Magic Claims

5

I got down from the third-floor balcony and to the top of the wall in under six seconds. It had to be some sort of a record.

Troy and Owen still beat me to it. Unlike them, I didn’t fancy dramatically jumping off the top floor balcony onto the street. I’d break my legs.

The teenage guard manning the tower handed me a pair of binoculars. I leveled them at the group waiting on the edge of the woods.

Ten people total. Eight looked like the woman in the sketch, tall and dressed in light brown tunics, cinched at the waist by belts. If you drew a horizontal line about two inches above their elbows, everything below it was relatively human skin, a kind of light ochre touched by the sun. The skin tone seemed uneven, but it could’ve been dirt.

Everything above the line was smeared in a thick coat of bluish clay: the top halves of their chests, their necks, their faces, and the first three inches of their hair starting at the scalp. The clay had dried, forming hairline cracks on their skin and stiffening their brown hair up and away from their faces.

The eight clay-covered people held spears, each exactly as tall as its owner and tipped by a spearhead made of some light-colored material. They looked like a group of hunters. The two people they clustered around definitely didn’t.

The central pair, a man and a woman judging by the outlines of their bodies, were also tall. The woman wore a long robe dress, brown with a broad strip of white in the front and thin red symbols woven into it. The man had a matching outfit, although his robe was more square-cut. They wore identical overcoats, a kind of half-jacket, solid over their chests but which split toward the bottom into long ribbons of white fabric that fell below their knees. Each ribbon bore more red symbols and ended in an amulet of golden metal. If they spun, the ribbons would fly around them, forming perfect circles.

A two-inch-wide band of braided cloth crossed the woman’s forehead. A fringe of thin fabric strips, each ending in a large gold bead, dripped from the band all the way to her nose, obscuring her eyes. The man wore a human skull over the top half of his face, studded with fangs from some sort of huge predator. All visible skin was smeared with the same bluish clay, but their hair was clean and pulled back from their faces into tight horse tails. Both held staves, and the brown stains on their shafts looked suspiciously like blood.

“What are they?” Troy murmured.

“Mages or priests,” I said. “The ruling caste. No collars.”

The two mages stood still. They were probably staring at us, but it was hard to tell. At five hundred yards, they were well outside of bow range.

Humans liked to see each other’s eyes. Hiding them was usually done for three reasons: to protect someone’s face, to obscure their identity, or to be seen as a personification of something greater than themselves. A conduit for the spirits, an embodiment of justice, a force rather than an individual.

“Nice skull.” Troy’s face was a harsh mask.

“I feel like he’s trying to tell us something,” I said. “Not sure what it is. He’s so subtle about it.”

Owen chuckled.

The skull mage raised his staff and tapped it on the ground. Two hunters stepped forward and unfolded another tapestry between them. Twenty red figures.

“They doubled their ask,” Troy said.

“Punishment,” I told them.

The skull mage pointed his staff at me and then at the tapestry.

Ah. It was my doing so I had to atone by being one of the twenty.

I crossed my arms on my chest. That should be clear enough.

The fringe mage stepped forward and spun, twirling her staff. She did it in complete silence. The creep factor was high.

The mage turned and twisted. There was a definite pattern to her dance. I couldn’t feel her magic from this distance, but she was cooking something nasty.

“Troy,” I said, “Go get my husband, please.”

Troy turned and took off down the stairs at top speed.

The skull mage stepped aside and spun as well. His staff work was less fluid, more abrupt, as if he was trying to rip through the air. The two mages whirled, but not in unison. Their movements weren’t coordinated. Whatever they were doing was similar but separate.

“You can ring the bell now,” I told the guard.

The kid grabbed the rope attached to the clapper and shook it hard. The bell rang out in a hysterical frenzy.

The fringe mage thrust her staff up and plunged it into the ground. Thunder clapped. A huge creature landed in the grass in front of her, swirling with dark smoke. Massive and shaggy with brown fur, it stood eight and a half feet tall on four thick, sturdy legs. A big hump protruded between its shoulders. Its head was pure rhino, bearing a single enormous horn, five feet long and at least a foot thick. It curved like the blade of a scythe, jabbing upward.

Every bit of the rhino’s bulk bore thick bone plates with foot-long spikes: its back, its sides, even its head. Gold-colored veins crisscrossed the plates, fusing them together. A broad bone carapace protected its forehead, and a segmented metal and bone collar shielded its neck.

The bone wasn’t a natural part of the creature but armor added to it.

I couldn’t see any belts or harness straps. The armor seemed stuck to the rhino, as if glued onto the animal’s hide. Magic rolled off it, like hot air from asphalt, a shimmering, transparent corona that turned into coils of dark vapor and melted into the air.

That was a hell of a summon. And there was a second one coming as soon as the skull mage finished his dance.

The beast sighted our gate with its mean black eyes.

“Owen, how much do you think it weighs?”

“I’d say he’s about five of me. Without armor.”

An adult bison weighed about two thousand pounds. If that thing hit the gates at full speed, it would rip right through them and probably take a chunk of the wall with it. Shit.

The monster rhino dug into the ground with his foreleg like a bull.

It was a summon. Summons had a simple remedy. Kill the summoner and they went away.

I’d have to cover five hundred yards, and those spears looked a lot like javelins.

“We have to get to the summoners.” I looked at the guard. “I need a horse. Do you have a horse?”

The kid shook his head, his eyes opened wide.

“Where is the closest stable?”

“Eight blocks to the south.”

Too far.

The fringe mage pointed at the gate with her staff and let out a short, high-pitched shout. The rhino grunted and started forward, aiming for the gate, accelerating into what would become a crushing charge.

The skull mage shoved his staff into the ground. Thunder cracked again, and a pack of six gray birds burst into existence. They stood on two legs, the tallest almost seven feet. They looked like some kind of mutated ostriches, except their necks were shorter and much thicker, their wings were tiny and useless, and their heads, two feet long, were mostly eyes and a huge, nightmarish beak, flat and heavy like an axe head.

What the hell…

“Since a horse isn’t handy, how about a bison?” Owen offered.

“Sold!”

Owen grabbed me by the waist and jumped off the wall. He landed with a thud, let go of me, and planted himself. He raised his arms, stretched his chest, flexed his back, took a deep breath, and blew the air out of his nose. A deep, furious red drowned his eyes.

The monster rhino picked up speed. He was almost running now. The skull mage screamed out a command, and the birds took off toward us at ridiculous speeds.

Owen’s body tore in a whirlwind of flesh and bone, and a big bull bison hit the grass, his horns the size of my forearms. I jumped onto his back.

Owen bellowed. It was so deep and rumbling, it was almost a roar.

The birds overtook the rhino.

Owen charged. I grabbed his mane and held on for dear life.

The rhino barreled toward us, the birds in a tight flock in front of him. The ground shook, and I couldn’t tell which stomps came from the rhino and which came from Owen. Every strike of his feet nearly sent me flying. Bisons weren’t meant for riding.

We hurtled at each other.

One hundred feet to the birds.

Eighty.

Sixty. I pulled the magic to myself.

Thirty.

Ten.

“Ahissa!” Flee.

The power word punched the flock. For a moment they were still running at us, their eyes wild, and then the magic sunk in, and they scattered, fleeing for their lives. We thundered forward, straight at the rhino.

“Turn! Owen, turn!”

We didn’t turn. We didn’t slow down. We galloped faster.

“Turn!”

The rhino loomed in front of us, the huge horn poised to gore.

Oh my God.

I threw myself to the right, tucking my legs and arms in. The ground smashed into me. My teeth rattled. Owww. I rolled, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Owen veer to the right, missing the horn by inches, and slam at full speed into the rhino’s left foreleg, hitting it from the side, all of his weight and momentum hammering the leg inward.

The rhino crashed. The ground shook as if a giant had punched it.

Owen bellowed and rammed the fallen rhino, sinking his horns into the bone armor plates protecting the monster’s gut.

I scrambled to my feet and sprinted to the summoners.

“Again, Mayor Gene, they weren’t Pack shapeshifters.”

We’d been over this, but the mayor simply couldn’t seem to grasp that the bodies in the cells were as much a mystery to us as they were to them. I hadn’t expected to give a lecture on Shapeshifters 101 but here we were.

“Meaning what?” The short, powerfully built older man leaned forward, placing his tanned forearms on the table. Visible among the scars was a blue-green blob of ink that may have been a legible tattoo at some point.

“Meaning most shapeshifters belong to one of the larger, organized packs who claim an area. For instance, shapeshifters who live in Wilmington belong to the Atlanta Pack. The Pack maintains a regional office in Wilmington, and Keelan oversees it. If new or unaffiliated shapeshifters moved into the area, they would be obligated to make their presence known to him.”

“Obligated?”

“Yes. It is considered polite. It avoids unfortunate misunderstandings.”

Keelan cleared his throat. “It’s not really optional. They introduce themselves in twenty-four hours or we come to see them.”

“You said most shapeshifters belong to a pack,” one of the council members said. “So, some don’t.”

“Those shapeshifters who don’t belong to a pack generally fall into two categories. The first would be individuals and small family units who live in unclaimed territory.”

“And the second?” Mayor Gene said.

“Loups.”

“The crazy ones?” one of the council members asked. Everyone at the table drew back a little.

“The correct term is magic-induced psychosis.”

“These aren’t loups,” Keelan said, nodding at the bodies in the cells.

“How can you be so sure?” Ned asked.

“One of them was a little late to the fight,” Keelan explained. “I caught a glimpse of him shifting, which means at least some of them were in a human shape right before they attacked us.”

“So?” Mayor Gene said.

Keelan looked at me. I made a go ahead gesture.

“Loups are stuck in a sort of half form,” he said. “Never fully human but unable to transform completely into their beast shape. They are trapped in a constant shift, and because of that, they burn through magic. Magic takes energy, which requires calories. They’re always hungry and always in pain. No matter how much they kill, how much they eat, it’s never enough. Within hours of succumbing to madness, a loup’s body begins to cannibalize itself, and when that happens, they give off a stench. We all know it, we all recognize it, and it smells like nothing else.”

It was Ned who spoke up. “And that particular scent was not present in the bodies you brought in?”

“No,” I told him. “Before today, were any of you aware of a family or clan of people living in woods? Maybe reclusive or isolated from civilization? Do any of them look familiar?”

I pointed to the seven heads arranged on the examination table we’d rolled into the conference room. They all turned, studying them again.

“No,” Ned shook his head. “Definitely not locals.”

“I’ve lived here more than fifty years,” Mayor Gene said. “Not only I’ve never seen them, I never saw anyone like them. The horns are hard to hide.”

He had a point.

The town bell tolled. A long, continuous, frantic note.

“Well, that’s not good,” Keelan murmured.

No, it probably wasn’t.

“Ned, would you and the mayor please get everyone to safety?”

“Of course. We’ll stay here.”

Mayor Gene laughed. “Yep, this old prison is the safest place in town.”

Super. Keelan was already headed toward the exit. I followed.

Outside, Troy was sprinting toward us. He looked like he’d run all the way from the house.

“We’ve got company.”

“How many?” Keelan asked.

“Ten that we could see.”

“Shapeshifters?”

Troy shook his head. “Eight with spears. Plus, a couple of priest or mage types. Real creepy bastards.”

That was all I needed to know. As I headed for the North Gate, I heard Keelan order Troy to round up the rest of our group.

If I knew my wife, by the time I got there she’d be over the wall and giving our visitors a warm welcome.

Buildings flew by. The North Gate loomed in front of me.

Magic slapped me. Like someone had struck a gigantic drum, except it wasn’t a sound, it was a feeling that raised the hair on the backs of my arms. Kate had used a power word.

I charged up the stairs and landed on the wall, next to a terrified kid running back and forth by the guard tower.

The grassy killing ground spread in front of me with us on one side and a group of ten invaders on the other. Between us and them, Kate was riding a bison, charging at full speed toward a monstrous rhino-like creature armored with spiked bone plates and shedding coils of black vapor. A flock of big-ass birds shot away from them, fleeing in panic.

Okay. That’s what we’re doing today.

The bison had to be Owen, and he was barreling toward the rhino at full speed.

Kate screamed something. I focused.

“Turn! Owen, turn!”

Owen would not be turning. He was a bull werebison who had spotted a larger challenger in his territory. I knew exactly what was going through his bovine brain right now.

Hit that guy. Hit him real hard. Show him who’s the strongest.

Through his brain fog and tunnel vision he had probably forgotten that Kate was still on his back. He’d ram into the rhino, right into those spikes.

Jump. Baby, jump off.

The rhino bellowed, exhaling fury.

Now! For fuck’s sake, Kate!

She jumped. I held my breath.

She flew through the air, landed hard in a clump, rolled, and bounced to her feet. She seemed alright. Nothing looked broken.

I exhaled.

Owen slammed into the much larger beast. He avoided the horn and shoulder-checked the rhino’s front leg.

The collision was colossal. The armored beast collapsed on his side. The impact shook the wall.

Owen galloped off, roaring like the fool he was, made a tight circle, and went in for seconds.

Kate was running toward the magic users with the staffs.

The rhino was down, kicking, and Owen was doing his best to disembowel it with its horns, except its armor and spikes were in his way.

And he got his horns stuck. Damn it.

Owen tugged his horns free, backed up, and charged again. Still on its side, the beast kicked out. His huge three-toed foot connected with Owen’s chest. The bison flew back twenty feet and crashed into the grass.

Damn, that had to hurt.

The rhino struggled. The dark smoke around it thickened.

“Think it’ll get up?” Keelan said.

“It shouldn’t.” That was a hard fall, and the armor added a lot of weight.

The smoke solidified at the rhino’s side and seemed to be pushing it to its feet.

“It’s getting up,” Keelan reported because I was clearly blind.

“Thank you. I can see that.”

The rhino would get up. And when it did, it would go after Owen or the gate. If we were really unlucky, it would go after Kate.

This wasn’t a natural animal. It wasn’t an animal god—I’d seen enough of them to recognize them on sight—but it wasn’t a normal rhino either. That bone armor sat on it as if it were welded to its hide, and the magic boiling around it was thick enough to cut with claws.

Everyone who had been in the house was already on the wall beside me.

“Elk Hunt One,” I ordered. “Keelan, Da-Eun, and I are the takers, the rest of you are drivers. Spin it around. Any direction except for the gate.”

“Yes, Alpha,” they answered in unison.

I leaped off the wall. By the time I hit the ground, I was in half form and roaring. The wall rained shapeshifters in warrior forms. We sprinted forward in a tight formation, howling and snarling.

The smoke picked the rhino up and set it back on its feet. It shook its head and roared. It was a sound filled with rage and hate.

“You owe me a dollar, my lord!” Keelan snarled on my right.

“I never bet you anything.”

“Being stingy is unbecoming of an alpha!” Da-Eun laughed on my left.

Keelan howled, a long triumphant battle cry, calling for blood.

The rhino started forward and was picking up speed, moving from a walk into a sort of trot. The ground started to shake.

Gods, he was massive. This was going to suck.

The drivers shot in front of the rhino, snarling and snapping.

I veered right, while Keelan and Da-Eun darted left. We circled the rhino. Those plates had to be held in place by something—chains, a harness—and I would find it and break it.

There was no harness. The rhino wasn’t wearing the bone plates. They hadn’t been placed on him. They’d been placed in him, embedded in the creature’s flesh and fused together by the same golden metal we saw on the collars. The hide in the narrow gaps between the plates was inflamed and bleeding. Pus wet the metal and bone. This beast had to be in tremendous pain.

The stench was the worst. It smelled like acid, burned flesh, and blood. And a hint of decay, just setting in. The rhino was dying.

I would kill it. I would make it as fast and as painless as I could. And then I would find the person who did that atrocity to it and kill them slowly.

I circled behind the beast, passing Keelan and Da-Eun running in the opposite direction. They hadn’t found a weakness either.

At the front end of the rhino, the shapeshifters baited the beast, leaping in and out before it could gore them, clawing, snapping, and snarling. The huge beast tried to press forward, but the chaos was too much. It couldn’t ignore the shapeshifters harassing it. Too many bodies, too much noise.

Andre lunged in and bit the rhino on the lip, the only exposed part of its head. For a moment the werewolf hung there like a terrier. That was the last straw.

The rhino rolled his head and flung Andre to the side. Andre landed on his feet. The beast screamed and pounded toward him.

Good. We’d turned him. Now we just had to bring him down.

I closed in on the rhino.

Could I pry a plate off?

The rhino kept going, totally focused on Andre. Trying to run him down.

Keelan and Da-Eun leaped onto its back, scrambling up.

Good plan. The spine was a solid target.

Keelan struck with his claymore, plunging it straight down, but didn’t seem to be doing any serious damage. The bone armor was too thick.

I grabbed the edge of one of the plates along the flanks, dug my feet in, and pulled. I could yank the door off a car. I’d done it before.

The rhino didn’t stop. The plate didn’t come off. Instead, I was dragged off my feet and pulled along. I let it drag me for a couple of seconds, let go, landed on my feet, and ran to keep pace.

A bird swung around the rhino and tried to hammer me with its giant beak. I slapped its head and broke its neck.

“Jynx, thin the flock!”

The bouda peeled off from the pack ahead with an eerie giggle.

On the rhino’s back, Da-Eun planted her feet and pulled at one of the plates along the beast’s back. The weretiger strained, her muscles swelling under her striped hide. She shook with effort, cried out…

The plate didn’t budge. Yeah, I already tried that.

Andre turned left, drawing a wide U. The rhino followed him, never noticing we were now running in the opposite direction. I caught a glimpse of Kate swinging her sword at the female mage.

The rhino thundered past me, and I got a quick peek of its head, the top half of it shielded by a thick bone plate bristling with spikes. The giant horn jutted upward, ready to impale anything in its path.

Armor or no, it still had to turn its head.

I sprinted and chanced a closer look. The rhino’s short neck was protected by segmented bone plates, but they were thinner than the rest. They had to be, or they would be too rigid, limiting the creature’s range of movement. The horn was its greatest weapon. It had to be able to aim it.

The neck. That was the sweet spot.

I had to find a way to pierce those plates and the monster's hide.

I rolled to my feet. We’d made it halfway across the field. The mages and hunters waited for me 250 yards away.

Crap.

The mage with the headband fringe spun her staff and clawed at the air.

I had to get there before she finished whatever she was doing. The effective spear-throwing range was about seventy to eighty yards or so, and if I ran fast enough, I should be able to dodge them.

I ran.

Behind me a deafening lion’s roar filled the air.

Hi, honey.

One of the hunters jogged back and raised his spear.

No way. I was still over 150 yards out.

He took a running start, his legs pumping, left arm thrust in front of him, and hurled the spear at me. It sliced through the air, whistling like a fucking arrow. I dodged left. The spear sank into the ground four inches away from my right leg.

What the hell were those shoulders made of?

The hunters backed up in unison.

I kept moving. 120 yards. At least twenty seconds across clear ground without cover. Too far for a power word, not enough time for anything complicated. I had to run and avoid being hit.

They had seven spears left. I could dodge seven spears.

The first hunter, the one who’d thrown the spear, reached behind a tree, pulled out a bundle of spears, and thrust them into the ground for easy grabbing.

Shit.

Seven more spears screeched through the air. I zigzagged like a rabbit, guessing the direction on pure instinct. Left, right, right, left… The sixth spear plunged into the ground right in front of me. I paused for half a second, and the seventh spear sliced across my side, grazing me in a scalding burn.

They were already reaching for more spears.

I dragged my left arm across my bleeding side, yanked the canteen of vampire blood off my belt, and poured it over my left arm, right over the blood already on it. The vampire blood sparked with the magic of my blood, coating my skin and clothes. I jerked my arm in front of me and whispered the incantation. Shaping it with my will alone wouldn’t be fast enough. The burn of magic expended too quickly scraped the inside of my chest with hot, serrated teeth.

The tortured whine of the new volley sliced through the air.

The blood armor sleeve snapped into place over my left arm, widening into a round shield three feet across. The first spear hit it and bounced off. The impact reverberated through my whole arm, right into my back and chest. Wow.

I sprinted, the spears hammering at my shield.

Erra would’ve loved this so much. I could almost hear her in my head. You run like a toddler. Slow and clumsy.

The spears rained around me.

A hundred yards. Seventy-five.

The hunters switched their grips and launched another salvo with a weird, underhanded motion. The spears flew almost straight. I thrust my arm with the shield in front of me and kept running.

I was almost to the fringe mage. The hunters backed away, trying to grab more distance. They were almost out of spears.

I unsheathed Sarrat, drew it against my bleeding side, soaking the blade in blood and power, and pushed my magic through it. The crimson liquid hardened into a razor edge. My pulse pounded in my ears.

The mage spun in front of me, her ribbons flying. I caught a glimpse of her eyes under the fringe, cold and dark, and then she stopped and spat fire.

A swirling cone of flames shot at me. I dropped to one knee and thrust the shield in front of me. The fire roared overhead, splitting around me. I held my breath.

She didn’t build it or shape it the way firebugs did. She spat it out.

The air turned to scalding soup and burned my face. A little more. I just had to wait a little longer…

The fire died.

My turn.

I surged up, turning as I rose, and struck. She jabbed her staff at me, but I was faster. The staff slid by me, and I hacked at her right arm. Sarrat’s blood edge cut through muscle and bone with ridiculous ease. Her right arm fell, severed just below the elbow, and the staff fell with it. She reeled back, screaming, and I beheaded her with a single vicious cut.

Her head flew off her shoulders. Her body toppled to the ground. I looked over my shoulder. Across the killing ground, the shapeshifters attacked the rhino. It chased them, bellowing its rage, and swung its giant head, trying to gore them. The birds dashed around it, taking potshots at the shapeshifters. A bouda in warrior form hounded them. As I watched, she caught up with one and slapped its head. The bird went tumbling across the grass.

The fringe mage was dead, but the rhino didn’t disappear. Fuck.

I spun back and saw the skull mage charging at me. He screamed something—it sounded like words—and broke into black mist. The dark smoke streaked around me, bouncing from spot to spot in a random pattern.

What is this fresh hell?

One of the hunters jabbed at me with his spear. I batted it aside and kicked him in the groin. He went down like a log.

The smoke raked my back with ghostly black claws. Pain burned across my shoulder blades.

I turned, trying to keep it in view, but it was too fast. It zipped back and forth, like some ground-bound lightning.

The black smoke pounced around me, striking, each cut of the ghostly claws like a strike of a whip made of pure pain. Left thigh. Right shoulder. Back again. You fucker.

I shattered the shield into dust—it was getting in the way—and turned slowly. The smoke clawed my right thigh. If he got me with that across the neck, I was done.

He had to become solid to strike.

I spun left, then immediately right. The black smoke bounced where my back would’ve been, and suddenly we were face-to-face, me and the loose column of swirling dark mist.

I thrust my left hand into it. My fingers locked around flesh. I gripped and yanked the skull mage out of the mist by his neck. He locked his hands around my wrist, but I was pissed off and stronger. I dug my fingers into his throat and impaled him on my sword. Sarrat slid into his gut with a soft whisper, through the abdomen, through the intestines, all the way to his back. The blood edge severed his spine and broke, its power exhausted.

The skull mage went limp.

I freed my blade with a tug and thrust it into his heart. The light went out of his eyes.

I pulled Sarrat out, dropped the corpse I was holding, and turned to the hunters.

They gripped their spears, their faces shocked. The spears, the faces, the collars of unpolished gold.

I pointed at the woods. “Go.”

They didn’t move.

“Go!” I took a step forward, raising Sarrat.

The hunters dashed to pick up their spears and fled, melting into the trees.

Across the grass, the seven-and-a-half-foot nightmare that was my husband in warrior form ripped the rhino’s horn off and jabbed it into its neck. Dark, almost purple blood gushed. The great beast collapsed, sending a cloud of shadowy magic into the air. The shapeshifters swarmed it.

Curran walked away from it, making a beeline for me. I started toward him.

Behind me, the hunters darted from the woods, grabbed the mages’ bodies, and carried them off. Fine. I already told them they could go, and I didn’t feel like chasing them. Right now nothing mattered except getting to Curran.

We met halfway. His gray fur was stained with blood. A deep cut across his stomach was knitting itself closed.

He hugged me to him. “You didn’t wait for me.”

“Things were hectic. How deep is that gash?”

“Nothing to worry about. Got caught by a spike. Looks worse than it is.”

I wrapped my arm around his waist. Everything was fine. We were both okay. It was fine.

His monster hand patted my shoulders, my back, my head…

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Checking for broken bits.” He pulled a strand of my hair. It came apart in his claws, breaking into ash. “You smell like blood and burned hair.”

Damn it. “How much hair is left?”

“Enough,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound reassuring.”

Keelan climbed up onto the dying creature and drove his claymore into its neck. The tortured beast let out a long breath and became still.

“He stopped hurting,” I said.

“Yes,” Curran said.

“It’s not a summon,” I told him. “It’s an actual creature.”

“I know. I smelled it dying.”

“Someone did that to it to create a living battering ram. It was custom-made for us.” The cruelty of it was staggering.

Curran squeezed me to him. His eyes were pure gold. “I wasn’t angry until today.”

“And now?”

“I’m going to find whoever put this creature through that torture, and I’m going to kill them slowly. Piece by piece.”

The magic drained out of the world in an instant. Suddenly every cut hurt a little more. A short magic wave this time. Thank you, Universe, for small favors.

Jynx had finished the last of the birds, put them together in a pile, and sat on it, grinning from ear to ear, her bouda fangs gleaming. Owen had reverted back to a human and sprawled in the grass on his back.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“He’ll live,” Curran said.

My brain absently catalogued the shapeshifters on and around the dead beast. Eight. Wait a minute.

Jynx on the birds, Owen in the grass, Andre and Hakeem, Troy, Keelan with the claymore, Da-Eun in shapeshifter form, flinging blood from her claws next to another, larger weretiger…

“Um, Curran?”

“Yes?”

“Why do we have an extra weretiger?”

Curran’s nightmarish face wrinkled, baring his teeth.

Da-Eun saw us looking and elbowed the other weretiger. He turned toward us. His huge striped body collapsed into human form, and Karter Byrne landed on the grass. The Alpha of Clan Cat flexed his broad, dark brown shoulders and waved at us.

“Lovely party. Couldn’t help crashing. I missed the hors d’oeuvres, but I helped myself to the main course.”