Ilona Andrews - Magic Rises

My voice came out cold. “Your clothes are on that rock, Your Majesty. I folded them for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, his voice casual.

“Is something wrong?” I asked quietly.

“No.” A spark of frustration shone in his eyes and melted. There was my pissy lion. He was up to something. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better.

The djigits sorted the game and tagged the hooves with different types of dye. We waited for the stragglers while the shapeshifters put on their clothes. The amount of game they had killed was staggering. Dozens of animals had lost their lives. I hoped they had ability to freeze the meat because thinking of all that game going to waste made me ill.

The team winner would have to be declared after the castle staff had a chance to weigh and sort the animals, but the prize catch was painfully obvious: a beautiful mature tur, at least two hundred thirty pounds, its horns like two curved moons. Hugh picked it out of our pile and the djigits made a big show of carrying it around.

“Will the hunter stand up and claim their prize?” Hugh boomed.

Aunt B stepped forward. Hugh bowed and presented her with the glass pitcher containing a plastic bag of panacea. Everyone applauded.

Aunt B smiled and passed the panacea to Andrea. “My gift to my grandchildren.”

Relief flashed on Andrea’s face. It was there for a mere blink, but I saw it. She hugged the pitcher for the tiniest second before handing it over to Raphael.

Clothes were put back on, horses were freed, and we began our descent to the castle. People around me seemed happier, calmer, satiated.

Curran walked in front of my horse. Lorelei must’ve sensed it wasn’t a good time to test my patience, and she had moved to talk to George behind us. Curran kept walking and I kept riding. Either something had happened on that hunt or he had hatched some sort of demented plan and was now following it.

We didn’t speak.

On my right Desandra chatted with Andrea about the hunt.

For the first time in months I felt completely alone. It was a familiar but half-forgotten feeling. I hadn’t felt this isolated since Greg died. He’d taken care of me for almost ten years after Voron’s death. I had taken him for granted, and when he was murdered, it felt like someone had cracked my life apart with the blow of a hammer. The shapeshifters never treated me like an outsider, but at this moment I knew exactly how a third wheel felt. They were all still high on the thrill of the chase. It bonded them together, and here I was, the lone human on a horse, and Curran wasn’t talking to me.

It was an unpleasant feeling and I didn’t like it. I would deal with it. I didn’t know what Curran’s problem was, but I would find out. Curran never did anything without a reason and he was so controlled, even his one-night stands were premeditated.

Curran wouldn’t lose his head over Lorelei, no matter how pretty and fresh she looked. He had cooked up some sort of plot, and now he was implementing it in his methodical Curran fashion, and the fact that he didn’t tell me about his plan meant I really wouldn’t like it. And that was exactly what worried me.

The road curved. I felt the weight of someone’s gaze on me and looked up. Hugh. Looking at me as we rounded the bend. In front of him the castle loomed on top of the mountain. It was time to put my badass face on.

Twenty minutes later we dismounted in the courtyard. A djigit took my horse. Curran, Mahon, and Eduardo were speaking. I made a beeline for their group. I had some air I wanted to clear.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hibla hurrying across the courtyard. I didn’t want to talk to her. My shift with Desandra was about to start and I wanted to talk to Curran before it did. Don’t come over to me, don’t come over to me . . .

“Consort!”

Crap on a stick. “Yes?”

“Can I speak with you?”

No. “Sure.”

We walked toward the wall, out of the way.

“The creature you killed. Did it have wings?”

“Did you have an attack?”

“It appears so.” Hibla lowered her voice. “I do not wish to start a panic or a hunt inside the walls. Will you view it with me?”

Not alone, I won’t. I searched the crowd, looking for Andrea, and saw her and Raphael at the doors ushering Desandra inside. Just as well.

“Derek!” I called.

A moment later he stepped out of the crowd like a ghost.

“Come with me, please.”

The castle seemed to last forever. We crossed one hallway, turned, crossed another, climbed the stairs . . .

“It’s a maze,” Derek said.

“It’s meant to be,” I told him. “Like the one under the Casino at home. Except that one was designed to keep vampires from escaping, and this one was made to keep attackers from reaching vulnerable points.”

We went up eight flights of stairs, until finally Hibla opened a heavy door. We stepped out onto the battlement and made our way along the top of the wall toward a flanking tower.

“Curran never does anything without a reason,” Derek told me quietly.

Well, well, the Beast Lord’s sudden breach of manners when it came to Lorelei hadn’t gone unnoticed. Derek was trained by Jim to be observant, and now the kid was concerned for me. I was touched he was concerned, but irritation spiked inside me. Navigating my love life was hard enough right now without unwarranted assistance from teenage werewolves.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

He shook his head.

We came to a doorway. A heavy door lay on its side next to it. We followed Hibla through the doorway and climbed another set of stairs and emerged on top of the flanking tower. Perfectly round, the tower had been designed to permit bombardment of the northern slope. Not that anything could come up that way—the ground dropped off so abruptly, it had to be only a couple of degrees short of a completely vertical cliff.

An antipersonnel machine gun sat on a swivel mount, facing to the south. A high-speed, medium-sized scorpio sat behind the machine gun on a rotating mount. Shaped like a very large crossbow, the scorpio was the Roman equivalent of a machine gun. It fired arrows with enough speed to pierce armor, and judging by the cranks, this one was a serial-fire, self-loading siege engine. It would take two people to operate, but once they cranked it up, the scorpio would spit enough arrows to cut down a small army. Both the gun and the scorpio rested on a rotating platform, and switching between them in case of a magic wave would take mere seconds. Smart, Hugh. Very smart. We’d have to steal this setup for the Keep. Assuming we made it back to the Keep.

Two djigits stood by the siege engines. Both seemed pale.

Hibla nodded and they moved aside, revealing a long bloody smear on the stone. A severed arm lay against the wall. Long, thin fingers. Could be female. I crouched. Scratches marked the stone. To the right, bits of jackal fur stuck to the blocks, glued with dried blood. Next to them lay an orange scale. Hibla’s jackal had gone down fighting.

I pulled a small plastic bag out and picked up the scale to take back to Doolittle. There was more than one of these things out there.

Derek inhaled, crouched low, and smelled the stones.

“There are four tower lookouts,” Hibla said. “The shift changes every twelve hours, at six in the morning and six in the evening. This morning Tamara relieved the night lookout. This is all we have left of her.”

“Who has access to the tower?” I asked.

“Nobody. Once the lookouts enter the tower, they bar the door behind them. The door was still barred when Karim came to relieve her. We had to take it off its hinges.”