that the Iveses’ house?”

He’d hoped she wouldn’t recognize it, but she had just been there two weeks ago, buying a knife with Kate. He nodded. There was nothing else to do.

Her eyes went wide. “All of them?”

He nodded again.

She clamped her hand over her mouth. He put his arm around her before he knew he’d done it. She stuck her face into his shredded T-shirt.

He hugged her gently and wished he could make it better.

The world was a fucked-up place. A girl like Julie shouldn’t know people who had been violently murdered. He shouldn’t know them. Instead they met in front of a slaughterhouse. He’d killed five people tonight, and she’d opened a man’s chest with her tomahawk.

“What were you supposed to do with the rock?” he asked, still holding Julie.

“Take it to Pillar Rock,” the wolf said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go down this street until you run into Manticore. Turn left, go two blocks. You’ll see a white building with a green roof. That’s the Pack safe house for this quadrant of the city. Tell them what happened and call your alpha.”

“Should I call their alphas, too?” he asked.

“No. Just call Desandra. She’ll handle it. Tell her I consider the matter closed.” Knowing Desandra, she would enjoy informing the other alphas that their new members had stepped in it.

The wolf exhaled, turned, and sprinted down the street at fifty miles per hour. In ten minutes the pickup team would swarm the area.

Julie pulled away from him. Her eyes were red. She never sobbed when she cried. She used to, but something had happened in the last year, and now she cried like that, without moving or making a sound. It was worse somehow.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Did you find out who killed the Iveses?”

He nodded again.

“Are they dead?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said, sudden viciousness in her voice. She sidestepped him and went into the house.

He knew this was it, all of the grief she would show. He’d seen her go through things like that before. Julie had spent three years on the street, where people lived by animal rules, and she’d learned them well: Never show a weakness; never show pain. The vulnerable get eaten. She would break down later when she was alone, but neither he nor anyone else would ever see it.

Yellow crime tape was too expensive to produce in the world that hated factories and plastics, and the cops rarely used it anymore. A single white sticker, slapped across the door and frame, barred entry to the house, and the shapeshifters had already cut it. The door stood wide open, and she went inside. He followed her.

Before the Shift, the processing of a murder scene could take days. Now it took three hours, because murders were plentiful and cops were stretched thin. It was all the time they could spare.

Julie walked straight to the built-in bookcase in the living room, took several books off the shelf, picking them up together, and set them on the floor. Behind the books, a single narrow slit indicated a hidden niche. She pried at it with her nails, and a small section of the wall fell forward, revealing a dark opening and a plastic box inside. Julie pulled it out and popped the lid.

They stared at the rock. A little larger than a softball, it resembled pyrite, fool’s gold, except it was bluish white and glowed gently with a cold, dispassionate light. Most of it was rounded, but on one side the stone ended sharply, as if a part had broken off. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He couldn’t explain why, but something about that rock made him wary. If he were in his wolf form, he would’ve circled it on careful paws and left it where it lay.

“Do you see anything?”

Julie frowned. Sensates like her saw the magic in an array of colors, something other people tried to duplicate by building m-scanners.

“Pale bluish silver glow.”

“Divine?” Divine objects and creatures glowed with silver.

“No, not divine. White and blue. Different kind of white.”

“What registers this kind of white?”

“Elemental magic.” She looked at him, her eyes bottomless. “They killed the Iveses for
this
?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head and peered at the rock. “What are you?”

He half expected the rock to answer, but it stayed silent, glowing weakly.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Someone jumped Luther,” she said.

“Luther? The Biohazard wizard?”

“Yep. Kate is out with Curran, so I took the call. They didn’t kill him, probably because they knew he worked for Biohazard, and they didn’t want a whole gaggle of mages hunting them down, so they hit him over the head as he was stepping out of his car. He doesn’t remember it. He remembers parking and then waking up on the ground with a headache and a bloody head. That afternoon someone brought him a rock. They claimed it fell from the sky and glowed under moonlight, and they wanted a thousand dollars for it. The magic was down by the time the rock got to Luther, so he bargained them down to three hundred bucks. He tried to get a sample to analyze, but he couldn’t cut it at his lab—nothing worked—so he took it to the Mage College, where they managed to slice a small flake from it. He was bringing the rock back to Biohazard when he was attacked.”

She reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out a small plastic vial. Inside, a tiny crumb of the rock glowed. “Luther is down with a concussion, so he couldn’t go look for it.”

And he wouldn’t ask his colleagues for help, because they’d ask why the hell he’d taken a possibly magic rock out of the Biohazard building. She probably hadn’t told him she would be the one doing the job. Most likely Luther thought Kate was on it. He would’ve done the same in her place. Why worry the client? As long as the job gets done, it doesn’t matter who does it.

“So I went to the place where the rock was found, climbed the building, and waited for the magic to hit.” She tapped the container. “The rock’s magic shines like a tiny star. If you know what to look for, you can see it from miles away.”

Which meant that if Caleb could see it, he would know exactly where they were at all times. “Any way to hide it?”

She shook her head. “It’s magic, Derek. I saw it through the house. Your turn. Why are you here?”

He started with a call from Curran and coming to the house where Hope, Melissa Ives’ sister, frantically rocked herself, crying hysterically. Curran and Kate patronized that shop. It was a well-known fact, and when she found the bodies, she called 911 first and Curran second. Curran, in turn, had called him. His orders simple: Find the people responsible and make sure they never do it again. How exactly he went about it was up to him. He made sure to have Melissa Ives’ sister sign the contract hiring him and Kate and Curran’s firm to investigate the murder. Anything he did in the pursuit of the investigation gave him a blanket umbrella of self-defense. After speaking to the overworked detective at the scene, he doubted he’d need it, but Kate liked to keep things legal, and he respected her wishes.

He glossed over finding the bodies. He did tell her about Caleb Adams, the rock that broke in three parts, and the dead men in the bar. Her face got tighter and tighter as he spoke.

“I hate people,” she said when he finished.

He wasn’t a fan of people either.

“What does it do?” he asked, looking at the rock.

“I don’t know.”

Whatever it was, people were willing to kill for it. The mission parameters had changed, he decided. He would still punish Adams for killing the Iveses. But he would have to recover the rock as well. It was too dangerous to be left uncontained.

A light noise came from the outside. He inhaled. Patricia, one of Jim’s shapeshifter agents; Nicolas; and two others whose scents he knew well. They’d come to pick up the injured. They’d smell him and Julie. If they had any questions, they’d look them up.

Julie tilted her head, giving him an appraising look. “So, Pillar Rock or Caleb Adams?”

She wouldn’t let go of this, and he wasn’t fool enough to try to convince her otherwise. Once Julie got a case, she was like a wolf with a bone. A dog would give up a treat for his human; a wolf surrendered it to no one. She could see the rock’s magic, and he couldn’t. He could either work with her and get this done faster and safer, or he could go off on his own. The latter brought no benefits, and he would wonder where she was and what she was doing the entire time.

“Pillar Rock,” he said. “We know where Caleb is likely to be. We know we’ll have to go and see him at some point tonight.”

“Him and his gang of enforcers who think they are big and bad.” Julie’s eyes narrowed. “We should talk to them about the Iveses.”

“We will,” he promised. “We don’t know who is at Pillar Rock. Maybe it’s a third party.”

“Maybe it’s Caleb.” Julie smiled.

“If we’re lucky.”

They looked at each other. In that moment he knew they were thinking the exact same thing. Caleb Adams didn’t know the Ives family, but before the night was over, he would regret their deaths. He would regret them more than he ever regretted anything in his life.

CHAPTER 2

PILLAR ROCK THRUST OUT of the ground among the ruins of North DeKalb Mall, a little over five miles away. He could’ve run it in half an hour, even if he took his time and carried Julie, which would be faster than her horse picking her way through the treacherously degraded streets. But Peanut had to come along and she trotted at about eight miles per hour, so he kept pace with a light jog.

 He’d pointed out before that the horse was neither brown nor peanut-shaped, so the name didn’t describe her in any way, and he was told that was the point. He let it lie. Some things you simply accepted, the way you accepted the sunrise or the winter cold. They called it lupine fatalism, but in reality it was plain common sense.

The moon lit their way. The north side of the city fought a never-ending battle with encroaching wilderness. On some streets, the pavement had worn away, surrendering to the forest growth, but North Druid Hills Road was still somewhat clear, if overgrown. Here and there a rusty car poked through the spring weeds, pushed or driven off the road just far enough to not block the way. The trees grew thick here, their massive branches shading the road, painting it in patches of shadow and light. Behind them houses crouched, most still occupied. The closer they got to North DeKalb Mall, the fewer houses would be occupied. The wilderness was frightening now to most humans. They sought safety in numbers, migrating toward the center of the city.

The wilderness never bothered him. He loved it.

He wondered idly if Julie liked it, too. He’d never asked her.

He wondered about many things he never talked about—most of the time there was no need for questions. He would get his answers if he waited long enough. However, she had said something that required a clarification.

 “Herald?” he asked. He’d never heard Kate use the term.

“That’s the official title,” she said. “Before one becomes a Warlord, one must be a Herald. That’s what Hugh d’Ambray was before he became the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs. “