Magic Shifts

by Ilona Andrews

  The vampire’s face became completely still as Ghastek mulled it over.

  “Hold on.” Julie took the corner at a breakneck speed. The vehicle careened. I grabbed the handle above the window. We flew on two wheels for a stomach-pinching second and landed back on the road.

  “A djinn,” Ghastek said finally.

  “Yes. It’s an old power, probably tied to an item. The man in the car is a merc. I believe he got a hold of the item, made himself younger, wished for a magic car filled with money, and for a woman, and now it will be time to pay the piper.”

  “The djinn will take over the human host,” Ghastek said. “So the giant who destroyed the Guild was of djinn origin and, since this man’s three-wish cycle just ran out, we can probably expect another giant.”

  Whatever faults Ghastek had, stupidity wasn’t one of them.

  “What do I need to know?” he asked.

  “It’s an ifrit, so it loves fire. The last giant was almost seventy feet tall. He was still transforming when I cut him down: metal legs, high heat. Low intelligence, no speech, lots of rage, and fun reanimative metamorphosis once he’s down. His corpse transformed into draconoids.”

  “Lovely,” Ghastek said. “Do the human host’s abilities affect the giant’s performance?”

  And why hadn’t I asked myself that question? “I have no idea. Lago is a good, well-trained merc. I guess we’ll find out.”

  The vampire’s head disappeared and I heard Ghastek’s voice. “Team Leader One and Two, merge to bandit. Team Three and Four, maintain. Team Leader One, tap, if no response, stop and dismantle. Watch for heat damage.”

  The vampires picked up speed, converging on the vehicle. Six vampires on the right dropped onto Lago’s convertible. They were in midfall when the top of the car snapped closed. Metal plates formed on the vehicle, overlaying each other like scales. Five vampires landed on the scales, nimble like cats. The sixth slid off and fell, rolling.

  “You must be faster than that, Evgenia,” Ghastek said.

  The bloodsuckers ripped into the vehicle, clawing at the armor. The lines of the car flowed, reshaping themselves as the armor grew thicker, covering the wheels. Two of the vampires managed to pry open the top panel. It went flying and a new armor plate snapped into its place.

  “I don’t get it.” Julie swerved. “So the djinn takes over the body after three wishes?”

  If the ifrit didn’t kill us, her driving would for sure.

  “That’s the theory.” And because the djinn wanted to take over a host for reasons unknown, he would’ve actively pushed his victim to make the wishes. For a weaker-willed person, the compulsion to wish for something would’ve been impossible to resist and the more wishes they made, the greater their break with reality would become. Under normal circumstances, Lago wouldn’t have tried to kidnap me. He was a self-proclaimed Casanova, not a rapist. And the Oswalds’ neighbor probably wouldn’t have let a deadly monster loose in a residential neighborhood. We had to stop this now, before anyone else got hurt.

  “But Lago already had his three wishes. Why is the car making armor?” Julie asked.

  “Because the ifrit needs time for the transformation. If we kill Lago now, we stop it, so he’s protecting him.”

  Julie stepped on it. The Jeep squeezed another small burst of speed out of its engine. We were ten feet behind Lago.

  “But why is he making giants?”

  “If we knew that, we would have this problem solved.”

  The armored scales sprouted spikes. The bloodsuckers dodged in unison. One of the undead squirmed, impaled, pulled himself off the spike, and kept clawing at the armor.

  “Team Leader Two, stop and dismantle.”

  We were barreling down the road when Lago turned again. Great. We had zigzagged through the three-square-mile block of the city and now we were almost exactly where we had started . . . Hmm. If we kept going straight, we’d run right into the Mole Hole. The Mole Hole, once the site of Molen Enterprises, was a 140-yard-wide crater lined with a foot of glass. It formed when one of the richest Atlanta families tried to hatch a phoenix. All kinds of fun activities took place at the Mole Hole, from roller derby to street hockey tournaments, but right now it would be deserted.

  “The car is glowing,” Julie reported.

  The metal scales shielding the car had gained a soft bright glow on the left side. Lago was transforming and if we didn’t hurry, Rowena would be cooked alive.

  I knocked on the roof. No answer.

  I unbuckled my seat belt.

  “Are you going to jump onto his car?” Julie asked. “I can get closer.”

  “What are you, out of your mind? No, I’m not jumping on his car. That only works in movies.” I stuck my head out of the window. “Ghastek!”

  The bloodsucker swiveled its head toward me.

  “Hold on to the car,” I told him, dropped back into my seat, and buckled up. Lago might have a magic convertible, but I had a kid who’d learned to drive from Dali. “He has a sharp right coming up. He will slow down for it. Julie, do you remember how to do a PIT maneuver?”

  Julie grinned. “Can I? Can I, please?”

  I braced myself. “Hit him.”

  Lago’s car slowed for the turn. Julie stepped on it. For a moment our Jeep overtook the former convertible, pulling up alongside it on the left. The two cars connected gently and Julie threw the wheel to the right. The impact shook the Jeep. The convertible spun and slid off the road, skidding across the pavement into the Mole Hole.

  Welcome to the twenty-first century, asshole.

  The Jeep kept going, veering dangerously close to the building. We missed a lamppost by three inches and Julie brought us to a stop.

  She hit the wheel with both hands and sang in a high-pitched voice, “Cru-u-u-u-shed it.”

  “Great job.” I jumped out of the car, sword in hand, and ran to the rim of the Mole Hole. The convertible lay on its side. Two vampires clawed at the passenger door.

  “Secure Ms. Daniels,” Ghastek ordered behind me.

  Four vampires landed in front of me.

  “What the hell?”

  “This is a People matter,” Ghastek said, his voice crisp. “I will consider any violence on your part a declaration of war.”

  “Like hell!”

  “I mean it. You have a very important dinner tomorrow. I’m not taking any chances.”

  Argh. Punching Ghastek’s bloodsucker would accomplish nothing because Ghastek wouldn’t feel a thing. I still wanted to do it. I wanted to cut its head off. My hand itched.

  “Kate!” Julie’s voice rang out. “You can’t fight a giant. You promised.”

  Damn it. I slid Sarrat back in its sheath. “I’m going to remember this,” I ground out.

  “I shudder at the thought,” Ghastek said, his voice dry. “Excuse me.”

  The bloodsucker dashed forward and took a huge leap. It landed between the two vampires clawing at the door and stabbed down with its hand. The door popped open. Ghastek’s vampire dove inside and emerged with Rowena’s limp body. It spun and handed her off to a different bloodsucker, who sprinted away from the car.

  The convertible exploded.

  A cloud of smoke billowed, spiraling up. Something solid moved inside it. Something massive and filled to the brim with magic. The smoke whipped into a column, spinning like a tornado, and a towering giant spilled forth. Hard muscle sheathed his seventy-foot-tall frame. His eyes glowed with red, his ears were pointed, and a mane of straight black hair fell down his back, but his face was still recognizable. He looked like Lago.

  The giant clenched his fists, his enormous arms bent at the elbows, and he roared at the sky. A blast of heat rolled at us. Something shiny sparked at Lago’s throat. I squinted. An earring. He had pierced the skin below his clavicle with it, probably to conceal it. The earring must’ve
required blood contact. Lago, you fool. You stupid, stupid fool. Now he would die. There was no way to save him. Such a waste.

  “You promised,” Julie said next to me in a small voice.

  “Settle down. I’m not going to fight him.”

  Ghastek’s voice rolled through the Mole Hole. “All teams, take him down.”

  • • •

  I CROSSED MY arms. “It’s been fifteen minutes.”

  “Sixteen,” one of my vampire babysitters said in a female voice. “Ma’am.”

  That didn’t exactly make things better.

  The question of whether the host’s body affected the giant’s power had been answered. Lago had survived nine years as a merc. He was damn fast. The vampires sliced at him, but he caught them, broke them, and tossed them aside. They regenerated, and he broke them again.

  Glossy metal scales had begun to form on his legs, slowly climbing their way up. They were midway up his thighs now.

  Something fell off the giant and lay in a heap. It looked like a human-sized pale maggot. I squinted at it. It was a vampire. Normally gaunt, it had swollen to ridiculous proportions, as if someone somehow had gotten the Michelin man from the old commercials and turned him into an undead monstrosity. As if the vampires weren’t already revolting enough.

  The vampire next to me opened its mouth. “Strike Leader, we have a one-twenty-eight in progress. Permission to retrieve?”

  “Permission granted.”

  The vampire sprinted across the glass crater toward the undead maggot thing.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Julie asked.

  “Too much blood,” one of the navigators said through another bloodsucker. “It’s an almost never-seen phenomenon, but it’s been observed in a controlled study in a lab environment. It takes an average of forty-eight liters of blood consumed in a continuous stream, or the blood of roughly 1.28 Holstein cows, to induce this state in a vampire.”

  The giant had too much blood and he was regenerating. They couldn’t drain him fast enough. I couldn’t use a power word on him, but I could do something.

  The vampire that left us picked up the bloated undead, slung it over its back, raced back across the glass, and dumped the abomination beside us. The vampire’s eyes had turned dull.

  “Ew.” Julie shuddered. “Ew.”

  “Ew” didn’t even begin to cover it. Its skin looked ready to rupture. “Why is nobody piloting it?”

  “It won’t be able to move for another hour,” the male navigator explained.

  “Please relay a message to Ghastek for me,” I said. “Your way isn’t working. Let me help.”

  The vampire dutifully repeated the words.

  “He says, ‘The situation is under control.’”

  “Tell him, no, it’s not. You can’t contain it now. What happens when the metamorphosis is complete?”

  “He says, ‘Your concern is duly noted.’”

  Argh. “Asshole.”

  The undead opened his mouth and paused as the navigator caught himself. “Should I . . . ?”

  “No,” another navigator told him. “You shouldn’t.”

  A caravan of black SUVs clogged the street leading to the Casino. The SUVs pulled up in a semicircle around the Mole Hole and disgorged Ghastek and a flock of journeymen. I recognized two Masters of the Dead: Toakase Kakau, a dark-eyed woman of Tongan descent, and Ryan Kelly, a large Caucasian man who looked the corporate shark in every way, except for a very long purple mohawk.

  The journeymen and the Masters of the Dead thinned out, forming a loose ring around the Mole Hole. A journeywoman next to Ghastek raised a large horn to her lips and blew a sharp note.

  Vampires dashed into the crater. A journeyman could pilot one; a Master of the Dead could control two or in Ghastek’s case three. There were about twenty people around the Mole Hole and probably thirty vampires below. Each was marked with a bright smear of fluorescent paint in a dozen colors, some with a cross, some with a ring. Something really weird was going on.

  The vampires swarmed Lago, climbing up his legs to his chest and stomach. He roared, throwing them around. They landed on the ground, some on their feet, some in a broken heap. The scales were up to his waist now. His feet began to glow. The glass under him would melt before long.

  Ghastek raised his hand. The horn screamed in response.

  In my mind, the dull red smears of magic that were the thirty vampires in the Mole Hole turned bright red.

  Dear God. They had turned the vampires loose.

  An unpiloted vampire went into an instant rage. It would slaughter until nothing with a pulse remained. If the PAD found out, nobody would be arrested. They would shoot everyone here out of principle. This was insane. Now I understood the paint—they’d marked the bloodsuckers so they could quickly grab them again without getting confused.

  The undead tore into the giant. He roared, frantically trying to knock them off. Flesh flew as they ripped, clawed, and burrowed into his body. The vampires piled on, maddened by bloodlust.

  A minute passed. The giant was still standing.

  Another . . .

  Two vampires dropped down, their bodies engorged with blood. Lago stomped on them.

  “Steady,” Ghastek said.

  The giant careened, rolling his shoulders in, as if trying to gather himself into a ball. The vampires nearly covered him now.

  Magic exploded like a clap of thunder. With a deafening howl, Lago jerked upright, his arms straight out. The vampires fell off, knocked aside by an enormous force.

  “Acquire!” Ghastek snapped.

  The horn screeched again, frantic. The navigators grabbed the minds of their vampires.

  Smokeless orange flames sheathed Lago’s feet. He turned, roaring, his face no longer bearing any trace of humanity. The metal scales were up to his collarbone now and those at his waist and below glowed orange. The glass under his feet softened, melting. The giant turned in our direction, casting a long look at the city, and raised his foot . . .

  Oh no, you don’t.

  I drew Sarrat, sliced my left arm, and stabbed the bloody blade into the body of the bloated vampire. My blood dashed down the blade, its magic spreading through the undead blood, like a spark charging down a detonation cord. In half a second, all of the blood was mine. I yanked the blood out of the undead’s body. It hovered before me in a massive round sphere. I thrust my bleeding hand into it, flattening the liquid into a solid disk, two feet across, spun, and hurled it with all my strength and with my magic.

  It flew, expanding as it whistled through the air, its edge turning razor sharp, and cleaved the giant’s neck. The impact shattered the now five-foot-wide disk into dust. The giant’s head flopped to the side, his neck three-quarters severed, his mouth contorting silently, his red eyes looking in different directions. Blood gushed out, washing over the torso, and hissed, evaporating as it met the hot scales covering his skin.

  There. No power words.

  The Mole Hole turned completely quiet and in the silence, the sound of hoofbeats rolled through the night. A huge gray horse galloped toward us, bearing a rider in a gray cloak. He carried a lance tipped with a glowing green spark.

  The giant dropped to his hands and knees, his neck jerking, trying to flip the heavy head back into its proper place. The wound on his neck tried to seal itself.

  The horse leaped onto the giant, pounding its way through the flames up his spine, to his head. The rider clamped the lance to his body and rammed it into the bloody stump of the giant’s skull. The horse reared, silhouetted against the orange flames. The rider’s cloak flared, his hood falling. Nick Feldman, a knight of the Order.

  Oh hell. We were so screwed.

  The massive horse jumped, clearing the gap between the giant and the side of the Mole Hole.

  The giant’s head exploded. Brain and bloo
d flew, splattering the vampires in front of me and drenching me in gore.

  Fan-freaking-tastic. That’s just the cherry on top of the sundae of this day. Curran would kill me.

  Nick’s voice boomed through the clearing. “The Order thanks you for your assistance. Kindly disperse.”

  Ghastek stepped forward, clearly untroubled by the size of the horse. Two vampires moved in unison to sit on both sides of him like loyal dogs.

  I braced myself.

  “This is a People matter,” Ghastek said, his voice ice cold.

  “The People have no jurisdiction here,” Nick said. “This investigation belongs to the Order.”

  “A crime has been committed against a member of the People and we responded to it decisively and with overwhelming force. The People find the Order’s presence and response insufficient to properly secure the body.”

  Translation: there is only one of you and a lot of us.

  “I am the law,” Nick said. “Impede me and you will suffer the consequences.”

  “Last time I checked, the Order was not a law enforcement agency,” Ghastek said, his voice dangerously mild.

  “You’re only one man,” someone called out.

  Ghastek took a moment to glance toward the speaker. Heads would roll when they got back to the Casino.

  Aw, hell. I really hated the Order.

  “Three,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me. Julie pulled out her axes.

  “He is three. Biohazard brought the Order in on the previous giant appearance. Therefore, this occurrence is a continuation of an ongoing investigation, authorized by a formal petition from a state law enforcement agency. He is the law. I will uphold the law.”

  Ghastek paused. Some sort of calculation was feverishly taking place in his mind. He couldn’t back down. There were no good choices. If he let the body get away, he would have to explain to Roland how a djinn kidnapped Rowena and how he had wasted several vampires and a bunch of resources trying to kill it but had nothing to show for it. If he claimed the body, he would have to explain to Roland why he’d attacked a knight of the Order, broken about half a dozen laws, and generated a quickly rising mountain of legal bills.