Magic Strikes (24 page)

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edges of the picture and twisting to form a frame around the forge. A demonic man hefted a huge hammer, critically surveying a half-forged sword in his hand. Monstrously muscled, he wore a leather apron and nothing else. A dark beard protruded from his face, and his eyes glowed red.

The next panel of the mural showed a room strewn with pillows. A beautiful man reclined in the center, clad in gauzy robes and surrounded by nude women bearing fruit and garlands of flowers. The man’s delicate face bore little resemblance to the dark inhabitant of the forge, but the dark beard gave him away. The metalsmith cleaned up rather nice.

The third part of the mural was unfinished. A pale gold wash had been applied through the faint pencil outline. The graceful man from the center of the mural had become a god: he had grown three additional heads and six arms. One face looked straight at me, two faces showed in profile, and an outline of the back of his head pointed to a fourth face turned away from me. North, east, south, and west.

Two enormous wings protruded from his shoulders, and between the wings shimmered a mirage of a city: a sea of elegant towers and domes guarded by a wall. The style of the mural didn’t point to any mythology in particular; it reminded me more of a comic book than anything else. The poses were stylized, the man’s musculature seemed greatly exaggerated, and all women came equipped with tiny asses, disproportionately long legs, and perfectly round, udder-sized breasts.

“Ring any bells?” I looked at Jim.

Jim shook his head.

“Yeah, me neither.”

I pulled the mural off the wall and rolled it into a tube.

Jim took the corpse from the table, slung it over his shoulder, and took it outside.

I went back to the freezer. I would’ve liked to bury the human remains, but we had neither the time nor the means to do it. I pulled a leather pouch from my belt, untied the cord securing it, and sprinkled dark green dust over the meat, careful not to inhale or touch the powder.

“Spicing it up?” Jim asked from the doorway.

“Water hemlock. Also called cowbane.” I put the pouch away. “Thirty minutes and then projectile vomiting, violent convulsions, and death or permanent nervous system damage. A little present from me for their table.”

Jim stepped outside, grasped the four-armed freak, swung it onto his shoulders, and stared pointedly at the other three bodies sprawled on the grass. They were our evidence. I would have to carry one. A seven-foot-tall scaled monstrosity, a green creature covered in foot-long needles, or the guy missing most of his flesh from his ass and legs. Hmmm, let me think . . .

CARRYING CORPSES IN PLAIN DAYLIGHT, ESPECIALLY corpses with four arms, pretty much takes the whole notion of “not drawing attention” out back and explodes it with fireworks. Especially since the people doing the carrying are covered in blood and look like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backward. Not to mention that one of them is a werejaguar in a warrior form and the other a woman hauling a human corpse with his ass cut off.

Fortunately, the outskirts of Unicorn were deserted. One would have to be some sort of special breed of idiot to approach that street in the first place. Apparently, Atlanta was experiencing a moron shortage, and today Jim and I were the only idiots of this caliber.

Even without his butt and thighs, Saiman’s unfortunate victim weighed a ton. We passed out of the jungle into the city with no problems, but carrying him through Unicorn Lane and out to the vehicle proved to be near my limits. I had slid into a kind of fog where taking the next step was all that mattered. I dimly recalled reaching the spot where we had left the vehicle and finding a cart hitched to a pair of horses
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instead. The dingo must’ve come back with the horses once the magic wave had hit the city.

Unfortunately, he didn’t stick around.

I also remembered packing the corpses into the cart under some canvas and sliding into the seat to steer, because Jim, being the top man on Curran’s Most-Wanted List, had to stay out of sight. Then there was the trek across the city, through the morning traffic. The glow of pain along my side and back nicely kept me awake. A layer of jungle dirt had mixed with Reaper blood on my skin, and the fall sun baked it into a crust over my face and hair. At least I had no trouble with traffic jams. The rival drivers took one look at my blood-encrusted persona and scrambled to get out of the way.

I drove and thought of Roland.

I had no mother. Instead I had Voron, whom I called my father. Tall, his dark blond hair cropped short, Voron had led me through my childhood with his quiet strength. Voron could kill anything. He could solve anything. He could fix anything. I would do anything for one of his rare smiles. He was my father, one of the two constants in my life.

Roland had been the other.

He entered my life as a fairy tale that Voron would tell me before bed. There once was a man who had lived through the ages. He had been a builder, an artisan, a healer, a priest, a prophet, a warrior, and a sorcerer. At times he had been a slave. At others he was a tyrant. Magic fell and technology reigned, and then magic rose again, and still he persevered, ancient like the sand itself, driven through the years by his obsession for a perfect world.

He had many names, although he called himself Roland now. He had been master to many men and lover to many women, but he had not loved anyone as much as he loved my mother. She was kind and smart and generous and she filled Roland with life. My mother wanted a baby. It had been millennia since Roland had sired a child, because his child would inherit all the power of Roland’s ancient blood and all of his ambition, and Roland had fought too many wars to kill children who had risen against him.

But he loved my mother too much and he decided to give her a child because it would make her happy.

She was only two months along when he started to have second thoughts. He became obsessed that the child would oppose him, and he decided to kill the child in the womb.

But my mother loved the baby. The more obsessed Roland became, the farther she pulled away from him.

Roland had a Warlord. His name was Voron, which meant
raven
in Russian. They called him that because death followed him. And Voron loved my mother as well.

When Roland was away, my mother ran and Voron ran with her. He was there when she gave birth to me. For a few blissful months on the run they were happy. But Roland chased them, and my mother, knowing that Voron was the stronger of the two, stayed behind to delay Roland so he and I could escape. She sank her dagger into Roland’s eye and then he killed her.

And that was where the fairy tale ended and we would check for a knife under my bed and then I would go to sleep, hoping to kill my natural father one day.

Wherever we went, whatever we did, Roland’s presence followed me. He was my target and the reason for my existence. He gave me life and I would take his.

I knew him intimately. Voron had been his Warlord for half a century, and would’ve served him through the ages, kept young and virile by Roland’s magic, if my mother hadn’t come along. He taught me everything he learned about his former master. I knew what Roland looked like. Voron had shown me his photo and I had committed it to memory before we burned it. I recognized his face on the statues in old history books and found it once in a Renaissance painting of a battle. I read the Bible passages about him, what little there was. I knew his lieutenants, his weapons, his powers. And Roland’s age had given him vast power. He could control hundreds of undead at once. He wielded his blood like a weapon, solidifying it at will to create devastating weapons and impenetrable blood armor. It was his fucked-up blood that accounted for my power.

Voron had been a supreme warrior. He took every crumb of his knowledge and he poured it into me, tempering me like a blade.
Grow stronger. Survive. Kill Roland. End it forever. Until then, hide.

Four months ago I made a conscious decision to stop hiding. I had questioned it ever since. I lacked the
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strength and experience to face Roland, but now I was playing out in the open, and our eventual confrontation was inevitable.

An instinct told me he was the Sultan of Death. Which meant that if I kept tugging at this tangled mess of a problem, I might end up running across someone from his inner circle. The idea filled me with dread.

I was afraid of Roland. But I was scared for Derek even more. And I was scared for Curran.

When I finally drew up to the shapeshifter safe house, the morning was in full swing. I pulled back the tarp. Jim slept atop the corpses. He’d reverted back to his human form and was naked as a jaybird. I shook him a few times, but he seemed to have gone into a Sleeping Beauty-like stupor and I wasn’t going to kiss him to wake him up.

I knocked on the door. No answer. I tried the handle—and the door swung open. I stuck my head in and called a few times but nobody materialized to assist me.

Brenna was supposed to have watched the door. The only thing that could’ve drawn her from it was . . .

Please don’t let Derek be dead.

At the thought of going down to the basement, my legs nearly gave out. I wasn’t sure I could take seeing him dead.

I needed to go down there but I couldn’t make myself move. I swallowed and stared at the doorway.

The bodies. I better go get the bodies. That’s a good idea.

It proved surprisingly difficult to maneuver a four-armed corpse through the door. I tried it for a full three minutes before my patience ran dry. But by the time Brenna appeared at the top of the gloomy staircase, I had matters well in hand.

“Is Derek dead?”

“Not yet.”

Relief rolled though me. I needed a nice place to sit down. “I thought you were guarding the entrance,” I said, sliding Slayer under my arm.

“I was. I had to let someone in.” She stared at the corpse at my feet.

“It’s not Curran, is it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Great.” I gathered up the four severed arms and nodded at the stub of the body. “Would you mind getting the bigger piece?”

DOOLITTLE HAD TAKEN ONE LOOK AT ME AND prescribed an immediate shower. Half an hour later, showered, patched up, and given a mug of coffee by Brenna, I felt almost human. Doolittle had disappeared into the depths of the house to continue his constant vigil on Derek. It was just me and two corpses. At about half a mug, Jim wandered into the room, looking mean and hungover. He favored me with an ugly scowl and flopped into a chair.

“Now what?”

“We wait.”

“What for?”

“My expert. She’s with Derek now.”

We sat for a while. I was still out of it. Doolittle was the best medmage in the business, hands down. My back almost didn’t hurt and the pain in my side was a distant echo. But I was so tired I could barely see straight.

I had to check with Andrea on the results of the silver analysis. I tried the phone. No dial tone.

A young woman strode into the room. She was barely five feet tall and very slender. Her skin was almond dark, her face wide and round. She looked at the world through thick glasses and her eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses were very brown, almost black, with a touch of Asian ancestry to their cut. She stepped into the apartment and peered at me as I closed the door.

“Indonesian,” she announced, shifting a tote bag on her shoulder.

“What?”

“You were trying to figure out what kind of ’nese I am. Indonesian.”

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“I’m Kate.”

“Dali.”

She looked to where Jim sat. As she swept past me, I caught a glimpse of a book in her tote bag: a long, lean blond man brandishing an improbably enormous sword posing with three girls strategically arranged at his feet. One of the girls had cat ears.

Dali fixed Jim with her disconcerting stare. “You owe me. If he finds out I’m here, I’ll be dead meat.”

He who?
He
better not be Curran.

“I take responsibility,” Jim said.

“Where are the corpses?” Dali asked.

“Behind you.”

Dali turned and stumbled over the four-armed freak’s legs, and would’ve executed a beautiful nosedive if she were an ordinary human. As it was, she managed to jump away and land with perfect balance if not perfect grace. Shapeshifter reflexes to the rescue.

Dali adjusted her glasses and shot me an irate look. “I’m not that blind,” she said. “I’m absentminded.”

Perhaps she was also telepathic.

“No,” she said. “I’m just not stupid.”

Okay.

Dali surveyed the four-armed corpse. “Oh boy. Polymelic symmetry. Any other supernumerary body parts? And did you have to hack his arms off?”

“Yes, I did. He wouldn’t go through the door.”

“You say it like you’re proud of it.”

I was proud of it. It was an example of quick thinking in a difficult situation.

Dali shrugged her tote to the floor, knelt by the corpse, and stared into the gaping hole where the creature’s heart used to reside. Jim had really done a number on it. “Tell me everything.”

I described the ward, the jungle, the flying palace, the ruins, the stone chariot with multiheaded driver, and the fight, with an occasional comment from Jim. She nodded, raised the corpse’s front left arm to take a look at the back set, frowned . . .

“So who isn’t supposed to know you’re here?” I asked.
Please don’t be Curran, please don’t be
Curran . . .

“The Beast Lord,” Jim said.

Damn it.

“Technically she’s under house arrest.”

“What for?”

“I went for a drive.” Dali picked up the corpse’s foot and studied the claws. “Nice and pliant. No rigor mortis at all.”

“He put you under house arrest because you went for a drive?”