Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  “Have you controlled it since its return?”

  The lack of response made my chest ache—it was as good as a yes. I remembered how Tennyson had described his link to all of his vampire children. They were connected by the mind and emotions. Since revenant spirits were all about emotional turmoil, it stood to reason the necromancer had a similar sort of link. And since Julius was only awake when he took off his lid and interacted . . .

  “He’s spying on us,” I said. Piotr’s left eye twitched. “He used his connection to Julius and has been spying on us. Son of a bitch.”

  Piotr hit the chains like a wolverine, snarling and snapping. I took a step backward, propelled by the wave of energy slamming my way, flavored with fury and hatred. Tennyson took a sideways step that put his body between me and Piotr. Neither of us had to ask if my assumption was true.

  “Release me!” Piotr roared in a voice so guttural it seemed torn from the belly of the earth. The monster was defeating the man. I’d seen it happen once and barely survived with my life.

  Vampirism isn’t a disease. Science will never understand it, cure it, or replicate it. It’s a dual existence, on a level that can only be explained by magic, occurring at the point of death through blood exchange. No longer fully human, infused with the instincts of a predator to hunt and drink and mate, vampires must learn to control their monster side early on in order to survive amongst humans. It’s why those chosen to be turned must be approved by the line’s Master—weak, irrational vampires weaken the line and bring unwanted attention.

  It’s rumored among the djinn that the first vampires were former djinn, cast out for using their magic selfishly and cursed with bloodlust. Funny enough, no one knows for sure, and the vampires . . . ah, dislike being referred to as fallen djinn. Really dislike it. In the same way djinn despise being referred to as fallen angels (even though they are, technically).

  In our first year together, our Para-Marshal unit was dispatched to hunt a rogue vampire who’d lost control of his monster. He’d gone on a killing rampage in the Philadelphia Zoo one night, devastating the animals and at least six caretakers before being cornered by a helpful troll. The carnage had looked like a scene from a slasher movie—guts and muscle and stringy red bits all over the ground and in trees. The vampire had been animalistic in its fury, eyes glowing red and fangs extended to over two inches. It had taken eighteen silver bullets to slow it down. I took a slice to my femoral artery when I moved in to decapitate the blessed thing.

  Red-eyed and fangs growing longer by the second, Piotr looked much like that feral vamp had six years ago. And unlike that feral vamp, Piotr was both very old and a necromancer. If he lost control, I doubted very much the cage would hold him.

  Tennyson backed up. I did, too, to avoid being stepped on, and then we were outside of the cage. I slammed the door into place. Tennyson hadn’t broken his gazelock, but judging by the sweat curling down his clenched jaw and the blazing red of his eyes, he was on the verge of losing Piotr. Letting the monster out.

  “Kill it, Shiloh,” Dad said. “Before your vampire loses control and the beast is free.”

  My vampire?

  “Release me!” Piotr’s second demand was more guttural than the first, harder to understand.

  Kathleen circled the cage and stopped behind Piotr’s straining back. She plucked a silver blade from her belt.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait, will killing Piotr also kill Julius?”

  “He is already dead,” she replied.

  “I mean with the spell. Does killing the necromancer destroy the revenant’s ability to function?”

  “There is but one way to find out.”

  “He was using the revenant to spy on you,” Dad said. “You don’t want to keep it around, anyway, no matter who it used to be, Shiloh.”

  I held his gaze a moment, but saw nothing useful there. Dad saw a monster that needed putting down. Kathleen saw the same thing. I saw a link to the remains of an old friend, but I also saw a potential opportunity. We’d used Julius to track down the pentagram room. We may yet use him to find the apprentice—an apprentice Piotr could still identify.

  “Give me the blade,” I said, moving to stand next to the Kathleen.

  She handed it over without question. I tested its weight in my palm, its perfect balance and shape. The cage’s bars were spaced far enough apart to thrust my hand through while fisted.

  “Do something,” Tennyson said through clenched teeth, the strain obvious in his tone.

  I eyed my target and drove the blade home.

  Chapter 13

  I shoved the knife into Piotr’s spine, directly between his shoulder blades. He didn’t scream. His entire body sagged against the chains as everything below his chest went slack. His fingers still twitched, so he hadn’t lost complete control of his arms, but the fight had gone out of him. As long as the blade stayed in place, he couldn’t heal and regain mobility.

  It also had to hurt like hell, but I didn’t care.

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Kathleen said.

  “He still has information we need,” I said. “If we dust him now, we’ll never get it.”

  Tennyson was sitting cross-legged on the floor, head down and cradled in his palms. I approached slowly, scuffling my feet on the concrete floor to announce myself.

  “I need a moment,” he said as I reached out to touch his shoulder.

  The announcement stayed my hand. I hazarded a look at Piotr, instead. His face was bloodless, his eyes downcast. Some internal war continued raging inside of his mind, but his damaged body could no longer seethe against its captivity. We’d be lucky to get any more answers from him. I just couldn’t sever the final link to Julius—not yet.

  Dad’s color was better now that the levels of vampire magic had reduced to a faint buzz. He was watching me like I was a particularly interesting bug specimen. Was that . . . surely that wasn’t disappointment? Over me not killing Piotr? Okay, so I understood the deep-seated hatred between the two species, but I was confident I’d made the right—

  His gaze dropped to Tennyson, then flickered back to me. Oh.

  Oh!

  I gave Dad my very best petulant teenager face, then squatted next to Tennyson. It made my entire body ache. Dad made a rude noise, punctuated by his feet stomping up the stairs. Kathleen followed him.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Tennyson looked up. His face was a strange, mottled color where the sweat had stained his skin. No hint of color remained in his eyes. A waft of tepid, clove-scented energy hit me. Coupled with the taut lines around his eyes and mouth, I categorized that one as pretty close to pain. “You’re welcome,” he said. “Thank you for not killing him.”

  “I didn’t do it for you.”

  “I realize that. However, the death of a Master can throw the line into turmoil when there is no clear leader to replace him or her.”

  “Clear leader?”

  He studied my nose—in pain but polite enough to avoid my eyes. “It is considered bad form to openly challenge another Master without cause, and it has happened only twice to my knowledge. In both instances, the victor is awarded all possessions of the slain Master, including control of his line.”

  I blinked, surprised by the information. “What happens if I kill Piotr?”

  “Nothing. You are not a vampire, therefore cannot be expected to control the line. Either a potential Master would emerge from the line and petition for leadership, or the line would fracture and scatter into smaller groups. Those individual nests are not unheard of, but they exist outside of the protection of our laws. If they are killed by law enforcement or other means, as Masters we are under no obligation to punish the culprits or demand recompense for their losses.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  He frowned—which was pretty impressive, given his already tense expression. “You are not aware of internal vampire politics.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Not much of it, no.” I hated admi
tting to ignorance. “I suppose it never occurred to me that a Master could be killed.”

  “We can, of course, but it is extremely difficult. Piotr would never have been captured today without my assistance. As such, I could successfully petition for claim over his line in the event of his death at a non-vampire’s hands.”

  My heart pitter-patted. “Giving you control of how many vampires?”

  “Several hundred, unless they are all murdered by this mysterious figure Piotr spoke of.” He must have understood something in my expression, because he offered a tentative smile. “It is my experience that adopting the vampires of another’s line is extremely taxing, both mentally and physically. Establishing a link with one you have not sired is difficult and time-consuming.”

  It is my experience. Those words haunted me. He knew of instances where such a thing occurred. Was he one of the two that had killed a fellow Master and assumed their line?

  “That is a story for another day,” he said. I glared, and he added, “I apologize, but your proximity makes it difficult to ignore your thoughts completely. You are an emotional thing, and you tend to project.”

  I stood up fast enough to make myself woozy, and then stalked toward the stairs. Show a little compassion and get insulted—check. At least I’d gotten a little more information out of him and knew enough to not kill Piotr if it could be helped. The last thing I needed was to be blamed for Tennyson gaining control of more—

  “Shiloh.”

  His hand wrapped around my left wrist and tugged. I spun into the motion, in no mood to be grabbed, and drove my knee into his groin. An approximation of it, anyway, since he was a bit taller and faster, and he managed to swing his body far enough to the side to avoid full-package contact. My knee pummeled the spot where his left leg met his hip, which threw me off balance. He kept me spinning, until I stopped with my back to his chest, my arms pinned over my stomach.

  I had a momentary déjà vu to the upstairs hallway and bit back an instinctual shriek. Bringing my teammates—or my dad for that matter—back down for this would only end badly. I didn’t need rescuing from Tennyson.

  “Let. Me. Go.”

  He did and stepped back to a respectable distance. As much as the Master vampire terrified me, he also infuriated me like no one I’d ever met. Power and arrogance far outweighed any positive qualities I’d observed in the few days we’d known each other.

  “I have no desire to acquire Piotr’s line,” he said in a voice cold enough to challenge an icebox. “None at all. My only desire is to ensure the safety of my existing line and to reclaim that which has been stolen from me.”

  “Which I’ve already promised to help you do.” I couldn’t quite match his glacial tone. “And now we know the same man who took your people is pulling all the strings, and he wants a necromancer under his thumb. Missing vampires, mated werewolf pairs, and necrotic magic—how does all of this fit?”

  The creation of vampires and forced werewolves were similar. Each needed the victim near death for the transformation to take place. Vampires had an eighty-twenty success rate. Werewolf transformation was closer to forty-sixty, because blood was not given back to the victim in the same manner as vampirism, and the physical effect was far more violent. Necrotic magic had similarities to both, in that the magic worked best with the brutally tortured. It was control of the dead.

  Or the undead. Vampires were not exactly dead, but they also were no longer alive.

  Tennyson made a surprised noise, as though he’d been following my train of thought and had come to the same conclusion. I was so thrown by my answer that I looked into his red-tinged eyes. My skin crawled as I felt the start of a gazelock; surprisingly, he blinked and averted first.

  “Could a necromancer alter the revenant spell in order to establish control over a vampire?” I asked. Just saying it made my stomach squirm.

  “Theoretically, it is possible. However, I know little of necrotic magic, and even less of altering spells to create a different end result than what is intended. It is not an efficient method—”

  “It is if you can control a Master.”

  He chewed on that for a minute. “Control of a Master means control of the line.”

  “Bingo. And right now, this big bad has forty-six vampires he can let his necromancer experiment on to get it right.”

  “The other Masters must be warned.”

  “Can you trust them?”

  His dark look said it all. “You saw what was done to Piotr. He was cooperating under coercion. No Master would willingly align him or herself with someone whose end goal is to dominate our race.”

  It sounded melodramatic said like that. He wasn’t wrong, though. If whatever we were facing could capture a Master and successfully put him under his thumb, the other lines would be in serious danger. Hunted by their own kind. Not to mention the fact that human authorities would be forced to intervene. It would be chaos for vampires. I could only imagine the anger and betrayal I’d feel if someone had told me this about the djinn. Tennyson was living it.

  “We’re getting all of the whys and whats figured out,” I said. “Now we need the whos and the wheres.” I cast a look at Piotr’s limp form; he didn’t seem conscious.

  “We will learn little else from Piotr now. Even through the gazelock, his thoughts were protected from me. We must seek further answers elsewhere.”

  I started toward the stairs again.

  “You have a plan?” Tennyson asked, tailing me up.

  “Yep. A little old-fashioned detective work.”

  The assortment of people collected around K.I.M.’s widest monitor looked normal enough from the outside. As I waited for the computer to bring up my requested information, I mused on the assortment of supernatural entities standing in a semicircle in the converted dining room. Six hundred-year-old Master vampire and his mortal enemy, an earth djinn; myself, a half djinn; and my mother, the half Romani daughter of a warlock; a fallen incubus who wore sex on his sleeve and could seduce male or female with a smile; a dhampir who hated her vampire half as much as she hated the weakness of being half human; and a skin-walker as comfortable running the woods as a seven-point stag as he was chasing a suspect through alleys with bullets raining down around him.

  Yeah, we were an odd bunch, hanging around a supercomputer invented by a demon, waiting to get a look at the cell phone records for Julius at the time he signed the storage unit lease. I gave K.I.M. a four-week window, asked her to separate any calls made to other Raspberries, and only show calls made more than once.

  Dozens of lines of data still streamed across the screen. Checking up on those frequent calls was our best lead, and after revealing our suspicions to the rest of the group, everyone seemed to agree that finding this big bad was urgent. Seriously urgent.

  Multiple names came up more than four times. Adam Weller, the leader of the West Coast Para-Marshal Unit (not a shocker there). Linus Parker, an old Army Rangers buddy of Julius’s of whom I’d heard dozens of stories, mostly good, mostly involving alcohol and bar fights. Catherine Gibbons, someone Novak identified as Julius’s shrink from the VA hospital (I hadn’t even known Julius saw a shrink). And three more names no one in the room knew offhand, which made them the likeliest of suspects.

  However, to further shed darkness on this thing, none of them spoke with Julius on the actual day of rental. The least likely suspect on the list was also the only one who called Julius’s phone the day he disappeared—Adam Weller. Judging by the records, the pair spoke every week, sometimes more than once. Given their rather solitary roles as lead Para-Marshals, the communication was expected.

  “Has anyone spoken directly to Weller recently?” I asked, unsure what had been done during my convalescence. “Not just emailed updates? He left me a voice mail yesterday, but didn’t ask me to call him back.”

  “Yeah, yesterday while you were visiting another dimension with Tennyson,” Novak said. He was standing behind me and to my left. “Said he talked to J
ulius around lunchtime, was reporting some unusual vampire movement near Sacramento, and asking if we’d noticed anything out here. Said Julius was waiting on Chinese food delivery, and they hung up when the food got there. Last he heard from him.”

  The computer logs confirmed the call had lasted sixteen minutes, beginning at 12:14 that afternoon.

  I gave K.I.M. new commands—bring up personal information on Parker, Gibbons, and the other three names. “So we’ve got five potential suspects,” I said, also commanding the information to be printed. “And five of us.”

  “Five?” Jaxon repeated, then jacked his thumb at Tennyson. “When did Fangs join the team?”

  “When he saved my life,” I replied, in no mood to argue Tennyson’s inclusion. Jaxon could go from sweet and charming to complete ass in point-two seconds.

  “Four suspects,” Novak said as he skimmed the computer screen. “Something tells me this Louisa Malcolm isn’t our bad guy.”

  “Why?” I turned to look at one of the names I hadn’t recognized.

  “She’s his grandmother.”

  “He has a grandmother?”

  “According to this, yes. Has he spoken of her to you?”

  I shook my head. “Anyone?”

  More nos. Funny the things you never really get to know about your coworkers.

  “That simplifies things,” I said. “We split up, take two names each.”

  “Let me guess,” Jaxon said. “You go with the vampire.”

  I spun to face him, temper rising. I aimed the full force of my glare at him. “Anyone in this room who would rather be partnered up with the vampire, please raise your hand.” No one did. Tennyson actually looked amused. “Well, guess what, Jaxon? Now you’re coming with us, too. Novak and Kathleen can handle themselves.”

  Jaxon started to protest, then clamped his mouth shut. I might have been slightly woozy, and still lacking in the full-range-of-motion department, but he recognized my position. Julius had trained us well.

  My parents stood apart from the rest of us, close enough to touch and not arguing, which was a nice change. “Mom, I’m sorry, but I think you should stay here,” I said. “If Piotr really did use Julius to spy on us, then whoever we’re hunting could know where you live. We can’t risk you going home.”