Magic Triumphs

by Ilona Andrews

  We stared at each other.

  “We should spar,” he said. “We will both feel better.”

  Yes. I needed to punch and kick and do things so badly, my limbs ached. “That’s a good idea. No; that’s the best idea ever.”

  Someone knocked on the front door. Derek sniffed the air, picked up a large knife, and hefted it in his hand.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The pervert,” Derek said, and started toward the door.

  Oh no, you don’t. “I’ll get it.”

  I beat Derek to the door and swung it open. A man stood on our doorstep, wearing gray pants, a light-gray button-down shirt rolled up to the elbows, and tired dark shoes. Bald. Average height, average build, unremarkable features, neither handsome nor ugly. You’d pass him in a crowd and never give him a second glance. Saiman in his neutral form, a clean slate for a polymorph who could impersonate any human on the face of the planet. Behind him a dark van with tinted windows waited in our driveway.

  I checked his eyes for the usual sharp intelligence. It was there, together with apprehension.

  “What’s the emergency?”

  “Emergency?” Saiman raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes. What bad thing happened to make you show up here? What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “My husband is generally frustrated and so am I, so it’s in everyone’s best interests if you tell me why you’re here quickly.”

  Saiman hesitated for a moment. “I don’t have a body.”

  I reached out and touched his shoulder with my index finger. “I’ve just conducted a field test and it appears you do have a body. Good night.”

  “I didn’t get a body. Biohazard, the Order, and the Pack received a body. I’m the best arcane expert in Atlanta, with a state-of-the-art lab, and you haven’t sent me one.”

  Oh. “I didn’t send you a body because you would charge me an arm and a leg for it.” There were way too many puns in that sentence for my liking. “I’m not interested in your services. Your price is too high.”

  Saiman took a deep breath, as if he were about to jump off a cliff. “I’ll examine it gratis.”

  I pinched my arm.

  A hint of the old Saiman’s arrogance crept into his eyes. “Really, Kate, this is childish.”

  I turned back to the kitchen and called out, “Saiman is here and he wants to help us for free.”

  Derek clamped his hand to his chest and dropped to the floor.

  “Oh gods!” Julie waved her hands. “Hide the children. The Apocalypse is coming. The werewolves are fainting!”

  Saiman spared them a single glance. “They were perfectly reasonable before. This is the result of prolonged exposure and proves my theory.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You’re contagious.”

  Julie rushed over to Derek. “No, no, that’s okay. He hasn’t fainted. He just has the vapors! False alarm.”

  Saiman looked to be in physical pain. “None of this is funny.”

  “All of that ability to transform and you can’t develop a sense of humor. Cheer up, Saiman. The ice of Jotunheim is far away. Your folks won’t know if you crack a smile.”

  Saiman sighed, opened his mouth, and froze, his gaze fixed behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Curran loomed in the hallway. My husband had a talent for emanating threat simply by standing still, and right now he was exercising this gift to its full extent. If menace were heat, the walls around me would’ve caught on fire.

  “I’m here to help,” Saiman said quietly.

  Derek rolled to his feet.

  “What’s the catch?” I asked. “What do you want? I don’t want to owe you anything.”

  “Nothing. No strings attached.”

  There were few absolute truths in this world, but the fact that Saiman never did anything without expecting a payoff was surely one of them.

  “Can you transform during tech?” Curran asked.

  Saiman drew himself to his full height. “Yes.”

  “Good. Come inside.”

  “Excuse me.” Saiman stepped into the hallway and walked past me to the kitchen.

  His Furriness was so laser focused on the blond dude, he was willing to work with Saiman. And this wouldn’t end badly. Not at all.

  “Kate tried to fire call her father tonight,” Curran said.

  “Fire call?” Saiman asked me.

  “Later,” I told him.

  “Someone cut in. I want to know what he looked like,” Curran said. “Can you do this?”

  Saiman smiled. “Of course.”

  “Good. Julie, get the Polaroid camera.”

  Saiman rubbed his hands together. The skin on his face crawled, as if a pool ball rolled under it. My stomach screeched in alarm and tried to empty itself.

  “Really?” Derek raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s a weird pervert, but he is our weird pervert and he came here to help. Let him help,” I said.

  Derek frowned.

  Curran gave him a hard look. “When you have to, use every resource available.”

  “Ready when you are,” Saiman said.

  There was no escaping it. I sighed and started. “Square jaw . . .”

  Five minutes later, my fire-call visitor stood in front of us. He was still wearing Saiman’s clothes, but the face and hair belonged to the man in the fire.

  “Yeah,” Derek volunteered. “That’s him.”

  Curran examined him, his jaw set. Julie snapped a few pictures. “You didn’t say he was handsome.”

  Thanks, just what I needed. “He was handsome, but there was something wrong with him.”

  “In what way?” Saiman asked.

  “His eyes were . . .” I struggled to describe them. “Cold. Not exactly flat, but remote. It was like looking into the eyes of a gator.”

  “Interesting,” Saiman said.

  “Does he look like any ancient you know?” Derek asked.

  “Nimrod and Astamur are the only ancient humans I’ve met in person,” Saiman said. “They don’t exactly wander about like stray cats.”

  I got up. “I’ll be right back. If I come back and our guest is injured, I’ll be very put out.”

  Julie opened her eyes as wide as they would go. “Injure? Us?”

  I went upstairs and brought the box down. “I need you to look at this.”

  Saiman collapsed into his neutral shape and examined the box, lifting the lid with his long slender fingers. “Is this an artifact?”

  “It was left on my doorstep.” I told him about the boy burning. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.

  “To burn a body alive but make the human immune to the pain . . .” he murmured. “How would you even begin to go about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If this is a message, there should be some way to attribute it. Unless this being’s arrogance is so great, they believe they would be instantly recognized.”

  “My aunt indicated the box is a generic way to declare war,” I explained.

  “And you found nothing in the box or on the knife?”

  “Nothing except this shape.” I drew the symbol for him.

  “Arsenic? Curious,” he murmured.

  “I have a body for you if you’re still interested,” I told him. “I took one to show my father.” Which was one of the reasons the trip had taken so long. We had to stop by the office and pull the spare out of the freezer.

  “I am.”

  Curran followed us to the Jeep and carried the body bag wrapped in chains to Saiman’s dark van. Saiman and I watched him.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “We’ve had our ups and downs. We are associates. Sometimes business partners. To your father, I’
m a bag of magically potent blood. He chained me in a stone cell with a barred, narrow window. Every day at sunrise your father’s soldiers would walk into my cell and shatter the bones of my legs with a hammer, so he could take full advantage of my regeneration. I couldn’t slow it down. My body would rebuild my bones and make more blood, and every evening the soldiers returned to drain it. I sat in that cell, staring at the sliver of the sky, and I knew nobody was coming for me. I would be there until I died.”

  We’d had this conversation before, but I didn’t want to interrupt to remind him.

  “Then Curran came and pulled me out of that cell, because you asked him to.” Saiman wouldn’t look at me, his gaze fixed on something distant. “I still have nightmares. There are nights when I keep a light on, as if I were a child. I.”

  I pictured him inside his ultramodern apartment, with his lab, his art, and the trappings of his wealth, on the top floor of an enchanted tower, flicking the lamp on. Oh, Saiman.

  Saiman glanced at me and there was sharp green ice in his eyes. He didn’t look human. He looked like a creature who had risen from a place where ancient ice never melted.

  “I can’t leave the city. If I do, your father will find me. This will never end unless you stop him, so I will do whatever I can to help you.”

  Curran stuffed the body into Saiman’s van.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out,” Saiman said.

  We watched him pull away.

  “What do you think that was all about?” Curran asked.

  “I think he’s scared of my father. He wants revenge.”

  “Think he’ll sell us out?”

  “No. Besides, if you can’t trust an ice giant driving a creeper van with a dead body inside, who can you trust?”

  Curran chuckled.

  “He knows this whole street houses shapeshifters and none of them are his fans. He drove into the mouth of the beast in the middle of the night. Odd. I’m surprised he didn’t call ahead.”

  “He couldn’t,” Curran said. “I broke the phone.”

  “How?”

  “I crushed it.”

  I turned and looked at him. Curran prided himself on his control, especially now that he was a father. He didn’t punch walls, break furniture, or scream. Even his roar was usually calculated. As much as I pushed and annoyed him, I had only seen him lose control beyond all reason once. Watching him hurl giant boulders off a mountain was a memorable experience. But he had never broken anything of ours before.

  “Why did you smash the phone?”

  “I was trying to put Conlan to bed and it kept ringing.”

  “That is not okay.”

  “I know. It was an impulse.”

  “You don’t give in to impulses. What’s going on with you?”

  “Who knows.”

  “Curran?”

  “Your dad is getting ready to attack us, that damn fae assassin is running around in Atlanta, people are being boiled, some ass is sending you boxes with flowers and knives and delegations of screwed-up monsters, our son was crying, and that idiot from Sunshine Realty called again asking if we wanted to sell our house. So, I squeezed the phone and it broke. I’ll buy us a new one.”

  “I changed my mind,” I said. “Instead of sparring, let’s go and take a nice long bath while the kid is asleep.”

  “Mmm.” His expression took on a speculative tint.

  “Although with our luck, he’ll wake up as we go up the stairs.”

  “I’ll carry you,” he told me. “It will be quieter.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “You stomp like a rhino.”

  “I glide like a silent killer.”

  His eyes shone. “A cute rhino.”

  “Cute?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “See, now you’ve sealed your fate. I’ll have to kill you . . .”

  He kissed me. It started tender and warm, like wandering through a dark, cold night and finding a warm fire. I sank into it, seduced by the promise of love and warmth, and suddenly it deepened, growing hot, hotter, scorching. His hand slipped into my hair. I leaned against him, eager for the heat . . .

  “Get a room!” George called from across the street.

  Damn it. We broke apart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw George drop a trash bag into the can. She was grinning.

  Golden sparks shone in Curran’s eyes, so bright his eyes glowed. Well, how about that?

  “We are going upstairs and taking that bath,” he said. “I’m not too proud to beg.”

  Neither was I, and if he kissed me again, he would find that out. “What if our son wakes up and starts banging on the bathroom door while we’re busy in the tub?”

  “I’ll threaten to wash him, and he’ll go right back to sleep.”

  He took my hand, kissed my fingers, and we went upstairs.

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE PROBLEM WITH having a son who’d discovered he was a shapeshifter was twofold. First, Conlan was a hyperactive toddler. Second, lions are cats, and cats like pouncing. They especially like pouncing on their happily sleeping parents and then bouncing up and down on the bed, flexing their claws.

  “It’s six . . .” bounce “in the morning.” Bounce. “I thought . . .” bounce “you hunted . . . in the evening.”

  “We’re . . .” bounce “adaptable.” Bounce. “Lions . . . are . . . crepuscular . . . active in . . . twilight.”

  “Can we . . . make him . . . less active?”

  Curran grabbed Conlan and pinned him down. “Stop annoying your mother.”

  “Rawrarawara!”

  “Why is he shifting all the time? Shouldn’t he shift once or twice every twenty-four hours and then pass out?”

  “He’s special,” Curran said, holding Conlan down with one hand.

  I groaned and put a pillow on my face. We’d had a late night and it was so worth it. But I could’ve really used another hour of sleep. Or five.

  “I can take him to the backyard,” Curran offered.

  “No, I’m up.” I crawled out of bed. “He must’ve been too tired from all the shape-changing to wake up last night. Now we’re paying for it.”

  “See? There are some benefits to shifting.”

  “Sure . . .” I dragged myself into the bathroom. I would need a big cup of coffee and at least two aspirins to make it through the morning.

  When I came downstairs, Derek and Julie were in our kitchen. The box was still on the table, together with several symbol encyclopedias. I gave Derek a bleary-eyed look of doom. “Why are you up?”

  “Curran wants me to come to the Guild.”

  I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down next to Julie. “Anything?”

  “It might be a symbol for intellect in Islamic mysticism. If you break the symbol into blaze symbols, it spells out Very Good—Doubtful—Very Good. It may or may not be a part of Illuminati cipher. I’m reasonably sure it’s not a hobo sign.”

  I sighed. We had people being murdered and ancient abominations running through the streets, but yay, at least the hobos weren’t about to invade.

  I looked through the stack of Julie’s notes. The symbol looked like something. I just couldn’t recall where I’d seen it.

  Curran walked into the kitchen, carrying Conlan in human-baby form. The kid changed shapes faster than I could count.

  “Roland is preparing for an invasion,” Curran said. “We found out yesterday.”

  Both Julie and Derek paused.

  “So, what does that mean?” Julie asked. “War? When?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “It depends on how he goes about it. He hasn’t brought Hugh back from his exile, or we would’ve heard about it, so at least we’re winning there.”

  “D’Ambray might still prove a problem,” Curran said.


  “I doubt it. It’s been years since he gave any signs of life,” I murmured, flipping through the pages. One of Julie’s drawings showed a wavy line inside the circles with two dots in the center. I’d definitely seen that before, but where?

  “Maybe he’s married and living happily in some castle somewhere,” Julie said.

  I barked a short laugh. “Hugh?”

  She didn’t answer, so I looked up. Julie had a stubborn look on her face, the line of her jaw firm. Right. Me and my big mouth. Hugh had been bound to my father in the same way Julie was bound to me. He was her only example of what the future held for someone who was bound by our blood. I kept forgetting that every time Hugh was brought up, I needed to take care with what I said.

  “I know you want him to find redemption, but that’s not who Hugh is. He is a wrecking ball. He destroys. If he hasn’t come back to kill me or any of us by now, he’s probably dead. Marriage and settling down isn’t for him. It doesn’t mean it’s not for you, but it’s not for him.”

  “Sometimes you can be really closed-minded,” she said.

  “Sometimes you hero-worship the wrong person, and when they fail you, it hurts.”

  She gulped the rest of her tea and got up. “I’ve got to go to the Warren. Somebody is drawing these signs on the walls. I put out some feelers yesterday, so I have to go see if they pay off.”

  “Wait. What about this?” I showed her the wavy drawing.

  Julie grimaced. “When I see magic, sometimes it’s clear or radiant and sometimes it’s hazy, more like fog. The magic on the box was like fog. It shifted and wavered and kind of curled inside the circles into a pattern. I don’t know if it’s intended or just magic interference.” She turned to the door.

  “Be careful,” I told her.

  “I was planning on blundering straight into danger without any preparation, but now that you told me, I will totally be careful.”

  “Blunder all you want,” I told her. “When you get into trouble, I’m not saving you.”

  “Ha! You will totally save me.” She stuck her tongue out at me and headed out the kitchen door to the stables for her horse.