Magic Shifts

CHAPTER 3

IT WAS MORNING, the tech was up, and I was in our sunlit kitchen, making a small tower of pancakes. Julie’s school didn’t start until nine, because traveling through the dark in post-Shift Atlanta was too dangerous for kids, and we made our own hours. In our line of work, we weren’t guaranteed a lunch and we weren’t always home in time for dinner, so breakfast was our family meal. Shapeshifters had faster metabolisms than normal humans and they consumed a shocking amount of food. Curran was no exception. I had a pound of bacon baking in the oven—cooking it on the stove resulted in burned bacon, a cloud of smoke, and everything around me covered in bacon grease. Two pounds of sausage simmered in another pan, and I was on my tenth pancake.

The sun shone through the windows, drawing long rectangles on the tiled floor, sliding over the light stone of the countertops, and playing on the wood of the cabinets, setting their dark finish aglow with red highlights. The air smelled of cooking bacon. I had opened the window and a gentle breeze floated through the room, too cold but I didn’t care.

After breakfast Julie would go to school and we would go to the Mercenary Guild. It was the best place to start looking for Eduardo. According to George, Eduardo’s family wasn’t in the picture. His parents lived somewhere in Oklahoma, but Eduardo didn’t keep in touch. He had no siblings. He was friendly with everyone, but George was his best friend. He spent all of his time with her.

Julie stomped into the kitchen and landed in a chair, tossing her blond hair out of her face. A long smear of dirt crossed her face. More dirt stained her jeans. When I found her on the street years ago, she was starved, almost waifish. She was fifteen now. Good food and constant training were paying off: her arms showed definition, her shoulders had widened, and she held herself with the kind of ready assurance that came from knowing an attack could come at any moment and being confident you can repel it.

“I want a new horse.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

Curran shouldered his way into the kitchen from the back porch. Blond, broad-shouldered, and muscular, he moved like a predator even in his human form. It didn’t matter if he wore fur, beat-up jeans, and a simple gray sweatshirt like right now, or nothing at all; his body always possessed a coiled, barely contained strength. A month ago he had gone to our first job together in his other shape and the client had locked himself in the car and refused to come out. Curran turned human, but the client still fired us. Apparently human Curran was still too scary, probably because no matter what kind of clothes he wore, they did nothing to tone down his face. When you looked into Curran’s clear gray eyes, you knew that he could explode with violence at a moment’s notice and he would be brutal and efficient about it. Except when he looked at me, like now. He stepped close to me and brushed a kiss on my lips. Mmm.

“That’s nice,” Julie said. “I still want a new horse.”

“Request denied,” Curran told her.

I flipped my pancake. This ought to be interesting.

“What? Why?”

“Because ‘want’ is not a need.” Curran leaned against the kitchen island. “I saw you in the pasture. You don’t want a new horse. You require a new horse. Lay your case out.”

“I hate Brutus,” Julie said.

I glanced through the window at the pasture, where an enormous black Friesian stalked in circles along the fence. Brutus used to belong to Hugh d’Ambray, my father’s Warlord. Killing Hugh was my life’s ambition. I’d tried twice now and each time he had dodged death with magic. That’s okay. The third time would be the charm.

After our last encounter I ended up with Hugh’s Friesian, and Curran, who didn’t care for horses, for some reason decided to keep him when we retired from running the shapeshifter Pack. The stallion was impressive and Julie decided to ride him to school. I told her it was a bad idea, but she insisted.

“Take the emotion out of it,” Curran said. “You will better persuade the other person if you make them understand the reasons behind your request. You have to demonstrate that in your place they would come to the same conclusion. Once they agree with you, saying no to you becomes much harder because they would be arguing with themselves.”

Once a Beast Lord, always a Beast Lord. Old habits died hard, and in his case, they probably never would.

Julie thought about it. “He doesn’t obey any of my commands and he keeps trying to throw me off.”

“You’re not heavy enough,” I said. “Hugh weighs over two hundred pounds, closer to two fifty in full armor. You’re too light. Hugh isn’t gentle with his horses either.”

Julie glared at the Friesian. “He’s stupid.”

“He is. It makes him easier to train for battle.” I poured more pancake batter into the pan.

“And mean. Last time I took him to school, he tried to break through the stall to fight with another horse.”

“He’s a war stallion,” Curran said. “He’s been taught to view every other horse as a challenge.”

Julie’s eyes narrowed. “If I keep getting hurt, it will cause both of you emotional distress and you will have to pay for my medical bills. If I lose control of him, he may injure another horse and you would be financially responsible for the damages. And if another child got hurt, you would feel terrible.”

Curran nodded. “Valid points. Bring it home.”

“I need a normal horse,” Julie said. “One I can ride to school and leave in the school stables without any of us worrying about it. A city horse, who would respond well to commands and wouldn’t throw me and hurt me.”

With the constant dance of magic and technology, horses were the most reliable method of transportation around the city. Julie’s school was four miles out and biking there was out of the question. Magic constantly gnawed on roads, and a lot of them were in disrepair. She’d have to carry her bike a third of the way. Not to mention that the amount of books she had to drag to school made it hard to maintain her balance. I’d lifted her backpack a couple of times and it felt like it was stuffed with rocks. On the other hand, if anyone attacked her and she managed to swing it in time, she’d brain them for sure . . .

“Much better,” Curran said.

“I’ll call Blue Ribbon Stables after breakfast,” I said.

Curran raised his head and leaned to glance at the front door. A moment later I heard a vehicle slide into our driveway.

“Who is it?”

“I’m about to find out.” Curran rose smoothly and went to the door.

I heard the door swing open. A moment later a tiny Indonesian woman with long dark hair and thick glasses swept into the kitchen and dropped into a chair.

“Dali!” Julie smiled.

Dali waved at her. After we retired, Jim Shrapshire, Curran’s best friend, became the Beast Lord. That made Dali the Beast Lady. She now had my job with all the pain and trouble that came with it.

“Consort,” I said. “You honor us.”

“Fuck you,” Dali said. “Fuck your shit. I quit.”

I laughed and reached for a potato. Dali, despite being a weretiger, was a vegetarian. Pancakes alone wouldn’t hold her over. Julie came over, picked up another knife, and started peeling next to me.

Curran came in. “Did you know there is a dent in your front bumper?”

“I know,” Dali said. “I hit some trash cans on the way over here. I was frustrated and needed something to hit.”

The neighbors would just love this. “What happened?”

“I had a fight with Jim.”

“Why?” Curran asked.

“Desandra.”

Figured. Of the seven Pack clans, Clan Wolf was the largest and its new alpha was . . . colorful.

“There is no privacy at the Keep,” Dali said.

You don’t say.

“I thought of going to my old house or to my mother’s house, but Jim would check for me there. So I came here.” Dali stared at me. “I liked my house. Living in the Keep sucks.”

“I know,” I told her.

“Can I stay for breakfast?” she asked.

“Of course.”

I had just pulled the bacon out of the oven and flipped the hash browns when another car pulled up. Curran laughed and went to the door.

“He didn’t.” Dali actually growled. I didn’t realize she could.

Jim walked into the kitchen. Some people had special talents. Some were charming. Others were clearly intelligent. Doolittle, the Pack’s medmage, could put patients at ease just by saying hello. Jim’s special talent was menace. Six feet two inches tall and built like he could punch through solid walls and dodge a bullet at the same time, Jim projected a concentrated promise to kick your ass. It emanated from him like heat from a sidewalk. He never actually threatened you, but when he entered a room full of hard cases, bigger men backed off, because when he looked at them, they heard their bones breaking.

And now I would have to be very careful about our morning conversation. Any mention of Eduardo could set off alarm bells in Jim’s head. The last thing we needed was him shutting down our investigation.

“Hail to the Beast Lord!” I waved my spatula for emphasis.

Jim spared me an ugly look and turned to Dali.

“You followed me!” Dali jumped out of her chair, her face furious.

“I didn’t. I came here to talk to him”—Jim pointed at Curran with his thumb—“about his money. We just happened to be going to the same place.”

“You knew I was here.” She squinted at him. “You have your goons following me, don’t you?”

“They’re not goons. They’re our security people. And yes, I have them following you. We’re in a dangerous position. We just took over the Pack and I don’t want any surprises.”

“You’re a paranoid control freak.”

That was putting it lightly. Before Jim became the Beast Lord, he served as the Pack’s chief of security. I thought I had a high level of paranoia, but Jim took it to stratospheric levels.

“My paranoia is keeping us safe.” Jim brushed his face. Suddenly he seemed tired. “Dali, I just spent eight hours arguing with the Pack Council. Do you think you could postpone yelling at me until later?”

“No!” She sighed. “Yes. Fine.”

I reached into the fridge. We would need more sausage.

NORMAL PEOPLE SPOKE while they ate. They socialized, carried on a polite conversation, and even told jokes, pausing their food consumption while doing all those things. Shapeshifters ate with single-minded focus, as if eating itself were a very important task and they had to concentrate on it completely. Talking while eating beyond the usual “pass that, please” was considered rude.

It took fully half an hour before they finally leaned back from the table. Jim sighed quietly. He looked haggard. It was unusual for him. Dali reached over and quietly stroked his hand. He took her fingers into his and squeezed.

“So what was the fight about?” Julie asked.

“We’re trying to pass a security reform,” Jim said. “One of the provisions requires Pack members residing at the Keep or at their Clan Houses to sign out before they go into the city. We’ve had a few issues over the last couple of years with finding everyone when an emergency hits.”

“Seems reasonable,” I said. Sailors did it on shore leave, soldiers did it when they left a military base, and there was no reason why Pack members couldn’t do the same.

“It’s his first act as the Beast Lord,” Curran said. “The alphas will dig their heels in to see if he will bend.”

“We were arguing,” Dali said. “And then Desandra said that if the Beast Lord wanted to know where she was at all times, she would be delighted to make it happen.”

I laughed. Dali glared at me.

“That’s what she does,” I said. “When she’s uncomfortable, she starts saying uncomfortable things to knock you off your stride.”

“I wanted to curse her.” Dali jabbed her thumb in Jim’s direction. “He wouldn’t let me.”

Considering that Dali’s curses backfired half of the time, that was probably a very good thing.

“We need the Wolf Alpha to pass the reform,” Jim said.

“I wasn’t going to kill her,” Dali told him. “I was just going to seal her mouth shut.”

“Knowing Desandra, that would kill her,” Curran said.

“I handled it,” Jim said. “I told her that if she required someone to watch her at all times, the Pack would accommodate her wishes and assign a nanny to her. Anyway, what have you been doing?”

I’d been thinking about whether Mahon had had a moment of insanity and murdered his future son-in-law. “Hunting ghouls.”

“Why?”

I told him about the ghoul horde.

He frowned. “Thirty.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of ghouls. Let me talk to my people. We’ll see what I can find out. Are you going to see Mitchell?”

“I was thinking about it.” The number of people who knew about Mitchell could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and here Jim rattled off his name like it was nothing. Why was I not surprised?

Curran glanced at me. I’d have to explain Mitchell later.

Jim leaned forward, his gaze intent on Curran. “Look, you’ve had your fun. It’s been nine weeks. You can come back now. We’ll say it was an extended vacation. A sabbatical.”

Curran leaned forward as well, matching Jim’s stare. “I’m out.”

Jim dropped his fork on the table and sagged in his chair.

“If you hate it so much, step down,” Curran said.

Frustration twisted Jim’s face. “I can’t. They’ll screw it up.”

Curran laughed.

“That was mean,” Dali said.

“It’s not funny,” Jim growled.

Oh no, it was funny. It was downright hilarious. I grinned at Jim. “I seem to remember a man who brought me a two-inch-thick file just last September, told me that Clan Nimble and Clan Jackal had declared a vendetta on each other and the details were in the file, and then walked away.”

“Oh yeah,” Curran’s eyes shone with gold. “What was it he said?”

“He said that we’d have to handle it because he had ‘real shit to do.’”

“What’s your point?” Jim grimaced.

“Payback’s a bitch,” I told him.

“You can moan all you want,” Curran said. “The fact is you wanted the job. You’re smarter than I am and you’re strong enough to hold the power. You had plans for the Pack and I didn’t always agree. Now you’ve got a chance to do it your way.”

Magic rolled over us in a fast invisible tide. Everyone paused for a moment to adjust.

Jim pulled a simple beige file out of his jacket and put it on the table.

“What’s in the file?” Curran asked.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Jim asked. “Once we do this, there is no going back.”

Curran just looked at him.

Jim opened the folder, took out a stack of papers, and passed them to Curran. Curran read the first page. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s like this,” Jim said. “You own too much crap. You hold at least a twenty-five percent stake in over twenty-two percent of the Pack’s businesses. Only a few of these businesses are established enough to be able to come up with the money to buy you out. A lot of them are new enterprises and each dollar of profit is being put right back into them. If we buy you out now, the way you want us to, the Pack will go bankrupt.”

“That’s bull,” Curran said.

Jim spread his arms. “This is what the accountants are telling me. I understand you might have a cash flow issue, but you wouldn’t have one if you were still the Beast Lord.”

Curran’s face went blank, unreadable like a stone wall. Uh-oh.

“Don’t test me.”

“I’m not testing you. I’m telling you, this is how it is. The contract you’re holding outlines our proposal. Instead of a monetary payout, we offer you a business in trade for fifty percent of your collective stake now, and then, once the other businesses begin to be profitable, you can either continue to own them and collect your share of profits or sell off your stake as you see fit.”

“This would make sense,” Curran said, “if I had no eyes to read it or no brain to understand it. Did Raphael write this?”

“He might have looked it over,” Jim said.

Raphael was the alpha of Clan Bouda. He was too handsome for his own good, mated to my best friend, Andrea Nash, and a complete shark when it came to all things business. If Raphael wrote the contract, it was a good deal for the Pack and a bad deal for us.

We weren’t desperate for money, but a large chunk of our ready cash had gone into buying and furnishing this house. I never asked Curran how much money he had, because even though he referred to it as our money, he had earned the bulk of it before he ever met me. But I got the impression that we weren’t too far from the bottom of our reserve.

Now that we both had time to devote to Cutting Edge, the business was picking up and it would start putting food on our table within a year. Trouble was, we faced a lot of stiff competition. In the hierarchy of clearing paranormal hazmat, Cutting Edge scraped the bottom of the barrel, with the Guild being our major competition. We had to underbid the mercs, and while the Guild was having serious issues, competing with them was difficult. It didn’t help that the Pack had bankrolled Cutting Edge’s startup costs and both Curran and I wanted to get that loan taken care of.

“What are you offering?” I asked.

“The Mercenary Guild,” Jim said.

“What?” I must’ve misheard.

“The Mercenary Guild,” Jim repeated.

“That’s stupid,” I told him. “I have the business sense of a walnut and even I know it’s stupid.”

Ever since its founder died, the Mercenary Guild had been run by an assembly consisting of veteran mercs, admin staff, and the Pack representative. The rule by committee wasn’t working. I knew this, because I was that Pack representative. I’d worked for the Guild since I was eighteen. Mercs didn’t have a long life expectancy, but I was hard to kill and I had passed the eight-year mark, which made me a veteran. I had street cred, but even with my reputation, my veteran status, and the power of the Pack behind me, I got through to the Guild only half of the time. As long as I was there, keeping the peace, some stuff got done, but when I hadn’t been there, from what I’d heard, the infighting got so bad, the Guild was on the brink of bankruptcy. Jim knew all this. He used to be a merc, too, and he had spies all over the city.

“First, the mercs and admins are too busy being at each other’s throats,” I said. “Second, the Pack doesn’t own enough of the Guild to make it worthwhile for us.”

“We do,” Jim said. “The mercs have been selling off their shares and I’ve been using the shapeshifter mercs to buy them.”

He must have thought I was born yesterday. “They’ve been selling off their shares because the Guild has hurtled over the cliff and is nose-diving into the ground. Rats abandon a sinking ship, you know that.”

Jim dismissed it with a brisk gesture. “That’s beside the point. Kate, the Pack now controls thirty-six percent of the Guild. We’ll transfer these shares to you, which will make you two the largest single shareholders.”

“This is a bad idea,” I said.

“We’re not taking it,” Curran said.

“Bottom line, I’m the Beast Lord,” Jim said. “I’m telling you, that’s our offer.”

“Your offer stinks,” I told him.

“Our offer is more than fair.”

“You can’t compel me to agree,” Curran said. “The Pack law is crystal clear: as a retired alpha, I have autonomy.”

“No, I can’t. But I can control what we offer you and this is what I am offering. You’re my friend, but the Pack is my job now. So you want me to go back to these people in whose businesses you invested and tell them that you don’t give a crap about their livelihood?” Jim said. “Just trying to be clear.”

“I own ten percent of Raphael’s reclamation business,” Curran growled. “His annual earnings are in the millions.”

The light dawned on me. “That’s why Raphael wrote the contract. He doesn’t want to pay.”

“He wrote the contract because I asked him,” Jim snarled.

Curran looked at him. An imperceptible shift occurred in the way he held himself. Nothing obvious. A slight hardening of shoulders, a straighter spine, a muted promise in the eyes, but suddenly everyone knew the conversation was over. This was how he used to silence the Pack Council.

“We thank the Pack for their generous offer,” Curran said. “The answer is no. Julie needs to get to school and we need to get to work. Thank you for your visit. You’re welcome in our home anytime.”

Jim rose. “Think about it.”

Dali looked at Julie. “Do you need a ride?”

“I’ll take it!” Julie jumped off her chair.

Dali drove like a maniac. “Do not kill my kid.”

Dali snorted. “I didn’t kill her when I taught her how to drive, did I?”

Curran rose and went to the other room. Jim and I traded glances. He reached for the folder.

I miss making it work . . .

“Leave it, please,” I said.