by Jasmine Walt
Unfortunately for me, Garius Talcon, the Deputy Captain of the Enforcer’s Guild, was in charge of distributing all the mission dockets. And ever since he found out that I was only half-shifter, he’d been treating me like a lesser being. Recently he’d decided that if I wanted to continue getting jobs I needed to get down on my knees and suck him off.
I’d told him that if I ever got down on my knees in front of him he’d better run like hell because it meant I was going to rip his balls off and feed them to him. And ever since then we’d been at an impasse.
I’d tried going to Captain Galling, but my word was useless against Talcon’s, and there was no one to corroborate my story. Truthfully, it was better not to draw attention, because as far as Talcon and Galling knew I was a shifter-human hybrid. If I gave them a reason to dig deeper, they would find out about my real heritage, and money would be the least of my problems.
Until I figured out a way around Talcon, the only Enforcer jobs I was getting paid for were the ones I brought in by answering the emergency response calls broadcasted by my Enforcer bracelet. As much as I hated to admit it, right now bartending paid the bills.
Turning my attention back to work, I served up the teca with a big, fat smile on my face, and was rewarded with a big, fat coin for my trouble. I nodded my thanks at the she-wolf before she disappeared into the crowd – the shifters here were always my best tippers.
“Sunaya!”
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of my mentor’s voice in my head, calling my name. Heart pounding, I scanned the crowded bar for him, though part of me wanted to simply shrink behind the counter and pretend I didn’t exist. Even though Roanas Tillmore knew about my bartending job, I didn’t like it when he saw me here – after all the time and effort he put into training me it was shameful that I was tending bar for a living. But I caught no sight of him, and weeding through the hundreds of clashing smells, I didn’t catch his scent either.
Shaking my head, I picked up another glass to get started on the next order. Must’ve imagined it. Mindspeech didn’t work well from more than a couple hundred yards away, so if I couldn’t smell him then he wasn’t here.
“Sunaya! Co… quick… need…”
The glass slipped from my fingers as Roanas’s garbled voice echoed inside my ears. It hit the ground and shattered, tiny pieces shooting across the floor, but I hardly noticed as acid-sharp panic filled my lungs – panic I realized wasn’t from me at all, but from Roanas.
As the Shiftertown Inspector, Roanas rarely ran into a situation he couldn’t handle. If he was able to reach me with a mental call from afar, he was in big trouble.
“Hey!” Cray snapped as he tapped me on the shoulder. “What the hell are you doing, standing around with all this broken glass everywhere!”
I whirled on him, baring my fangs. “I have to go,” I growled. He took a step backward, his eyes wide – Cray was a big guy, but as an unarmed human he was no match for me.
Turning away, I slapped my palm on the counter and launched myself over the bar. Patrons yelped as I sailed over their heads, and Cray cursed me, but I hardly heard them over the blood pounding in my ears. I landed in a crouch halfway from the bar to the door, then sprinted outside to where my steambike was parked on the curb. I was going to lose my job over this, but I didn’t care – nothing mattered more to me than Roanas.
With that thought taking up all available real estate in my mind, I hopped onto my bike and shot into the street, leaving a white-hot cloud of steam in my wake.
Twenty minutes later, I skidded to a halt in front of Roanas’s house in Shiftertown. The lights spilling out from the windows and into the darkness of the street told me he was home. I charged up the steps of the two-story brick townhouse, my veins full of fire as I prepared to face an army of enemies. I fully expected to open the door and find the place wrecked, the furniture splintered and the floor splattered with blood, because nothing short of a fucking army would be able to take down Roanas.
Instead, I found him lying on the red and gold carpet in the living room, his big body splayed next to the coffee table.
“Roanas!” I was at his side in an instant, an icy fist of fear squeezing my heart. He was lying on his back, his skin pale beneath his dark complexion as he shook. Foam spurted from his blue lips, and his tawny lion-shifter eyes rolled.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chanted as I scrambled for the vial of antidote I kept in one of the pouches strapped around my torso. I knew the signs he was exhibiting all too well. This was silver poisoning.
I carefully positioned Roanas’s head in my lap, then pried open his mouth and poured in some of the antidote. The pale amber liquid trickled right out of his icy lips, but I tried again, doing my best to get it into his mouth despite the tremors. Still nothing. I bit my lip as his cheek came into contact with my hand – his skin was frigid – and then tried a third time. Finally, his throat bobbed and the liquid stayed down.
Instantly the tremors receded to slight vibrations, and his breath came a little easier. A huge wave of relief rushed through me, and I wanted to sag against the couch. Instead, I fed him the rest of the antidote, drop by drop until the entire vial was gone. Even so, the symptoms did not completely subside – his lips were still blue, his skin ice-cold.
“Sunaya,” Roanas croaked in a voice like crushed gravel. He shifted his head in my lap, his black mane of tiny braids sliding against my legs.
“Shhh,” I soothed, sliding my arms beneath him so I could lift him onto the couch. His dark cotton shirt was soaked in sweat. “Don’t speak. You need to conserve your energy.”
“No… point…” he said with a weak chuckle. My leg muscles flexed as I rose to my feet with Roanas cradled in my arms. I carefully deposited him atop the couch, then sat down next to him and pulled his head into my lap again. “I’m dying.”
“No,” I said firmly. I ran my hand through his braids, pushing them back from his clammy forehead. “You just feel like you’re dying. Which is perfectly understandable since you just experienced silver poisoning, but –”
“The antidote… wasn’t enough.” He wrapped his long fingers around mine, and a tremor went through me – his grip, normally so strong, was as weak as a newborn babe’s. “Too much silver… too fast. Not… going to… make it.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I snarled, tightening my grip on his hand. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. Roanas was only eighty years old – not even close to middle-aged for a shifter. He had a long, full life ahead of him, at least another two hundred years or so. Fuck, he was supposed to meet me tomorrow afternoon for a sparring match. Dying was not on the agenda.
“How could this happen to you?” I choked out as the tears spilled down my cheeks. “You... I… you’d never be so stupid as to accidentally poison yourself with silver!”
Shifters are hypersensitive to silver, so if it’s within fifty yards of us we’ll catch a whiff of it. The only reason I’d been burned by the coin earlier was because I’d been distracted. There was no way Roanas, who could hit a moving target with a chakram a hundred yards away – thirty more than my personal best – would miss such a thing.
But the empty glass lying on its side on the carpet told me that Roanas had done exactly that, and I couldn’t understand why. Leaning over, I picked up the glass and sniffed it, certain I would catch the scent of silver.
But I scented absolutely nothing except the burning stench of liquor and a hint of saliva.
“What… how?” I gaped down at the glass as if it were a foreign species clutched in my palm, and to me, it might as well have been. “Why don’t I smell anything?”
“The silver was mixed… with some kind of chemical… that masked the taste and scent.” Roanas panted the last word, his voice edged with pain. My heart ached at the sight of his pale skin and strained expression. “That’s why none of the others… detected it either.”
“There are others?” My throat tightened. “As if it
isn’t bad enough you’re dying.” My voice broke on the last word.
“Please, Sunaya.” Roanas’s fingers curled around my jacket collar, pulling me closer. Even though he was sinking fast, his tawny eyes burned with a ferocious intensity. They cut through the fog of tears and pain in my brain, demanding my attention. “You must find out… who did this. There are other shifters… being targeted. Not just… about me.”
“Targeted?” My eyes narrowed as my brain tried to catch up with the implications of that. “Targeted how? And why?”
“The facts… are in my case file…” Blood spilled over Roanas’s lower lip, and I blinked back tears. “The Enforcers have been slow… to put the different cases together… but they are related.” His voice strengthened. “I was investigating… and so they’ve taken me out. You must connect the dots, Sunaya. Find out who did this. Stop the killings, avenge me, and… and…”
“And what?” Shards of ice scraped along the walls of my insides, the fear inside me painfully sharp. I gripped Roanas’s hand hard enough to grind the bones against each other, holding on for dear life. I never wanted to let him go.
“And… be careful.”
His face went slack then, the life gone from his eyes. And as he slid from this world to the next as silently as the hot tears rolling down my cheeks, I vowed not to rest until I caught the bastard who did this.
2
By the time I left Roanas’s house at seven in the morning, every last tear in my body had been burned away by the seething fury in my heart. I’d called the Enforcer’s Guild using the telephone in Roanas’s kitchen to report the murder, only to have two Enforcers show up at the doorstep – several hours later, the lazy fucks – and start interrogating me.
Yeah, okay, I get it. I was with him when he died, so I couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect. Even though I’ve only worked on homicide cases a handful of times, I’d done enough to know that this was part of procedure. But what really pissed me off was that they’d brushed me off, when I’d asked about similar cases.
“Oh, come on Baine,” Nila, a blond Enforcer, had scoffed as the coroner and the crime scene technicians filed out of the house with Roanas’s body and what pertinent items they’d found in tow. I studiously ignored the covered stretcher as it went past us, but my heart clenched all the same. “You should know better than to believe in conspiracy theory crap like that. We’ll find out who did this to your old man, but don’t be surprised if we drag some rat out of a hole who happened to have a bone to pick with him, rather than a serial murderer.”
“He told me someone was targeting shifters before he died,” I’d said between gritted teeth. “And don’t try to tell me he was just hallucinating or paranoid, because I don’t believe it. Roanas doesn’t make mistakes like that.”
“Didn’t,” Nila corrected me.
“Look,” Brin, the other Enforcer, had interjected before I ripped Nila’s face off. “I’m not going to deny there have been other silver poisonings in Shiftertown recently.” He’d given me a stern glare, as if I were a whelp that needed to be put in her place rather than a fellow Enforcer. But then, Brin and Nila were part of the Main Crew, many of whose members routinely treated the other Enforcers like we were beneath them. “But we don’t have enough evidence to determine whether or not the murders were related. We’ll work to find your friend’s killer, but in the meantime you need to back off and stay out of our way.” He stepped forward and shoved his nose into my face, menace bleeding from every pore in his hulking body. “Have I made myself clear?”
I’d responded by flipping him off, and then I walked out with the case file Roanas had mentioned tucked beneath my leather jacket, which I’d torn the house apart to find while I was waiting for the Enforcer’s Guild to arrive. No way was I turning it over to them. Brin and Nila weren’t exactly known for being thorough – their work was half-assed at best, and more than likely they would end up pinning this on the wrong person just so they could collect their bounty and go home. Besides, they were both humans and didn’t give a rat’s ass about Roanas.
Roanas deserves better than them, I thought as I swung my leg over the seat of my steambike. A few people passing through the streets on foot glanced nervously at my bike and then scurried to the sidewalks as I turned the engine on – steam-powered vehicles were a rather new invention, less than fifty years old, and steambikes in particular were considered dangerous. It didn’t help that mages abhorred technology as a whole, sticking to either magical methods of transportation or the horse-drawn variety.
I took my rage out on the streets of Solantha, whipping around corners at breakneck speeds and leaning the bike so close to the ground my leather jacket scraped against the asphalt. I raced the bike up and down the hilly roads reserved specifically for steam-powered vehicles, zipping past clusters of townhouses huddled together and groupings of small shops where you could get anything from takeout to bridal gowns. My helmet shielded me from most of the scents, but I still caught a few of them – the briny air drifting in from Solantha Bay, freshly baked goods wafting from an open shop window, and the unique burnt-sugar smell that I recognized as magic.
Magic and I have a complicated relationship. I can’t survive without it, but it’s bound and determined to be the death of me. The mages in this country have a monopoly on magic, and use it to beat us into submission. Since they’re the most powerful race in this country, they rule us by default, which really sucks because they don’t care about anyone outside their own ranks.
However, magic isn’t all bad. It’s what gives us shifters the power to change forms and communicate via mindspeech – all useful talents to have, even if they were given to us by the mages experimenting on our human ancestors. And the various charms, amulets and spells for sale on both the black market and the regular one have their uses. Lots of people rely on them, convinced they can’t live without the mages who provide them.
I’m not one of those people. I may use the amulets, but I hate mages more than anyone else. My father was a mage, and he left me before I was even born with a talent I’ve had to hide for years in order to avoid execution. A talent that’s failed me more often than not, and has never worked when I needed it.
The crush of buildings began to thin out as I reached the bay, giving way to wider streets, fancier shops, and luxurious apartment complexes Solanthans paid a premium for so they could sit in their living rooms and enjoy the waterfront view. The scent of brine grew significantly stronger as I approached the shoreline, where the sun had broken over the horizon, painting the stone boathouses at each pier a pale pink and gold. The line of piers stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see, covering the coastline along the bay from end to end.
This section of town was known simply as the Port – but a lot more happened around here, than just ships coming and going to pick up and drop off cargo and passengers. While most of the piers lining the south end of the shore were exclusively devoted to shipping, the ones up north each had their own hubs of activity. I stopped at a corner to allow traffic from the perpendicular street to pass, glancing to the pier on my right that was known as The Fish Market. Even if you didn’t catch the stench from a mile away, you could spot it by the cawing seagulls constantly trying to swoop down and snatch bass or mussels from the vendors. I watched a particularly haggard-looking man waving his wide-brimmed straw hat at a gull who was circling his stall, only to get blindsided as another one swooped in from behind and snatched a silvery-looking fish right from the cart. It made me wonder whether the feathery bastards worked in tag-teams.
The traffic cleared and I sped off, blowing straight past a black steamcar as I headed towards Pier Eighteen – also known as Witches’ End. Here mages and other magic users set up shop, selling charms, amulets, potions and other magical bric-a-brac.
I parked my bike in a nearby lot, stuffed my hands in my pockets and walked briskly down the boardwalk. A bitter sense of irony filled me as I passed by most of the shops, which wer
e owned by witches, seers, healers, psions and more. Very few mages actually operated shops out of the Port, as most of them preferred to work out of The Mages Quarter. The very existence of Witches’ End was proof the rules only exist for us humans and shifters to follow – they don’t apply to the magic wielders who consider themselves above us.
In Solantha, as well as the rest of the country, anyone who is born with the power to wield magic, aside from a mage’s acknowledged offspring, either has their magic stripped from them or is executed. It’s a brutal method of control that’s existed for hundreds of years to ensure the current regime stays firmly in place, and most citizens give in rather than try to circumvent the law because the older you are when you’re found out, the greater risk of mental damage when the mages strip the magic from you.
The law that hung above my neck like a guillotine, however, doesn’t apply to the magic users who run Witches’ End. The residents of Witches End are allowed to practice their craft because they are foreigners who paid a hefty fee in order to obtain a special license to come over here. And because they aren’t actually the local mages we all love to hate, and charge quite a bit less than the ones in the Mage’s Quarter offering the same services, they do a brisk business here at the Port.
My boot-clad feet finally took me near the end of the pier, where my friend’s shop, Over the Hedge, sat nestled in between an apothecary and a fortuneteller’s shack. It was a small brick building with a glass storefront, the company name frosted on the large glass window in simple but charming letters. A small bell tinkled as I opened the door and stepped inside, and something inside me relaxed as I inhaled the scent of herbs, wax, and burnt-sugar magic.
Every piece of furniture and decoration in the place was crafted out of natural materials – from the white cotton curtains hanging in the windows, to the driftwood tables and shelves scattered throughout the shop and laden with merchandise, to the hand-woven and colorfully dyed rugs covering the wooden floorboards. The only machinery in the entire shop was the clock on the wall and the register on the counter.
