Ilona Andrews: Magic Bites

SOMEONE STOOD OVER ME. MY EYES SNAPPED OPEN and Curran’s face slammed into focus. He leaned against the wall next to the bed looking at me.

“What?”

“He called,” Curran said.

I sat up in bed. “He decided he wants a fight?”

“Yeah. He put Derek on the line. He broke the kid’s legs and is keeping him in the leg irons so the bones can’t heal.”

Better and better. “Bono give you any terms?”

“Me, the Crusader, and you. Tonight.”

How nice. A party for the top three on the upir’s most wanted list. “Where?”

“South-eastern ley point. He says he’ll let us know from there.”

“Are you bringing backup?”

“No,” he said. He didn’t mention any reasons but I knew them all: his word, his pride, his duty, the fact that the upir would kill Derek. Any one of those would do.

I rubbed the sleep from my face. “What time is it?”

“Noon.”

The patrols caught me at seven in the morning and I had gone to bed around eight, which gave me a grand total of four hours of sleep. “When do we have to leave?”

“Seven thirty.”

I lay back down, pulled the blanket up, and yawned. “Fine, wake me up at seven then.”

“So you’re coming?”

“Did you expect me to hide here?”

“He referred to you as his little snack.”

“He’s a sweetie.”

“He’s also all about screwing you.”

I raised my head enough to look at him. “Look, Curran, what do you want from me?”

“Why does he want to mate with you?”

“I’m a good lay. Go away, please.”

Curran brushed my quip aside. “I want to know why he’s got a hard-on for getting you knocked up.”

There was a pun in that sentence somewhere but he didn’t look like he was in the mood to notice. “How should I know?” I said. “Maybe the idea of torturing my child gets him hot. I’ve had four hours of sleep. I need at least four more, Curran. Go away.”

“I will find out.” He made it sound like a threat.

“You read too much into it.”

He peeled himself from the wall. “How will I find the Crusader?”

“He’ll be here in a couple of hours. He thought he’d get an invitation. Please don’t take his weapons away this time. He comes of his own will.”

Curran walked out. I took a deep breath and forced my mind to go blank.

NICK WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR AT TWENTY minutes till four. I was awake and putting on my boots.

He closed the door and leaned against it. His face had gained stubble and his hair looked greasy again.

“What do you do to your hair?”

“Dust, hair gel, and a little gun oil.”

“Ever thought of patenting the recipe?”

“No.”

I stood up. He locked the door and took a leather roll from the inside of his trenchcoat. He put it on the table, untied the string securing it, and unrolled it with a snap. Inside lay two yellowish blades, one almost a foot long and the other about the size of my hand. I picked up the larger one. It was filed from a human femur split in half, and a long groove ran along the center of the blade where the bone marrow had been.

“Too heavy,” I murmured.

“And brittle,” he said softly. “I broke four.”

“Why didn’t you have one when you and Bono fought over Derek?”

His eyes flashed. “I did,” he said. “It shattered in my coat when he kicked me.”

I ran my finger along the blades. Considering how little time he had, they were amazingly well made.

“I won’t get anywhere near him with this one.” I put the large blade down and picked up the smaller one. With this one I’d have to get close to the upir. Very close.

“You get one shot,” Nick said.

I nodded and tucked it into my knife sheath.

“You still have the sphere?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Still planning to use it?”

My hand twitched to check the comforting weight of the metal in my pocket. Somewhere deep down I knew I wouldn’t use it. I would fight to the end, fight until he would be forced to cut me to pieces. I would make him kill me if I had to. After all I was only human. It wouldn’t take much.

I glanced at Nick and realized he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Only if I have no choice,” I said.

I RODE ONE OF THE PACK’S HORSES, A SOLID, THICK-MUSCLED creature of undeterminable shade somewhere halfway between mud and soot. He pounded the ground with his hooves as if suspecting that the thin layer of soil masked a nest of wriggling snakes and he could get at them if he just stomped hard enough.

“Wind,” the surly werewolf had told me after presenting me with the reins. Given that I had smothered his face with wolfsbane less than twenty-four hours ago, I wasn’t high on his list of favorite people. “His name’s Wind.”

I had thought of asking him what possessed someone to give this illegitimate offspring of a knight’s war stallion and an oversized plow horse a star-of-the-racetrack name but had decided against it. Now Wind was merrily pounding his way through the darkened city at the velocity of a tired speed walker. Curran’s howling jeep wasn’t even getting a workout and Nick I couldn’t see. His red gelding had taken off at the first snarl of the magic-powered engine and insisted on maintaining the distance.

I patted the charger’s neck. “At least you’re not skittish.”

Might just as well have screamed into a tornado. The bloody jeep drowned any sound in its tortured battle for sonic supremacy.

The magic was thick and growing thicker, flooding the sleepy city with untapped power. It mixed with the light of the old moon, swirling in the alleys, churning among the ruined carcasses of gutted buildings, feeding on concrete and plastic. As we rode through the derelict industrial district, heading toward Conyers and the ley point, we watched the crumbling wrecks of once proud structures disintegrate slowly into nothing while all things magic triumphed. It was impossible not to find significance in the situation. A superstitious person would’ve viewed it as an omen, a gloomy forecast of things to come. I scowled at the cemetery for human ambition and kept riding. Tonight I would have given ten years of my life to have the tech reassert itself for a few hours. As it was, I probably didn’t have ten years to give.

The ley point shimmered ahead, a short, controlled jerk of reality pricked by a magic needle. We reached it at the same time, the snarls of Curran’s jeep sending Nick’s gelding into near panic.

“Would you shut that thing off!” I screamed over the noise.

“No! Takes too long to warm up!” Curran roared back.

“Why won’t you ride a horse!”

“What?”

“A horse! Horse!”

Curran’s gesture plainly told me what I could do with the horse in question.

An animal scuttled forward and paused before us, poised until it was sure we noticed it. It resembled a bobcat but only vaguely. It was too large, close to sixty pounds, its spine and legs too long and disproportionately narrow, like those of an adolescent cat. The top part of its face was unmistakably feline, while the bottom half boasted an almost perfect human jaw with a small, pink-lipped mouth. The effect was too disturbing for me.

At least now I had a good idea who had left those hairs at Greg’s murder scene.

Convinced that we’d seen it, the nightmarish bobcat took off down the highway with unexpected speed. Nick chased it and so did Curran in his Jeep. After a few moments of prompting, Wind realized that I wanted him to move and happily obliged.

We followed the bobcat out of the city and along the highway for the better part of an hour. The horses began to tire, but the beast showed no signs of slowing down. Finally it darted off onto a side road, under a canopy of tall pines. The pavement had crumbled, splitting under the pressure of the roots. It would slow the horses down and stop the car flat.