Master of Shadows

by Angela Knight

  “No,” Belle interrupted, her voice catching. “If I could, please believe me, I would.” She swallowed. “I had a daughter once. I know how . . . I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss.”

  Breaking off as if realizing she was on the verge of losing it completely, Belle whirled and headed for the house’s front door. Justice pulled it open for her, and she started inside—only to recoil in the doorway.

  Tristan realized why as the smell of blood rolled out in a choking wave. The boy’s mother collapsed into her chair and began to sob. The women around her joined in, voices a rising wail that made Tristan wish he was any other damned place at all.

  Helpless. He hated feeling helpless.

  Belle straightened her shoulders and walked into the house, her head high, her spine erect. The two men followed. Justice closed the door behind them, muffling the wails and angry mutters.

  In the foyer, Justice took the lead. Not that he had to. They could easily tell where the scene was from the bloody tracks on the polished wooden floor.

  When they stepped into the small den, they saw it was every bit as bad as Tristan had known it would be. He was no stranger to the effects of a beheading, so he’d expected the blood spray. He’d expected the body, still sitting erect in the armchair, since the chair’s cushions supported it.

  What bothered him was the big screen television and the Xbox, which was still mindlessly running the kid’s last video game. Two armored knights swung swords at each other, accompanied by the sound of ringing steel and cries of pain. “Christ.”

  “Yeah,” Justice agreed. “But take a deep breath. Under the blood—isn’t that the smell of a vampire?”

  Tristan frowned at him, but dropped to one knee and took an obedient breath right behind the armchair, where the killer must have stood.

  He expected some generic odor that Warlock had faked in an effort to trigger the war he wanted. Maybe even Arthur’s scent, since Warlock hated the Magus with an insane jealousy.

  But as he breathed in, Tristan recognized a scent he didn’t expect. One he’d smelled just a few hours before.

  Startled, he looked up at Belle, who was standing frozen at his side, her face pale as fine porcelain. “Merlin’s cup, Belle—It’s Davon Fredericks.”

  TWO

  Belle stared at him in frozen horror. Her stomach rolled at the blood reek, and she tried not to breathe too deeply. “If that’s your idea of a joke, Tristan . . .”

  Hurt flashed across the knight’s face, almost too fast to register. “I don’t make that kind of joke.”

  “Wait.” Justice gave Tristan a narrow stare. “You know this guy? You recognize his scent?”

  “No way in hell did Davon Fredericks kill this boy. Christ, look at him!” Belle turned to gesture at the body. The game controller still rested in the teen’s hands, though drying blood covered him so thickly, it was hard to make out the details. She had to swallow again, hard. “Davon would have had to be blood-mad, and I’d have noticed. Even if I’d missed it, Davon’s been Magekind for two months now, and you can’t hide something like that. He’d have killed somebody before now. Probably me.”

  Justice frowned. “What’s blood-madness?”

  “Merlin’s Gift drives some Latents insane within minutes of the spell being triggered,” Belle explained. “They just can’t handle exposure to the Mageverse.”

  “Does it always happen like that? Could it have come on later?”

  She shook her head. “It’s immediate. I suppose it’s the same as what happens to your young werewolves when they burn. They just can’t control the magic.”

  “I’ve been a Magus fifteen hundred years,” Tristan added. “I’ve never seen it happen any other way. If your mind withstands the Gift, you don’t lose control of it later.”

  Justice propped his hands on his hips and studied them, his head tilted in curiosity. “Actually, I’m not sure how the spell is triggered in you folks. With us, you get Merlin’s Curse if you’re born into a Direkind family or if a werewolf bites you. It’s automatic.”

  “It’s a different process with the Magekind.” Belle had repeated this next bit so many times, she could recite it in her sleep. “Back fifteen hundred years ago, Merlin tested the knights and ladies of Camelot . . .”

  The Wolf Sherriff nodded. “He tested our Saxon ancestors, too.”

  “Right. In our case, the winners drank from Merlin’s Grail, and their DNA was altered by the magical potion the cup contained, transforming the men into vampires and the women into witches,” she said. “But all of them were immortal. Though their children inherit the DNA containing the spell, the kids are mortal. We call them ‘Latents.’ A Latent only transforms if the spell is triggered when they have sex at least three times with one of the Magekind. Then they transform into vampires or witches, depending on their gender.”

  “Sounds a hell of a lot more pleasant than how we do it.”

  “Not if you go insane.” Belle winced at a particularly nasty flash of memory. “A blood-mad vampire immediately tries to rip out the throat of the Maja who Gifted him. Since I’m the Maja who Gifted Davon, one of us wouldn’t be here if he’d gone blood-mad.”

  “One of you? Are you implying you’d have . . .”

  “Killed him? Oh, yes. I’ve killed sixteen blood-mad vampires.”

  The werewolf’s eyes narrowed. “You make a habit out of killing men who sleep with you?”

  “She’s not a serial killer, dammit,” Tristan snapped. “That’s her job.”

  “It’s your job to kill men who sleep with you?”

  Tristan curled a lip. “Now you’re just being an asshole.”

  “And if Tristan says you’re an asshole . . .” Belle muttered. “Look, did you miss the part where they try to rip out my throat? I always make sure they’re attempting to kill me before I . . . take action.”

  Justice eyed her, brows lifted. “You weigh, what? A hundred and twenty soaking wet? How the hell would you kill a vampire? Fry him with a spell?”

  “Considering I’m usually on top of him at the time, no. I’m good with a knife. And none of this has a damned thing to do with the boy.”

  “Depends. You good with a sword, too?”

  “Justice,” Tristan growled, “you’re beginning to piss me off.”

  The Wolf sheriff shot him a cool look. “I was a cop for ten years before I became a werewolf. I’ve made a career of pissing people off.”

  “Then you boys should get along fine.” Belle rubbed the spot between her brows where a headache was taking root. “Justice, I’ve been the lead Maja court seducer for more than a thousand years. I’ve Gifted so many men, I have literally lost count.”

  He blinked. “A thousand years? You’re a thousand years old?”

  “We are immortals,” Tristan said dryly. Unlike werewolves, who were as mortal as humans. Why Merlin set it up that way was anybody’s guess.

  “I was given this duty because I have a talent for determining whether a man is likely to go blood-mad,” Belle continued, grappling for patience. “I’ve refused to Gift three hundred and twenty-three men the Majae’s Council sent me to seduce, because I could tell they couldn’t handle it. That’s a damned crucial skill, because Majae have been murdered by insane vampires. Twenty-eight of them were my fellow court seducers.”

  “You have those stats memorized?”

  “They tend to stick in my mind.”

  Justice examined her face with his cop’s searching black gaze. “You take your job pretty damned seriously.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  “So you get paid to sleep with these guys?”

  “If you take one more shot at her,” Tristan growled, “I’m going to take a shot at you.”

  Belle felt her jaw drop. Tristan was usually the one to make the whore comments. She closed her mouth and said, “No, I don’t get paid, any more than Tristan or Arthur do. First, Avalon isn’t a cash-based economy. Second, I do what I do because it’s my duty, and I
’m good at it. If I quit, another Maja would have to take my place, and she might get herself killed. I’m already haunted by sixteen ghosts. I don’t need any more.”

  Justice tilted his head and studied her. She wished he’d direct that piercing stare elsewhere. “Why do those guys haunt you if you were only defending yourself?”

  “Because I should have realized they didn’t have the strength to survive the Gift. If I’d left them the hell alone, they could have lived out their mortal lives. They were all decent men, and I drove them insane and killed them.” She looked away, her hands curling into fists. “Now, could we drop this, please?”

  A cold silence ticked by, broken only by soft female sobs and grumbling male voices from somewhere outside. Finally Justice said, “All this implies that if this Davon Fredericks killed Jimmy, he was in his right mind when he did it. That doesn’t improve the situation.”

  “I don’t believe it’s him.” Brooding, Belle studied what was left of the teen. “Maybe Warlock created a false scent. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. I can think of a half dozen ways myself. If he got his hands on a sample of Davon’s hair, for example . . .”

  Justice shook his head, his mouth pulled into a hard line. “I don’t understand why you’re so convinced Warlock is involved. Assuming he even exists.”

  “Oh, he exists,” Tristan said grimly.

  “I fought him,” Belle confirmed. “So did Smoke.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Shape-shifting Sidhe warrior,” Tristan said. “Damned near a god himself.”

  “Warlock used a spell to absorb the elemental who gives Smoke his power,” Belle explained. “Smoke got him back, but the elemental still remembers what being in Warlock’s mind was like.”

  Justice frowned. “Elemental? What’s an elemental?”

  “An alien energy being. This one uses Smoke as a host. Gives him a hell of a lot of power.”

  The cop huffed out a laugh. “You guys sound like an episode of Star Trek, you know that?”

  Tristan glowered at him. “Bite me, furboy.”

  Justice bared his teeth. “Okay, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “Down, boys,” Belle told them. “Point is, Smoke knows Warlock pretty well after all that psychic contact, and he says Warlock is insane. And that Warlock hates Arthur and wants to destroy the Magekind so the Direkind can take our place. A war between us would serve that purpose nicely.”

  Especially since the Magekind would probably lose. Merlin had created the werewolves to destroy the Magekind if they became a threat to humanity. The Magekind had been unaware of Merlin’s little insurance policy until a couple of years ago. The werewolves had managed to stay hidden until a group of alien demons forced them out into the open. They still weren’t happy about being revealed to their magical rivals.

  Justice shook his head. “But why would Merlin give Warlock so much power if he was that crazy?”

  “Smoke says he wasn’t insane in the beginning,” Tristan explained. “But he’s spent fifteen hundred years watching the Magekind, waiting for any sign that we’re a threat to the human race. The job’s made him paranoid.”

  Belle nodded. “Plus, he’s convinced Arthur should take a more direct role in preventing wars and disasters. We just don’t work that way, so he’s decided to get rid of us and take over.”

  “Basically, he’s become exactly what Merlin created you folks to prevent us from becoming,” Tristan said. “He means to make himself a mystical dictator/god of the human race.”

  “Warlock thinks he’ll create a utopia, but Smoke says all he’ll really accomplish is a bloody Direkind war with humanity.”

  Justice stared at her. “That’s completely insane. There are six billion humans and at most thirty thousand of us. The humans would wipe us out, no matter how many of them we bit and Cursed.”

  “Yeah.” Belle shifted her feet, brooding. The red-soaked carpet squelched as she moved. “And in the meantime, the Magekind would be destroyed as a stabilizing force for humanity. We were all that got the planet through the Cold War. Without us around to make sure nobody triggers nuclear war . . .”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Tristan said. “That about sums it up.”

  He turned to Belle. “I just thought of something. What about the dimensional gate? Judging by the scent trail, whoever killed that boy did not come through the front door. They must have gated in.”

  “But not right into this room.” Justice frowned thoughtfully at the boy’s body. “Judging by what I felt when you arrived, a magical burst like that should have gotten the kid’s attention, no matter how intent he was on his game.”

  “Would the boy have sensed him if he’d gated into the hallway instead?” Belle stepped back out into the foyer. The two men followed her.

  “Maybe.” Justice shrugged his broad shoulders. “Maybe not.”

  “So we’ll see what I can detect.” Belle closed her eyes and opened her senses, looking for the fading pulse of magic. An instant later, a faint glow lit up the darkness behind her lids. Turning in that direction, she opened her eyes and pointed. “There it is.”

  A ghostly golden oval hung in the air, gently pulsing.

  Justice frowned. “I don’t see anything. Don’t sense anything either.”

  “You’re not a Maja,” Tristan told him.

  “It’s definitely there.” Belle moved toward the gate’s shimmering remnants, raising her hands to cast a spell designed to draw in the energy and determine its origins.

  The identity of the caster leaped to her magical senses like a shout, so strong any Maja would have known at once who it was. She stared at the fading glimmer in shock.

  It’s got to be a frame. Warlock faked the magical signature somehow.

  If she could just dissect it down to its component energy, she should be able to prove as much. Warlock’s Dire Wolf magic operated on a different magical wavelength than the Magekind’s.

  Belle picked at the energy carefully, trying to unravel the fading pulse without destroying it completely, seeking the distinctive signature of werewolf magic. Sweat rolled down her spine as she struggled, and the headache that had been born during the argument began a full-fledged throbbing. Ignoring the pain, she manipulated the trace energy, looking for the proof of Warlock’s involvement.

  She didn’t find it. There was no sign of his magic at all.

  “Screw this.” Belle dropped her hands in frustration. “There’s a simpler way to clear this up.”

  “And that would be?” Justice leaned an elbow on the banister of the stairs that led to the second floor, his pose that of a man who’d been standing there for a while. His shotgun lay on the carpeted steps.

  “We call the pair in here and question them. You can smell a lie, right? If you can’t, Tristan can. They’ll tell us what happened one way or the other.”

  “Belle, who cast the dimensional gate that brought the killer here?” Tristan asked quietly.

  “Cherise Myers,” Belle growled. “Davon’s partner.”

  Davon turned away from the crowd heading back toward Joyous Gard, the dorm building the new recruits shared. He didn’t have the patience to listen to laughter. He felt scalded, as if he’d been sprayed with a hydrochloric acid solution that was slowly eating through his skin.

  If he heard one more chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” he was going to start howling like one of the schizophrenics that wandered the streets of Chicago.

  Damn, he wished he was back home, schizophrenics and all. Patching up gangbangers and their innocent bystanders would be better than this.

  It had seemed like such a fabulous dream when Belle first appeared with her offer. He’d been in the middle of dictating notes on a case when she’d opened a gate into his private office at the hospital.

  A beautiful blonde, stepping from a sparkling hole in the air right in front of his desk. Davon thought somebody had slipped something into his morning latte.

  The sto
ry Belle had told was just as flatly unbelievable. She’d finally had to cast a spell on him to make him accept what she had to say.

  Davon had known he was the descendant of slaves, but he’d never have dreamed a Knight of the Round Table was also among his ancestors. It had been all he could do not to call his parents with the amazing news. Mary Fredericks was a teacher, while Davon’s father, Jordan, was a cop. Being middle class at best, they hadn’t had the money to send him to college. Davon got in by wrangling a a football scholarship, then worked two jobs and clawed his way to an academic scholarship that had paid for med school. Between studying and working, he’d put in so many all-nighters, he might as well have been a vampire.

  Still, all that effort had paid off in the end. He’d made the dean’s list and graduated with high honors. His parents had been almost incandescent with pride at his graduation.

  Davon had loved the medical career he’d worked so hard for. The thought of giving it up had been wrenching, but this was an opportunity to take an active role in saving humankind from itself. He’d never be able to save so many lives as a doctor.

  Besides, being immortal wouldn’t exactly suck.

  Belle had warned Davon he’d pay a personal cost if he became a Magus. He’d watch not only his parents, but his brother and sister, grow old and die, not to mention his nieces and nephews, their children, and their children’s children in turn. All while he stayed the same apparent age he was now. He would lose all his friends, and he’d never be able to talk about his work to the mortals he knew and loved.

  Knowing all that, Davon had still decided playing a role in the survival of the human race was worth the personal cost.

  But he hadn’t known that cost would be so high. This was only his second mission, and it had been the most horrifying experience of his life. Still, he’d done his duty. His ugly, bloody duty. Now the guilt was eating him alive.

  God, I wish I’d said no. Being immortal no longer seemed like a blessing. Not if it meant he’d spend the rest of that very long life being haunted by the boy’s ghost. No matter what the kid had done, he was still a kid.