Magic Shifts

by Ilona Andrews

  “Did you get anything from Mitchell?” Luther asked.

  “Yes. It’s an ifrit, a very powerful one. Coal-black and red in color and very fond of fire.” If it had been a marid, folklore said it would’ve been blue, and we had to go by folklore until real life disproved it. “He has a hell of a lot of power, and for some reason he’s keeping Eduardo in a cage.”

  I had seen a bowl of water in Eduardo’s cage, but no food. His shoulders had been sticking out of his T-shirt and his face was gaunt, so he was likely starving. An average human could survive roughly twenty days without food. A shapeshifter had to consume two to three times as many calories as a human of the same size. Their regeneration slowed down the starvation somewhat but not enough. If we didn’t get Eduardo out of that cage in the next three days or so, we wouldn’t need to bother looking.

  A piercing shriek tore through the silence. It came from inside the building.

  CHAPTER

  15

  LUTHER JERKED THE door open and sprinted down the hall. Julie and I chased him.

  “What the hell is that?” I yelled over the shrieks.

  “My alarm! Someone just broke into my lab.”

  We rounded the corner and almost collided with four other people, one in a suit, two in scrubs, and one in a biological containment suit without helmet or gloves. Each was charged with enough magic to level a small building. Luther shoved past them and thrust the door of his lab open. The metal hood was raised, the body of the draconoid out in the open. A deep puncture wound gaped in its side.

  “Damn it!” Luther dragged his hand through his hair. “He stabbed my specimen!”

  Someone had gotten into the building, bypassing all of the security measures, and broken into Luther’s lab. If the press found out that Biohazard, the repository of all things strange and dangerous, had had a security breach, there would be no end of heads rolling.

  “This way!” a woman screamed. “He’s going out the front door!”

  The mages spun and gave chase. The guy in the biocontainment suit shoved the nearest window open. Flames burst over his fists. He punched the air. A fireball broke free of his hand, streaked down to the street, and exploded.

  Oh boy.

  Everybody except for the firebug ran for the staircase. I decided to run too, just so I wouldn’t be left out.

  We collectively burst out the front door. The street lay empty. Nothing but five-foot-wide scorch marks.

  “Where did he go?” Luther yelled.

  Nobody answered.

  “Where is Fluffy?” a woman asked.

  “Jana took her on a job,” a man answered.

  “Oh, come on! What good is a tracking dog if she’s never here to track?” Luther threw his hands up.

  A fireball tore over our heads and splashed flames onto the street.

  “Garcia, will you stop setting things on fire?” Luther roared.

  “Sorry!” the man from the window called. “It was an accident.”

  I put my hand over my face. Next to me, Julie pressed her lips together and was making small meowing noises trying not to laugh.

  The door of Biohazard flew open and Patrice Lane, the head of the Infectious Diseases department, emerged with a gaggle of her techs behind her.

  “Alright, where is he? I’m charged with Staphylococcus. Give me two seconds, and he’ll be covered in boils. He’ll tell us everything.”

  “He got away,” a dark-haired woman explained.

  “What?” Patrice blinked.

  Julie bent in half and began snorting.

  “Stop that,” Luther told her.

  A man walked out of the shadows. He wore jeans and a brown jacket with a hood that right now rested on his back. Of medium height, he had light brown, slightly curly hair and a pleasant, friendly face with hooded blue eyes, a big nose, and the stubbly beginning of a mustache and beard. There was something vaguely familiar about his eyes.

  He came over to me. “Consort. It’s such an honor to meet again. Oops. Shouldn’t have called you that.” He had a light Irish accent.

  “She might not remember you,” Julie said. “She—”

  “Jardin,” I said. The last time we had met he was in his wererat form and I almost stabbed him. He worked for Robert, Alpha of Clan Rat and the Pack’s current security chief.

  “Ah,” Jardin said. “You remember. I am so flattered.”

  “Who is he?” Luther demanded. “Who are you?”

  “It’s not him,” the dark-haired woman said. “The other guy was older and taller and wore black.”

  “He’s a member of the Pack,” I told him.

  “Oh. Wait!” Luther’s eyes lit up. “Can you track?”

  “Yes.” Jardin nodded.

  “Great. A man ran out of here. Do you have his scent?”

  “Sure,” Jardin said. “I saw him and I can smell him, but you see, you won’t catch him.”

  “What?” the man in a suit demanded. “Why?”

  “He had a horse.”

  “A horse?” Luther waved his arms. “We have several advanced vehicles. We can beat a horse. With all of us chanting, we can start it in under three minutes.”

  Ha. If more than one person chanted, the cars started faster. Why hadn’t I ever tried this? I filed that tidbit away for further study.

  “It was a very fast horse,” Jardin said.

  “How fast?” the dark-haired woman asked.

  The wererat smiled. “It had wings.”

  The street turned completely silent.

  “Beautiful black wings,” Jardin said.

  So. We had an ifrit holding Eduardo at some undisclosed location and our only lead had flown away on a winged horse.

  Everybody spoke at once. The mages waved their arms.

  Luther’s voice cut through it. “I’ll call the Order.”

  Really? I raised my eyebrow.

  “Sorry, Daniels,” Luther said. “It’s protocol. We need the heavy artillery now.”

  I stepped away and smiled at Jardin. “Black horse?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  “An Arabian?”

  “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know.”

  I bet it looked like a million-dollar horse.

  “Was there something you wanted?”

  He reached into his jacket. “My alpha brought this to the attention of the Beast Lord, but Jim doesn’t feel this is the right time. My alpha has a different opinion. He feels this is a threat to the Pack and to the city. He said you should know about it.”

  He handed me a stack of Polaroids. The first one showed a big gray block formed from the remnants of different buildings. A person stood next to it. The block had to be at least thirty feet tall. My heart jerked in my chest. I had seen this before. That was how my father had made Mishmar.

  I flipped through the rest of the Polaroids. Another block. Another. A small wooden model standing on a folding table in the middle of a field. My father standing next to a man holding a blueprint. He was still wearing his “wise father” persona, an older man with the features of Zeus or perhaps Moses toward the second half of his life, wise, beautiful, possessing otherworldly power, his dark brown eyes ageless . . . My father’s profile blurred. He turned toward me in the photograph and winked. Cute.

  Julie clamped her hand over her mouth. Jardin turned pale.

  Sonovabitch. He was building another tower. He would not take this land.

  “Where was this taken?”

  Jardin recovered enough to speak. “Near Lawrenceville.”

  Just outside my territory. Oh no, you don’t. Over my dead body. Better yet, over his.

  “Thank you,” I told Jardin. “Tell Robert I will handle this.”

  I turned and marched toward our car. Approaching my father directly could be seen as an act of war, an
d trying to contact him by magic means was just asking for trouble. In the magic arena he was miles ahead of me, and opening any kind of connection through magic was unwise. I had no idea how to get hold of him, but I knew someone who did.

  “Are we going home?” Julie asked, speed-walking next to me.

  “No.” My voice had a lot of steel in it. “We’re going to the Casino. I’m going to have a chat with my father.”

  • • •

  “HOW DID HE do that with the photograph?” Julie asked. “How? The tech was up when the picture was taken.”

  “I don’t know.” I would’ve loved to know what Sienna’s vision meant as well, but so far I had no sage insights. It bothered me.

  We were walking through the parking lot of the Casino, where the People, my father’s pet cult/undead petting zoo, made its headquarters in Atlanta. The Casino, a replica of the Taj Mahal, perched in the center of a huge lot where the Georgia Dome had once offered seventy-some thousand seats to sports fans. The Dome was long gone, fallen casualty to the magic waves, and now the Casino dominated the area. During the day, the tint of its pure white marble changed depending on the color of the sky, but at night, painted by the glow of a powerful feylantern, the intricate marble lattice work appeared completely otherworldly and weightless, as if the entire massive building had been spun out of moonlight by some magic spiders. Long rectangular fountains, decorated with statues of Hindu gods caught in mid-move above the tinted water, stretched toward its doors, and as we walked between them toward the Casino, the tiny red lights of vampire minds glowed in my mind. They crawled along the textured parapets, they moved inside the Casino, and below the building, where the stables lay, the ground was completely red, like the tide of some bloody sea. I would’ve loved nothing more than to reach out and crush them one by one, until the sea of red lights vanished and only peaceful darkness remained.

  “How does this not freak you out?” Julie demanded.

  “I can’t afford to be freaked out. Neither can you.”

  “Well, I . . .” Julie stopped, her eyes wide open.

  I turned to her.

  She stared at the Casino, looking down, where the stables would be. “Are those . . . ?”

  This wasn’t her sensate magic at work. We were too far away and separated from the stables by tons of rock and soil.

  “Vampires,” I told her.

  A while ago she had almost died and I had purified her blood with mine to save her. It was my father’s blood ritual, but it was the only way. It bound her to me in the same way Hugh was bound to my father, and like Hugh she could never defy a direct order from me, something I had tried my best to keep secret. Unless my memory failed me, so far I had avoided it, simply because Julie usually did what I asked without my having to order her, and in those rare times when I had to issue a command, Julie was willing to obey. One day the time would come when she would want to do the exact opposite of what I said and would find out that I had robbed her of her free will. I dreaded that day, but I would deal with it when the time came. Right now I had to deal with a whole different side effect. It seemed that my blood was changing Julie.

  “They have so many,” Julie whispered.

  “Yes.” I stood next to her. “They keep it quiet. If people knew how many vampires are under the Casino, nobody would ever come to gamble.”

  Her gaze swept the Casino.

  “Can you feel each one?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you could reach out and grab one?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “It feels like I could.”

  “Good. Once we find Eduardo, we can practice. Now follow me and keep your power to yourself.”

  We walked up to the door of the Casino. Two guards studiously ignored us. We passed into the lobby. The sound hit me first: the mechanical whirring of the slots, redesigned to work during magic; the din of human voices; the excited shouts of someone winning that sounded almost like a bird in pain; the clanging of metal tokens; all of it blending together into a disorienting, hysterical cacophony. I saw the main floor: dozens of machines, lit up by feylanterns and crowded with users, and, past them, green card tables and roulette wheels, the faces of the poker players devoid of any human emotion. Servers glided through it all, and here and there a journeyman in black-and-purple Casino colors watched over the patrons.

  One of the journeymen, an average-sized man in his midtwenties with a pinched face, stepped in my way. “Excuse me, we will need some ID.”

  I frowned at him. “My ID?”

  “Hers.” He pointed at Julie. “Minors are not permitted on the Casino floor.”

  “Tell Ghastek that Kate is here to see him. He’ll make an exception for me.”

  The journeyman’s face took on a pompous expression. “I’m sorry, he isn’t accepting visitors right now.”

  “He will accept me.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I work directly under him and I’m quite sure he won’t be seeing you today.” He pointed at the door with his hand. “Please. I would rather not call security.”

  I sighed. “Fine. I guess I’ll tell him myself.”

  I reached out with my magic and grabbed the sea of red lights underneath us. The entire vampire stable sat still. Holding two hundred vampires was really difficult and my brain really, really didn’t like it.

  The journeyman in front of me noticed nothing. “Perhaps I wasn’t clear,” he said, speaking with exaggerated slowness. “Sometimes I go too fast.”

  “That’s because of your blinding intellect, isn’t it?” Julie asked.

  I tried really hard not to laugh. Here’s hoping someone noticed that all of their undead were facing in the same direction and not moving, because I could feel my magic ripping at the seams.

  The journeyman’s face turned red. “Look, you, there are two kinds of people who belong here: those with talent like me who work here and those who come here to have a good time and spend money. You don’t work here and”—he gave my jeans and beat-up boots a long once-over—“you don’t look like you have any money.”

  Rowena emerged from the back. Her bright red hair crowned her head in a heavy complex braid. She was five feet, two inches tall and her figure, adorned by a kelly-green shimmering gown, was impossibly perfect: tiny waist, generous breasts, perfect butt, nice legs. Her face was shockingly beautiful. She didn’t just turn heads, she kept them turned, and given that she was the Casino’s PR person, this was quite handy. She was also the third strongest Master of the Dead in the city and made a formidable enemy. Normally her entrance was an event, but right now it was rather comical. Rowena was running as fast as her narrow gown and six-inch-high green pumps would allow, which wasn’t very fast. Behind her two journeymen, a man and a woman both in their midtwenties and wearing business suits rather than uniforms, were trying to find a delicate balance between hurrying and overtaking her. The late-year apprentices, close to graduating.

  I let go of the vampires.

  Rowena saw me and put an extra effort into her speed-walking.

  “You don’t belong here,” the journeyman continued. “We don’t tolerate panhandlers.”

  “You’re in so much trouble,” Julie told him.

  Rowena caught up with us. True to form, she was smiling, but her eyes were terrible. The journeyman saw her. “Master, I can handle—”

  She hit him on the back of the head. He flinched.

  “Bow,” she squeezed through the smile.

  “What?”

  “Bow, you idiot.”

  The journeyman bowed, his face surprised.

  Rowena smiled at me. “Sharrim. Our deepest apologies for the misunderstanding. He is new and we didn’t expect you.”

  Sharrim. Of the king. I hated being called Consort while Curran was the Beast Lord, but I would take it over Sharrim any day. “No worries.”

>   The journeyman was still bowed. Judging by his face, he had no clue what was happening.

  “This way, please.”

  Julie and I followed Rowena. Behind us the journeyman straightened. “Who was that?”

  “Never mind,” the female journeyman told him. “This is your sick pass. You need to go home.”

  “What?”

  “You’re very sick,” the male journeyman ground out. “You need to go home and lie down. You were home all evening, and if Ghastek asks, you have no idea who was working the floor instead of you. Go.”

  We turned the corner and descended the staircase. A dry revolting stench washed over me, the odor of undeath. A vampire hung from the ceiling directly above us, fastened to it with its long claws. Skeletally thin, gray, and hairless, it shed foul magic. Gagging would’ve totally ruined the moment, so I did my best to ignore it. We moved down, and the undead followed us, its eyes glowing dull red.

  Rowena kept her expression carefully neutral. Her mother and mine were distantly related, which she had probably figured out by now. She owed a favor to the witches, and the witches in turn had bound her to help me, because at the time they were trying to make me stronger since the Covens didn’t fancy being enslaved by Roland. Nobody except the Witch Oracle and the two of us knew about this arrangement. Whatever emotions churned inside Rowena, she was keeping them under lock and key.

  We descended deeper and deeper, into the bowels of the Casino, passed through a steel door and into a concrete hallway, and kept walking into a maze of tunnels designed to confuse the unpiloted vampires in case the locks on their cages somehow failed. The tunnels finally ended and we emerged into a vast round room filled with vampire cells, two to a row, stretching toward the center of the chamber. The stench was overpowering. Next to me Julie inhaled sharply.

  “No need to worry,” Rowena said. “They’re secured.”

  Julie glanced at me. I put a hand on her shoulder, trying to reassure her. Too many undead. Their magic was overloading her senses.

  “I see Ghastek didn’t want Nataraja’s office?” The People’s former head used an opulent office in the dome of the Casino, complete with a golden throne and priceless works of art on the walls.