Don’t be dead . . . don’t be dead . . .
I pulled the door open. It swung with a screech, revealing the cab.
Empty.
Oh phew. Phew.
Curran pulled the other door off. “I smell him. It’s his car.”
The interior of the Tahoe looked like it had been through a tornado made of knives.
“Does he smell dead?”
“No.” He inhaled. “It reeks of ghouls.”
“Our ghouls? The ones we killed?”
“No, a different group. These scents are older.”
So we had more than one group of ghouls running amok.
Derek walked out of the left tunnel. “The trail stops here.”
“What do you mean, stops?” I asked.
“I walked in both directions.” Derek leaned against the grimy wall. “The trail comes here and then simply stops. There are no fresh ghoul scent trails in either tunnel.”
“They didn’t just fly off,” I said.
“Could they grow wings?” Curran asked.
“I doubt it.” Ghouls with wings, that was all we needed. “If they could grow wings, they would’ve done it by now. It’s a great defensive adaptation and they are cowards.”
“Their scent says they got here and then they vanished,” Derek said.
I rubbed my face. “That would suggest teleportation.”
“D’Ambray teleports,” Curran said.
“Yes, but Hugh uses power words and special water that’s been messed with by Roland. That teleportation is my father’s exclusive trick. Besides, I would know if Hugh were in the city.”
“How?” Derek asked.
“I would feel him crossing the border into Atlanta.”
Curran leaned toward me. “There is a border?”
“Yes.”
“Were you planning on sharing that with the class?” His voice was quiet.
“It didn’t come up.”
He didn’t look happy. When in trouble, change the subject. “The point is, teleportation is a difficult thing that takes a crap ton of magic.”
“Is ‘crapton’ a technical term?” Derek asked.
Smartass. “Yes,” I growled. “I examined a scene of teleportation during the Lighthouse Keeper mess. It was done by volhves.”
Volhves were Russian druids, and unlike the actual druids, who were struggling to overcome the historical stigma of human sacrifice, volhves didn’t give a damn.
“These were really powerful pagan priests, but they had to sacrifice a human being to get enough juice.”
“What’s your point?” Curran asked.
“Look around you. No signs of a ritual. Just dirt.”
The three of us surveyed the cavern.
“I have no idea what we are dealing with,” I said. “I really, really don’t like it.”
“We need Julie,” Curran said.
Once magic came on the scene, it was quickly determined that figuring out the nature of magic at any given crime scene was vital. That was why investigators used m-scanners, clunky heavy contraptions that sampled the magic and spat out colored printouts of it: blue for human, purple for vampire, green for shapeshifter, and so on. Julie was the human equivalent of an m-scanner, and she was much more sensitive than the most advanced model.
I pulled the keys out of my pocket. “She should be at home by now.”
Curran eyed the hole in the cavern’s ceiling. It was fully forty feet up. Derek took the keys, put them in his jeans, and backed up for a running start. Curran locked his hands together and crouched, holding them out like a step. Derek charged him, fast like a blur. His right foot stepped on Curran’s fist, Curran straightened, his arms propelling Derek like a spring, and the boy wonder shot up like a bullet. For a second I thought he would fall short, and then his hand caught a broken metal pipe sticking out of the edge of the hole. He pulled himself up and vanished into the daylight.
CHAPTER
7
LONG RIPS SCOURED the Tahoe’s front passenger seat, the edges of the fabric frayed, ripped by claws rather than cut. A much smoother cut scarred the dashboard and the far edge of the passenger seat. Dents potholed the dashboard, some with pieces of bone and clumps of dark red tissue stuck to the surface. Several dark smears, thick, the color of reddish tar, stained the inside of the Tahoe, all except for the driver’s seat, which meant Eduardo was in it when the fight happened. I sat in the driver’s seat—my feet could barely touch the pedals—and swung my hand out. Yep. Eduardo had some sort of a short blade in his hand, probably a machete judging by the cut in the dashboard, and he’d hacked at something with it. Then the blade was ripped out of his hand, and he started bashing his attackers into the dash.
I pulled a small plastic bag out of my pocket on my belt, got a pinch of powder, and sprinkled it on the blood. The dark green powder turned white.
“Ironweed,” I explained to Curran. “Ghouls don’t like it. Not sure if it hurts them, but it reacts with their blood.”
Curran examined the dash. “For being pinned by the seat belt and swarmed, he put up a hell of a fight.”
“And that’s what puzzles me.” I reached over and touched the remains of Eduardo’s seat belt. About eight inches of it hung from the top bracket, the end of the section rough and frayed.
“Gnawed through,” Curran said.
“Yes. He was wearing the seat belt when they jumped him. You’re a ghoul. This guy’s hacking at you with a blade and crushing your buddies’ skulls left and right, and instead of killing him right here, while he is trapped by his seat belt, you take the time to chew through it and pull him out.”
“They wanted Eduardo alive,” Curran said.
“But why?”
We searched the rest of the Tahoe. I found Eduardo’s backpack with his lunch and his wallet in it with a hundred bucks in cash. The cache of weapons in the back of the Tahoe was intact. Any human predator would’ve taken the guns and the tactical blades. Whoever took Eduardo had no interest in his weapons or his money, which probably meant our ghoul theory was correct. Not only had the ghouls kidnapped Eduardo, they pushed his car into a hole to hide it. They weren’t that devious under normal circumstances. Some sort of malevolent intelligence was controlling the ghouls, and it clearly had a plan. If only we could figure out what that plan was.
I sat on a rock. Curran stretched out next to me. He looked like hell. Some time ago the ichor covering us had begun to smell like rotten fish, and while we crawled around underground, loose dirt had mixed with it to form a cement-like substance on his skin and mine, in my case no doubt tainted by whatever blood seeped through the bandages. My shoulder hurt. My back hurt, too. Neither of us had eaten since morning. Curran had to be starving. Some pair we made.
He noticed me studying him. “Here we are in a filthy hole.”
“Yep. Looking like two ghouls who rolled in some rotting corpses.”
He flashed a grin at me. “Hey, baby. Want to fool around?”
I laughed at him.
“If I were planning to kidnap Eduardo,” Curran said, “and I knew where he was going, the easiest thing would be to station some shapeshifters near his destination so they could ambush him as he arrived. Except that destination happens to be in a residential neighborhood, which meant if my people jumped Eduardo there, they would have to drag him through the streets kicking and screaming.”
“Yes. Too risky. Too exposed, and too many potential witnesses,” I agreed.
“I would want to grab my victim off the street fast and quiet, so I would scout the possible routes to his destination, find good places to jump him, and put a group of shapeshifters at each route and one final group near the destination itself, just as insurance.”
“Makes sense.” That was exactly what the ghouls did.
“So what is so special about E
duardo?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “Maybe he’s a secret ghoul prince.”
I wanted to climb out of the hole and kill something to make Eduardo be okay. Instead I had to sit here, twiddling my thumbs. I reached over to Curran and squeezed his hand.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find him. They took him alive, so they want something from him.”
“It’s not finding him. It’s finding him in time.”
“He knows help is coming,” Curran said. “George loves him. He knows she’s searching for him and she’d make the Pack look for him.”
“I keep wondering how I missed it,” I murmured.
“What?”
“George and Eduardo.”
“They were very careful,” Curran said. “George loves her father. She didn’t want him and Eduardo fighting. Mahon is the Pack’s executioner and has more experience, but Eduardo is younger, five hundred pounds heavier in beast form, and he would be very motivated. It wouldn’t matter who won. When they were done, one of them would be dead and the other one dying.”
“Would he really fight Eduardo?”
“Depends on the circumstances. Martha can pull Mahon back most of the time, but sometimes his brakes malfunction.”
“But why? What would that accomplish except makes everyone involved miserable?”
Curran sighed. “Mahon’s problem is that he has some very definite ideas about what a man’s supposed to be and what a male werebear should be. It sounds great in his head and he gets carried away with it. He isn’t shy about sharing his bear wisdom. Then his views collide with reality and they mostly don’t survive. At the core Mahon isn’t evil. He means well and he wants to be seen as a good person, so when people react badly to the nonsense coming out of his mouth, he gets shocked and has to readjust. For example, the first time Aunt B came to the Pack Council, he took it upon himself to lecture her about how men should be men and women should be women, and Clan alphas should be men with women helping them, not the other way around.”
I laughed. “What did she do?”
“She petted his shoulder and said, ‘Bless your heart, you must be awful in bed.’”
Ha!
“Then she turned to Martha and told her that if she ever was in need of a man who respected women enough to think they were human beings, she had several available in her clan.”
That sounded like Aunt B.
“Mahon turned purple and didn’t say another word through the whole Council meeting.” Curran grinned. “Never brought it up again. I left him in charge once for about a month, because I had to travel out of our territory, and came back to a full revolt. It wasn’t what he did—he actually governed well while I was gone—it was what he said at the Pack Council. He said he was trying to give the other alphas guidance and he was mystified why everyone wanted to tear his throat out. It would be the same with Eduardo. His initial reaction would be to rage and probably goad Eduardo into attacking him, because he loves George and he wants to be a good father, and in his mind the best thing to do, the proper thing to do, is to steer her away from what he sees as a terrible match. He’s probably convinced that if George only saw things from his point of view, she would agree with him.”
“I’m pretty sure he thinks that about everybody.” I’d been on the receiving end of Mahon’s wisdom. It made me fantasize about violence.
Curran sighed. “Mahon adores his daughters. If George went to her dad right now and cried and said that she was miserable without Eduardo and she felt awful, Mahon would drop everything and run to look for Eduardo.”
I blinked. “Seriously?”
Curran nodded. “But she won’t do it and I agree with her. From her point of view, why should she have to manipulate her father? She isn’t asking him for a puppy. She’s telling him that this is the man she loves, and she expects him to deal with it like a loving parent should. She’s his daughter and she’s just like him. They’ve butted heads for as long as I’ve known them. She always loves him, but sometimes she also hates him. This is one of those times.”
It must’ve been an interesting family to grow up in. “Do you manipulate him?”
“I know what Mahon’s version of the Beast Lord should say and do. When I want him to do something, I frame it in that light. With Mahon sometimes it’s enough to growl and declare that he will do this because I’m the Beast Lord. He expects occasional dictatorship, because in his head that’s what a capable Beast Lord would do. If I tried the same tactic with Jim, he’d tell me he’d come back later after I had my head examined.”
“Mahon’s Beast Lord is a hard man who makes hard decisions, huh?”
“Mm-hm. And who doesn’t have time for foolishness.” Curran looked up. “A car.”
A moment later I heard it too, the dull roar of water engines. It sputtered and died. Julie’s blond head poked through the hole. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said.
Julie’s head disappeared, replaced by her foot in the loop of a rope. The rope moved down, lowering Julie to the floor of the cavern. She wore her work clothes: old jeans, a black turtleneck, and boots. A tactical tomahawk rested in a loop on her belt. Thirteen inches long, the Kestrel tomahawk weighed eighteen ounces. Its wide bearded blade tapered down to a wicked spike that curved downward, sharpened to a narrow point. It was meant as a tool that occasionally could be thrown at rotten logs for fun. Julie had decided to make it her weapon of choice. None of my explanations about the versatility and lightness of swords made any dent in her.
I sighed. I had plenty of perfectly good swords, balanced and made specifically for her. When she first started carrying the axe, I tried to push her toward the sword and she resisted until I finally asked her why she dragged it with her everywhere. She said, “Because I can make a hole in anything.” I decided that was good enough for me.
If the dead could judge the living, Voron, my adoptive father, was probably spinning in his grave over the axe. He’d dedicated his life to teaching me how to use a sword. He viewed it as the perfect weapon. But then Voron was long dead and I had exorcised his ghost out of my memory. He still spoke to me once in a while, but his voice no longer ruled my life.
Julie winced. “Is that Eduardo’s car?”
I nodded. Derek slid down the rope.
“Okay.” She turned to the half-crushed Tahoe. “Ugly yellowish orange . . . Ghouls. A lot of them.”
She circled the car, moving slowly, and looked up, her gaze fixed on a point about six feet above the car. Her eyes widened. She smiled slightly, as if she were looking at something beautiful.
“It’s like a flame,” she murmured. “Beautiful flame. Not orange or yellow. More like copper.”
“Copper?” What the hell registered copper?
“A goldish, silverish kind of copper,” she said. “There was an explosion of it right there.” She pointed above the Tahoe. “Like rose gold. Very pretty. I’ve never seen this before.”
Blue meant human, silver meant divine, weak yellow meant animal . . . I had never run across goldish-silverish copper before. What the hell was I supposed to do with that? It didn’t even sound right. The creature registered a rose gold color . . . I’d get laughed at.
Julie tilted her head. “It’s not that variable.”
“What do you mean?” Curran asked.
“Magic isn’t usually one color,” she said.
“The m-scanners print it as one color because they’re not really that precise,” I said.
“Real magic shifts and changes shades,” Julie said. “Ghoul magic looks yellow-orange but it’s more like streaks of olive and orange mixing together with some really light brown. Even the vampires have traces of red and blue in their purple.” She glanced up. “Whatever that is, it’s very uniform. There are very light flecks of gold and silver in it, but most of it is one color.”
A u
niform magic signature meant whatever made it emitted very concentrated specific magic. “Any blue?”
Julie shook her head.
Blue stood for human magic. Any sort of human derivative, like a ghoul’s or a shapeshifter’s, showed blue in their magic signature. They could never completely get rid of the traces of their humanity. Whatever this was didn’t start out as a human.
I rubbed my face. It didn’t give me any new insights. “Whereabout is this copper?”
Julie frowned. “About four feet above the car.”
I stepped onto the Tahoe’s hood and climbed onto its roof.
“What are you doing?” Curran asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to get a sense of things.” I stood up.
“Okay, you’re in it,” Julie said.
I didn’t feel anything. I stared up at the sky, waiting for a clue to fall out of the heavens and land on my head. At this point, I’d welcome the hit.
From here I could see the whole cave, the two tunnels, the whole area from which we had come, the dirt floor against which the Tahoe had impacted, the loose soil churned by the ghouls as they scrambled across it. A glint caught my eye to the right. Something shiny reflected the light among the dirt. An identical spark glowed to the left, exactly the same distance. Hmm. I turned slowly. More sparks, buried under the dirt.
I slid off the Tahoe. From here the glint was invisible. I pulled some gauze out of my pocket, knelt in the spot I thought I saw it, and brushed at the dirt. The loose soil slid aside, revealing a narrow ribbon of translucent shiny sand. It looked brittle, but held together as if some great heat had touched the sand and half fused it into glass.
Julie knelt next to me and reached to brush more dirt off.
“Don’t touch it.” I passed her the gauze. The first rule of staying alive in Atlanta: if you see something weird, stay the hell away from it.
We began brushing the dirt aside, Julie and I from one side, Curran and Derek from the other. In twenty minutes we had it cleared and I climbed the Tahoe again. A perfectly round ribbon of glass sand, about eight inches wide, circled the vehicle, lying on top of the dirt like a thin crust of dirty ice on the surface of a pond after the first frost. Someone, probably the ghouls, had tried to cover it, but there it was.
Magic Shifts Page 11