Magic Bleeds

CHAPTER 3

I MADE IT TO THE OFFICE BY TEN. I’D HAD ROUGHLY four hours of sleep, awoken in a foul mood, and my face must’ve shown it, because people took pains to move out of my way on the street. Of course, it could’ve been because a giant fetid mess of a dog trotted next to me, growling at anyone who came too close.

The office of the Order of Merciful Aid occupied a plain box of a building. When the magic was up, it was shielded by a military-grade ward, but now while the technology had the upper hand, nothing distinguished the bastion of knightly virtue from its fellow office buildings. I climbed to the second floor, entered a long drab hallway, and landed in my tiny office, painted plain gray. The faithful canine companion flopped on the carpet.

I pushed the button of the intercom. “Maxine?”

“Yes dear?”

“I believe I’m due two cookies.”

“Come and get them.”

I looked at the canine companion. “Me cookies. You stay.”

Apparently “stay” in faithful canine companion language meant “follow with enthusiastic glee.” I could shut my office door in his face, but then he’d probably howl and be sad. I had enough sad in my life right now.

We trotted down the hallway and crashed to a halt before Maxine’s desk. She surveyed the demon dog for a couple of stunned seconds, then reached under her desk and produced a box of cookies, each the size of my palm. The scent of vanilla hit me. I did my best not to drool. One must maintain the sleek and deadly image, after all.

I snagged two cookies, broke one down the middle, picked the chocolate chips out of one half, and gave it to the mutt. I chomped on the other half. Heaven did exist and it had walnuts in it. “Any messages for me?” Usually I got one or two, but mostly people who wanted my help preferred to talk in person.

“Yes. Hold on.” She pulled out a handful of pink tickets and recited from memory, without checking the paper. “Seven forty-two a.m., Mr. Gasparian: I curse you. I curse your arms so they will wither and die and fall off your body. I curse your eyeballs to explode. I curse your feet to swell until blue. I curse your spine to crack. I curse you. I curse you. I curse you.”

I licked cookie crumbs off my lips. “Mr. Gasparian is under the impression that he has magic powers. He is fifty-six years old, terribly unhappy because his wife left him, and he keeps cursing his neighbors. Magically, he’s a dud, but his ranting scares the neighborhood kids. I kicked his case to Atlanta’s finest. I’m guessing they paid him a visit and he’s a bit upset that I didn’t take his magic mojo seriously.”

“People do the strangest things. Seven fifty-six a.m., Patrice Lane, Biohazard: Joshua was a shapeshifter. Call me now.”

I choked on my cookie. Shapeshifters didn’t get sick, at least not in the traditional sense. The only time I’d seen one of them sneeze was when they got a bit of dust in their nose or when they became inexplicably allergic to giant tortoises. Their bones knitted together in a couple of weeks. What the hell?

Maxine kept going.

“Eight oh one a.m., Derek Gaunt: Can you ring me when you get in?

“Eight oh five a.m., Jim, no last name given: Call me.

“Eight twelve a.m., Ghastek Stefanoff: Please call me at your earliest convenience.

“Eight thirty-seven a.m., Patrice Lane, Biohazard: The dog’s clean. The Good Samaritan was a woman with an accent of some sort. Why haven’t you called me?

“Eight forty-four a.m., Detective Williams, Atlanta PAD: Agent Daniels, contact me about your statement in regard to the incident at Steel Horse ASAP. And that’s all of them.” Maxine gave me a bright smile and handed me a stack of pink message slips.

Andrea emerged from the armory, carrying a manila envelope, and headed my way. Short and blond, she was armed with a pretty face, a charming smile, and a pair of 9mm SIG-Sauers. Which she used to shoot things with preternatural accuracy many times and very fast. She was also my best friend.

Andrea braked a couple of feet from me. I shook my giant stack of pink slips at her.

“I see—you have messages. That’s nice.” Andrea nodded at me and snagged a cookie from the box.

The canine companion growled under his breath. Just in case she was trouble.

“What is that?” Andrea’s eyes widened.

“What is what?”

“The beast.” She waved the cookie at the dog.

The beast trotted over to her side, sniffed her, and wagged his tail, indicating he had decided she was good people and she should give him a piece of her cookie.

“He’s evidence.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I think a dog is a great idea. I just never pictured you with a mutant poodle.”

“He isn’t a poodle. He’s a Doberman mix.”

“Aha. Keep telling yourself that.”

“Where have you seen a poodle colored like that?”

“Why don’t we ask Mauro? His wife’s a vet and he breeds Dobermans.”

I growled. “Fine. Let’s go ask him.”

We padded down the hall to Mauro’s office, canine enigma in tow. If I had to partner up for a job and Andrea wasn’t available, I usually conned Mauro into joining forces. A huge, hulking Samoan, he was steady as the Rock of Gibraltar. Bringing him to a job was like having your own portable howitzer—people took one look at him and decided making trouble wasn’t in their best interest.

Mauro’s office was only marginally bigger than mine, and his body was substantially larger, so the examination of the faithful canine companion had to be taken to the hallway. Mauro knelt by the dog, felt his sides, stared at his mouth, and rose, shaking his hands.

“Standard poodle. Probably purebred, even. Aside from being freakishly large, he’s actually a very nice-looking dog under all that fur. You won’t get any breeders lining up at your door, because you can’t show him. He’s too huge. But otherwise, a very fine specimen.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “What about the color?”

“That’s a recognized bicolor for the breed. They’re called phantom poodles.”

Andrea snickered.

The phantom poodle sat by me, looking at my face like it was the best thing he’d ever seen.

“They’re very smart dogs,” Mauro said. “Canine Einsteins. They’re protective and they make good guards.” He cleared his throat and slid into an atrocious Southern tinged with Samoan accent. “You know, a young wallflower such as yourself, Ms. Scarlett, shouldn’t be on these vicious streets without a male escort. It’s just not proper.”

Andrea doubled over, croaking with laughter.

“Screw you guys.”

Mauro shook his head, gazing mournfully at Andrea. “See? The streets have affected her: she’s become coarse.”

There were times in life when nothing short of spitting fire would do.

“Have you thought of what to name him?” Mauro asked. “How about Erik? After the Phantom of the Opera.”

“No.”

“You should name him Fezzik,” Andrea said.

“Inconceivable,” I told her and took the canine traitor back to my office.

“You might want to shave him,” Mauro called after me. “His fur’s all matted and it’s uncomfortable for him.”

In the office I pulled out my brown bag. I’d stopped by a food stall on the way to the office. It was a dingy stall marked with a big sign that said HUNGRY MAN and operated by a thin blond guy. You’d have to be a very, very hungry man to stop by that stall. On the brink of starvation. And even then, I think I would go for a raw rat instead. The smell alone was known to send people running for their lives. However, the dog had found the aroma emanating from Hungry Man curiously enticing, and so I bought a bag of small round fried things that were supposedly hush puppies.

I reached into the bag, pulled a round object out, and tossed it at the poodle. Big jaws opened for a blink, caught a hush puppy, and snapped shut. He must’ve spent some time being a stray, because he’d learned the two things all strays know: food is rare so eat it quick, and stick to the sap who feeds you.

I folded the bag over. Kate Daniels and her deadly attack poodle. Kill me, somebody. Julie, my adopted niece, would have a field day with this. It was a good thing she was away at a boarding school until Thanksgiving.

Maybe the corner store would have hair clippers.

I flopped behind my desk and spread my pink slips in a fan on its scarred surface. In a perfect world, Joshua’s vertically gifted murderer would’ve had himself a monologue before rampaging, during which he loudly and clearly would’ve announced his full name, occupation, religious preference, preferably with his god’s country and time period of origin, his goals, dreams, and aspirations, and the location of his lair. But nobody had ever accused post-Shift Atlanta of being perfect.

The killer was likely a devotee of some deity who enjoyed plagues as means to motivate and discipline his or her faithful. A very powerful devotee, able to overcome the regenerative powers of Lyc-V, which was pretty much impossible as far as common wisdom was concerned. Obviously common wisdom had once again proven itself wrong.

Of course, the killer could also be some psychopath who thought all disease was divine and just enjoyed infecting people in his spare time. I leaned toward the first theory. The man had specifically wanted Joshua, he killed him in a very odd way, and he strode off once the deed was accomplished. He didn’t stay to soak in the reaction. All this pointed to some sort of method to his madness, some definite purpose.

Why start a fight? If he had wanted Joshua, he could’ve ambushed him on some lonely street instead of starting a brawl in a bar full of tough guys. Why take the risk that he or Joshua would get injured? Was this some sort of a message? Or did he think he was just that much of a badass?

The only hint I had was the link between disease and the divine. I pulled a piece of paper from the drawer and took a stack of books off my shelf. I wanted some background before I started returning calls.

TWO HOURS LATER MY LIST OF DEADLY DISEASE-RELATED deities had grown to unwieldy proportions. In Greece both Apollo and his sister, Artemis, infected people with their arrows. Also from Greece hailed the nosoi, daimones of pestilence, disease, and heavy sickness, who escaped the confines of Pandora’s jar. In the myths, nosoi were mute, and my guy definitely spoke, but I’ve learned not to take myth as gospel.

The list kept going. Every time an ancient man stumbled, there was a god ready to punish him with an array of agonizing maladies. Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, was known as the goddess of disease; Japan was riddled with plague demons; the Mayans had Ak K’ak, who was the god of both disease and war and looked to be a good candidate, considering Joshua’s killer started a brawl; the Maori boasted a disease deity for each body part; the Winnebago Indians tried to secure blessings from some two-faced god they called Disease-Giver; the Irish had the plague-bringer Caillech; and in ancient Babylon, Nergal gave out diseases like they were candy. And that wasn’t even counting deities who, while not specializing in illnesses, used an odd plague here and there when the occasion called for it.

I needed more data to narrow this down. My butt hurt from sitting still for too long. I’d fed the dog four hush puppies so far and curiously he seemed no worse for wear. I half expected him to blow up or upchuck on the carpet. Attack poodle with the stomach of steel.

When my eyes glazed over, I took a break and called Biohazard.

“A shapeshifter?”

“Werecoyote,” Patrice said.

“How sure are you of this?”

“Without a shadow of a doubt. Several pissed-off Pack members showed up at my office demanding his remains.”

“How is that possible? Shapeshifters don’t get sick.”

“I don’t know.” A note of worry vibrated in Patrice’s voice. “Lyc-V is a jealous virus. It exterminates all other invaders with extreme prejudice.”

If the plague did that to a shapeshifter, what would it do to a regular human?

The rest of the conversation went in a similar vein. The guy in a cloak now had an official code name—the Steel Mary. The attack poodle was all dog, the Good Samaritan was gone forever, and we were all out of clues as to the Steel Mary’s identity. The statements of eyewitnesses proved useless. The medmages had crawled all over the scene and discovered diddly-squat. No names of forbidden gods written in blood on the wall. No accidentally discarded matchbooks from five-star hotels. No mud prints made with one-of-a-kind mud found only three feet to the left of some famous landmark. Nothing. I asked Patrice if she thought praying to Miss Marple would help. She told me to stuff it and hung up.

PAD was next in line. Williams mostly flexed his muscle and rattled his sabers, because PAD hadn’t been called to the scene and Biohazard got all the glory, but after my vivid description of Joshua’s nose falling off, the good detective decided that he had a very pressing and very full caseload, and while he would love to assist my investigation in any way possible, he was simply swamped. Regretful, that.

I checkmarked the three pink slips from Patrice and Williams and called Jim, because I had to. One had to take pains to be polite when dealing with the Pack’s security chief. Even if that chief was your buddy.

A male shapeshifter named Jack put me on hold. I flipped the pink slip over and doodled an ugly face on it.

Jim and I went way back. Before my job as a liaison between the Order and the Mercenary Guild and his job as the Pack’s head spook, we both earned our cash as mercs, contractors for the Mercenary Guild. The Guild assigned each merc a territory. Mine happened to be crap, and well-paying gigs came my way very rarely. Jim’s territory, on other hand, often generated good gigs, but they frequently required more than one body. Usually he cut me in on it, mostly because he couldn’t stomach working with anybody else. During that time I learned that, with Jim, the Pack always took precedence. He could have the guy we hunted by his throat, but one call from the Keep, and he’d walk away without a word.

He was probably going out of his mind. Shapeshifters spent all their life thinking they were free of disease. Last night had ripped their immunity away from them.

I colored the doodle’s nose black and added a spiky mane of wild hair.

“Kate?” Jim said into the phone. Jim looked like he broke bones for a living, but his voice was heavenly. “What the hell took you so long?”

“You say the sweetest things to me, honey bear,” I told him. “I was trying to track down the Mary who killed Joshua.”

Jim growled a little, but didn’t bite back. “He was only twenty-four years old. A werecoyote, good guy. He worked for me once in a while.”

I gave the doodle two sharp horns. “I’m very sorry.”

“Biohazard told me he was infected with syphilis and it ate him from inside out.”

“That’s . . . accurate.”

“They won’t release the remains to us.”

I knew where he was coming from. “Doolittle wants a sample to analyze?”

“Yeah.”

Doolittle was the Pack’s medic and the best medmage I’d ever had the privilege of driving to the brink of near insanity. He was the reason why my friend Derek still had a face. He was also the reason why I was still around at all.

“Jim, Joshua was extremely contagious. Pieces of him fell off, grew pale fuzz, and crawled across the pavement. Biohazard torched him down to his skeleton, which they locked in a hermetically sealed coffin and then cremated. They would’ve dropped a nuke onto the parking lot if they thought they could get away with it.”

“Is there anything left?”

I drew claws on the doodle’s arms. “Unfortunately, no. Georgia Code, Title 38: under Georgia Supernatural Emergency Management Act of 2019, in the event of a clear threat of epidemic, Biohazard has broad emergency powers, which trump everything, including the Pack’s claim on the remains. As far as I know, they didn’t even keep a sample for themselves. It was extremely virulent, Jim. It slithered over salt and fire. If it got out, most of the city would be infected by now.”

The poodle raised his head, a low warning rumble rolling deep in his throat.

I looked at him.

“Visitor,” Maxine’s voice whispered in my head.

“I’ll have to hang up in a minute, so very quickly,” I murmured into the phone. “There were other shapeshifters in the bar. Why did they leave?”

He hesitated.

“Jim. We went through this before: I can’t help you if you don’t level with me.”

“They were driven out. Something that bastard did terrified them out of their minds.”

“Where are they now? I need to interview them.”

“You can’t interview Maria. She’s under sedation.”

“What about the rest?”

There was a tiny pause. “We’re looking for them.”

Oh crap. “How many are missing?”

“Three.”

There were three panicked shapeshifters lost in the city, each a spree killer in waiting. If they went loup, they’d paint the city red. Could this get any worse?

An emaciated shape scuttled into my office with preternatural quickness and perched in my client chair. It might have been a man at some point, but now it was a creature: gaunt, hairless, corded with dried muscle as if someone had stuck it into a dehydrator for a few days and all of the fat and softness had drained from it. The vampire stared at me with glowing eyes and in their red depths I sensed a terrible hunger.

The attack poodle exploded into wild barking.

Why did I even bother asking that question?

“Once again, I’m very sorry. Please pass my condolences to his family,” I said. “If there is anything I can do to help, I’m here.”

“I knew you would be.” Jim hung up.

I hung up and looked at the vampire. Its mouth gaped open and it showed me its fangs: two long curved needles of ivory. Seeing bloodsuckers during daylight wasn’t unheard of, but usually they appeared smeared with sunblock. Considering the dense gray blanket of clouds smothering the skies and weak, late fall sun, they probably didn’t need to bother today.

The vampire spared a single glance for the attack poodle and looked back at me.

I would’ve liked to kill it. I could almost picture my saber slicing into undead flesh right between the sixth and seventh vertebrae of his neck.

I pointed a finger at the attack poodle. “You—quiet.”

“An interesting animal.” Ghastek’s voice spilled from the bloodsucker’s mouth, sounding slightly muffled, as if through a phone.

The vampire repositioned itself in my client chair and crouched like a cat, arms in front.

Of all the Masters of the Dead among the People in Atlanta, Ghastek was the most dangerous, with the exception of his boss, Nataraja. But where Nataraja was cruel and chaotic in his behavior, Ghastek was intelligent and calculating, a far worse combination.

I folded my arms on my chest. “A personal visit. Don’t I feel special.”

“You don’t return your phone calls.” The vampire leaned forward, tapping my doodle with a scimitar claw. “Is that a lion with horns and a pitchfork?”

“Yep.”

“Is he carrying the moon on his pitchfork?”

“No, it’s a pie. What can I do for Atlanta’s premier Master of the Dead?”

The vampire’s features twisted, trying to mirror the emotion on Ghastek’s face. Judging by the result, Ghastek was struggling not to vomit. “Someone attacked the Casino this morning. The People wish to petition the Order to look into it.”

The vampire and I stared at each other. “Can you run that by me again?” I asked.

“Some mentally challenged individual attacked the Casino this morning, causing roughly two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of harm. The bulk of the cost came from four vampires he managed to fry. The damage to the building is mostly cosmetic.”

“I meant the part where the People petition the Order.”

“It was my understanding that the Order extends its protection to all citizens.”

I leaned forward. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the same guys who run the other way the moment a badge gets involved?”

The vampire looked insulted. “That’s not true. We always cooperate with law enforcement.”

And pigs gracefully glide through clear sky. “Two weeks ago, a woman robbed a vendor at gun point and fled into the Casino. It took the cops fourteen hours to get her out, because you claimed some sort of sanctuary privilege that was last invoked by the Catholic Church. As far as I know, the Casino doesn’t stand on hallowed ground.”

The vampire looked down on me with an air of haughty disdain. Whatever faults Ghastek had, his control over the undead was superb. “That is a matter of opinion.”

“You don’t cooperate with authorities unless forced, you lawyer up at the first hint of trouble, and you have a stable of undead capable of mass murder. You’re the last group I expected to petition the Order for assistance.”

“Life is full of surprises.”

I chewed on that for a minute. “Does Nataraja know you’re here?”

“I’m here on his direct orders.”

Warning bells went off in my head.

Ghastek’s superior, the People’s head honcho in Atlanta, called himself Nataraja after one of Shiva’s reincarnations. There was something odd about Nataraja. His power felt too old for a human and he packed a lot of magic, but I had never actually witnessed him pilot a vampire. About three months ago, I ended up getting involved in an underground martial arts tournament, which resulted in me fighting shapeshifting demons called rakshasas. It also resulted in my owing Curran a naked dinner.

If that furry bastard could stop intruding on my thoughts for five seconds, I might have to dance a jig in celebration.

The rakshasas had made a pact with Roland, the People’s leader and my biological father. He provided them with weapons and in return they tried to destroy the shapeshifters. The Pack had grown too large and too powerful and Roland wanted it out of the way before it grew any larger. The rakshasas failed. If Nataraja turned out to be a rakshasa, I wouldn’t be surprised. Roland still wanted the Pack out of the way and Nataraja answered to Roland.

Maybe Nataraja had hatched some sort of a plan in retaliation, and he sent Ghastek here to me to create an appearance of propriety.

Maybe I was just getting paranoid . . .

I looked into the vampire’s eyes. “What’s the catch?”

The bloodsucker shrugged, a revolting gesture that jerked his whole body. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Should I take that as a refusal to accept the petition?”

Ghastek one, Kate zero.

“On the contrary, the Order would be delighted to accept your plea.” I pulled the petition sheet from the stack of forms. The People accumulated money to fund their research. Their extreme wealth went hand in hand with severe frugality. They were notoriously tightfisted. “The Order charges on a sliding scale, according to one’s means of income. For the impoverished, our services are free. For you, they will be shockingly expensive.”

“Money is no object.” The vampire waved his claws. “I’ve been authorized to meet your prices.”

They really wanted the Order involved. “Tell me what happened.”

“At six oh-eight a.m. two men wearing ragged trench coats approached the Casino. The shorter of the men burst into flames.”

I paused with the pen in my hand. “He burst into flames?”

“He became engulfed in fire.”

“Was his buddy made out of orange rocks and did he at any point yell, ‘It’s clobbering time’?”

The vampire heaved a sigh. It was an eerie process: it opened its mouth, bit the air, and released it in a single hissing whoosh. “I find your attempted levity inappropriate, Kate.”

“Consider me properly chastised. So what happened next?”

“The pyromancer directed a jet of flame at our building. His companion aided it by creating a strong wind, which carried the fire toward the Casino’s entrance.”

Most likely a fire mage and a wind mage. A firebug and a whistler, working together.

“The fire swept the front of the Casino, scorching the outer wall and the parapet. A team of four vampires was dispatched to deal with the issue. Their appearance caused the two intruders to shift the flames from the Casino onto the approaching vampires. The intensity of the fire proved to be higher than anticipated.”

“They took down four vampires?” That was unexpected.

The vampire nodded.

“And you let them walk away?” I couldn’t believe this.

“We did give chase. Unfortunately, the two intruders disappeared.”

I sat back. “So they appeared, sprayed some fire, and vanished. Did you receive any demands? Money, jewels, Rowena in lingerie?” Personally, I was betting on Rowena—she was the Master of the Dead who handled the Casino’s PR, and half of the city’s male population would kill to see her naked.

The vampire shook its head.

Was this a prank of some sort? If it was, it ranked right up there with dropping a toaster in your bath tub or trying to put a fire out with gasoline. “How badly did they burn the vampires?”

The vampire gagged. The muscles of its neck constricted, widened, constricted again, and it disgorged a six-inch-long metal cylinder onto my desk. The bloodsucker grasped it, twisted the cylinder’s halves apart, and retrieved a roll of papers. “Photographs,” Ghastek said, handing me a couple of sheets from the roll.

“That’s disgusting.”

“He is thirty years old,” Ghastek said. “All his internal organs, with the exception of the heart, atrophied long ago. The throat makes for a very good storage cavity. People seem to prefer it to the anus.”

Translation: be happy I didn’t pull it out of my ass. Thank the gods for small favors.

The two photographs showed two charred blistered ruins that might have been bodies at some point and now were just burned meat. In random places the undead flesh had peeled away, revealing bone.

A mage who could deliver a blast of heat intense enough to cook a vampire was worth his weight in gold. This wasn’t some two-bit firebug. This was a high-caliber pyromancer. You could count those guys on the fingers of one hand.

I held out my hand. “The m-scan, please.”

The vampire became utterly still. Many miles away, Ghastek was deep in thought.

“You have enough diagnostic equipment in the Casino to make the entirety of the Mage College giddy with joy,” I said. “If you tell me the scene wasn’t m-scanned, I’ll be very tempted to make a new storage cavity in your vampire with my saber.”

The vampire peeled another page from the roll and handed it to me. An m-scan printout, streaked with purple. Red was the color of undeath, blue was the color of human magic. Together they made the purple of the vampire. The older the vamp, the redder the signature. These four were relatively young—their residual magic registered almost violet. Two bright magenta lines sliced through the vampiric traces like twin scars. No matter how old a vampire would grow, it would never register magenta. The tint was wrong. Bloodsuckers ran to the deeper tones of purple.

But magenta still had red in it, which meant . . .

“Undead mages.” Holy shit!

“It seems so,” Ghastek said.

“How is this possible?” I was beginning to sound like a broken record. “The use of human elemental magic is directly tied to cognitive ability, which ceases to exist after death.”

The vampire shrugged again. “If I had answers, I wouldn’t be here.”

Just when I got comfortable with the rules of the game, the Universe decided it was time for a swift kick to my rear. Were-coyotes caught deadly plagues, the People asked the Order for assistance, and undead creatures used elemental magic.

“Do you have any idea who could be behind this? Any suspicions at all?”

“No.” The vampire leaned forward. A long yellow claw traced the slice of magenta across the m-scan. “But I’m dying to find out.”