Ilona Andrews - Magic Bites

Like a servant overly eager to please, my mind thrust a memory before me. The front yard of Buchanan’s holdout, past the trenches and the mud wall from which his deranged pack had sprayed shotgun blasts at us. Fall grass strewn with bodies of dead loups, a kiddy inflatable pool—blue with yellow ducks—full of blood and clumpy pale strings of entrails, and a woman, naked and bloody, black holes gaping where her eyes once were. Her hands spread before her, she stumbles on the corpses, searching blindly, grabbing the trunk of a pine for support, and calling, her voice barely above a whisper, “Megan! Megan!” And us, two dozen mercs in battle gear, unable to tell her of the tiny dark-haired body hanging from a noose in the branches of the tree to which she clings.

I clenched my teeth.

“Bad memories?” Curran asked.

“You have no idea,” I said hoarsely and remembered whom I was talking to. “But then you probably do.”

I shook my head, flinging the memories from me like a wet dog shakes off water. That was my third job with the Guild. I was nineteen and the nightmares were still vivid. And Buchanan had gotten away, ran into the woods while we pounded his berserk loups into wet mush. We never caught him. Knowing that was worse than any nightmare.

Curran was watching me. I opened my mouth to ask him why hadn’t he done something about that rabid loup and then remembered that Jackson County had barred the Pack from interfering. That was six years ago. Today they would not dare.

My mouth was open so I said, “What does any of it have to do with Derek?”

“Derek’s parents were Southern Baptist separatists. He was the oldest son and allowed to attend school. For a while at least, until his father had gone deeper into religion. He remembers burning books in the front yard, Dr. Seuss and Sendak.”

I nodded. The shift to “deep religion” wasn’t unusual. Half of the mountain towns had gone “deep” before the “Live-Life-with-God” movement gave them a new dogma.

Curran rubbed his neck, biceps rolling under the sleeve of his shirt. “When the kid was fourteen, they went to an end-of-the-world tent revival and daddy brought home the Lyc-V.”

He sat next to me. “He didn’t know what the fuck it was or how to deal with it. He didn’t even know enough to get help. Went loup within days. Loups are contagious as hell. Derek’s mother killed herself after she got infected and left her rabid husband alone with seven kids. Five of them were girls.”

I swallowed the hard clump in my throat. “How long?”

“Two years.” Curran’s face was grim. “They killed a passing lycanthrope midway through the first year and Derek found the Code on his body. That and starvation kept him sane.”

“So how did it end?”

“The way it always does. The kid became competition for the females and the father tried to kill him. The kid has a good beast-form and he can keep it steady.”

The beast-form is the warrior form, superior to both animal and man. Most first-generation shapechangers have trouble with beast-form, unable to maintain it longer than a few seconds. They get better with practice, but it takes years of trial and error.

“Derek killed his dad?”

“And set the house on fire.”

“What of the other children?”

“Dead. Two from starvation, three from daddy’s affections, and the last one burned to death. We went through the rubble and buried the bones.”

“And now you’re giving him to me? Why, Curran? I can’t be responsible for him, I’m doing a piss-poor job of being responsible for myself.”

His gaze held enough contempt to drown me. “Derek can handle himself. I don’t tolerate loss of control. He’s been tested and he won’t lose his way when he smells the blood. In your place, I’d worry more about your own ass.”

“Well, you’re not in my place.” I rose to my feet. Time to go.

We walked back to the room, where Curran said a few words to Mahon and left. Mahon approached me. “I’ll show you out. Derek’ll meet us at the entrance.”

“Please make sure he takes a shower,” I said. “Lots and lots of Irish Spring. I don’t want the People smelling blood or wolf on him.”

Mahon led me a different way, through the maze of dim passages and branching tunnels that brought us to a wooden door. Mahon leaned his palm against it and it swung open.

“Curran wanted you to see this before you left,” he said.

In the room, on a simple metal table under a glass hood laced with preserving spells, lay the head of Sam Buchanan.

BETSI WOULD NOT START. A WERERAT MECHANIC took one look under the hood, mumbled something about the alternator, and pointed me toward the stables.

Before we left, I popped Betsi’s trunk, untied the strings holding the long oiled-leather roll and pulled it open, displaying swords and daggers secured in leather loops. The moonlight silvered the blades.

“Wow,” Derek said.

Men and swords. My father said that if you put any able-bodied man, no matter how peaceful, into a room with a sword and a practice dummy and leave him alone, eventually the man would pick up the sword and try to stab the dummy. It is human nature. This young wolf was no different.

“Choose a weapon.”

“Whatever I want?”

“Whatever you want.”

He examined the row of cutlery, his face thoughtful. I thought he’d go for a leaf blade, but he ignored it and his fingers strayed toward Bor instead. It was a good sword, especially for a beginner, with a thirty-two-inch blade and an ash-sheathed hilt just under eight inches long. It had a straight steel guard with sharp tips pointing downward and a no-nonsense steel pommel. Like all weapons I owned, it had a superb balance.

Derek held it upright.

“It’s light!” he said. “I went to a sword fair once, and the swords there were way heavier.”

“There is a difference between a sword and a swordlike object,” I said. “What you saw at the sword fair were mostly reasonable imitations. They are pretty and heavy and they make you slower than a slug on vacation. This one only weighs two pounds.”

Derek swung the sword in a practice slash.

“It’s a working sword,” I said. “It won’t break and it doesn’t send a lot of vibration back to your hand when you strike a target.”

“I like it,” he said.

“It’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

I grabbed my utility bag and we were ready to go. Derek made some sniffing noises at the bag. “I smell gasoline.”

“You smell right,” I told him and left it at that. Explaining that I carried a large canteen filled with gasoline in my bag in case I spilled some of my blood and had to clean it up in a hurry would’ve been too complicated.

THE PACK LENT ME A MARE. HER NAME WAS FRAU. The stable master swore that while she wasn’t the swiftest beast in the stables, she was obedient, strong, and steady as the rock of Gibraltar. So far, I had no reason to doubt him.

Derek’s dun gelding was perfectly content to let Frau take the lead. The kid rode with the stiffness of a moderately trained rider who had never got quite comfortable with horses. Some shapechangers rode like they were centaurs. Derek wasn’t one of them.

Neither of us had spoken since we left the shapechanger keep fifty minutes ago.

If I were to work with him, we had to at least be able to talk. I dropped back, drawing side by side with him. The sounds of hoofbeats echoed on the deserted street.

“Why the arm?” Derek asked.

He was looking at my burn. The custom called for a hand to be thrust into the flame.

“Because I don’t heal as quickly as you do. I need my hand to hold my sword.”

“Oh. That was a dumb question.” He looked away toward the city. Atlanta sprawled, looking relieved to be free of magic and yet also apprehensive, knowing its reprieve would be short-lived.