Magic Triumphs

CHAPTER 2

I DROVE BACK to the subdivision. The phone in the first house worked, and I dialed Biohazard’s number with Luther’s extension from memory. I could’ve just reported the whole thing to the front desk, but this was bad enough that I had to cut through the red tape.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

Come on, Luther.

The line clicked. “What?” Luther’s irritated voice said.

“It’s me.”

“Whatever it is, Unclean One, I don’t have time for it. I have important wizarding to do—”

“Someone boiled two hundred people and dumped the liquid and their remains near Serenbe at a Walmart distribution center.”

Silence.

“Did you say ‘boiled’?”

“I did.”

Luther swore.

“The mass grave is unsecured and magically potent. There are no bugs in it, Luther. No insect activity anywhere for approximately a quarter mile. I’ve got a basic chalk ward around it now, and Teddy Jo’s watching it. The sheriff’s department is coming today to process the scene, so if you want to get here before them, you have to hurry. It’s off South Fulton Parkway heading west. I’ll mark the turnoff for you.”

“I’m on my way. Do not leave that grave site, Kate. You do whatever you have to do to keep anything from spawning in there.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll sit on it.”

I hung up and dialed home. No answer. Figured. Curran was still out.

I called George. Conlan was down for a nap. He had eaten some cereal and successfully run away from her twice.

I hung up and dug through the kitchen of the dead house for salt. A big bag waited for me in the pantry. I carried it outside to the Jeep just in time to see Derek hefting four forty-pound bags like they weighed nothing.

“Where did you get this?”

“Found a communal hunters’ shed,” he said. “They must’ve used this for a deer salt lick. There is more.”

“We’ll need it.”

We headed toward the shed.

“Talk to me about scent trails,” I asked.

“Human,” he said. “But there’s something else with it. A screwed-up scent. When you smell a loup, it smells wrong. Toxic. You know there will be no talking. Either you kill it or it will kill you. These things stink like that. Loup but no loup.”

“Corrupted?” I guessed.

“Yeah. That’s a good word for it. They took the people out to the mouth of the subdivision.”

I waited but he didn’t say anything else.

“And then?”

“The scent stops,” he said. “It reappears by the puddle.”

“Stops like they teleported?”

“Pretty much.”

I’d run up against teleportation a couple of times. Teleporting a single human being took a staggering amount of power. The first time, a gathering of very powerful volhvs, Russian pagan priests, had done one, but it had taken a sacrifice to do it. The second time had been a djinn. Djinn were elder beings, extremely powerful and very rare. There simply wasn’t enough magic in the world to support the continuous existence of one. That particular djinn had been imprisoned inside a jewel. It was a sophisticated prison that sustained him between magic waves, when technology was at its highest. Even so, he’d required a human with a significant reservoir of magic whom he’d possessed in order to do his tricks, and then he’d hidden in Unicorn Lane, where some magic flowed even during the tech, for his final act.

How the hell did whoever this was disappear two hundred people?

I really didn’t want to deal with another djinn. I’d had a stroke, well, several small strokes simultaneously, and almost died the last time.

I turned to Derek. “Could you tell from the scents if all of the people disappeared at the same time?”

“Yes, and they did.”

“Two hundred people and whatever herded them,” I thought out loud. “Teleportation is right out. Too much magic. It has to be a pocket reality.”

Derek glanced at me.

“Remember during the last flare when Bran appeared? He spent most of his time in the mist outside of our reality.”

“I remember the rakshasas and their flying palace in a magical jungle.”

Of course he did. After what they’d done to his face, he would never forget them. “This is probably similar. Someone came out, grabbed a bunch of people, and took them somewhere.” Which would imply the presence of an elder power, which meant we were all screwed.

The elder powers—gods, djinn, dragons, the great, the powerful, the legendary—required too much magic to exist in our reality. They did exist somewhere, in the mists, in other realms or dimensions, loosely connected to us. Nobody quite knew how it all worked. Nobody knew what would happen if one of them manifested and was caught by a tech wave. Conventional wisdom said they would cease to exist, which was why the only time we saw any elder beings was during a flare, a magic tsunami that came every seven years. During the flare, the magic stayed for at least three days, sometimes longer.

This area wasn’t particularly saturated with magic. If we were dealing with an elder power, this one had balls. Normally, my knee-jerk response was to blame every odd, powerfully magical thing on my father, but it didn’t feel like him. I hadn’t sensed any familiar magic, and there was nothing elegant or refined about dumping the remains like that in some forgotten parking lot. My father’s magic shocked you with beauty before it killed you.

“It took two hundred people to its lair to boil them?” Derek asked. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they want the bones?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if the bones were incidental to this. There are worse interpretations.”

Derek stopped and looked at me.

“They may have boiled them slowly while they were alive to torture them,” I said.

He turned to the shed.

“The world is a fucked-up place,” I told him. “That’s why I’m glad I have Conlan.”

He gave me a sharp look.

“The world needs more good people in it, and my son will be a good person.”

IT TOOK OVER two hours before the loud snarling of enchanted car engines announced Biohazard’s arrival. Two SUVs fought their way up the road, growling and spitting. Behind them a heavy armored truck brought in a cistern. Behind that came two more SUVs. The vehicles spat out people and containers of orange safety suits. They took one whiff of the air rising from the puddle fifty yards behind us and got masks on.

Luther strode toward us. Stocky and dark-haired, he was wearing boots, a pair of stained shorts, and a T-shirt that said KNIGHT IN THE STREETS, WIZARD IN THE SHEETS.

“I like the T-shirt,” I told him. “Very professional.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. He just stared at the jellied mass grave. We’d made a basic salt circle around it. The pavement was too broken for the chalk lines.

“I’ll need a statement,” he said. “From the werewolf and Thanatos, too. Where is he?”

I nodded. Teddy Jo had taken a spot on top of the warehouse roof, looking down at the grave. Black smoke curled from him, swirling around his body. If he’d had the power, he would’ve plucked the remains of a young couple from that grave and resurrected them. But he didn’t. None of us did. Only gods brought people back from the dead, and the results were usually mixed, to put it kindly.

“He’s grieving,” I told Luther. “One of his people is in that. He can’t shepherd his soul to the afterlife. To do that, he would have to perform rites over the body, and there is no way to separate it. He can’t bring the body back to the family. He is very angry, so I would be gentle in my questioning.”

Luther nodded.

I told him about the scent trail disappearing. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.

“An elder power?” he asked.

“I hope not.”

He stared at the grave again. “Whole families, even the children?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

I wished I knew why. “The bones are missing.”

He grimaced. “The highest concentration of magic is in human bones. That’s why ghouls chew on them. Do we know for sure that they extracted the bones and kept them?”

“No, but statistically there should’ve been at least some bones in there. A skull, a femur, something. I only saw soft tissue.”

He sighed and for a moment he seemed older, his eyes haunted. “I’ll let you know after we excavate and go through it.”

We stood for a long moment, united by outrage and grief. We would both dig into that, he from his end and I from mine. Eventually we would find the one responsible. But it would do nothing for the families whose remains lay in the parking lot, dumped like garbage.

Finally, Luther nodded and went to get into his orange suit while I went to give my statement.

HELL WAS BEING stuck behind a teamster convoy driving across Magnolia Bridge. Normally I would’ve turned off onto the side street, but Magnolia was one of those new bridges that spanned the rubble of collapsed overpasses and fallen buildings and was the fastest way back to the office, and my head was still full of boiled people. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.

It cost us a solid half hour, and when we pulled up to Cutting Edge, the afternoon was in full swing. Derek got out, unlocked our parking lot chain, and I drove into my spot and parked.

The street was relatively quiet today, the heat having chased off most of the customers normally frequenting Bill Horn’s tinker shop and Nicole’s car repair place. Only Mr. Tucker lingered. Time and age had whittled his once broad-shouldered and probably muscular body to a thin, slightly frail frame. It had also stolen most of his hair, so he kept it so short, it looked like white fuzz floating over his dark-brown scalp. But the years hadn’t destroyed his spirit. He walked our street twice in the morning and at least once in the afternoon, carrying a large placard. The placard said, ATTENTION! THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE! OPEN YOUR EYES!

As I climbed out of the Jeep, Mr. Tucker delivered the same message at the top of his voice, just as he’d done countless times before. But, being Southern, Mr. Tucker also believed in politeness.

“Repent! The end is here! How you folks doing today?”

“Can’t complain,” I lied. “Would you like some iced tea? It’s hot out.”

Mr. Tucker raised a metal canteen at me. “Got some tea at Bill’s. Thank you. I’ll see you around.”

“Okay, Mr. Tucker.”

A car went by slowly, obviously looking for something. Mr. Tucker lunged toward it, shaking his placard. “Repent! Open your eyes! You’re living in the Apocalypse!”

I sighed, unlocked the side door, and went inside. Derek followed me, grimacing. “He’s going to get hit by a car one day.”

“And when he does, we’ll take him to the hospital.”

Mr. Tucker was right. We were living in the Apocalypse. Slowly, with each magic wave, a little more of the old technological world died, and the new world and its powers and monsters grew a little stronger. Being one of the monsters, I supposed I shouldn’t complain.

We needed to clear our caseload. Serenbe had to take precedence. I checked the large chalkboard hanging on the wall. Three cases active: a ghoul in Oakland Cemetery, a mysterious “critter” with shiny eyes scaring the students at the Art Institute and eating expensive paint, and a report of an abnormally large glowing wolf in a suburb off Dunwoody Road. Derek approached the board and wiped the wolf off.

“Got it last night.”

“What was it?”

“Desandra.”

I blinked at him. “The alpha of Clan Wolf?”

Derek nodded.

“What is she doing in Dunwoody Heights?”

“She tried to enroll her boys in gymnastics class in the city, and one of the other parents threw a giant fit, so they asked her to leave. She’s been rolling in glow-in-the-dark powder and menacing that woman’s house for the last three nights.”

“Did you explain to her that intimidation isn’t in the Pack’s best interests?”

“I did. She told me that she would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for me, a meddling kid.”

I stoically kept a straight face. “Good job on closing the case.”

“Sure.”

“So where did you put the Scooby Snacks?”

“Hilarious,” he said dryly.

I pondered the board. A year ago, I would’ve tossed the paint case at Ascanio and forgotten about it. But Ascanio was scarce lately. He barely came in anymore. The last couple of times I had to call him instead of him bugging me for jobs nonstop. School had taken up a lot of his time, but he’d graduated last year.

He was still nominally on the books. I picked up the phone and dialed the Bouda House.

Miranda answered with a breathy “Hello.”

“It’s me.”

The sexy breathiness vanished. “Oh, hi, Kate.”

“Is the evil spawn around?”

“He’s helping Raphael with something.”

That was the answer I’d gotten the last time I’d called, too. “Okay. Would you let him know that I have a job if he’s interested?”

“Sure.”

I was Ascanio’s employer, but Raphael and Andrea were his alphas, and Clan Bouda valued loyalty to the clan above all else. Raphael trumped me. “On second thought, never mind. We’ll handle it.”

“Okay,” Miranda said.

I hung up. With Ascanio MIA and Julie off with Curran on his hunting adventure, we were down to just me and Derek.

“You want me to take it?” he asked.

“No, I need you for Serenbe. We’ll have to pass it on to the Guild.” I hated passing gigs to the Guild. I promised to do the job when I took it, and I took pride in making sure we got it done. Now I would have to explain to the clients that we were too busy. It was bad business and it made me feel lousy. But sometimes I had no choice.

I dialed Barabas at the Guild. I could’ve gone to the Clerk, but since Barabas was the head admin, it would be faster. Besides, the mercs walked into dangerous situations all the time. They needed to know about Serenbe. The more people who knew, the better our chances of figuring this out were.

He picked up on the first ring. “Yes?”

“I have to send you two gigs. One is a nuisance job, but the ghoul extraction will need someone good on it.”

“Is your father invading?”

“No, but something bad happened.” I brought him up to date on Serenbe. “Whoever did this got away clean. I have a feeling it won’t be a onetime thing.”

There was a long tense silence.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I am. I’m trying to think of a way to notify the mercs that also won’t cause a panic.”

“If you figure that out, call me back.” I could use some pointers in the notifying etiquette department.

“I will. We’ll take care of the gigs.”

“Thanks.”

I hung up, pulled the two files on the ghoul and the paint eater, and put them on my desk. I’d pass them on to Barabas when I got home today. Being neighbors had its advantages.

“You really think this will happen again?” Derek asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I leaned against the table. “They killed the dogs, got two hundred people out, and made them disappear. Nobody escaped. None of the attackers died, or at least we didn’t find any of their bodies or large pools of their blood. Nothing went wrong. They had no screwups. You don’t get that good at controlling large numbers of people unless you practice.”

“You think they’ve done it before.”

“I know they’ve done it before, and more than once. If they’ve done it more than once, it’s likely they need a continuous supply of humans for something, so they’ll do it again. I need to be there to stop them. This city is not going to be their hunting ground if I can help it. So, you and I are going to call the Pack, the People, the Order, and every other person in charge we know and notify them that this happened.” Biohazard would be sending its own notifications, but I wanted to put the net out as wide as I could.

Derek moved to his desk. “Dibs on the Pack.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“KATE?” DEREK’S FACE blocked my view.

I rubbed my forehead. “Yes?”

“Food?” he asked.

Food? I hadn’t eaten at all today. “Food would be amazing.”

He nodded and went out the door.

In the past two hours, I’d talked to the three county sheriff’s offices where people knew me: Douglas, Gwinnett, and Milton. Beau Clayton, the Milton County sheriff, and I went way back. He didn’t like hearing about the disappeared people.

I called the Order and asked to speak to Nick Feldman and was told by Maxine, the Order’s telepathic secretary, that he was in the city but out at the moment, so I had to leave a message with her. I kept it short.

If the Order knew anything, they wouldn’t share it with me, and they didn’t trust my information. In the eight months I’d been back at work, we’d had to cooperate on a few cases, and every time working with Nick Feldman, the current knight-protector, was like pulling teeth. My mother breaking up his parents’ marriage was bad enough, but Nick also spent some time undercover in Hugh d’Ambray’s inner circle, and he got to see firsthand how my father operated. He hated our whole family with the passion of a thousand suns and had made it his life’s mission to make sure we didn’t exist.

Derek had taken the city’s law enforcement, the Pack, and some of the street contacts he’d been building. Between us, we’d pretty much covered it. Only the People were left.

I dialed the number.

“You’ve reached the Casino Help Desk,” a young man said into the phone. “This is Noah. How can we make your day wonderful?”

That would take a miracle. “Put me through to Ghastek or Rowena, please.”

“May I ask who is calling?”

“Kate.”

“Are they expecting your call?”

Great. I’d gotten a new apprentice or journeyman. “No.”

“I’m going to need a last name, ma’am.”

“Lennart.”

“One moment, please.”

There was a beep and Noah spoke to somebody. “Hey, there’s a Kate Lennart calling for the Fearless Leader. She’s not on the list.”

Apparently, Noah hadn’t mastered putting people on hold.

“Kate who?” another male voice asked.

“Kate Lennart?”

“You idiot, that’s the In-Shinar!”

“What?” Noah squeaked.

“You put the In-Shinar on hold, you dumbass! Ghastek’s going to hang you by your balls.”

Ugh.

“What do I do?” Panic spiked in Noah’s voice.

You could connect me to Ghastek. If I said something now, it would only freak them out more.

There was some random beeping. I had a vision of Noah frantically pawing at the phone, smacking keys at random like a toddler. A disconnect signal beeped in my ear.

The last time I attended the induction of candidates to the ranks of journeymen, Ghastek introduced me as “Behold, the Immortal One, the In-Shinar, the Blood Blade of Atlanta.” I spent the whole ceremony trying to kill him with my brain. When I chewed him out afterward, he asked who I would rather risk my life for, the Blood Blade of Atlanta or Kate Lennart, small business owner. I should’ve told him to stuff it. I had only myself to blame.

I put down the phone and counted to five in my head. That should give them enough time to get their crap together.

I redialed.

“Help Desk,” Noah croaked.

“It’s me again. Calling for Ghastek.”

“Yes, lady ma’am, um, In-Shinar, um, Your Majesty.”

I waited. Nothing happened.

“Noah?”

“Yes?” he said in a desperate near-whisper. He sounded close to death.

“Transfer the call, please.”

He made a small strangled noise, the line clicked, and Rowena’s smooth voice answered. “Hello, Kate. How is Conlan?”

Telling her that one of her journeymen just called me “lady ma’am” would be counterproductive. “He’s fine.”

“When will you bring him by?”

Rowena came from the same village as my mother. They shared a similar magical talent, although my mother’s had been much stronger. The talent came with a price. Women who possessed it had a hard time getting pregnant and an even harder time carrying a child to term. I was an exception; perhaps it had to do with Roland’s genes, but Curran and I had had no trouble conceiving. Rowena never had children of her own, but she desperately wanted some. She once told me that while my father was alive, the world wasn’t safe enough for her children. Instead she lavished all of her maternal affection on my son.

“As soon as I can. I have some bad news.”

“Is it your father?” A hint of alarm undercut her words.

“No. At least, I don’t think so.”

I explained Serenbe.

“That’s horrible,” Rowena finally said.

Not much shocked a Master of the Dead. Not much shocked me either. By now I’d told this story about seven or eight times. You’d think repetition would file the sharp edge off it, but no, every time was as disturbing as the last.

“We’ll call down to Biohazard and try to get some samples for analysis,” Rowena said.

“That would be amazing.”

I said good-bye and hung up before she had a chance to ask me if Conlan had developed any magical powers. Everybody wanted my son to be something more. He was perfect the way he was.

Someone rapped their knuckles on my door.

“Come in,” I called.

The door swung open and Raphael walked in, carrying a dark-green bottle. He wore a dark-gray suit.

“Beware the boudas,” I said. “Especially when they bear gifts.”

He smiled. “Can I come in?”

“Please.” I pointed to my client chair. “Sit down.”

He did. His black hair fell on his shoulders in a soft wave. Usually when people used words like “smoldering” to describe a man, I just laughed. However, for Raphael that word felt entirely appropriate. There was something about him, something in his dark-blue eyes, in the way he carried himself with a hint of feral shapeshifter cutting through the polish, that made women think of sex. Luckily, I was immune.

“What’s in the bottle?”

He pushed it across the desk to me. The handwritten label with a cute orange-yellow apple read, B’S BEST CIDER.

I whistled. “Now I know it’s bad.”

When Curran and I got married, Clan Bear provided several barrels of honey ale for the wedding. The ale was a roaring success. Raphael realized that the bouda clan house sat in the middle of an apple orchard and sensed a business opportunity. B’s Cider hit the market a year ago, and like all things Raphael touched, it turned to gold.

He leaned back in the chair, one long leg over another. Life with Andrea was good to Raphael. He looked clean-cut. His suit fit him so well, it had to be tailored.

“Let me guess, your tailor is holding your latest outfit hostage and you want me to liberate it.”

“If I asked you to do that, everything would be covered in blood and my suit would be ruined. No, I’d ask my wife. She’d shoot him between the eyes from a hundred yards away.”

That she would.

“I came to talk about the boy,” he said. “I brought the cider, because it isn’t an easy conversation.”

Oh.

“I’ve come to ask you to let him go.”

I thought as much. “Why isn’t Ascanio here to speak for himself?”

“Because you took him in when nobody would have him. Aunt B sent him to you because he was impossible to handle, and she knew that sooner or later he would do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, and someone would rip out his throat. You gave him a job, a place he belonged, you trained him, and you trusted him. You turned him into someone who is now an asset to the clan. He understands all of this. He’s loyal to you.”

He paused. I waited for him to continue.

“But he also wants things.”

“What things?”

“We can start with money. He can earn money here, but he wants more. He wants wealth.”

He and I both knew that Ascanio wouldn’t get wealth working for me. Cutting Edge paid the bills, but it wouldn’t make anyone rich. I had no interest in expanding. I liked that we were small.

“Also, he wants acceptance, responsibility, and power. He wants to climb the clan’s power hierarchy. At his core, he’s a bouda, and he needs other boudas to acknowledge how good he is.”

“Okay.”

“Both of these are means to an end.” Raphael leaned forward. “What he really wants is . . .”

“Security,” I told him. “I taught him for almost four years, Raphael. He grew up without a male role model in a hellish place, so when he went to the clan, he fixated on you. He wants to be you. A respected, successful, dangerous alpha. I figured all this out a long time ago.”

“He’s been working for me for the last six months,” Raphael said.

“Aha.”

Raphael chewed on his lip. “There is no point in trying to be diplomatic, so I’m just going to come out and say it. Male nineteen-year-old boudas think with their balls. Andrea and I spend half of our time fighting to keep them out of Jim’s rock-hauling camp.”

Like Curran, Jim constantly improved the Keep, adding on towers, walls, and escape tunnels. A good portion of those improvements were built by boudas between ages twelve and twenty-five performing the Pack’s version of community service for various infractions. The boudas couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, and Jim always welcomed free labor.

“Ascanio is different from his peers,” Raphael said. “He thinks with his head, and he’s strategic in his decisions. When we sent him down to Kentucky, he ran into h . . .” Raphael paused. “. . . into trouble. He handled it. Better than I did.”

“I have no doubt he did.”

“We need him, and he needs us. And I realize that my mother dumped him on you, and you spent four years stabilizing, teaching, and hammering him into what he is today, and now that he’s useful, we want him back and it’s unfair. I’m sorry. I owe you. Our entire clan owes you.”

“You don’t owe me anything. I did it for him, not for you.”

“But you did it and someone has to appreciate it. I’m here to say that we acknowledge it and we won’t forget. If you leave it up to him, he will never walk away from you. He can’t. His sense of loyalty won’t let him. But he won’t be happy here. He wants recognition and acceptance from the Pack. Like it or not, you’re not just anyone, Kate. You are the In-Shinar. The longer you keep him with you, the harder it will be for him to be seen as separate from you.”

He just had to throw it in my face. I sighed. “Do you see any chains around here, Raphael?”

“No.” His smile was sad.

“Okay then. He isn’t an indentured servant. He’s free to do as he wants. I’ll take him off the payroll as of today. He is welcome to come back anytime, but I will stop calling.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s not about you. He should do whatever makes him happy.”

Raphael nodded again. He looked miserable.

I let him off the hook. “How is Baby B doing?”

He grinned. “A wolf boy tried to steal her toy at the picnic last week. She chased him down, took the toy away, and beat him bloody with it.”

“You must be so proud.”

“Oh, I am.”

“I’ll see you around, Raphael.”

“You will, Kate.”

He left.

Well, that was that. I felt oddly hollow. No more funny one-liners. No more tortured Latin. No more off-color jokes. It had been moving to this moment for a while, but it still made me feel empty.

Derek walked into the office. “What did Raphael want?”

I shook my head. “Nothing important.”

Derek eyed the bottle of cider and pulled two small paper bags out of a larger paper bag. The delicious aroma of Mexican spices filled the air. Chicken soft tacos. My favorite. The closest Mexican place was about two miles off. He’d gone to get them for me.

I got up, got two glasses, opened the cider, and poured some for us. He landed in the client chair and bit into his taco. I chewed mine. Mmm, delicious.

“I’m going to go back to Serenbe tomorrow,” he said. “I want to do a wider search. See if I can pick up a trail.”

“Okay,” I said.

We chewed some more.

“Do you ever want wealth?” I asked.

Derek paused his chewing. “No.”

“I mean, do you ever want more money?”

He gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “My bills are paid. Got enough for food, got enough for tools of the trade, can buy Christmas presents. What else would I need?”

I nodded. We drank our cider and ate our tacos, and it was nice.