Ilona Andrews - Magic Slays

He rose above me, I wrapped my legs around him, and when he thrust inside me, the world took a step back. There was only me and him. We built to a smooth hard rhythm, faster and faster, each thrust lifting me higher, until finally heat blossomed inside me, drowning me in a cascade of pleasure. He shuddered and emptied himself. We stayed like that for a long moment, then he moved to the side, gathering me up to him. We lay, curled up together, as the day uncurled outside the window.

I refused to let Julie go. There had to be a way around it. There had to be something I could do. She wasn’t a loup yet, damn it. There had to be a way.

“We’ll kill them,” Curran said, his voice laced with so much violence I almost shivered. “We’ll stamp them out.”

Yes. “A year from now nobody will remember they existed.” There would be no more Lighthouse Keepers after we were done. It wouldn’t help my kid. But it might keep other Julies from being hurt.

A knock resonated through the door.

“What?” Curran growled.

“Jim is here, my lord,” Barabas said.

I pushed off the pillow.

“Tell him to wait,” Curran said. He turned to me. Gray eyes looked into mine. “I love you, too.”

Maybe he truly did. “Promise me that if we leave, nobody will touch Julie until we return.”

Gold rolled over Curran’s eyes and vanished. “Not if they want to live.”

“Not even an alpha of a clan.” I didn’t know how dark the inside of Jennifer’s head was.

“Not even an alpha. Julie is sedated and restrained in her bunk. The access to her room is restricted, and Derek is staying with her. He’s gotten it into his head that if he and Ascanio hadn’t gotten into it, the bouda kid would’ve put up more of a fight. Jennifer doesn’t have a prayer of getting past him, nor would she try. That’s not who she is.”

He swiped his sweatpants off the floor.

I put my clothes on. “It wouldn’t have mattered about Ascanio. She was a trained render. You could’ve killed her. B. Mahon. Jezebel, maybe. Jim . . .”

“Kate,” Curran said. “And now the entire Keep knows it.”

I stopped with a boot in my hand. He was actually proud of me. I heard it in his voice. Oh hell.

He was looking at me with a smile, like the cat who ate the canary.

“What did I do with my other shoe?”

“You’re holding it.”

“Ah.” I sat down on the couch and put my boot on.

Curran slipped on his T-shirt and went to the door. I followed. Curran opened the door, revealing Jim. His cloak was back on. Andrea stood behind him. The right side of her face was black and blue as if she’d been hit by a five-pound dumbbell. She looked ready to kill something.

Jim’s face was grim. “The Keepers activated the device at Palmetto.”

“When?” Curran snarled.

“Half an hour ago.”

Curran swore.

THE JEEP BOUNCED OVER A METAL PLATE IN THE road, went airborne, and landed with a crunch. Jim drove the way he did everything—just on the edge of reckless but never out of control.

In the front seat Curran rolled the window down and leaned, trying to read a grimy road sign. “Three miles.” He rolled the window up before the roar of the Jeep’s enchanted motor made us all deaf.

The Roosevelt Highway rolled past the window, the trees one long greenish smudge. Next to me Andrea held her crossbow. We didn’t have a chance to talk, but we didn’t need to. We just needed a target.

“The Keepers brought the device in sometime during the night,” Jim said. “The Spring Farm Fair is in town this week. That’s where most of Palmetto makes a good chunk of their money. School is canceled for the week and all the church services are moved to eight o’clock to accommodate the fair. The Keepers set the thing up in the middle of a busy street and bailed. The Fair has two fields’ worth of weird magic crap. Nobody would’ve given Kamen’s device another thought.”

The people of Palmetto had walked right past the ticking bomb and watched it charge. And then it activated and killed them.

“Why not hit the fair itself?” Andrea asked.

“Because they wanted witnesses,” Jim said. “People will travel in for the fair, see a dead town, and rush back to spread the panic.”

“So it’s over?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “We had people combing through the town yesterday, looking for Leslie. This morning I sent a man from the Keep to brief them on the Keepers and tell them to clear out. They were on the road to Atlanta when they saw the light behind them. They stayed the hell away from it. From what they say, white light appeared above the town, glowed for several minutes like the northern lights, and vanished. The whole thing took about ten minutes.”

To the left, four hyenas, two wolves, four jackals, and a weremongoose burst from the brush and flanked the car. Barabas, Jezebel, and others. The entire bouda clan howled for blood.

“Our source says the device can’t be moved by a water car,” Jim called out over the engine’s noise.

Good call not mentioning Saiman by name.

“He says it kills the enchantment in the water. And they can’t carry it—too heavy. They have to move it by cart and horse. There are four roads out of Palmetto. Used to be five but Tommy Lee Cook Road is shut down. There is a gap across it a quarter of a mile wide. I have people on every road. The machine pulls magic in a circle starting from the perimeter and going inward. The perimeter of the blast zone is clearly visible. They aren’t getting out.”

“Can we enter the zone after the blast?” Andrea asked.

“The source said he walked through the blast of the first prototype. He seemed no worse for wear,” I told her.

An old billboard loomed from between the trees, advertising some gun show.

Jim stood on the brakes, spinning the wheel. The engine sputtered and died. The Jeep’s tires squealed and the vehicle veered left and screeched to a stop. Fourteen bodies lay across the road. Men, women, children, dressed in good clothes. To the right, a church rose, its doors wide open. A preacher lay on the stairs, his Bible still in his hand. On the other side of the road, in a wide enclosure, carts waited for the owners who would never come. Horses snorted and whipped their tails at flies.

“Dear God,” Andrea whispered.

They must’ve been Seventh Day Baptists, going to church for the Saturday-morning service. Whole families. Adam Kamen was right. If you had enough magic, the shock of losing it killed you.

Why? Why the hell were the Keepers doing this? What the hell were they hoping to achieve?

A naked man ran out from behind the church and made a beeline for us. Short brown hair, lean build . . . Carlos, one of the rat scouts. He came to a stop next to us and bent over, out of breath. “Can’t go into it in a half-form. Turns you human or animal. You’re weaker, too.”

Carlos strained. Fur sprouted along his back as bones snapped. A moment and a wererat stood in front of us. Carlos opened his long jaws. “Thank Goshhh. I wash worreed.”

A distant wolf howl echoed through the air.

“South.” Curran pulled off his clothes. His skin split. Muscle boiled, fur sprouted, and he dropped to all fours, dark stripes like whip marks over his pelt. Jim shrugged off his shirt and a jaguar in warrior form landed next to Curran.

The monstrous lion head opened its jaws and Curran’s voice rolled forth, the words perfect. “We’ll cut across the fields, along the edge of the blast zone.”

“I’ll take the car.”

Jim threw the keys at me and I snapped them out of the air.

“Don’t break the device,” I said. “You break it, it explodes, we all find our wings in a hurry.”

Curran growled. “Later, babycakes.”