Magic Shifts

by Ilona Andrews

  Good call. “Bring me a name. Then I’ll give remembering a shot.”

  He took off and I went to collect Julie. We needed to find Luther and ask him some questions.

  CHAPTER

  14

  THE BIOHAZARD DIVISION occupied a large solid building made with big blocks of the local gray granite. A large black sign in front announced its official name: The Center for Magical Containment and Disease Prevention. I parked in the front in a visitor spot. It was just me and Julie. I had asked Derek to go to the suspect stalker’s address and watch his house, doing whatever he had to do not to be seen, and Curran was still at the Guild.

  The day had burned down to a cold evening, the sky an icy purple in the west as the sun rolled toward the horizon. The magic was strong tonight.

  Curran had offered to come with me, but I insisted. He needed to stay and get his hands dirty, because the mercs would respect that, and I needed to see a man about a ghoul. He offered again and I told him no, and not just because Mitchell wouldn’t crawl out of his burrow if he smelled Curran coming.

  Curran was impossible to ignore. He wasn’t quite hovering around me, but he was very forcibly there in case I was about to collapse. Right now he was the equivalent of having a squad of trained killers at your beck and call, ready to defend you at the slightest provocation. My stroke had put him on edge. I could feel him surfing that narrow line between maintaining his composure and losing all semblance of rational thought. He had lost his parents and his siblings to loups, and he had never recovered. The fear that something would happen to me constantly gnawed at him, and sitting on his hands for two days waiting to see if I’d die while the kids were freaking out had driven him nuts. He was wound so tight, the energy rolled off him. If someone accidentally bumped into me, he’d rip them to pieces. What he wanted most was to stuff me into an armored room lined with padded pillows and stand guard over it until all the insanity that drove him boiled down to the simple realization that we were both going to be alright. He would never say it and he would definitely never try it, but the urge was there. I saw it in his eyes.

  Maybe it was because he was extra wound up, or maybe it was the way we always were, but I felt completely secure when he was near. I felt safe. He was like a one-man army.

  Right now I didn’t want to have the luxury of feeling safe. I needed to feel fear, the good electrifying kind of fear that kept me sharp when my life was on the line. I needed to know I could function, that I was still fast and could still kill, and that I could handle Atlanta on my own. That I was still me.

  “I know you’re worried. I need to do this. Either I go or I might as well pack it up and retire,” I had told him. “I’ll be careful.”

  “You should wait,” he had said.

  “How long?”

  The answer had been clear in his eyes: forever. I had to go, because I wouldn’t always have the luxury of having him with me and we both needed to deal with that.

  “Promise me that if you run across another giant, you won’t go after it until I get there,” Curran had said.

  “I promise.” A giant was an anomaly. Running across another one was highly unlikely.

  “I mean it, Kate. You can’t take another stroke.”

  And neither could he. “I give you my word.”

  Now we were in front of the Biohazard Division. I hoped my arms and legs would work as well as they did before all this mess happened.

  “How do they get ‘Biohazard’ out of CMCDP?” Julie asked.

  “The Center started as a division of the Atlanta Police Department. Before the Shift, whenever there was a murder or some violent altercation, people would call crime scene cleanup crews. They cleaned up blood, body decomp, animal feces, that sort of thing. Biohazard.” I got out of the car and started toward the building. Julie caught up with me.

  “At that time, magic was new, but it quickly became clear that its little presents had to be studied and contained. Nobody quite knew how to do that, and the APD ended up creating its own Biohazard Division. They gave it a familiar name, probably because it made them feel better and everybody knew what it stood for. Over the years, Biohazard expanded, until finally the governor separated it and brought it under state authority by an executive order.” I stopped by the wall and pointed at a dark shiny spot in the granite. “Do you know what this is?”

  Julie squinted at it. “No.”

  “Dark tourmaline. This building is made with Stone Mountain granite, which has natural tourmaline inclusions. Why?”

  Julie wrinkled her forehead. “Tourmaline is frequently used in purifying. It can generate a weak electrical current when rubbed or heated by the sun, and it is a good magic conductor, which makes their wards stronger.”

  “What else?”

  She looked at me. “Uhh . . .”

  “Scrying,” I told her. “It’s used as a scrying stone. It helps them with their research. Come on.”

  We walked to the big doors. A ward squeezed me, cutting off my breath for a moment, and then the pressure vanished. We were through.

  I nodded at the guard at the fortified reception desk. “Kate Daniels. I am here to see Luther.”

  “Go in,” the woman told me. “Second floor, big door on the right.”

  We went up the stone stairs. People walked past us, talking in quiet voices, sometimes relaxed, sometimes intense. We made it to the second floor and turned right. A deserted hallway stretched in front of us, lit by the blue glow of feylanterns.

  “Kate,” Julie asked, her voice small.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “You do remember me, don’t you? You don’t have amnesia?”

  Oh, Julie. I turned on my foot and hugged her. She leaned against me, limp.

  “Do you remember when I took you to Pelican Point? You ate shrimp and cried.”

  She sniffled.

  “And when we bought the owl?” I said. “The woman wanted thirty bucks for it, and then, when we got home, I had to fight with you to wash it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Even if I had amnesia, I would still remember that I love you.”

  She hugged me once, squeezing me tight, and let go. We walked down the hall as if nothing had happened, right up to the big metal door blocking our way. I knocked and swung it open.

  Luther stood by the laboratory table, holding a clear plastic container filled with dried herbs. He wore pale scrubs that had been bleached too many times and his face was sour. On the table, splayed out and butterflied like a chicken for the grilling, sprawled the corpse of a scaled lizardlike beast. Luther bent over it and sprinkled the herbs onto the exposed tissue. Ugh.

  “Really, Luther, if I knew you were that hungry, I would’ve picked up some takeout.”

  At the sound of my voice, he turned. “You!”

  “Me.”

  “What is this?” He looked at Julie. “Mini-you?”

  “Julie—Luther. Be careful with him, he’s sharp. Luther—Julie. She’s my adopted daughter.”

  “Showing her the ropes?” Luther squinted at Julie. “What is that magic you’ve got there? A sensate? You’ve been sitting on a sensate all this time and you didn’t share? Not cool, Daniels. Not cool at all.”

  “I’ll share if you do.”

  Luther spread his arms. “All things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine.”

  “John seventeen, the Prayer for Disciples,” Julie said. “But not the King James version.”

  That’s right. The King James version would’ve had “thines” in it.

  “New American Standard,” Luther said. “I’m a patriot and proud of it.”

  “Is that the lizard that came out of the giant?” I asked before they decided to dazzle each other with their brilliance.

  “It is, and I had to fight the military and the GBI for it. I just sprinkled mugwort on
it.”

  Nice. Whatever faults Luther had, stupid wasn’t one of them. I walked over and looked at the carcass.

  “Why mugwort?” Julie asked. “I thought it was for warding off evil?”

  “Because it is associated with Goddess Nu Wa,” Luther said.

  “There is a reason why Nu Wa was depicted in ancient Chinese art as having the head of a human and the body of a serpent,” I told her.

  Luther checked the clock “Three, two . . . one.”

  The exposed muscle turned bright emerald green.

  “A draconoid,” I said. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  Luther stared at the ceiling and made a frustrated growl.

  “Why is that bad?” Julie asked.

  “There have been four documented sightings of a real dragon,” Luther said. “They are the UFOs of our age. We don’t know a lot about them . . . no, scratch that, we have a wealth of myths so we know a lot about what they might be, but we have almost no empirical evidence to justify any of the bullshit. We do know that they are beings of immense magic power. Three of the sightings have been during a flare.”

  “A draconoid is a catch-all name for the proto-dragons,” I explained. “A proto-dragon is almost like a primitive dragon, not quite a dragon but definitely not just a lizard or a serpent. They pack a serious magic punch. If the Summoner can produce hundreds of these, what else can he summon?”

  “But I thought you fought a dragon a long time ago?” Julie said.

  “No, I fought an undead dragon, a pile of bones with a very faint memory of what it used to be. If the Summoner calls out a dragon, we’ll be in deep trouble.”

  “It wouldn’t even have to be a dragon,” Luther said. “If he summons a drake, we’re in deep sewage. There are no protocols for fighting dragons. We have no idea what to expect. We would be fighting blind. This city isn’t ready for a dragon.”

  I looked at Julie. “Color?”

  “Same,” she said. “Bronze.”

  That’s what I thought.

  “Bronze?” Luther blinked. “What the hell registers bronze? Daniels, what are you not telling me?”

  Denial only goes so far. I took a deep breath. “I think we have a djinn.”

  • • •

  LUTHER SANK INTO a chair. “How sure are you?”

  “Sure enough to say it out loud.”

  He dragged his hand across his face. “You know, if anyone else had told me, I would’ve smiled and nodded and after he left, I’d make calls to his emergency contacts and suggest they hospitalize him ASAP.”

  “I know.”

  “A djinn is problematic because it’s a higher being?” Julie asked.

  I nodded. True gods couldn’t manifest except during the flares, times of uninterrupted magic. At other times, so-called gods were just constructions of the Summoner’s will or a creature inhabiting an avatar or an effigy. Their powers in these forms were severely limited. Most of the creatures we encountered post-Shift either started as human and transformed into their new shapes or had powers that were not significantly greater than that of an average human. Even so, these creatures clung to magic. Fomorian demons attacked during a flare, and rakshasas had made excursions into our reality through a portal, running to it any time the magic dropped.

  The djinn and the dragons were on another level entirely.

  “How did you arrive at a djinn?” Luther asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  He got up off the chair and pulled a lever. A thick metal hood descended on the table, hiding the lizard’s body. Luther threaded a thick chain through the rungs in the hood and the table, wrapping it several times around the hood, secured it with a padlock, and disappeared into the side room. A moment later, he emerged with three mugs and a carafe of coffee.

  I started with the encounter with the ghouls and laid it all out, glossing over details like Ghastek pointing me toward the ghouls in the first place, protecting the city, and having microscopic strokes. It didn’t take him long to connect the dots. We had a disgruntled neighbor who somehow got himself involved with a magical heavyweight from Arabian mythology. He made three wishes and then in turn the magic power possessed his body, turning him into a giant. The giant punished the Guild for interfering. All of this was consistent with a djinn. They granted wishes, they came from the Arabian mythos, and they held a grudge. It was a solid theory, but it was solid in the same way Swiss cheese was solid. We still didn’t know what the djinn wanted, why he was gathering ghouls, or why he’d kidnapped Eduardo.

  When I finished, Luther exhaled.

  “Unlimited power at this guy’s fingertips, and he wishes for his neighbor’s bike to be crushed, steals the kids’ decorations, and summons a monster to eat all of the cats.”

  “Thank the Universe for small favors.” It could’ve gone much worse.

  “That kind of show of power requires a higher being, so you are right. As freaky weird as it is, we might have a djinn. Why now? Why here?”

  I had been asking myself that same question. If a djinn existed, he would be as much of a threat to Roland as he was to me. My magic was my father’s magic. Was this some sort of extra-special test? Did my loving father send me this lovely present to see if I could deal with it? Was it his way to undermine me without becoming involved? Was it completely unrelated? There was really no way to tell.

  “If it’s a djinn, what kind?” Luther frowned. “Is it a marid, an ifrit, a shaytan?”

  “It’s not a jann,” I thought out loud. “They don’t pack enough power. It could be a marid, but if the literature is to be believed, their power is elemental in nature.”

  “But marids are described as giants,” Luther pointed out.

  “True. I have something for you.” I reached into my backpack and pulled out my bag of dirty glass. “We found a ring of this around Eduardo’s car. I think it’s melted sand that was used as a teleportation anchor. We need to know where it’s from.”

  Luther grabbed the bag and held it up so the light of the feylantern shone through it. He squinted. “What is that squirmy shiny thing inside the glass?”

  The only thing inside that glass was dirt. I had looked at it through a magnifying glass. I sighed. “Luther, we don’t all have magic vision. We can’t see what you see.”

  He pulled the ziplock bag open and passed his hand over the glass. “Ooo. This is something.”

  “What is it?” Julie asked.

  “I don’t know yet, but it’s not nothing.”

  Mages. Clear as mud.

  “You think there’s a three-wish cycle?” Luther asked. “He grants three wishes, then possesses the body? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Can I talk to Mitchell?” I asked.

  “You can try. I tried last night. I even brought very delicious carrion with me, but he wouldn’t come out of his burrow.”

  “I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Okay,” Luther said. “I’ll get the tranquilizer gun in case the magic fails.”

  “Is this dangerous?” Julie asked.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I’ll need you to stay with Luther. You can see everything from the balcony.”

  “But—”

  “If you come with me, Mitchell might not come out.”

  Her face fell. “Fine.”

  Luther came out of the back room carrying an oversized rifle. “Shall we?”

  We followed him out of the examination room, down the hallway, to a door leading to the outside. Luther pulled a key chain out of his pocket, flipped through the keys with one hand until he found the right one, and unlocked the door. We stepped out onto a private concrete balcony running along the side of the building for about fifty feet. In front of us a large lot stretched, secured by a twenty-foot stone wall topped with coils of razor wire. The wire had some silver in it and the light of the
rising moon coated it in a bluish glow. Trees dotted the lot, some normal, some odd and twisted. On the left, black tar-like goo oozed from one of the trunks. On the right, a group of bushes with small red leaves sprouted two-foot-long bright orange thorns. Tiny blue spheres floated in the grass, moving in different directions. Magic pooled and coursed through it, twisting between the trees and leaking from the leaves and spiraling into the ground. Even the ground itself was changed. Sharp outcroppings of translucent citrine-colored crystal cut through the surface like the fins of mythical sea serpents swimming under water. Here and there small veins of pale white rock stretched to form knobby protrusions about a foot high and buttressed to the ground by thin roots.

  “What is this?” Julie asked.

  “The dumping ground. This is where we put things we want to study,” Luther said.

  “This is where they put things when they have no idea what they are or what to do with them,” I told her. “Luther, don’t bullshit my kid.”

  Luther rolled his eyes. “Yes. What she said.”

  “What if they get out?” Julie asked.

  He pointed up. Julie leaned out. I knew what he was pointing at, but I glanced over all the same. Massive catapults and guns lined the roof of the building, pointing at the dumping ground. Anything that tried to leave would be pounded to a bloody pulp.

  I stripped off my jacket and pulled off my boots.

  “So why do you keep a ghoul in there?” Julie asked.

  “Because he used to be one of us,” Luther said. “Mitchell was a brilliant guy. He studied ghoulism and we all thought he would crack it. Turned out he was a point zero zero zero two percenter.”

  “Oh.” Julie nodded. “That makes sense.”

  Mitchell and I went way back. I knew him when he was still human. He was one of those health nuts who did things like running punishing marathons and then got upset if he wasn’t one of the first ten to cross the finish line. When his transformation hit and he disappeared, Biohazard hired me to find him and bring him back quietly, because they felt responsible for him. Every time a new case of ghoulism became public, people freaked out, which was why the PAD eliminated all new ghouls with extreme prejudice. Nobody at Biohazard wanted Mitchell to be hunted down and shot.