Oh God.
Jennifer clamped her hand over her mouth and fled out of the room.
“Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird . . .”
Margo stirred and crawled to her mother, dragging one twisted leg behind her. Maddie followed. They huddled together, the three of them, pressed against the Plexiglas. Meredith kept singing, desperate. Her lullaby was woven from years of love and hope, and all of it was now dying. My eyes teared.
Julie rose and slipped out of the room.
I listened to Meredith sing and wished I had more magic. Different magic. I wished I were more. From the time I could remember, my adoptive father, Voron, had honed me into a weapon. My earliest memory was of eating ice cream and holding my saber on my lap. I had learned dozens of martial arts styles; I fought in arenas and sand pits; I could walk into the wilderness and emerge months later, no worse for wear. I could control the undead, which I hid from everyone. I could mold my blood into a solid spike and use it as a weapon. I’d learned several power words, words in a language so primal, so potent, that they commanded the raw magic itself. One couldn’t just know them; you had to make them yours or die. I fought against them and made them my own. At the height of a magic tsunami, I had used one to force a demonic army to kneel before me.
And none of it could help me now. All of my power, and I couldn’t help two scared girls and their mother crying her heart out. I could only destroy, and kill, and crush. I wished I could make this go away, just wave my arms, pay whatever price I had to pay, and make everything be okay. I wanted so desperately to make everything okay.
Meredith had fallen silent.
Julie returned, carrying a Snickers bar. She unwrapped it with shaking fingers, broke the candy in half, and dropped each piece through the slits.
Maddie reached out. Her hand with four stubby nubs of fingers and a single four-inch claw speared the candy. She pulled it to her. Her jaws unhinged and she took one tiny bite of chocolate with crooked teeth. My heart was breaking.
Margo lunged at the glass, snarling and crying. The half-a-foot-thick Plexiglas didn’t even shudder. She hurled herself against it again, and again, wailing. Each time her body hit the wall, Meredith’s shoulders jerked.
The door opened. I saw the familiar muscular body and short blond hair. Curran.
He must’ve been out of the Keep, because instead of his regular sweatpants, he wore jeans. When you looked at him, you got an overwhelming impression of strength. His broad shoulders and powerful chest strained his T-shirt. Carved biceps bulged on his arms. His stomach was flat and hard. Everything about him spoke of sheer physical power, contained but ready to be released. He moved like a cat on the prowl, graceful, supple, and completely quiet, stalking the Keep’s hallways, a lion in his stone lair. If I didn’t know him and I saw him coming in a dark alley, I’d make myself scarce.
His physical presence was alarming, but his real power was in his eyes. The moment you looked into his gray irises, you knew he would tolerate no challenge to his authority, and if his eyes turned gold, you knew you were going to die. In a fit of cosmic irony, he had fallen in love with me. I challenged his authority on a weekly basis.
Curran didn’t look at me. Usually when he entered the room, our stares would cross for that silent moment of connection, a quick check of Hey, are you okay? He wasn’t looking at me and his face was grim. Something was seriously wrong. Something besides Maddie.
Curran walked past me to Doolittle and handed him a small plastic bag filled with olive-colored paste.
Doolittle opened the bag and sniffed the contents. His eyes widened. “Where . . .”
Curran shook his head.
“Is that the panacea?” Meredith spun toward him, eyes suddenly alive again.
The panacea was produced by European shapeshifters, who guarded it like gold. The Pack had been trying to reverse engineer it for years and had gotten nowhere. The herbal mixture reduced chances of loupism at birth by seventy-five percent and reversed midtransformation in one third of teenagers. There used to be a man in Atlanta who somehow managed to smuggle it in small batches, which he sold to the Pack at exorbitant prices, but a few weeks ago the shapeshifters had found him floating in a pond with his throat cut. Jim’s security crew tracked the killers to the coast. They had sailed out of our jurisdiction. Now Curran held a bag of it. What have you been up to, Your Furry Majesty?
“There is only enough for a single dose,” Doolittle said.
Damn it. “Can you get more?”
Curran shook his head.
“You must choose,” Doolittle said.
“I can’t.” Meredith shrunk back.
“Don’t make her pick.” How the hell could you choose one child over the other?
“Split it,” Curran said.
Doolittle shook his head. “My lord, we have a chance to save one of them . . .”
“I said split it.” Curran growled. His eyes flashed gold. I was right. Something bad had happened, and it wasn’t just Maddie and Margo.
Doolittle clamped his mouth shut.
Curran moved back and leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.
The paste was split into two equal portions. Tony mixed each into a pound of ground beef and dropped it into the cells. The children pounced on the meat, licking it off the floor. Seconds crawled by, towing minutes in their wake.
Margo jerked. The fur on her body melted. Her bones folded on themselves, shrank, realigned . . . She cried out, and a human girl, naked and bloody, fell to the floor.
Thank you. Thank you, whoever you are upstairs.
“Margo!” Meredith called. “Margo, honey, answer me. Answer me, baby.”
“Mom?” Margo whispered.
“My baby!”
Maddie’s body shuddered. Her limbs twisted. The distortion in her body shrank, but the signs of animal remained. My heart sank. It didn’t work.
“She’s down to two,” Doolittle said.
The shift coefficient, the measure of how much a body had shifted from one form to the other. “What does that mean?”
“It’s progress,” he said. “If we had more of the panacea, I would be optimistic.”
But we didn’t. Tony hadn’t just emptied the bag, he had cut it and rubbed the inside of the plastic on the meat and then scraped it clean with the back of the knife. Maddie was still going loup. We had to get more panacea. We had to save her.
“You can’t kill her!” Julie’s voice shot into high pitch. “You can’t!”
“How long can you keep the child under?” Curran asked.
“How long is necessary?” Doolittle asked.
“Three months,” Curran said.
Doolittle frowned. “You’re asking me to induce a coma.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes,” Doolittle said. “The alternative is termination.”
Curran’s voice was clipped. “Effective immediately, all loupism-related terminations of children are suspended. Sedate them instead.” He turned and walked out.
I paused for half a second to tell Julie that it would be okay and chased after him.
The hallway was empty. The Beast Lord was gone.
CHAPTER 2
I climbed the Stairs of Doom to the top floor. I had wanted to chase Curran down, but Julie was still freaked-out and Meredith ping-ponged from hugging one daughter to crying over another. She didn’t want us to induce a coma. She wanted more panacea and couldn’t understand that there was none to be had. It took the three of us—Doolittle, Julie, and me—over two hours to convince her that Maddie needed to be sedated. By the time I finally left the medical ward, Curran was long gone. The guards at the entrance saw him walk out, but nobody knew where he went.
I reached the guard station at the entrance to our floor. Living in the Keep was like trying to find privacy in a glass bowl, and the two top floors of the main tower were my refuge. Nobody entered here unless the Beast Lord’s personal guard vetted them, and they weren’t charitable when ap
proving visitors.
Sitting in a dark room watching a child suffer while her mother’s soul died bit by bit was more than I could handle. I needed to do something. I had to vent or I would explode.
I nodded at the guards and went down the hallway to a long glass wall that separated our private gym. I took off my shoes and stepped inside. Weights waited for me, some free, some attached to machines. Several heavy punching bags hung from chains in the corner, next to a speed bag. Swords, axes, and spears rested in the hooks on the wall.
My adoptive father, Voron, died when I was fifteen, and afterward my guardian, Greg Feldman, took care of me. Greg had spent years accumulating a collection of weapons and artifacts, which he left to me. It was all gone now. My aunt paid us a visit and left a chunk of Atlanta a smoking ruin, including the apartment I had inherited from Greg. But I was rebuilding it slowly. I didn’t have any prized weapons in my collection, except for Slayer, my saber, but all of my weapons were functional and well made.
I shrugged off the back sheath with Slayer in it, lowered it to the floor, and did push-ups for a couple of minutes to warm up, but my weight wasn’t enough, so I switched to the bag, hammering punches and spinning kicks. The pressure, building in me for the past several hours, fueled me. The bag shuddered from the impact.
It wasn’t fair that children went loup. It wasn’t fair that there were no warning signs. It wasn’t fair that I could do absolutely nothing about it. It wasn’t fair that if Curran and I ever had children, I would be like Jennifer, stroking my stomach and terrified of the future. And if my children went loup, I’d have to kill them. The thought spurred me on, whipping me into a frenzy. I wouldn’t be able to do it. If Curran and I had a baby, I couldn’t kill him or her. I didn’t have it in me. Even thinking about it was like the shock of jumping into an iced-over pond.
I worked the bag for the better part of an hour, switched to weights, then did the bag again, trying to drive myself to near exhaustion. If I got tired enough, I would stop thinking.
Exhaustion proved elusive. I’d spent the last few weeks recuperating, training, eating well, and making love whenever I felt like it. I had more stamina than the battery bunny from the old commercials. Eventually I lost myself to the simple physical exertion. When I finally came up for air, sweat slicked my body and my muscles ached.
I took a Cherkassy saber off the wall and went and picked up Slayer. The saber had cost me an arm and a leg many years ago, when I still worked for the Mercenary Guild. I had kept it at my old house, and it had survived my aunt’s reign of terror.
I raised the two swords—the Cherkassy saber was heavier and more curved, while Slayer was lighter and straighter—and began to chop, loosening the muscles. One sword a shiny wide circle in front of me, one behind me, reverse, picking up speed until a whirlwind of sharp steel surrounded me. Slayer sang, whistling as it sliced the air, the pale, opaque blade like the ray of a steel sun. I reversed the direction, switching to the defense, and worked for another five minutes or so; while walking, I turned and saw Barabas standing by the glass.
A weremongoose, Barabas was raised in the bouda clan. They loved him, but it soon became apparent that he didn’t fit into the werehyena hierarchy, so Aunt B, the alpha of Clan Bouda, had offered his services to me. He and Jezebel, the other of Aunt B’s misfits, acted as my nannies. Jezebel watched my back, and Barabas had the unenviable task of steering me through the Pack’s politics and laws.
Slender and pale, Barabas was born with a chip on his shoulder, and he made everything into a statement, including his hair. It stood straight up on his head, forming spiky peaks of brilliant orange and pretending that it was on fire. Today, the hair was particularly aggressive. He looked electrocuted.
“Yes?”
Barabas opened the glass door and stepped into the gym, his eyes tracking the movement of my swords. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes you scare me, Kate.”
“Barabas, you grow two-inch claws and can bench-press a Shetland pony. And you find me scary?”
He nodded. “And I work with some very scary people. That should tell you something. How do you not cut yourself?”
“Practice.” I’d been practicing since I was tall enough to keep my swords from snagging on the ground.
“It looks impressive.”
“That’s mostly the point. This is the style of bladework used when you’re knocked off your horse and surrounded by enemies. It’s designed to let you carve your way out of the crowd as quickly as possible. Most people will see you doing this and decide they should be somewhere else.”
“I don’t doubt it. What if it’s one super swordsman guy that jumps in front of you?” Barabas asked.
I raised Slayer and drew a horizontal eight with the sword, rolling my wrist.
“Infinity symbol.”
“Butterfly.” I sped it up and added the second sword below. “One butterfly higher, one butterfly lower, switch arms, repeat as necessary. Throat, stomach, throat, stomach. Now he isn’t sure what to guard, so either you kill him or he gets out of your way, and you keep walking until you’re out of the crowd. Did you want something?”
“Curran is here.”
I stopped.
“He came in about an hour ago, stood here for a while, watching you, and went upstairs. I think I heard the roof door. I thought that perhaps he would come down, but it’s been a while, so I thought you might want to know.”
I put the saber down, grabbed Slayer and the sheath, and went down the hallway to a short staircase. The first landing led to our private quarters, the second to the roof. The roof was our sanctuary, a place we went when we wanted to pretend we were alone.
I pushed the heavy metal door open and stepped outside. The roof stretched before me, a wide rectangle of stone, bordered by a three-foot wall. In the distance, at the horizon, the skeleton of Atlanta rose against the backdrop of moonlit sky. Haze shrouded the ruined buildings, turning them pale blue, almost translucent, and the husk of the once-vibrant city seemed little more than a mirage. The night was almost over. I hadn’t realized so much time had passed.
Curran crouched in the center of the roof, on top of some cardboard. He was still wearing the same gray T-shirt and jeans. In front of him a black metal contraption lay on its side. It resembled half of a barrel with long metal bits protruding to the side. The long bits were probably legs. The other half of the barrel waited upside down to the left. An assortment of screws in small plastic bags lay scattered around, with an instruction manual nearby, its pages shifting in the breeze.
Curran looked at me. His eyes were the color of rain, solemn and grim. He looked like a man who was resigned to his fate but really didn’t like it. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t in a good place.
“Hey there, ass kicker.”
“That’s my line,” he said.
I made my voice sound casual. “What are you building?”
“A smoker.”
The fact that we already had a grill and a perfectly fine fire pit about ten feet behind him must’ve escaped his notice.
“Where did you get it?”
“Raphael’s reclamation crew pulled a bunch of these out of the rubble of an old home improvement store. He sent me one as a gift.”
Judging by the number of parts, this smoker was more complicated than a nuclear reactor. “Did you read the instructions?”
He shook his head.
“Why, were you afraid they’d take your man card away?”
“Are you going to help me or just make fun of me?”
“Can’t I do both?”
I found the instructions, flipped to the right page, and passed him the washers and nuts for his screws. He threaded them onto the bolts and tightened them with his fingers. The bolts groaned a bit. If I ever wanted to take this thing apart, I’d need a large wrench to do it. And possibly a hammer to hit the wrench when it wouldn’t move.
Curran lined up the hinges with the top of the smoker. They didn’t look
right.
“I think these hinges are backward.”
He shook his head. “It will fit.”
He forced the bolts through the hinge holes, tightened the screws, and tried to attach the top to the bottom. I watched him turn it around about six times. He threaded the bolts in, attached them, and stared at the mutilated smoker. The lid was upside down and backward.
Curran glared at it in disgust. “To hell with it.”
“What’s bugging you?”
He leaned against the wall. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Europe?”
“No.”
I came over to stand next to him.
“When I was twenty-two years old, Mike Wilson, the alpha of Ice Fury, came to me with an invitation to the Iberian Summit.”
Mike Wilson ran a pack in Alaska. It was the only pack in the United States that rivaled ours in size.
“Wilson’s wife was European, Belgian, I think, and they used to cross the Atlantic every couple of years to visit her family. She’s his ex-wife now. They had a falling out, so she took their daughter and went home to her parents.”
Considering that home was across the Atlantic Ocean, she must’ve really wanted away from Wilson. “Mike didn’t fight for his kid?”
“No. But ten years ago they were still together. They stopped in Atlanta on their way to the summit, and Wilson invited me to come with them to Spain. He made it sound like a deal for panacea was on the table, so I went.”
“How did it go?”
“I expected it to go badly. Turns out I was overly optimistic.” Curran crossed his arms on his chest, making his biceps bulge. “Things in Europe are different. The population density is higher, the magic traditions are wider spread, and many structures are old enough to stand through the magic waves. The shapeshifters are more numerous, and they started hammering out packs and claiming territory early on. There were nine different packs at the summit, nine sets of alphas, all of them strong, all of them ready to rip my throat out at any minute, and none of them honest. It was all big smiles to my face and claws at my back the moment I turned around.”
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