She gave me her own version of a hard stare. The funny blonde vanished and in her place sat a knight of the Order: hard, dangerous, and controlled. “That’s why you need me. You can’t do it alone.”
“Did you hear a word of what I said?”
“I heard you loud and clear. You don’t get to make my choices for me, Kate. Last time I checked, I was still in charge of my life.”
Fuck me. I raised my hands. “I give up.”
“Good,” she said. “Does this mean we can go back to Hugh?”
I sighed. “Fine. Tie your own noose.”
“What do you know about him?” Andrea pulled Hugh’s file toward her.
I passed her the notebook. “Everything there is to know up until the last twenty years. He was found by Voron when he was six. Roland saw potential in him. Voron was a genius swordsman, one in a million, and he was a decent commander, but Roland wanted a true Warlord.”
I tapped a piece of paper. “My father put me through a variety of trials. I fought in gladiator rings, I survived in the wilderness, I received training in a dozen martial arts. He did the same thing with Hugh. In a way, Hugh was a practice run for me.”
I refilled my cup.
“Voron trained me to be a lone wolf. I’m a self-reliant killer. I’m designed to cut through the ranks and kill my target. Hugh was groomed to lead armies. He fought in dozens of regiments in hundreds of conflicts, all across the world. Roland’s magic keeps him young. It makes him stronger than an ordinary human and harder to kill. Hugh is the ultimate warrior-general. He’s patient, cunning, and ruthless.”
“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working,” Andrea said.
“I’m trying to explain to you the kind of enemy Hugh is. Hugh won’t permit himself to be embarrassed. He’ll gather as much information as he can, so when he presents my existence to Roland, he’ll have a wall of facts to back it up. He won’t move until he has absolute proof of my ancestry. I’m guessing that right now he’s making circles around me, piecing my life together. He has patience and time. He can’t be bought off, intimidated, or convinced to let me alone. And I’m not sure I’m strong enough to kill him.”
Andrea’s face turned sour. “You don’t want to kill him. If you do that, Roland will flood the area with his people trying to figure out who nuked his Warlord.”
“Exactly.” I drank my now lukewarm tea. “My only option is to lay low and try not to draw any attention to myself. Voron has been dead for over a decade. Not that many people remember him. My track record is mediocre—I worked very hard to keep it that way. I shouldn’t be viewed as anything out of the ordinary.”
“That’s nice, but there is the matter of the sword,” Andrea said.
“Yeah.” There was the shattered sword. No matter what I told myself, I couldn’t dodge that bullet. There was a price for everything. The price for keeping my friends alive was being found and I paid it. At the time, I was sure I would die and risking discovery didn’t seem like a big deal.
“If the shit hits the fan, I can always disappear,” I said.
“What about Curran?” Andrea asked.
“What about him?”
“Fifteen hundred shapeshifters in a freaking castle will make anyone think twice about breaking in. Could you go to Curran? You guys are—”
“There is no me and Curran.” Saying it hurt. No bag to punch to relieve it. I smiled instead and poured us another cup of tea.
Andrea stirred hers with a spoon. “Did something happen?”
I told her everything, including what happened in the Guild. The more I talked, the more pained her face became.
“That was very asshole of him,” she said when I was done.
“No argument there.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. When he brought you back from the rakshasas, he almost killed Doolittle because he couldn’t fix you fast enough. I think he might actually be in love with you. Maybe he did come to your house looking for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You guys should talk.”
“I’m done talking.”
“Kate, don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t been yourself since you came back from leave. You’re . . .”
I gave her my look of doom. It bounced right off her.
“. . . grim. Really grim. It’s almost painful. You don’t joke, you don’t laugh, and you keep taking chances.” Andrea rubbed the rim of her teacup. “Did you have friends when you were growing up?”
“Ouch.” I rubbed my neck. “That’s a sharp change in the direction of this conversation. I think I got whiplash.”
Andrea leaned forward. “Friends, Kate. Did you have any?”
“Friends make you weak,” I told her.
“So I’m your first real friendship?”
“You could say that.” Jim was a friend too, but it wasn’t the same.
“And Curran’s your first real love?”
I rolled my eyes.
“You don’t know how to cope,” Andrea said softly.
“I’ve been doing well so far. It’s bound to go away eventually.”
Andrea chewed on her lip. “You know that I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself, and I don’t need a man to fight my wars for me. And if I wasn’t with Raphael, I would still be totally fine, and good at my job, and happy at times.” She took a deep breath. “With that in mind . . . A real broken heart never goes away. You can pull yourself together and you can function, but it’s not the same.”
I couldn’t drag this hurt around me for the rest of my life. I’d implode. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“I’m not finished. The thing is, people have a remarkable potential to injure you, but they also have a great power to help you heal. I didn’t understand this for the longest time.”
She leaned forward. “Raphael is hot and loaded and the sex is great, but that’s not why I’m with him. I mean, those things don’t hurt, but that’s not what keeps me there.”
If I had to guess, it would be respect for Raphael’s perseverance. Raphael, a werehyena, or bouda as they preferred to be called, loved Andrea beyond all reason. He courted her for months—unheard of for a bouda—and refused to give up until she finally let him into her life. The fact that he was the son of Aunt B, the bouda alpha, made things complicated but neither Raphael nor Andrea seemed to care.
Andrea smiled. “When I’m with him, I can feel myself getting better. It’s like he’s picking up broken pieces of me and putting me back together, and I don’t even know how he’s doing it. We never talk about it. We don’t go to therapy. He just loves me and that’s enough.”
“I’m happy for you,” I told her and meant it.
“Thank you. I know you’ll tell me to fuck off, but I think Curran loves you. Truly loves you. And I think you love him, Kate. That’s rare. Think about it—if he really stood you up, why would he be pissed off about the whole thing? You both can be assholes of the first order, so don’t let the two of you throw it away. If you’re going to walk away from it, at least walk away knowing the whole picture.”
“You’re right. Fuck off. I don’t need him,” I told her.
Andrea sighed quietly. “Of course you don’t.”
“More tea?”
She nodded. I poured her another cup and we drank in my quiet kitchen.
Later she left.
I took a small dish from the counter, pricked my arm with the point of my throwing knife, and let a few red drops fall into the dish. My blood brimmed with magic. It coursed just beyond the surface.
I pushed it.
The blood streamed, obeying my call, growing into inch-long needles, then crumbling into dust. The needles had lasted half a second? Maybe less.
At the end of the Midnight Games, when I lay dying in a golden cage, my blood felt like an extension of me. I could twist and shape it, bending it to my will, solidifying it again and again. I’d been struggling to replicate it for weeks and had been getting nowh
ere. I’d lost the power.
Blood was Roland’s greatest weapon. I didn’t cherish the prospect of facing Hugh d’Ambray without it.
The attack poodle stared expectantly at me. I washed the blood down the drain, sat on the floor so he could lay next to me, and petted his shaved back. If I closed my eyes, I could recall Curran’s scent. In my head, he grabbed me and spun around, shielding me as his body shook under the impact of the glass shards.
I felt terribly alone. The poodle must’ve sensed it because he put his head on my leg and licked me once. It didn’t help but I was grateful all the same.
CHAPTER 9
AN ODD CHOMPING NOISE CUT THROUGH MY SLEEP. My eyes snapped open.
Pieces of garbage lay strewn across my carpet, next to an overturned trash can. In the middle of it, the attack poodle methodically devoured my trash. As I watched, he tore a piece from a potato peel, raised his muzzle to the ceiling, chewing it with a nirvana-like rapture printed on his face, and bent down for more. A black substance stained his paws and muzzle. It had to be paint. Julie had gone Goth on me a couple of months ago. When she wasn’t at the boarding school, she stayed with me. She had picked the library as her bedroom and I’d let her paint it black. The poodle had gotten into her paint can.
“You’re so dead.”
Chomp, chomp, chomp.
The magic wave was still up and my apartment was freezing cold. I had a hard time sleeping in sweatpants—something about sweats under a blanket just didn’t agree with me—but this morning I definitely regretted my decision. My toes were so cold, it was a wonder they didn’t break off. I grabbed the blanket, stood up on my bed, and put my hand against the vent. Nothing. The building’s boiler was in its death throes. It had cut out twice in the past month. Even if all of the tenants pooled their money, we still couldn’t afford to replace the damn thing. Especially considering that we had already bought coal for the winter.
That left me with plan B. I glanced across the room to a small woodstove, half-covered by stacks of books. Building a wood fire right now seemed impossibly hard, so I bravely dropped the blanket and pulled on sweats as fast as I could.
Once dressed, I checked the head in the fridge. Still no decomposition. This whole investigation took the notion of “normal” undead behavior out back and blew its brains out with a sawed-off shotgun.
I walked the dog, sorted out the garbage, which took nearly twenty minutes, and tried the phone. Dial tone. No rhyme or reason to it, but one doesn’t look a gift phone in the mouth. I called to the Casino before the phone line decided to cut out on me. In ten seconds Ghastek came on the phone.
“I sincerely hope you have news, Kate. It’s been a long night and I was resting.”
This was likely the stupidest thing I could’ve done, but I had no idea who else to ask. “Are you familiar with the Dubal ritual?”
There was a tiny pause before he answered. “Of course. I’ve performed it on several occasions. However, I’m surprised you’re aware of it.”
He wouldn’t ask me how I knew about it, but he had to be dying of curiosity. Nobody except my guardian’s ex-wife knew I was able to pilot undead. The Dubal ritual required a great deal of raw power and a lot of knowledge. Ghastek viewed me as a thug. The idea that I was capable of it would never cross his mind and that’s the way I preferred it. “What would cause the ritual to fail?”
“Describe the manner of the failure.”
“Instead of the identity or location of the undead’s former navigator, the person performing the ritual saw themselves in the blood.”
Ghastek hummed to himself for a long breath. “The Dubal ritual lifts the imprint of the navigator’s mind from the undead’s brain. The blood streaming from the head isn’t central to the ritual; in fact, any dark surface will do. The dark background simply makes the image stand out more. If you stare for a few seconds at a lamp, then close your eyes or look at a dark object, you’ll see the glowing outline of the lamp. This phenomenon is called negative afterimage. The same principle applies here, except that the image is acquired from the mental footprint left on the brain of the undead.”
I filed that tidbit away for future reference. “Aha.” “There are two factors that could cause the practitioner to see themselves. One, too much time had passed or the undead had been unpiloted. How quickly was the ritual performed?”
“Within two hours of death.”
“Hmmm. Then the time lapse shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve been able to pull a reasonably decent image six hours after the termination of the undead. In this case we’re left with possibility number two: the navigator’s will was much stronger than that of the practitioner. If the navigator realized the undead was about to be terminated, he or she could shock it with a mental surge. We refer to it as searing. A seared brain is difficult to read. Lifting the image becomes a matter of raw power rather than skill. Is there a possibility that the navigator is much stronger than the practitioner?”
“Unlikely.” I had little skill, but in the raw power department, I would blow even Ghastek off the scale.
“What makes you say that?”
“I know how powerful the practitioner is.”
“So this is someone you know personally?”
Thin ice. Proceed with caution. “Yes.”
“Am I to understand that you were in possession of an undead head and you didn’t take it to me for identification?”
“Yes.” Oh boy.
Silence reigned. “There are four people in Atlanta, aside from the People’s personnel, capable of performing the Dubal ritual. I have their numbers in front of me. Of the four, Martina is the best, but she can’t match me in either finesse or power. Why would you use someone other than me?”
“I had my reasons.”
“I’m waiting to hear them.”
“I’d rather keep them to myself.”
“You disappoint me.”
I grimaced. “Why should you be any different?”
“Was it a vampire head?”
This wouldn’t go over well. “No.”
More silence. Finally he sighed. “Do you still have it?”
If I brought him the head, he’d lift my imprint from its mind. “It decomposed.”
Ghastek sighed again. “Kate, you had a unique undead specimen and you’ve denied me the opportunity to examine it. Instead, you’ve taken it to a hack, who’s obviously ignorant of the basic necromantic principles; otherwise we wouldn’t be engaged in this phone call. I trust you won’t make the same mistake in the future. Was there anything else?”
“No.”
A disconnect signal beeped in my ear.
I looked at the poodle. “I think I hurt his feelings.”
This petition was getting complicated in a hurry. On one side, the Steel Mary attacked the shapeshifters. On other side, undead mages tried to barbeque the Casino and the Guild. They didn’t seem connected, except that both the Steel Mary and the undead then attacked the Guild.
Maybe Roland had declared a free-for-all on the Pack and we were getting a flood of bounty hunters who thought they could take the shapeshifters on. But then the attack on the Casino made no sense.
The phone rang. I picked it up. “Kate Daniels.”
“It’s me,” Curran said. “I—”
I hung up.
The phone rang again. I unplugged it from the wall. Talking to Curran was beyond me at the moment.
WHEN I MADE IT INTO THE OFFICE, MOST OF THE coffee was already gone and what remained had cooked down to a syrup-thick brew that smelled toxic and tasted like poison. I got a mug anyway. I also stole a small yellow doughnut from the box of Duncan’s doughnuts in the rec room and fed it to the attack poodle in my office. He made a great production of it. First, he growled at the doughnut, just to show it who was boss. Then he nudged it with his nose. Then he licked it, until finally he snagged it into his mouth and chomped it with great pleasure, dropping crumbs all over the carpet. Watching him eat made me feel marginally bet
ter, but only just.
Mauro walked into my office, carrying a large paper box plastered with evidence tape. The poodle growled and snapped his teeth.
Mauro smiled. “He’s such a good doggie. So fierce.”
“He has a mad passion for garbage.”
“He probably lived on it for a while. Did you name him yet?” Mauro set the box on the table.
“No.”
“You should name him Beau. Beauregard. He looks like Beau. Anyway, this came for you from Savannah.”
“Thanks.”
He left and I checked the shipping manifest. Evidence pertaining to Savannah Mary #7, aka Steel Mary, aka the Guy in the Cloak. Oh goodie.
I reached over to lift the stack of paperwork out and my fingers grazed something solid. Hmm. I dragged it into the light. A lead box, six inches long, four inches wide, and three inches deep.
In the magic trade, people often referred to lead as black gold. Gold, being a noble metal, was inert. It didn’t rust, tarnish, corrode, or decay, and most acids had no effect on it. Magically, lead imitated gold. It resisted enchantment, ignored wards, and absorbed most magic emissions without suffering any consequences.
A lead evidence box had to contain something spiffy. The small sticker in its corner stated, EXHIBIT A, MARY #14, OCTOBER 9TH. I dug in the paperwork. October 5, October 8 . . . October 9. Here you are.
I perched on the corner of my desk and scanned the report. The Steel Mary crashed the monthly cage match held in the bottom floor of the Barbwire Noose, a booze hole on the southern edge of Savannah. The proprietor of the Barbwire Noose, Barbara “Barb” Howell, reported a seven-foot-tall, hairy man walking through the door, wearing nothing except a tattered cloak and what she described as leather Bermuda shorts. Barb proceeded to communicate her refusal to serve the intruder by leveling a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun at the man, accompanied by “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
I liked Barb already.
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