Magic Bites

Chapter 3

I AWOKE EIGHT HOURS LATER, TIRED AND PLAGUED by a migraine. I had meant to call Anna, but instead I somehow had fallen into bed and my body turned off my brain for the entire night.
The phone no longer worked. I sat on the bed and stared at it. So far I had some data for a hair but not the actual specimen; I had some lines that may or may not be the result of an m-reader malfunction; and I had a name of some nocturnal character given to me under duress by a People journeyman who'd pretty much do anything to get me off his back. On top of it I had what was probably a feline hair on a dead vampire, which set the Pack and People on a collision course. I pictured two colossi running at each other across the city, like monstrosities from an antique horror movie, and myself, a gnat in the middle.
It would be a bloodbath, which most of the city wouldn't survive. So the trick wasn't to survive it, but to keep it from happening.
In my daydream the gnat kicked one colossus in the groin and hit the other with a vicious uppercut.
I tried the phone again. It still didn't work. I cursed and went to dress.
An hour later I slipped into Greg's office. Nobody challenged me. Nobody glared and asked me why the hell the case was not solved or why I was so late arriving. The lack of drama was very disappointing.
I sifted through Greg's data. The cabinets contained no files marked "Corwin," but in the last cabinet I found a stack of folders marked with a question mark, so I went through them on the faint hope that I'd find something. Anything. Otherwise I'd be reduced to grabbing people on the street and screaming, "Do you know Corwin? Where is he?"
The files secured Greg's notes, written in his particular code. I frowned as I scanned one indecipherable entry after another. "Glop. Ag. Bll.-7." "Bll" had to be bullets. "Ag" could be Argentium, silver. What the hell did "Glop" mean?
My hopes dimmed as I flipped through page after page, and when I came across it, my brain almost did not register it. On a single page there was a scratchy "Corwin" and next to it were two drawings. One was a very clumsy rendition of a glove with sharp blades protruding from its knuckles. The other was some sort of bizarre doodle against a dark semicircle. I stared at the doodle. It meant nothing to me.
The phone rang.
I looked at it. It rang again. I wondered if I should answer.
The intercom came to life and Maxine's voice said, "You should, dear. It's for you."
How did she know? I picked up the phone. "Yes?"
"Hello, sunshine," said Jim's voice.
"I'm kind of busy."
I turned the file on its side and examined the doodle. Still nothing.
"No shit," he said.
"Yeah. No gigs for me."
"That's not why I'm calling."
I frowned at the phone and turned the file upside down. "I'm all ears."
"Someone wants to meet you," he said.
"Tell him to get in line," I mumbled. The doodle almost looked like something.
"I'm not joking."
"You never joke because you're too damn busy proving that you're a badass. Come on, black leather cloak? In mid-spring Atlanta? Besides I don't have time to meet anybody."
Jim's voice dropped low and he spoke each word very distinctly. "Think very carefully. Do you really want me to tell the man no?"
Something about the way he said "the man" stopped me. I sat still and thought very hard about what kind of "man" would inspire Jim to use that voice.
"What did I do to warrant the Beast Lord's attention?" I asked dryly.
"You're sitting in the piner's office, aren't you?"
Touche.
The Beast Lord was the Pack King, the lord of the shapechangers, and he ruled his brethren with an iron fist. Few ever saw him and the mention of his title was enough to make the loudest shapechanger shut up. In other words, he was precisely the kind of fellow my father and Greg had warned me to avoid. I ground my teeth, thinking of a way to weasel out of it. I would have to go and see the People sooner or later to find out about the vampire. But so far nothing necessitated my walking into the Pack's lair.
"Your safety's guaranteed," Jim said. "I'll be there."
"That's not the reason," I murmured. There had to be a way to dodge this invitation. I glared at the stubborn doodle...
"Look," Jim said, making an obvious attempt to sound reasonable, "consider the..."
"Tell him I'll meet him tonight someplace private," I said. "I'll answer his questions if he answers mine."
"Agreed. Eleven o'clock, corner of Unicorn and Thirteenth."
He hung up. I tapped the desk with my fingers. I finally made sense of the doodle. The head of a howling wolf silhouetted against the semicircle of the moon. The sign of the Pack. Corwin belonged to the Pack.
There was a small matter of Maxine to attend to. I concentrated and whispered so quietly I couldn't hear myself. True communicators could focus enough to broadcast their thoughts without vocalization, but I still had to move my lips like a dufus.
"Maxine?"
"Yes, dear?" Maxine's voice said in my head.
"Were there any other calls for me?"
"No."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
I put the file back into its place and walked out of the office. Maxine was a telepath. A strong one. From now on, there would be no thinking done in the office.
I left quickly, almost breaking into a run on the stairs. The idea of someone digging in my head took some getting used to.
I went back to the apartment. I sat on the floor, leaned against the door, and took a deep breath. All my life I was taught to stay out of the way of the powerful. Don't draw attention to yourself. Don't show off. Guard your blood, because it will betray you. If you bleed, wipe it clean and burn the rag. Burn the bandages. If someone manages to obtain some of your blood, kill him and destroy the sample. At first it was a matter of survival. Later it became a matter of vengeance.
Meeting the Beast Lord meant plunging head first into the supernatural politics of Atlanta. He was one of the heavyweights. I could choose not to meet the Beast Lord.
All I had to do was walk away. It would be so easy. A vision of me squatting over a human corpse, stuffing shreds of limp meat into my mouth flashed before my eyes.
The apartment was silent. It felt like Greg. It was suffused with his lifeforce, with everything that made him what he was. He was like my father, direct, unbending, doing his own thing and never worrying about how the world would look upon him.
I couldn't let it go. I would find whoever killed him and punish them, if not for Greg, then for me, otherwise I wouldn't be able to look myself in the eye.
WHEN LIFE BACKS YOU INTO A CORNER AND OFFERS you no escape, when your friends, your lover, and your family abandon you, when you're at the end of your rope, panicked, alone, and losing your mind, you know you'd give anything to make your problems go away. Then, desperate and eager, you will come to Unicorn Lane, seeking salvation in its magics and secrets. You'll do anything, pay any price. Unicorn Lane will take you in, shroud you in its power, fix your problems, and exact its price. And then you will learn what "anything" really means.
Every city has one of those neighborhoods - dangerous, sinister places - so treacherous that even the criminals who prey on other criminals shun them. Unicorn Lane was such a place. Thirty city blocks long and eight blocks deep, it cut through what used to be Midtown like a dagger. Half-crumbled skyscrapers stood there, mute witness to the past's technology, the husks of GLG Grand, Promenade II, and One Atlantic Center, gnawed down to the bones by magic. Rubble choked the streets and sewage overflowed from the busted pipes in foul-smelling streams. Magic pooled there, lingering even in the strongest of tech waves, and hideous things that shun the light found refuge there, among the dark carcasses of gutted high rises. Lunatic mages, vicious, perverted loups who feared a death at the hand of unforgiving Pack, Satanists, and rogue necromancers all ran to Unicorn, for if they could make it there and survive, no lawman on this earth would force them out. Unicorn Lane held on to its own.
Hell of a place for a rendezvous.
I drove up Fourteenth Street, parked Karmelion in a secluded alley, and walked the two remaining city blocks. Ahead a stone wall had crumbled, a pitiful attempt of some fool on the city council to contain Unicorn Lane. I climbed over the wreckage. A large block of concrete barred my way. It looked slick, almost slimy, and I leaped over it.
Here, even the moonlight snapped and growled like a rabid dog, and magic bit without warning.
Five minutes into the Unicorn a sign on the side of an abandoned house announced that I had reached my destination, corner of Thirteenth and Unicorn. In front of me, an old apartment complex stared at the street with empty windows. To the right, a tangled mess of concrete and steel framework marked a collapsed office building. The debris blocked the street, burying the pavement beneath the rubble. The street was open on the left, but shrouded in darkness. I stood very still, waiting, listening.
The moonlight spilled onto the ruins. Thick, inky darkness pooled in the alcoves and burrows and stretched forth, mingling with light, spawning half-shadows, and blurring the lines between real and illusory. The eerie landscape appeared false, as if the ruined buildings had vanished, leaving behind treacherous shadows of their former selves. Ahead in the depths of Unicorn Lane something howled, giving voice to a tortured soul. My heart skipped a beat.
Someone or something watched me from the darkness. I felt their stare press upon me like a physical burden. Moments dragged by, with minutes in tow. After a while I glanced at my watch. It had stopped.
Somewhere in the darkness the Beast Lord prowled. I didn't know what he looked like. I didn't know the species of his beast. Few people outside of the Pack claimed to have met him and nobody seemed willing to discuss the experience. The only thing certain about him was power. By the latest count, he commanded a force of three hundred and thirty-seven shapechangers in Atlanta alone. He wasn't in charge because he was the smartest or the most popular; he ruled because of those three hundred and thirty-seven he was unquestionably the strongest. He was in charge by the right of might; that is, he had yet to meet anyone who could kick his ass.
Among the shapechangers, wolves were the most numerous, then came the foxes, the jackals, the rats, and then the hyenas and the smaller felines: lynxes, bobcats, and cheetahs. There were the exotic forms too, the were-buffalos and wereserpents, but the buffalos formed their own Herd in the Midwest and the serpents were solitary. All of the beast-forms were larger than their natural counterparts; an average shapechanger in a wolf form came close to two hundred and twenty pounds while the natural gray wolf weighed a hundred pounds less. From a biological point of view, the transformation of a hundred-and-seventy-pound human into a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound animal made no sense, but then when it came to shapeshifting, the fluctuating mass was the least of the anomalies. Magic could not be measured and explained in scientific terms, for magic grew through destroying the very natural principles that made science as people knew it possible.
Another howl ruptured the quiet, still too far away to be a threat. The Beast Lord, the leader, the alpha male, had to enforce his position as much by will as by physical force. He would have to answer any challenges to his rule, so it was unlikely that he turned into a wolf. A wolf would have little chance against a cat. Wolves hunted in a pack, bleeding their victim and running them into exhaustion, while cats were solitary killing machines, designed to murder swiftly and with deadly precision. No, the Beast Lord would have to be a cat, a jaguar or a leopard. Perhaps a tiger, although all known cases of weretigers occurred in Asia and could be counted without involving toes.
I had heard a rumor of the Kodiak of Atlanta, a legend of an enormous, battle-scarred bear roaming the streets in search of Pack criminals. The Pack, like any social organization, had its lawbreakers. The Kodiak was their Executioner. Perhaps his Majesty turned into a bear. Damn. I should have brought some honey.
My left leg was tiring. I shifted from foot to foot...
A low, warning growl froze me in midmove. It came from the dark gaping hole in the building across the street and rolled through the ruins, awakening ancient memories of a time when humans were pathetic, hairless creatures cowering by the weak flame of the first fire and scanning the night with frightened eyes, for it held monstrous hungry killers. My subconscious screamed in panic. I held it in check and cracked my neck, slowly, one side then another.
A lean shadow flickered in the corner of my eye. On the left and above me a graceful jaguar stretched on the jutting block of concrete, an elegant statue encased in the liquid metal of moonlight.
Homo Panthera onca. The killer who takes its prey in a single bound.
Hello, Jim.
The jaguar looked at me with amber eyes. Feline lips stretched in a startlingly human smirk.
He could laugh if he wanted. He didn't know what was at stake.
Jim turned his head and began washing his paw.
My saber firmly in hand, I marched across the street and stepped through the opening. The darkness swallowed me whole.
The lingering musky scent of a cat hit me. So, not a bear after all.
Where was he? I scanned the building, peering into the gloom. Moonlight filtered through the gaps in the walls, creating a mirage of twilight and complete darkness. I knew he was watching me. Enjoying himself.
Diplomacy was never my strong suit and my patience had run dry. I crouched and called out, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty."
Two golden eyes ignited at the opposite wall. A shape stirred within the darkness and rose, carrying the eyes up and up and up until they towered above me. A single enormous paw moved into the moonlight, disturbing the dust on the filthy floor. Wicked claws shot forth and withdrew. A massive shoulder followed, its gray fur marked by faint smoky stripes. The huge body shifted forward, coming at me, and I lost my balance and fell on my ass into the dirt. Dear God, this wasn't just a lion. This thing had to be at least five feet at the shoulder. And why was it striped?
The colossal cat circled me, half in the light, half in the shadow, the dark mane trembling as he moved. I scrambled to my feet and almost bumped into the gray muzzle. We looked at each other, the lion and I, our gazes level. Then I twisted around and began dusting off my jeans in a most undignified manner.
The lion vanished into a dark corner. A whisper of power pulsed through the room, tugging at my senses. If I did not know better, I would say that he had just changed.
"Kitty, kitty?" asked a level male voice.
I jumped. No shapechanger went from a beast into a human without a nap. Into a midform, yes, but beast-men had trouble talking.
"Yeah," I said. "You've caught me unprepared. Next time I'll bring cream and catnip toys."
"If there is a next time."
I turned and there he stood, wearing a loose T-shirt and sweatpants. A modest shapechanger, how refreshing. You wouldn't even know that he had changed, save for the glistening sheen of dampness on his skin.
He looked me over slowly, judging, taking my measure.
I could blush demurely or I could do the same to him. I chose not to blush.
A couple of inches taller than me, the Beast Lord gave an impression of coiled power. Easy, balanced stance. Blond hair, cut too short to grab. At first glance he looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, but his build betrayed him. His shoulders strained his T-shirt. His back was broad and corded with muscle, showing the power and strength a man developed in his early thirties.
"What kind of a woman greets the Beast Lord with 'here, kitty, kitty'?" he asked.
"One of a kind." I murmured the obvious reply. Eventually I had to look him in the eye. Better sooner than later.
The Beast Lord had a strong square jaw. His nose was narrow with a misshapen bridge, as though it had been broken more than once and hadn't healed right. Considering the regenerative powers of the shapechangers, someone must've pounded his face with a sledgehammer.
Our stares met. Little golden sparks danced in his gray eyes. His gaze made me want to bow my head and look away.
He regarded me as if I was an interesting new snack. "I'm the Lord of the Free Beasts," he said.
"I figured." Perhaps he expected me to curtsy.
He leaned forward a little, puzzling over me as if I were an odd-looking insect. "Why would a knight-protector hire a no-name merc to investigate the death of his piner?"
I gave him my best cryptic smile.
He grimaced. "What have you found out?" he asked.
"I'm not at liberty to tell you that." Not with the Pack suspect.
He leaned forward more, letting the moonlight fall on his face. His gaze was direct and difficult to hold. Our stares locked and I gritted my teeth. Five seconds into the conversation and he was already giving me the alpha-stare. If he started clicking his teeth, I'd have to make a run for it. Or introduce him to my sword.
"You will tell me what you know now," he said.
"Or?"
He said nothing, so I elaborated. "See, this kind of threat usually has an 'or' attached to it. Or an 'and.' 'Tell me and I'll allow you to live' or something like that."
His eyes ignited with gold. His gaze was unbearable now.
"I can make you beg to tell me everything you know," he said and his voice was a low growl. It sent icy fingers of terror down my spine.
I gripped Slayer's hilt until it hurt. The golden eyes were burning into my soul. "I don't know," I heard my own voice say, "you look kinda out of shape to me. How long has it been since you took care of your own dirty work?"
His right hand twitched. Muscles boiled under the taut skin and fur burst, sheathing the arm. Claws slid from thickened fingers. The hand snapped inhumanly fast. I weaved back and it fanned my face, leaving no scars. A strand of hair fell onto my left cheek, severed from my braid. The claws retracted.
"I think I still remember how," he said.
A spark of magic ran from my fingers into Slayer's hilt and burst into the blade, coating the smooth metal in a milky-white glow. Not that the glow actually did anything useful, but it looked bloody impressive. "Any time you want to dance," I said.
He smiled, slow and lazy. "Not laughing anymore, little girl?"
He was impressive, I'd give him that. I turned the blade, warming up my wrist. The saber drew a tight glowing ellipse in the air, flinging tiny drops of luminescence on the dirty floor. One of them fell close to the Beast Lord's foot and he moved away. "I wonder if all this changing has made you sluggish."
"Bring your pig-sticker and we'll find out."
We circled each other, our feet raising light clouds of dust from the dirty floor. I wanted to fight him, if only to see if I could hold my own.
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.
"If I prove to you that the Pack had no interest in removing the piner, 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."
"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?"
"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 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 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.
The crusaders served as the Order's equivalent of a lancet. Got a nasty boil ready to rupture - throw a crusader at it. Loners, highly skilled and deadly, they were great at what they did and after they did it, they returned to where they came from. Ted expected me to "investigate the crime," meaning he expected me to make lots of noise and draw attention to myself, while the crusader quietly worked under my smoke screen. It chaffed at me for about two seconds, but in the end both parties got what they wanted: Ted got his lightning rod and I got to search for Greg's killer. Everybody won.
I flipped open the Almanac and pulled the m-scan and the folded cutout of the article Bono had given me from between the book's pages. Glancing at the m-scan one last time, I slid it onto the glass table, unfolded the article, and began to read. The owner of the apartment would arrive shortly. He rarely stayed out past two in the morning - he thought 3:00 a.m. to be an unlucky hour.
IT WAS CLOSE TO TWO O'CLOCK WHEN A SINGLE cab made its way up the avenue below me. I raised binoculars to my eyes.
The door of the cab opened and a blonde stepped onto the pavement. She was tall and very slender. The short black dress clung to her narrow hips and long waist, flaring to artfully enclose breasts that looked too large for her body. Her hair, so pale it shimmered white, fell to her shoulders without a trace of a curl.
Her face was perfectly formed, with high prominent cheekbones, aquiline nose, huge eyes, and a full mouth. As she strode to the highrise, her face wore an expression which on someone less attractive would be called a sneer. Elegant, graceful, and arrogant in her beauty, she was like a young Arabian horse, haughty and cruel and an irresistible challenge to any male.
A lone passerby stopped, struck by the sight of her. I thought he whistled but could not tell for sure. The blonde ignored his presence without even trying; for her, he simply did not exist. I put away the binoculars and returned to my Almanac.
Five minutes later the lock clicked and the blonde walked through the door. She saw me and stopped. The sneer vanished. "Oh, good. I have something for you."
Not again.
She went to the kitchen, retrieved several protein cans from a cabinet, and put them onto the bar. A bag of dried apricots joined the cans, together with a bag of sugar, a block of chocolate, and an oversized blender. She took a carton of eggs from the fridge and cracked three into the blender. Two handfuls of apricots followed, with several cups of sugar, the chocolate, and the contents of at least six cans. "Ice water," the blonde murmured, nodding to the drink I had gotten myself. "You could've gotten something from the bar."
"I wanted water," I said.
The blonde smiled, a strange expression on her face, and turned on the blender. The blades spun, converting the contents into a thick uniform paste. She unplugged the blender, detached the top with a practiced twist, and drank straight from it.
"What is it, about two-thirds of a gallon?" I asked.
She stopped drinking for a moment. "Closer to three-quarters, actually."
She finished and unceremoniously pulled her dress over her head. I looked at my book again.
"Are you uncomfortable?" the blonde laughed, stripping her stockings.
"No, just giving you a bit of privacy." And hoping to miss the glorious moment when my stomach would clench and squirt its burning contents into my throat.
"You could just admit that I make you ill."
"There is that."
"How do you like her?" the blonde asked.
I glanced up and saw her standing nude on the floor. "Not bad for an ice queen. The breasts are too large."
The blonde grimaced. "Yes, I know."
"Why a woman?" I wondered.
"Because I deal in information, Kate, and men tend to blab their secrets to beautiful women." She smiled. "As you well know."
"I usually have to threaten men with bodily harm before they tell me secrets."
"Then I feel sorry for those men. They obviously have poor taste. Do you know who makes the converters that go into our feylamps?"
"I have no idea."
"There are four companies, actually. By the end of the week the city council will decide which one of them gets a municipal contract for the next three years. Right now there are three people in this city who know how they will vote."
"Let me guess, you're one of them?"
The blonde didn't answer, but her smile widened just a little, permitting a brief glimpse of white teeth. Even a financial moron like me knew the price of that kind of information had to be astronomic.
Her muscles moved, stretching, twisting, as if a tangle of worms suddenly came to life under her skin. My stomach lurched. I clenched my teeth and tried to keep my dinner where it belonged. The blonde's pelvis shifted, her shoulders grew broad, her legs thickened, while her breasts dissolved, forming a massive male chest. Ropes of muscles coiled, shaping powerful legs and huge arms. The bones of her face crawled, the nose thickening, the jaw becoming strong and square. The eye color darkened to piercing intense blue. The hair dissolved and grew again, this time turning dark brown. I blinked and a man stood before me. Muscular with the crisp exactness of a professional body builder, he was towering and quite well endowed. Blue eyes glared at me from the flat face of a born fighter - no sharp edges, no jutting bone to shatter under a punch. A bit of armor and he would earn the loyalty of any barbarian horde.
"What do you think?" he asked, his voice deep and commanding.
I eyed him. "Impressive, but too much."
He leaned toward me, the blue eyes smoky with a promise I was sure he could fulfill. I tried not to think of the bedroom.
"Too much?"
"Yes. I like the menace. It's very masculine, but he looks like he would screw everything in sight and call me 'wench'."
The barbarian king before me rubbed the bridge of his nose. "What exactly leads you to that conclusion?"
"I'm not sure. Something in the eyes, I think."
"So it's a no?"
"It's a no."
"I'll have to work on him."
The barbarian deflated, his awesome musculature slimming into a leaner build. The hair vanished, leaving the head bald, and the face grew longer, with intelligent dark eyes and a large nose. The man I knew as Saiman strode to the bar and drew a glass of water from the sink faucet.
"Business?" he said, glancing at the m-scan.
"Yes."
He nodded, drained his glass and refilled it.
"I can't feel a trace of magic," I said. "Yet you seem to have no problem metamorphosing. Why is that?"
He arched an eyebrow at me - a gesture so much like my own that I could've sworn he copied it from me. It was likely. Saiman often mimicked the mannerisms of his clients. He did it consciously, knowing it unnerved them.
"The key word is 'seem'. Metamorphosis now requires concentration, while during the magic tide it flows naturally. But to answer the essence of your question, I believe my body stores magic. Like a battery. Perhaps it even produces its own."
He downed the second glass and approached the couch. "How long have I kept you waiting?"
"Not too long."
For a moment I thought he would make a comment about the view, and then I wouldn't be able to help myself and have to ask him to shield his own 'view' with some clothes. Fortunately he withdrew to the bedroom.
Saiman was driven by the desire to create his own Uberman, a super-male that would be irresistible to women. The sexual aspect of his quest interested him much less than the scientific motivation to craft an image of a perfect human being. He engaged in this pursuit of an ultimate shape for purposes unknown, for I truly had no idea what he would do with his Uberman if he ever succeeded. He approached the challenge with the same methodical logic he applied to everything, attempting to gather feedback from a wide pool of subjects, most of whom had no idea what he truly looked like.
Long ago I argued that his Uberman simply could not exist. Even if he did succeed in creating an image of the essential male, it would fail his expectations. Too much depended on the interaction between two human beings, and ultimately it was that interaction that led to intimacy. He debated me with great passion and I had learned not to argue anymore.
We met during a merc gig a year ago, bodyguard detail. All mercs did one sooner or later, and it was just my luck I drew Saiman. He was injured at the time, confined to his bed by a postoperative complication from a stomach surgery. His body kept changing while it fought the infection and he proved very difficult to guard. I managed to kill two of the assassins sent to dispatch him. He killed the third with a pencil through the eye. I thought I had botched the job but he had seemed grateful ever since. I didn't complain. His services didn't come cheap.
Saiman returned wearing loose clothes of dark blue that were cut like common sweats but looked too expensive to be soiled by that moniker. He looked at the Almanac still opened in my lap, the article Bono had given me a few days back laying on the page.
"Cut from the Volshebstva e Kolduni. What a pretentious title. As if writing 'Spells and Warlocks' in Russian would somehow lend them more credibility. I didn't know you read that trash."
"I don't. The article was given to me by an acquaintance."
"The problem with those rags is that the people who publish them don't realize that magic is fluid. They print erroneous information."
It was an old argument and a valid one. People affected magic just as magic affected them. If enough people believed something to be true, sometimes the magic obliged and made it true.
Saiman scanned the article. "It's incomplete and full of garbage as always. They classify the upir as a corpse-eating undead. Look, they correctly state the upir has an enormous sexual appetite, but are unaware of the contradiction: an undead has no urge to mate, therefore an upir cannot be undead. They also mention that it will try to mate with anything mammal it can secure long enough to achieve a climax but fail to note that the product of such union usually survives to serve the upir." He dropped the article in disgust. "If you ever need to know more about this creature, let me know."
"I will."
"So what brings you to my humble abode?"
"I need an m-scan evaluated."
He arched his eyebrow again. I could learn to hate him. "Very well. I'll charge you by the hour. Our usual discount starting..." He glanced at his watch. "Now. Do you want a complete workup?" he asked.
"No, just the basics. I can't afford the fancy stuff."
"Cheap client?"
"I'm working pro-bono."
He grimaced. "Kate, that's a horrible habit."
"I know."
He took the chart, holding it gently with his long fingers.
"What interests you?"
"A series of small yellow lines toward the bottom."
"Ah."
"What would register yellow? And how much is the answer going to cost me?"
"A great question. Let me run a test to make sure this isn't a mechanical failure."
I followed him to the lab. A forest of equipment that would make the personnel of an average college lab giddy with joy rested on black surfaces of flame-resistant tables and counters. Saiman donned a green waterproof apron and a pair of slick opaque gloves, reached under the table and produced a ceramic tray. With a practiced, economic movement, he took the tray to a glass cube in the corner.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm going to scan the m-scan to pick up any residual traces of magic. Full enclosure. I don't want any contamination."
"I can't afford it."
"It's free. Your altruism infected me. You still have to pay for my time, of course."
He touched a lever and the cube rose upward on a metal chain. Saiman slid the tray onto the ceramic platform and lowered the cube, so the glass enclosed the tray. His fingers danced across the keyboard and an explosion of green color flooded the cubicle. It died, flashed again, died, and a printer chattered on a different table, belching a piece of paper.
He ripped it free and handed it to me. It was blank - a control to make sure no magic traces contaminated the tray.
Saiman attached the m-scan to the tray, slid it into the cube and repeated his elaborate high-tech dance. This time the printer produced an exact copy of my m-scan.
Saiman pondered it for a moment and leaned against the table, m-scan in hand. "The problem is, the m-scanner is imperfect."
My heart sank. "So, it's a malfunction?"
"In a manner of speaking. As of now, the scanner is an imperfect instrument. It registers humans in various shades of light blue to silver, but it frequently fails to document the subtle tint of their magic. Almost anything except the most radical variations, such as purple for a vampire or green for a shapechanger, escapes it. A clairvoyant and a piner of roughly equal power would register in the same color, even though their magic inclinations differ. And," Saiman allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. "It registers all fera magic as white."
"Fera as in feral? Animal magic?"
"Each animal species exudes its own specific magic. The common m-reader documents it as white so we don't even see it. Recently some bright minds in Kyoto examined a wide variety of animals using a hypersensitive scanner. They conclusively proved that each species of animal produces its own color. Faint, pastel, but distinct, and always a derivative of yellow."
"So the yellow lines mean animals?"
"On a superb scanner, yes. But on our piece of junk the animals would most likely register white. The only way we would notice them is through mixing with some other magical influence."
"You lost me."
"Look at your lines. They have a light peach tint. It's very faint but that peach is the only reason we can see the lines in the first place. It means that you are facing something that is mostly animal but has been tainted with something else."
My head swam. "Okay. Let me reiterate this. All animal magic registers as white but is truly pale yellow. A very weak yellow that is easily dominated by all other colors. There is no way to see that pale yellow, except when it's mixed with some other color. The yellow of the wolf mixing with blue of a human makes the hunter green of a lycanthrope. By this reasoning, the wolfwere, an animal shapeshifting into human, would register as swampy green. Am I right so far?"
He nodded.
"The fact that I can see the yellow lines means that the scanner showed the presence of something with strong animal magic and a touch of something else. Since the lines are peach, then the likely suspect would be... orange."
I bit off the last word. Orange came from red and red was the color of necromantic magic.
Saiman confirmed my deduction. "It's an animal that has some connection with necromantic magic. I don't know of what kind. It certainly isn't an animal zombie. That registers as a dark red. Have fun."
I groaned.
"Time is money," he said, "so I suggest you save your ruminations for later. Do you have anything else for me?"
"No."
He looked at his watch. "Thirty seven minutes."
I wrote a check for nine hundred and sixty-two dollars, which left exactly four hundred dollars and nine cents in my checking account. I had five hundred in savings to use in case of emergency. If more money didn't come my way soon, I'd have to consider a change of venue.
I handed him the check. He didn't bother looking at it.
"Let me know how it turns out," he said with his customary smile.
"You'll be the first to hear."
"And Kate? If you change your mind about my latest prototype, the offer still stands."
The piercing blue eyes and enormous muscles flashed before my mind's eye. That way lay dragons. "Thanks, but it isn't likely."
As I strode out of the apartment, I decided that I didn't like the tint of smile playing on Saiman's lips.