Dervishes Don't Dance: A Paranormal Suspense Novel with a Touch of Romance (Valkyrie Bestiary Book 2)

by Kim McDougall

  “It would be if you weren’t so uptight about your magic. I only got to listen to that damnation sword screaming to know you’re afraid of the power the gods gave you.”

  So Angus could keen too. Made sense if that part of my magic came from my dryad side.

  “Just drop those walls you’ve built around you. You’re better protected than the gold in old Fort Knockers.”

  “That was Fort Knox.”

  “Whatever. Just drop it.”

  I sighed and tried to comply. It wasn’t easy, no matter what Angus thought. I’d spent the last sixty-five years fortifying those walls. They’d need a magic jackhammer to break them down.

  I leaned in closer so the parsley filled my vision. The green leaves were beautiful in their symmetry and variegation. I tried to block out all other thoughts—the rustling of little feet in the cages, the rasp of Angus’s shoe on the floor, the tiny splashes as Hunter ate dinner in his tank, and the faint hum of my slumbering sword.

  I could do this. I could drop my wards completely. I was safe here. This was my space. I let magic slip through my fingers, draining it away like water from a tub. The psychic noise around me grew, humming and buzzing, filling every space between my atoms. And under all that noise was the deep thrum of Terra’s heart—the magic of the land itself.

  Now the trick was to find one tiny parsley voice within that din. No, not one voice. Dozens of voices, as if each leaf sang a harmony of a greater song. Of course, I’d been aware of plant magic before, but I’d never paid attention to it. Always, it had just been a drone of magic in the background of all the other magics. Now I sensed the uniqueness of this one pot of parsley. Its song was a bit cheeky, like it was having fun.

  “I hear it!” I almost pulled back in my excitement, but Angus urged me on.

  “Go on. Don’t stop now. Reach for it.”

  Instinctively, my hand reached forward, even though I knew he meant for me to reach with my magic. I let my hand drop and tried to release a bit of my magic, like I did with my sword when I needed to prime it. The parsley leaves shot straight up in rigid spikes then wilted flat.

  Suddenly the magic around me was overwhelming, like the racket of a million cicadas coming out of their seventeen-year hibernation. My fingers went rigid. I wanted to be holding my sword. Too…much…magic.

  I panicked and slammed my wards back down hard. Hard enough that Angus winced. My sword wailed its anxiety from the umbrella stand by the door.

  I laid my head on my arms that rested on the table.

  Angus patted my back. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I glanced at the parsley that hung like wet noodles over the edge of the pot.

  “You said I wouldn’t hurt it!”

  “Well, now I didna expect you to blast it so. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “I…I don’t know. It’s just something I can do with my sword.”

  Angus whistled. “Remind me never to spar wit’ you.”

  I could tell my magical outburst ruffled him because his accent got thicker. He patted the parsley and hummed a little tune. The leaves perked up.

  “Give her some water and she’ll be fine.”

  I slumped in my chair. “Clearly my dryad nature can never beat out the Valkyrie warrior in me.”

  “Nonsense. It just takes practice. If you can hear the wee greenie, you can talk to it.” He rose to leave. “For now, just practice listening. We’ll try again in a few days. But now, I’m off to do my rounds. No rest for us Guardians.”

  I gripped his hand, and he looked a bit startled. I didn’t think that many people were ever brave enough to touch a green-man gargoyle.

  “Thanks.” I tried to fill that one word with true gratefulness.

  Angus smiled. “Oh, aye.”

  Chapter

  13

  Wednesday morning greeted me like a kick in the face. After Angus left, I practiced dropping my wards until my head pounded, but got no closer to success. Now I felt hungover, though I hadn’t had the fun of drinking.

  I shuffled through my morning chores like a zombie. Gita force-fed me oatmeal with raisins, and it sat in my stomach like cement. Gabe watched me with worried eyes as he handed off the morning job manifests. I scanned my widget and groaned. I’d forgotten about Hub’s grubber problem.

  “You want me to cancel?” Gabe asked.

  “No.” Hub was a priority. They gave me too much business to just blow them off.

  I grabbed the large cooler Gabe had packed for me, my travel mug filled with Gita’s jet-fuel brew, and my sword before heading out to the truck. Just gripping my sword’s sheath eased my headache. Usually, the magic was a one-way street—from the ley-lines, through me and into the sword. But ours was an odd symbiotic relationship, even if I rarely took advantage of its power. Today, I welcomed the boost. Along with the caffeine, it might just get me through the morning.

  Jacoby popped his head out of his little house beside the garage.

  “You needs ‘prentice today?”

  “Sure, hop in.” I held open the door and he jumped into the passenger seat. Jacoby was about to get a real dose of what pest control meant in the brave new world.

  A Hub cleanup crew met me at the site of an explosion in Carterville, a neighborhood in the north end of the ward. An illegal magic amplifier had been found at the scene, and detectives were trying to figure out who had initiated the blast. I had little to do with the investigation, but Hub had called me in to tackle the grubber that emerged from the flood plains, attracted to the burst of magic.

  Grubbers are translucent, glutinous creatures about the size of a compact car. They have dozens of stubby legs that leave trails of slime as they move. They’re harmless to humans because they feed only on corpses. But there were a lot of corpses in the wake of the explosion. My job was to neutralize the slimy beast and recover anything it ate.

  Woo-hoo.

  The crew chief met me wearing a thaumasuit that would insulate him from magic contamination. He had yet to don the hood and mask, but his long red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and his beard was braided like a Viking’s. The sight of him shoved a tiny splinter into my heart because he looked a whole lot like Aaric, my first love.

  “Matt Kender.” He didn’t hold out a hand to shake mine. People who worked with hazmat rarely did. “You can suit up in there.” He pointed to a large tent.

  “Is it really necessary? I can take a lot of magic.”

  He leaned in close and bared his perfect white teeth.

  “I don’t care if you’re the equivalent of a magic sponge. On my site, everyone suits up.”

  “Fine.”

  Inside the crew hut, I found a suit more or less in my size. Another crew member was just starting her shift and she helped me tape up my wrists and ankles. By the time she sealed me in, I was already sweating. This was going to be a long day.

  There were no suits in Jacoby’s size, but he would have just teleported out of it anyway. Dervishes could take a lot of heat, magic or otherwise, so I wasn’t worried about him.

  Outside, I approached the perimeter of the site which was blocked off with yellow rope and also protected by a powerful ward that extended a full city block. Whatever had exploded inside wasn’t good.

  The crew chief watched the coroner haul out two covered bodies on stretchers.

  “Anyone know what happened?” I asked.

  Matt frowned, then his expression turned to stone.

  “Some moron had an unauthorized lab in a residential area. Experiment went bad and boom! Suddenly we’ve got a ruptured ley-line and creatures breaking out of the flood plains to feed on it. Not to mention a dozen fatalities and twice as many wounded.”

  Technically, the Laval flood plains were inside Montreal ward. After the war, a vast section of the city fell into the wat
er. In the fifty years since, Laval had been partially drained, but it was still unusable swampland. The ruling ministers had big plans to reclaim it, but draining the water was only part of the problem. So much magic had been expelled on the site, it was a perfect breeding ground for manifestations of all kinds. The royal fae court was situated nearest to Laval, and they patrolled the border, keeping the nastier swamp creatures in their place.

  “What else broke through the border?” I asked.

  Matt puffed up his chest. “So far we’ve taken down a griffin, a bear-like creature and something my tech called a wendigo. I don’t believe it, but the thing bit off the tech’s arm before we could blast it.”

  “You killed them all? Why did no one call me in sooner?” If it truly was a wendigo—which I doubted—I couldn’t have done much. But a griffin? I could have saved that.

  Matt’s eyes slid sideways at me. “With all due respect, ma’am. We had it under control.”

  Did he just “ma’am” me?

  “Fine. Whatever. Show me where the grubber is.”

  “Southeast quadrant. Near the church.” He corrected himself. “Near where the church used to be. The explosion happened during the knitting circle’s monthly meeting and three senior ladies died in the blast. Then, before we could recover the bodies, the grubber rolled over them like a steamroller—a Mrs. Dulyle, Mrs. Wardynski and a Miss Poole.” He checked his widget. “Another knitter is being treated for a heart attack after seeing her friends sucked inside the beast. It’s a gruesome thing.” Matt frowned.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sounds like an efficient way to clean up the dead,” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

  I headed for the ward gate, carrying my cooler and my sword. Jacoby skipped along behind me.

  “Who’s that? He can’t go inside.” Matt pointed at the dervish.

  “You just try and keep him out,” I said over my shoulder.

  I ducked under the rope and walked down the street to a kind of town square, bracketed on all sides with duplexes. Fires had scorched one section of buildings, but the rest looked untouched. Except for the glass that crunched like gravel under my feet. Every window in every building was shattered.

  We walked past the epicenter of the blast zone. The home that had stood there was flattened. Those on either side sustained heavy damage too. Rescue workers were still picking through the debris, looking for bodies. Even with the thaumasuit, I could keen the rush of magic coming through the ruptured ley-line. It howled like hurricane-force winds, and I couldn’t believe that the rescue workers were deaf to it.

  “Who’s house was this?” I asked a tech who was making scans of the wreckage with a thaumagauge.

  “Some alchemist moron,” he muttered.

  “Does the moron have a name?”

  The tech checked his widget. “Peter Sewel.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “Seems to be.” The tech shrugged. “Shouldn’t have had a lab here. There’s a park just across the street.

  A second tech approached. His face was red inside his mask. “What are you doing giving out classified information to a civie?”

  “She’s not a civie. She works here.” He pointed to my thaumasuit as if it were an official badge.

  I left them arguing and slipped away before they could question my credentials.

  Peter Sewel. I would ask Angus about him on the off chance he was one of the alchemists working with Gerard Golovin.

  The church on the southeast corner was one of these modern designs that looked more like a community center, at least what was left of it. The back end of the building was nothing more than a pile of crumpled siding.

  I found the grubber sitting like a bloated bag of clear pudding on the front lawn. It had eaten so much in the last few hours that its pudgy feet no longer reached the ground, and they twitched in the air while the grubber went about digesting the knitting club.

  Because the beast was translucent, I could see the bodies floating in its digestive juices. One face pressed against the inside of the stomach. She wore an expression of surprise, even in death.

  I set down my cooler, opened it and pulled out a vampire slug.

  “Take this.” I handed it to Jacoby, who pulled a face. “Just take it. Press it to the side of the grubber.” I pulled out two more slugs. “We’re going to juice this thing.”

  An hour later, I was exhausted, covered in slime and nicely broiled inside my suit.

  Vampire slugs are amazing. They can drink ten times their weight in liquid. And they happen to find grubber juice delicious. When latching onto an animal in the wild, the slugs will drink until they became too heavy, then drop off to digest their booty. But grubber slime short-circuits their instincts, and they would keep drinking until they burst. After an hour, we pulled them off the grubber and let the slugs rest and digest in the shade.

  Jacoby looked a little green as he watched the slugs that were now each as fat as prized hogs.

  “We’ll need a wheelbarrow to get them home,” I said. “Go see if you can find one.” Jacoby nodded and dashed off.

  I walked around the grubber, which was much deflated. I didn’t want to kill it. The poor thing was just doing what grubbers do. But humans are twitchy about their dead. If I didn’t retrieve the knitting club ladies, someone else would and that would go much worse for the grubber.

  I primed my sword and made a two-foot slit on its belly. The grubber didn’t even flinch. I shoved my arm inside, searching through the goo until my hand closed around something solid and I pulled. The body popped out with a gush of viscous liquid that soaked me to the ankles. She was still clutching her knitting.

  I love my job. I love my job. I kept repeating that mantra, hoping I’d believe it as I dug in for the next body.

  *

  After stitching its wound, I dropped the deflated grubber at the edge of the Laval flood plains. It would recover and slink back into the magic-rich waters of the swamp. I didn’t worry about it breaking out again. The fae were swarming the border, guarding it in the aftermath of the explosion in Carterville.

  At Hub Station, I left Jacoby to watch the vampire slugs in the truck and headed inside. I kept a locker there, so at least I could shower and change before I had to fill out my report. Working for Hub paid the bills, but I didn’t love the documentation, especially when there were deaths involved. Hub would investigate this event from every angle, and my report needed to be exacting.

  After cleaning up, I grabbed a tablet from the dispatch office to detail the gory account of my morning and headed for the cafeteria.

  Susanna Coulter was getting her tray when I stepped in line.

  “Hey, anything good on the menu today?” I asked.

  She turned her bright smile on me. We weren’t exactly friends, but I’d helped her through the opji attack last spring, and we’d bonded over Cyril’s corpse, so I felt that we were close enough acquaintances to have lunch together.

  She pointed to my wet hair. “You just come off a job?”

  “Yeah. A grubber.”

  “Eww. I don’t know how you do it.”

  I shrugged. “The work keeps me in cat food.” When she looked at me oddly, I added, “I have a lot of rescues.”

  Still thinking about the grubber, I avoided anything pudding-like and added a spring salad with grated beets and turnip to my plate. You couldn’t eat a bad meal in Montreal. It was part of our civic pride. But the cafeteria at Hub was a hidden gem. The chefs were a married couple—human and fae—who brought as much passion to their food as they did to their kitchen. Even now I could hear them arguing hotly behind the kitchen’s swinging doors. A sound rang out, like a metal bowl hitting the wall.

  “Looks like Penny and Cedric are at it again,” Susanna said with a smile.

/>   “They can argue all they want as long as they keep making this amazing bread.” I added an extra deep brown pumpernickel bun to my tray. I’d earned it with that grubber.

  As we sat at an empty table with our loaded trays, I said, “So did you know the alchemist who blew himself up in Carterville last night?” I wasn’t good at small talk. Susanna didn’t seem to mind.

  “Peter? I didn’t know him well, but it’s a shame. He was a good alchemist.”

  “In what way?”

  Susanna stirred her soup, thinking before she spoke. “I heard he was working on the swamp problem. Had a new device that would speed up reclaiming the flood plains by decades. His theories are supposed to revolutionize the way we use magic. I guess it didn’t work out.”

  Not so much.

  “He was working for Gerard Golovin though, right?”

  Susanna’s eyes jerked up to meet mine.

  “Who told you that?”

  You just did, I thought, but I only shrugged.

  “I saw the excavations at his new railway. Isn’t he also looking for some new engine to make the digging go faster? Seems natural that the two alchemists would work together.”

  Susanna peered around the cafeteria as if looking for eavesdroppers. Then she leaned in and spoke softly.

  “Don’t get me wrong. Golovin’s brilliant. And kind of sexy too, if you like old guys.” She grinned, and I played along, pretending that Golovin was a girl’s dream.

  “But he’s very strict about research protocols. Don’t go around asking questions or you’ll find yourself being questioned in return.” She leaned in and whispered, “In a Hub interrogation room.”

  I nodded and chewed my salad for a few minutes, looking for something to say that would change the topic.

  The silence stretched. This was why I didn’t have a lot of close friends. I sucked at the whole social interaction thing. Animals were so much easier.

  “So you said you take in rescues? What’s that like?” Susanna finally asked. I eyed her to see if she was really interested, or just making noise to fill the space. She smiled, so I gave it a shot.