Magic Bleeds (12 page)

“So it’s my fault? I made you your bloody dinner. You didn’t show up. Just couldn’t pass up a chance to humiliate me, could you?”

Curran bit the air as if he had fangs. “I was challenged by two bears. They broke two of my ribs and dislocated my hip. When Doolittle finally finished setting my bones, I was four hours late. I asked if you called and they said no.”

He’d sunk enough gravity into that “no” to bring down a building.

“If you were late, I would’ve turned the town inside out looking for you. I called you. You didn’t answer. I was so sure something happened to you I dropped everything and dragged myself to your house. I came to check on you with broken bones and you weren’t there.”

“You’re lying.”

Curran snarled. “I left a note on your door.”

“More lies. I waited for you for three hours. I called the Keep, thinking that something happened to you, and your flunkies told me that the Beast Lord said he was too busy to speak to me.” I was shaking with rage. “That in the future I should address all my concerns to Jim, because His Majesty declared that he didn’t want to be bothered with talking to the likes of me anymore.”

“That phone call happened in your head. You’re delusional.”

“You stood me up and then rubbed my nose in it.”

Something hissed behind the frosted glass in the main hall.

Curran lunged toward me. I should’ve thrust straight through him. Instead I just stood there, like an idiot.

He clamped me to him, spinning us so his back faced the glass.

The glass wall exploded.

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Shards pelted the dining room behind us, breaking against Curran’s back. A black and gold jaguar crashed against the opposite wall. Twin jets of water burst into the room from the main floor. The first thudded into the wall, pinning Jim. The second smashed against Curran’s spine. He grunted and clenched me to him.

We were caught out in the open. No place to hide. Oh, the stupid, stupid idiot. He was shielding me.

Jim snarled, trying to get to his feet, but the water slapped him down and kept him there.

Gold flooded Curran’s eyes. His big body shook.

I jerked left, trying to see past Curran’s shoulder. A man stood in the middle of the main hall, his hands raised. Behind him a broken pipe jutted from the wall, spilling water under his feet. Two pressurized jets shot from the water, following the direction of his arms. A water mage. Shit.

I pressed closer to Curran to speak into his ear. “One-man fire brigade, dead center of the room. He’s broken the main pipe and is emptying the Guild’s water tower into the lobby. Let me go.”

“No.” Curran gripped me tighter. “Too risky.”

“He’s sanding the skin off your back.”

“I’ll heal, you won’t.”

Until he let go of me, he couldn’t maneuver. If he did, the mage would cut me down.

The jet that pinned us was only a foot wide. I pulled out a throwing knife. Slayer was too long for close-up fighting. “Throw me.”

Golden eyes looked into mine.

“Throw me at him.”

He grinned, showing me his teeth. “Over or under?”

“Under.”

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“Say please.”

Red spray hit my lips. Magic nipped at me—I tasted shapeshifter blood. The water was scraping the skin off his back, but he didn’t give an inch.

When this was over, I would rip his head off. “Throw me,
please
!”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He spun, twisting, and hurled me like a bowling ball. I slid across wet floor and broken glass, the twin water jets shooting above my head, right at the mage standing in a ten-inch whirlpool. Water drenched my face. The mage’s bare feet loomed before me. I grabbed his left ankle. The momentum jerked me behind him, and I sliced across the Achilles tendon of his right leg.

The mage dropped to his right knee, his back to me, his filthy cloak pooling about him. I knocked his left leg out from under him and sank a throwing knife deep between his ribs. He twisted to me. I saw the fist coming, but could do nothing to avoid it. The blow smashed into my jaw like the strike of a sledgehammer. I slid across the wet floor, through the whirlpool, and rolled to my feet on instinct. The world shuddered and swam sideways in a haze of pain. I stumbled back, shaking my head. Things snapped into focus.

The mage grinned at me from twelve feet away. Pale hair framed a narrow face. Mid-twenties, maybe a bit younger. His tattered cloak hung open, revealing a martial artist’s body: hard, crisply defined, and completely nude. Too short. Five ten at most. I had a guy in a cloak, he was naked, and he wasn’t the Steel Mary. Only I could be this lucky.

The jets behind the water mage kept spraying, changing direction. He was still tracking Curran and Jim.

How the hell did he do that?

Water swirled around his feet, surging up. A needle-thin jet hit me, burning my left thigh. A narrow cut sliced through my jeans and skin, like a slash from a scalpel. Another jet singed my ribs. He was playing with me. If he hit me straight on with one of those, the water would punch right through me. As long as he didn’t hit heart or eyes, I would survive. Everything else medmagic could fix.

The mage pulled my knife out of his side and looked at it. “Nice knife.”

The voice was deep but female.

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I threw my second knife. The blade bit into the mage’s chest. Shit. Missed the neck. “Here, have another one.”

The mage laughed. Definitely a female voice. The only way he could sound like a woman would be if he

. . .

A demonic shape leapt above the man: a seven-and-a-half-foot tall muscled monster, sheathed in gray fur, halfhuman, half-beast, all nightmare. He came sailing above the water as if he had wings, huge arms opened wide, eyes burning with gold on a terrible face.

God damn it. “No!”

The mage spun about. Water shot from him in dozens of sharp narrow jets. Curran backhanded him.

Bones crunched. The mage’s head spun on his shoulders, turning completely around: hair, face, hair again.

The mage’s body froze, rigid. He toppled back like a log, crashing on the wet floor with a splash. The whirlpool fell apart.

Broken neck, severed spinal column, instant death. There goes my chance at a chat. I swore. “Did you have to kill him?”

Gray eyes stared back at me. Prehistoric jaws opened, revealing enormous teeth. “Yes, I did.” The words came out perfectly. Curran’s control over his warrior form was absolute. “You’re welcome.”

You’re welcome, my ass. I pulled Slayer from the back sheath and strode to the corpse. Why the hell was I so relieved that Curran was mostly unhurt? I wanted to strangle him, not celebrate the fact that he was in one piece.

“Thank you for killing my suspect before I could talk to him.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Jim trotted over and sniffed the mage’s body.

I reached them and crouched by the corpse. Jim decided it was a good moment to shake. Wet spray hit me in the face.

“Thanks. That’s just a cherry on my day.” I wiped wet jaguar out of my eyes and stabbed Slayer into
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the mage’s stomach.

“He’s dead already,” Curran told me.

“The Casino was attacked this morning.” I leaned closer, watching the skin around Slayer’s blade. “Two elemental mages fried some vampires and enhanced the Casino’s walls with a lovely burn pattern.”

Curran shrugged his monstrous shoulders. “Stupid, but not remarkable.”

“They registered magenta on an m-scanner.”

Jim snarled.

Curran wrinkled his muzzle. “Undead mages?”

It was my turn to shrug. “We’ll see in a minute. Fire, air, water are all part of the same brand of magic.”

The mage had spoken in a female voice. The room was noisy with the sounds of running water, but I had heard a woman laugh. The body before me was unmistakably male. The only way he could speak like a woman would be if he was undead, and a female navigator was riding his mind. But I’d never heard of any other types of undead being piloted. Vampires, yes. But nothing else.

Well, no, wait, I’d seen undead mermaids being piloted, too, but they weren’t undead in the traditional sense of the word.

I leaned closer to examine the wound. My saber liquefied undead flesh and consumed it, building thickness onto the blade. If this was a vampire, the wound would’ve sagged by now.

A thin streak of white smoke curled from the blade. It could be something, or it could be just Slayer reacting to me being pissed off out of my mind.

“Clerk?” I yelled.

“Hey!” The Clerk’s head appeared above the third-story balcony rail. A moment later more heads joined it. That’s the Guild for you. Would it have killed one of them to shoot the damn bastard with a bow? I didn’t say it out loud. They would’ve laughed. People inclined to help others ended up in PAD or the Order. These guys were exactly where they wanted to be. Unless money or their hide was involved, they didn’t give a damn. They weren’t getting paid, so why bother?

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“You all okay up there?”

“We’re fine,” Juke called back. “Touched you care.”

Slayer hissed. I tapped the saber with the tip of my index finger. It careened to the side. The edges of the wound drooped, as if the man’s flesh were heated wax. I pinched the muscle near the wound and watched a telltale burgundy fluid seep from the cut.

Curran inhaled next to me, sampling the scent. A grimace troubled his nightmarish face. “Undead.”

“Yep.”

Just like the two undead mages who had attacked the Casino with elemental magic. It would be a miracle if they weren’t connected.

There were things I could do with an undead body that I couldn’t do with any other corpse. I had to hurry. I’d need magic and herbs for this. The herbs waited in my apartment and there was no telling how long the magic wave would last.

I looked up at the Clerk. “What happened?”

“He came in through the front,” the Clerk shouted. “I saw he was naked and cleared out. He busted the pipe and went after you.”

Except it wasn’t me he was after. True, the People hired me to investigate the attack, but I hadn’t had a chance to do anything warranting this sort of retaliation. No, he went right after Curran. He and Jim were the primary targets. I was a bystander.

“Get the firebugs to torch the floor and call PAD.”

“Who’ll pay for the torching?” Mark called out.

“The Guild will, Mark, unless you’d like us to keep walking around in undead blood.”

If Mark had any other objections, he decided to keep them to himself. There were at least a few pyro-talented mercs, and once they were done with the floor, all traces of the undeath and of my blood

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would be gone.

I raised Slayer and sliced across the corpse’s neck. It only took one cut—Curran had broken his neck and tore the muscle, leaving only skin for me to sever. I grasped the head by the hair and got up to my feet.

“The Order accepts the offer of aid from the Pack,” I said quietly. We had an audience and this wasn’t something I wanted them to hear. I was about to force Curran into a corner, and while he might come to terms with it in private, in public he would immediately refuse. “With the understanding that the Order is in the position of authority and our agreement can be terminated at will. This is mine.” I showed the head to Curran.

“The rest is yours. We compare results later.”

“Changed your mind?” Gold rolled over Curran’s eyes, but he kept his voice low. To the peanut gallery above, we appeared to be having a pleasant conversation.

“I can now take this to Ted. It’s hard to refute eyewitnesses. If I fight hard enough, he’ll let it stand. Let Jim know what Doolittle finds out about the body.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Jim’s better.”

Curran leaned to me. Bones crawled under his skin. His jaws shrank, his muzzle shortened, his claws receded. Gray fur flowed, melting into human skin. In a blink, he stood nude in front of me. A month ago I would’ve needed a moment to cope. Today I just looked straight at his face.

“I’ll call you,” he repeated.

“If you call me, I won’t pick up the phone.”

“You will wait by the phone for my call, and when it rings, you will pick it up and you will speak to me in a civil manner. If you don’t know how, ask someone.”

That did it. I pivoted to him. My voice came out quiet and cold. “Do you need me to draw you a chart?

You stood me up. You made me think there was something between us. You made me want things,
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things I thought I could never have, and then you crushed it. Don’t come near me, Curran. Don’t call.