Magic Strikes (25 page)

“She slipped a roofie to her bodyguard, hot-wired a car, and went drag racing on Buzzard’s Highway. In the dark.” Jim’s face held all the warmth of an iceberg.

“You’re just upset that I made Theo look stupid.” Dali dropped the hand. “It’s not my fault that your lethal killing machine was so excited by the prospect of getting his hands on my tiny boy-breasts, he forgot to watch his drink. Quite frankly, I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“You’re legally blind, you can’t pass the exam to get a license, and you drive like shit.” Jim’s lip wrinkled in a silent snarl. “You’re a menace.”

“Drivers on Buzzard don’t come there to be safe. They come there for thrills. If they knew I was legally blind, it would just make things more interesting for them. It’s my body. I can do whatever I want with it.

If I want to get in a wreck, then I should be able to do so.”

“Yes, but you drove to Buzzard’s Highway,” I said. I really needed more coffee. “What if you wrecked on the way and hurt yourself, or worse, hurt somebody else, another driver or a pedestrian, a kid crossing the street?”

Dali blinked. “You know, that is precisely what Curran said. Almost word for word.” She sighed. “Let’s agree that, in retrospect, it wasn’t one of my brightest moments. Do you have anything else besides the
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

corpses?”

Jim handed her the rolled-up mural. She pulled the paper open and frowned. “Here, you hold this end, and, Jim, you hold this end. Okay, separate.”

She actually wanted me to move. She must’ve been out of her mind. We walked apart until the paper was unrolled. She glanced at it for a second, nodded, and waved her hand. “You may let go. So, do you have any ideas as to what corner of mythology your friend belongs?”

I took a wild stab in the dark. “Hindu. First, we have a jungle, the ruins of what looked like a Dravidian temple to me, then a stone chariot drawn by elephants, and a humanoid with many arms and heads. We also have a tiger monster and he has four arms. Not that many mythologies feature extra sets of arms or that many extra heads in a humanoid. Several heads on dragons or giants, yes. Extra limbs and heads on a humanoid, no. Also, the girl called one of the Reapers ‘Asaan.’ I looked it up and it’s a term for a guru or practitioner of Dravidian martial arts.”

Dali looked at me for a long moment. “You’re not stupid either.”

“Yes, but that’s all I got.”

“I believe this is a rakshasa.” She nudged the four-armed corpse with her toes. “And if I’m right, the two of you are in deep shit.”

“AT FIRST THERE WAS VISHNU, EXCEPT AT THAT point he was Narayana, the embodiment of Supreme Divinity.”

Dali sat on the floor next to the corpse.

“Narayana floated in endless waters, wrapped in a great albino serpent and having a marvelous time, until a lotus grew from his navel. Within the lotus, god Brahma, the creator of worlds, was reborn. Brahma looked around, saw Narayana being content to float, and for no apparent reason became obsessed that his water would get stolen. So he made four guardians, two couples. The first couple promised to worship the water, and they were yakshasas. The second couple promised to protect the water, and they were rakshasas.”

“Talk strengths and weaknesses,” Jim said.

“Rakshasas are born warriors. They were created for this purpose. According to legend, they are conceived and carried to term in a single day, and upon birth, they instantly grow to the age of their mother. They are carnivores and have no qualms about consuming human meat. They come in a vast variety of shapes and sizes. They’re excellent illusionists and magicians.”

I sighed. This just got better and better. “For some reason I thought rakshasas were humanoid tigers, like a shapeshifter in a warrior form but with a tiger’s head.”

Dali nodded. “They are most often depicted as monsters resembling tigers, because a tiger is the scariest thing an Indian sculptor or artist could reasonably picture. Elephants are larger, but they are vegetarians and mostly keep to themselves, while tigers are silent, deadly, and actively hunt people.”

A humanoid tiger, equipped with extra arms and human intelligence, would be the stuff of anyone’s nightmares.

“Rakshasas realize that tigers are frightening and often adopt this form; however, legends say that they can be ugly or beautiful. Out of three rakshasa brothers, one could be lovely beyond description, one could be a giant, and one could sprout ten heads. It really varies. Some sources insist that one can never know the true form of a rakshasa; only the form they favor most at the moment.”

“Anything else?” Jim asked softly.

“They can fly.”

Delightful. “Ours didn’t fly. They mostly jumped unnaturally high.”

“That could be due to low magic, incorrect information, or an insufficient number of people believing in the myth. Or all three. Take your pick.”

“Can these rakshasas do something that would stop you from shifting?” I asked.

Dali thought about it. “They’re shapeshifters but not in the same way we are. They deal in illusion. You said they pulled their human skins off. Where are the skins? You brought his ripped clothes. I find it very
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

hard to believe that between the two of you, you forgot to pick up torn human hide.”

I concentrated, recalling the scene as we left the house. “The skins disappeared.”

Dali nodded. “That’s because technically there were no skins. Magic or no magic, you couldn’t physically pack that”—she kicked the four-armed corpse again—“into a human hide. Rakshasas don’t actually flay a human and pull on his skin. They consume a human in some way, physically, mentally, or spiritually, or all of the above, and then they assume the shape.”

Light dawned in my head. “The skin ripping was an illusion. An intimidation tactic.”

“Exactly. They pretended to cast off human skins because they wanted to disturb you. Rakshasas are exceedingly arrogant and cunning but not too bright. Their mythical king, Ravana, is a prime example: ten heads but very little brain. The flying palace you saw, assuming both of you haven’t gone insane, is most likely Pushpaka Vimana, an ancient flying machine. Ravana appropriated it from its original owner and was flying around on it to and fro when he came upon Shiva the Destroyer during his rest.” Dali paused for dramatic effect.

Hindu mythology wasn’t my strongest suit, but even I knew about Shiva. Any god titled Destroyer of Worlds wasn’t to be taken lightly. When not enjoying his home life with his loving wife and two sons, he ran around the woods wrapped in cobras and wearing a torn tiger skin still dripping blood. He stripped pelts from fearsome beasts with a touch of his pinkie. His wrath was likened to Rudra, a roaring storm. In his malignant aspect, he was absolutely terrifying. In his benign aspect, he was easily amused. His forehead hid a third eye, which, when directed outward, burned everything in his path and periodically destroyed the universe. Anything associated with Shiva had to be treated with kid gloves while wearing a Level IV biohazard suit and preferably a tank.

Dali smiled. “Ravana managed to annoy Shiva, and the Destroyer of Worlds put him into a cage of stone bars. Ravana had to sit there and sing until Shiva got tired of listening to him and let him go. Ravana was the ultimate rakshasa: arrogant, flashy, and ruled completely by his impulses. He was what they would aspire to be. You’re dealing with terrible show-offs, convinced of their own superiority. To them you’re amusing food slash adoring audience. They’ll milk everything they got for dramatic effect and they get off on playing to the crowd.”

Jim and I exchanged glances. If you got your jollies by getting the herd high, the Midnight Games was the place to do it.

I turned my cup upside down, looking for more coffee. None came out. Still, the crowd-pleasing factor had to be just a bonus. They were after the gem. Why? I was swimming in a sea of random information and it refused to make itself into anything logical. I opened my mouth to ask Dali about the topaz, but Jim jumped ahead of me.

“Can you explain the jungle?”

She made a face. “I have no idea. It could be some sort of pocket of deep magic. Or a portal into a magic jungle land. I’d need more information to answer this question. By the way, I’m so thirsty, my tongue feels like paper.”

Dali licked her lips and Jim went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water, which he handed to her. She drained half of it. “So, the rakshasas hate us.”

“ ‘Us’ as in shapeshifters or ‘us’ as in normal humans?” I asked.

“Both. This takes us back to Ravana. Ravana was an upward-climbing type of individual. He had ten heads, and every century he sacrificed one of his heads by hacking it off. Finally he had only one head and the gods could stand it no longer, came down in all their heavenly glory, and asked him what the hell did he want to stop doing that. He asked for immunity from every race except that of men and animals.

He thought us to be too puny and lowly to harm him. Once he got his immunity, he set about conquering Heaven, burned the city of the gods, killed all the dancing girls . . . And then Vishnu decided he had just about enough of that, went to Earth to be reborn as a human, Rama, marshaled together an army of animals, and nuked him.”

If rakshasas were as arrogant as she said, they would hate humans and animals with the passion of a thousand suns. And shapeshifters were both. Bonus genocide. Now the Reapers’ half-breed revulsion made sense.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

“Is there anything in the legends about a topaz called the Wolf Diamond? A large yellow gem maybe?” I asked.

Dali wrinkled her forehead. “Topaz is associated with Brihaspati—Jupiter.”

“The Roman god?” Jim frowned.

“No, the planet. Honestly, Jim, the world doesn’t revolve around the Greco-Roman pantheon. Rudra Mani, Shiva’s gem, is also gold in color. He carries it on his neck. By the way, Shiva was the one who gave the rakshasas the gift of flying.”

“This one would be large,” I said. “A powerful stone.”

“Rudra Mani is pretty large. The size of a baby’s head.”

Saiman had described the Wolf Diamond as being the size of a man’s fist . . . Either a big fist or a very small baby . . . Unless he meant an ice giant’s fist. “What do you know about it?”

Dali rolled her eyes. “It’s supposed to be a stone of virtue. It also belongs to Shiva, if you catch my drift.

With Shiva, you never know what you’re going to get. He might find a rakshasa baby, think it was cute, and give it the power of flight and the ability to grow to adulthood in one day. Or he might start stomping demons for fun.”

Jim crossed his massive arms on his chest. “So we have a rock that belongs to a bipolar god with a warped sense of humor.”

“Pretty much. Not a lot is known about Rudra Mani. I’ll look it up. We don’t even know if your topaz is Rudra Mani or some other chunk of yellow stone.” Dali waved her hands. “It’s too vague. It could be anything or nothing.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Wolf Diamond was Rudra Mani in disguise. Mythological elements tended to occur in bunches. We had rakshasas who were firmly associated with Shiva in the Hindu myths. Shiva had a large yellow rock. The rakshasas planned to enter a tournament to win a large yellow rock. It would be foolhardy to assume that the two rocks weren’t one and the same.

At least we’d get no Shiva. The flare had come and gone, so he couldn’t manifest. No Shiva was good, whichever way you looked at it.

I looked at the bloodied stump that once had been the axe fighter facing Saiman. Next to the four-armed monstrosity, he looked almost fragile. “Why is he still in the human skin?”

“What?” Dali wrinkled her nose at me.

“This fellow ripped off his skin and started roaring and waving his four arms around the first chance he got. The axe fighter remained in his human form. Why?”

Dali put her cup down. “Well, you’re assuming the axe fighter isn’t human. But even if he is a rakshasa, he might not have wanted to change shape. You said they are posing as humans. He would blow his cover.”

“He was beaten to a pulp,” Jim said. “Trust me, he would’ve changed. It’s the matter of the survival instinct taking over.”

All these facts tried to coalesce in my head. I could almost grasp it. “Perhaps he couldn’t change shape.

Maybe something kept him from changing. Kind of like something is keeping Derek from shifting. An object. A spell. Something that suppresses the magic.”

Jim caught on. “Something that would also fool the m-scanner into reading them as human.”

Dali kicked off her shoes and began pulling off her shirt. “I’ll have to shift. I’m more sensitive to magic in my animal shape and my sense of smell is better.”

I looked to the floor. The shapeshifters mostly fell into two camps: some were very modest, and some would strip in the middle of the Market Highway without a moment’s thought. Apparently Dali was of the second category.

A deep, low rumble of a large cat rolled through my apartment, a cascade of sound bouncing off my skin.

I looked up.

A white tiger stood in my living room. Glowing as if sculpted of fresh snow, she looked at me with ice-blue eyes, enormous, otherworldly, like some eternal spirit of the North, taiga, and winter hunt. Long stripes outlined her fluid shape with coal black. More than a mere animal, more than a lycanthrope in the beast form, she was majestic. I couldn’t even breathe.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

And then she sneezed. And sneezed again, blinking, and when she raised her head again, I realized that only one glacial eye looked straight at me. The other stared off to the side. The tiger spirit went cross-eyed like a Siamese cat.

The tigress raised one paw, looked quizzically at it, put it down, and rumbled low in the throat, a befuddled expression on her big face.

“Yes, those are your paws,” Jim said patiently.