Magic Shifts

CHAPTER 20

I WALKED INTO my house to see the knight and the wizard sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee. If you added in Julie’s thieving skills and my sword, we almost had an adventuring party.

“It’s too bad we’re missing a cleric,” I said.

They both looked at me like I had grown a second head.

Never mind. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

“The earring is gone and I can’t account for one of my people,” Nick said.

I sat in the chair and rubbed my face. Julie positioned herself on the couch with a notebook and several books.

“Go ahead and get it off your chest,” Luther said. “It will make things easier.”

“I told you not to leave it where people had access to it.”

“I didn’t. I put it into the Vault, into the wall containment unit, until an expert from Wolf’s Head could examine it.”

The Vault served as the Order’s repository of all things dangerous and magical, but too valuable to set on fire.

“Is the expert missing?”

Nick didn’t say anything. Great.

“What’s done is done. Let’s not point fingers,” Luther said.

“This is a waste of time,” Nick said.

“Why don’t you like me?” I asked.

Nick leaned back. His hair was cropped very short and his features looked like they were carved from granite. “I could fill the room with it, starting with who you are and what you did.”

He had to be referring to the claiming of the city.

“I had no choice.”

“No, there is always a choice.”

Luther was giving us odd looks. “Should I give you two some time?”

“No,” I told him. “I get it. You have a problem with me. What are you going to do about it?”

“I haven’t decided. I’m contemplating killing you.”

“Knight-protector,” Luther said.

Nick got promoted. He had been a crusader before. He was like a scalpel: when you had a nasty boil, you sent in a crusader to lance it. He got the job done, cleaned up the mess, and moved on. The last time I saw him, he was deep undercover pretending to serve Hugh d’Ambray. He’d spent years infiltrating Hugh’s Iron Dogs, and the former head of the Order, Ted Moynohan, blew his cover just before he died. All of the things Nick had endured were useless. The experience had changed him. The man I had met years ago was deranged but human. The man in front of me now looked like he’d petrified from the outside in. And now he had Ted’s job. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put Nick in charge of Atlanta’s chapter of the Order?

And now he threatened me in my own home, where Julie could hear.

“Contemplate it all you want,” I said. “When you’re done thinking it over, go and get every knight in your chapter. Bring them here and then, maybe, if all of you bigoted fanatics work together, I’ll think about taking your threat seriously. Until then, shut the hell up, because if you threaten me in front of my kid again, I will finish what Hugh started.”

Something slid under Nick’s skin, like two golf balls rolling down his arms.

“Okay,” Luther said. “I can see there is a lot of tension and some unresolved issues. However, none of this is helping us with the ifrit. He has escalated in power and now he has a hold of a knight of the Order. I hate to be a downer, but the city may not survive the next magic wave, so why don’t we all put away our angry faces and try to act like reasonable adults.”

The intensity died down in Nick’s eyes. Whether he liked it or not, he had a duty to Atlanta and so did I.

“You should apologize to the child,” Luther said quietly.

“Sorry,” Nick called out.

“That’s okay,” Julie said without lifting her head. “I’m used to it. Just let me know if you’re going to fight, so I can go into another room. I have a paper due tomorrow.”

Luther turned to me. “See? He apologized. What do you have?”

“You first,” I said.

He reached into his bag and placed a photograph on the table. In it a balding man in his midfifties smiled at the camera.

“Justin Thomas Rogers.” I couldn’t resist rubbing Nick’s nose in it.

Nick scowled. I’d have to thank Ascanio later.

“He was an auctioneer. His exact title is Certified Estate Specialist. When a stranger dies in the city, Atlanta hires one of three firms to liquidate the estate. Rogers and Associates was one of them. The last sale he made was on Saturday, February nineteenth. He didn’t show up to work on Monday.”

“What was the last estate he sold?” I asked.

“Two families, which checked out, and a state case,” Nick said. “An unidentified man walked into traffic in Unnamed Square a week ago. He had a note on his body that suggested he arrived by boat into Savannah. The boat is now gone. The papers said it came from New York, but the New York ports have no documentation of it.”

“Smugglers.”

Nick nodded.

“If we assume that the earring passed from that man to Rogers, that means he had it in his possession for over a week,” I said. “He must’ve been remarkably strong-willed, because the djinn subverted Lago in forty-eight hours.”

“Rogers was a conscientious, principled man,” Nick said. “He did a lot of charitable work. He was a harder nut to crack than a merc.”

“The two of you are forgetting Samantha Binek,” Luther said. “The knight who is missing. The djinn broke through the Order conditioning in less than a day. He is getting stronger with each host.”

“Tell me about Binek,” I said.

Nick grimaced. “Thirteen years in, knight-archivarius. She wasn’t one of mine. She came down from Wolf’s Head specifically to determine if the earring can be moved to the HQ vault. She had a sterling reputation. She went into the Vault to examine it. A knight-defender escorted her. Three hours later Maxine went to check on them. Binek had activated one of the artifacts in the vault, incapacitated the knight, and taken off.”

“What did she use?” I asked.

“An iron mask. He spent two hours thinking he was trapped in a slave ship. He’d ripped half of his nails out trying to break through the walls.”

Knights-archivarius were specifically trained to handle dangerous magic objects. This woman would’ve had all of the training, she would’ve evaluated hundreds of artifacts over the years, and she would’ve taken every precaution. This wasn’t good. We had to get to the djinn before she made her wishes and transformed. The amount of destruction he could unleash with her body would be catastrophic.

“My turn,” Luther said. “I analyzed your glass sample. It’s sand that has been cooked by very high heat. The sand contains concrete dust, so it was likely part of a building, and magically charged algae. It doesn’t look like algae got into the concrete and sand naturally. It appears the algae has been deliberately mixed into it.”

“Algae?”

He nodded.

That was what those in our business called a clue or potentially a gift from above. How many buildings in Atlanta could have magic algae in them? I was betting not that many. I got up and dialed Raphael’s number.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s me. I need help.”

“I’m here,” he said.

I put him on speaker. “Is there any reason why debris from an old building might contain magical algae?”

“Lazarus Builders,” Raphael said. “About two years after the Shift, when they started seeing the first evidence of magic-induced erosion, a builder firm came out with a surefire way to proof the buildings against the magic waves.”

When it came to magic, there was no such thing as surefire anything.

“They found that a particular type of algae had the potential to absorb a lot of magical energy, so they mixed it into their concrete. Initial tests suggested it would be magic-resistant. It worked great for about five years, and then the first flare hit.”

Flares were like magic tsunamis—several days of uninterrupted, ridiculously strong magic. It was the time when gods could manifest.

“Turned out the algae was like a water balloon. It would absorb some magic, but when the flare overloaded it, it popped. Everything they built with Lazarus concrete fell either during the flare or within a month after it. It was one of the bigger scandals in Atlanta real estate.”

“How many buildings are we talking about?”

“That’s the bad news. They licensed the recipe. They even mixed it into stucco and claimed it would magic-proof residential construction. Lazarus was the darling of the business community back then, because everyone panicked and rushed to have new magic-proof corporate headquarters built. Basically anything built between the Shift and the first flare will have that crap in it. It’s so common, I don’t even have a separate file on it.”

Fate sucker-punched me in the face and then laughed.

“I can go through all of my files and pull every somewhat large building out by date, but it will take a while. A couple of days. Do you want my guys to do that?”

“No.” Eduardo didn’t have a couple of days and neither did the city. “Thank you, Raphael.”

“You’re welcome. Any time, Kate. I mean it.”

“Dead end,” Luther said. “Lovely.”

“There is something else we can try . . .”

Someone knocked on my front door. I got up and opened it. A tall man stood in the doorway, carrying a backpack on his left shoulder. He looked older, close to sixty. He wore dark trousers, loose enough to not restrict his movement, tucked into tall boots, a sweater, and a gray cloak over it, a common outfit for someone on the streets of Atlanta. His shoulders were still broad and his posture straight. He must’ve been very strong once, but age had stolen some of his bulk. I could tell by the way he stood that he carried at least one knife under the cloak and he was ready to use it at a moment’s notice. Lines marked his olive skin, but his dark eyes behind round glasses were smart and sharp. Gray sprinkled his once-dark hair and a short precise beard hugged his jaw. He reminded me of a human version of my father.

Julie leaned from her couch. “Mr. Amir-Moez? What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Julie.” His voice was quiet and calm.

I glanced at her. “Do you know this man?”

“This is Mr. Bahir Amir-Moez,” Julie said. “He teaches ancient history and Islamic studies at my school.”

Mr. Amir-Moez turned to me. “I found your note. I accept your help.”

Finally something had gone right. “Honey!” I yelled.

“Yes?” Curran called down.

“Can you tell George that Eduardo’s father is here?”

THE SEVEN OF us sat around the kitchen table. George was glaring daggers at Bahir. Mahon, a big looming shadow, occupied the chair next to his daughter. They agreed to table their discussion until we sorted things out. Bahir, as he asked to be called, took the chair next to me.

“How did you know?” he asked me.

“We put it together,” I told him. “We found out that Eduardo was born in Atlanta and that his mother married her current husband when Eduardo was seven years old. The ifrit referred to him as betrayer’s spawn, which suggested that Eduardo’s ancestors served the ifrit in some capacity and he might be part ifrit himself. We also knew that Eduardo reacted violently when he saw you and walked off a job, despite badly needing the money. When asked why, he said his reasons were personal. We found the dagger you gave him, which seemed inconsistent with Eduardo’s stance on religion. Then this evening I had dinner with my father.”

Nick burst into a coughing fit. I gave him a moment to come to terms with it.

“He said that parents can’t help themselves and, given a chance, they will watch over their children.”

“It does seem rather obvious when laid out like that,” Bahir said.

He reached into his backpack, pulled out a metal box, and set it on the table. Pale silver lines of koftgari stood out, the script tiny, as if written with an enchanted pen on the blackened steel. The Ayat al-Kursi—the Verse of the Throne, Surah al-Fatiha, the last two verses from Surat al-Baqara, the first verse of Surah al-Imran, a large portion of Surat al-Jinn . . .

“How long did it take the smiths?” I asked.

“A year,” Bahir answered.

“You knew the ifrit was coming?” Luther asked.

He nodded. “It started on the day Eduardo was born. At first there were dreams. Violent disturbing dreams. Rima and I had been married for three years, we had an infant son, and I didn’t want to jeopardize them, so I sought treatment. I went to a psychiatrist. I got a prescription for medication, which I took on schedule. The dreams persisted. At first they made no sense; then gradually the meaning began to emerge. Something was coming. Something was hunting me. The visions were full of death.

“I had made a conscious choice to reject the visions. We’d discovered that Rima was a shapeshifter and she had a difficult time dealing with it. She was a werebison, an uncommon breed, and to her knowledge, she had never been attacked by a shapeshifter. Neither of her parents were shapeshifters, and it caused a great deal of tension between her mother and father. Her father asked her to undergo a paternity test. She was so deeply hurt by it. She saw it for what it was—a rejection of all the years her father had been a part of her life. To her it didn’t matter if she was or wasn’t his biological child. She cut off all ties with her family. She needed me, so I spent another year trying to convince myself that I was simply disturbed. My parents were dead. I had nobody to ask for guidance.”

Bahir sighed. “One night I was coming home from work. It was dark. A nervous woman came up to me asking for directions. She drew a knife sheathed in fire and stabbed me with it. I didn’t die. The blade passed through me and when she withdrew it, there was no wound. I was whole. I almost choked her to death out of sheer fear, but reason prevailed and I let her go. She told me that I was an ifrit, part of the ancient line stretching back from the time lost in history, when some ifrit, sensing the waning of magic, sought to mix their bloodline with humans in an effort to preserve it. The ifrits can sense those of the same clan. She said there were others like me who had felt my presence and sent her to test me.”

“That’s a hell of a test,” I said.

“What if you had died?” George asked.

“Then I wouldn’t have been an ifrit.” Bahir smiled. “Eventually I met some of my clansmen. They had the visions as well and they were frightened. I was trying to find some answers. I found only legends cobbled together from fragments of visions and dreams. A long time ago a powerful ifrit ruled a kingdom of djinn. We don’t know his name. One of my clansmen called him Shakush, the Hammer, because his dreams gave him a pounding headache as if his skull were being struck by a hammer. Shakush had many warriors and princes under his command. One day a holy man who trespassed in his territory was brought to him. The ifrit king mocked the holy man and ordered him beheaded. As the holy man’s head rolled off his shoulders onto the floor, his mouth opened and he cursed the ifrit to madness.”

So far this was a paint-by-numbers folkloric cautionary story. Don’t be mean to random strangers and those in need.

“Eventually the ifrit king went mad, but his magic was too potent and even the combined might of his warriors couldn’t overcome it. They failed to kill him. Sometimes, when the power of your enemy is too great, the only thing you can do is contain it. Shakush’s warriors confined his essence to an amulet. Nobody knows what they did with it, but when it surfaced in my dreams, it was an earring on the earlobe of an old woman. The period of technology had weakened the seal on it and magic woke the mad ifrit. At first he was weak, his power a mere whisper. It took him years to corrupt the owners of the earring, but with every victim he grew a little stronger.

“One of my clansmen had the gift of prophecy. He could reach further into his dreams than I could. He told me that Shakush was driven by vengeance. Three ifrit warriors had performed the containment ritual and now Shakush was hunting their descendants, killing them one by one. After he was done, he would turn on the rest of the clan that had betrayed him. That meant that eventually he would make his way to me. I have seen my ancestor’s face in my dreams. He was the one who fitted the lid onto the amulet.”

If the ifrits were as vindictive as my father claimed, there would be no escape and no place to hide. Shakush would find him.

“Did your people offer to help you?” Curran asked.

“They were not warriors. Within our society there are castes. Only those with greater magic and a violent nature enter battle. My clansmen are artists, teachers, and tradesmen. One is a lawyer, another is a pediatric nurse. The woman who stabbed me is an elementary school teacher. They had drawn straws to see who would perform the test and she pulled a short one. She was terrified out of her wits, but Shakush scared her more. In a fight with Shakush, they would simply become victims. He would devour their magic. They were so happy when they found me. They thought I would protect them from the mad creature Shakush had become.”

That must’ve been so terrible. To think that you had finally found the answers and help you needed, only to realize everyone was counting on you to save them. “What did you do?”

Bahir leaned back. “I had to protect myself. I had to protect my son, so I began training. I tried dojos and martial arts clubs, but it wasn’t the right kind of training. So I asked my clansmen and they finally found a man who would teach me. He was a killer, and the things I learned from him turned my stomach.”

“But they felt right,” Nick said.

Bahir nodded. “Yes. There were no points and no submission holds.”

“And your wife?” George asked.

“I kept most of it from her. I didn’t want her to have to carry the weight of knowing that an unseen terrible creature was searching for her husband and her son. It was my burden. My clansmen couldn’t help me fight, but they helped in other ways. One of them was a smith. He made my weapons. The rest did research. We dug through folklore and historical accounts, what little there were. Finally through a combination of many hours of study and prophetic dreams, we came on the design for a box.”

He nodded at the box on the table.

“It should contain the ifrit, sealing him in once again.”

“Should?” Mahon asked.

“Should is as certain as we can be. A box of this design was used once by a holy man to contain an enraged desert marid. If it can hold a sandstorm, it should hold Shakush.”

“And your wife?” George asked. “I’m just trying to understand why you were never in Eduardo’s life.”

“It wasn’t by choice. The breaking point came when a husband of one of the teachers at the college where I taught at the time brought a gun into the building. He was a disturbed man. She had left him and he was trying to hunt her down. I took his life. It happened very quickly. I saw the gun. He fired at her. I reacted.”

His voice sounded flat. “It was almost as if the dagger had taken me over and driven itself into his body. I could’ve disarmed him. I knew how. But I didn’t.”

Being trained as an efficient killer wasn’t enough. You also had to learn to control your stress and your fear, becoming so used to violence that you could detach yourself from the trauma of it and assess the level of violence necessary to respond. When the fight-or-flight response kicked in, Mother Nature shut off our brains. It was a biological survival mechanism. By the time our minds processed the full impact of a predator’s presence, we would already be running for the nearest tree.

Bahir wasn’t a natural predator. Given a moment to think, he probably wouldn’t have killed the man, but in the pressure cooker of the moment, his body simply reacted and his training took over.

“I had committed a great sin,” Bahir said.

“Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land—it is as if he had slain mankind entirely,” Luther said quietly.

“Yes.” Bahir nodded.

The Qur’an had many different verses, some pointing to war, some pointing to peace, but the fifth chapter of it was clear on the subject of murder. Human life was precious.

“I went to the man who taught me and asked him why this had happened. He said I was too old. I started too late. I realized that my son had to be a better fighter than me. Eduardo was six at the time, so I took him to be trained. When Rima found out, she was furious with me. She wanted an explanation, so I told her everything. I had planned out how to tell her, and it sounded reasonable in my head, but when it came to the actual explanation, everything went wrong. It was a jumbled mess. I must’ve sounded like a man deep in the throes of a psychotic break, raving about murder, holy men, and vengeful ifrits. I had begun to build the box by then, so I brought it out. It was plain steel then.”

Nitish had said the inside of it was bone. “What is under the steel?” I asked.

“My father’s skull.”

Okay, then.

“The lid is made of my mother’s bones.” Shame twisted his face. “I desecrated their graves to make it. They both carried ifrit blood. I tested their bones for it and the magic in them will help contain him.”

Yeah, if I were his wife and he had unloaded all of this on me at once, I would be less than thrilled.

“Rima was horrified. She asked me to check myself into a hospital. I refused. She asked me to stop exposing our son to violence. I told her that violence would find him one way or another. At least we could prepare him. She thought I was mentally ill.”

He sighed. “My wife is a gentle soft-spoken woman, but when it concerns our son, she is fierce. The next day I went to work and when I came home, she was gone. I found her two weeks later. She had traveled to Oklahoma and joined a werebuffalo community. I tried to reason with her. I stayed as long as I could, but it became clear to me that she wouldn’t change her mind.”

“Werebison are herd creatures,” Curran said. “And they have a chip on their shoulder. Once she joined them, they would protect her against all predators.”

Bahir nodded. “Yes. It became clear that I would have to murder all of them to get to her or Eduardo. I loved my wife and son, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit more violence and even if I had, what would it resolve? I left and went about my life, training and hoping that growing up among shapeshifters, my son would learn enough to protect himself when the time came. Meanwhile my wife remarried. Her husband adopted my son. She sent me Eduardo’s report cards, and he was listed only as Eduardo Ortego. It gave me hope that he would be difficult to find. It was a false hope, but I held on to it.”

“What is his full name?” George asked.

“Eduardo Bassam Amir-Moez. He was named after his grandfathers.” Bahir sighed. “The visions had died down, and for almost a decade I had barely seen any dreams. Then, a year ago, they started again, more vivid than before. Shakush was growing in power with each new victim and coming closer. He had followed the footsteps of my family.

“Over the years, as I watched the atrocities he committed, I understood that this is bigger than me or my son. Allah doesn’t charge a soul with more than a person can bear. I’m meant to do this. This is the purpose of my life. If Shakush continues unchecked, he will become a plague on this world, and I won’t let it happen. But the smith who had helped me died, so I had to turn to Nitish to have the box finished. I was preparing myself for the final battle. And then I saw my son and I realized that it all had come full circle. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen to me, so I watched him, hoping to be there when Shakush struck. I tried to give him a weapon that would offer at least some slight advantage. I missed the attack.”

He had dragged this weight forward for decades alone. It was a miracle it hadn’t broken him.

“Why didn’t you come to the Order?” Nick asked, his face dark.

“What would I tell you? That I had visions of distant people murdered? That I was part ifrit? Your Order isn’t known for its kindness toward anyone they deem an aberration.”

“The Order is people,” Nick said. “People change.”

“Perhaps,” Bahir said.

“What about the draconoid corpse?” Julie asked from the couch.

“It was one of Shakush’s creatures. I had a fear that my sword would pass through it just like the dagger had passed through me when my people tested me for the first time. I wanted to make sure that my blade worked so I could use it on Shakush next.”

“Talk to me about the box,” Luther said. “It is clearly some sort of transdimensional containment unit.”

“What does that mean?” Mahon asked.

“It is an object that exists as one thing in our reality and something else in a different realm. It leads to a place that is attached to our plane of existence but is also outside it.”

“Like the mists of the Celtic gods,” I said.

“Yes. That means that someone has to activate a portal to that other place, hold it open, and then close it once the djinn is deposited into the box.” Luther turned to Bahir.

Bahir nodded. “There is a ritual. I memorized it. The box must rest on the ground—it won’t work on the second floor, for example—and I must draw a complex circle and write sacred verses around it. Then I will open the portal with my blood and hold it open. Once the earring is placed into the box, if everything is done correctly, I will become a conduit and banish it. The problem is getting the earring into the box. Someone must murder the human host and physically take the earring and carry it to me. The box cannot be moved once it’s positioned.”

“That will be really difficult,” Luther said.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. Shakush would do everything in his power to keep from being put into the box. Even if we brought the entire chapter of the Order and managed to pry the earring from the current host, whoever touched it would become Shakush’s target. He could go through the knights one by one. Ugh.

“We will help,” Mahon said into the sudden silence.

George startled. “Dad?”

He put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t care how powerful he is. Nobody touches my future son-in-law.”

“As long as you stay away from the earring,” Curran said.

Mahon looked at him.

“He’s worried about the wishes you would make,” I told him. “Wish one, Curran is the Beast Lord. Wish two, George is his Consort. Wish three, you turn into an even bigger bear.”

George stared at me, horrified.

“You think so little of me?” Mahon said. “That really hurts.”

He sounded genuinely upset. Oh no. I had hurt my stepfather-in-law’s feelings.

“We still don’t know where Shakush is,” Nick said. “Can you sense him?”

Bahir shook his head.

“I know someone who can,” I said. I would probably go straight to hell for this, but there was no choice. We had to save Eduardo and the city.

“You can’t use Mitchell,” Luther said. “First, it’s unethical. Second, it’s cruel. Third, he was my colleague and it’s a matter of basic human decency. He’s a ghoul, for crying out loud.”

“What if he were no longer a ghoul?” I asked.

Luther opened his mouth and paused. “Are you thinking of setting him on fire again?”

“Was that what it looked like?”

“Yes. I was concerned, actually.”

“Then yes. Something like that.”

“I have a moral obligation to safeguard him,” Luther said. “The answer is no.”

“Why don’t we ask Mitchell what he wants to do?” I said. “If he says no, I’ll walk away. If he volunteers, you’ll help me.”

“Help you do what exactly?” Nick asked.

Explaining it was too long and complicated. “You will see. Bahir?”

“Yes?”

“Why haven’t you turned into a ghoul?”

Bahir blinked. “Was I supposed to?”

Ghouls were djinn without enough magic to assume their true forms. He must’ve had enough magic.

“Can you transform into an ifrit?”

Bahir smiled. “Not all the way.”

That explained it. He already had enough magic, so he bypassed the ghoul stage.

“Okay.” Curran leaned forward, an unmistakable note of command in his voice. Suddenly all of the attention focused on him. “We need to limit this. The more people, the more potential possession targets for the djinn. It will be me, Kate, Bahir, Mahon, George.” He glanced at Mahon. “Anybody else?”

“I’ll talk to the family,” Mahon said.

“Me!” Julie volunteered.

“No,” Curran and I said at the same time.

“But . . .”

“You just got a united parental no,” Luther said. “Stay down, you’ve lost the fight.”

“I will go.” Derek stepped out of the shadows in the hallway.

Curran thought about it.

Derek waited.

“Okay,” Curran said finally. “Who else?”

“I will come,” Luther said. “With the caveat that if the djinn possesses me, one of you will kill me. My magic reserve is too great.”

Curran looked at Nick.

“Six knights,” Nick said. “Including me.”

“That should be enough,” Curran said.

Mahon and Nick rose at the same time, heading for the phone. I went upstairs to get dressed.