“I don’t like it.”
Christopher quietly got up and walked out of the kitchen.
“Do you trust me?”
The line of Curran’s jaw went hard. “I trust you,” he said. “I don’t trust that degenerate with your safety.”
“I know. But Eduardo needs him. Any other lab will take too much time.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“If Saiman tries anything, I’ll take him apart.”
Curran looked at me. I looked back. I meant what I said. If Saiman got out of line, I would do whatever I had to do to get him back behind it.
“While you’re doing that, I’m going to swing by the Guild,” Curran said. “You don’t stalk someone you don’t know. Eduardo and the man who watched him crossed paths somehow, and while we can’t look at the logbooks, I have his scent now. If he’s been to the Guild in the past week, I’ll recognize it.”
“If Eduardo was being stalked, would he talk to anyone in the Pack?” I thought out loud.
“He didn’t tell George,” Curran said.
That was true. She didn’t mention it and it wasn’t the kind of thing one would consider irrelevant when your loved one was missing.
Christopher still wasn’t back.
“Julie, where did Christopher go?”
She raised her head from her paper. “He said he was going home.”
“What?” Home. In the dark. All the way to the Keep.
I tossed the towel onto the island and dashed outside, into the cold. Our front yard was empty. I sprinted to the end of the driveway and spun left, then right. There he was, walking down the neighbors’ driveway.
“Christopher!”
He waved at me and headed straight for their door. I ran after him, trying not to slip on the icy pavement. In retrospect, shoes would’ve been an excellent idea.
I got to Christopher just as he knocked on the neighbors’ door.
“Hey,” I touched his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Home.” He smiled. “I like home. It’s warm and there are books.”
“This isn’t—”
The door swung open and Barabas appeared in the rectangle of electric light. He wore sweatpants and a T-shirt that hung from his lean frame. His red hair, spiky as always, stood straight up on his head, making his handsome angular face seem even sharper. He saw me and his eyes got wider.
“Um,” Barabas said. “Eh. Good evening, Kate.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Eh.”
“We live here,” Christopher explained to me, and walked into the house.
They’d moved in next door to us. Christopher and Barabas had moved in next door to us and nobody had told me.
Barabas finally recovered his ability to speak. “There is this wonderful invention. It’s made of leather and lined with soft fabric, and it goes on your feet to protect them from cold and rough surfaces. It’s called shoes. You really should try it.”
“You rented a house next to us?”
Barabas wrinkled his nose. “Not exactly. Please come in. Your toes look like they might fall off and Curran would eviscerate me if I let you get frostbite.”
I came inside. Their bottom floor was open, just like ours. A big stack of cardboard boxes occupied the left side of the living room.
“You just moved in?” I asked, my voice sweet enough to spread on toast. Moved in and didn’t tell me.
“About two weeks ago. Those are all Christopher’s books. We are putting shelves in one of the bedrooms and some down there along the wall.” Barabas waved at the left side of the room.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in!” Barabas called.
The door swung open and Derek stuck his head in. “Hey, do you have any duct tape?”
He saw me, stepped back, and closed the door without a word. Well.
“Coward,” Barabas said, loud enough for Derek to hear.
“Where?” I asked.
“The house on the other side of yours.”
“And I suppose this house and the one Derek is in just happened to be for sale . . .”
I stopped. Curran didn’t rely on luck. He was thorough, and he thought ahead. I recalled our street. On our side, five large houses, including ours, backed to the woods, and I couldn’t remember seeing their owners or their cars. He must’ve bought out the whole street. Oh wow. That explained why we were running low on funds.
“Did you separate from the Pack?” I asked.
“Yes.” Barabas invited me to sit on the plush brown sofa.
I sat and tucked my cold feet under me.
“Who else?”
“So far Christopher, Derek, and I. Jezebel was thinking about it, but decided against it.”
I nodded. Jezebel was in a relationship with Louis, who was very much a Pack kind of shapeshifter. Louis was a widower. His daughter, whom Jezebel adored, was five, and Louis wanted her to be brought up in the safety of the Pack. After being Julie’s babysitter and seeing everything that could happen to a child, Jezebel agreed.
“I get Derek,” I said. There was no place for Derek among Jim’s people. Derek understood security and he was a good fighter. He had no other skills. I once tried to talk to him about college and he smiled at me and walked away.
The security avenue was closed to Derek. Robert, one of the alpha Rats, had taken over the position of security chief. He had to trust his staff, and he and Derek hadn’t worked together enough for that trust to form. Robert would be bringing in his own personnel, and if Derek joined that parade, he would have to start from the bottom up. His only other option was to go back to Clan Wolf, where Desandra would pressure him into a beta position, because he was skilled and respected and because she couldn’t afford to have him as a rival. Derek wanted to have nothing to do with clan politics. He was quite clear on that point. It made sense for Derek to separate, but Barabas had thrived as the Pack litigator.
“I don’t get you,” I said. “You love practicing law.”
“Now I will practice it for you and Curran.”
He had practically run the legal department in the Pack, and he had walked away from all of it? I didn’t know if I had to feel guilty, frustrated, or grateful. “I doubt there will be much work for you here.”
“You’d be surprised,” Barabas said.
“I thought you were all set to work with Jim.”
Barabas shook his head. “I stayed long enough to ease the transition. Jim needs a different lawyer. Trisha is taking over from me. She will do very well for him.”
“And Christopher?”
Barabas sighed. “Christopher wouldn’t stay in the Keep without you or me. Once he realized that both of us had left, he wandered the hallways crying and then went catatonic.”
I ground my teeth. “I told them to call me if there were problems.”
“They called me instead,” Barabas said. “So I came and got him.”
“And Jim just let him go?” After all, Christopher was the one who had brought the recipe for panacea to us.
“He had no choice. Christopher decided to live here with me. I’ll take good care of him. Jim always viewed him as a security risk, and if the panacea makers run into any problems, they know where to find him.”
Christopher had been doing better. In the past six months he had managed to keep a schedule, dress himself, and maintain personal hygiene. But he still had moments of complete confusion. In the Keep our security staff always kept an eye on him, but here the whole weight of responsibility rested on Barabas.
“He cooks now,” Barabas said. “It was very sudden. He walked into the kitchen and just started doing it.”
“What did he make?”
“Cream puffs shaped like swans. They were ridiculously delicious.”
“Barabas . . .”
“Kate, I like taking care of him. He is no trouble.” Barabas raised his head. “Curran is outside.”
“Did you hear him?” When he wanted to, Curran moved completely silently, a fact I often regretted because he enjoyed popping up behind me out of thin air and making me jump.
“No. I felt him.” Barabas grimaced. “It’s hard to describe. It’s a kind of awareness, like something large and dangerous passing by you in absolute darkness. You don’t hear it, you don’t see it, you don’t smell it, but you know it’s there. It was better at the Keep. He was always at the Keep, so you always felt a small measure of it, and the place was always crowded, which helped some. Now it’s more jarring. He isn’t there and then suddenly he is there.” He blew a long breath out. “This will take some getting used to.”
Ha! I wasn’t the only one.
Curran knocked on the door.
“It’s open,” Barabas said.
Curran stepped inside. He was holding the Guild’s Manual and Jim’s contract in his left hand and a pair of my soft padded boots in his right.
He handed me the boots and smiled.
I smiled back and put the boots on.
Curran held out the Guild’s Manual and Jim’s contract to Barabas. “The Guild is suffering from cash flow problems. The mercs want to raid the pension fund, so they forced a shutdown. The admin staff walked off due to nonpayment and they’ve lost their cleaning crews. I’d like to take it over.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Barabas said, taking the contract and the Manual. “Do you want to muscle in or be more subtle about it?”
“I want to know my options. I wrote a summary in the front. Look at the last provision in Membership Powers and see if you can find me a way in.”
“I’ll have something by tomorrow.”
I couldn’t remember what the hell the last provision in Membership Powers was. I used to know the Manual cover to cover, but it had been a while since I had to pull that knowledge out of my head.
“Don’t forget to bill me,” Curran said. “Exorbitantly.”
Barabas flashed him a quick smile. “I’ll be very generous in my billable hours.”
We walked home through the cold. “You didn’t tell me,” I said.
“It wasn’t my place to tell.”
“I don’t understand why they didn’t tell me either.”
“All of them were part of our inner circle,” Curran said. “They knew exactly how much you wanted to be away from the Keep and the Pack. They wanted to give you space.”
“Did they think I would throw a tantrum?”
“Baby, you’re not the tantrum type. You are the scary-smile-and-stabbing type.”
I looked at him.
“Hard-stare type.” He grinned. “They knew you wanted privacy. They didn’t want you to feel like they chased us down. But it was getting a bit ridiculous, so it’s good Christopher gave them a nudge.”
I waved at our side of street. “How many of these houses do you own?”
“We own, and all of them.”
“Do we own anything else?”
“We also own the woods directly behind us.”
Those woods extended for quite a while. There used to be a huge golf course and a shopping center behind us, but trees and brush had swallowed it long ago. “How many acres?”
“Five hundred and twelve.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
“I thought of calling it the Five Hundred Acre Wood,” Curran said.
My mouth finally worked. “How much did you . . . ?”
“Three million.”
Oh my God.
“It was a steal. They kept trying to clear it, but the trees there seem to have a really high affinity for magic. Every time they clear something, the woods grow back in weeks, which is perfect for us. Once we allow the woods to develop, the growth will self-regulate.”
“Is this why we’re out of money?”
“Yes.” He smiled at me. “We’re not out of money. We just have a firm budget.”
I laughed quietly. Somehow it all completely made sense.
“I did tell you about the woods. On three different occasions.”
No, he didn’t. “I don’t remember that.”
“Beginning of February, I told you that I was thinking of buying a little extra land with our house.”
I had no recollection of that conversation. Also, a little extra land meant another acre. Not a forest five times the one Pooh Bear lived in. “What did I say back?”
“You said, ‘You want to talk about this now?’ And then you said, ‘Can’t you just bite him in half?’”
Ah, now I remembered. “We were in a half-flooded garage with a deranged lunatic who was shooting lightning at us.”
“And then I brought it up again the second weekend after we moved in. We were in our bedroom. You were doing paperwork and I came out of the shower and I said . . .”
That I had a perfect recollection of. “You said, ‘Hey, baby, come here often?’”
“Before that.”
“I don’t remember what you said before that. You made it difficult to concentrate.”
“In my defense, you were doing paperwork naked.” Curran grinned.
Whatever. “When was the third time?”
“I brought it to you at work and I said, ‘Look at this. I’m buying this land.’ And you said, ‘I feel awkward telling you how to spend your money. If you want to buy extra land, I think you should.’”
Okay, so he had a point.
Curran reached over and squeezed my hand. “What’s done is done. The Pack belongs to Jim now and for all of his grandstanding, if I decided to take it back, he would fight me for it. But now we have to take care of our people. The least we can do is to provide them with a place to live, a place to run at night, should they so choose, and the means to earn their living.”
The moon chose that moment to break through the clouds, flooding the street with gentle pale light. I always liked the darkness. The world seemed bigger somehow under the endless night sky. An odd calm settled over me.
“I’m worried about Eduardo.” I said. “What we have is better than nothing, but all of our leads are slim. We are moving too slowly. The longer he’s gone, the smaller the chances of finding him alive. I’m a lousy detective . . .”
Curran’s eyebrows rose. “Could’ve fooled me.”
I held up my hand. “I’m a lousy detective, but I’m excellent at annoying people.”
“Yes, you are.”
Ha-ha. “Normally at this point I would make myself into a pain in the kidnapper’s ass. I’d make it personal and become a target, so whoever took him turns himself inside out trying to nuke me. It would give me a way in and it would keep other people from getting hurt.”
Curran’s eyes shone with a predatory light. “So let’s make it personal.”
I pointed over my shoulder at the house. “Julie.” Before Julie was at the Keep. Now she was here. There was a world of difference between a tower full of killers and a house in the suburbs. It was a very well-protected house, but still.
“Julie will be fine,” he said. “We have strong wards and good doors, and our neighbors are very invested in her safety. How do we get under his skin?”
“Ghouls. I don’t know if he cares about them, but he uses them.”
“So we’ll hit his ghouls.”
“I’ll talk to Ghastek, if you talk to Jim,” I said. “Between the vampires and the shapeshifters, someone has to have seen ghouls moving through the city. We find them and kill them. If we knock out enough of his teeth, eventually he’ll get pissed off and come to punch us in the face.”
Curran bared his teeth. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
“That makes two of us.�
��
At least we had a plan. Even a bad plan was better than none.
The purr of a car engine rolled through the neighborhood. A Pack Jeep pulled up to our driveway. George jumped out.
“Did you find out anything?” Curran asked.
She shook her head. “Did you find him? Did you—”
“We know the ghouls took him,” I said. “He was alive when they got him. We don’t know why.”
Her face was a pale mask, her teeth clenched, her eyes feverish. “Ghouls? What?”
“Come inside,” I told her. “We’ll explain everything.”
CHAPTER
9
CUDDLES CLOPPED DOWN the street at a jerky trot. She galloped like a champ and was comfortable to ride at a walk or a canter, but her trot was rattling teeth in my skull. I slowed her down a couple of times, but she felt like trotting this morning and once she got something into her head, no force on Earth could change her mind. I’d taken her because the magic waves had been coming in short bursts lately, and an enchanted engine took forever to warm up. Also because a couple of weeks ago Buckhead had experienced an invisible hailstorm. You didn’t see the hail, but you saw the impact. It didn’t cause that much damage—most of Buckhead was in ruins anyway—but it turned the roads into an obstacle course of potholes.
“You’re trying to kill me, is that it?” I shifted in the saddle, trying to find a spot where my back didn’t hurt.
Cuddles ignored me and kept trotting.
This morning when I woke up, my body let me know just how displeased it was that I wasn’t spending the day in bed. I dragged myself up, we made breakfast, and then I went one way and Curran and Julie went the other. Maybe I should have taken a car. I needed to make progress today and Saiman was my best bet.
Saiman made his lair in the posh luxury of a Champion Heights penthouse. The building was impossible to miss. It was just about the only high-rise still left standing in Buckhead. Its owners had sunk an obscene amount of power into its wards, tricking magic into thinking the building was a very large natural rock. During the magic waves parts of it looked like a granite crag, but right now it was a fifteen-floor building, shrouded in morning fog and backlit by the rays of the rising sun like some mystical spire of an evil overlord.
Magic Shifts Page 14
