by John Levitt
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY- ONE
TWENTY-TWO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise for NEW TRICKS
“If you like urban fantasy, this one is a cut above the rest.”
—CA Reviews
“A suspenseful tale that’s supported by strong characters and a delightful infusion of magic and mystery.”
—Darque Reviews
Praise for
DOG DAYS
“The supernatural lives, breathes, and slithers in a San Francisco where the dog days don’t just get you down; they eat you alive.”—Rob Thurman, national bestselling author of Trick of the Light
“A compelling magical mystery, filled with twists and some uncomfortable turns as it follows a likable new character through a mostly familiar San Francisco . . . I thoroughly enjoyed Dog Days. It’s proof that there’s still a heck of a lot of potential for variation in the urban fantasy genre, and it’s a highly satisfying read . . . an excellent start to a promising new series.”—The Green Man Review
“Appealing, fully founded characters . . . Levitt promises to be a novelist worth watching . . . Readers will enjoy the roller-coaster ride through dangers both magical and mundane. Anyone who likes solid storytelling will enjoy Dog Days. Here’s looking forward to the next adventure.”
—SFRevu
“Levitt has envisioned a lively world . . . [a] delightful take on good versus evil. Mason’s character, with his self-deprecating humor, beat-up van, and list of odd associates, is entertaining and engaging, and will certainly leave readers looking for more from this unlikely hero and his dog.”
—Monsters and Critics
“Dog lovers don’t get many fantasy books geared to them, so finding one is a pleasure . . . Fans of Harry Dresden will enjoy the tone this story sets.”—Huntress Book Reviews
“A great little cross-genre read; I highly enjoyed this . . . I highly recommend this book to anyone that likes urban fantasy . . . [It] came together exceptionally well and had more than enough surprises to keep it interesting.”
—FantasyBookSpot.com
Ace Books by John Levitt
DOG DAYS
NEW TRICKS
UNLEASHED
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
UNLEASHED
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / December 2009
Copyright © 2009 by John Levitt.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form
without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in
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For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
eISBN : 978-1-101-15153-2
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Don Sipley for all the wonderful covers he’s done for the Dog Days series.
Also, thanks to my copy editor, Emma Stockton, and all the people at Ace Books—art department, production, promotion—everyone there who works so hard to make the books as good as they can be.
ONE
A FRESH BREEZE, CARRYING A SALTWATER TANG, pushed inland from across the ocean. The sky had just turned that purplish hue of dusk, and the top of the Golden Gate Bridge was just visible over the tops of the trees. A fine San Francisco evening, perfect for sightseers, dog walkers, and lovers. And hunters.
Somewhere in the undergrowth and tangled brush, the creature waited for us. Victor was over to my left, carrying the sawed-off shotgun. Not much of a weapon if you need to aim, but for close-up work it’s unbeatable. Lou ranged ahead, light on his paws, using only his dog senses for once. His magical talents were useless in tracking this thing, but he still had those sharp ears and an even sharper sense of smell.
He moved his head from side to side, nose twitching, constantly testing the air. Victor watched intently, and when Lou finally stopped and focused on a particular patch of thick brush, he moved up behind him. He motioned for me to hang back—the last thing he wanted was for me to be anywhere near the line of fire. A sawed-off shotgun sprays pellets like a garden hose, and even if you’re not directly in the line of fire, you can be struck anyway. And since each double-ought pellet is roughly the size of a .32 bullet, even one of them can kill you.
I didn’t have a gun. My job was to take care of the magical side of things. The creature wasn’t much affected by any use of magical talent, but situations can still arise where a clever spell might come in handy.
The patch of brush was edged by tall, leafy trees, a pocket of wildness on the edge of the urban landscape. Lou edged closer, but he looked puzzled, as if he’d picked up the scent, then lost it. Maybe the thing had slipped away once again. We’d been hunting it for months, off and on, without success. It was as smart as it was vicious.
Victor moved toward the underbrush, shotgun held easily at hip level, ready to swivel in any direction. He stopped well before he reached the tangle of bushes; shotgun or no, he wasn’t pushing his way into an overgrown space where anything lying in wait would have every advantage.
I don’t know if Victor heard something or if a sixth sense kicked in, but he suddenly glanced
up and then dove sideways just as the thing dropped down from an overhead tree branch. It aimed for his shoulders, hoping to get its muzzle close to his throat. That would have been the end of that story. It missed, but even so it raked his arms on the way past and knocked the shotgun flying. It was up and at him again in an instant, a blur of claws and teeth and snarls.
Lou charged forward and tried for a back leg, but Victor and the creature were rolling on the ground, momentarily inseparable. I ran toward the shotgun and scooped it up. The shot pattern wouldn’t spread if I could press the muzzle right into the creature. All I’d need was a moment’s separation between the two.
It saw me coming with the shotgun and broke off the attack, darting into the cover of the bushes. Victor hauled himself up into a sitting position and gasped something I couldn’t catch. He shook his head as I approached him, and reached out his hand.
“Mason. Give me the gun,” he finally got out. “It may come back.”
Clearly he thought he was better able to handle the threat, torn up as he was, than a healthy Mason would be. He might have been right.
“How bad is it?” I asked, squatting down and handing over the shotgun, wincing as I watched blood dripping onto the ground beside him.
“I’ve been better.” He’d managed to protect his vital parts, but his right leg was a mess of blood and torn tissue. The fabric of his black jeans hung in shredded strips. “Hiding in the tree,” he muttered, talking half to me, half to himself. “How could I have been so dumb? Rookie mistake. Look up; always look up.”
It took him ten minutes to be convinced the creature wasn’t returning. Lou sat next to him, keeping guard as well. Victor kept hold of the shotgun the whole time, but he was beginning to have trouble holding it. Blood loss was rapidly weakening him. Finally, he reluctantly handed it to me and tried to climb to his feet. His leg, not surprisingly, gave way and I had to catch him to keep him from falling over.
“Might be time to go home,” he said.
“Yeah, sure. A good night’s sleep is all you need.”
“I’ll survive.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve got to make a quick stop first.” He looked at me suspiciously.
“Where?”
“It’s a special place, one you may have heard of. It’s called a hospital emergency room.”
TWO
YOU MIGHT SUPPOSE THAT ALL ERS ARE MUCH the same, but they’re not. San Francisco General is like the ones you see on TV—gunshot victims, knife wounds, heart attack patients staggering in clutching their chests and gasping for air. Luckily, we were over at UCSF on Parnassus, a kinder and gentler place.
Victor wasn’t the kind and gentle sort, however. He never is, but right now he was more pissed than usual since the lower half of his left leg was shredded, almost to the bone in places. His pants leg was now soaked through with blood, which was the only reason he’d finally agreed to an ER visit.
“Pit bull attack,” I explained to the admitting nurse.
If only that had been true. Victor had been savaged by something far worse, and it was my fault, at least in part.
“Did you notify Animal Control?” the admitting nurse asked. He seemed genuinely concerned.
“Not yet,” I said. “It ran off and I was too busy getting my friend over here to even think about that.”
After months spent hunting the creature off and on, this time we had almost got it. We’d started taking an interest in tracking it when odd stories about mutilated pets had begun to surface in the newspapers. We were fairly sure we knew what was responsible for those attacks. But it didn’t become a priority for us until it started attacking Ifrits whenever it could. And now, it had apparently started targeting people as well. That was when we had got serious about it.
But we hadn’t been able to track it down. It was fast and it was smart. Being smart was a given, seeing as it was an Ifrit of sorts. Not a real Ifrit, like Lou, but the product of an incautious incantation by some very peculiar individuals. I had been instrumental in bringing them what they needed to accomplish it, and so I felt it was partly my responsibility. And Victor and I are also enforcers. Our job is to prevent problems like that from happening, not to help create them.
True Ifrits are small—seldom over ten pounds or so, although Lou, my Ifrit, was twelve and would have been twenty if I’d let him eat every time he felt like it. They are companions to practitioners—the lucky ones at least. Not everyone has one, although all practitioners wish they did. The reasons why Ifrits are relatively rare are still not clear, although we’d come up with some interesting theories lately.
Most Ifrits take the form of cats or other small animals; a few, like Lou, are small dogs. Lou looks just like a shrunken-down Doberman with uncropped ears and tail, black with a tan chest patch and muzzle and eyebrow markings. But he’s not a dog, not really.
The creature we were hunting was more like forty pounds. That may not sound very impressive, but your average wolverine weighs no more than forty pounds, either, and they can tear through the roof of a mountain cabin and have been known to drive an adult bear away from a tasty carcass. And I had no doubt this thing could have taken a wolverine in a fight.
If it had been only an animal, even a smart one, there would have been no problem. Animals just want to be left alone; they don’t plot revenge or possess agendas. But it was more than that, and psychotic as well. It killed just to kill, and it had an unquenchable hatred for true Ifrits.
An orderly helped Victor onto a gurney and rolled him into a side room. Sometimes it pays to be compact—Victor fit on the gurney quite nicely. My feet would have been hanging over the end. Victor was looking drawn and wan, a far cry from his usual dapper self. His face was ashen and his close-cut beard showed dark against his pale skin. That skin was drawn tight across his face, so tight that the cheek-bones looked as if they were about to burst right through. Below his left eye, a muscle twitched. The only other time I’d seen a twitch like that on his face was when he’d been trying to restrain himself from killing someone. But he was still Victor, in complete control of his emotions even with a mangled leg. An ER doc stopped by for a quick look.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he said, lifting the sheet.
He spoke with that practiced, casual air of competence good doctors have, meant to reassure the patient that however bad it is, it can be fixed. You know it’s an act, but it’s reassuring nonetheless. But his involuntary intake of breath when he saw the leg dispelled that illusion. He took only a brief look before shaking his head.
“I’m afraid you’re going to need a plastic surgeon,” he said. “That’s a little beyond me.” He looked at the leg more carefully. “You say a dog did that? Hard to believe. Looks more like that mountain lion that’s been making news.”
Victor didn’t argue. He’s a master at saying just the right thing to avoid problems with civilians.
“I know,” he said. “Jim Schenkman is a personal friend of mine, and I’ll be seeing him first thing tomorrow. All I need is some basic suturing until then.”
I had no idea who Jim Schenkman was, but the ER doctor clearly did.
“That’s a break,” the doc said. “That’s who I’d want working on me. But I’m afraid suturing won’t be enough. You need to be admitted to the hospital. If we don’t get you into surgery fairly quickly, you’re going to lose that leg.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Victor said.
The doc stared at him as if he were insane. He tried to explain why going home wasn’t an option, and another doc came by to back him up. Victor didn’t argue, but he wasn’t about to spend the night in the hospital. He just nodded agreeably and waited for them to run down.
Victor might or might not actually know this Schenkman guy, but that wasn’t who he was going to be seeing anyway. I’d already called Campbell, my ex, and she was on her way down from Soda Springs. She’s the best healer around, and once Victor’s leg was stabilized, she’d be able to do more
for him than any plastic surgeon. Without her, he might well lose his leg, even with the best of surgeons available. She wouldn’t be able to heal it overnight; the leg was too damaged even for her, but she could make it whole and cut his recovery time from months to a week or so. In theory. After I got a good look at the leg I wondered if the damage might not be too much even for her.
It was three hours before the staff was satisfied they’d done all they could for the present. They weren’t happy when Victor insisted on leaving, and the ER doc actually swore at him, but there wasn’t anything they could do keep him there. Despite what they like you to think, if you’re determined to leave, there’s not a thing they can do to stop you, even if it means you’ll die soon after.
While they worked on Victor, I picked up a tattered newspaper from the lounge and spent some of that time rereading what I’d already seen that morning.
THIRD MOUNTAIN LION VICTIM DIES
Cathy Brougham, 22, is the latest victim to die from a vicious mountain lion attack. While hiking Tuesday in the East Bay near Mount Diablo State Park she vanished, failing to return home that night. Her body, mauled almost beyond recognition, was discovered early Wednesday morning by another hiker.
Two other hikers believe they may have seen her on a hiking trail at dusk on Tuesday.
Farther down on the page, an interview with a park ranger explained what to do if you meet a lion—wave your arms, yell, try to appear large, never turn your back—all useful bits of advice. But only if it’s really a mountain lion. I knew better.
The ranger also said he’d never seen a lion do anything like that before. The injuries were more consistent with a bear attack, he said, but noted there hadn’t been a fatal bear attack in California in more than a century.
