“I’m going to need a last name, ma’am.”
“Lennart.”
“One moment, please.”
There was a beep and Noah spoke to somebody. “Hey, there’s a Kate Lennart calling for the Fearless Leader. She’s not on the list.”
Apparently, Noah hadn’t mastered putting people on hold.
“Kate who?” another male voice asked.
“Kate Lennart?”
“You idiot, that’s the In-Shinar!”
“What?” Noah squeaked.
“You put the In-Shinar on hold, you dumbass! Ghastek’s going to hang you by your balls.”
Ugh.
“What do I do?” Panic spiked in Noah’s voice.
You could connect me to Ghastek. If I said something now, it would only freak them out more.
There was some random beeping. I had a vision of Noah frantically pawing at the phone, smacking keys at random like a toddler. A disconnect signal beeped in my ear.
The last time I attended the induction of candidates to the ranks of journeymen, Ghastek introduced me as “Behold, the Immortal One, the In-Shinar, the Blood Blade of Atlanta.” I spent the whole ceremony trying to kill him with my brain. When I chewed him out afterward, he asked who I would rather risk my life for, the Blood Blade of Atlanta or Kate Lennart, small business owner. I should’ve told him to stuff it. I had only myself to blame.
I put down the phone and counted to five in my head. That should give them enough time to get their crap together.
I redialed.
“Help Desk,” Noah croaked.
“It’s me again. Calling for Ghastek.”
“Yes, lady ma’am, um, In-Shinar, um, Your Majesty.”
I waited. Nothing happened.
“Noah?”
“Yes?” he said in a desperate near-whisper. He sounded close to death.
“Transfer the call, please.”
He made a small strangled noise, the line clicked, and Rowena’s smooth voice answered. “Hello, Kate. How is Conlan?”
Telling her that one of her journeymen just called me “lady ma’am” would be counterproductive. “He’s fine.”
“When will you bring him by?”
Rowena came from the same village as my mother. They shared a similar magical talent, although my mother’s had been much stronger. The talent came with a price. Women who possessed it had a hard time getting pregnant and an even harder time carrying a child to term. I was an exception; perhaps it had to do with Roland’s genes, but Curran and I had had no trouble conceiving. Rowena never had children of her own, but she desperately wanted some. She once told me that while my father was alive, the world wasn’t safe enough for her children. Instead she lavished all of her maternal affection on my son.
“As soon as I can. I have some bad news.”
“Is it your father?” A hint of alarm undercut her words.
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
I explained Serenbe.
“That’s horrible,” Rowena finally said.
Not much shocked a Master of the Dead. Not much shocked me either. By now I’d told this story about seven or eight times. You’d think repetition would file the sharp edge off it, but no, every time was as disturbing as the last.
“We’ll call down to Biohazard and try to get some samples for analysis,” Rowena said.
“That would be amazing.”
I said good-bye and hung up before she had a chance to ask me if Conlan had developed any magical powers. Everybody wanted my son to be something more. He was perfect the way he was.
Someone rapped their knuckles on my door.
“Come in,” I called.
The door swung open and Raphael walked in, carrying a dark-green bottle. He wore a dark-gray suit.
“Beware the boudas,” I said. “Especially when they bear gifts.”
He smiled. “Can I come in?”
“Please.” I pointed to my client chair. “Sit down.”
He did. His black hair fell on his shoulders in a soft wave. Usually when people used words like “smoldering” to describe a man, I just laughed. However, for Raphael that word felt entirely appropriate. There was something about him, something in his dark-blue eyes, in the way he carried himself with a hint of feral shapeshifter cutting through the polish, that made women think of sex. Luckily, I was immune.
“What’s in the bottle?”
He pushed it across the desk to me. The handwritten label with a cute orange-yellow apple read, B’S BEST CIDER.
I whistled. “Now I know it’s bad.”
When Curran and I got married, Clan Bear provided several barrels of honey ale for the wedding. The ale was a roaring success. Raphael realized that the bouda clan house sat in the middle of an apple orchard and sensed a business opportunity. B’s Cider hit the market a year ago, and like all things Raphael touched, it turned to gold.
He leaned back in the chair, one long leg over another. Life with Andrea was good to Raphael. He looked clean-cut. His suit fit him so well, it had to be tailored.
“Let me guess, your tailor is holding your latest outfit hostage and you want me to liberate it.”
“If I asked you to do that, everything would be covered in blood and my suit would be ruined. No, I’d ask my wife. She’d shoot him between the eyes from a hundred yards away.”
That she would.
“I came to talk about the boy,” he said. “I brought the cider, because it isn’t an easy conversation.”
Oh.
“I’ve come to ask you to let him go.”
I thought as much. “Why isn’t Ascanio here to speak for himself?”
“Because you took him in when nobody would have him. Aunt B sent him to you because he was impossible to handle, and she knew that sooner or later he would do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, and someone would rip out his throat. You gave him a job, a place he belonged, you trained him, and you trusted him. You turned him into someone who is now an asset to the clan. He understands all of this. He’s loyal to you.”
He paused. I waited for him to continue.
“But he also wants things.”
“What things?”
“We can start with money. He can earn money here, but he wants more. He wants wealth.”
He and I both knew that Ascanio wouldn’t get wealth working for me. Cutting Edge paid the bills, but it wouldn’t make anyone rich. I had no interest in expanding. I liked that we were small.
“Also, he wants acceptance, responsibility, and power. He wants to climb the clan’s power hierarchy. At his core, he’s a bouda, and he needs other boudas to acknowledge how good he is.”
“Okay.”
“Both of these are means to an end.” Raphael leaned forward. “What he really wants is . . .”
“Security,” I told him. “I taught him for almost four years, Raphael. He grew up without a male role model in a hellish place, so when he went to the clan, he fixated on you. He wants to be you. A respected, successful, dangerous alpha. I figured all this out a long time ago.”
“He’s been working for me for the last six months,” Raphael said.
“Aha.”
Raphael chewed on his lip. “There is no point in trying to be diplomatic, so I’m just going to come out and say it. Male nineteen-year-old boudas think with their balls. Andrea and I spend half of our time fighting to keep them out of Jim’s rock-hauling camp.”
Like Curran, Jim constantly improved the Keep, adding on towers, walls, and escape tunnels. A good portion of those improvements were built by boudas between ages twelve and twenty-five performing the Pack’s version of community service for various infractions. The boudas couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, and Jim always welcomed free labor.
“Ascanio is different from his peers
,” Raphael said. “He thinks with his head, and he’s strategic in his decisions. When we sent him down to Kentucky, he ran into h . . .” Raphael paused. “. . . into trouble. He handled it. Better than I did.”
“I have no doubt he did.”
“We need him, and he needs us. And I realize that my mother dumped him on you, and you spent four years stabilizing, teaching, and hammering him into what he is today, and now that he’s useful, we want him back and it’s unfair. I’m sorry. I owe you. Our entire clan owes you.”
“You don’t owe me anything. I did it for him, not for you.”
“But you did it and someone has to appreciate it. I’m here to say that we acknowledge it and we won’t forget. If you leave it up to him, he will never walk away from you. He can’t. His sense of loyalty won’t let him. But he won’t be happy here. He wants recognition and acceptance from the Pack. Like it or not, you’re not just anyone, Kate. You are the In-Shinar. The longer you keep him with you, the harder it will be for him to be seen as separate from you.”
He just had to throw it in my face. I sighed. “Do you see any chains around here, Raphael?”
“No.” His smile was sad.
“Okay then. He isn’t an indentured servant. He’s free to do as he wants. I’ll take him off the payroll as of today. He is welcome to come back anytime, but I will stop calling.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s not about you. He should do whatever makes him happy.”
Raphael nodded again. He looked miserable.
I let him off the hook. “How is Baby B doing?”
He grinned. “A wolf boy tried to steal her toy at the picnic last week. She chased him down, took the toy away, and beat him bloody with it.”
“You must be so proud.”
“Oh, I am.”
“I’ll see you around, Raphael.”
“You will, Kate.”
He left.
Well, that was that. I felt oddly hollow. No more funny one-liners. No more tortured Latin. No more off-color jokes. It had been moving to this moment for a while, but it still made me feel empty.
Derek walked into the office. “What did Raphael want?”
I shook my head. “Nothing important.”
Derek eyed the bottle of cider and pulled two small paper bags out of a larger paper bag. The delicious aroma of Mexican spices filled the air. Chicken soft tacos. My favorite. The closest Mexican place was about two miles off. He’d gone to get them for me.
I got up, got two glasses, opened the cider, and poured some for us. He landed in the client chair and bit into his taco. I chewed mine. Mmm, delicious.
“I’m going to go back to Serenbe tomorrow,” he said. “I want to do a wider search. See if I can pick up a trail.”
“Okay,” I said.
We chewed some more.
“Do you ever want wealth?” I asked.
Derek paused his chewing. “No.”
“I mean, do you ever want more money?”
He gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “My bills are paid. Got enough for food, got enough for tools of the trade, can buy Christmas presents. What else would I need?”
I nodded. We drank our cider and ate our tacos, and it was nice.
CHAPTER
3
TWO BIG GRAY eyes regarded me from a round face, lit up by the morning light filtering through the kitchen window. Conlan pushed the oatmeal away. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Huny.”
I crossed my arms. “Did Grandma give you honey muffins yesterday?”
His eyes lit up. “Gama!”
“Grandma isn’t here.”
My son made nom-nom noises.
When I was pregnant, I tried to avoid doing dangerous things, which left me with a lot of time on my hands. I’d spent it reading baby books. Those books made it crystal clear that giving honey to your baby before he was a year old made you a terrible mother. The moment a spoon of honey would touch his lips, the words “Awful Mother” would appear on your forehead, forever branding you as a parenting failure. I had explained this to Mahon and Martha. They listened, nodded, and agreed, and then proceeded to ignore me. They’d been giving him honey and various honey-infused sweets since he was able to hold them in his tiny hands and then lied to my face about it. Werebear parents-in-law came with their own challenges.
“You’re not getting honey. You will eat oatmeal.”
“No.” He pushed the cereal away.
“Okay. Then you’ll go hungry.”
“Huny!”
In baby terms, my son was developing at the speed of light. At thirteen months, most babies had a vocabulary of three or four words. Mama, dada, bye-bye, uh-oh. The experts called this phase passive language acquisition. My sweet dumpling was making tiny sentences and arguing with me about honey. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was proud or frustrated. Probably both.
“I have to do a lot of work today,” I told him. “And neither your grandparents nor your aunt can watch you, because they have clan business. So, you’re stuck with me.”
“Huny.” Conlan sniffled.
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists. Oatmeal or nothing.”
I put some oatmeal into my own bowl from the pot, added salt and butter, and spooned it into my mouth. “Mmm. I’m going to eat all this and be nice and full.”
Conlan watched the spoon travel to my mouth. One. Two . . . Three . . .
He pulled the bowl to him and dug in with his spoon. Hunger won again. My son wasn’t a shapeshifter, but he certainly ate like one.
I licked my spoon. Today was going to be a busy day.
The phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello.”
“Hey, Kate,” Luther said.
He didn’t call me a heathen or a troglodyte. Things were bad. “How did it go?”
“You were right. They extracted the bones.”
My mind took a moment to digest it. “What kept the bugs away?”
“We don’t know yet. The substance is magically inert, but not devoid of magic. It registers blue on the m-scan, but I can’t tell you if it’s due to human remains or the nature of the solution itself. Is your sensate around?”
“No.” Julie was still off with Curran. I wished they were home.
“A pity.”
“Did you find any inhuman blood in any of the houses?”
“We found hair,” Luther said. “Coarse, reddish brown, short. In one of the houses, someone tore a chunk of it out of their attacker.”
“DNA?”
“We are running it now.”
“Is it hair or fur?”
“Good question. It has an amorphous medulla, consistent with human hair, and a coronal cuticle, which can occasionally be found in humans but typically indicates a rodent, a bat for example. Human head hair continues to grow until we cut it. This hair exhibits synchronized growth, meaning at some point it stopped growing, like fur. It wasn’t cut. But it also exhibits a club root, which is typical to humans. It is inconsistent with shapeshifter hair in some respects and consistent in others.”
“Are you trying to tell me this is a human-bat hybrid?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Frustration spiked his voice. “I’m trying to tell you that I spent twenty-four hours digging in a jellied mass grave and then analyzing what I found, and I have nothing to show for it.”
“That’s not true. You have a sample for comparison.”
“I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”
“Thanks.”
“And, Kate? If you run across this again, I want to know about it the moment it happens.”
“That might be a little difficult, Luther. Last I checked, telepathy wasn’t among my talents—”
He hung up.
“Someone’s pissy,”
I told Conlan.
Conlan didn’t look impressed.
I dialed Nick’s direct number. Usually I went through the proper channels, meaning Maxine, but he hadn’t called me back, and Biohazard wouldn’t notify them. The Order’s legal status as a law enforcement agency had always been murky; however, after the Wilmington Massacre, the knights were firmly outside the law. Some kids at UNC in Wilmington took a fun new drug that turned them into monsters. It also robbed them of their intelligence, because their monstrous rampage consisted of running around their dorm and growling at passersby. The Order was called in, and instead of securing the scene and waiting, the knights made an executive decision to go in and slaughter everyone they found. Midway through the slaughter, the magic wave ended, and the kids turned back into humans. The Order didn’t stop. When the blood stopped spraying, twelve young people were dead. At the trial, the knight-protector of the Wilmington chapter testified that he didn’t care if they returned to human form or not. In his opinion, they stopped being human when they took the drug. The national fallout was catastrophic.
Some states still recognized the Order’s semi-law-enforcement position, but Georgia wasn’t one of them. All cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the Order had ceased as of last year. I didn’t care for the Order’s methods or for Nick calling me and my baby abominations every chance he got, but the Order had accumulated decades’ worth of magic knowledge. If my going to Nick would help prevent another Serenbe, it would be worth it.
The message I’d left yesterday was short. It had only two words: “Call me.” He knew I wouldn’t come to him unless it was an emergency. Since he hadn’t called me back, I felt the need to make this one slightly longer.
That done, I sat Conlan down and got his fire truck out of storage. The truck was a gift from Jim and Dali for his first birthday. Large enough for a small child to sit in and climb on, it had a tiny enchanted water engine, which powered lights and a ladder during magic waves. It must’ve cost them an arm and a leg. Conlan adored the truck. He showed no interest in riding in it, but he liked to climb on the roof, which usually took him a solid minute and multiple tries. Once he ascended, he would wave his arms and make strange noises. Sometimes he fell asleep on top of it. Like his dad, my son enjoyed being in high places.
Magic Triumphs Page 4
