Ilona Andrews - Magic Slays

She gasped. The bones of her shins snapped like toothpicks and she crashed to her knees. I swung Slayer. The sword’s pale blade smoked, feeding off my fury. I cut, severing the spinal column. Leslie’s head dropped to the side. I chopped at it again. It rolled to the floor. Her headless body toppled toward me. I kicked her head into the corner and dragged myself to the loup cage.

Julie whimpered in a thin tiny voice, her breath whistling through the space between her mangled jaws. Ascanio lay on his back. His eyes looked at me, flashing red. Still alive. They were both still alive.

I grabbed onto the bars. God, my chest hurt. “She’s dead. It will be okay. It will be okay. Give me the keys.”

Ascanio cried out and flipped onto his side. A rib had pierced his chest, sticking out. His hand opened, the key a gory bloody mess in his palm. He shut his eyes.

I thrust my hand through the bars, grabbed the slick, warm key, and unlocked the cage.

“Help us,” Julie whispered. “It hurts, Kate . . . It hurts.”

“I know, baby. I know.” I had to get them to Doolittle. A quarter of Lyc-V’s victims didn’t survive their first transformation.

Tears slid from Julie’s eyes. “The boy’s dying.”

I looked over Ascanio. Broken ribs, torn-up back. I touched Ascanio’s neck. Pulse. Weak, but steady pulse. He opened his eyes slowly. “I trrrried.”

“You did great.”

The roar of an enchanted engine thundered outside. Jim’s backup. I forced myself upright.

“Don’t leave me!” Julie sobbed.

“Just to the door. To get help. I’ll be right back.”

I ran out into the living room, wrapped in my pain like a cloak, and saw a gray van pulling up in front of the office. The Pack didn’t own gray vans.

I sprinted to the door.

The van door opened. An older man stepped out and leveled a crossbow at me. A tiny green spark winked on the end of the crossbow bolt. An exploding arrow head.

I slammed the door shut and barred it.

The explosion shook the building.

I pulled the internal shutter on the left window closed and dashed right. The crossbow bolt got there half a second before me and bounced off the grate, falling back. I pulled the shutter down. The burst of magic energy was like a wrecking ball. The walls groaned but held. A couple more direct hits and they would come down.

The kids couldn’t move, not fast enough to outrun a vehicle.

Grendel limped to me. I hugged his shaggy neck and ran my hands along his back. Nothing was broken.

I had enough juice for one power word. It would buy us a couple of minutes, but I would pass out, and with the kids immobile, we were trapped.

“When the shit hits the fan, you hide, you hear?”

Grendel whined.

“Don’t be a hero, dog.”

I slid the cover in the door aside, exposing the narrow viewing window. The door of the van was open. Inside, the man in the tactical vest slowly, methodically loaded another explosive bolt into his crossbow.

We were done.

When they blasted through the wall, I would take a few of them with me. That was all I could do.

The crossbowman raised the bow.

A gray shape leaped off the roof. A massive beast, a meld of human and lion, landed on the roof of the van, crushing it.

Curran.

The giant claws gouged the top of the van, and he ripped the metal sheet away, as if opening a can of sardines. The crossbowman looked up in time to see the huge paw just before it cracked his skull like an egg. The enormous jaws of the leonine head opened and a deafening roar blasted forth in a declaration of war, drowning even the noise of the enchanted engine. The beast dipped his massive head inside, pulled a kicking body out between his teeth, pinned it with his paws, and ripped the top half of the body off.

He had come for me again.

Curran’s body flowed, snapping into a more humanoid form. He plucked another man from the van, snapped his neck, hurled the broken body aside, and dove into the vehicle. The van rocked. Blood sprayed the windows, someone screamed, and he emerged from the van, bloody, his golden eyes on fire.

I unlocked the door. It swung open and he clenched me to him. I threw my arms around his neck and I kissed him, blood and fur and all.

HELL WAS DRIVING A BLOOD-SOAKED VAN LISTENING to two children dying in the backseat, while Grendel whined as if something were killing him. Hell was watching Jezebel run out of the Keep’s gates, her face a pain-distorted mask, clench Joey’s mangled body, rock him like a child, and scream and scream and scream, as if it were Jezebel who was dying. Hell was seeing fear in Doolittle’s eyes when Curran carried Julie, wrapped in the sheets from my office cot, into the Keep, and then sitting in the waiting room.

Curran spoke into the phone, biting off words. “Is anybody going to tell me why our own fucking render attacked my mate?”

Barabas walked into the room. The skin of his face stretched too tight over his features, making him look sharper and fragile. He came over and crouched by me. “Can I get you anything?”

I shook my head. Curran hung up the phone.

Barabas’s eyes were watering. He looked feverish and unhinged. His quiet voice shook with barely contained anger. “Did she hurt before you killed her?”

“Yes,” Curran said. “I saw the body.”

“That’s good.” Barabas swallowed. His hands shook. Technical difficulties with controlling his rage. I could relate. “Jez will be glad to hear it.”

“Was Joey a relative?” I asked. My voice squeaked. I could’ve given a rusty metal gate a run for its money in the creaking department.

“He was the youngest of our generation,” Barabas said. “Jezebel used to babysit him. We all did, but she had done it the most.”

The door swung open and Jim blocked the light. Tall, dark, grim, and wrapped in a black cloak, he looked like death walking in. Jim reached into his cloak and pulled out a thin gold chain. The light of the feylanterns clutched at the gold and slid down to a small pendant. A lighthouse. A tiny diamond winked from the spot where the lighthouse lamp would have been.

“Boyfriend had it,” Jim said. “Leslie broke the chain. He was getting it fixed for her birthday.”

Leslie Wren was a Lighthouse Keeper.

It wasn’t the hundred-mile walk through rough terrain that had hurt Julie. It wasn’t a freak accident or a render gone loup. No, it was my case. Had she not been in that office, she wouldn’t have been attacked. Had I ordered the trackers to bring her back to the Keep . . .

“Leslie’s father was an engineer in Columbia,” Jim said. “Made good money. About fifteen years ago the man lost his shit, quit his job, and moved the family north of Atlanta, to the countryside. He’d inherited the house from his parents. Leslie had an older brother, but he stayed in Columbia. The locals say they never saw the family much. They remember Leslie—a quiet kid in threadbare clothes. She went to school, but the parents wouldn’t leave the property.”

“How did they survive?” I asked.

Jim put the pendant on the table. “Lived off the land. There are deer in the woods, raccoons, small game. They must’ve hunted a lot. Three shapeshifters need a lot of food.”

Curran glanced at me. “Explains why Leslie made a good render. She probably spent more time in her fur than in her skin growing up. It’s not good for children. Messes with your head.”

Jim shrugged off his cloak. “She came straight to the Pack the moment she turned eighteen. She’s been with us for nine years. She was squared away. No warning signs, no problems, nothing. In hindsight, I should’ve asked myself why there were no problems. Most renders miss a step once in a while. She never did. She was the go-to render when we had an issue.”