Hindu mythology wasn’t my strongest suit, but even I knew about Shiva. Any god titled Destroyer of Worlds wasn’t to be taken lightly. When not enjoying his home life with his loving wife and two sons, he ran around the woods wrapped in cobras and wearing a torn tiger skin still dripping blood. He stripped pelts from fearsome beasts with a touch of his pinkie. His wrath was likened to Rudra, a roaring storm. In his malignant aspect, he was absolutely terrifying. In his benign aspect, he was easily amused. His forehead hid a third eye, which, when directed outward, burned everything in his path and periodically destroyed the universe. Anything associated with Shiva had to be treated with kid gloves while wearing a Level IV biohazard suit and preferably a tank.
Dali smiled. “Ravana managed to annoy Shiva, and the Destroyer of Worlds put him into a cage of stone bars. Ravana had to sit there and sing until Shiva got tired of listening to him and let him go. Ravana was the ultimate rakshasa: arrogant, flashy, and ruled completely by his impulses. He was what they would aspire to be. You’re dealing with terrible show-offs, convinced of their own superiority. To them you’re amusing food slash adoring audience. They’ll milk everything they got for dramatic effect and they get off on playing to the crowd.”
Jim and I exchanged glances. If you got your jollies by getting the herd high, the Midnight Games was the place to do it.
I turned my cup upside down, looking for more coffee. None came out. Still, the crowd-pleasing factor had to be just a bonus. They were after the gem. Why? I was swimming in a sea of random information and it refused to make itself into anything logical. I opened my mouth to ask Dali about the topaz, but Jim jumped ahead of me.
“Can you explain the jungle?”
She made a face. “I have no idea. It could be some sort of pocket of deep magic. Or a portal into a magic jungle land. I’d need more information to answer this question. By the way, I’m so thirsty, my tongue feels like paper.”
Dali licked her lips and Jim went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water, which he handed to her. She drained half of it. “So, the rakshasas hate us.”
“ ‘Us’ as in shapeshifters or ‘us’ as in normal humans?” I asked.
“Both. This takes us back to Ravana. Ravana was an upward-climbing type of individual. He had ten heads, and every century he sacrificed one of his heads by hacking it off. Finally he had only one head and the gods could stand it no longer, came down in all their heavenly glory, and asked him what the hell did he want to stop doing that. He asked for immunity from every race except that of men and animals. He thought us to be too puny and lowly to harm him. Once he got his immunity, he set about conquering Heaven, burned the city of the gods, killed all the dancing girls . . . And then Vishnu decided he had just about enough of that, went to Earth to be reborn as a human, Rama, marshaled together an army of animals, and nuked him.”
If rakshasas were as arrogant as she said, they would hate humans and animals with the passion of a thousand suns. And shapeshifters were both. Bonus genocide. Now the Reapers’ half-breed revulsion made sense.
“Is there anything in the legends about a topaz called the Wolf Diamond? A large yellow gem maybe?” I asked.
Dali wrinkled her forehead. “Topaz is associated with Brihaspati—Jupiter.”
“The Roman god?” Jim frowned.
“No, the planet. Honestly, Jim, the world doesn’t revolve around the Greco-Roman pantheon. Rudra Mani, Shiva’s gem, is also gold in color. He carries it on his neck. By the way, Shiva was the one who gave the rakshasas the gift of flying.”
“This one would be large,” I said. “A powerful stone.”
“Rudra Mani is pretty large. The size of a baby’s head.”
Saiman had described the Wolf Diamond as being the size of a man’s fist . . . Either a big fist or a very small baby . . . Unless he meant an ice giant’s fist. “What do you know about it?”
Dali rolled her eyes. “It’s supposed to be a stone of virtue. It also belongs to Shiva, if you catch my drift. With Shiva, you never know what you’re going to get. He might find a rakshasa baby, think it was cute, and give it the power of flight and the ability to grow to adulthood in one day. Or he might start stomping demons for fun.”
Jim crossed his massive arms on his chest. “So we have a rock that belongs to a bipolar god with a warped sense of humor.”
“Pretty much. Not a lot is known about Rudra Mani. I’ll look it up. We don’t even know if your topaz is Rudra Mani or some other chunk of yellow stone.” Dali waved her hands. “It’s too vague. It could be anything or nothing.”
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Wolf Diamond was Rudra Mani in disguise. Mythological elements tended to occur in bunches. We had rakshasas who were firmly associated with Shiva in the Hindu myths. Shiva had a large yellow rock. The rakshasas planned to enter a tournament to win a large yellow rock. It would be foolhardy to assume that the two rocks weren’t one and the same.
At least we’d get no Shiva. The flare had come and gone, so he couldn’t manifest. No Shiva was good, whichever way you looked at it.
I looked at the bloodied stump that once had been the axe fighter facing Saiman. Next to the four-armed monstrosity, he looked almost fragile. “Why is he still in the human skin?”
“What?” Dali wrinkled her nose at me.
“This fellow ripped off his skin and started roaring and waving his four arms around the first chance he got. The axe fighter remained in his human form. Why?”
Dali put her cup down. “Well, you’re assuming the axe fighter isn’t human. But even if he is a rakshasa, he might not have wanted to change shape. You said they are posing as humans. He would blow his cover.”
“He was beaten to a pulp,” Jim said. “Trust me, he would’ve changed. It’s the matter of the survival instinct taking over.”
All these facts tried to coalesce in my head. I could almost grasp it. “Perhaps he couldn’t change shape. Maybe something kept him from changing. Kind of like something is keeping Derek from shifting. An object. A spell. Something that suppresses the magic.”
Jim caught on. “Something that would also fool the m-scanner into reading them as human.”
Dali kicked off her shoes and began pulling off her shirt. “I’ll have to shift. I’m more sensitive to magic in my animal shape and my sense of smell is better.”
I looked to the floor. The shapeshifters mostly fell into two camps: some were very modest, and some would strip in the middle of the Market Highway without a moment’s thought. Apparently Dali was of the second category.
A deep, low rumble of a large cat rolled through my apartment, a cascade of sound bouncing off my skin. I looked up.
A white tiger stood in my living room. Glowing as if sculpted of fresh snow, she looked at me with ice-blue eyes, enormous, otherworldly, like some eternal spirit of the North, taiga, and winter hunt. Long stripes outlined her fluid shape with coal black. More than a mere animal, more than a lycanthrope in the beast form, she was majestic. I couldn’t even breathe.
And then she sneezed. And sneezed again, blinking, and when she raised her head again, I realized that only one glacial eye looked straight at me. The other stared off to the side. The tiger spirit went cross-eyed like a Siamese cat.
The tigress raised one paw, looked quizzically at it, put it down, and rumbled low in the throat, a befuddled expression on her big face.
“Yes, those are your paws,” Jim said patiently.
At the sound of his voice, the tigress backpedaled, stumbled over the four-armed body, and sat on it in the most undignified manner.
“You’re sitting on the evidence,” Jim said.
The tigress leapt up and spun around, nearly taking me off my feet with her butt. A snarl ripped from her mouth.
“Yes, there is a dead creature in the room. Lie down, Dali, and relax. It will come to you.”
The tigress settled on the floor, peering at the bodies with open suspicion.
“She has short-term memory l
oss after the shift,” Jim murmured. “It will wear off in a minute. The cross-eyed thing will go away, too. Some cats react that way to stress.”
“Does she get aggressive?” The last thing I needed was to get raked over hot coals because I used excessive force to subdue a raging cross-eyed weretigress with temporary amnesia.
Jim’s face took on an odd expression, so unusual on his hard mug that it took me a moment to diagnose it as embarrassment. “No. She gags on raw meat and blood.”
“What?”
“She won’t bite or scratch or she’ll vomit. She’s a vegetarian.”
Oh boy. “But when she’s in beast form . . .”
He shook his head. “She eats grass. Don’t ask.”
Dali rose and sniffed the four-armed body. She began at his feet, her flat feline muzzle trailing a mere quarter inch above the skin. The dark nose scanned the long toes of the left foot, tipped with sharp claws, and slid up, along the shin to the knee. Dali paused there, licked the hard pane of the kneecap, and moved up along the thigh. She stopped at the crotch, shifted to the right, and repeated the same thorough scent search with the right leg.
It took her a full five minutes to complete her survey.
“Anything?” I asked.
Dali shook her magnificent head. Damn it. We were back to dying Derek lying in a vat of liquid.
“Alright.” Jim nodded. “Change back. I thought of something else to ask.”
The tigress nodded. Her white pelt stretched, quivered, but remained on her body.
“Dali?” Jim’s voice was calm and measured.
The white fur crawled and snapped back into a tiger. Glacial-blue eyes stared at me, and in their crystal depth, I saw panic.
The tigress ran.
She dashed around the room, trampling the bodies. Her furry shoulder brushed the tall, tulip-shaped lamp. The lamp went flying and exploded against the floor in a shower of glass. Dali rampaged over the shards and collided with the LCD display on the wall. The large metal frame slid off its hook and thundered down, landing on Dali’s skull. I winced.
Dali whipped about, her eyes completely wild, and met Jim. He stepped in her way and stared.
Dali shivered. The fur rose on her haunches. She snarled.
Jim simply stood. His eyes were pure emerald.
With a heavy sigh, Dali hugged the ground and lay down.
Alpha of the cats in action.
Jim knelt by Dali. “Can you change shape?”
The tigress whined low. I took it as a no.
Small streaks of blood seeped from Dali’s huge paws, vivid against her white fur. Given her aversion to blood, she probably wouldn’t even lick her injuries. I fetched the med kit Doolittle had used to patch me up, fished out a pair of tweezers, and settled down by her feet. She offered me one enormous paw. I opened the bottle of antiseptic, poured some on a piece of gauze, and wiped the blood from the huge pads. Three glass shards sat embedded in the flesh, trophies of her glorious battle with the lamp.
“I want you to keep trying to revert to human shape,” Jim said. “Don’t strain yourself, but keep a steady pressure.”
I hooked the first shard with the tweezers and plucked it from her paw. Blood gushed. Dali jerked, pulling me with her. Fire laced my side. I winced. There went Doolittle’s patching.
“Hold still, please.”
Dali whined and let me have her paw. The cut didn’t seal. I swiped at it with gauze. Still open. Shit. She and Derek now exhibited the same symptoms: an inability to shift and retarded regeneration. I deposited the bloody piece of frosted-white glass onto the lid of the first aid kit.
“Let’s talk scents.” Jim’s voice was smooth, soothing. “Did you smell anything odd off the bodies?”
Dali rocked her head side to side.
I plucked another shard from her paw. “Aside from shape, do you feel any different?”
Dali whined. That was the trouble with shapeshifters in animal form: they couldn’t vocalize and most couldn’t write. Yes and no questions were our only option.
I hooked the third shard, but the tweezers slipped. The sucker was deep in there. “Dali, spread your fingers for me if you can.”
Huge claws shot out from her paw as she spread her toes.
“Thank you.” I pinched the shard and pulled it out.
The tiger flesh boiled under my fingers and I found myself holding a human hand.
“Oh my God.” Dali’s voice hit a trembling high note. “Oh my God.”
“What did you do?” Jim leaned forward, focused as if he sighted prey.
Tears swelled in Dali’s eyes. “I thought I would be stuck in animal form forever.” She looked around the room. “I wrecked the place. And your wound . . . I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I mumbled, focused on the shard. It looked yellow to me. The tulip lamp had been frosted white. “Happens all the time.”
I grabbed the first aid kit, held it under the tweezers in case I dropped the shard on the way, got up, and carried the sliver of glass to the window. The shard sparkled, casting a faint yellow shade onto the white first aid box. Hello, Mr. Clue.
Jim frowned at the shard. “Topaz?”
“I think so. What do you want to bet this is a piece of the Wolf Diamond?” It made sense. The Reapers wanted the Wolf Diamond so they could use it as a weapon against shapeshifters. Two plus two equaled a bloody chunk of silicate in my hand. “Do you think it prevents transformation?”
Jim swiped it from the tweezers and sliced the flesh of his palm with a quick flick of his nails. He slid the shard into the cut.
Green rolled over his eyes. His lips trembled. A shiver ran through his body, raising the hair on the back of his arms. His gaze had gone jaguar-wild, but his shape remained human.
Without a word, he extracted the shard and dropped it into the lid as if it were red-hot.
This was it. This was the weapon the rakshasas needed to destroy the Pack. The gem couldn’t be stolen; it had to be won or it would bring a curse upon its thief. They entered the Midnight Games so they could get the gem, and once they got it, they would carve it into a thousand pieces and use the shards to prevent shapeshifters from assuming their animal or warrior form. Without shapeshifting and regeneration, the Pack would become filling for the rakshasa meat grinder.
“I must’ve stepped onto the shard when I touched the body,” Dali murmured.
“You mean, when you stomped all over it.” Jim shook once, as if flinging water from himself. “The kid has one inside him somewhere. But the m-scanner isn’t picking it up.”
Dali touched the shard with her fingertip. “It’s so small. The scanner might not be sensitive enough to detect it with low magic.”
“I don’t want to slice him to ribbons looking for it. He might not make it. There has to be another way,” Jim said.
The plan shaped up in my head. “I’m going to Macon.”
Jim blinked and a light sparked in his eyes. “Julie, your ward. She is in school near Macon. And she’s a hell of a sensate.”
Julie, the kid whom I met during the flare, had a one-in-a-million talent. She was a sensate and she could read the colors of magic better than any m-scanner. She was studying in the best boarding school I could get her into, only two hours away by ley line.
I nodded. “If anybody can find the shard in Derek’s body, she will.”
CHAPTER 21
I TAPPED MY FINGERS ON THE COUNTER, THE phone to my ear, and checked the gauze I pressed against my ribs. Still bleeding.
The line clicked and a soothing female voice greeted me. “Ms. Daniels?”
“Hello.”
“My name is Citlalli. I’m Julie’s counselor.”
“I remember. We’ve met.” Memory thrust an image before me, a small dark woman with Madonna eyes. A very strong empath. Like surfers, the empaths rode the waves of people’s emotions, feeling the grief or joy of others as if it were their own. They made excellent psychiatrists and sometimes their pa
tients drove them insane.
I frowned. Something was up. I didn’t ask to speak to the counselor.
“Ms. Daniels . . .”
“Kate.”
“Are you precognizant, Kate?”
“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“I’m drafting a letter to you regarding Julie, and I wondered if my concentration may have triggered your phone call.”
Oh no. “What did she do?”
“Julie has developed some issues.”
Julie was an issue riding on an issue and using a third issue for a whip. But she was mine, and despite the kind quality of Citlalli’s voice, all my needles stood up defensively . I tried to keep the hostility out of my answer. “Go on.”
“Due to the gap in her education, she has to take remedial classes.”
“We discussed that prior to her admittance.”
“Academically she’s progressing ahead of schedule. I have no doubt that she will catch up with her peers by the end of the year,” Citlalli assured me. “But she’s experiencing problems adjusting socially.”
She had practically lived on the streets for the last two years, hiding from gangs and being brainwashed by her scumbag boyfriend. What did they expect from her?
On the other end of the line, Citlalli cleared her throat softly. My irritation must’ve been intense enough for her to pick up. I took a deep breath and cleared the baggage. Emotions receded, still present but held deep below the surface. It was a meditation technique I had learned in childhood. I rarely used it because I liked to ride the edge of my emotions. Fear, anger, outrage, love, courage, I utilized them for a boost in the fight. But I knew how to suppress them, and the older I got, the easier suppression came to me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you discomfort. You were describing Julie’s problems?”
“Thank you. Children can be cruel at Julie’s age. They struggle for personal identity. Establishing pecking order becomes very important. Julie finds herself at a disadvantage. Academically she’s behind, so she can’t use her accomplishments in that area to gain popularity. She’s not very good at sports, partially due to malnourishment and partially because she doesn’t have remarkable talents in that arena. We have some outstanding athletes and she realizes she will never be a star. She doesn’t excel at combat, and while those with knowledge find her magical sensitivity impressive, children appreciate flashier magics more.”
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