Magic Bleeds

by IIona Andrews

  He must’ve waited years to use that in a report. “Go on.”

  “According to the hotel staff, the poor man did try to discourage the femme fatale the best he could, but she was either dense or really hoped to take him for a ride. Having met her, I’d say both.”

  I sighed. I knew where this was going.

  “When Miss Nash approached, her fella informed the scantily clad female that Miss Nash and he were together. He says the female appraised Miss Nash as ‘cute.’ ”

  I put my head down and bumped it on the table a couple of times.

  The two furry caterpillars Beau used as his eyebrows crept up. “Do you need a minute?”

  “No, I’ll be alright. Sorry.”

  “It seems that the young woman made some indelicate suggestion of a threesome. Nobody is quite sure what happened next, but everybody agrees it was damn fast. When I got there, Miss Nash was standing by the hot tub in a small bikini, pointing the business end of a SIG-Sauer P-226 at her fella and concerned members of the hotel staff, while dunking the scantily clad female’s head under the water and asking, ‘Who’s diving for clams now, bitch?’ ”

  My pain must’ve reflected on my face, because Beau reached into his desk drawer and handed me a small bottle of aspirin. I popped two tablets into my mouth and swallowed, grimacing against the bitterness. “Then what?”

  “Well, Miss Nash and I had a conversation. I bet that she wouldn’t shoot a badge and I won that bet. She had no ID on her—it was a very small bikini—so we invited her, her fella, and the aggrieved party to be our guests here in this lovely jailhouse. Spending the night with us calmed her down.”

  Oh, boy. “She had no ID, but she had a gun?”

  “Brought it in a towel, from what I understand.”

  Why wasn’t I surprised? “She’s a knight.”

  “I figured that when she called the Order.”

  I took the parcel off my lap, placed it on his desk, and carefully unwrapped the rags. Beau sucked in a lungful of air in a sharp breath.

  A beautiful rapier lay in the rags.

  “The schiavona,” I said. “The preferred weapon of Dalmatian Slavs, who served in the Venetian Doge Guard in the sixteenth century. Deep basket hilt.” I traced the gleaming spider web of deceptively narrow metal strips forming the sword’s guard. “Thirty-six-point-seven-inch blade, efficient for both cut and thrust. A genuine Ragnas Dream sword.”

  I turned the schiavona to the side, letting the light of the feylantern catch the stylized RD on the ornate pommel. Ragnas Dream didn’t make swords, he created masterpieces. The schiavona alone would pay the mortgages on both my apartment and my father’s house in Savannah for a year. Greg, my deceased guardian, had purchased it years ago and hung it on a wall in his library, the way one would display a treasured work of art. It was the kind of sword that would make a life-long pacifist look for tall boots and a hat with feathers.

  Beau’s face acquired a greenish tint.

  “Breathe, Beau.”

  He exhaled in a rush. “May I?”

  Every person had a weakness. Beau loved rapiers. I smiled. Once he touched it, I had him. “Feel free.”

  He got up, took the rapier gently, as if it were made of glass, and slid his big hand around the leather hilt. He raised the sword point up, admiring the elegant steel blade. A deep serenity claimed his face. Beau thrust, a textbook perfect, liquid movement, elegant and precise and so completely at odds with his huge body. “Christ,” he murmured. “It’s perfect.”

  “She was never here,” I told him. “Her ‘fella’ was never here. You don’t know their names and you’ve never seen them before.”

  Beau was a very good cop, because he made himself put the rapier down. “Are you trying to bribe a law enforcement official, Kate?”

  “I’m trying to present a law enforcement official with a token of appreciation for his delicate handling of the Order’s personnel issues. Knights of the Order are under a lot of pressure. Andrea Nash is one of the best knights I’ve ever met.”

  Beau looked at the schiavona. A minute stretched into eternity.

  I gave him a wide smile. “Oh, and one more thing.” I reached over and touched the pale opal in the base of the hilt.

  Three. Two.

  One.

  The sword hummed a single perfect chime, like a silver bell. A thin line of red grew from the hilt down the blade, branching in curling shoots like an ornate vine until it finally reached the point. Beau turned pale.

  “Enchanted blade. Never needs sharpening or oiling. I forgot to mention that part,” I said.

  Beau tore his gaze from the schiavona. “Take them and make sure they don’t come back.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER ANDREA, RAPHAEL, AND I stepped out of the jailhouse into a frigid overcast day. Both Raphael and Andrea wore the orange potato sacks that passed for Milton Jail uniforms.

  “Assault.” I counted off on my fingers. “Assault with a deadly weapon. Conduct unbecoming a knight. Endangerment of civilians. Reckless use of a firearm in a public place. Resisting arrest. Drunk and disorderly.”

  “I was neither drunk nor disorderly.” Andrea clenched her teeth.

  “No, I’m sure you were drowning her in a completely calm and professional manner. Beau Clayton is a crack shot. You’re lucky he didn’t empty his clip into your head. You brought a gun to the hot tub. Who does that?”

  Andrea folded her hands on her chest. “Don’t hassle me about my guns. You drag that sword everywhere. The whole thing was his idea. I wanted to go on a weekend.”

  I looked at Raphael. He hit me with a dazzling smile. If I had any capacity for swooning, I would’ve hit the floor like a log. Some men were handsome. Some were sexy. Raphael was scorching hot. Not traditionally handsome, he had dark blue eyes, intense and heated from within by a fire that instantly made you think of sheets and skin. Coupled with his long black hair and the toned, supple body of a shapeshifter, the effect was shocking to all things female. Since he was my best friend’s honey bunny, I was pretty much immune to his evil powers, but once in a while he caught me off-guard.

  “It was the only night that was available in the next six months,” he said, “and I had to call in a favor to get it.”

  Andrea waved her hands around. “And we spent it in a jailhouse. Do you have any idea how hard it is to go out in public with him? We can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything, because he gets hit on all the time. Sometimes women come up to him like I’m not even there!”

  “I sympathize, but you can’t drown them, Andrea. You’re trained to kill and they aren’t. It’s not exactly a fair fight.”

  “Fuck fair! Fuck you and fuck him, and whatever.”

  She strode off.

  Raphael was grinning ear to ear.

  “Well, you’re taking it well.”

  His eyes shone with a faint ruby sheen. “Mating frenzy.”

  “What?”

  “When two shapeshifters become mated, we go crazy for a few weeks. It’s all about unreasonable aggression and irrational snarling at anyone who looks at your mate a second too long.”

  “And you’re loving every moment of it.”

  He bobbed his head up and down. “I’ve earned it.”

  Andrea reversed her course and came up to us. “I’m sorry I was an ass. Thank you. I owe you one.”

  “No big,” I told her.

  She looked at Raphael. “I’d like to go home.”

  He bowed with an exaggerated flourish. “Your wish is my command, my lady. We need to go back to the hotel, scale the wall, and steal our car back.”

  “That sounds good.”

  They walked off.

  Mating frenzy. The world had gone completely insane on me. I sighed and went to get Marigold. I had an appointment with a sexual deviant and I didn’t want to be late.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN I TOLD SAIMAN THAT I RECOGNIZED HIS eyes, I wasn’t lying. He looked at the world through a prism of intellect, arrogance, and subtle but
smug contempt, and he was unable to hide it. It took me precisely two seconds to zero in on him in a half-deserted Guild Hall, but this time it wasn’t his eyes that did it.

  Today he chose to appear as a lean male in his early thirties. When I entered, he stood with his face in profile, casually speaking to Bob, Ivera, Ken, and Juke seated at a table. Saiman’s black jacket showed a light Mandarin influence with a high collar and a formfitting cut that accentuated his narrow waist and the straight line of his shoulders. Dark pants hugged his legs, showcasing muscular thighs, but his was the smooth, long muscle of a fencer or a runner, not the bulk of a weightlifter or the crisp definition of a martial artist. His hair, the color of dark alder wood, fell down to his waist without a trace of a curl.

  Saiman turned at my approach, presenting me with a well-defined oval of a face: crisp jawline, a wide nose with a shallow bridge, and almond-shaped, slightly hooded eyes with shockingly green irises. He oozed professionalism and expertise the way I sometimes emanated threat. Had I not known who he was and met him on the street, I would’ve thought him one of the high mages from the local college, the type who could decipher three-thousand-year-old runes, speak a half-dozen dead languages, and level a city block with a sweep of his hand. He stood out among the mercs present in the Hall like a professor of medieval studies in a bodybuilder bar.

  Saiman smiled, showing even white teeth, and came toward me, gracefully stepping past a large wooden trunk.

  “Kate,” he said, his voice a smooth tenor. “You look lovely. The cloak, in particular, is an intimidating touch.”

  “I strive to menace,” I said.

  “Do you like my working persona?” Saiman asked softly. “An aesthetically pleasing combination of intelligence and elegance, wouldn’t you say?”

  Aren’t we pleased with ourselves. “Are you Chinese, Japanese, half-white? I can’t tell, your features are neither here nor there.”

  “I’m inscrutable, mysterious, and intellectual.”

  He forgot conceited. “Did you have any trouble getting that ego through the door?”

  Saiman didn’t even blink. “Not in the least.”

  “Have you been able to glean any information from the eyewitnesses using your mysterious intellect?”

  “Not yet. They do seem ill at ease at the moment.”

  The Four Horsemen looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here. I surveyed the hall. Out of the twenty or so calls I had made this morning, fourteen people showed up, including Mark, who stood leaning against the wall, a sour look on his face. A lot of familiar faces. The movers and shakers of the Guild had turned out to watch Saiman and me work.

  I reached into my cloak and pulled out a plastic bag with a piece of parchment in it.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is a magic parchment.”

  Saiman took the bag with long, slender fingers, held the parchment to the light, and frowned. “Blank. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

  I took a piece of paper from my pocket. “This is the list of tests ran on the parchment by PAD.”

  Saiman scanned the list. A narrow smile curved his lips. “Amusing. Twenty-four hours. I’ll tell you what is written on it, or I’ll tell you who can read it.” He slipped the parchment into his inside pocket. “Shall we?”

  I turned to the mercs. “We need five volunteers. Don’t volunteer if you didn’t get a good look at the guy.”

  Bob raised his hand. “The four of us will do it.”

  “I need one more,” I said.

  Mark came forward. “I’ll do it.”

  Juke sneered down her Goth Tinker Bell nose, decorated with a tiny stud. “You weren’t even there.”

  Mark gave her a grim look. “I was there for the end.”

  They glared at each other.

  “Let us not argue,” Saiman said. “The five of you will do splendidly.”

  He knelt by the trunk. It was a large, rectangular trunk, made of old scarred wood reinforced with strips of metal. Saiman flicked his fingers and produced a piece of chalk with the buttery grace of a trained magician. He drew a complex symbol on top of the trunk. A dry metallic click sounded from the inside. Slowly and with great care, Saiman lifted the lid and took out a bowling ball. Blue and green, swirled with a gold marbleized pattern, the ball had seen some wear and tear.

  “Have you ever heard of David Miller, Kate?” Saiman asked.

  “No.”

  Saiman reached into the trunk and retrieved a plastic pitcher tinted with hunter green. “David Miller was the magic equivalent of an idiot savant. All tests showed that he had an unparalleled magic power. He constantly emanated it the way an electric lamp emanates heat.” He set the pitcher next to the bowling ball. “However, despite numerous attempts to train him, Miller never learned to use his gift. He led a perfectly ordinary life and died a perfectly average death from heart failure at the age of sixty-seven. After he had passed on, it was discovered that the objects he had handled most during his life had gained a magic significance. By manipulating them, their owner can achieve a rather surprising and occasionally useful effect.”

  Interesting. “Let me guess, you hunted the objects down and acquired them?”

  “Not all of them,” Saiman said. “Miller’s descendants made a concerted effort to scatter the objects, selling them to different buyers. They had agreed that concentrating all of that power in the hands of a single person was foolhardy. But I will collect them all, eventually.”

  “If they were worried, why sell the objects at all?” Mark asked.

  Saiman smiled. “The lack of money is the root of all evil, Mr. Meadows.”

  Mark blinked. My guess was, nobody ever called him by his last name. “I thought it was ‘the love’ of money.”

  “Spoken like a man who never went hungry,” Ivera said.

  “Besides,” Saiman continued, “the family had concerns for their safety. They were afraid they would be robbed and murdered by enterprising parties interested in Miller’s collection. Considering the worth of the objects, their worries were quite valid.”

  He extracted a key chain from the trunk and carefully closed it. “I’ll need a pitcher of water and five glasses, please.”

  A couple of mercs brought over a full glass pitcher from the cafeteria and five glasses. Saiman surveyed the floor and headed to the front door, chalk in hand. He drew a semicircle about ten feet from the doorway, the curve facing the center of the room and chalked an odd symbol into it. Then he crossed to the spot of Solomon’s death, drew another larger semicircle, straight side flush against the elevator shaft, and filled it with perfectly round circles. I counted. Ten.

  “Bowling pins?” I asked.

  “Precisely.”

  Saiman returned to the table, freed the keys from the chain, and handed each of the five keys to the Four Horsemen and Mark. “Hold them between your hands and try to recall the event in your mind. What did you see? What did you hear? What smells floated in the air?”

  Saiman poured the water from the glass pitcher into Miller’s plastic one.

  Ken, the Hungarian mage, studied the key. “What sort of magic is this?”

  “Modern magic,” Saiman said. “Each age has its own magic traditions. This is ours. It’s unlikely that most of you will see a repetition of this ritual in your lifetime. This magic is extremely rare and very taxing. I only perform it for very special clients.” He smiled at me.

  Oh good. He just made everyone involved think we were sleeping together.

  I smiled back. “I’ll be sure to inform the knight-protector that he should be very generous in his compensation.” Right back at you. Let them scrub the image of a naked Ted Moynohan out of their brains.

  After half a minute, he collected the keys, slipped them back onto the keychain, and dropped it into the pitcher. The keys sank to the bottom. Magic pulsed from the pitcher, breaking against me. It felt like someone had clamped a furry soft paw over my eyes and ears, then vanished.

  Saiman poured a
n inch of water into each glass and glanced at the eyewitnesses. “Drink, please.”

  Juke grimaced. “That shit ain’t sanitary.”

  “I’m sure you’ve swallowed much worse, Amelia,” Saiman said.

  “Amelia,” I said. “What a lovely name, Juke.”

  She scowled at me. “Drop dead.”

  “Drink the water,” I told her.

  She skewed her face. “I already told you everything I saw.”

  “Our memory is much more detailed than our recall,” Saiman said. “You might be surprised how much you do remember.”

  Juke gulped it down.

  Bob drank his with a stoic expression. Ivera peered into hers and drained it. Mark tossed his down like it was whiskey. Ken was the last. He drank his water very slowly, in sips, holding each swallow in his mouth, probably trying to glean some sort of knowledge from it.

  Saiman picked up the bowling ball. “Please remain sitting through the event. Don’t interfere with the illusion in any manner. Kate, you may move if you wish; however, don’t intersect the image. Is everyone clear?”

  An assortment of affirmative noises answered him. He strode to the first semicircle, held the ball at his chest for a long moment, bent, and sent it hurtling across the hall’s floor. As the ball rolled, a different reality bloomed in its wake, as if someone had pulled a zipper on the world, revealing the past. Solomon’s murder took place in the afternoon, and the light slanted at a different angle from the present midmorning sun, clearly marking the edges of the illusion: an oval about thirty feet at its widest stretching through the hall.

  The ball smashed into the second semicircle, scattering the imaginary pins. It would’ve been a perfect strike.

  Two men dropped from above into the oval. One was Solomon, his eyes bulging, his face bright red. He landed badly, on his back, but jumped to his feet.