I checkmarked the three pink slips from Patrice and Williams and called Jim, because I had to. One had to take pains to be polite when dealing with the Pack’s security chief. Even if that chief was your buddy.
A male shapeshifter named Jack put me on hold. I flipped the pink slip over and doodled an ugly face on it.
Jim and I went way back. Before my job as a liaison between the Order and the Mercenary Guild and his job as the Pack’s head spook, we both earned our cash as mercs, contractors for the Mercenary Guild. The Guild assigned each merc a territory. Mine happened to be crap, and well-paying gigs came my way very rarely. Jim’s territory, on other hand, often generated good gigs, but they frequently required more than one body. Usually he cut me in on it, mostly because he couldn’t stomach working with anybody else. During that time I learned that, with Jim, the Pack always took precedence. He could have the guy we hunted by his throat, but one call from the Keep, and he’d walk away without a word.
He was probably going out of his mind. Shapeshifters spent all their life thinking they were free of disease. Last night had ripped their immunity away from them.
I colored the doodle’s nose black and added a spiky mane of wild hair.
“Kate?” Jim said into the phone. Jim looked like he broke bones for a living, but his voice was heavenly. “What the hell took you so long?”
“You say the sweetest things to me, honey bear,” I told him. “I was trying to track down the Mary who killed Joshua.”
Jim growled a little, but didn’t bite back. “He was only twenty-four years old. A werecoyote, good guy. He worked for me once in a while.”
I gave the doodle two sharp horns. “I’m very sorry.”
“Biohazard told me he was infected with syphilis and it ate him from inside out.”
“That’s . . . accurate.”
“They won’t release the remains to us.”
I knew where he was coming from. “Doolittle wants a sample to analyze?”
“Yeah.”
Doolittle was the Pack’s medic and the best medmage I’d ever had the privilege of driving to the brink of near insanity. He was the reason why my friend Derek still had a face. He was also the reason why I was still around at all.
“Jim, Joshua was extremely contagious. Pieces of him fell off, grew pale fuzz, and crawled across the pavement. Biohazard torched him down to his skeleton, which they locked in a hermetically sealed coffin and then cremated. They would’ve dropped a nuke onto the parking lot if they thought they could get away with it.”
“Is there anything left?”
I drew claws on the doodle’s arms. “Unfortunately, no. Georgia Code, Title 38: under Georgia Supernatural Emergency Management Act of 2019, in the event of a clear threat of epidemic, Biohazard has broad emergency powers, which trump everything, including the Pack’s claim on the remains. As far as I know, they didn’t even keep a sample for themselves. It was extremely virulent, Jim. It slithered over salt and fire. If it got out, most of the city would be infected by now.”
The poodle raised his head, a low warning rumble rolling deep in his throat.
I looked at him.
“Visitor,” Maxine’s voice whispered in my head.
“I’ll have to hang up in a minute, so very quickly,” I murmured into the phone. “There were other shapeshifters in the bar. Why did they leave?”
He hesitated.
“Jim. We went through this before: I can’t help you if you don’t level with me.”
“They were driven out. Something that bastard did terrified them out of their minds.”
“Where are they now? I need to interview them.”
“You can’t interview Maria. She’s under sedation.”
“What about the rest?”
There was a tiny pause. “We’re looking for them.”
Oh crap. “How many are missing?”
“Three.”
There were three panicked shapeshifters lost in the city, each a spree killer in waiting. If they went loup, they’d paint the city red. Could this get any worse?
An emaciated shape scuttled into my office with preternatural quickness and perched in my client chair. It might have been a man at some point, but now it was a creature: gaunt, hairless, corded with dried muscle as if someone had stuck it into a dehydrator for a few days and all of the fat and softness had drained from it. The vampire stared at me with glowing eyes and in their red depths I sensed a terrible hunger.
The attack poodle exploded into wild barking.
Why did I even bother asking that question?
“Once again, I’m very sorry. Please pass my condolences to his family,” I said. “If there is anything I can do to help, I’m here.”
“I knew you would be.” Jim hung up.
I hung up and looked at the vampire. Its mouth gaped open and it showed me its fangs: two long curved needles of ivory. Seeing bloodsuckers during daylight wasn’t unheard of, but usually they appeared smeared with sunblock. Considering the dense gray blanket of clouds smothering the skies and weak, late fall sun, they probably didn’t need to bother today.
The vampire spared a single glance for the attack poodle and looked back at me.
I would’ve liked to kill it. I could almost picture my saber slicing into undead flesh right between the sixth and seventh vertebrae of his neck.
I pointed a finger at the attack poodle. “You—quiet.”
“An interesting animal.” Ghastek’s voice spilled from the bloodsucker’s mouth, sounding slightly muffled, as if through a phone.
The vampire repositioned itself in my client chair and crouched like a cat, arms in front.
Of all the Masters of the Dead among the People in Atlanta, Ghastek was the most dangerous, with the exception of his boss, Nataraja. But where Nataraja was cruel and chaotic in his behavior, Ghastek was intelligent and calculating, a far worse combination.
I folded my arms on my chest. “A personal visit. Don’t I feel special.”
“You don’t return your phone calls.” The vampire leaned forward, tapping my doodle with a scimitar claw. “Is that a lion with horns and a pitchfork?”
“Yep.”
“Is he carrying the moon on his pitchfork?”
“No, it’s a pie. What can I do for Atlanta’s premier Master of the Dead?”
The vampire’s features twisted, trying to mirror the emotion on Ghastek’s face. Judging by the result, Ghastek was struggling not to vomit. “Someone attacked the Casino this morning. The People wish to petition the Order to look into it.”
The vampire and I stared at each other. “Can you run that by me again?” I asked.
“Some mentally challenged individual attacked the Casino this morning, causing roughly two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of harm. The bulk of the cost came from four vampires he managed to fry. The damage to the building is mostly cosmetic.”
“I meant the part where the People petition the Order.”
“It was my understanding that the Order extends its protection to all citizens.”
I leaned forward. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the same guys who run the other way the moment a badge gets involved?”
The vampire looked insulted. “That’s not true. We always cooperate with law enforcement.”
And pigs gracefully glide through clear sky. “Two weeks ago, a woman robbed a vendor at gun point and fled into the Casino. It took the cops fourteen hours to get her out, because you claimed some sort of sanctuary privilege that was last invoked by the Catholic Church. As far as I know, the Casino doesn’t stand on hallowed ground.”
The vampire looked down on me with an air of haughty disdain. Whatever faults Ghastek had, his control over the undead was superb. “That is a matter of opinion.”
“You don’t cooperate with authorities unless forced, you lawyer up at the first hint of trouble, and you have a stable of undead capable of mass murder. You’re the last group I expected to petition the Order for assis
tance.”
“Life is full of surprises.”
I chewed on that for a minute. “Does Nataraja know you’re here?”
“I’m here on his direct orders.”
Warning bells went off in my head.
Ghastek’s superior, the People’s head honcho in Atlanta, called himself Nataraja after one of Shiva’s reincarnations. There was something odd about Nataraja. His power felt too old for a human and he packed a lot of magic, but I had never actually witnessed him pilot a vampire. About three months ago, I ended up getting involved in an underground martial arts tournament, which resulted in me fighting shapeshifting demons called rakshasas. It also resulted in my owing Curran a naked dinner.
If that furry bastard could stop intruding on my thoughts for five seconds, I might have to dance a jig in celebration.
The rakshasas had made a pact with Roland, the People’s leader and my biological father. He provided them with weapons and in return they tried to destroy the shapeshifters. The Pack had grown too large and too powerful and Roland wanted it out of the way before it grew any larger. The rakshasas failed. If Nataraja turned out to be a rakshasa, I wouldn’t be surprised. Roland still wanted the Pack out of the way and Nataraja answered to Roland.
Maybe Nataraja had hatched some sort of a plan in retaliation, and he sent Ghastek here to me to create an appearance of propriety.
Maybe I was just getting paranoid . . .
I looked into the vampire’s eyes. “What’s the catch?”
The bloodsucker shrugged, a revolting gesture that jerked his whole body. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Should I take that as a refusal to accept the petition?”
Ghastek one, Kate zero.
“On the contrary, the Order would be delighted to accept your plea.” I pulled the petition sheet from the stack of forms. The People accumulated money to fund their research. Their extreme wealth went hand in hand with severe frugality. They were notoriously tightfisted. “The Order charges on a sliding scale, according to one’s means of income. For the impoverished, our services are free. For you, they will be shockingly expensive.”
“Money is no object.” The vampire waved his claws. “I’ve been authorized to meet your prices.”
They really wanted the Order involved. “Tell me what happened.”
“At six oh-eight a.m. two men wearing ragged trench coats approached the Casino. The shorter of the men burst into flames.”
I paused with the pen in my hand. “He burst into flames?”
“He became engulfed in fire.”
“Was his buddy made out of orange rocks and did he at any point yell, ‘It’s clobbering time’?”
The vampire heaved a sigh. It was an eerie process: it opened its mouth, bit the air, and released it in a single hissing whoosh. “I find your attempted levity inappropriate, Kate.”
“Consider me properly chastised. So what happened next?”
“The pyromancer directed a jet of flame at our building. His companion aided it by creating a strong wind, which carried the fire toward the Casino’s entrance.”
Most likely a fire mage and a wind mage. A firebug and a whistler, working together.
“The fire swept the front of the Casino, scorching the outer wall and the parapet. A team of four vampires was dispatched to deal with the issue. Their appearance caused the two intruders to shift the flames from the Casino onto the approaching vampires. The intensity of the fire proved to be higher than anticipated.”
“They took down four vampires?” That was unexpected.
The vampire nodded.
“And you let them walk away?” I couldn’t believe this.
“We did give chase. Unfortunately, the two intruders disappeared.”
I sat back. “So they appeared, sprayed some fire, and vanished. Did you receive any demands? Money, jewels, Rowena in lingerie?” Personally, I was betting on Rowena—she was the Master of the Dead who handled the Casino’s PR, and half of the city’s male population would kill to see her naked.
The vampire shook its head.
Was this a prank of some sort? If it was, it ranked right up there with dropping a toaster in your bath tub or trying to put a fire out with gasoline. “How badly did they burn the vampires?”
The vampire gagged. The muscles of its neck constricted, widened, constricted again, and it disgorged a six-inch-long metal cylinder onto my desk. The bloodsucker grasped it, twisted the cylinder’s halves apart, and retrieved a roll of papers. “Photographs,” Ghastek said, handing me a couple of sheets from the roll.
“That’s disgusting.”
“He is thirty years old,” Ghastek said. “All his internal organs, with the exception of the heart, atrophied long ago. The throat makes for a very good storage cavity. People seem to prefer it to the anus.”
Translation: be happy I didn’t pull it out of my ass. Thank the gods for small favors.
The two photographs showed two charred blistered ruins that might have been bodies at some point and now were just burned meat. In random places the undead flesh had peeled away, revealing bone.
A mage who could deliver a blast of heat intense enough to cook a vampire was worth his weight in gold. This wasn’t some two-bit firebug. This was a high-caliber pyromancer. You could count those guys on the fingers of one hand.
I held out my hand. “The m-scan, please.”
The vampire became utterly still. Many miles away, Ghastek was deep in thought.
“You have enough diagnostic equipment in the Casino to make the entirety of the Mage College giddy with joy,” I said. “If you tell me the scene wasn’t m-scanned, I’ll be very tempted to make a new storage cavity in your vampire with my saber.”
The vampire peeled another page from the roll and handed it to me. An m-scan printout, streaked with purple. Red was the color of undeath, blue was the color of human magic. Together they made the purple of the vampire. The older the vamp, the redder the signature. These four were relatively young—their residual magic registered almost violet. Two bright magenta lines sliced through the vampiric traces like twin scars. No matter how old a vampire would grow, it would never register magenta. The tint was wrong. Bloodsuckers ran to the deeper tones of purple.
But magenta still had red in it, which meant . . .
“Undead mages.” Holy shit!
“It seems so,” Ghastek said.
“How is this possible?” I was beginning to sound like a broken record. “The use of human elemental magic is directly tied to cognitive ability, which ceases to exist after death.”
The vampire shrugged again. “If I had answers, I wouldn’t be here.”
Just when I got comfortable with the rules of the game, the Universe decided it was time for a swift kick to my rear. Were-coyotes caught deadly plagues, the People asked the Order for assistance, and undead creatures used elemental magic.
“Do you have any idea who could be behind this? Any suspicions at all?”
“No.” The vampire leaned forward. A long yellow claw traced the slice of magenta across the m-scan. “But I’m dying to find out.”
CHAPTER 4
WHEN YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO START, GO back to basics. In my case, the basics involved gluing myself to the phone and calling the Biohazard units of major cities around Atlanta. Being with the Order had its disadvantages, but it did open some doors and anything concerning an epidemic had a high profile among Biohazard staff.
In two hours I had a better picture and it wasn’t pretty. So far the Steel Mary had left his skid marks in five cities: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Savannah—hit my home turf and I didn’t even know it—and finally Atlanta. He was moving north, working his way up the coast, which probably meant he came off the boat in Miami. Sea travel was a dicey affair; he would’ve stayed away from the ocean if he could help it. Several sea routes ran out of Miami. I had a sick feeling he came by the one curving down from Wes
t Africa. Africa churned with old magic, ancient, powerful, and primal.
In Miami a man in a cloak had been sighted in the marketplace. A herd of cattle waited to be slaughtered. He walked right into the enclosure, raised his arms, and the herd broke through the wooden corral and stampeded through the market. His magic hit the shoppers as well, and in seconds people fled the marketplace, trampling each other and causing a citywide panic. Then he unleashed smallpox, which proved to be too strong to cause trouble. It killed its carrier in seconds and burned itself out.
The citizens of Fort Lauderdale had no idea the guy in the cloak existed but their Biohazard unit did report an outbreak of extremely virulent influenza, which affected everyone who visited an underground bare knuckles tournament. Fancy that.
The PAD in Jacksonville got his number pretty fast, but he dumped a hellish strain of dysentery on them, and by the time they cleaned up the bodies, he was long gone. They did mention that he had four flunkies with him. They also called ahead to just about every city in Georgia with a warning, which Savannah and Atlanta’s Biohazard units promptly ignored.
Savannah paid for it with an outbreak of bubonic plague that started after a battle royale in one of their infamous Irish pubs on River Street. I knew the PAD detectives down there, and all three of them were very sore about the whole thing, so sore that they offered to box their case evidence and send it up to me. I jumped on the chance with both feet.
Every incident took place during a magic wave. Every incident involved a rough crowd and a brawl, and in every case the toughest fighter ended up pinned to the first available hard surface. Sometimes the Steel Mary used a spear. Sometimes a harpoon or a crowbar. Women seemed mostly unaffected. Either his magic didn’t work on them as well or he wasn’t interested in the more dangerous of the sexes.
Animals ran from him. Shapeshifters seemed to have issues as well. In Miami the three werewolves in the market went berserk. Of the berserkers, one was killed by the cow stampede, and the other two were apprehended and taken into police custody. The first survivor ripped out his own throat and bled to death in his cell. The other escaped and the upstanding members of the Miami PD blew the back of his head to pieces and collected the bounty. Some things even Lyc-V couldn’t fix. A shotgun blast to the head was one of them. The Miami PD had issued a formal apology to the Pack, but it was clear the Pack had no leg to stand on. In the cops’ place, I would’ve shot him down, too.
Magic Bleeds kd-4 Page 5
