Magic Slays kd-5

by Ilona Andrews

  The countdown had begun. We had ten hours and fifty-nine minutes.

  Someone knocked. Curran went to the door. From where I lay, I could see his face in profile. His mouth curved. He came back, chuckling to himself.

  “Yes?”

  “The witches have sent you a gift.”

  MY PRESENT SAT BEHIND THE TABLE IN THE SMALLER conference room. It hid in the folds of a dark cloak. Only the hand was visible, a small feminine hand with manicured nails that gripped a spoon, stirring the tea in a blue cup. Jezebel leaned against the opposite wall, glaring at the cloaked woman as if she were a fire-spitting dragon. Barabas waited by the door. He saw me and smiled. It was a sharp, nasty smile, like a cat that had finally caught the mouse and was about to torture it to death.

  What now?

  I pulled my hair up into a bun and headed for the door. Barabas handed me a note in Evdokia’s curvy Russian script. It read:

  A gift for you, Katenka. Thank me later.

  Beware of gifts from Baba Yaga—they came with strings attached, and sometimes if you took them, you ended up in the oven as dinner.

  “Did she come alone?”

  “No, Evdokia’s daughters brought her.” Barabas’s grin got wider. “I checked into it and she and Grigorii have five children. They’re their own private Russian mafia.”

  I stepped through the door and took a seat at the table. The woman pulled her hood back, exposing a wealth of glossy red hair. Rowena.

  If she had pulled off her hood and turned out to be Medusa with her head full of vipers, I would’ve been less surprised.

  We looked at each other. A red feverish flush colored her cheeks. Bloodshot eyes, puffy nose. Slightly smeared eyeliner. Rowena had been crying. That was a first. Rowena kept her composure no matter what. The roof could cave in and she’d smile against the backdrop of falling rocks and ask you to do her the favor of moving toward the exit.

  “Okay,” I said. “I want an explanation. Now. What are you doing here?”

  Rowena swallowed. “Bozydar, the journeyman who killed himself today, was my nephew. I’m banned from navigation pending an investigation. I will be cleared of all charges and they will reinstate me.”

  “You seem very sure of that.”

  Rowena sniffed. “Ghastek is ambitious. Nataraja won’t last much longer; something happened, and he mostly hides in his quarters now. Ghastek and Mulradin are running things, and each one of them wants to be at the top. They are scrambling to form alliances. I’m ranked third in finesse and fourth in power, and I support Ghastek. He can’t afford to lose me.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Bozydar had a girl,” Rowena said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Her name is Christine. She would do anything for him. She loved him so much. I spoke to her. She said that my nephew had been recruited by the Keepers years ago, when my brother and his wife died. They were on Route 90 crossing over the Mississippi, when the bridges collapsed due to magic erosion. They drowned. Bozydar was pulled out of the river comatose. By the time I found him, they’d shipped him to an orphanage.” Rowena clenched her hands. “He suffered a lot of abuse. They’d done things to him. I’ve given him a chance at revenge, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t enough.”

  She fell silent. I waited for the rest.

  “He was doing things for the Keepers, and Christine helped him,” Rowena said. “She was in it knee-deep. She covered for him, she fed him classified information he needed; whatever he asked for, she did it.”

  “Is she a member of the Keepers?”

  “No.” Rowena shook her head. “She is just a foolish girl who was in love with a broken boy. When Palmetto was hit, she was horrified.”

  I bet.

  She gripped her slender fingers so hard, her manicured nails left red indents in her skin. “We have been publicly embarrassed, and Ghastek is looking for a scapegoat. If he finds out what Christine has done, he will purge her. Purged journeymen don’t go home, Kate. They disappear. One day she won’t be there for her shift and then the new schedule will be posted and everyone will know what happened to her. He’ll kill her, Kate, to demonstrate that he’s capable of making problems vanish.”

  I was still waiting for the punch line.

  “Christine is five months pregnant,” Rowena said.

  Ah. Here we go.

  “People in my family have a difficult time with fertility. I’ve been trying to have a child for years. So far, I’ve failed. Bozydar was the only relative I had. Now he’s dead and his baby is my only family. Do you have any family, Kate?”

  Now there was a loaded question. “No.”

  She leaned forward, her eyes wide and desperate. “This unborn baby is everything to me. I can’t protect Christine. Even if I give her money and send her away, Ghastek will find her. He can be so single-minded, it’s terrifying.”

  I finally put two and two together. “So you went to the witches.”

  “Yes,” Rowena murmured. “Yes, I did. My family has roots in that world. So I went and offered the covens anything they wanted to hide Christine.”

  She must’ve been truly desperate. “What’s the price?”

  Rowena looked up at me. “Three years of service. To you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They bound me to you for three years. I swore a blood oath. I will do whatever you require, and I am sworn to never speak of it.” She raised her hand. A fresh scar cleaved her palm. “I don’t understand any of it, and if Ghastek finds out that I helped Christine or that I came here, I am dead. So.” Rowena leaned on the table. “What service can I perform for you?”

  I rested my elbow on the table, leaned against my hand, and exhaled. To have access to a qualified necromancer was akin to finding a case of ammo in the middle of a gunfight. Here was my chance to learn and train. I needed her desperately. Unfortunately, I trusted her about as far as I could throw her. I was strong and she was small, but it still wasn’t very far.

  “The problem is, I don’t trust you,” I said.

  “I don’t trust you either,” she said. “But if I don’t do as they say, Christine’s life is forfeit.”

  “They actually made you swear to it.”

  She nodded. “She was right there. She stood right there when I swore. She heard every word. If they kill her, she will know it’s because I failed.”

  Note to self: avoid being in debt to the witches like the plague.

  “Whatever it is you want, Kate, I will do it. No matter how foul. Even if it means debasing and humiliating myself . . .”

  Fantastic. Who did she think I was, exactly? “I guess we will start with humiliation, move onto debasing, and perhaps do some torture for a spiffy finish.” I glanced at Jezebel. “Is our Torturer in residence?”

  Rowena opened her mouth, looking as if she were about to say something sharp, and must’ve thought better of it, because she clamped it shut.

  “How accomplished are you in necromancy?”

  She gathered herself. “I’m rated as Master of the Dead of the Third Caliber, Level Two, which means I can simultaneously hold three vampires and effectively pilot two at the time. I’ve passed all the prerequisite examinations. I rank third in finesse and fourth in power in Atlanta and seventy-first overall among the People. That rank is misleading, as when you’re that high up, the differences between the ranks are minute. For example, the range of the person above me is only twenty inches longer than mine. I hold the shield of the Silver Legion. The Gold Legion is—”

  “Roland’s top fifty,” I finished. “You had to climb the Ladder, correct?” The Ladder was Roland’s way of promoting education among the People. Each step of the ladder consisted of a work on magic, necromancy, or philosophy. Some steps were books, some scrolls. Once you mastered a step, you took a test to prove your knowledge. The more steps, the higher the pay.

  Rowena’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, the Ladder of Knowledge. You have to complete ten to be rated as a Second Caliber Journeyman, and twenty-five t
o obtain the title of Master. How do you know this?”

  “How many steps did you complete?”

  “Eighty-nine,” she said.

  “And Ghastek?”

  “One hundred and sixty-five.” She grimaced. “The man is a machine. As I’ve said, Ghastek can be extremely single-minded. If you are considering using me against him, I will obey, of course, but you should understand that though I can injure him, he’ll win this fight.”

  “When Roland made Arez, he used a ritual to purge him of loupism. The technique involves withdrawing a person’s blood and purifying it. Are you familiar with it? Rowena?”

  Rowena decided it would be a good time to close her mouth. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it?”

  “It’s the same process he uses to create his Chosen,” she said. “You receive a gift of his blood and power, but in return you’re bound to him forever. He doesn’t use it often.”

  “Is Hugh d’Ambray bound to him?”

  “Yes.”

  I’d thought as much. Since both Arez and Hugh had been preceptors of the Order of Iron Dogs and were bound to Roland, Voron must’ve been bound, too. That was why my mother had stayed behind to fight Roland. Voron couldn’t disobey a direct order from Roland. If my father had ordered him to hand me over, Voron would’ve done it; he’d have had no choice.

  “Have you ever seen it done?”

  She shook her head. “Only what I have read.”

  “Is the use of the obedience power word necessary?”

  “Yes. That’s what gives him control over the blood once it’s removed from the body.”

  I leaned back. There was no way around it. If she survived, Julie would be bound to me forever.

  “Kate, it’s a very difficult ritual. Other people, high-ranking members of the Gold Legion, have tried and failed. You can’t just do something like that. Roland’s blood and power are unique.”

  Yes, yes.

  Rowena kept going. “I’ve met him, when I was initiated into the Silver Legion. The magic radiating through his blood is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.”

  To the right, Jezebel rolled her eyes.

  “It’s like meeting a god in person. It’s . . . I can’t even describe it.”

  I wondered what she would do if I cut my forearm, dipped my fingers into the red, and touched her hand with it. Was it something like this?

  I bet she would jump.

  I folded my arms on my chest instead. “Just tell me about the ritual, Rowena. That’s all I need for now.”

  She was looking past me. I glanced behind me and saw Curran looking through the glass doors, radiating menace. He opened the door. “The Keepers were sighted at Nameless Square. I need you.”

  I looked at Jezebel. “Get our guest some paper. Once she writes everything down, make sure she leaves safely.”

  CHAPTER 23

  I CROUCHED ON THE HUGE CONCRETE BOULDER jutting from the pavement like the stern of a sinking ship. To the left, an abandoned building rose from the street, its stucco and concrete long turned to dust. Only a rusty cage of the framework remained, thrusting brown grates to the sunlit morning sky. Down below, the wreckage of Downtown unrolled: oncesolid buildings reduced to heaps of rubble and abandoned ruins, crisscrossed by roads, once busy, now mostly atrophied, and stubby blocky structures born of the new age. To the right, the golden dome of the Georgia State Capitol building caught the light, the copper statue of Miss Liberty on its top thrusting her torch upward. To the left, in the distance, Unicorn Lane boiled with wild magic. The air shimmered there as a dark mist rose between the fallen high-rises marked with garish stains of magic-mutated vegetation.

  I scanned the horizon. Nothing.

  The sighting at Nameless Square turned out to be a bust. Someone had caught a glimpse of a large metal cylinder and sounded the alarm too early. The metal cylinder turned out to be a massive charged-air converter being installed at the Capitol as a backup system, in case the main charged-air lines went down. Since then we’d been to a half dozen spots within the city, as the magic users scouring the city for the Keepers raised the alarm here and there. Every lead sounded promising, and every lead turned out to be a miss. We were playing Whack-A-Mole and we were almost out of time.

  I squinted at the sun. Around ten. Four hours left? Less? Atlanta was a huge sprawling beast. Every ruin doubled as a potential hiding place.

  I hadn’t seen Jim or Andrea or Derek since yesterday. It worried me.

  Below me, Curran gathered himself, jumped ten feet in the air, bounced off the concrete into another jump, then another, and landed next to me.

  “Me Kate. You Tarzan?”

  “No.” Curran bared his teeth at me. “In the first book, he grabs a lion by the tail and pulls it. Never gonna happen. First, an adult male lion weighs five hundred pounds. Second, you grab my tail, I’ll turn around and take your face off.” He surveyed the city.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  Curran stroked my back. “If the countdown is down to an hour and we still don’t know where it is, I want you to leave.”

  I turned to him.

  “The children are out of the Keep,” Curran said. “They were shipped out overnight into the Wood.” The Wood, otherwise known as Chattahoochee National Forest, served as the hunting grounds for the Pack. Curran had bought a hundred-year lease, and once a month each shapeshifter made a pilgrimage there to run among the trees without his or her human skin. “They have orders to scatter. Julie is in Augusta under heavy sedation. Barabas and two of our guards are with her.”

  “I’m staying,” I told him.

  “No.” His eyes were clear, his voice calm. “You owe me for agreeing to the ritual. If the countdown reaches one hour and we still have no leads, you will leave. The Pack must have an alpha. You will take over. The betas from each clan have evacuated; they are spread out all over the state. They will be your new Council.”

  Fear grabbed my throat and squeezed, crushing. In a blink I could lose him. “I can’t run the Pack, Curran. You’re kidding yourself.”

  He looked at me. He wasn’t giving me a hard stare; he just looked at me. “I need you to tell me that you will do this. No arguments, no bullshit heroics. Just do this for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want you to be safe. I want you to survive and if I’m not there to protect you, the Pack will be the next best thing. Promise me,” he said.

  “Okay,” I told him. “But if we find them, I’m staying to the end.”

  A bright burst of green blossomed to the right. South. A new lead. What was south of the Capitol. . . “The airport?”

  Curran swore.

  BEFORE THE SHIFT, THE HARTSFIELD-JACKSON AIRPORT had served as the primary hub for all flights to the Southern United States. Almost three miles wide and flanked by highways on all sides, the airport ate a huge chunk of the city’s Southside. The damn place was so big, there was a train going through it. If you died in the South, you had to stop in Atlanta for a layover before getting to the other side. The Shift fixed that right up. The commercial aviation industry took a century to grow and only five minutes to die, as the first magic wave dropped five thousand planes out of the sky. Overnight, the airport was dead.

  The structure didn’t sit abandoned for too long. When the MSDU officially came into being, christened in the blood of the Three-Month Riots, the local Unit took over the airport, turning it into a fortified base and the HQ of military operations for the Southeast. Over the decades that followed, the MSDU’s forces had continued steadily increasing the airport’s defenses, turning it into a full-fledged fortress.

  As I drove along a narrow access road, I could see the edge of the runways, the concourse, and beyond them the white and sea-foam spire of the control tower. The place looked impenetrable. The long gray building of the terminal bristled with siege engines and machine guns, aided by square boxes of concrete bunkers. A hundred yards out, the second row of bunkers guarded the concourse. Between th
e bunkers and us lay half a mile of clear ground. Nothing but the old pavement of the runways and brownish grass, mowed down to mere fuzz. No cover, no safe approach, nothing.

  Three wards shimmered in the air. The first sheathed the tower in a bluish translucent cocoon. The second rose just past the bunkers. Glowing threads of pale magic wound through it, swirling like colors on a soap bubble. The third and final ward, a translucent wall tinted with red, extended the length of the field.

  Why were all three wards up? MSDU usually didn’t bother with activating the defensive spells unless they had to contain something nasty, and even then, only the perimeter and the killing field ward went active. I could see the killing field to the left—no ward shielded it. What the hell was going on?

  “Could the Keepers have taken the MSDU?” I murmured.

  Curran stirred in the passenger seat. “If they have, the device is in the tower.”

  I’d stick the device in some sort of storage room in some forgotten concourse, but if the Keepers somehow claimed the base, they would choose the tower. They knew we were coming. The tower was an excellent place for their last stand. Stick enough sharpshooters with crossbows at the top and we’d all look like hedgehogs by the time we got to it. Assuming we’d manage to breach all the other defenses first.

  “The red ward is a bouncer,” I said. “It’s not too hard to break. With all of our magic juice, we can breach it in fifteen, twenty minutes. We go through it, and it will bounce shut right back behind us. We’ll be pinned between that ward and whatever is in those front bunkers.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The red is more opaque near the ground, which means magic is concentrated there. That’s usually a mark of a bouncer. Regular wards have uniform thickness, like the ones I used to have on my apartment. They can be opened or closed, but once they break, they take several magic waves to regenerate. This one will surge right back up.”

  “Your wards are transparent, too,” Curran said.

  “I could make them in color. Transparent wards take more effort. In this case they are warding an area about three miles in diameter. They went for the most bang for their buck—the strongest ward with the least effort. And to people who don’t know about wards, giant red domes look impressive.”