Magic Bites

by Ilona Andrews

“Done,” he said. “You’ll have your talk. On our premises.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I did my part,” he said.

  I took the m-scan I stole from the morgue and spread it in the dirt.

  “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  “These.” I pointed to the yellow lines.

  “Looks like a scanner malfunction.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He frowned. “What would register yellow?”

  “I don’t know. But I know an expert who might.”

  “You have something more to go on, besides that?”

  There was the hair, and I considered not telling him about it. Forewarned is forearmed. And he didn’t give me anything that I couldn’t have gotten from the knight-protector. Theoretically. Still, the Beast Lord saved me a lot of work and I doubted the texture of Corwin’s hair could be altered so severely that DNA mapping would not match it to the sample.

  The Beast Lord looked at the photographs, shifting through them with marked slowness. He looked almost human. I realized that I was biased. Biased against Nataraja and his college of death-devotees, with their clinical indifference to tragedy and murder. For them, a dispatched vampire and a comatose journeyman equaled a loss of an investment, costly and inconvenient, but ultimately not emotionally painful. The man in front of me, on the other hand, had lost friends. They were people he knew well and they had placed themselves in his charge. The Pack leader’s ultimate duty was to protect his Pack—and he had failed them. As he looked at the snapshots of their deaths, his face reflected determination and anger, cold crystallized anger, born of guilt and grief. There was an old word for that kind of anger. Wrath.

  This I understood. I felt it every time I thought of Greg. I’d have to be very careful from now on, because I was no longer neutral. If the Beast Lord did kill Greg, I would have to work harder to convince myself of his guilt.

  To think that I had found a kindred spirit in the Beast Lord. How touching. Greg’s death was making me lose my mind. Perhaps I could hack off the murderer’s head while the Beast Lord held him down.

  “Several hairs were found at the scene,” I said. “The medical examiner’s office doesn’t know what to make of them. They contain fragments of both human and feline genetic sequences. It’s not any kind of shapechanger that the ME’s analysts have seen. It’s weird as hell and no, I don’t have the exact printout of the base pairs.”

  “Does Nataraja know?”

  “I think he does,” I said. “One of his journeymen gave me Corwin’s name. He didn’t say they thought he did it, but it’s obvious they do.”

  A small muscle twitched in Beast Lord’s cheek, as if his face wanted to twist into a feral snarl. “Figures.”

  “Are you satisfied?” I asked.

  He nodded. “For now. I’ll call on you.”

  “I won’t come here again,” I said. “Unicorn Lane makes my skin crawl.”

  His eyes shone again. “Really? I find it relaxing. A scenic location. Moonlight.”

  “I never was much for scenic locations. Next time I’d like an official invitation.”

  He put away the snapshots.

  “Can I keep those?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. It’s enough that they exist.”

  I turned to leave and paused before the gap in the ruined wall. “One last thing, Your Majesty. I’d like a name I can put into my report, something shorter than typing out ‘The Leader of the Southern Shapechanger Faction.’ What should I call you?”

  “Lord.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He shrugged. “It’s short.”

  This was turning out to be a difficult night, and it showed no signs of being over. I climbed out, over the heap of rubble. Jim was gone.

  Something touched my shoulder. I whirled and saw the Lord of Beasts looking at me from the gap ten feet away.

  “Curran,” he said, as if granting me a boon. “You can call me Curran.”

  He melted into the darkness. I waited for a moment to make sure he was gone. Nobody jumped me from the shadows.

  Beyond the Unicorn, I could see the blue feylanterns of the city. Time to take the m-scan to my expert. He rarely minded late night visits.

  CHAMPION HEIGHTS WAS AN EASY PLACE TO FIND. It was about the only high-rise still standing. Once it was called Lenox Pointe, but it had undergone so many renovations, and changed hands so many times that its old name was all but forgotten. Nestled among the artfully pruned evergreens, the seventeen-story building of red brick and concrete loomed above the shops and bars of Buckhead like a mystic tower. Pale haze clung to its walls and balconies, blurring the crisp man-made edges, as a web of wards worked tirelessly to convince the very magic which fed it that the high-rise was nothing but a large rock. A distortion, the side effect of the spells’ labor, spread unevenly across the structure, and sections of the high-rise looked like portions of a steep granite cliff.

  The enchantment must have cost a small fortune, and although it had kept the high-rise standing so far, there was no guarantee it would continue to do so. I thought it would. The entire setup had that bizarre illogic peculiar to complex magic. Understanding it required a mind with a specific twist—just like quantum physics. Whatever the future held for Champion Heights, the owners had already recouped their investment several times over. Many couples would be happy to retire on what they charged for a year’s rent.

  I parked Karmelion in a lot among the Cadillacs, distinguished Lincolns, and bizarre mechanisms designed to transport their drivers during the magic waves. There was no convenient way to carry an m-scan, so I folded it and slid it between the pages of my Almanac. The night wind came, bringing smells from far away: a touch of wood smoke, the aroma of seared meat. I crossed the lot and made my way up the concrete stairs, flanked by some picturesque shrubbery, to the revolving glass doors. Enchanted glass lost a little of its transparency, but I had no trouble making out the heavy metal grate barring the lobby and the small cage with the guard who leveled a shock crossbow at me.

  I reached to my left and pressed the button of the intercom. It hissed.

  “Fifteenth floor, one fifty-eight, please.”

  His voice came back, distorted by the static. “Code, please.”

  “Forth he fared at the fated moment, sturdy Scyld to the shelter of God.” Without the code he would keep me outside while he queried one fifty-eight and even then I wouldn’t get in without being frisked and surrendering Slayer. Parting with my saber was not an option.

  The metal grate slid aside. “Proceed.”

  A revolving door admitted me to the lobby, flooded with the light of feylanterns. My steps, loud on the tiled floor of polished red granite, sent little echoes scurrying into the corners. I approached the elevator. The magic was still up, but I’d visited Champion Heights in the middle of a magic fluctuation before. Their elevator worked no matter the circumstances.

  A luxurious green carpet lined the fifteenth floor. The pile was thicker than some mattresses I’ve seen. Sinking into it, I made my way to the metal door marked 158, pressed the button of the bell, and knocked in case the magic had short-circuited it. Nobody home.

  The metal box of an electronic key card reader, about six by three inches, secured the door. Like all things in Champion Heights, the lock was not what it seemed, magic masquerading as tech. Slayer whispered as it left its sheath, and I slid its blade into the narrow slit of the key card reader. Concentrating on the saber, I put my hand onto the blade. A jolt of magic pulsed from my fingers.

  Open!

  The lock clicked and the heavy door gave under the pressure of my palm. Retrieving Slayer, I stepped inside and locked the door behind me.

  Reaching for the feylantern, I turned the round handle and a wide tongue of blue flame flared into existence, illuminating the apartment. I would never make a living as an interior decorator. My home was a comfortable chaos, my furniture mismatched but highly functional. The esthetic proper
ties of any given piece were secondary to its convenience, and luxury for me meant having a small table by my couch to support a reading lamp and a mug of coffee.

  Not so here. The moment I stepped into this apartment, it was clear that its owner had crafted his environment with a deliberate goal in mind. I was looking at years of selective purchases made by a person for whom the word “sale” held no meaning. The furnishings, the carpet, the spare decorations—all blended to present a distinctive whole, and looking at it produced the same feeling as viewing the reconstruction of an African savannah in a zoo. It was a harmonious but alien habitat of glass, steel, and white plush, all ellipses and curves. Three doors led from the room, one to the bedroom, another to a bathroom with a double sink and a walk-in shower, and the third to the lab.

  The spell-haze did not affect the view from the inside and huge windows offered a vision of midnight Atlanta under the endless black sky. The weak light of the single feylantern caressed the window glass, rendering it invisible, and permeated the darkness outside as if the apartment itself was but a piece of midnight sky, defined by glass and stone but not separated from the world outside. If I stood very close to the window, I could imagine that I was flying high above the city . . .

  As I watched, the tech hit. Thousands of tiny lights sparked into existence, like jewels among the folds of black velvet and the street lamps flooded the avenue below me in man-made sunshine. The feylantern flickered and died, and bright electric lights came on inside the apartment, murdering the illusion and separating me from the infinite blackness. The glass became impenetrable, and I stood confined by it as if locked in the middle of a transparent cage. Suddenly I felt vulnerable so I turned off the lights, all but a single reading lamp of steel and opaque glass.

  I washed my face and arms up to my elbow, dried them with a fluffy white towel I found hanging on a hook near the sink, and took up residence on the ultramodern couch. Curran’s question nagged me: why would the knight-protector give Greg’s investigation to a no-name merc? On the surface, it made no sense. I finally managed to look past my own ego. One of the Order’s own was dead, a well-known man of substantial power. They wouldn’t handle it themselves. They would bring in a crusader.

  The crusaders served as the Order’s equivalent of a lancet. Got a nasty boil ready to rupture—throw a crusader at it. Loners, highly skilled and deadly, they were great at what they did and after they did it, they returned to where they came from. Ted expected me to “investigate the crime,” meaning he expected me to make lots of noise and draw attention to myself, while the crusader quietly worked under my smoke screen. It chaffed at me for about two seconds, but in the end both parties got what they wanted: Ted got his lightning rod and I got to search for Greg’s killer. Everybody won.

  I flipped open the Almanac and pulled the m-scan and the folded cutout of the article Bono had given me from between the book’s pages. Glancing at the m-scan one last time, I slid it onto the glass table, unfolded the article, and began to read. The owner of the apartment would arrive shortly. He rarely stayed out past two in the morning—he thought 3:00 a.m. to be an unlucky hour.

  IT WAS CLOSE TO TWO O’CLOCK WHEN A SINGLE cab made its way up the avenue below me. I raised binoculars to my eyes.

  The door of the cab opened and a blonde stepped onto the pavement. She was tall and very slender. The short black dress clung to her narrow hips and long waist, flaring to artfully enclose breasts that looked too large for her body. Her hair, so pale it shimmered white, fell to her shoulders without a trace of a curl.

  Her face was perfectly formed, with high prominent cheekbones, aquiline nose, huge eyes, and a full mouth. As she strode to the highrise, her face wore an expression which on someone less attractive would be called a sneer. Elegant, graceful, and arrogant in her beauty, she was like a young Arabian horse, haughty and cruel and an irresistible challenge to any male.

  A lone passerby stopped, struck by the sight of her. I thought he whistled but could not tell for sure. The blonde ignored his presence without even trying; for her, he simply did not exist. I put away the binoculars and returned to my Almanac.

  Five minutes later the lock clicked and the blonde walked through the door. She saw me and stopped. The sneer vanished. “Oh, good. I have something for you.”

  Not again.

  She went to the kitchen, retrieved several protein cans from a cabinet, and put them onto the bar. A bag of dried apricots joined the cans, together with a bag of sugar, a block of chocolate, and an oversized blender. She took a carton of eggs from the fridge and cracked three into the blender. Two handfuls of apricots followed, with several cups of sugar, the chocolate, and the contents of at least six cans. “Ice water,” the blonde murmured, nodding to the drink I had gotten myself. “You could’ve gotten something from the bar.”

  “I wanted water,” I said.

  The blonde smiled, a strange expression on her face, and turned on the blender. The blades spun, converting the contents into a thick uniform paste. She unplugged the blender, detached the top with a practiced twist, and drank straight from it.

  “What is it, about two-thirds of a gallon?” I asked.

  She stopped drinking for a moment. “Closer to three-quarters, actually.”

  She finished and unceremoniously pulled her dress over her head. I looked at my book again.

  “Are you uncomfortable?” the blonde laughed, stripping her stockings.

  “No, just giving you a bit of privacy.” And hoping to miss the glorious moment when my stomach would clench and squirt its burning contents into my throat.

  “You could just admit that I make you ill.”

  “There is that.”

  “How do you like her?” the blonde asked.

  I glanced up and saw her standing nude on the floor. “Not bad for an ice queen. The breasts are too large.”

  The blonde grimaced. “Yes, I know.”

  “Why a woman?” I wondered.

  “Because I deal in information, Kate, and men tend to blab their secrets to beautiful women.” She smiled. “As you well know.”

  “I usually have to threaten men with bodily harm before they tell me secrets.”

  “Then I feel sorry for those men. They obviously have poor taste. Do you know who makes the converters that go into our feylamps?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “There are four companies, actually. By the end of the week the city council will decide which one of them gets a municipal contract for the next three years. Right now there are three people in this city who know how they will vote.”

  “Let me guess, you’re one of them?”

  The blonde didn’t answer, but her smile widened just a little, permitting a brief glimpse of white teeth. Even a financial moron like me knew the price of that kind of information had to be astronomic.

  Her muscles moved, stretching, twisting, as if a tangle of worms suddenly came to life under her skin. My stomach lurched. I clenched my teeth and tried to keep my dinner where it belonged. The blonde’s pelvis shifted, her shoulders grew broad, her legs thickened, while her breasts dissolved, forming a massive male chest. Ropes of muscles coiled, shaping powerful legs and huge arms. The bones of her face crawled, the nose thickening, the jaw becoming strong and square. The eye color darkened to piercing intense blue. The hair dissolved and grew again, this time turning dark brown. I blinked and a man stood before me. Muscular with the crisp exactness of a professional body builder, he was towering and quite well endowed. Blue eyes glared at me from the flat face of a born fighter—no sharp edges, no jutting bone to shatter under a punch. A bit of armor and he would earn the loyalty of any barbarian horde.

  “What do you think?” he asked, his voice deep and commanding.

  I eyed him. “Impressive, but too much.”

  He leaned toward me, the blue eyes smoky with a promise I was sure he could fulfill. I tried not to think of the bedroom.

  “Too much?”

  “Yes. I like the m
enace. It’s very masculine, but he looks like he would screw everything in sight and call me ‘wench’.”

  The barbarian king before me rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What exactly leads you to that conclusion?”

  “I’m not sure. Something in the eyes, I think.”

  “So it’s a no?”

  “It’s a no.”

  “I’ll have to work on him.”

  The barbarian deflated, his awesome musculature slimming into a leaner build. The hair vanished, leaving the head bald, and the face grew longer, with intelligent dark eyes and a large nose. The man I knew as Saiman strode to the bar and drew a glass of water from the sink faucet.

  “Business?” he said, glancing at the m-scan.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, drained his glass and refilled it.

  “I can’t feel a trace of magic,” I said. “Yet you seem to have no problem metamorphosing. Why is that?”

  He arched an eyebrow at me—a gesture so much like my own that I could’ve sworn he copied it from me. It was likely. Saiman often mimicked the mannerisms of his clients. He did it consciously, knowing it unnerved them.

  “The key word is ‘seem’. Metamorphosis now requires concentration, while during the magic tide it flows naturally. But to answer the essence of your question, I believe my body stores magic. Like a battery. Perhaps it even produces its own.”

  He downed the second glass and approached the couch. “How long have I kept you waiting?”

  “Not too long.”

  For a moment I thought he would make a comment about the view, and then I wouldn’t be able to help myself and have to ask him to shield his own ‘view’ with some clothes. Fortunately he withdrew to the bedroom.

  Saiman was driven by the desire to create his own Uberman, a super-male that would be irresistible to women. The sexual aspect of his quest interested him much less than the scientific motivation to craft an image of a perfect human being. He engaged in this pursuit of an ultimate shape for purposes unknown, for I truly had no idea what he would do with his Uberman if he ever succeeded. He approached the challenge with the same methodical logic he applied to everything, attempting to gather feedback from a wide pool of subjects, most of whom had no idea what he truly looked like.