“Life is full of surprises.”
I chewed on that for a minute. “Does Nataraja know you’re here?”
“I’m here on his direct orders.”
Warning bells went off in my head.
Ghastek’s superior, the People’s head honcho in Atlanta, called himself Nataraja after one of Shiva’s reincarnations. There was something odd about Nataraja. His power felt too old for a human and he packed a lot of magic, but I had never actually witnessed him pilot a vampire. About three months ago, I ended up getting involved in an underground martial arts tournament, which resulted in me fighting shapeshifting demons called rakshasas. It also resulted in my owing Curran a naked dinner.
If that furry bastard could stop intruding on my thoughts for five seconds, I might have to dance a jig in celebration.
The rakshasas had made a pact with Roland, the People’s leader and my biological father. He provided them with weapons and in return they tried to destroy the shapeshifters. The Pack had grown too large and too powerful and Roland wanted it out of the way before it grew any larger. The rakshasas failed. If Nataraja turned out to be a rakshasa, I wouldn’t be surprised. Roland still wanted the Pack out of the way and Nataraja answered to Roland.
Maybe Nataraja had hatched some sort of a plan in retaliation, and he sent Ghastek here to me to create an appearance of propriety.
Maybe I was just getting paranoid . . .
I looked into the vampire’s eyes. “What’s the catch?”
The bloodsucker shrugged, a revolting gesture that jerked his whole body. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Should I take that as a refusal to accept the petition?”
Ghastek one, Kate zero.
“On the contrary, the Order would be delighted to accept your plea.” I pulled the petition sheet from the stack of forms. The People accumulated money to fund their research. Their extreme wealth went hand in hand with severe frugality. They were notoriously tightfisted. “The Order charges on a sliding scale, according to one’s means of income. For the impoverished, our services are free. For you, they will be shockingly expensive.”
“Money is no object.” The vampire waved his claws. “I’ve been authorized to meet your prices.”
They really wanted the Order involved. “Tell me what happened.”
“At six oh-eight a.m. two men wearing ragged trench coats approached the Casino. The shorter of the men burst into flames.”
I paused with the pen in my hand. “He burst into flames?”
“He became engulfed in fire.”
“Was his buddy made out of orange rocks and did he at any point yell, ‘It’s clobbering time’?”
The vampire heaved a sigh. It was an eerie process: it opened its mouth, bit the air, and released it in a single hissing whoosh. “I find your attempted levity inappropriate, Kate.”
“Consider me properly chastised. So what happened next?”
“The pyromancer directed a jet of flame at our building. His companion aided it by creating a strong wind, which carried the fire toward the Casino’s entrance.”
Most likely a fire mage and a wind mage. A firebug and a whistler, working together.
“The fire swept the front of the Casino, scorching the outer wall and the parapet. A team of four vampires was dispatched to deal with the issue. Their appearance caused the two intruders to shift the flames from the Casino onto the approaching vampires. The intensity of the fire proved to be higher than anticipated.”
“They took down four vampires?” That was unexpected.
The vampire nodded.
“And you let them walk away?” I couldn’t believe this.
“We did give chase. Unfortunately, the two intruders disappeared.”
I sat back. “So they appeared, sprayed some fire, and vanished. Did you receive any demands? Money, jewels, Rowena in lingerie?” Personally, I was betting on Rowena—she was the Master of the Dead who handled the Casino’s PR, and half of the city’s male population would kill to see her naked.
The vampire shook its head.
Was this a prank of some sort? If it was, it ranked right up there with dropping a toaster in your bath tub or trying to put a fire out with gasoline. “How badly did they burn the vampires?”
The vampire gagged. The muscles of its neck constricted, widened, constricted again, and it disgorged a six-inch-long metal cylinder onto my desk. The bloodsucker grasped it, twisted the cylinder’s halves apart, and retrieved a roll of papers. “Photographs,” Ghastek said, handing me a couple of sheets from the roll.
“That’s disgusting.”
“He is thirty years old,” Ghastek said. “All his internal organs, with the exception of the heart, atrophied long ago. The throat makes for a very good storage cavity. People seem to prefer it to the anus.”
Translation: be happy I didn’t pull it out of my ass. Thank the gods for small favors.
The two photographs showed two charred blistered ruins that might have been bodies at some point and now were just burned meat. In random places the undead flesh had peeled away, revealing bone.
A mage who could deliver a blast of heat intense enough to cook a vampire was worth his weight in gold. This wasn’t some two-bit firebug. This was a high-caliber pyromancer. You could count those guys on the fingers of one hand.
I held out my hand. “The m-scan, please.”
The vampire became utterly still. Many miles away, Ghastek was deep in thought.
“You have enough diagnostic equipment in the Casino to make the entirety of the Mage College giddy with joy,” I said. “If you tell me the scene wasn’t m-scanned, I’ll be very tempted to make a new storage cavity in your vampire with my saber.”
The vampire peeled another page from the roll and handed it to me. An m-scan printout, streaked with purple. Red was the color of undeath, blue was the color of human magic. Together they made the purple of the vampire. The older the vamp, the redder the signature. These four were relatively young—their residual magic registered almost violet. Two bright magenta lines sliced through the vampiric traces like twin scars. No matter how old a vampire would grow, it would never register magenta. The tint was wrong. Bloodsuckers ran to the deeper tones of purple.
But magenta still had red in it, which meant . . .
“Undead mages.” Holy shit!
“It seems so,” Ghastek said.
“How is this possible?” I was beginning to sound like a broken record. “The use of human elemental magic is directly tied to cognitive ability, which ceases to exist after death.”
The vampire shrugged again. “If I had answers, I wouldn’t be here.”
Just when I got comfortable with the rules of the game, the Universe decided it was time for a swift kick to my rear. Were-coyotes caught deadly plagues, the People asked the Order for assistance, and undead creatures used elemental magic.
“Do you have any idea who could be behind this? Any suspicions at all?”
“No.” The vampire leaned forward. A long yellow claw traced the slice of magenta across the m-scan. “But I’m dying to find out.”
CHAPTER 4
WHEN YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO START, GO back to basics. In my case, the basics involved gluing myself to the phone and calling the Biohazard units of major cities around Atlanta. Being with the Order had its disadvantages, but it did open some doors and anything concerning an epidemic had a high profile among Biohazard staff.
In two hours I had a better picture and it wasn’t pretty. So far the Steel Mary had left his skid marks in five cities: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Savannah—hit my home turf and I didn’t even know it—and finally Atlanta. He was moving north, working his way up the coast, which probably meant he came off the boat in Miami. Sea travel was a dicey affair; he would’ve stayed away from the ocean if he could help it. Several sea routes ran out of Miami. I had a sick feeling he came by the one curving down from West Africa.
Africa churned with old magic, ancient, powerful, and primal.
In Miami a man in a cloak had been sighted in the marketplace. A herd of cattle waited to be slaughtered. He walked right into the enclosure, raised his arms, and the herd broke through the wooden corral and stampeded through the market. His magic hit the shoppers as well, and in seconds people fled the marketplace, trampling each other and causing a citywide panic. Then he unleashed smallpox, which proved to be too strong to cause trouble. It killed its carrier in seconds and burned itself out.
The citizens of Fort Lauderdale had no idea the guy in the cloak existed but their Biohazard unit did report an outbreak of extremely virulent influenza, which affected everyone who visited an underground bare knuckles tournament. Fancy that.
The PAD in Jacksonville got his number pretty fast, but he dumped a hellish strain of dysentery on them, and by the time they cleaned up the bodies, he was long gone. They did mention that he had four flunkies with him. They also called ahead to just about every city in Georgia with a warning, which Savannah and Atlanta’s Biohazard units promptly ignored.
Savannah paid for it with an outbreak of bubonic plague that started after a battle royale in one of their infamous Irish pubs on River Street. I knew the PAD detectives down there, and all three of them were very sore about the whole thing, so sore that they offered to box their case evidence and send it up to me. I jumped on the chance with both feet.
Every incident took place during a magic wave. Every incident involved a rough crowd and a brawl, and in every case the toughest fighter ended up pinned to the first available hard surface. Sometimes the Steel Mary used a spear. Sometimes a harpoon or a crowbar. Women seemed mostly unaffected. Either his magic didn’t work on them as well or he wasn’t interested in the more dangerous of the sexes.
Animals ran from him. Shapeshifters seemed to have issues as well. In Miami the three werewolves in the market went berserk. Of the berserkers, one was killed by the cow stampede, and the other two were apprehended and taken into police custody. The first survivor ripped out his own throat and bled to death in his cell. The other escaped and the upstanding members of the Miami PD blew the back of his head to pieces and collected the bounty. Some things even Lyc-V couldn’t fix. A shotgun blast to the head was one of them. The Miami PD had issued a formal apology to the Pack, but it was clear the Pack had no leg to stand on. In the cops’ place, I would’ve shot him down, too.
I tapped my notes with my fingernails. I had to warn Andrea about it. She was female, true, so she’d have some protection against the Steel Mary’s magic, but she was also beastkin. Lyc-V, the shapeshifting virus, infected people and animals alike. Sometimes, the result was an animal-were, a creature that had started life as a beast and gained the ability to turn into a human. Most animal-weres were violent, mute, sterile idiots, unable to cope with the rules of human society. Murder and rape had no meaning to them, which was why some shapeshifters killed them on sight, no questions asked. Very occasionally the animal-weres developed the ability to reason and learned to communicate. Even more occasionally they could procreate.
Andrea’s mother was a bouda, a werehyena, but her father was a hyenawere, which made her beastkin, the child of an animal. She hid this fact from everyone: from the Order, because they would jettison her from their ranks, and from the Pack, because some shapeshifters would kill her. Only a handful of people knew what she was and we all quietly decided to keep it to ourselves.
There was no telling what this guy’s power would do to her. If she panicked and ran or went berserk, we’d all be in deep shit.
The growing number of the Steel Mary’s flunkies worried me. According to Toby the bouncer, this guy told Joshua that he had an opening for two more gods. What did that mean? Was he gathering himself a posse and calling them gods?
I rubbed my face. His MO said he might move on to another city, but I had a feeling he would stick around. He was obviously building to some sort of goal, and if he got whatever it was he wanted from Joshua, that left the Steel Mary with only one would-be-god spot. Something big would happen when he filled his quota. Atlanta was the center of the South. The largest Pack was here, the largest Guild was here, the Southern MSDU was headquartered here. It made sense that Atlanta has been his goal all along. I didn’t know where he would hit next, but at least I could thrust some sticks into his wheels.
I pulled up the phone and grabbed the phone book. My tenure in the Mercenary Guild was about to pay off.
I dialed the first number. A gruff male voice answered. “Black Dog Tavern.”
“Hey, Keith, it’s Kate Daniels.”
“Hey, Order Kate, how are ya?”
I almost choked. Order Kate? Really? “I’m good. How about yourself?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain. What’re you hunting for today?”
“I’ve got a troublemaker who recently moved to town, a really tall guy in a tattered cloak. He likes to come into bars when the magic’s up and throw around some heavy-duty spells to start fights.”
“Sounds like a fun fella.”
Depends on your definition of fun. “Do you still have that girl working for you, Emily?”
“Yep, she’s here every night.”
“Apparently, this guy’s power bounces from ladies. Would you do me a huge favor and make sure you have Emily working during the magic waves? Give her my number and tell her to call me right away if any crazy fights break out. He’s costing the bar owners an arm and a leg in broken furniture.”
“Just so you know, he comes in here, it won’t be my furniture that will get broken. I’ll snap his legs.”
Sure you will. “You do that. But make sure you give the girl my number anyway? I know your crew can handle him, but humor me. I’d really like to get my hands on this guy.”
“Will do,” Keith said.
“Thanks.” I hung up. That was the best I was going to get. I slipped my fingers to the next number and dialed.
“Devil’s Pit,” a woman answered.
“Hey, Glenda, it’s Kate Daniels. How are you?”
“Good, how about yourself?”
“Still trucking. Listen, I’ve got this moron who just cruised into town. He likes to start fights and I want to head him off at the pass . . .”
In an hour and a half, I’d hit every tough-guy watering hole I could remember. I’d called PAD and apprised them of the situation. I’d called the regular cops and given them the description of the guy. I’d called the local gossips and asked them to spread the word around. I’d called the Guild, where the Clerk picked up the phone. I’d known the Clerk for years. A trim, middle-aged man, he manned the counter and all mercs saw him twice per every gig, first, when they got the job, and second, when they turned in their capture tickets at the end. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his name and the multitude of us knew him simply as “the Clerk.”
I gave him my spiel and he chuckled at me. “If he comes in here, I’ll just tell the fellas there is a gig ticket on his head. They’ll dismantle him to parts.”
“He’s a tough guy to deal with. Let Solomon know.”
“Sure.”
I could tell by his voice that he would blow me off. Just as well. I doubted the Guild’s founder would pay me any mind. Solomon Red didn’t even know my name. But I had to try. “I tell you what, put me through to him.”
“Sorry, he’s on DND.”
Do Not Disturb. Fine. “Give me his voice mail, then.” “Suit yourself.”
I left a long and detailed message, explaining all about the Steel Mary and his penchant for picking fights. Fat good it would do me.
Solomon Red was a legend, the king of the mole hill that was the Mercenary Guild. If mercs did have to elect a king, he probably would’ve gotten the job, too: huge, rust-haired, with a bulky jaw and different color eyes, one blue, one brown. He lived in the Guild, but was almost never seen, save at the obligatory Christmas celebration, when he personally gave out bonuses to the best mercs. In my s
ix-year tenure with the Guild, I had seen him exactly twice and not because I stood in the bonus line. I seriously doubted he’d listen to my warnings of a mysterious ass kicker in a torn cloak.
I called a couple of local dojos and the Red Guard and Fist & Shield, the other premier security guard outfit. I called to Biohazard and spoke to Patrice to bring her up to speed. Patrice liked what I had to say so much, she cursed for a full three minutes. She especially enjoyed the part where I explained how her staff had failed to make use of Jacksonville’s warning. I let her vent—it’s not often you got to hear the head of the Biohazard Rapid Response unit promise to rip out someone’s guts.
At two, I left to go home. I needed sleep and a new jaw, but if the guy in the cloak so much as showed his nose in one of Atlanta’s bars, I’d know about it first.
THE DOG AND I STOPPED AT THE OR DER’S STABLES and I checked out Marigold again. I did have a beat-up old truck by the name of Karmelion which ran on enchanted water, but it took a good fifteen minutes of intense chanting to get it started, and if the guy in the cloak attacked somewhere, I didn’t want to waste time begging my engine to start.
My apartment building came equipped with a set of garages, which the residents used for everything, from extra storage to makeshift stables. I used mine mostly to store wood for the winter and to put up an occasional mount I borrowed from the Order’s stables. With Marigold safely installed in the garage, the faithful canine and I went down to the store.
The corner store didn’t have clippers, so I generated a new plan, one that involved leaving the shaving of attack poodles to people who actually knew what they were doing. The dog and I jogged three miles to the groomer.
We stepped through the door, announced by a bell, and a smiling plump woman emerged from the depths of the place, glanced at the dog, and smiled wider. “What a lovely poodle.”
We both growled a little bit, I because of the poodle comment and the dog out of a sense of duty.
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