Magic Bites (26 page)

My foot found an imperfection in the pavement. I slid, and almost landed on my ass. Pain bit my leg. I bent forward, waiting for it to pass and growling wordless curses under my breath.

"Do you need me to carry you?" a voice whispered into my ear. "Again?"

I spun and hammered an uppercut into the speaker's midsection. My fist met a wall of solid muscle.

"Good punch," Curran said. "For a human."

Yeah yeah. I heard you exhale when I hit you. You felt it
. "What do you want?"

"Where is your pretty date?"

"Where is yours?"

I started toward the building again. The only way to get away from him was to climb up the stairs and shut the ward in his face.

"Home," he said. "Waiting for me."

"Well, do me a fucking favor and go see her."

I reached the stairs and sat down. My leg demanded a break.

"Hurts?"

"No, I like sitting on filthy steps in an expensive evening dress."

"You're a bit surly tonight," he observed. "Not getting laid will do that."

I looked at the night sky, at the tiny dots of stars. "I'm tired, my leg hurts, and there's shit that needs answers and I can't find any."

"Like what?"

I sighed. "One, I don't know who killed Greg and why. Two, we found no evidence of the necro-tainted animals that killed your people. Three, Greg's file mentioned women. Why did Olathe take them and what did she do with them?"

He bent low toward me. "It's over," he said. "And you've got a bad case of spotlight deprivation."

"A bad case of what?"

"You're a no-name merc and all of a sudden everyone wants to talk to you. The power brokers of the city know your phone number. Makes you feel important. And now the dance is done. I sympathize." His voice dripped derision. "But it's over."

"You're wrong."

Curran walked away.

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"She called you a half-breed," I told his back. "Why?"

He ignored me.

I forced myself to my feet and went upstairs. I got into the apartment, changed clothes, threw together a bag of stuff I didn't want to be without, took Slayer, and went downstairs again. I started Karmelion, biting off the words of the chant like a snapping dog, and pulled out of the parking lot. I've had it with this whole bloody city. I was going home. To my real home.

DAYLIGHT STREAMED THROUGH THE WINDOW tickling my face. I yawned and snuggled under the covers. I didn't want to wake up. Not yet. In retrospect driving out of the city close to midnight, and with an aching hip, wasn't the brightest idea, especially considering that the tech hit around four, leaving my truck marooned a mile away from the house, but I had gotten in just before the sunrise and now none of it mattered. I was home.

I stuck my face into the pillow, but daylight persisted and I stretched, sighing. My bare feet hit the sun-warmed floor and I happily padded to the kitchen to make coffee.

Outside the late morning was in full swing. The clear sky was luminescent with blue. No wind troubled the leaves on the myrtles. The kitchen window begged to be opened. I unlocked it and pushed the bottom half up to let the coastal, sea-spiced air into my house. Home. Finally.

In the yard, positioned so it could be noticed from either kitchen or porch, rose a stick. On the stick was a human head.

Long hair hung in blood-caked strands. Pale eyes bulged from their sockets. The mouth gaped open and green flies were breeding among the torn lips.

It was so out of place in my sunlit world that for a moment it didn't seem real. It couldn't be real.

An unmistakable stench of rot crept into my kitchen I sprinted to the bedroom, wincing at the pain, grabbed Slayer, and went to the front door. My wards were up. Cautiously I opened the front ward and stepped onto the porch.

Nothing.

No sound. No power.

Nothing except a rotting head in my front yard.

I approached the head and circled it slowly. It belonged to a young woman. She had died recently—the expression of horror was still frozen on her face.

A large nail pinned a folded piece of paper to the back of her head. I raised the paper with the tip of
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Slayer's blade. Uneven letters glared back at me.

Do you like my present? I made it special for you. When you see your half-breed friend, tell him I
won't waste his head like this. I'll strip every shred of meat off his bones. I'll gorge myself on his
carcass until I can't walk and let my children finish the rest, while I sleep it off with half-breed
women. Half-breed meat tastes like shit but it has good texture. Olathe never did appreciate it. It's
a shame about her dress. I was partial to it.

I walked inside and dialed Jim's number.

THE DEAD HEAD LOOKED AT JIM. JIM LOOKED AT the head.

"You know some fucked up people," Jim said.

"Her name's probably Jennifer Ying," I said. "The hair has Mongoloid texture. She's one of the missing women whose names I found in Feldman's file. The head wasn't here when I came in, which was around four thirty this morning."

Jim sniffed at the head. "Fresh kill. A day, maybe a day and a half at most," he said. "You need to call Curran."

"He won't listen to me. He thinks I'm a glory hound."

Jim shrugged. We've worked together long enough to know that neither of us was interested in fame.

"You aggravate the hell out of him."

"There is more." I led him to the porch. A gathering of human bones lay arranged on canvas, spanning the entire porch.

"You rob a graveyard?"

"I wondered how he came so close to the house without setting my wards off, so I went looking and found these. He arranged them in a circle around the property in the tree line. It's a form of a ward. Very old."

"How old?"

"Neolithic. Primitive hunters would lay out the bones of their prey around their settlements. The idea is to form a chain of Rock, Bone, and Wood. You use Rock and Wood to obtain the Bone, binding all three, so if you return the Bone to the Rock and Wood after you're done with it, it will afford you protection.

He created himself a safe passage so he could wander around my yard whenever he wanted. It's an easy spell to break. All you have to do is to remove the bones, and that's why nobody uses it anymore.

Unfortunately, you can't detect it unless you stumble over it."

I picked up a skull and handed it to him. Jim took it and recoiled, hissing. His eyes flooded with green.

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Folklore correctly stated that in death a shapechanger's body would revert to the form it had at birth, be it human or animal, but Lyc-V did some permanent things to bone structure, which remained in life or in death. Several long glossy strips of Lyc-V-created bone marked the skull in telltale places above the jaw and along the cheekbones.

"A wererat," Jim said, handing me the skull as if it was hot.

"Guess how many I found?"

"Seven."

"And at least three vampires. The skeletons are not complete. Some bones are missing, but there are eight pelvises and nine skulls, three of which have bloodsucker fangs."

Jim glared at the bones. "You have to put the vamps separate."

"What?"

"Put the bloodsucker bones separate," he repeated. He was agitated and low snarls crept into his voice.

"Why don't you get off your ass and help me?"

"I'm not touching
them
."

I sighed. "Jim, I'm not a criminalist. Without a bloody loup and an m-scanner, I don't know which bones are vamp. You, on the other hand, can tell by the scent."

He glared at me, his eyes a little wild. "You look through it and if you have trouble, you let me know."

He marched into the yard. I sighed and went about sorting the bones.

I SAT ON THE PORCH BETWEEN TWO PILES OF bones, watching the werejaguar in my yard make small circles around the stick supporting the rotting head of a young woman. I had failed her.
I
had looked at the evidence.
I
had drawn the wrong conclusions. But I was still here, sitting on my porch, while she had paid for my stupidity. And my arrogance.

Jim kept walking, placing each foot softly in front of the other, stalking an invisible prey around a circle.

Yellow flooded his eyes and his upper lip quivered once in a while, showing his fangs. Unless the cat was yawning in your face, you wouldn't see his fangs until he was ready to sink them into you. Jim was ready to sink them into
someone
. He would have to wait in line.

"Stop it. You're wearing a hole in my yard."

Jim stopped pacing to glare at me.

A dark van pulled into the driveway. It was magic and water powered like Karmelion and it made enough noise to match my horror of a truck. Four stone-faced shapechangers stepped out and approached me, carrying several canvas bags. I got up and stood aside, giving them access to the bones.

They began packing the fractured skeletons of their dead into the bags, sorting as they went along, handling the bones with the same care a china dealer employs when touching his best merchandize.

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Doolittle stepped out of the van, wearing denim overalls and carrying a portable m-scanner. He paused to murmur a few words to Jim and proceeded to the head.

Jim approached the porch. "Curran wants you in the city."

I shook my head. "I can't go. After you're done, I'll have to call the cops. You got your bones back. The Ying family deserves to receive their daughter's."

"What the fuck do I tell Curran?"

Doolittle plucked the note from the nail, flipped it over. "Looks like he wrote on the back of some sort of magazine page."

I took the note from his fingers. The page was from
Volshebstva e Kolduni
, the "Spells and Warlocks"

rag-sheet whose credibility Saiman had so easily dismissed.

"Kate?" Jim asked.

I wanted to cry. How could I have been so stupid? I brought the Almanac out to them and handed the upir article Bono had given me to Doolittle. He read a few words. "It says here this creature feeds on dead human flesh. It will mate with animals and produce half-breed sons, neither animal nor human.

Where did you get this?"

"One of Ghastek's journeymen gave it to me."

"Ghastek knew," Jim snarled. "He knew the whole time. I'll rip his heart out!"

" 'Driven by the need to produce an heir, the upir will mate with women of power, for only a woman of power can carry a true upir to term…'" Doolittle looked at me. "You cannot stay here, Kate. You must come to the keep." I opened my mouth but he silenced me with a wave of his hand. "There are seven of us and one of you. We'll carry you if we have to."

THE PACK COUNCIL SAT IN PADDED CHAIRS around a table. In the middle of the table sat the head of Jennifer Ying brought in as evidence by Doolittle and placed under a glass hood laced with preserving spells. She bore silent witness to all that was said. Next to her a speaker phone relayed Saiman's cool voice.

"All upiri are male. The history of their breed is quite old: it's likely they were an integral part of the fertility cults in early agrarian societies of the Bronze Age. During the rites young women, embodying the Goddess, were brought to the upir so he could play out his role of her son-consort by copulating with them. Of course, often the copulation resulted in the woman's death, in which case, the upir would complete the rite full circle, devouring her body.