by Curtis, Greg
“Add your name to the list. Because you'll need to get in line.” James had no worries about anything she could do. “But if you do somehow get free, you won't have to come looking for me. I'll hunt you down and kill you myself. No second chances.”
Was that true? Even James didn't know. But his five years in this world of magic and nightmare had changed him. He might be just threatening her. But there was also something deep within him that truly hated the witch. That thought it wrong that she should still be breathing. He generally disliked magic to start with. And those who used their gifts to harm the innocent he hated. He had come a long way from his days as a cop.
“Bastard!” The witch continued swearing at him as he drove off, determined to make sure he knew just what a loathsome man he was. Perhaps James thought, he should have shoved her in the boot instead of the passenger seat? Though really he didn't want her in the car at all. Still, he resisted the urge to smash her in the face again in the hopes of shutting her up, even though he thought it would have been the decent thing to do. Instead he tried to ignore her. The Illuminati could deal with her. And he doubted they would be any more lenient than the police or the real courts.
She was so screwed.
But what she cared about most he guessed was that her powers would be bound and her life expectancy would shorten considerably. Blood magic was addictive and powerful which was one of the reasons that it was nearly completely banned. And the vampiric spells were the most destructive of all. But what they gave was also temporary. When she'd started draining the living energy of her victims however long ago the witch had increased her own power and made herself younger. That was the intent behind it. But there was a price for using such magic, and not just one of damnation. She'd by now adapted to living with all that extra vitality coursing through her flesh. It had become a habit as necessary to her as that of any junkie's next fix.
Without the magic to sustain her she would age and weaken quickly. She might even die. In fact, considering that she looked middle aged when no doubt she had wanted to look and feel young, the chances were that she was already a long way along the path to her own destruction. James doubted she had many years of life left. He hoped not anyway.
In the end it had been a successful hunt.
Chapter Two
The park was dark and quiet when James drove the big BMW in. There was no sign of anyone around, which boded well for the prisoner transfer. Because even if most people didn't know anything about the world of magic they would still know something was very wrong when a woman in heavy metal restraints was dragged from one car and shoved into another. They'd call the police and there would be questions to answer. Questions he couldn't answer.
The others were waiting for him at the rendezvous point when he arrived, the van's back door already open. That pleased him. After an hour and a half of driving with the witch beside him and abusing him at every opportunity, he was more than ready to get rid of her. He couldn’t wait to see her dragged from the car and thrown into the back of the van. If nothing else she would be out of his car. And if they could drag her out by her hair he thought that would be a bonus.
He didn't like the witch. Though after seeing what she'd been doing, that was a natural enough opinion. But even without that an hour and a half spent in her company was enough to convince him that Magda Luscior was not a woman he wanted to know. She had a vile tongue and an ego so large it must have made walking through a door tough. But mostly he disliked her complete lack of empathy for others. Everything she said was either a threat or a dismissive comment. And not just about him. She included her victim in her put downs, even going so far as to wonder why anyone would ever have come for her. As for James she'd quickly decided that he was an underling of some sort, and that it was demeaning that she should so much as be in the same car with him.
She'd also put his car down which didn't help. It was a big seven series BMW, a luxury car. But it wasn't up to her standards. Maybe that was because it was twenty years old and had acquired a few rattles over time. But mostly he suspected, she didn’t like it because it was his.
He was keen to get rid of her.
“Any problems?”
A man – not one of the regulars so James didn't know his name – came over and asked the normal first question as he opened the passenger door. Then he stopped and stared, probably when he saw the trail of blood running down the witch's face and soaking her entire front. “Crap! Not again! The warden’s going to be pissed!”
“No problems.”
James ignored the man's upset. The warden was always pissed with him anyway. “She was using vampiric blood magic. I caught her draining a girl when I arrived. Angie Newcombe. The ambulance has probably got her to a hospital by now. Here's her details.” He handed the man the girl's wallet which he'd rescued from her pocket while trying to get her to drink the juice.
“The girl knows the woman –.” The man looked at the tablet with the details he'd been given about the rogue. “Magda Luscior. She knows that she’s a witch?”
“Yes. But she was near death when I got to her and unable to say much else. So I don't know what she saw or how much she knows. I also don't know what the girl's gift is. Luscior was using a screening spell to identify those with magic at a perfume booth. She sprayed a little enchanted perfume on people and on some it reacted.” That would be the Illuminati’s job to work out. Not the man's obviously – he clearly worked for the warden as a guard – but the Illuminati had others who were specialists in keeping things quiet. James worked with some of them.
Briefly James pondered the witch’s name. It sounded made up. And wasn't there a warship called the Luscior or something like it? That might be something that needed following up. Though not by him. As a hunter his job was done.
“Why do you always bring them to us at such short notice?” Yasmin unexpectedly appeared from behind the van and immediately accused him of making her life difficult. Yasmin had accused him of the same crime before. Many times before. And he supposed she had a point this time. From the moment the witch had taken the girl, his time frames had become very compressed. “We had to go rushing back into the office and then drive like demons to get here in time.”
“It's just the way it went down.” James tried to concentrate on the accusation instead of the shapely figure she cut in in her knee length dress. The woman might be a pain in the arse who took pleasure in making his life difficult but she was still a living pin up. And when she occasionally let her hair down instead of twirled up into that elegant bun she normally wore, she took his breath away. Of course she also made it clear that she thought he was a savage who should never have been given the role of hunter.
Yasmin – actually she pronounced it Jasmine but spelled it with a “Y”, he assumed her parents thought it fancier – was in charge of prisoner restraint and transportation for their little group and he supposed he should have expected to see her there. Everyone in their little unit had their own gift and their own duty. That was hers.
She had what the Illuminati called meta magic, which was just a clever way of saying that she could take whatever magic was used against her and transform it into her own magic which she could throw back at her enemies. It was a useful skill he supposed for dealing with rogues and others with magic. In fact if it came to a battle she was probably the one best suited to it. But she looked like anything but a warrior unless she was fighting fashion crimes.
All in all she was an extremely competent officer – not that any of them were actually officers. It was just that he always found her difficult to deal with. Mostly perhaps because of the way she dressed. And the way she looked. Yasmin had the looks of a model, and she always overdressed as though she was ready for the runway. He was a cop when all was said and done. He had always been a cop. And there was a way that cops looked and acted. She just wasn't that.
To add to that she was always critical of him because he didn't live up to her standards of what a hunter shou
ld be. It was hard to square that away with her work, and the fact that he was sort of her boss. It didn't help that she was six feet tall and in her heels which she insisted on wearing everywhere, towered over him. Of course the stilettos weren't a lot of use on grass, and with every step she was sinking in to it which might be another reason she was looking unhappy.
“It's always the way it goes down! And another broken nose? I mean what is that, the third this year? Do you get some sort of bonus for breaking noses? Or is it just a caveman thing?” She added the last with a despairing sigh.
“It's just a quick way of rendering people harmless.” James hated the caveman crack – but it wasn't the first time she'd called him one and he doubted it would be the last. She found his methods violent.
“And giving us endless reports to fill out!” Yasmin didn't seem impressed. “You know you could just shoot a few of them! It would make things much easier. And you have a gun for a reason.”
“I've told you before. When you guys saved Matti you got my services as promised. But I'm a cop not an executioner.” Even if he wasn't a cop any longer it was true. Besides, though some of the Illuminati like Yasmin might grumble and groan about his actions, no one had ever forbidden him from doing what he did. If they wanted her dead he figured, they could do it themselves.
“Not that gun you dolt!” She sighed somewhat melodramatically. “Your proper gun.”
“The ray gun?!” It was James' turn to be a little dramatic. “Are you mad? That thing’s useless. It works less than half the time, misses even when it does fire, and doesn't draw well. Some days I'd be better off throwing it at people.”
That was all more or less true. Mostly though what he hated about it was that it looked like some sort of science fiction gun that had come off a movie set. No one could take a man holding a toy gun seriously.
“It's perfectly serviceable. As long as you remember the rhyme. If she's a blood magic witch the paralysis spell would have taken her down every time.”
“I had a second to act. I don't have time to go through that whole damned rhyme to work out which position to push the lever to!”
Yasmin didn't seem impressed by that though. But then for her the world of magic was one she had grown up with. She scarcely had to think about these things. And despite her horrible obsession with fashion she was very bright. He'd only had five years to get used to things. To try and unlearn so much of what he'd always thought was true.
“But now she's going to have to spend time with the healers before she gets to go before the elders to be judged, have her powers bound, and finally be sentenced. No doubt there will be more complaints about rough treatment. It's a lot of work. And really, she's a blood magic junkie. She won't have much of a life left after this anyway. Life with a broken nose will just add to her troubles. And you didn't need to do it.”
“She was trying to kill me at the time,” James defended himself. Sometimes he suspected the others just didn't understand what life in the field was like. Split second decisions. Lives hanging in the balance. And Yasmin in particular was lucky. She always knew what sort of magic her prisoners had before she dealt with them.
“But now she's badly injured. Her health is going to be crap. And the chances are the injury will never heal properly because of it. Honestly, you would have been kinder to her if you had shot her with that antique cannon of yours!”
“And that's your problem to deal with, not mine. Mine was just to bring her in.”
James wasn't completely sure whether Yasmin meant what she said. He was never sure of what anyone meant or said in this messed up world of magic. And Yasmin was one of those women who always struck him as being especially cryptic. If she'd been Chinese she might have been described as inscrutable. But since she was American of mixed race he would simply call her unreadable. But he was sure of his principles. And if he hadn't killed his brother Francis after what he had done to his daughter and his wife, nor the child slavers he’d caught he wasn't going to kill anyone else. That had to be their job if it was anyone's. His was to find those who were using dark magic and get them off the streets however he had to.
Of course if he was honest he had actually beaten his little brother to a pulp and very nearly killed him. In fact when he'd left him he hadn't known whether Francis was alive or dead. He'd actually thought he was dead or dying. But that was a technicality.
In five long years he hadn't had to kill anyone, and the two he'd shot had only been wounded. Both shot in the legs – and with his own gun, not the magical ray gun they'd provided. They'd been brought down quickly and cleanly and with a minimum of fuss. After all, he could hit a target at fifty paces with his Sig, and no one seemed to be immune to bullets. He had to stick to what he knew worked. That was really the only thing he was sure of in this bizarre world of magic.
“Huh!” Yasmin grunted non-committally at him. “I think you think your job is to make ours harder.” Somehow she actually seemed to grow more attractive when she dismissed him. And she was already hot.
That was the other problem he had with Yasmin. She was raw sex appeal on legs. And every so often she'd flash him a million watt smile and he'd suddenly turn into a teenage boy in lust, with absolutely no idea what to do about it. He had the devil's own time simply trying to keep his thoughts in order around her. And just then, it was becoming difficult once more.
“No. But regardless my work is done. I'm heading home.” With that James turned and left them, heading for his car before he said something stupid.
“Uh uh – not so fast hunter. She's got a broken nose. That needs explaining. Celia's going to ask and we have to be able to tell her something. And we're not taking the heat for that. You said she was trying to kill you?”
“It stopped her casting.” Did it really need explaining James wondered? After all the woman was talking about her shooting people one minute and now she was worried about a minor injury. Maybe the blood didn't reach all the way to her head some days. It was a long way to travel after all.
“She was casting? What?”
“How should I know? All I know was that she was mumbling some sort of spell at me and I didn't want to let her finish it.”
“So self-defence – again! It's getting thin as excuses go.” She shook her head sadly and did everything but bury her face in her hands. “We'll tell the warden but the details go in your report first thing.”
“And another thing where was your back up? Peters should have been there. Or West. Either of them could have handled her. You shouldn't have needed to protect yourself against the witch.”
“Didn't have time to call for some.”
“Crap!” This time Yasmin actually did plant her face in her hands for a moment. “Not again! What is this lone wolf shit? Are you trying to get yourself killed?” She sounded upset.
“By some second rate blood witch? Hardly.”
Though he knew she was right. If the witch had been younger or better prepared things could have been hairy. But he never thought about those things when he was hunting.
“And yet you still needed to break her nose?” Yasmin shook her head disbelievingly.
“And there was a young kid's life hanging in the balance.”
“You said. But you're going to have to fill out the paperwork explaining that as well. Not us!”
Paperwork! It was the bane of his life and the one constant in every job. How was it that a private business concern like the Illuminati could still require reports? And there would be detailed reports required covering everything from how he'd tracked her to the final take down. It just seemed wrong. Bounty hunters, which was more or less what he was save for the bounties, didn't have to fill out forms. He was sure of that. But he suspected it was all part of the Illuminati's desire to be seen as fair and even handed by the rest of their realm. To demonstrate that they were responsible and accountable – even if they actually weren't.
“Fine. First thing in the morning. I'm tired.”
Wi
th that James finally left them. He could have stayed he supposed. Perhaps helped them with the witch. Maybe chatted a bit. When he'd been a cop that was exactly what he would have done after arresting someone. But since he'd started his new career with the Illuminati, socialising had become an alien thing. He didn't trust the wizards and witches. None of them. There was so much they couldn't tell him. So much more that they wouldn't. And from their perspective he was just the hired help, not one of them. He might wear their markings on his skin and carry their name but he had no magic after all. He was no witch or wizard. Just a cop with a good nose for spotting the truth. And by and large they didn't like cops. Not even ex-cops. And especially not cavemen.
So why bother trying to make the effort? These people had saved his daughter's life. He owed them for that. He owed them for her schooling too. And for keeping his little brother eternally locked away so he didn't have to become a murderer. And if Francis did ever get out he would have to kill him. It was the only way anyone could be safe. He repaid his debts which was what he was doing by taking their job and hunting down their rogues. And he did his job professionally – more or less. But anything more than that seemed unnecessary to him. It was just that everyone else seemed to have a different opinion.