Magic Burns Read online

  “Treat yourself to a splendid new urban fantasy…I am looking forward to the next book in the series or anything else Ilona Andrews writes.”

  —Patricia Briggs,

  #1 New York Times bestselling author of Iron Kissed

  MORE PRAISE FOR

  MAGIC BITES

  “Andrews shows a great deal of promise. Readers fond of Laurell K. Hamilton and Patricia Briggs may find her work a new source of reading pleasure.”

  —SF Revu

  “The plot moves along at a pleasant clip, and the world building is interesting and well done.”

  —Romantic Times

  “The strong story line coupled with a complex alternative history…will have readers hoping for more.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “An excellent start to a brand-new series.”

  —Dragon Page

  “Fans of CSI…The X-Files, and any other of a host of such subgenre offerings should be pleased.”

  —FantasyBookSpot.com

  “Magic Bites is an enchanting paranormal whodunit that takes the supernatural into new, natural directions.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Her world building and characterizations are exceptional…Magic Bites is not to be overlooked.”

  —Book Fetish

  “A unique world laced with a thick plot full of strife, betrayal, and mystery.”

  —Romance Junkies

  MAGIC BURNS

  ILONA ANDREWS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  MAGIC BURNS

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the authors

  Copyright © 2008 by Andrew Gordon and Ilona Gordon.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 1-4362-0816-5

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To the late David Gemmell.

  You have inspired me with your books.

  It was my dream to meet you,

  and I deeply regret your passing.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to so many people:

  Thank you, Anne Sowards, my editor, for your wisdom, your guidance, and most of all your faith in my ability as a writer. You took a mess and shaped it into a book.

  Thank you, Rachel Vater, my agent, for your tireless devotion to your clients. You’re the best thing that could happen to a writer’s career.

  Thank you, Cam Dufty, Ace’s editorial assistant and quite possibly the most patient woman the world has ever known, for your help with copyedits and a million other things. I owe you a chocolate martini.

  Thank you, Kristin del Rosario, the interior text designer, for the gorgeous layout and for making the book a reality.

  Thank you, Judy Murello, the art director, for the spectacular cover design, and thank you, Chad Michael Ward, the artist, for creating fantastic cover art.

  Thank you, Valerie Cortes, Ace’s publicist, for tirelessly promoting the books in the Kate Daniels series.

  Thank you, all of the generous people who have suffered through my beta drafts, for making this book so much better than how it started out: Charlene Amsden, Bianca Bradley, Susan E. Curnow, Shannon Franks, Elizabeth Hull, Jackie M., Jill Myles, Reece Notley, Lizane Palmer, May, S. K. S. Perry, G. Jules Reynolds, Lys Rian, Melissa Sawmiller, Sonya Shannon, P. J. Thompson, Heidi Tallentine, and Amber van Dyk.

  Finally, thank you, all of the people who read the Kate series. Your e-mails keep me going.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE PHONE RANG IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. THE magic wave was in full swing, and the phone shouldn’t have worked, but it rang anyway, again and again, outraged over being ignored, until finally I reached over and picked it up.

  “Yehmmm?”

  “Rise and shine, Kate.” The smooth cultured voice on the line suggested a slender, elegant, handsome man, all things that Jim was not. At least not in his human shape.

  I clawed my eyes open long enough to glance at the windup clock across the room. “Two in the morning. Some of us sleep during the night.”

  “I’ve got a gig,” Jim said.

  I sat up in the bed, wide-awake. A gig was good—I needed the money. “Half.”

  “Third.”

  “Half.”

  “Thirty-five percent.” Jim’s voice hardened.

  “Half.”

  The phone went silent as my former Guild partner mulled it over. “Okay, forty.”

  I hung up. The bedroom lay quiet. My curtains were open and moonlight sifted into the room through the metal grate shielding the window. The moonlight acted as a catalyst and the metal bars glowed with a weak bluish patina where the silver in the alloy interacted with the ward spell. Beyond the bars, Atlanta slept like some hulking beast of legend, dark and deceptively peaceful. When the magic wave ended, as it inevitably would, the beast would awaken in an explosion of electric light and possibly gunfire.

  My ward wouldn’t stop a bullet, but it kept the magic hazmat out of my bedroom, and that was good enough.

  The phone rang. I let it ring twice before I picked it up.

  “Fine.” Jim’s voice had a hint of a snarl in it. “Half.”

 
; “Where are you?”

  “In the parking lot under your window, Kate.”

  Calling from a pay phone, which shouldn’t have worked, either. I reached for my clothes, left by the bed for just such an occasion. “What’s the gig?”

  “Some arsonist wacko.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, I WAS WINDING MY way through an underground garage and cursing Jim under my breath. With the lights knocked out by magic, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my nose.

  A fireball blossomed in the pitch-black depth of the garage. Huge, churning with violent red and yellow, it roared toward me. I jumped behind the concrete support, my throwing knife sweaty in my hands. Heat bathed me. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and then the fire hurtled past me to burst in an explosion of sparks against the wall.

  A thin gleeful cackle emanated from the garage depths. I peeked out from behind the support in the direction of the sound. Nothing but darkness. Where was the tech shift when you needed one?

  Across from me at the next row of supports Jim raised his hand and touched his fingers to his thumb a few times, imitating an opening and closing beak. Negotiate. He wanted me to engage a lunatic who had already turned four people into smoking meat. Okay. I could do that.

  “Alright, Jeremy!” I yelled into the night. “Give me the salamander and I won’t cut your head off!”

  Jim put his hand over his face and did some shaking. I thought he was laughing, but I couldn’t be sure. Unlike him I didn’t have the benefit of enhanced night vision.

  Jeremy’s cackle reached a hysterical crescendo. “Stupid bitch!”

  Jim peeled himself from the support and melted into the darkness, tracking Jeremy’s voice. His vision worked better than mine in low light, but even his sight failed in absolute darkness. He had to hunt by sound, which meant I had to keep Jeremy talking. While Jim stalked Jeremy’s melodious voice, Jeremy, in turn, stalked me.

  Nothing to worry about, just a homicidal pyromaniac armed with a salamander in a sphere of enchanted glass and intent on setting what’s left of Atlanta on fire. The main thing was to keep the salamander’s sphere safe. If that thing broke, my name would be more famous than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

  “Damn Jeremy, you need to work on your vocabulary. So many good names to call me and the best you could come up with is bitch? Give me the salamander before you hurt yourself.”

  “Suck my dick…whore!”

  A tiny spark flared into existence to the left of me. It hung suspended in the darkness, illuminating both the scaly outline of the salamander’s mouth and Jeremy’s hands clutching the glass sphere with white-knuckled need. The enchanted glass parted and belched the spark. The air hit the tiny packet of energy and the spark exploded into a fireball.

  I ducked behind the support just as the fire smashed against concrete. Flames shot past on both sides of me. The acrid stench of sulfur stung my nostrils.

  “That last fireball missed me by a mile. You shoot blanks with your other salamander, too, Jeremy?”

  “Eat shit and die!”

  Jim had to be close to him by now. I stepped into the open. “Come on, you sniveling shit for brains! Can’t you do anything right?”

  I saw flames, lunged to the side and hit the floor rolling. Above me the fire howled like an enraged animal. The handle of the knife burned my fingers. The air in my lungs turned to heat, and my eyes watered. I pressed my face into the dusty concrete, praying it didn’t get any hotter, and then suddenly it was over.

  Screw this. I jumped to my feet and charged in Jeremy’s direction. The salamander flared within the sphere. I caught a flash of Jeremy’s crooked smile above the glass. It wilted as Jim’s dark hands closed around Jeremy’s throat. The arsonist slumped, ragdoll limp, the sphere rolling from his weakened fingers…

  I dived for it, caught it three inches above the cement, and found myself face-to-face with the salamander. Ruby-red eyes regarded me with mild curiosity, black lips parted, and a long, spiderweb-thin filament of a tongue slithered from the salamander’s mouth and kissed the sphere’s glass in the reflection of my nose. Hi, I love you, too.

  Gingerly I got to my knees and then to my feet. The salamander’s presence tugged on my mind, as eager to please as an overly enthusiastic kitten arching her back for a stroke. Visions of flames and heat wavered before me. Let’s burn something…I slammed my mental shutters closed, locking her out of my mind. Let’s not.

  Jim relaxed his hold on Jeremy and the arsonist sagged to the ground like a wet blanket. The whites of his eyes stared at the ceiling from his slack face, caught by death in a moment of utter surprise. No pulse check needed for this one. Shit. There goes the capture bonus.

  “You said it was a live-preferred bounty,” I murmured. The living Jeremy was worth a lot more than his corpse. We’d still get paid, but we had just waved a third of the money good-bye.

  “It is.” Jim twisted the body on its side, exposing Jeremy’s back. A thin metal shaft, tipped with three black feathers protruded from between Jeremy’s shoulders blades. Before my mind had the time to digest its significance, I hit the deck, cradling the salamander. Jim somehow got there before me.

  We stared into the gloom. Darkness and silence.

  Someone had taken out our mark with a crossbow bolt. Could have taken us out, as well. We had stood by the body for at least four seconds. More than enough time to squeeze off two shots. I touched Jim and touched my nose. He shook his head. With all the sulfur in the air he probably couldn’t smell a skunk if it sprayed him in the face. I lay very still and tried to breathe quietly. Listening was our best bet.

  A minute dragged by, long, viscous, and silent. Very slowly Jim shifted into a crouch and nodded to the left. I had a vague feeling the door lay to the right, but in the darkness with some unknown crossbowman waiting, I would trust Jim’s senses over mine.

  Jim grasped Jeremy’s corpse, slung it over his shoulder, and we took off, bending low, running fast, him ahead and me, half-blind in the gloom, slightly behind. Concrete supports flashed by, one, two, three, four. The tech hit, and before I could put down my raised foot, the magic drained from the world, leaving the battered technology in its wake. The fluorescent lamps in the ceiling blinked and snapped into life with a buzz, bathing the garage in a weak man-made glow. The black rectangle of the exit gaped ten feet before us. Jim dived into it. I lunged to the left, behind the nearest support. The salamander in the globe stopped glowing and went to sleep, looking like a harmless black lizard. My long-range weapon was tuckered out.

  I set it down on the floor and slid Slayer from its sheath. Salamanders are overrated anyway.

  “He’s gone,” Jim said from the doorway and pointed behind me.

  I turned. Far at the back, the concrete wall had crumbled, revealing a narrow passageway probably leading up to the street. He was right. If the bowman wanted to take us out, he had had plenty of time to do it.

  “So he sniped our mark and left?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Jim shook his head. “Weird shit always happens around you.”

  “This was your gig, not mine.”

  A shower of sparks fell from above the door and a green EXIT sign burst into life.

  Jim stared at it for a moment, his features twisted in a distinctly feline expression, disgust and fatalism rolled into one, and shook his head again.

  “Dibs on the bolt in his back!” I called.

  “Be my guest.”

  Jim’s pager went off. He checked it and a familiar neutral mask slid onto his face.

  “Oh no, you don’t! I can’t carry him by myself.”

  “Pack business.” He headed for the exit.

  “Jim!”

  I killed the urge to throw something at the empty doorway. Served me right for taking a job with a guy who served on the Pack Council. It’s not that Jim was a bad friend. It’s just that for shapeshifters, Pack business always took precedence. On a scale from one to ten, the
Pack was eleven and everything else a one.

  I stared at a very dead Jeremy lying like a sack of potatoes on the floor. Probably a hundred and fifty pounds, dead weight. There was no way I could carry him and the salamander at the same time. There was no way I could leave the salamander unattended, either. The magic could hit anytime, setting the little lizard ablaze. Plus, the sniper might still be around. I needed to get out of here, and fast.

  Jeremy and the salamander, each worth four grand. I no longer did a lot of work for the Guild, and gigs of this size didn’t come my way too often. Even split in half with Jim, the bounty would cover my two mortgages for two months. The thought of leaving four grand on the floor made me physically ill.

  I looked at Jeremy. I looked at the salamander. Choices, choices.

  THE MERCENARY GUILD’S BOUNTY CLERK, A SHORT, trim, dark-haired man, stared at Jeremy’s head on the counter. “Where is the rest of him?”

  “I had a slight logistics problem.”

  The clerk’s face split in a wide smile. “Jim took off on you, didn’t he? That will be one capture ticket then?”