Magic Shifts Read online

  He kept going. How had he even managed to figure out all of this in less than forty-eight hours? With each item Bob’s expression darkened a little more.

  “. . . and finally the remaining $16,000 to restock the supply of ammunition for the weapons room. In the interests of making sure the money is distributed as assigned, Cutting Edge designates me as the treasurer for these funds.”

  “All in favor of grabbing this money before they change their mind and appointing that guy to handle all the admin crap with it?” Rigan asked.

  “Don’t you see?” Bob pointed at Curran, who loomed next to Barabas in his dark cloak. “It’s him. He’s bankrolling it.”

  “I don’t give a flying snake who is bankrolling it,” Sonia told him. “It’s money, Bob! Money in hand!”

  Bob ground his teeth. “We all fought for this spot. We earned it. You can’t just let an outsider come in and take it over. He’s buying his way in.”

  “Would you care to explain how exactly I am an outsider?” I asked. “That’s mean of you, Bob. My feelings are all injured.”

  The crowd snickered.

  Rigan turned to Bob. “He isn’t asking for anything.”

  Bob opened his mouth and clamped it shut.

  Yep, you’ve just been outmaneuvered. Curran didn’t ask for any position in the Guild except for that of an ordinary merc.

  Curran smiled.

  “The man is giving us magic money with no strings attached,” Rigan said. “He hasn’t asked for any special power. He isn’t bargaining with us. He’s just offering us money. Do you have money, Bob? If you want to give us 150K, I’ll use yours instead. Hell, I’ll use anybody’s money to get gigs coming into the Guild again.”

  “Let’s vote,” Sonia said, and raised her hand.

  Rigan put his hand up. Ivera hesitated.

  “Ivera, shit, piss, or get off the pot,” Rigan said.

  Mercs, people of genteel disposition and refined manners.

  Ivera raised her hand. Bob shot her an injured look.

  “We need the money,” Ivera said quietly.

  “Done.” Rigan rubbed his hands together. “We just passed the budget for the next two months.”

  Bob spat on the floor and walked out. Ivera followed him. Wrong move. He’d just given Curran the run of the field, and Curran wouldn’t waste the opportunity.

  Curran pondered Bob’s spit. “We need to clean this place up. Grab a shovel or a broom, and let’s go.”

  “I’m not a janitor,” Paula, one of the mercs, called out.

  Curran turned to her. “Funny, I’m not a janitor either. Although that depends on who you ask. Sometimes I end up cleaning up other people’s messes. But we’ve all been there. That’s what being a merc is, right?”

  “You wouldn’t know,” Paula said.

  Curran glanced at her. “I take it you come to us from a privileged background.”

  Paula drew back. “That’s none of your business.”

  “I don’t come from money,” Curran said. His voice rolled, filling the space. “Everything I have I made with my own two hands, and I have to work hard every day for it.”

  “Even Daniels?” another merc asked.

  That got some giggles. Curran cracked a smile. It was a bright, infectious smile. “Especially Daniels. I work to keep her daily. Otherwise she wouldn’t put up with me.”

  More laughs.

  “I thought I was going to be rich at one point, but when I left my people, instead of paying me, they gave me shares in this Guild.”

  “You got suckered,” someone called out.

  “That’s what they thought, too,” Curran said. “Turns out I suckered them. I think this place is a cash cow.”

  People laughed.

  “You need to have your head examined,” Paula volunteered.

  He ignored her. “I’m not here to make speeches or to run anything. I’ve been there and done that. I have a family now and I’m here for only one reason. I’m here to make money.”

  He had said the magic words. They were listening now.

  “When I hire someone, I look at the tools of his trade and his place of work. If I am hiring an electrician, I want her shop to be clean and organized and her tools to be in good repair. If I am hiring a killer, I want to know he has respect for his job and his weapon. Look around you. There is garbage on the floor. Dirt. Old food. The place doesn’t smell too good and looks worse.”

  The mercs looked about, as if seeing the Guild for the first time.

  “If I walked through that door right now and saw this, I wouldn’t hire us. We look weak. We look sloppy.” Curran shook his head. “Judging by this place, you could never tell that this is a guild of skilled tradesmen. Because that’s what you are. You put your life on the line every day to make a buck and to help people. Not every Joe Blow can do this job. This is just as much a guild as an electricians’ or masons’ guild, except that when a member of this guild screws up, instead of the power going out or the building looking crooked, people die.”

  They were hanging on his every word now.

  “You deserve better than to come to work in garbage. Once the gigs start coming in, we’ll hire janitors and we’ll pay them well, because we’ll have the money to spare. But for someone to hire us, he has to make it through the front door without gagging. Besides, that’s my kid over there.” He nodded at Julie. “I don’t want her to think that I work in a dump. So I’m going to get off my ass and clean this place up. If you are too well bred to take pride in this place or if you are too scared of dirt, I don’t mind. Go sit out of the way with the rest of the special snowflakes.”

  • • •

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I stood next to the Clerk as he pulled the list of Eduardo’s jobs. I was feeling light-headed. My left side itched all over. But if these were the worst side effects I got, I would be thrilled.

  The Guild had turned into a bustling hive. Trash was being swept, debris was being shoveled into wheelbarrows and, across the floor, Curran single-handedly picked up huge chunks of brickwork that had fallen off the walls and carried them outside.

  “Here is everything.” The Clerk handed me a handwritten list.

  I scanned it. Routine, routine, routine . . . Nothing even remotely pointing to Arabian mythology. Nothing in that particular subdivision. This looked like a dead end . . . Eduardo had worked a lot in these few weeks. Did he ever sleep?

  Wait.

  I pointed to an entry on the fifth of February. “It says here he declined a gig.”

  Clerk checked the list. “I remember that. He took a job in the morning, came back two hours later, and dropped it.”

  Dropping a gig wasn’t unheard of, but once you committed to a gig, you had to do it, so the Guild allowed only three dropped gigs per year. This was a blue gig too, which meant double rate. “What happened?”

  “It was a bodyguard detail, VIP client. Rose was with him on it. I did the interview with her afterward for the liability and evaluation, and she said that everything was fine until Eduardo saw a neighbor come home. Hold on . . . I don’t remember this that well.” Clerk flipped through another book. “There. ‘A man in his early fifties, six foot tall, large frame, dark hair, dark eyes, short beard, olive complexion, glasses . . .’”

  I’d bet my arm this was Nitish’s customer.

  “‘. . . riding a breathtaking black Arabian horse.’”

  “Arabian?” That by itself didn’t mean anything.

  “Yes. Rose knows her horses. She went on for about five minutes about how good that horse was. Let’s see, Rose ‘made a comment to Eduardo, “There goes a million-dollar horse.” Eduardo looked at the man as he was dismounting. The man recognized Eduardo and called him by name. Eduardo didn’t answer, went inside the house, got his gear, and left. The man watched him leave but didn’t interfere.�
� The end.”

  Hello, Eduardo’s stalker.

  The Clerk looked up. “He came straight here, dropped the gig, and took another one. I told him it was a bad habit to get into and he said it was personal.”

  “Can I have the address of the neighbor?”

  “No, but here is the address of the gig.” Clerk wrote it down on a piece of paper. “Just this once.”

  “I promise.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?” Clerk asked.

  I didn’t like the sound of that “was.” “He still is.”

  “I hope you find him.”

  “So do I.”

  I needed Derek. It would be dark soon and I had to talk to Mitchell, because he was still my best bet to figure out if something was influencing the ghouls in the Atlanta area. I couldn’t miss that date.

  I glanced up and saw Ascanio picking his way across the floor. A middle-aged African American man in a suit walked next to him.

  Ascanio saw me and made a course correction.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “This is Mr. Oswald,” Ascanio said. “He came by the office, so I thought it would be better if you talked to him yourself.”

  Mr. Oswald. The woman whose family we saved from the wind scorpion had the last name of Oswald.

  I held out my hand. “Mr. Oswald?”

  “Thank you for saving my wife and my kids,” he said.

  Normally I would offer to take him to one of the side rooms, but right now everything was filthy, so we might as well stand. “No problem, sir. Sorry about the accommodations. We had some trouble the last magic wave. How is your family doing?”

  “They’re doing well,” he said. “We’ve hired movers and put the house on the market. We don’t want to take any chances.”

  “That’s understandable.” Keep him talking . . .

  “Pamela mentioned that you asked if anybody had a problem with us or our cats.”

  Please tell me that someone had a problem with you and that you know his name and address. Please, Universe, do me this one favor.

  “A couple of weeks ago I was doing some yard work after that storm we had. I was in the front yard and this man came up to me and started ranting about how our cats get on his car.”

  “Have you ever seen him before?”

  Mr. Oswald shook his head. Of course not. That would be too easy.

  “I told him that he must have me confused with someone else, because Sherlock and Watson are inside cats. It makes no sense, if you ask me. A cat is a predator. He must go out and hunt to be fulfilled, but the kids are scared that something will eat them, so we keep them inside.”

  “What did the man say?”

  “He became very agitated.” Mr. Oswald frowned. “He raised his voice, waved his arms around, and proceeded to what I can only describe as ranting. I thought he might be intoxicated. Eventually he got to the part where he told me that everything was fine until ‘you people’ moved into the neighborhood with ‘your spoiled brats.’ At that point I told him to get off my property.”

  “Did he?”

  “He told me that now his hands were tied and walked off.”

  I pulled my small notebook out. “What did he look like?”

  “Late fifties, dark hair, balding, average build.”

  “White, Hispanic . . . ?”

  “White. He wore a suit and tie. Glasses.”

  Too generic. “Anything else? Anything you can remember?” I asked. “Tattoos, scars, anything out of the ordinary?”

  “He wore an earring.” Mr. Oswald thought about it and nodded. “Yes, I remember. He wore an earring in his left ear, one of those dangling earrings with a very large glass gem in it. I thought it was strange because it didn’t fit him at all.”

  “How do you know it was glass?”

  “It was bright red and the size of an almond in a shell, almost an inch long. I thought it looked ridiculous.”

  Alarms went off in my head.

  “Can you draw the earring?” I passed the notebook to him.

  He sketched a quick shape and passed it back to me. It looked like a cluster of large grape berries fused together and covered by a metal cork with the gem in its center.

  “It was obviously a very bad imitation,” he said. “The gold looked too pale, like one of those metallic paints, and the earring was old and dented.”

  Crap. Old was bad. A simple design was also bad.

  “Was the gem faceted?” I asked.

  “No, it was smooth. What is it called?” He grimaced.

  “Cabochon cut,” Ascanio said.

  “Yes.”

  And we just went from bad to worse. “Thank you so much, Mr. Oswald. You were of great help.”

  “Of course. Sorry we didn’t tell you sooner, but I never mentioned it to Pamela. She was already worried about the neighborhood.”

  “Why was she worried about the neighborhood?”

  “We had some odd things happen. It started with the cars. We’ve got a neighbor down in the cul-de-sac. He’s what you might call a bike enthusiast. Every damn Sunday if the tech is up, right when we’re trying to sleep in, he starts riding his bike up and down the street. Two weeks ago I saw him crying on the curb. Someone had crushed his bike and all of his cars. I saw what was left—it looked like someone stepped on them.”

  You don’t say. “When was this?”

  “Last Monday. But the worst thing was last Thursday. We decorated for Shift Day. There are a lot of kids on our street.”

  Shift Day was a new holiday, born from the terror of the first magic wave years ago. On the anniversary of it, people put out decorations: streamers made with ribbons, crosses, crescents, the Star of David. They lit blue lights and little kids went up and down the street knocking on doors and handing out little charms in exchange for cookies and candy. It was a way to celebrate life on the anniversary of the day when one-twelfth of the Earth’s population died.

  “We had all the decorations out, the ribbons, the wire monsters, everything. The whole subdivision was decorated. Then overnight everything disappeared.” Mr. Oswald cleared his throat. “All of it gone in the entire neighborhood, like it was never there. I talked to Arnie across the street and he says he was coming home late that night. He drove past the decorations, pulled into the garage, and then remembered to go grab the mail, so he walked back out. We are serious about the decorations at our house. We’d wrapped our tree in ribbons. It took the kids a good hour. Arnie might have been a minute in the garage, but when he came out, everything was gone on the entire street. What kind of magic can make it all vanish in a couple of minutes?”

  The kind of magic that turned a normal middle-aged man into a sixty-five-foot giant. Last Thursday was February 24. Eduardo disappeared on Monday, February 28. “Mr. Oswald, could you think back for me. When did you talk to the man about your cats?”

  “A few days ago,” he said.

  “Was it before or after that Thursday?”

  He frowned. “It had to be before. I left on Friday, so it must’ve been . . . It was Wednesday. I remember it was Wednesday, because I took the trash to the curb.”

  “And you don’t know who might be behind this?” I asked.

  “No idea. But I hope you find the bastard. Well, I better get going.”

  “Of course. Thank you so much for your help.”

  He went out.

  “Why is it important if the gem was faceted?” Ascanio asked.

  “Because people didn’t start cutting gems until the fourteenth century. Before that they didn’t have the tools, so they shaped them into cabochons. That man saw an ancient earring with an inch-long ruby in it.”

  I turned to Ascanio. “Do you work for me?”

  “Yes. You promoted me from unpaid to paid intern.”

  �
�Whose idea was it to make you an intern in the first place?”

  “Yours. Andrea thought it was too dangerous,” he said helpfully.

  “That’s because Andrea has a better head on her shoulders than I do.” There was a reason why she was my best friend. “I need you to call the Chamblee and Dunwoody Police Departments and ask them if there were any complaints against the Oswalds specifically or anything in their neighborhood.” Given that the Oswalds’ house was right on the border, there was no telling to which department the complaints might have been placed.

  Ascanio got a weird look on his face. “You already told me to do that. They had no complaints.”

  “Did you call or go there in person?”

  “I called.”

  Since he was an intern, I had to train him. “A loud motorcycle, a bunch of bright decorations, and cats who sit on people’s cars. What do they have in common?”

  “A cranky neighbor who shakes his cane and yells at people to get off his lawn.”

  There was hope for him yet. “Cranky neighbors complain and they usually complain to the authorities, and often in writing.” And sometimes, when their complaints are ignored, they make deals with arcane powers. Unfortunately, there was always a price to pay. “Can you be charming, Ascanio?”

  Ascanio unleashed a smile. He didn’t just grin, he launched a smile like a missile from a catapult. It would likely have the same catastrophic impact on anything female, ages fifteen to thirty. Perfect.

  “I need you to go to the Dunwoody Police Department and be charming. Ask around. Someone has to remember this man calling in. If you don’t find anything, go to the health department, then to animal control. Do you have a car?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  “Go and do this for me. Don’t come back until you dig something up. I need a name.”

  “Okay. And then will you remember me?”

  “I don’t know. I have amnesia, paralysis, and a death wish, and they don’t go away just like that.”

  He opened his mouth and froze. “Okay. I’m an ass. She wanted to know what could happen, so I told her. But I shouldn’t have.”