Magic Rises (20 page)

For the first time in months I felt completely alone. It was a familiar but half-forgotten feeling. I hadn’t felt this isolated since Greg died. He’d taken care of me for almost ten years after Voron’s death. I had taken him for granted, and when he was murdered, it felt like someone had cracked my life apart with the blow of a hammer. The shapeshifters never treated me like an outsider, but at this moment I knew exactly how a third wheel felt. They were all still high on the thrill of the chase. It bonded them together, and here I was, the lone human on a horse, and Curran wasn’t talking to me.

It was an unpleasant feeling and I didn’t like it. I would deal with it. I didn’t know what Curran’s problem was, but I would find out. Curran never did anything without a reason and he was so controlled, even his one-night stands were premeditated.

Curran wouldn’t lose his head over Lorelei, no matter how pretty and fresh she looked. He had cooked up some sort of plot, and now he was implementing it in his methodical Curran fashion, and the fact that he didn’t tell me about his plan meant I really wouldn’t like it. And that was exactly what worried me.

The road curved. I felt the weight of someone’s gaze on me and looked up. Hugh. Looking at me as we rounded the bend. In front of him the castle loomed on top of the mountain. It was time to put my badass face on.

Twenty minutes later we dismounted in the courtyard. A djigit took my horse. Curran, Mahon, and Eduardo were speaking. I made a beeline for their group. I had some air I wanted to clear.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hibla hurrying across the courtyard. I didn’t want to talk to her. My shift with Desandra was about to start and I wanted to talk to Curran before it did.
Don’t come over to me, don’t come over to me . . .

“Consort!”

Crap on a stick.
“Yes?”

“Can I speak with you?”

No.
“Sure.”

We walked toward the wall, out of the way.

“The creature you killed. Did it have wings?”

“Did you have an attack?”

“It appears so.” Hibla lowered her voice. “I do not wish to start a panic or a hunt inside the walls. Will you view it with me?”

Not alone, I won’t.
I searched the crowd, looking for Andrea, and saw her and Raphael at the doors ushering Desandra inside. Just as well.

“Derek!” I called.

A moment later he stepped out of the crowd like a ghost.

“Come with me, please.”

CHAPTER 11

The castle seemed to last forever. We crossed one hallway, turned, crossed another, climbed the stairs . . .

“It’s a maze,” Derek said.

“It’s meant to be,” I told him. “Like the one under the Casino at home. Except that one was designed to keep vampires from escaping, and this one was made to keep attackers from reaching vulnerable points.”

We went up eight flights of stairs, until finally Hibla opened a heavy door. We stepped out onto the battlement and made our way along the top of the wall toward a flanking tower.

“Curran never does anything without a reason,” Derek told me quietly.

Well, well, the Beast Lord’s sudden breach of manners when it came to Lorelei hadn’t gone unnoticed. Derek was trained by Jim to be observant, and now the kid was concerned for me. I was touched he was concerned, but irritation spiked inside me. Navigating my love life was hard enough right now without unwarranted assistance from teenage werewolves.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

He shook his head.

We came to a doorway. A heavy door lay on its side next to it. We followed Hibla through the doorway and climbed another set of stairs and emerged on top of the flanking tower. Perfectly round, the tower had been designed to permit bombardment of the northern slope. Not that anything could come up that way—the ground dropped off so abruptly, it had to be only a couple of degrees short of a completely vertical cliff.

An antipersonnel machine gun sat on a swivel mount, facing to the south. A high-speed, medium-sized scorpio sat behind the machine gun on a rotating mount. Shaped like a very large crossbow, the scorpio was the Roman equivalent of a machine gun. It fired arrows with enough speed to pierce armor, and judging by the cranks, this one was a serial-fire, self-loading siege engine. It would take two people to operate, but once they cranked it up, the scorpio would spit enough arrows to cut down a small army. Both the gun and the scorpio rested on a rotating platform, and switching between them in case of a magic wave would take mere seconds.
Smart, Hugh. Very smart.
We’d have to steal this setup for the Keep. Assuming we made it back to the Keep.

Two djigits stood by the siege engines. Both seemed pale.

Hibla nodded and they moved aside, revealing a long bloody smear on the stone. A severed arm lay against the wall. Long, thin fingers. Could be female. I crouched. Scratches marked the stone. To the right, bits of jackal fur stuck to the blocks, glued with dried blood. Next to them lay an orange scale. Hibla’s jackal had gone down fighting.

I pulled a small plastic bag out and picked up the scale to take back to Doolittle. There was more than one of these things out there.

Derek inhaled, crouched low, and smelled the stones.

“There are four tower lookouts,” Hibla said. “The shift changes every twelve hours, at six in the morning and six in the evening. This morning Tamara relieved the night lookout. This is all we have left of her.”

“Who has access to the tower?” I asked.

“Nobody. Once the lookouts enter the tower, they bar the door behind them. The door was still barred when Karim came to relieve her. We had to take it off its hinges.”

“Did the other lookouts hear anything?”

“No.”

I looked at Derek. “Anything?”

“Similar scent as in the hallway,” he said.

Locked door, heavy weaponry. The only access was from the air. So the wings had been functional after all. Still, the one I’d killed didn’t have a wingspan wide enough for it to fly. It was a heavy bastard, too. I turned. The main building of the castle rose in front of me. Tall, blocky, with a blue roof.

“It glides,” I said. “It probably took off from the main keep, swooped down, and rammed Tamara.” The fight must’ve been brutal and quick, because the werejackal didn’t have a chance to call for help.

“Why did it take the body?” Hibla asked.

“I don’t know.” Something had taken the other guard too, the one who’d stood over the mechanism guarding the hallway gate. “Have you ever heard about anything like that?”

Hibla shook her head. “It is not local. I know all of the local creatures.”

“There must be miles of mountains out there.” And some of them spawned mutant kangaroo goats with bone axes in their chests. “Are you sure these shapeshifters haven’t crawled out of some dark ravine?”

She crossed her arms. “I told you I know all the local creatures.”

I fought to keep from grinding my teeth. She’d invited me in and now she’d decided to get all defensive. “Any rumors of anything similar? Anything at all?”

“No. I need useful information. You are not being useful.”

I thought of telling her to bend over so I could remove the iron stick she had jammed up her ass, but getting into a fight with the head of Hugh’s security wasn’t in our best interests. I needed to maintain a working relationship, because I might have to rely on Hibla later.

Derek was leaning over the wall. “Kate?”

I came over. The southern wall rose above a large square inner yard. Practice dummies sat along the walls. Past them a big metal cage hung from chains, about five or six feet off the ground. A pile of rags lay inside it.

The pile stirred. A rag was thrown back and then a grimy face stared up at me.

“Who is that?”

“A prisoner,” Hibla said.

“Why is he in a cage?”

“He belongs to Lord Megobari. He’s a criminal. This is his punishment.”

Hugh put people in cages. Lovely. “What’s his crime?”

“He stole.”

“Take me to talk to him.”

Hibla grimaced. “It’s forbidden.”

“The contract the clans signed gives me the authority to pursue and eliminate any danger threatening Desandra. A similar creature attacked her and we can now conclude there are more of them out there. That tells me Desandra is in danger. If Lord Megobari makes an issue of it, tell him I insisted. He will believe you.”

Hibla’s face told me she had no doubt about that part. “Follow me.”

We entered the tower and descended a spiral staircase.

“Their scent is odd,” Derek said. “Like someone shoved sandpaper up your nose. Must be something they give off only when transformed, because I haven’t smelled it before.”

“How tight is your security?” I asked.

If looks could conduct electricity, Hibla would’ve electrocuted me on the spot.

“I’m not questioning your competence,” I told her. “I’m trying to do my job. If a stranger scales the wall, how fast would you know about it?”

“If he entered the keep, immediately,” Hibla said. “We have patrols at the doors and in the hallways. They are trained to remember scents and faces.”

“What if he entered one of the minor buildings?”

“We do rolling sweeps of every structure twice a day. We may not see him, but we would smell him. I would know within twelve hours.”

I had to give it to Hugh, his security was good. “Any strangers since we arrived?”

“Aside from you and the three packs, no.”

“How many people, besides us and you, are in the castle?”

“The Volkodavi have eighteen, the Italians have twenty, and Jarek Kral has twenty also.”

That was fifty-eight, and including us would make it an even seventy. “And you are confident your people can recall seventy different scent signatures?”

Hibla looked at Derek.

“Yes,” he told me. “Five hundred people come to the Keep during any week. I recognize every single scent.”

I knew that shapeshifter scent memory was good, but I had no idea it was that good. Thinking about remembering five hundred scent signatures made my head hurt.

“How can you be the Consort and not know this?” Hibla said, in the way someone would say,
Of course the Earth is round; what are you, a moron?

Derek bared his teeth. Great. If he went for Hibla’s throat, I’d have a mess on my hands.

“In the U.S., shapeshifters don’t volunteer information about themselves to others,” I told her. “I learn as I go, and the subject of just how many scents you can recall never came up.”

Hibla checked Derek’s face. “We can recall thousands. Knowing this is important.” Her tone made it plain she thought I was a moron unfit for duty. First Desandra, now her. I was beginning to get tired of the constant you-are-not-a-shapeshifter song.

“Learning other things was a priority.”

“What other things?”

“How to effectively kill one of you with a six-inch knife. I’m a fast learner and I had a lot of practice. Turns out there is a way to jam the knife blade under the cervical vertebrae in such a way that your neck pops right out. Remind me some time, I’ll show you.”

Hibla blinked.

Derek laughed quietly.

“What about the head of the man I killed? Do you know his scent?”

“No,” Hibla admitted.

“So he wasn’t with any of the packs.”

“No.”

“And we don’t know how he got into the castle?”

Her upper lip wrinkled. “No.”

Strangers or not, the assaults had to be coming from one of the three packs. Someone had made a bargain with the devil and now these creatures were walking among us disguised.

We came to a heavy steel door barred by a metal rod as thick as my arm. It had to weigh at least fifty pounds. Hibla casually lifted it with one hand and pushed the door open. We emerged into the courtyard and I made a beeline for the cage.

The prisoner saw me. The pile of rags shifted and a dirt-smeared hand reached between the bars toward me.

“Please . . .”

Next to me Derek grimaced. A moment later I caught it too, the stench of stale urine and feces. Hugh was a fucking bastard. “Your magnanimous Lord Megobari lets him sit in his own excrement.”

There was a small pause before Hibla answered. “It can’t be helped.”

Yes, it can. It definitely can.

We reached the cage. A man looked at me through the bars with feverish eyes. Not that old. It was hard to tell with all the dirt, but possibly twenties. Filthy dark blond hair. Scarce beard. His cheekbones stood out, sharp like blades on his gaunt face. Unless he was naturally emaciated, they were starving him.

“Please,” he whispered.

English. Fantastic.

“Beautiful lady, please, water.”

I pulled a canteen off my belt and passed it to him. He grabbed it and drank greedily, gulping the water.

“Easy. If you drink too much too fast, you’ll vomit.”

The man kept drinking. His hands shook. He barely looked human.

“How long has he been in the cage?”

“Two months,” Hibla said.

Dear God. “And the last time he had water?”

“He gets a cup of water and a cup of gruel every morning.”

This was torture. Hugh gave him just enough to keep him alive but not enough to end thirst and hunger. I’d done without water before. When you don’t have it, that’s all you can think about. I didn’t care what the man had stolen; putting him in a cage and letting him rot in his own filth was inhuman. “How can you follow a man who does this?”

Hibla squared her shoulders. “My father was a dispatcher at the Gagra railroad station. When the Shift happened, he turned into a jackal in the middle of the station. Once the magic wave was over, the railroad guards cornered him and shot him, and when he wouldn’t die, they threw him under the incoming train. And then they hunted down our family. Me, my mother, and my two brothers, we had to run into the mountains with nothing but the clothes on our backs. When I walk through the town now, people bow to me. You want to know why I follow Lord Megobari? I do it because I am not the one in the cage. You can be outraged all you want. It bothers me not at all.”

The prisoner clutched his stomach and vomited water onto himself.

Hibla sneered.
“Abzamuk.”

The man shook his head, drank another desperate swallow, and hugged the canteen to him. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Christopher. Christopher. I am.”

“Why did they put you into the cage?” Derek asked.

“I stole. Very bad, very, very bad. Wrong. It was a book. I wanted the knowledge.” His gaze fixed on me. “Beautiful lady, kind lady. Thank you.”

Derek glanced at me. “He isn’t all there.”

No, he definitely wasn’t. Either he was nuts to begin with or sitting in the cage shook a few screws loose. Crazy or not, the desperation in his face was real. Hugh could let him die in this cage and it wouldn’t bother him at all. It bothered the hell out of me.

“Christopher, today a guard died on top of the tower,” I told him. “Did you see what happened?”

He looked at me with eyes that were luminescent with a mix of innocence and wonder. “I see everything. I see wonders.”

Right. Lights were on, but nobody was home. “Could you tell me what you saw?”

“A beast.” The man raised his hands, his fingers spread like claws. “Big, orange beast. Swooped down—whoosh—dead doggie.”

Dead doggie
was right.

“It is the hunter of heavens. A celestial protector.”

Celestial protector. Chinese legends spoke of dragons that acted as celestial guardians, but none of them looked like cats with wings. “What do you mean by ‘celestial protector’?”