I lowered the stacks to the floor, pulled up a chair, and emptied the envelope onto the desk’s surface. Two photographs and a letter. In the first photo two couples stood side by side. I recognized my father, a hulking, red-haired man, enormous shoulders spread wide, one arm around a woman who had to be my mother. Some children retain memories of their deceased parents, a shadow of a voice, a hint of a scent, an image. I recalled nothing of her, as if she had never existed. My father kept no photographs of her—it must have been too painful for him—and I knew only what he told me. She was pretty, he had said, and she had long blond hair. I stared at the woman in the photograph. She was short and petite. Her features matched her build, well-formed, delicate, but devoid of fragility. She stood assured, with easy, natural poise, clothed in a kind of magical allure and perfectly aware of her power. She was beautiful.
Both he and Greg told me I resembled her, but no matter how hard I studied her image, I could see no resemblance. My features were bolder. My mouth was larger and not pouting by any stretch of the imagination. I did manage to inherit her eye color, dark brown, but my eyes had an odd cut, almond-shaped, slightly elongated. And my skin was a shade darker. If I overloaded on eyeliner and mascara, I could easily pass for a gypsy.
There was more to it than that—my mother’s face had feminine gentleness. Mine didn’t, at least not when compared to hers. If we were to stand side by side in a room full of people, I wouldn’t get a single glance. And if someone had stopped to chat me up, she could’ve stolen him with a single smile.
Pretty . . . Yeah. Nice understatement, Dad.
On the other hand, if the same people had to pick one of us to kick a bad guy in the kneecap, I’d get the vote, no problem.
Next to my mother and father, Greg stood by a lovely Asian woman. Anna. His first wife. Unlike my parents, those two stood a little apart, each maintaining a barely perceptible distance as if their individualities would strike a spark if they reached for one another. Greg’s eyes were mournful.
I put the photograph face down on the desk.
The other photo was of me, about nine or ten years old, diving into a lake from the branches of a giant poplar. I didn’t know he had it or even when it was taken.
I read the letter, a few sparse lines on the white piece of paper, a part of Spenser’s poem.
“One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.”
Below four words were written in Greg’s blood.
Amehe
Tervan
Senehe
Ud
The words blazed with red fire. A powerful spasm gripped me. My lungs constricted, the room blurred, and through the dense fog the beating of my heart sounded loud like the toll of a church bell. A tangle of forces swirled around me, catching me in a twisted mess of slippery, elastic power currents. I reached out, and gripped them, and they carried me forth, far into the amalgam of light and sound. The light permeated me and burst within my mind, sending a myriad of sparks through my skin. The blood in my veins luminesced like molten metal.
Lost. Lost in the whirlwind of light.
My mouth opened, struggling to release a word. It wouldn’t come and I thought I would die, and then I said it, pouring my power into the weak sound.
“Hesaad.” Mine.
The world stopped spinning and I found my place in it. The four words towered before me. I had to say them. I held my power and said the words, willing them, forcing them to become mine.
“Amehe. Tervan. Senehe. Ud.”
The flow of power ebbed. I was staring at the white piece of paper. The words were gone and a small puddle of crimson spread across the sheet. I touched it and felt the prickling of magic. My blood. My nose was bleeding.
Pulling a dressing from my pocket, where I always carried some, I pressed it against my nose and leaned back. I’d burn the bandages later. The watch on my wrist said 12:17 p.m. Somehow within those few instants I had lost almost an hour and a half.
The four words of power. Obey, Kill, Protect, and Die. Words so primal, so dangerous, so powerful that they commanded the raw magic itself. Nobody knew how many of them there were, where they came from, or why they held such enormous hold over magic. Even people who had never used magic recognized their meaning and were subject to their power, as if the words were a part of some ancient racial memory we all carried.
It wasn’t enough to merely know them; one had to own them. When it came to acquiring power words, there were no second chances. You either conquered them or you died trying, which explained why so few among the magic workers could wield them. Once you made them yours, they belonged to you forever. They had to be wielded with great precision and using them took a chunk of power that left the caster near exhaustion. Greg and my father both warned me that the power words could be resisted, but so far I hadn’t had a chance to use them against an opponent that did. They were the last resort, when all else failed.
Now I had six words. Four given to me by Greg and two others: Mine and Release. My father taught them to me long ago. I was twelve and I almost died making them mine. This time it had been too easy.
Maybe the power of the blood grew with age. I wished Greg was alive so I could ask him.
I glanced to the floor. The orange lines of Greg’s ward had grown so dim, I could barely see them. They had absorbed everything they could.
The words clamored in my head, shifting and tossing, trying to find their place. Greg’s last gift. More precious than anything he could have given me.
Gradually I became aware of someone watching me. I looked up and saw a lean black man in the doorway. He had smiled at me when I passed by his office some three hours earlier.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Tripped a residual ward,” I mumbled, the rag still covering my nose. “Happens. I’m okay.”
He eyed me. “You sure?”
“Yeah.” Okay, I’m an incompetent moron, go away now.
“I brought you Greg’s file.” He made no move to enter the room. Smart. If I had tripped a trap set up by Greg, it could hit him as well. “Sorry it’s so late. One of our knights had it.”
I walked to him and took the file from his hands. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He regarded me for a moment and walked away.
I rummaged through Greg’s desk for a mirror. Every self-respecting mage had a mirror close to hand. Too many spells required it. Greg’s was a rectangle set in a plain wooden frame. I caught my image in it and almost dropped the rag. My hair glowed. It radiated a weak burgundy luminescence, which shifted when I ran my hands through it, as if each individual strand of hair was coated with fluorescent paint. I shook my head, but the radiance didn’t dim. Growling at it didn’t help either and I had not the faintest idea how I could get rid of it.
I hid in the farthest corner of the room, invisible from the door, and opened the file. If you can’t make it go away, wait it out.
The last time I assimilated words of power, I was exhausted. Now I felt exhilarated, high on magic. The energy filled me, and I struggled to contain it. I wanted to jump, to run, to do something. Instead I had to hide in a corner and concentrate on the file before me.
The file contained a coroner’s report, a summary of a police report, some hurried notes, and several photos of a crime scene. A wide shot showed two bodies sprawled on the asphalt, one corpse stark, pale, and nude and the other a bloody mess of mauled, shredded tissue. I found the close-up of the mauled corpse first. The cadaver lay spread-eagled upon a blood-soaked cloth. Something had ripped into its chest, snapped the breastbone, and tore it away with unbelievable force. The chest cavity lay exposed, the wet, glistening mass of the smashed heart dark against the spongy remains of lungs and the yellow white of the broken ribs. The left arm, wrenched clear of its socket, hung by a thin, bloodied filament.
A lump rose in my throat. I struggled with it for a few agonizing seconds and forced it down. This was not Greg. It was only his corpse.
The next photo provided me with a close look at the other body. This one appeared untouched, all except for the head, which was missing. A broken shard of the spine jutted from the neck stump framed by limp shreds of torn tissue. No other evidence of the head ever being there remained. There was hardly any blood. There should have been pints of it. The body lay at an angle and both carotid and jugular were cleanly severed, so where did all the blood go?
I found four more shots of the corpse and arranged them next to each other on the floor. The smooth marble-white skin of the cadaver stretched tightly over his musculature, as if the body had no fat at all, only lean muscle. Not a single hair marred the epidermis. The scrotum looked shriveled and unusually small in size. I needed a close-up of the hand but there was not one. Somebody had dropped the ball. It did not matter too much, since all of the other telltale signs were there. Even without the nails, the conclusion was plain. I was looking at a dead vampire.
Vampires are dead by definition, but this one had ceased its undead existence. Not even Ghastek, with all of his necromantic powers, could fix a vampire without a head. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was who did this vampire belong to? Most People branded their vampires. If this one was branded, it didn’t show in any of the shots the moron photographer had taken.
What could wipe out a vampire and a knight-diviner? The vampire, super fast and able to take out a SWAT team unaided, would prove hard prey by itself. The vampire plus Greg made for near impossible kill. Yet there they were, both dead.
I leaned back, thinking. The killer would have to possess great power. He would have to be faster than a vampire, strong enough to tear the head off a body, and able to shield himself from Greg’s magic and his mace. Off the top of my head the list of possible murderers was rather short.
First, the People could have sought to kill Greg and used one of their vamps as bait. An aged vampire in the hands of an experienced and able Master of the Dead was a weapon like no other. If there was more than one, they could’ve taken out Greg and their own bloodsucker. It was expensive and improbable, since Greg was particularly effective against vampires, but it wasn’t impossible.
Second, the condition of Greg’s ravaged corpse pointed to the shapechangers. That kind of damage had to be done with claws and teeth and by more than one set of them. Perhaps it was a loup, a deranged shapechanger. The bodies of those afflicted with Lycos Virus, or Lyc-V for short, yearned to slaughter without discrimination while their minds sought to restrain the bloodlust. If the mind won over the body, a shapechanger became a Free Man of the Code, existing within a well-structured and highly disciplined Pack. If the body conquered the mind, a shapechanger became a loup, a cannibalistic murderer driven mad by hormones, hunting everything and hunted by everyone.
The loup theory was even less probable than the People theory. For one, the beheaded vamp was untouched except for its neck, and loups tore into everything with maniacal frenzy. Next, Greg would’ve killed more than one of them, and no other bodies littered the scene. Third, if the murderer was a loup, or more likely, several of them, they would’ve left a ton of evidence at the scene, everything from saliva and hair to their own blood. The medical examiner’s office had genetic profiles on almost all known shapechanger types. As far as I could discern, the file contained no paper showing that any shapechanger DNA had been found at the scene.
Rubbing my face didn’t give me any special insights into the situation. Most likely, the murders had been committed by none of the above and for the time being I had to leave it at that.
The autopsy report confirmed the beheaded cadaver as Homo sapiens immortuus, a vampire. An ironic name since the mind of a human died the moment vampirism took hold. The vampires knew no pity and no fear; they couldn’t be trained; they had no ego. On a developmental level they stood close to insects, possessing a nervous system and yet incapable of forming thoughts. An insatiable hunger for blood ruled them and they slaughtered everything in their path in their urge to quench it.
I frowned. The file contained no m-scan. All crime scenes involving death or assault were routinely scanned for magic. Technically both the police and MSDU could demand access to this file and be granted such access by a court order. The fact that an m-scan was missing meant that it showed something the Order didn’t wish to reveal to the general public. Unless the same cretin that took the photographs somehow managed to drop the scan in the trash.
The only remaining page in the file listed several female names. Sandra Molot, Angelina Gomez, Jennifer Ying, Alisa Konova. None of them sounded familiar, and no explanation of the list was offered.
A fresh examination of my hair revealed that it was no longer glowing. I made a quick dash to the desk and dialed the number listed in the police report.
A gruff voice answered the phone. I introduced myself and asked for the lead detective. “I’m looking into the murder of the knight-diviner.”
“We’ve spoken to you people,” the man on the other end said. “Read the goddamned report.”
“You haven’t spoken to me, sir. I would very much appreciate any time you could find for me. Any time at all.”
The phone clanged and I was greeted by a disconnect signal. So much for interagency cooperation.
The watch on my wrist showed 12:58 p.m. I’d have time to hit the morgue. The mandatory one-month waiting period for the dead vampires was nowhere close to running out and the MA sticker would ensure that I’d have no problem taking a look at the bloodsucker’s body.
I closed the file, placed it into the closest filing cabinet, and made my escape.
THE CITY MORGUE STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE downtown district. Directly across from it, past the wide expanse of the Unnamed Square, rose the golden dome of the Capitol Building. The old morgue had been leveled twice, first by a rogue Master of the Dead, and second by a golem, the same one that created the Unnamed Square when it reduced the five city blocks to rubble in its failed attempt to break through the Capitol’s wards.
Even now, six years later, the city council refused to rename the empty space surrounding the Capitol, reasoning that as long as it had no name, nobody could summon anything there.
The new morgue was constructed on the principle of “third time’s the charm.” A state-of-the-art facility, it looked like the bastard offspring of a prison and a fortress, with a bit of medieval castle thrown in for good measure. The locals joked that if the Capitol Building came under attack again, the State Legislature could just run across the square and hide in the morgue. Looking at it, I could believe it, too. A severe, forbidding building, the morgue loomed among the dolled-up facades of the corporation headquarters like the Grim Reaper at a tea party. Its mercantile neighbors had to be unhappy about its presence in their midst, but could do nothing about it. The morgue got more traffic than all of them. Another sign of the times.
I walked up the wide staircase, between granite columns, and moved through the revolving door into a wide hall. The high windows admitted plenty of light, but failed to banish the gloom completely. It pooled in the corners and along the walls, lying in wait to clutch at the ankles of an unwary passerby. Polished tiles of gray granite covered the floor. Two hallways radiated from the opposite wall, both flooded by blue feylantern light. The tiles ended there, replaced by yellowish linoleum.
The air smelled of death. It wasn’t the actual nauseating odor of the rotting flesh, but a different kind of stench, one of chlorine and formaldehyde and bitter medicines, reminiscent of a hospital smell, but nobody would confuse the two. In the hospital, life left its sure signs. Here only its absence could be felt.
There was an infor
mation desk between the two hallways. I made my way to it and introduced myself to a clerk in green scrubs. He glanced at my ID and nodded. “He’s in seven C. You know where it is?”
“Yes. I’ve been here before.”
“Good. Go ahead, I’ll get someone to open it for you.”
I took the right hallway to a flight of stairs and went down, into the basement level. I passed section B and came to a stop at its end, where a steel gate barred my progress.
After five minutes or so, hurried steps echoed through the hallway and a woman wearing green scrubs and a stained apron came rushing around the corner. She carried a thick three-ring binder in one hand and a jingling key chain in the other. A few thin wisps of blond hair had escaped her sterile hair net. Dark circles surrounded her eyes and the skin on her face sagged a little.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Nahh, don’t worry about it,” she said, fumbling with the keys. “It didn’t hurt to take a walk.”
She unlocked the gate and swept past me. I followed her to a reinforced steel door. She opened two locks, stepped back, and barked, “It is I, Julianne, who commands you, and you shall do my bidding. Open!” The magic shifted subtly as the spell released the door. Julianne swung it open. Inside, on a metal table riveted to the floor, lay a nude body. Stark against the stainless steel, it was a queer shade of pale, whitish pink, as if it had been bleached. A silver-steel harness enclosed the cadaver’s chest. A chain as thick as my arm stretched from the harness to a ring in the floor.
“We usually just collar them, but with this one . . .” Julianne waved her hand.
“Yeah.” I glanced at the stump of the neck.
“Not that he’ll rise or anything. Not without a head. Still, if anything . . .” She nodded toward the blue circle of a panic button on the nearest wall. “You armed?”
I unsheathed Slayer. Julianne jerked back from the shimmering blade. “Whoa. Okay, that’ll work.”
Magic Bites kd-1 Page 3
