“He’s waiting for an ‘or,’” I told her.
“What?”
“Usually there is an ‘or’ attached to this kind of threat. Do it or something bad happens.”
“He doesn’t get an ‘or.’” A faint green sheen rolled over Dali’s irises. “There is no ‘or.’ Do it. Because I said so.”
Rodney ducked his head. “Yes, Alpha.”
We watched him retreat down the hallway.
“You’re getting good at this,” I told her.
She shrugged. “I figured it out. Most people will do just about anything you tell them to do, if you act with authority, give them no choice, and accept the responsibility for their actions. That’s kind of scary, isn’t it?”
• • •
GETTING THE CLERK out of the Steel Horse proved to be ridiculously easy. Curran and I walked in there and sat at the bar. The Clerk was drying shot glasses with a towel. He was a trim middle-aged man with light brown hair. He would’ve been a good bartender. He liked to listen to people.
“Kate. Long time no see.” The Clerk eyed us. “What will it be?”
“You like being a bartender?” I asked.
“It has its moments,” he said. “It’s a complicated business. Have to keep track of suppliers. Have to deal with customers.” He didn’t sound especially enthusiastic.
“What did you make at the Mercenary Guild?” Curran asked.
“Forty grand.”
“I’ll pay you sixty if you come back.”
The Clerk pulled the towel off his shoulder and called to the back. “Hey, Cash? I quit.”
As we walked out of the bar, the Clerk smiled. “I would’ve done it for less.”
“I don’t want you to do it for less,” Curran said. “You need to be paid what you’re worth. If you get the Guild running, we’ll talk about a raise.”
The Clerk smiled wider. “I’ll hold you to it.”
Now he was following our Jeep in his truck. One small victory at a time.
Curran drove. The magic was in full swing and the engine roared, but the soundproofing in the cabin dampened the noise enough so, even though we had to raise our voices, we could carry on a conversation.
“Here is what we know,” I said. “The ghouls originate in ancient Arabia. So do the wolf griffins and the wind scorpions. Before the griffin, the Oswalds were attacked by a giant tick, but ticks are universal. They’re on every continent, except probably Antarctica, and I wouldn’t rule that out completely either. So it could have been a tick from Arabia.”
“What about the lizards?” Julie asked.
“I can’t remember what they looked like, because of the head trauma, but it’s possible they are azdaha.”
“What are azdaha?” Derek asked.
“Azdaha. Persian dragons. The old Iranian mythos is full of dragon slayers.”
This line of reasoning was pointing me to a very troubling conclusion and I was trying to do my best to hold up denial as a shield.
“There is a pattern,” Curran said. “Everything is connected by the place of origin.”
“Yes. Also, reanimative metamorphosis is rare. To have two occurrences of it so close together is very rare. I would bet my right arm that whoever is behind the wolf griffin and ghouls is also behind the giant and the azdaha.”
“We need to get Julie to your friend the wizard,” Curran said.
“You mean Luther?”
He nodded. “You said they quarantine the bodies. Would he keep the wind scorpion on ice?”
Knowing Luther? Yes, he would keep it on ice and screw with it until someone higher up lost their patience, took it away from him, and set it on fire. I knew what Curran was thinking. If the wind scorpion also emitted bronze-colored magic, we would have confirmation that everything we’d encountered so far was connected.
“Luther promised me access to Mitchell.” I glanced at Julie over my shoulder. “Would you like to go to the PAD morgue with me to look at weird remains and then visit the PAD’s pet ghoul?”
Julie wrinkled her nose. “I could do that or spend the evening writing an essay for Contemporary English on an extremely boring book about people living in a pre-Shift small town, which has absolutely no bearing on my life and helps me not at all. I don’t know, both options are so enticing . . .”
“I think this new school made your sass even worse,” I said.
“You made me worse,” Julie said. “I’m your punishment.”
I shook my head. “Anyway, everything we’ve run across while trying to find Eduardo comes from Arabian mythology, which means it comes from the same geographical region as my magic. Same as my father’s magic.”
“You think Roland is behind this?” Curran asked.
“I don’t know. I do know that the giant was immune to my power words. My magic bounced off it and there was hell to pay. I can’t risk using a power word against this creature again or my head will explode.”
“We just lost one of our biggest guns,” Derek summed up.
“Not necessarily,” Curran said.
“I can’t attack it with power words directly, but I can attack the environment around it. My magic doesn’t work only against the creature itself. I used a power word on ghouls who were clearly answering this creature’s call, and it worked as intended.”
“Why?” Derek asked.
“Because there are some very key differences between the ghouls, the griffin, and the giant,” I said. “Let’s assume that some being, some Summoner, is behind all of this. He has some sort of agenda, but he is limited because he can only accomplish his goals during magic, so he somehow finds a way to control the ghouls and uses them to do his bidding. My power words work against them because while they are under the Summoner’s control, they still retain their own magic.”
“That makes sense,” Derek said.
“Good. Now, a griffin is a summoning, something the Summoner pulled out of thin air. It’s an expression of his magic, so my power words may or may not work on it. I don’t think the giant is a summoning, because he was clearly wearing an object of power. It was shiny. I saw it in his ear. I think it might have been a piece of jewelry of some sort.”
“How do you know it was an object of power?” Julie asked. “Maybe it was just some random earring.”
“Because the giant was naked except for it and it was clearly too small for him. That object most likely turned him into a giant, and he probably started out as a person, not a summoning. For that kind of transformation to take place, the Summoner would have to imbue the human body with his power completely.”
“I get it,” Julie said. “The Summoner possessed the person and turned him into a giant, which makes the giant an avatar. It’s almost as if the Summoner himself became the giant.”
“Exactly. My power words work on the creatures he controls, they might work on the creatures he summons, but they sure as hell don’t work on him directly.”
“No power words,” Curran said.
“I agree,” Julie said.
“I have no plans to use power words unless I absolutely have no choice.” I made a mental note to ask Luther if the object of power had been recovered. It felt like I was missing something, some vital piece, but when I reached for it, I found nothing.
“I don’t understand why he attacked the Guild.” Derek grimaced. “What was the point?”
“Revenge,” Curran said. “Look at it from his point of view. First, he decides he has something against cats and starts attacking the Oswald family. He summons a tick. Eduardo, a merc, comes and kills it. Then Kate and I kill some of his ghouls. Then he summons a wolf griffin, and two mercs from the Guild kill it. He turns the griffin into a wind scorpion, and Kate and I, who had just come from the Guild, kill it. Then you, Ascanio, Julie, and I go into the MARTA tunnels and kill more of his ghouls. If I we
re him, I’d be pissed off and come over to the Guild to make the mercs pay and to make sure they stopped screwing with me.”
“The problem with our theory is that Eduardo doesn’t fit,” I said.
“Why not?” Derek asked.
“They didn’t kill him,” Curran said. “If Eduardo just happened to be targeted because he was a merc, than why not just kill him? Why go through the trouble of kidnapping him? What’s so special about Eduardo?”
“We won’t know until we pull his other jobs from the Guild,” I said. And to do that we needed two things: for the Clerk to help us, and for the rest of the Guild to look the other way. Everything hinged on the Guild, one way or the other.
Curran turned onto Phoenix Drive. The top floor of the Guild was in ruins, its roofline ragged and broken, but all of the debris from the parking lot was gone. The wrecked cars and chunks of the building had vanished. An inch of silvery powder covered the street.
“The MSDU did a shake and bake,” I said.
Curran glanced at me.
“They torched the contaminated ground and salted it.”
Salt was a universal detergent for all things magic. When you didn’t know what sort of magic you were dealing with, you had two options. You could set the contaminated object on fire or you could bury it in salt. MSDU usually opted for both, which was known as a shake and bake. They had excellent flamethrowers and there had to be truckloads of salt on the street. If anything magical survived that, I would be surprised.
“Okay, put your game faces on,” I told the kids.
We parked on the side. I grabbed the bag Barabas had given Derek for our show-and-tell at the Guild. Curran got out of the car and swung his cloak on. The cloak was Barabas’s idea. Big, black, and edged with black feathers, it was gathered on Curran’s right shoulder. The Pack had made it for him after he ripped off the Raven god’s head during the flare. He never wore it. Barabas had sent it in via Derek with my change of clothes and a note for Curran that said, Wear it, please. It forced you to focus on his face, and you didn’t want to look at that face or to see the power in his eyes. Curran the Godkiller.
The Clerk caught up with us, his expression stretching as he surveyed the damage. “Jesus. I came to see it yesterday but couldn’t get close. The authorities had the place cordoned off.”
“We’ll put it back together,” I told him. “Like new.”
“Better,” Curran said.
We walked to the Guild. The salt crunched under our feet.
The long-suffering metal doors of the Guild were open about a foot. Some halfhearted attempt had been made to push them together. It must’ve taken several people, because the edges of the doors left scrape marks on the salted pavement.
“You should do the dramatic door-opening thing,” I told Curran.
“Would you like to see me do the dramatic door-opening thing?”
“Yes, I would. Very much.”
A quick smile bent his lips. We picked up speed. We were almost marching now. A merc stuck his head out of the gap, saw us, and disappeared.
We reached the doors. Curran didn’t even slow down. He raised his arms. His hands hit the doors. He pushed and they swung open with a metal groan, scraping the floor.
Curran kept walking. My scary, scary bastard.
We walked into the Guild Hall. The floor had been stripped bare. Most of the roof was gone and open sky rose high above us. This would take so much work. Work and money.
Mercs sat and stood by the walls. I saw Barabas standing to the left. Our stares connected and he smiled.
In the middle of the floor stood Mark; Bob Carver; Ivera, who was the only other member of the Four Horsemen in the Assembly; Rigan, a big blond bear of a man who looked like he accidentally got left behind by some Viking raiders; and Sonia, a graceful African American woman muscled like a fencer. Oh good. The Guild Assembly was all here.
Everybody looked at us. Mark spared us a glance and turned back to the crowd. His suit sat askew on his frame. His tie hung loose around his neck. He looked feverish.
“For years, I ran this hellhole. I babysat your idiot founder,” Mark said.
Faces turned grim. Insulting Solomon Red’s memory wasn’t a good move.
“I bargained with suppliers. I got you the big-ticket contracts. I handled the VIP clients. The Malinov contract? I got that for you. The Horowitz job? I arranged that. Not Solomon Red. Not the Clerk. I did that.”
Oh goody. We’d caught him in the middle of his “I’m a special snowflake” speech.
“That’s bullshit,” Rigan said. “I was on the Horowitz job. They wouldn’t even talk to us until Solomon convinced them we were good.”
Mark spun to him. His eyes narrowed. “You know what, Rigan?” He took a deep breath.
Wait for it . . . Wait for it . . .
“Fuck you!”
There it is.
“Fuck all of you.”
He was going to walk. I could feel it. Bob knew it too, because he wasn’t talking. Unlike three-quarters of the people present, Bob also knew that running the Guild without Mark would be almost impossible.
“I’m done defending myself. I’m done justifying myself. This place is finished. Finished!” Mark grinned. “Well, I’m not going down with this sinking ship. I got myself a job. I am done.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” one of the mercs called out.
“I don’t give a goddamn crap what the rest of you shit-sniffing animals are going to do. I am out. I just wanted to let you all know how much I hate each and every single one of you. Rot in hell for all I care.”
Mark turned to leave.
“Wait,” Bob called. “What about your shares?”
Mark spun around. “You want my shares, Bob?” He giggled. “Is that it? My worthless shares that you and your Neanderthals drove from two hundred and seven dollars per share to fifty-six cents? You’re not getting them, Bob. I already sold them. And I got above market value, too. Enjoy the rest of your lives in this busted-ass ruin.”
Mark bowed with a flourish, turned, and took off.
Silence reigned.
“Who bought his shares?” Sonia asked.
“I did,” Barabas said.
Everyone looked at Barabas. Bob Carver had the expression of a man who was feverishly calculating his odds.
“I’m invoking the Donations and Charitable Contributions provision,” I said. “The last entry under Membership Powers in the Manual.”
Everyone looked at me.
I raised my bag. “I am donating twenty thousand dollars to the Guild to be used only to fund the Clerk’s salary and the salary for an assistant of his choice for the next two months, if the Guild is willing to reinstate him.”
“You can’t do that,” Bob sputtered. “You can’t just buy your way in.”
“Yes, she can,” Rigan said. “Hell, yes, she completely can.”
Bob turned to him. “We had a deal.”
“Your deal didn’t mention her donating money. What the devil do you think this is, the Order?” Rigan turned to the crowd. “Raise your hand if you work here for free.”
Nobody moved.
“Who here wants to get paid?”
A forest of hands went up. It’s nice when they do your work for you.
“Three of my last paychecks were short,” Sonia said. “Three! I’m sick of it.”
Bob turned to Ivera. She shrugged.
“Why are we still talking about this?” Rigan asked. “I move to reinstate the Clerk. All in favor?”
He thrust his hand up. Sonia joined him. Ivera raised her hand. Bob hesitated, but his hand went up. Voting against the Clerk in front of the whole Guild would slam the lid on the coffin of his leadership.
“Majority,” Rigan announced. “You’re reinstated, Clerk.”
&
nbsp; Someone in the back clapped. The crowd caught it, and the hall erupted with stomps, applause, and whistles.
The Clerk made a little bow.
“Alright, alright,” Bob yelled. ‘We have bigger problems. Like no damn roof.”
“Under the corporation provision, I request to enroll three people as my auxiliaries,” I said.
“This can wait.” Bob glared at me.
“No, it can’t,” I told him.
“Last time I checked, Daniels . . .” Bob started.
“She killed the giant,” a woman called out. “She cut his neck. Lago took the credit, but I saw her do it.”
Lago took the credit? Sounded like something he would do. And I didn’t remember a bit of it. Must’ve happened between the giant falling and the lizards Curran told me about.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Bob yelled.
“If it weren’t for her, the Guild wouldn’t be standing,” the woman answered. “Let her do her thing.”
“Where were you, Bob?” another merc called out.
“I was on the job,” Bob barked.
“Let her talk.” Alix Simos stepped forward. That was unexpected. I barely knew him.
“Who are you enrolling?” Sonia asked me.
“Him, him, and him.” I pointed to Curran, Derek, and Barabas.
“No,” Bob said. “Don’t you see? She’s using it to avoid the stopgap.”
Barabas opened his mouth. I shook my head. It would be better if I said it.
“Bob, it’s not up to you. I’ve been registered as a corporate member for over a year. I can enroll my auxiliaries any time.”
“She’s right,” the Clerk said.
“You’ll be liable if they screw up,” Bob said.
“Fine, you’re enrolled,” Sonia said. “The Clerk will do the paperwork.”
Bob spread his arms.
“What?” Sonia gave him a look. “I want to see where this is going. The three of you are in.”
I stepped back. Barabas stepped forward. “Cutting Edge invokes the Donations and Charitable Contributions provision. In accordance with financial limits, Cutting Edge donates $150,000 to the Guild, $50,000 per auxiliary member, to be earmarked as follows: $18,000 for the repair of the roof, $10,000 for the repair of the interior, $12,000 to settle the outstanding balances on utility bills . . .”
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