Master of Shadows (6 page)

“I know what I smell—it was him. That fucking vampire cut off Jimmy’s head.”

“Maybe. Tristan and Belle say there’s something more going on, and I think they could be right. One way or another, I’m going to find out. If the murderer is Magekind, I’ll arrest him and let the Council of Clans decide his guilt. But if somebody else did the killing, they’re not going to use me to frame an innocent man.”

“It’s Arthur!” a voice shouted from the crowd. “Arthur sent them to kill Jimmy to get revenge for his son.”

“Maybe, or maybe not. But I
will
find out. And whoever’s responsible is going to pay.”

 

“That,” Tristan said
as the gate collapsed, “was a little too fucking close.”

Belle frowned at the last dying pulse of the inter-dimensional portal. “They weren’t just pissed about Jimmy’s murder. Someone’s been working on those werewolves, to turn them against us. And I’ll bet I know
which
someone it is.”

Tristan shook his head. “I don’t get this game Warlock’s playing. He—”

“Belle!” Davon said. “Look at this!”

She jerked around at his urgent tone. Given Cherise’s injuries, she’d transported them all directly into Belle’s bedroom. Davon had put his partner down on the canopied bed, where the girl now twisted in helpless pain, clutching her bleeding arm. “Jesus.” The Maja gasped. “It’s burning me alive! It feels like acid . . . Oh, hell.” Belle hurried over to the bed.

Davon sat by his partner’s side, an expression of deep worry on his handsome face. “This bite—I’ve never seen anything like it. And I was an ER doc for four years.”

“Let me see.” Belle reached for Cherise, but the girl curled tighter around the injured arm.

“Let her see it, Cherise,” Davon said, his voice deep, soothing, as he gently took her arm and stretched it out. He had a hell of a bedside manner. It was almost a shame he’d left medicine.

Then Belle got a good look at the bite, and every other thought vanished from her head. A set of deep punctures marked the woman’s arm in a V, sparks of magic leaping around the ragged holes. “Jesus, Mary, and all the saints,” she breathed. “What the hell is that?” Conjuring a basin of hot water, Belle went to work rinsing the blood away so she could get a better look. Her magical senses told her the bite had penetrated all the way to bone, shattering Cherise’s forearm.

But what chilled Belle was the blue glowing lines that snaked up the length of the Maja’s arm, following the tracks of her veins, as if carrying some lethal spell throughout her body.

“It hurts, Belle,” Cherise gritted. “God, it’s all I can do not to scream.” Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter, and sweat streamed down her face and matted her blond hair.

“Call Morgana,” Belle snapped over her shoulder at Tristan. “Have her bring a healer.”

“She’s going into shock,” Davon murmured, both hands cradling Cherise’s arm to support the broken bone. “Her pulse is thready—and the way that magic is following her veins is scaring the hell out of me. Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”

“Please!” Cherise gasped.

“Calm, child.” Belle closed her eyes, gathered her magic, and sent mystical energy flooding the punctures—only to slam right into a wall of magic so viciously cold, it seared her mind like an arctic blast.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t just a bite. It was devouring Cherise like magical acid. Belle could feel the Maja’s life force weakening as the spell ate away at bone, muscle, and blood. Gritting her teeth, Belle poured more power into the girl. Cherise cried out in pain.

But it wasn’t working.

 

“I don’t care
if you’re hunting the grassy knoll shooter,” Tristan growled over Morgana’s protests. “Get your ass over here.” He shoved the enchanted iPhone in his pocket and turned toward the bed.

Davon clamped his hands around the girl’s wounded arm, blood running over his dark fingers as magic popped and flickered over the Maja’s skin. Belle sat beside him, her hands tracing magical patterns in the air.

Tristan stared at them, helplessness grinding at him. Belle sat as if carved from ivory, delicate and rigid, her face bloodless in the blue light leaping around the bite. Her eyes were wide, staring intently downward as her hands moved in the intricate patterns of spell-casting. Cherise was no longer conscious, though he couldn’t tell whether that was the bite or Belle’s doing.

Davon looked up at him, dark eyes lost and helpless. “It’s killing her, Tristan. Cherise was bitten trying to protect me, and it’s killing her.”

Tristan offered the only comfort he could. “Morgana and the healer are coming. They’ll save her life if anyone can.”

He sensed the flare of magic from an opening dimensional gate in the hall. Morgana swept through the door a moment later, tall and carnivorously beautiful in a gown of black velvet that made her pale skin seem to glow. Black hair fell to her hips in long swirls of ebony. The healer followed, a strawberry blonde in a T-shirt and jeans, radiating power like a searchlight.

“Move aside, Magus,” Morgana told Davon. “You can moon at your witch when we’ve saved her.”

Davon backed reluctantly away to join Tristan at the other end of the room. “I’m a doctor. I should be able to help.”

“This is magic, Davon. Witch business.” Tristan frowned. The healer, Morgana, and Belle joined hands and began to chant.

“What?” Davon asked, reading his expression.

“That’s not good. Usually Majae just will the magic to do whatever the hell they want it to. Any time they start making an extra effort, something’s wrong.”

The lines of blue light were winding up the girl’s arm now, and the bite itself blazed, just short of blinding.

Davon’s big hands clenched into fists. “If it reaches her heart . . .” He didn’t have to say the rest.

Tristan eyed the young vampire. Normally, he kept his nose out of other agents’ lives, but this time he figured a little advice was warranted. A little damned
late
, true, but still. “It’s not a good idea to become lovers with your partner, Davon.”

“How did you . . .” He broke off. “It’s that obvious?”

“It’s a natural temptation.” Tristan decided it was best to ignore the implied question. “Mutual hunger, adrenaline rush . . .”

“Guilt,” Davon muttered.

“But it makes things messy. The heart follows the body’s lead—or maybe one of you doesn’t feel anything while the other goes nuts, so you’re just fucked all around. I’ve found it best to do my rutting elsewhere.”

Davon eyed him. “Rutting?”

Tristan shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“It wasn’t rutting with us.” The doctor’s expression turned stark with pain. “It may not have been very professional, but we both felt . . . something. Maybe not love, not so soon, but
something
.”

Something strong enough to make Cherise dive between Davon and seven feet of pissed-off werewolf. Now he was going to have to deal with the fallout from her self-sacrifice. Which, in Tristan’s experience, was pretty much the way it went. Nothing could suck quite like love.

Tristan’s mind brushed the acid memory of Isolde’s betrayal and quickly shoved the thought away.

The chanting broke off. The healer cried out in wordless protest. Morgana cursed and Belle muttered something guttural in French, as Cherise’s slender body bowed against the mattress. She gasped out a strangled cry of pain that trailed into a wet rattle. Blue light flared.

The young witch collapsed, boneless, limbs sprawled, her empty eyes staring blindly at the embroidered canopy.

“Cherise?” Davon whispered it, the sound raw with disbelief and pain.

“Oh, hell,” Tristan said wearily.

 

Warlock moved around
the bar, his orange eyes appraising its drunken patrons. His claws clicked on the uneven, peanut shell–littered floor, but nobody heard them over the death metal howling from the sound system.

He had cast an invisibility spell on himself, a necessity given that he was eight feet tall, with the head of a wolf, thick white fur, and long black claws that contrasted with his even longer teeth. If the customers had gotten one look at him, you’d have heard the screams clear to Texas.

Dave’s Beer Shack was a long, low building located on a frontage road off I-85. The lighting was provided by a few dim bulbs and neon beer signs. The bar, like the tables, was a slab of uneven wood scarred by knife gouges and sticky with spilled beer. A couple of Harley-Davidson posters hung on the walls in dusty black frames, and the waitress wore Daisy Dukes she could barely zip.

As Warlock watched, somebody passed somebody a twenty and got a Baggie containing what looked like dirty rock candy. A sweaty man with a jailhouse build—all chest and arms, not much in the way of leg muscle—flashed a knife and roared with laughter as the waitress flinched. Pool balls clacked from a table somewhere off to the left, and somebody cursed with a distinct lack of creativity.

The werewolf lowered his invisible head and sniffed delicately at a brawny man’s hands. Fresh blood. A lot of it, splattering his arms and the legs of his jeans. He’d done a half-assed job washing it away, as if he didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it.

Warlock tilted his furry white head. Careless bastard.

A poker game was in process at the next table. He padded around the foursome, eyeing the cards. A man with a tear tattooed on his cheekbone lazed back in his seat, his face expressionless despite the aces in his hand. He was sixfour or so, more lean than bulky. Warlock suspected he’d be faster on his feet than most foes would expect. His shoulder-length hair was tobacco brown with streaks of gray at the temples, and his black eyes were cold and alert. When he spread his hand on the table, the others cursed as he raked in his winnings.

“Jesus, Dice, you’ve got the luck of fuckin’ Satan, you know that?” one wiry, hard-eyed opponent said and threw himself back in his chair with a huff of disgust.

Wayne “Dice” Warner laughed in a rusty rumble. “But you keep right on playing with me, you dumb bastard.”

“I may be dumb, but at least I’m
persistent
.”

The four laughed as Warlock studied Dice’s leather jacket. “Demon Brotherhood” was scrawled over the back in scuffed red lettering.

According to his sources, the Demon Brotherhood wasn’t one of the larger biker gangs—not like the Outlaw Disciples—but its fifteen members had a vicious reputation. Murder, arson, rape, armed robbery, dealing drugs and guns—name it and the Brotherhood was said to have done it and gotten away clean. They were even rumored to have killed a Highway Patrol trooper, which was why every cop on the Eastern Seaboard was gunning for them.

And Dice was their leader. Warlock had heard interesting things about Dice over the past month. The biker might well be perfect for his purposes, once Warlock established who was in control.

He’d kill the waitress first, he decided. Female that she was, she was no good to him, but her shrieks should unnerve the cowardly. The bartender would go next—he was too fat and too old for Warlock’s purposes.

Then he’d see.

There were fifteen of the bikers. Warlock always limited his team of Bastards to twelve, like Arthur’s twelve Knights of the Round Table. But these men weren’t going to become his Bastards, as he’d originally planned before getting a good look at Dice. In fact, the more of them he had, the stronger the spell would be.

The waitress jumped and giggled as a male hand pinched her ass. Warlock recognized his moment.

She turned right into the werewolf’s lunge as he dropped his invisibility spell and let them all get the full effect of his teeth ripping out the little bitch’s throat.

It made one hell of a view. Warlock’s hands were big enough to engulf her whole head, and his claws were the length of the girl’s fingers. The waitress didn’t have a prayer.

Her dying screech was suitably shrill and nicely bubbling. He picked her up and dumped her bleeding carcass in the middle of the poker game, then vaulted the bar to deal with the bartender.

He got to the man just before the bartender could bring up the sawed-off, knocked the weapon up, and bit off the bartender’s head. He spat it out like the tip of a cigar, and it rolled across the bar:
bump bump bump
.

Now there was a conversation stopper.

Warlock threw up a spell shield in time to block Dice’s nine-mil blast. One of the other bikers screamed, the sound thin and high. No nerve in that one.

He bounced back over the bar and took the first bite out of a biker who didn’t scramble away quite fast enough. Magic sizzled through his jaws into the man’s arm, and Warlock cuffed him hard across the face, tumbling him ass over heels. That would keep him down while the Curse took hold.

Wheeling, the werewolf took a judicious bite out of someone’s shoulder, then clubbed the biker behind the ear. He fell as Warlock sought his next victim.

You had to be careful with the bite, he’d found over the years. Merlin’s Curse could heal some pretty impressive injuries, but not if the target bled out too fast. And in this case, he needed them to survive as long as possible.

Generally Warlock liked to restrict himself to one bite per customer, though he did enjoy the sensation of his teeth ripping human flesh. He just loved the look in their eyes, the utter panic of staring Death in the face. It made him feel like a god.

Which he basically was, since feasting on Zephyr’s intoxicating power.

One. Bite. Each.

He was particularly careful when he did Dice, sinking his fangs almost tenderly in the biker’s hand before knocking the human cold.

 

In the aftermath
of Cherise’s death, Belle, Tristan, Arthur, and the others gathered in the Round Table chamber, falling into hunched poses of weariness in the carved oak chairs.

The room had a twenty-foot ceiling and, like its centerpiece, was circular. A massive chandelier hung over the table, its countless iridescent crystals shaped like swords. Gorgeous tapestries covered the walls, depicting knights and their ladies fair, unicorns romancing virgins and dragons trying to eat them. Though the hangings were hundreds of years old, the magical thread was so brilliant with shimmering color, each tapestry looked new.