Magic Strikes (15 page)

“It’s a good law,” Jim continued. “We don’t need to be messing around with a place that’s interested in making us dead in a pretty way. Even the People stay the hell away from it since it’s gone underground.”

He fell silent. Like Curran, Jim mostly hid his emotions, but his eyes betrayed him this time. Dark and troubled, they brimmed with anxiety. He was keeping it in check, but I could sense it. Jim was uneasy.

Haunted.

“So what made you mess with the Games, Jim?” I prompted.

“They’re importing shapeshifters. Some are on the level. They brought a mountain cat out from Missouri a few months ago. A decent female. But some are scum. They come in to scope our territory. They’re a threat. That’s a security issue, and that makes it mine.”

Pieces clicked together in my head. “You put a mole into the Games. And you didn’t tell Curran because you didn’t think he would be reasonable about it.” Jim took it upon himself to make a decision only the Beast Lord could’ve made. It wasn’t just a Bad Idea. It was a Sure to Get You Killed in a Hurry Idea.

Jim pushed the photograph toward me. “Garabed. Good, strong cat. Armenian. Found him like this a block from the Northern Office.”

Now I saw it. Jim had a dead shapeshifter and he couldn’t tell Curran about it. Knowing Curran, he would shut down the whole operation at the root. The Beast Lord had to uphold his laws. But now that one of his people was lost, Jim couldn’t let it go. He had to find and punish the guilty. First, to avenge the death, and second, because his crew would abandon him if he didn’t. The first duty of an alpha was to protect his clan, and Jim’s crew was his clan for the time being.

“Garabed showed no signs of shifting shape?” I asked.

“None.”

If I were Jim, I’d put somebody back into the Games. Somebody vicious, smart, and skilled. Somebody hard to take down . . .

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“You brought Derek in.”

Jim nodded. “He’s the best covert agent I have. He looks”—words caught in his throat—“
looked
like a brainless pretty boy. Nobody pays him any mind. But he misses nothing.”

“What happened?”

Jim grimaced. “He went there for a month and came back with this weird-ass story about the Reapers.

It’s the name of a team. They came out of nowhere a few weeks ago and landed with a lot of noise. Half of them m-scanned as human, but Derek said they weren’t. Didn’t smell right. He thought they had some sort of beef with us. Not just with the Pack but with our whole kind. Something about us being a meld of humans and animals, and those guys hate both. He told me there was a human girl in the Reaper crew and spun this long story about how she wanted to switch sides and would tell us all about the Reapers and Gar’s murder if we got her out.”

“And you told him no.”

Jim drained a third of his glass. “I told him it was too risky. The Reapers travel together, fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty per group, always armed.”

“As if they know they’re going in and out of enemy territory.”

Jim nodded.

“And they can’t be tracked by scent? They have to have a base of some sort.”

Jim looked like he’d just bitten a lime. “The problem isn’t tracking. The problem is the location of their base.”

“Where is it?” Why did I have a feeling this wouldn’t be good? With my luck, the next thing to come out of his mouth would be something crazy, like Unicorn Lane . . .

“In Unicorn—”

I held my hand out. “Got it.”

Unicorn Lane gave no quarter. Savage magic roiled there, streaming through the gutted corpses of skyscrapers, too powerful to harness, too dangerous to fight. Ordinary objects became suffused with lethal power. Horrible things that shunned the light hid in Unicorn, feeding on lesser monsters and spinning foul magics of their own. Lunatic cultists with secret power, deranged loups, cast-out Masters of the Dead, when they had nowhere to go, when every friend and every family member turned them away, when the apprehension directive on their profiles became “Shoot on sight” and desperation muddled their minds, only then did they try to enter Unicorn Lane. Most became nourishment for abominations. The rare few who survived went mad, if they weren’t already.

There was a reason why Andorf the Bear who had rampaged at the last legal Games chose Unicorn Lane as his refuge. There was a reason why Curran had set our first meeting on the outskirts of Unicorn, just deep enough to weed out the scared and kill the stupid.

To follow thirty monsters in human skin into Unicorn Lane in the middle of the night was a cruel and unusual way to commit suicide.

“Scouting their base is right out,” Jim said. “But suppose we did somehow spring the girl before they hit Unicorn Lane. We just kidnapped one of their own. Guilty or not, human or not, they would go to war with us after that. We can’t afford another damn war.”

“Not without cause,” Doolittle put in.

“All he had were some funny smells and a girl with a big mouth. I told the kid to stop chasing tail and bring me some proof. He went there one more time, but I could tell the girl made an impression.”

“I’ve seen her,” I told him. “I can’t blame him.”

Jim started. “How?”

“You finish first, then I’ll tell you my side.”

Jim shrugged. “Derek clammed up. I saw reason wasn’t getting through—he would try to rescue her one way or another, and I pulled him out of it. The tickets to the Games are hard to get and go for three grand apiece. I knew he didn’t have three grand lying around, and even if he managed, the type of ticket he could get wouldn’t let him into the lower level. I put a tail on him, told him to chill, and thought that was the end of it.”

Ahh, but Derek had seen Saiman at the Games and recognized him by scent. He knew Saiman in his
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Durand persona owned part of the House and had “go anywhere” tickets.

“While Derek was cooling off, I put Linna into the Games in his place.” Jim placed a second photograph in front of me. A corpse of a woman lay on the surgical table. The outline of her body was distorted, uneven. I studied the photo and realized she was in pieces. The body had been severed into sections and reassembled bit by bit.

“They carved her into twelve pieces,” Doolittle said. “Each piece exactly six inches long. She was probably alive while they did it. And no, she didn’t change shapes either. Her clothes were still on her.”

“I was picking her off the pavement when you came by.” Jim clenched his teeth. “Then my tail returned.

The kid lost him. And then we found Derek.”

I didn’t need further explanation. Jim’s crew had chased the scent, retracing the trail of Derek’s assailants, and found me dipping my fingertips into his blood.

“What do you have?” Jim asked.

I told him. When I came to the part where I led Curran to Linna’s dump site, Jim closed his eyes and looked as if he wanted to strangle me. I kept going until the whole story was out on the table. Jim decided he needed more tea. He probably needed something a lot stronger, but he’d have to fight Doolittle for it. The Pack doctor took a dim view of alcohol consumption.

“Did you tell Curran?”

“No.”

“Does he know about this office?”
Please say yes.

“No. This is one of my private places.”

“So as far as he knows, you and your crew went AWOL?”

He nodded.

“Rogue,” Doolittle said. “The correct term is ‘rogue.’ What the cat isn’t telling you is that right now Curran thinks a good chunk of his security force split from the Pack. He’s turning the city upside down looking for Jim. There is an order out for Jim to contact Curran.”

“I’ll call him in the morning,” Jim said.

“Which will only make things worse, because the Beast Lord will give the order to return to the Keep, and, you see, this young man here will decline.”

Jim growled low in his throat. It bounced from Doolittle like dry peas from a hard wall.

“Now why would you do that?” I stared at Jim.

“I have my reasons,” he said.

“To refuse a direct order is a breach of Pack Law,” Doolittle said. “By tradition, Jim will have three days to change his mind. And if he doesn’t, Curran will have to do what the alpha does when he is defied.”

Doolittle shook his head. “It’s a hard thing to contemplate, killing your friend. Bound to make a man crazy.”

Crazy Curran ranked right up there with monsoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

I turned to Doolittle. “And you? How did he get you into this mess?”

“We kidnapped him,” Jim said. “In broad daylight with much noise. He’s safe from Curran.”

“And right after I got Derek into the tank, I had to treat my kidnappers for injuries.” Doolittle shook his head. “I didn’t take kindly to being shoved into a cart and sat upon.”

Since Jim had gone through all this trouble to set Doolittle up as an innocent victim, Jim must’ve expected a shit storm of hurricane proportions when Curran found them.

“I was kidnapped.” Doolittle smiled. “I have little to worry about. But someone who helps Jim hide from his alpha of her own free will, well, that is a completely different story.”

“Don’t you have someplace to be?” Jim’s eyes flashed green.

Doolittle got up and rested a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Think before you sign your death warrant.”

He left the room. It was me and Jim.

In a fight, Curran was death. He’d never liked me. He’d warned me to stay away from the Pack’s power struggles. I’d get no leeway this time.

“Jim?”

He looked at me and I saw it, right there, shining clear through all his mental shields: fear. Jim was
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terrified. Not for himself—I’d known him for a long time and threats to his personal well-being didn’t inspire terror in him. He was off balance, as if he’d been knocked down in the dark and had sprung to his feet, not sure where the next blow would come from.

He had “his reasons,” and I needed to know them. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call Curran right now and blow this whole thing out of the water.”

Jim looked into his glass. Muscles clenched on his arms. A brutal internal battle was taking place inside him, and I wasn’t sure which side was winning.

“Seven years ago, a string of loup infestations hit the Appalachians,” he said. “I had just started with the Pack. They brought me along as an enforcer. Tennessee let us in right away, but it took North Carolina two years to decide they couldn’t handle that shit on their own. We went in. It’s all mountains. Old Scotch-Irish families, separatists, religious nuts, they all run there and squat on their own personal mountaintops and then they breed, and their kids set up trailers and cabins right there, a spit away.

People come there to be by themselves. Everybody minds their own business. Nobody talked to us.

Families had gone loup, entire clans, and nobody knew. And sometimes they knew and didn’t do anything about it. You’ve been to the Buchanan compound. You know what we found.”

Death. They found death and kiddie pools full of blood and half-eaten children. Women and men, raped, torn to pieces, and raped again, after they were dead. People flayed alive. They found loups.

“We were combing through Jackson County when the local cops called us. A house had caught on fire on Caney Fork Road, but none of them wanted to go up there. Claimed Seth Hayes owned the house and he shot trespassers on sight. Since we were close and would get there faster, could we please swing by.”

Bullshit. The cops knew Hayes had gone loup. Probably known it for a while. Otherwise why call shapeshifters about a house fire?

“The place sat on the edge of a damn cliff. Took us an hour to come up on the house. The building was a ruin by that point. Nothing but charred coal and greasy smoke and that stink. The loup stink.”

I knew that smell. Thick, musky, sour, it overlaid your tongue with a harsh, bitter patina and made you choke. The scent of a human body gone spiraling out of control into the depths of Lyc-V’s delirium. I had smelled it before. Once it stained you, you never forgot it.

Jim kept on, his voice flat. “The kid sat in the ash. He’d dragged two bodies out, what was left of his sisters, and just sat there, waiting for us to finish him off. Filthy, skinny, starved kid covered in his dad’s blood. He stank like a loup. I thought we should kill him. I looked at him and thought ‘loup kid’ and said so. Curran said no. Said we’ll take the kid with us. I thought the man was crazy. The shit that kid had been through, he wasn’t even human anymore. I looked at him and saw nothing left. But Curran went and sat with the kid, and talked him into following us. The kid didn’t speak. I didn’t think he knew how.”

Jim drew his hand over his hair. “We didn’t even know his name, for fuck’s sake. He just followed Curran everywhere like a tail: to the gym, to the Keep, to the fights. He’d sit by the door while the council meetings ran, like a dog. Curran would read books to him. He’d sit and read to the kid and then ask his opinion. He did this for a month until one day the kid answered.”

Jim’s eyes blazed. “Now the kid has a half-form better than mine. Taught himself to speak in it. Might be the wolf-alpha one day. I can’t do it to him.”

“Do what?”

“I have to fix it, Kate. Give me a chance to fix it.”

“Jim, you’re not making sense.”

Doolittle walked back inside, a platter of hush puppies in his hand. “She doesn’t have your frame of reference, James. Let me take over.” He sat and pushed the hush puppies my way. “When a shapeshifter suffers a great deal of stress, be it physical or psychological, it stimulates the production of Lyc-V. The virus saturates our bodies in great numbers. The higher the virus swells and the faster it spikes, the greater are the chances of the shapeshifter going loup.”

“That’s why the greatest risk of loupism coincides with the onset of puberty.” I nodded.

“Indeed. Derek is under a great deal of stress. Something is blocking him, and if we manage to successfully remove the block, the virus will bloom inside him in huge numbers very quickly. It will be a
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