Shifty Magic (19 page)

* * *

"Hey!" I ducked as Cooper's shirt came flying at me followed
by his jacket. We'd stepped out into the alley, and he was
stripping faster than I could say "stop that". I watched him
avidly, unable to stop myself. He looked just like I remembered,
all muscles and gorgeous, lean strength and my knees felt
weak.

"You'll have to carry my clothes," he said,
kicking his shoes and holster my way while he unzipped his
jeans.

I spun around in alarm, putting my back to
him. My strength to resist felt ready to crumble, and I held on
with both hands. I became acutely aware of the rustle of clothing
being shed behind me as the thick stormy air pressed down on me.
Sweat broke out across my forehead.

"Try to control yourself," he said, sounding
amused and growly all at the same time. "You're shooting off
pheromones like a Fourth of July fireworks show."

His snug boxers landed on top of my head,
and I snatched them off. "Don't flatter yourself," I said crossly,
pouring all of my attention into tying his belongings into a
compact bundle. It was bad enough my attraction for him was getting
worse. He didn't have to rub my nose in it.

I heard a
pop
and the air fizzed
with electricity, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Dropping the bundle, I spun around and went into a crouch as alarm
shot through me. I froze with my knife in my hand and wonder stole
my breath from my throat.

Cooper was shifting.

I expected cracking bones and horrifying
squishy sounds like in all the propaganda shows that the
paranormals had seeded into humanity's consciousness in the early
twenty-first century. I realized in an instant that it had all been
a cover-up to keep humans away, even after they revealed
themselves—the original goal, until the more aggressive factions
sprung their attack.

I understood why they'd wanted to hide how
they shifted. After seeing the truth, I wasn't sure I could think
of Weres as anything close to human again.

In awe, I pushed to my feet, staring at the
being of pure, silver-white light that stood in the middle of the
filthy alley. A shaft of light spilt the air above and below it,
about five feet in both directions. As I watched, the split widened
and pressed down, compressing in on the roughly human shape,
melting into it until only a column of white filled the space.

The limbs of the being pulled in on itself
and thickened as it shrank toward the pavement, growing so bright I
squinted my eyes against it. Just when I thought I'd have to look
away, six scattered bulges bubbled out of the shapeless blob,
quickly forming into a preschool-level, Play-Dough shape of a large
wolf. As I watched, the shape clarified, turning into a lean body
with legs, a tail, head, ears, fur.

There was another
pop
like a muffled sonic
boom and the shafts of light flared above and below the animal
shape. I winced, shielding my eyes. When my vision cleared, a two
hundred and ten pound silver and black wolf stood in the alley
looking at me with intelligent, silver-green eyes.

I stumbled back, my hand
gripping the woven leather covering the handle of my knife. It's
one thing to know in your head that someone's a Were. It's another
to really
know
.

"Coop?" I whispered, not completely
understanding what I'd witnessed.

The huge animal shook himself, making his
ears rattle together, and then gave me a doggy grin. Trotting over
to me, he bent his head and snuffled my left palm with his cold,
wet nose. His back came to my waist, and when he gathered his
haunches under himself and sat down, his head was level with my
chest. It took everything I had not to react to the deep, primal
fear screaming in my brain.

"You're...enormous," I choked out.

The wolf gave me a smug look that I
instantly recognized. I rolled my eyes, half amused, half
disgusted, and then gave a shaky laugh. This was Cooper all right.
Leave it to him to know just how to shake me loose from my
shock.

I edged closer and reached out to rub one of
his fluffy, triangle-shaped ears. "But your ears are so darn cute,"
I cooed.

Cooper shook his head to knock away my hand
and made an annoyed, huffing sound, and I grinned. Jumping to his
feet, he turned and put his nose to the ground and started weaving
back and forth across the alley in quick, decisive movements.
Across from me and about six feet to my left, he lifted his head,
tossed a short, quiet bark over his shoulder and took off for the
street.

The first drop of rain hit my nose as I
sheathed my knife in my boot. It wouldn't be long before it came
down hard, obliterating any scent Marla and her boyfriend had left.
We didn't have much time. I grabbed Cooper's bundled clothes and
sprinted after him.

I expected to find following a timber wolf
that was three times the size of a German Shepherd easy. I couldn't
have been more wrong. Cooper moved like smoke, darting from one
scent to another as we left the alley, and headed down the street
to the right. I made a good showing of myself for the first three
minutes, but lost him two blocks east of the club. When the rain
went from spitting fitfully to a steady, light drizzle, Cooper shot
off into the darkness.

Shoving my hair out of my eyes, I came to a
stop in front of what looked like an old community center. "Damn
it, Cooper," I hissed into the deserted darkness of the street.
"Where the devil are you?"

"Miss me?" he said, slipping up beside
me.

"Hey, hey, hey," I sputtered, jumping back
from his extremely naked state. "Geez." I thrust his clothes at
him, making sure I aimed low to cover up what I did not need to
see.

"Did you lose their scent?" I asked,
pointedly staring at the plain brick front of the building behind
us. A weathered sign with a faded pentagram painted on it hung over
the reinforced entrance.

"Eventually. But not before I found their
mark on that door."

I wiped rain from my eyes, and my gaze
traveled over the building. A feeling of triumph rose into my
chest. Laiyla and Keith's killers might be in there. I was more
than ready to bring them down.

"You feel like catching some bad guys?" I
asked, risking a glance at Cooper.

A fierce, predatory smile flashed across his
face as he shrugged into his shoulder holster and clipped it on. "I
think I can find an opening in my schedule."

* * *

Thunder bitch slapped the air above me as rain
poured down, dimming visibility to the boarded up grocery store on
one side and the empty lot on the other. The deteriorated
elementary school across the street was nothing but a hazy, low
slung blob hunched behind a fifteen foot chain link with common
barbed wire running through it.

I huddled closer to the front of the old
community center, wishing it had more of an overhang. Not that it
mattered. I was soaked through, my skirt a soggy mess plastered to
my legs, my tank top clinging to me like a second skin. I was glad
I didn't have the Browning. It never would have survived this
dunking. At least I didn't have to worry about Wizard going out on
a night like this. She hated the rain as much as I did.

A few feet away, Cooper knelt in front of
the door and worked the tip of my hunting knife under the edge of
the bottom hinge. He'd already loosened the other two, and as I
watched, he popped up the last screw, gave a grunt of satisfaction
and handed the knife back to me. "Say what you want about
pre-strike technology." He wedged his fingers under the bottom
hinge, got a grip on it and snapped it free. "It was made to last.
Hard as hell to break into quietly, too."

"Or quickly," I muttered, the itch of
impatience crawling across my shoulders. "They could be miles away
by now."

"We're only thirty minutes behind them." He
snapped off the other two hinges.

"How can you know? The rain probably broke
up their trail."

Cooper flattened his palms next to the
broken hinges and pushed the door with a slow, steady pressure. His
biceps bulged beneath the edge of his sleeves, and the four-inch
thick metal of the door groaned and squealed as it slowly gave way.
When the gap widened to about twelve inches, he gestured to me and
squeezed inside.

I slipped in behind him and blinked at the
sudden lack of rain and faint light from the city. The dim glow
from the crack in the door faded just ahead of me into pitch
blackness. Cooper was nowhere in sight.

I rubbed my arm across my forehead where
streams of water dripped from my hair and squinted into the
nothingness. "Where the hell are you?" I hissed, my stomach tensing
as the rest of my senses strained to locate him.

"Here," he whispered from the darkness. I
heard a muffled footstep, and then his hand and arm thrust into the
watery light. His fingers wrapped around mine, strong and warm.
"This way."

He tugged me forward, and I stumbled,
hampered by my wet skirt and lack of night vision. Being soaked to
the skin and led blind was definitely not in my comfort zone.

"We're in some kind of vestibule," he said,
his voice low and soft, barely skating along the edge of my ability
to hear him. "There's a door across from us."

"Look for a light switch," I muttered as we
crept forward.

"Don't like holding my hand?" he teased.
"I'll know if you lie."

I clamped my teeth together and did my best
to calm the delicate joy doing its best to blossom in the middle of
my chest. I couldn't let it. I wouldn't. Caring about someone gave
you a weakness. A soft spot that could be exploited. I couldn't
afford that. No one could with the way the world had gone.

"You're an idiot, Cooper Daine," I
muttered.

He stopped, and I bumped into the hard
muscles of his back. "Do you smell that?" he asked quietly.

"I'm not a—" And then it hit me; the heavy,
sharp stink of blood and fear. "It's ahead of us," I said, anger
and worry closing in on me.

He took a right and his pace quickened as
the smell grew stronger. Next a left and I was running blind,
pulled along by Cooper while I focused my full attention on my feet
so I wouldn't trip.

He skidded to a stop and then moved forward
more cautiously. "We're in a lobby cluttered with potted plants and
old furniture. Watch your step."

"You'll have to do that for me. The best I
got is dark shapes against a dark background," I said. "There was a
faded pentacle on the door. Is this a practitioner meeting
hall?"

"Based on the artwork of moonlit women with
power animals cluttering the hall I'd say, yes." He came to a stop
and I tensed as the loud, metallic clank of a gymnasium door bar
being pushed in rattled into the silence around us.

"I have a bad feeling about this," I said as
he eased open the door. The soft, golden light of hundreds of
candles flowed into the lobby and the air stirred.

"Rotting jasmine," I whispered, nauseous
that we were too late.

Cooper gave an ominous growl. A chill
vibrated down my spine and my hand was suddenly empty. In a blur of
movement, he streaked across the open floor of the gymnasium
heading straight for the body of a young man sprawled on his back
across a bloodied alter.

* * *

A practitioner's altar was never meant for sacrifice.
Do no harm
tended to
preclude violence, so simple offerings of flowers and fruit were
generally the order of the day. That didn't mean large groups of
practitioners couldn't indulge in their love of the ornate in other
ways, however.

The setup in the gym was a perfect example.
Woven tapestries featuring moonlit woods, sunny meadows and
mystical symbols covered the walls. Fat white candles in tall,
looping stands stood in abundance near the corners of the room and
along the walls. A white arbor covered with live flowering vines
arched over the carved marble alter and what it held.

Fists clenched with helpless rage, Cooper
towered over the body.

The young Were lay at an angle across the
top, his blonde head thrown back, eyes blank and staring. Thick,
dark blood trailed down the sides of the white stone and pooled on
the polished wooden floor below his head. The slit across his
throat was deep and gaping, bone and ligaments showing in painful
detail.

Horror, anger and sorrow welled up from my
gut into my chest in a sickening rush. Against the wall behind the
arbor, a tapestry lay heaped on the floor. A dagger shape had been
drawn pointing toward a clumsy star with the sunburst and cursive Z
drawn above it. Seeing that symbol made the bile climb up into my
throat, and I looked away. At least this time there wasn't any
leftover nasty magic oozing out of it.

A shuffle of movement came from behind me
and Cooper's head snapped up. My intuition prickled, and I pivoted
to the left just as the bloodied silver blade of a jeweled knife
pierced the air where I'd been standing.

"Marla!" I shouted as she came at me
again.

"Whore! I won't let you have him," she
hissed. She lurched toward me, hammering the knife at me with
choppy stabs while I danced out of reach.

Cooper hit her full force from the side.
They slammed into the floor and slid along the polished wood for
several feet. Marla screeched incoherently as Cooper straddled her,
grappling with her flailing arms to gain control of the knife.

He latched onto her wrist and pinned it
along with the weapon to the floor while his other hand wrapped
around her neck. She fought wildly, her beautiful exotic face
twisted with insanity. Cooper squeezed down on her throat, a feral
snarl tightening his mouth.