Ilona Andrews - Magic Strikes

She snarled in a hoarse voice.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “Just me, the doctor, and Raphael. They are gone.”

“I want him to go,” she gasped. “Please.”

“You’re convulsing. I can’t hold you still because you’re too strong, and the doctor will be too busy.”

“Cut her clothes,” Doolittle ordered briskly.

“No. No, no . . .” Andrea began to cry.

Raphael pulled her to him, his arms around her, her back to his chest. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s all right. It will be fine.”

In less than a minute I had her nude. Ugly spots of gray peppered her torso. She must’ve gotten a head-on blast of the needles. Andrea shuddered again, tremors spreading from her chest to her legs. She yelped in pain.

“Don’t fight the change,” Doolittle said softly, opening a leather case with gleaming instruments. “Let it take you.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” I told her.

“No!” she snarled through clenched teeth.

“You aren’t going to die because you’re too embarrassed by your hyena freckles. I’ve already seen you in your natural form and Doolittle doesn’t care. He’s seen it all before. Right, Doctor?”

“Oh, the stories I could tell.” Doolittle chuckled. “This is nothing. A minor thing.” His face said otherwise, but Andrea couldn’t see it. “We’ll have you up and running in no time.”

“And Raphael thinks you’re sexy in your true form. He’s a pervert, remember? Come on, Andrea. You can do it.”

Raphael cradled her. “Change, sweetheart. You can do it. Just let the body take over.”

The gray spots widened. She clenched my hand in hers, nearly crushing my fingers.

“Change, Andrea. You still owe me lunch, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” she ground out.

“Yes, you do. You and Raphael ran out on me and I had to pick up the tab. If you die on me, it will be hard to collect and I’m too cheap to get stuck with the bill. Let’s go.”

Andrea’s head jerked back, slamming into Raphael’s chest. She cried out. Flesh flowed along her frame, reshaping, molding into a new body, a lean, long-legged creature covered in short fur. Her face flowed into a mix of human and hyena. Unlike the bouda shapeshifters, whose form too often was a horrific mishmash of mismatched parts, Andrea was a proportional, beautiful, elegant being. Too bad she didn’t see herself that way.

Doolittle probed her abdomen with the fingers of his left hand, a scalpel in his right. “Now when I cut, you push. Nice and easy, just like you trained.”

“Trained?” Andrea choked.

“The silver-extraction training,” Doolittle told her.

“I haven’t trained!”

Of course she hadn’t trained. She pretended she wasn’t a shapeshifter. “She doesn’t know how,” I told him.

Andrea convulsed. Raphael clamped her still. His face had gone bloodless.

“The silver burns. Your flesh tries to shrink from it and it burrows deeper and deeper into your body. You must fight it,” Doolittle said. “It goes against all your instincts, but when I cut, you must strain and push against it to force it out of your body.”

“I can’t,” Andrea gasped.

“You can,” Raphael told her. “Everyone learns how to do it. Children are trained to do it. You’re a knight of the Order. You can push a fucking needle out of your body. Stop crying and feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I hate you,” she snarled.

Doolittle positioned the scalpel above the largest gray spot. “Ready?”

He sliced without waiting for an answer. Black blood gushed from the wound. Andrea crushed my hand, screamed, straining, and a silver needle slid onto her stomach.

Doolittle swiped the silver-fouled blood from her skin with gauze. “Good girl. Very good. Now we do it again.”

WHEN IT WAS DONE, RAPHAEL CARRIED ANDREA to the shower, murmuring soothing endearments into her ear. My part in it was finished. I went to the bedroom to find Dali slicing Derek’s back to get out the needles. Unlike Andrea, Derek had training and his progress was much faster. He joked while Dali cut him, mangling the words with his monstrous jaws, snarled with a pretended rage, and dramatically promised to “kirrrl youraaalll for this!” Curran chuckled. Dali was giggling. Even Jim smiled, for once lingering in the room instead of watching the fights.

I couldn’t stay. I wanted to be alone, by myself. I should go and watch the fights instead. Some other people dying for the sake of the greedy crowd. That would fix me right up. There was nowhere else I could go.

It wasn’t until I was out in the hallway that the after-shock of the fight hit me. Little painful sparks danced along my skin and melted first into relief, then into electric anxiety.

At the far end of the hallway a woman in a flowing sari was heading toward me between two Red Guards. She carried an ornate metal box.

I retreated to our quarters and blocked the doorway.

The woman and the guards stopped before me. She smiled at me. “A gift. For the man with the shattered face.”

I took the box. “I’ll be sure that he gets it.”

She smiled wider.

“That’s a beautiful skin you’re wearing,” I told her. “I’m sure its owner screamed very loud before you killed her for it.”

The Guards reached for their weapons.

“You will scream too, when I take yours,” she said.

I smiled back at her. “I’ll cut your heart out and make you eat it. Or you can save me the trouble and swallow your tongue like your scaled friend.”

Her smile got sharper. She inclined her head and took off. The Guards escorting her followed, relieved.

I brought the box into the bedroom and explained where it came from.

Derek reached over and opened it without a word. Inside lay a wealth of human hair. He scooped it with his claws and lifted it out. No blood. Just dark hair, gathered into a horse tail and chopped off. His upper lip rose, revealing his fangs. Livie’s hair.

“Was this done to disfigure her?” I asked.

Dali shook her head. “Widows cut their hair. They’re taunting him. If she’s his bride, then he’s as good as dead.”

I AWOKE AROUND FIVE. GYM, STRETCH, LIGHT workout, shower, breakfast. Routine. Except for all us monsters gathered around the table. The shapeshifters loved to eat. It was a wonder the table didn’t break under all the food they had requested.

“These grits are terrible.” Doolittle grimaced and dropped another dollop of butter into his bowl.

Dali licked her spoon. “The cook must be a blind man with two left hands.”

“How can you ruin grits—that’s what I want to know?” Raphael shrugged. “They’re barely edible when fixed properly.”

“I’ll tell your mother you said that,” Doolittle told him.

“The corn bread is a brick.” Jim took the yellow square and knocked on the table with it. “The sausage is like paper.”

“Maybe they’re hoping to starve us,” Andrea quipped.

“More like they’re fixing to give us a hell of a stomach-ache.” Curran loaded more bacon on his plate.

For people who frequently turned into animals and ate their prey raw, they sure were a choosy lot.

“Kate makes good sausage,” Jim said.

Six pairs of eyes stared at me. Thank you, Mr. Wonderful. Just what I needed.

“Oh yeah.” Andrea snapped her fingers. “The links? The ones we had the beginning of the month? I didn’t know you made those. I thought they were bought. They were so good.” Her smile was positively cherubic. Of all the times not to be able to shoot laser beams out of my eyes . . .

“What do you put into your sausage, Kate?” Raphael wanted to know, giving me a perfectly innocent look.