Magic Strikes (29 page)

“What happened next?”

“Eventually the Pack invited me to one of their gatherings to discuss things in greater detail. You’ve seen how they treat outsiders. Bite first, apologize later. They brought me to their Keep in the middle of the night and led me underground to this huge room. I stepped inside and found half a thousand shapeshifters and they weren’t happy to see me.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was scared I’d blow it. I realized by this point that if I couldn’t get the Pack to work with me, I’d make things a lot harder for myself. I had gone from a no-name merc to making arrangements with the head of the People and the Beast Lord, and I was seriously outclassed. I wasn’t used to that.”

“I know what you mean,” Julie murmured. “You try your best and only make yourself feel stupid.

Everybody seems to know some sort of secret that you don’t and that makes them better than you.”

I reached over and petted her wispy hair. “The school’s that bad, huh?”

“Sometimes. It’s okay usually. But there are mean people and they do nasty things, and if you call them
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on it, they make it seem like you just don’t get it.” She squeezed her hands into tight fists and said through clenched teeth, “They make me so mad. If we were on the street, I’d punch them. But if I do punch them, that will just mean I can’t win by their dumb rules.”

“Well, then you know exactly how I felt.” I could do the punching. Punching was easy. It was the clever banter and dealing in convoluted half-truths and almost-lies that made me want to jump out of my skin.

“So what did you do?”

“I made my way down through the room, and this group of young shapeshifters barred my way and started making lots of noise. I knew Curran had put them up to it to see what I would do. One of them reached out and touched me, and I took him over with a power word and made him guard me against the rest.”

“Derek,” Julie guessed.

“Yep. And then it turned into this huge complicated deal, because Curran thought I was challenging him by taking his wolf . . .” I waved my hand. “In the end, Derek swore a blood oath to protect me so Curran wouldn’t have to kill him. He’s released from the oath now, but you remember how he is. He decided he’s responsible for me and I feel responsible for his ass—”

With a hoarse scream, Derek jerked upright and ripped the IV tubes from his arms.

“Get Doolittle!” I lunged to the tank.

Gnarled hands gripped me. Deranged eyes flared white from the mangled face. He clawed at me, crushing my arms, agonizing screams ripping from him.

“Safe,” I yelled into his ear. “It’s okay, it’s okay . . .”

His skin bulged, ready to rip. The dark slash of his mouth gaped open. “Hurrrts! Hurts, it hurts!”

And then Doolittle was there with a syringe and Raphael’s long fingers clenched Derek’s wrists, pushing pressure points to make him let go, but Derek hung on to me with desperate ferocity. The pull of his arms jerked me off my feet and dragged me into the vat. He clung to my shoulders, gouging my skin.

“Hurts!”

“Get her out!” Doolittle sank the needle into Derek’s arm with no effect. “The pain’s too much! He’s going loup!”

Raphael wrestled Derek’s arms, trying to separate him from me, but Derek just held on tighter. Doolittle dropped the syringe and grabbed Derek’s left wrist. Fangs cut through Derek’s disfigured lips.

“Get her out!” Doolittle screamed.

Someone thrust a piece of bloody meat into Derek’s mouth. He released me and clutched on to the meat, shredding it. Bloody juice and flesh flew everywhere. I got the hell out of the vat.

On the other side of the tank, Jim dangled another raw rib eye before Derek. Derek snapped it from his fingers and ripped into it in a frenzy.

Jim’s melodious voice was sweet like a lullaby. “Eat, wolf. Eat. Safe now. That’s it. Eat. Leave the madness behind.”

The terrible battered thing that was Derek snarled and stabbed the meat into its mouth. The eerie, juicy sounds of a predator feeding filled the room. I shook the green crap off my arms and caught sight of Julie in the doorway, pale like a wraith, eyes fixed on Derek.

Jim pushed her out of the way, stepped out of the room, and carried in a trough filled with hamburger meat. He set the trough on the floor. Derek went down on all fours. His broken legs gave out and he crashed face-first into the meat. I marched to the door and took Julie by the shoulder.

She tugged my hand off. “No.”

“We don’t need to see this.”

In the corner Doolittle swung a heavy leather case onto the table and popped it open. Metal blades gleamed in a neat row.

“But . . .”

“No.”

I pushed her out of the room. Raphael closed the door behind us and helped me carry screaming Julie away.

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THE KITCHEN CABINETS CONTAINED WOODEN jars identified by handwritten adhesive labels.

The jar labeled SUGAR had flour in it. The jar labeled FLOUR held an enormous amount of chili powder, which made me sneeze. The jar labeled CHILI PEPPER contained a Smith & Wesson M&P

45. I growled. I had fallen asleep next to Julie on the couch and woken up five hours later, unable to form rational thoughts because my head pounded.

“Looking for something?” Dali came up from the hallway.

“No, I’m dancing the can-can.” Ask a dumb question . . .

Dali blinked at me. “Would you mind making coffee while you’re dancing? I smell it on the bottom shelf, either first or second jar on the left.”

I opened the first jar and looked inside. Coffee. The label said BORAX.

“What’s up with the labels?”

Dali shrugged. “You’re in the house of a cat whose job is to spy. He thinks he’s clever. I’d be careful with the silverware drawer. There might be a bomb in it.”

I extracted a small pot and set about boiling coffee.

“How’s Derek?”

“I don’t know. The door’s still closed. They’ve been in there for hours.”

The coffee foamed up. I held it away from the fire, put it back, and let it foam a second time. Dali got the cups. “I found out more about the jewel.”

I poured coffee into her mug. Dali watched me do it. “I always spill half of it,” she said. “Mine always runs down the side of the pot.”

Manual dexterity—just about the only thing I was good at. “So what about the jewel?”

“A couple of old texts say that Rudra Mani has the power to calm beasts and take away the suffering of man.”

A deeper meaning hidden in the description: the power to suppress a shapeshifter’s animal nature and keep him locked in his humanity. “Does it? Take the suffering away, I mean?”

Dali looked into her coffee. “Having a shard in you is like having part of you cut off. It’s a terrible feeling.

I would prefer to be killed.”

So would I in the same situation. It was akin to surrendering my magic. I hated the man who’d given it to me. Aspects of it repulsed me and I refused them. But it was a part of me. With it, I felt whole for better or for worse. Using magic made me the person I was born to be. Keeping people from being themselves drove them insane.

“Rudra is a one of Shiva’s names,” Dali said. “It means ‘strict’ or ‘uncompromising.’ ”

How fitting. That was what the shapeshifters were, a compromise between beast and man. The gem forced them to become one or the other. I had been thinking about this on the way to the house, while riding the ley line. By then I had grown too numb to worry about Derek—I had described his condition for Julie and it had been like opening an old wound. At first there’d been the sharp slash of pain of a scab being ripped off, and then I’d bled, and the wound had gone numb.

I thought about the Order instead. About Ted and his true believer’s inability to compromise. Ted wanted humans to remain human no matter the cost.

A dark storm gathered on the horizon of my mind, with Rudra Mani firmly in its center.

“Does the name ‘Sultan of Death’ sound familiar to you?” I asked.

Dali paused, considering, and shook her head. “I have no clue who that is.”

That reminded me—I still hadn’t checked on the analyses of the molten silver the rakshasas had poured onto Derek’s face. The magic had fallen while I was asleep. I pulled the phone to me. Dial tone. Finally.

The phone was one of those erratic devices that sometimes worked during magic. Most people had no idea how it worked. To them, it was almost magic, and sometimes magic waves shared that view.

I punched in Andrea’s home number. She answered on the second ring. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I’ve got your results right here,” she said. Not a hint of humor in her voice. “It’s not silver. It’s electrum.”

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Electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of silver and gold with a pinch of copper thrown in, was incredibly potent magically. It was also extremely toxic to shapeshifters.

“You don’t rank high enough to know the rest, so they won’t tell you,” Andrea said, “but I do. This particular alloy is very old and very poisonous to shapeshifters. You know how high my silver tolerance is. I can’t even hold it, Kate. Do you remember the agreement we made during the flare?”

“Yes.” We had agreed that I would never reveal to the Order that she was a beastkin and she would never reveal that I knew enough specific information about Roland to induce a collective seizure in the entire Order.

“There is only one person who has access to this alloy in a large quantity. The composition is very specific. It’s—”

“About fifty-five percent gold, forty-five percent silver, three percent copper, and the rest is random crap.”

“Yes.”

Samos electrum, from the coins struck on a small Greek island in the North Aegean Sea in 600 BC. My heart dropped. Logic had lost and my unreasonable paranoia had triumphed.

“I guess you know what that means, then,” she said.

“Yes. Thank you,” I said.

“Be careful.”

I hung up.

Roland. Only he had a large supply of the ancient Samos electrum. No doubt he meant for it to be used sparingly, perhaps as bullets or stakes, but instead the rakshasas had melted the lot of it just so they could pour it on Derek’s face. Dumb.

Roland was the Sultan of Death. If I continued to oppose the rakshasas, I would come into a confrontation with his agents. I would be discovered.

“Are you alright?” Dali asked.

“Never better,” I said.

A hot anger swept through me. If I was discovered, I would fight him to the end with everything I had, just like my mother had. I was fucking tired of paranoia and panic. It was an irrational, totally idiotic thought, and I reveled in it.

Jim came up the stairs. “He’s up and talking.”

I rushed down, abandoning my coffee.

HE SAT ON THE BED, HIS LEGS COVERED BY A BLUE sheet. He was human and his color had returned to its normal skin tone. His hair was still dark brown. And that was about all that remained of the former Derek.

His face had lost its perfect symmetry. Its lines, so sharply defined before, had thickened and grown harsher. His features gained a rough hardness, and from the top of his mouth to his hairline, his face seemed slightly uneven, as if the shattered bones of his skull didn’t quite mesh. Before if he walked into a rough bar, someone would whistle and tell him he was too pretty. Now people would stare into their drinks and whisper to one another, “Here’s a guy who’s been through some bad shit.”

He looked up. Dark velvet eyes regarded me. Usually a hint of sly humor hid there behind the solemn composure of a Pack wolf. It was gone now.

“Hi, Kate.”

His lips moved but it took me a second to connect the low, raspy voice with Derek’s mouth.

“Damaged vocal cords?” I asked.

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He nodded.

“It’s permanent,” Doolittle said softly. He stepped out of the room and closed the door. It was me and Derek now.

I perched on the side of the bed. “You sound like you kill people for a living,” I told him.

“I look like it, too.” He smiled. The effect was chilling.

“Is there a spot on you that’s safe to punch?”

“Depends on who’ll be doing the punching.”

“Me.”

Derek winced. “Then no.”

“Are you sure? I have a lot of baggage to release from the past couple of days.” My voice was breaking.

I struggled for control.

“Positive.”

All of my guilt, all of my worry, all the anxiety and pain and regret, everything I had carefully packaged and stuffed away into the deepest recesses of myself so I could function, all of it swelled into an unbearable pressure. I fought to contain it, but it was like trying to hold back the tide. A hint of relief was all it took. The flood burst through my defenses and drowned me.

My spine turned to wet cotton. I clamped my arms to my sides, trying to hold myself rigid and keep myself from slumping over. A hard, hot clump blocked my throat. My heart thudded. It hurt, it really hurt, and I didn’t even understand where the pain emanated from. I just knew I hurt all over. Cold and burning up at the same time, I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering.