Magic Triumphs

CHAPTER 9

I WALKED INTO the Casino covered in blood and carrying my son. To the left of me a vast gaming floor offered card tables and slot machines, reconfigured to run during magic. Men and women fed tokens into the machines amid flashing lights; the ball rolled around the roulette wheel; cards fell on purple velvet, all under the watchful eyes of Casino staff, most of them apprenticed to the People, dressed in black pants and purple vests. To the right lay the bar and the patrons drowning their sorrows or celebrating an unexpected win. They might as well have been deaf and blind. Straight ahead was the house counter flanking the stairway leading up and down.

A cacophony of noises hung in the air, a shroud of sound that drowned out voices and footsteps. For a brief moment nobody noticed me. Then the young journeyman at the counter looked up. His name popped into my head—Javier. I’d met him before, during my visits to the Casino. Ghastek had found him in Puerto Rico.

The journeyman’s gaze connected with mine. Javier mashed something on his console.

Shutters lowered, shielding the windows. Behind me the massive doors clanged closed. Nobody paid it any attention. A panel in the ceiling slid open, and four vampires dropped through. Gaunt, hairless, little more than skeletons wrapped in dry muscle and tight skin, they surrounded me on four sides, padding in their odd jerky gait in time with my steps. Their minds, each ridden by a navigator, burned in my head like four sharp red points of light. If they wanted to contain me, they’d need a hell of a lot more bloodsuckers.

The vamps moved into formation, one in front of me, its back to me, one behind, and two at my flanks. The light dawned. They weren’t there to contain me. They were my bodyguards.

Javier accelerated toward me. “May I escort you to the infirmary, In-Shinar?”

“I don’t have time for the infirmary. I need to see Ghastek.”

“Please follow me.” He headed toward the staircase, murmuring. “Belay medic at the main floor. I need medic at Legatus. In-Shinar and the heir are en route.”

A rapid staccato of heels clicking on marble came from the staircase. Rowena burst onto the scene. Her fiery hair fell in a long artful cascade down her back. Her dress, the deep brown of smoky quartz, hugged her perfect figure, staying just a hair on the right side of the line between professional and seductive. Her heels were four inches high. Her skirt was narrow. She was ten years older than me, and she ran down the stairs like a gazelle who’d spotted a lion in the tall savanna grass.

“Thank goodness. I was so worried.”

She rushed to me, green eyes opened wide, grabbed Conlan out of my bloody hands, and cooed. “There, there. Aunt Rowena has you now. You are all safe.” She turned and hurried down the staircase, carrying my son into the bowels of the Casino.

I looked at my bloody hands for a second, then glanced at Javier. “It’s good she was worried about me. We are distant cousins. You can see the family love.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the journeyman said.

At least he didn’t “lady ma’am” me. Thank goodness for small favors.

I hurried to catch up with Rowena. We went down the staircase, through the labyrinth of twisted, branching hallways, and into a cavernous room. Rows and rows of vampire holding cells filled the floor, set in widening sections radiating from the round platform at the center of the room. The bloodsuckers, secured by thick chains, snapped at us as we walked by, their eyes glowing, their foul magic polluting my mind like dirty smears on a window.

Ahead Rowena stopped, holding Conlan. My son sniffed at the vampires and grimaced.

“Daa phhhf!” Conlan declared.

Yep, phhhf is right.

We followed Rowena up the staircase to a room raised above the floor. Two-thirds of it was tinted glass. It served as Ghastek’s office, and from there he could survey his entire vampire stable. His predecessor had sat on a golden throne in the cupola of the Casino, but Ghastek was a scientist at heart. He never strayed too far from his subjects.

My vampire escort fell away and lined up in a row at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on their haunches like mutant hairless cats. Javier invited me up the stairs with a sweep of his hand. I climbed after Rowena into Ghastek’s domain. He stood with his arms crossed, silhouetted against a window, a tall thin man in a black shirt, charcoal pants, and expensive dark shoes. All of the Masters of the Dead dressed as if they anticipated being ambushed with a surprise board meeting, but since he’d become my Legatus, Ghastek had been steadily moving away from suits and corporate-slick toward clean and comfortable clothes, more suitable to a wealthy academic researcher than a captain of industry. As I entered, a vamp scuttled out of the small kitchenette on the side and set a cup of coffee on the polished black granite of Ghastek’s desk.

My Legatus peered at me, his eyes sharp on a narrow face. “What happened?”

“Sahanu.”

Ghastek pivoted toward the journeyman. “Initiate Counter-Invasion Protocol One, Sierra Delta, Target Group Charlie.”

“Yes, sir. The medic team is closing on the office. Should I ask them to wait?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Ghastek said. “Send them in immediately. Aside from them, I do not want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That will be all, Javier.”

The journeyman made a shallow bow, or a deep nod, it was hard to tell, and left, closing the door gently behind him. Through the glass I saw him walk down the steps and park himself next to the vampires.

Ghastek faced me. “As I recall, we discussed this possibility thirteen months ago. We both agreed that it wasn’t a matter of if Roland would try to obtain your child but when.”

“The sahanu who attacked us didn’t want to obtain Conlan. She wanted to eat him.”

“What?” Rowena drew back. “His own grandson?”

“I’m sure that wasn’t part of the plan,” Ghastek said. “It makes no sense. Your son is too important to be wasted like that.”

“My father kidnapped a bunch of children, imprisoned them in a fortress, and brainwashed them into believing he is a god to mold them into fanatical assassins. Then he turned them loose in the world on a suicide mission without any supervision. You’re right, he couldn’t possibly anticipate anything going wrong with that plan. I need to call him.”

A woman hurried to the door, carrying a bag, two men behind her. Ghastek shook his head. The woman and the men went down the stairs and went to stand by Javier.

“We’ve been over this,” Ghastek said. “One doesn’t simply call your father. Especially not now and not from this place.”

“We’ve betrayed him,” Rowena said. “All of our contacts are cut off.”

“Do I look like an idiot?” I asked.

Ghastek raised his eyebrows.

“I know my father and I know you. He has spies among your people, and you figured out who they are ages ago, and now you’re sitting on them.”

Rowena smiled. Conlan wiggled out of her arms and padded across the floor to the vampire that sat motionless by Ghastek’s desk. My son and the bloodsucker stared at each other, their noses inches apart.

Ghastek grimaced. “I liked you better as a merc.”

“Well, too bad, because I spent two years knee-deep in Pack politics, and I know how you operate. Get me a phone number, Ghastek.”

Ghastek inhaled. “No.”

I spoke slowly, sinking menace into my words so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding. “What do you mean, no?”

Ghastek leaned against his desk, braiding his long fingers into a single fist. “We are aware of three people who report to Roland. Of those three, one is a second-year journeyman and two are apprentices, both of whom are wavering in their devotion to your father since you personally singled them out with your goddess routine.”

The goddess routine involved me radiating magic during a tech wave. “You insisted on the goddess routine. You claimed it would boost morale.”

“It did. Do you really think that any of these three would have a direct line to your father? They don’t. They report to someone and that someone reports up to someone else and so it goes, up a very tall ladder that may reach your father or may terminate with the Legatus of the Golden Legion or any of half a dozen people in Roland’s inner circle. These contacts are best used for subterfuge and disinformation. I won’t let you throw them away so you can yell at your parent.”

“Be very careful with words like ‘let,’” I told him.

“If you wanted someone who always said yes, you should’ve picked someone else.”

“I’m reviewing the error of my ways,” I told him. “He gave an order that resulted in one of those freaks trying to eat my son. Conlan is probably traumatized for life because he watched me kill a woman in front of him.”

“Your kills are usually quick,” Rowena pointed out. “Maybe he didn’t notice.”

“He noticed.”

Conlan raised his hand, fingers outstretched, as if they had claws, and slapped the vampire upside the face.

The undead remained unmoved.

“Your son doesn’t look traumatized to me,” Ghastek observed.

“I’m sure this will surface as a repressed memory fifteen years from now.”

Conlan smacked the vampire again.

“Stop,” I told him.

“What a shame,” Ghastek murmured. “He isn’t even trying to pilot.”

Conlan raised his hand.

“Har.” No. The ancient word rolled off my tongue, suffused with magic. I was too keyed up.

Conlan dropped his hand, backed away from the vampire, and came toward me, his hands raised. “Up.”

I swung him onto my hip. My right arm screamed.

“Oh my God,” Rowena whispered. “He understood.”

Of course he understood. “Erra sings to him in Shinar every night. He speaks it better than English at this point.” I petted his hair. “I need to speak to my father, Ghastek. You’re my Legatus. Make it happen.”

Ghastek leaned over to the window and knocked on the glass. The woman ran up the stairs and opened the door.

“Just you, Eve,” Ghastek told her.

She shut the door behind her and crouched by me. “May I treat you, In-Shinar?”

Given that my arms burned like fire, it was probably a good idea. I turned to Rowena, and she took Conlan from me and smiled at him. “There is my little prince.”

Conlan petted Rowena’s fiery hair and made a cute noise.

I tried to take off my shirt. Pain shot all the way through my shoulder. Nope.

“You’ll have to cut it,” I said.

Eve opened her bag and took out a pair of scissors.

Conlan cooed, looking like the most adorable child, all innocence and light. The kind of child who would never turn into a monster and eat raw mice in the woods with his father. My son was a con man.

Eve cut my right sleeve. It fell apart. I sent a pulse of magic through the fabric, and black powder rained from it onto the floor. The last thing I wanted was my clotting blood everywhere.

Rowena gasped.

The cut on my bicep was pretty deep. It had turned an odd color of green, too. I’d thought something didn’t feel right. The bitch had poisoned me.

“Keep going,” I told Eve.

The scissors slid up my arm. My shirt fell away, leaving me in a sports bra. A dozen shallow cuts, blooming with green, covered my arms. My shoulder blade burned where the dagger had embedded itself.

Rowena put her hand over her mouth.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Ghastek demanded.

“The medic was on the way.”

“You look like you’ve been through a tornado of knives,” Rowena said.

“She had two daggers. I had no weapons, because Biohazard makes me surrender them before I go into their lab. I couldn’t use power words because Luther was at risk. I bludgeoned her to death with my bare hands and a microscope.”

The two Masters of the Dead stared at me.

“She wasn’t going to touch my son,” I told them.

Ghastek turned to the medmage. “How bad is it?”

“The cut on the right arm is deep. Slow healing is best in this case. It will take three sessions over the next twenty-four hours if the magic wave holds.”

“That won’t work for me,” I told her. “Fix the arm as much as you can. That’s all I need.”

She met my gaze. “If I do this all at once, it will be very painful.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’ll need to cleanse the wounds. They already closed. The poison is trapped inside.”

I pulled on my cuts with my magic, calling on my blood. Red slid from the gashes. Eve shied back as if struck with a live wire.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

She swallowed and held up her hands. “Yes. Please stop.”

I stopped the bleeding. A spark of magic and the blood streaking my skin turned to dust.

I held my arm out to her. Eve sat down next to me, touched my arm, her fingers cold on my skin, and began to chant. The burn in my wound exploded into ice, stabbing my muscles with a dozen sharp needles. She was a burst medic. Most medmages poured their magic into the body in a steady current, amplifying the natural regeneration. Burst medmages, who were much rarer, drove their magic into their patients, mending them like they were inanimate objects. They were excellent in emergencies, because they healed even the worst wounds fast, but the pain was excruciating.

Some terrible beast with icicle teeth bit my wound and began gnawing on it.

I unclenched my teeth before I did any damage to my jaw. “I need to speak to my father. The sahanu who attacked us isn’t the only one. Razer is in the city, so there will be more.”

A muscle jerked in Ghastek’s face. “How do you know Razer is in Atlanta?”

“The Pack snapped a candid photo of him prancing on a roof near Sandy Springs some days ago.”

The pain was almost unbearable now. I checked to see if my arm was still attached. It was.

Ghastek pushed a key on his phone.

“Yes, sir?” a male voice said.

“Prior to today, were you aware of any sahanu in the city?”

“No, sir.”

“Razer was seen near Sandy Springs two days ago by the Pack. Is it our custom now to rely on the Pack for our intelligence?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s our mission?” Ghastek’s voice was almost mild.

“To defend In-Shinar and the heir,” the man responded, his voice clipped.

My arm was actually being torn off now. I wished I had something to bite on.

“Can we accomplish this mission without proper intelligence?”

“No, sir.”

“Can you tell me why the Pack knows about the sahanu and we do not?”

Silence.

“I’m waiting,” Ghastek said, his voice iced over.

“Uh-oh,” Conlan assessed the situation.

“Uh-oh!” Rowena smiled at him. “Such a smart boy.”

Oh no. Now she was encouraging him.

“Uh-oh!” my son told her.

“Uh-oh!” Rowena said.

“Uh-oh!”

Ghastek gave her a look. She turned away, walking a few steps toward the glass window. “Look there. Look at all the vampires.”

The phone still offered only tortured silence.

“Can anyone there tell me why this is the case?” Ghastek ground out.

Silence.

“This is your chance to help me understand why I’m now facing an injured In-Shinar and having to explain our failure. Demonstrate to me that someone in the intelligence division has even the smallest modicum of intellect, or I’ll replace the lot of you.”

“The sahanu must’ve identified a pattern to our patrols,” said a different voice.

“Who is this?” Ghastek asked.

“Journeyman Wickert, sir.”

“Wickert, find the pattern and bring me your results.”

Ghastek hung up.

The pain released me. I took a nice, deep breath and checked my arm. I couldn’t even see the scar. Eve was a miracle worker.

The ice stabbed into the gouge on my left shoulder. I gritted my teeth. Here we go again.

Ghastek knelt next to me, his sharp face serious. “It’s my fault. I take full responsibility for this failure. I’m sorry.”

He bowed his head. I wished to be anywhere but here. What do I do now?

I waved Eve off and she stepped away. “Stop, Ghastek. We agreed. No kneeling, no bowing. I can’t do it.”

He stayed where he was. “Protecting you and your son is what we do. We exist to fulfill this purpose. We didn’t know that girl was here. We didn’t know Razer was here. It’s a failure of leadership. If my people are incompetent, I didn’t realize it. You have given me free rein over my subordinates. I restructured the People, I oversaw personnel assignments, I approved patrols. The ultimate responsibility for this is on me.”

I finally understood. Ghastek prized competence above all else. He was deeply ashamed. He didn’t want Kate, his friend, right now. Convincing him that he’d done nothing wrong wouldn’t work. He needed absolution or punishment. He wanted the In-Shinar.

Something in me died a little. First Raphael, then Teddy Jo, now Ghastek. I would never again be just Kate. You are the Princess of Shinar, the beacon of your people’s hope, and if you succumb, that hope will perish with you.

Sooner or later, in every relationship I had, I would end up becoming In-Shinar, and once I did, if only for a few moments, it altered that relationship forever. Mercs in the Guild remembered my voice shaking the building when I had spoken in the old tongue to the projection of my father. Shapeshifters who fought in the battle against Roland remembered In-Shinar’s rage.

Once I showed my true face, people never forgot it.

I’d fought it so hard for these last three years, but in the end, it didn’t matter. I had claimed Atlanta and everyone in it. I accepted responsibility for their safety. I was Sharratum na Shar. The queen who didn’t rule, but a queen still the same.

I dropped my cloak and pulled the magic from the depths of my soul. It bubbled up to the surface like a geyser. If it’d had a voice, it would’ve whispered, I’m awake. I’m alive.

Eve knelt by my side.

“Mama!” Conlan said, the same way he’d tried to tell me that the shiny walls of Biohazard were pretty.

I reached for Ghastek and my skin glowed with pale gold. Gently I touched the right side of his jaw and made him look up at me.

“I forgive you.”

The reverence in Ghastek’s eyes almost broke me. He was a natural skeptic, but in that moment, he would’ve followed me off a cliff. It was the last thing I wanted.

“I forgive you,” I repeated in English. “Keep my son safe. I have faith in you.”

Ghastek just nodded quickly several times.

At least I still had Curran. Curran would always want me, Kate. He would be human with me. I was enough.

“Rise,” I told him.

Ghastek got up to his feet. As he moved, I saw Javier and the other men staring at me from beyond the glass, awe in their eyes. Oh brother. Just what I needed.

I pulled the magic back, curling it inside myself like the petals of a closing flower. An odd emotion flickered through Ghastek’s eyes, almost as if he wanted to stop me. Yep, In-Shinar was addictive, and if I kept showing my inner self to the people around me, soon I would be as bad as my father.

“Thank you for your help,” I told Eve.

The medmage startled as if waking up from a trance. “Of course.”

She gathered her bag and walked out. I waited until she cleared the stairs.

“She wasn’t one of my father’s spies, was she?”

“No,” Ghastek said.

“Conlan doesn’t know how to cloak. He’s ridiculously easy to track if you can sense magic.”

“Makes sense,” Ghastek said, his voice and expression neutral.

“I thought about letting his grandparents watch him at the Keep.”

“That might not be a good idea,” Rowena said behind me.

“Why not?”

Ghastek walked to the desk, opened a drawer, and brought me a photograph. A shot of a wooded road in twilight. A man in his forties, salt-and-pepper hair, strong profile, walking between two shapeshifters in warrior form, a werejaguar and a bouda. I recognized both. Renders, the deadliest fighters the Pack had at their disposal. Jim wasn’t taking any chances.

“This is Avag Barsamian,” Ghastek said. “Landon Nez’s second-in-command.”

Landon Nez was Ghastek’s counterpart, my father’s right-hand necromancer and the head of his Golden Legion. Any time Nez got involved, things went from bad to worse.

I scrutinized the photograph. Avag was carrying a briefcase. He didn’t appear to be in distress. The two shapeshifters flanking him didn’t have their claws on him. The lines of their bodies suggested caution, but when guards transported a dangerous prisoner, they watched for outside threats, rescue attempts, and so on, because the person in their charge was properly restrained and unlikely to escape. These two watched Avag instead. He was there of his own free will.

I tapped the photograph. “I recognize this oak. This is the road to the Keep.”

“He visited the Keep two nights ago,” Rowena said. “I saw him through the eyes of my vampire. He was there for two hours and then he left, except this time he didn’t have a briefcase. They escorted him just like that to his car parked on the side of the road.”

And the next day Robert came to us with the offer of alliance.

“I was told my father is mobilizing. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Ghastek and Rowena answered at the same time.

Wasn’t that interesting. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, what was in the briefcase?”

“We don’t know,” Rowena said.

The vamp at Ghastek’s desk rose, grasped a cord suspended from a roll of fabric above the window, and pulled it down, unrolling a large screen. On it, in painstaking detail, spread a map of Atlanta. In the center of the map sat a small red dot. A ragged ring of city blocks outlined in blue enclosed the dot, followed by another ring in green. Choppy lines crossed the whole thing, looking like some sort of Gordian knot. Colored dots marked other points of interest: the Casino, the Guild, and so on. The whole thing looked disturbingly like some distorted bull’s-eye centered on . . .

“Why is there a red dot over my house?”

“I’ve had two years to prepare,” Ghastek said. “The blue is the kill zone, the green is the outer perimeter. About”—he checked the clock on the wall—“twenty-two minutes ago, I doubled our patrols and deployed six strike groups, each member of which has memorized the dossier of the twenty-one sahanu in our database. They know their magic signatures, their movement patterns, and they will recognize them by sight. They will work in shifts around the clock and can be activated at a moment’s notice, because they will sleep here in the Casino, next to the OPS room. I know we got off to a less-than-ideal start, but I personally guarantee to you that no sahanu will penetrate our defenses and get through to you.”

And if he switched sides, the entirety of the Casino vampire stables could converge on my house and kill my child while I was out, thinking Conlan was safe and protected. He was unlikely to change sides, but then the Pack was equally unlikely to betray us.

Ghastek and Rowena were both looking at me.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way.”

“I won’t fail you,” Ghastek said. It sounded like a vow and I didn’t like it.

“Do you still have the body of the creature I sent you?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ghastek said.

“The creatures pose an imminent threat. If you encounter them, I want them followed, and if you can’t follow them, I want them destroyed. My aunt recognized them and called them yeddimur.”

“Understood,” Ghastek said.

“It would mean a lot if you could analyze the body. Luther believes these creatures started out as human, and they may be contagious when alive. It would also be a great help if you could study the body or perhaps just display it somewhere where it may be observed by journeymen.”

“And possibly apprentices?” Rowena asked.

“Yes. Perhaps someone could be overheard using the word ‘yeddimur’ when referring to the creature.”

Ghastek frowned. “Why?”

“Because I want my father to know about it.”

Ghastek thought about it. I could practically see the wheels in his head turning, but he didn’t ask. He preferred to discover things on his own, and I gave him just enough to motivate him to continue digging. My hairy abomination would get top billing now at the People’s dissection party.

I got up. “Do you have a copy of this photo?”

“We have others,” Rowena said.

“Can I take this one?”

“Of course,” she said.

I pocketed the photograph of Avag and took my son from her. Conlan yawned and flopped on my shoulder like a rag doll.

“I need an escort to my house.”

“It would be our pleasure,” Ghastek said.

The phone rang. Ghastek picked it up, listened, and turned to me. “Your husband is on his way to the Casino. He seems to be upset.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s running. There are two Guild vehicles following him, and they’re having difficulty keeping up.”

Curran didn’t want to wait for the mercs. He ran much faster than an average human, but he was a lion, not a wolf. Long-distance running was never his thing. Either something bad had happened, or he’d found out about the fight at Biohazard and somehow tracked me down. The People worked for me now, but we’d been on opposite sides for so long that even though I’d spent a lot of time with them over the past months, every time I walked into the Casino, I snapped into alert mode. I didn’t expect to be attacked, but I wasn’t at ease either. Curran had never warmed up to the People. If he’d found out about what had happened at Biohazard and thought that Conlan and I were injured, he wouldn’t just arrive at the Casino. He would land like a bomb.

I turned to the door, patting Conlan’s back. “Let’s go meet your dad outside before he causes an incident.”

“I’ll never understand what you see in that man,” Ghastek said.

“He loves me,” I told him, and escaped.