Magic Slays kd-5 Read online

  “You need a warrant for that.”

  “I don’t need a warrant if I think you’re in immediate danger. Say, Charlie, do you think she’s in danger?”

  “Oh, I think she’s in a lot of danger,” Charlie said.

  “And would it be our duty as law enforcement officers to rescue her from said danger?”

  “It would be a crime not to.”

  One person dead, one painting the floor with her blood. I guess it was time for jokes.

  “You heard Charlie. Open the door or we’ll open it for you.”

  I leaned a touch farther from the peephole. If they tried to break in, I could probably take them, but I could also kiss any sort of future cooperation from the PAD good-bye.

  “Stop.” A familiar female voice rang outside the door. It couldn’t be.

  “Ma’am, step back,” the cop barked. “You’re interfering with a police matter.”

  “I’m a knight of the Order. My name is Andrea Nash; here is my ID.”

  Andrea was my best friend. I hadn’t seen her for two months, ever since my aunt trashed half of Atlanta. After the final fight with Erra, Andrea had disappeared. About two weeks later I got a letter that said, “Kate, I’m sorry about everything. I have to go away for a while, please don’t look for me. Don’t worry about Grendel, I’ll take good care of him. Thank you for being my friend.” Five minutes later I was on my way to the city to look for her, His Grumpiness the Beast Lord in tow. We found nothing. No sign of Andrea or my attack poodle, who had ended up in her care after the chaos of my aunt’s demolition derby. Then I’d pestered Jim, the Pack Security Chief and my Mercenary Guild buddy, until he put one of his units on combing the city for her. They came back empty-handed. Andrea Nash had vanished into thin air.

  Apparently she was still alive. If I got out of this siege, I’d punch her in the face.

  The cop’s voice gained a new edge. Knights of the Order didn’t screw around. “That’s nice, Miss Nash. Step back or we’ll place you under arrest and you can call the Order from the station and have them bail you out.”

  “Look up above the door. You see a metal paw bolted to the wood?”

  “And?”

  “This business is the property of the Pack. If you break the door down, you’ll have to appear before a judge and explain why you invaded these premises without a warrant, arrested guests of the Pack, and caused damage to Pack property.”

  “We can do that,” the cop said.

  “No, you can’t—because I’ll testify that you had no reasonable cause to enter said building. Unless you’re planning on killing me, in which case, start praying now, because I’ll put a bullet through the head of every man in your squad before you get off a single shot.”

  “I wouldn’t call that bluff,” I said. “I’ve seen her shoot. She’s being modest.”

  “Whose side are you on anyway?” the cop growled.

  “I’m on the side of serving and protecting,” Andrea said. “Your squad killed a civilian in the cross fire.”

  “It was a justifiable kill,” the cop said. “I’m not going to debate it with you.”

  Andrea’s voice vibrated with steel. “One man is already dead. And judging by the blood trail on the pavement, somebody in that building is wounded. Someone either crawled or was dragged to that office and is probably bleeding out inside it. You now have a choice. You can either get the paramedics in there or you can let another civilian die of their injuries, break into an office owned by the Pack, assault the Beast Lord’s wife, and shoot a knight of the Order. You can do it either way, but I promise that if you somehow survive, twenty years from now, when you’re old and broken, you’ll look back at this moment and wish you had taken two seconds and thought about what you were doing, because this is the point where it all went very wrong.”

  Wow. “What she said.”

  There was a long pause. They were thinking it over.

  “Look, I worked with you guys before,” I called. “Call Detective Michael Gray. He’ll vouch for me. If you get paramedics here, I’ll open the door. No fuss, no damage, everybody is happy, nobody gets hauled to court. We’re going to need an ambulance pretty soon, too. I’ve got one of the girls in a tourniquet and if we don’t hurry this along, she’ll bleed to death.”

  “Tell you what,” the cop said. “Open the door, let us take the wounded girl out, and then we’ll call Gray.”

  Like I was born yesterday. “The moment I open the door, you’ll rush me. I’ll wait until the paramedics get here.”

  “Fine. I’ll make the call, but you’re playing with her life. She dies—it’s on you, and I’ll personally book you.”

  I slid the metal guard shut and went back to the women. The dark-haired woman stared at me with haunted eyes. “You’re going to let them have us?”

  “If it’s a choice between your friend’s life and your freedom, yes. For now, we’ll wait. My best friend is on the other side, and she won’t let them do anything stupid.” I looked at the dark-haired woman. “When Ghastek fainted, why didn’t either of you grab the vampire’s mind?”

  “I tried. It wasn’t there.”

  “What do you mean, not there?” Vampire minds didn’t just blink out of existence.

  The dark-haired woman shook her head. “It wasn’t there.”

  “She’s right,” Emily said. “I tried, too. It’s like I couldn’t navigate anymore.” She shivered on the floor. “I’m cold.”

  I went into the storage room, pulled a spare cloak from the hook, and covered her with it.

  Emily’s lips had turned blue. “Am I going to die?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MINUTES DRIPPED BY, COLD AND SLOW. FIVE. SIX. Eight.

  A loud knock echoed through the door. “Kate?” Andrea’s voice called.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have paramedics with me. Let me in.”

  I unbarred the door and swung it open. Four paramedics sprinted into the room. Andrea followed them. She was short and blue-eyed, and for some reason the tips of her short blond hair were frosted with neon blue. The barrel of a rifle protruded over the shoulder of her jacket. Knowing her, she probably had two SIG-Sauers under that jacket, a combat knife, and enough bullets to take on the Golden Horde.

  Normally Andrea’s face wore a nice easygoing expression that made random strangers want to pour their hearts out to her. One look at her now, and they would cross to the other side of the street. Tension locked her face into a rigid, strained mask, and she moved like a soldier in enemy territory, expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades at any moment and ready to fire back in a split second.

  Behind her two cops in PAD uniforms waited at the door, giving me their best versions of a cop scowl. Strangely, I felt no urge to quiver in terror.

  Andrea stepped closer and kept her voice low. “I leave you alone for eight weeks and you get into a pissing match with the PAD.”

  “That’s just how I roll,” I told her.

  Emily screamed.

  “Excuse me.” I went over to where the paramedics had lifted her onto the stretcher. She reached out and gripped my hand.

  “It will be okay,” I told her. “You’re going to the hospital. They’ll take care of you.”

  Emily didn’t say anything. She just clutched my hand and didn’t let go until they loaded her into the ambulance. A stretcher with Ghastek followed into the second vehicle, and then the dark-haired woman came out, wrapped in a blanket, led by two paramedics. The ambulance doors closed and the two emergency vehicles took off wailing like banshees.

  When I came back into the office, it was empty, except for Andrea and a puddle of blood on the floor. “Where are the cops?”

  She shrugged. “They cleared out.”

  We looked at each other. She’d saved my bacon. That didn’t change the fact that she’d disappeared for two months. And now something was wrong.

  “What the hell?” Andrea glared at me. “How in the w
orld did you end up with three navigators in your office with the PAD outside? They were ready to storm your office. Are you nuts?”

  “What the hell back at you. Where have you been? Did you forget how to use the phone?”

  Andrea crossed her arms. “I wrote you a letter!”

  “You wrote me a note that made my hair stand on end.”

  The phone rang. Now what? I marched to my desk and picked it up. “Yes?”

  Curran’s voice filled the phone. “Are you okay?”

  It was completely absurd, but hearing him instantly made me feel better. “Yeah.”

  “Do you need help?”

  His voice was perfectly even. The Beast Lord was a hair away from charging to my aid.

  “No, I’m good.” For some reason my insides clumped into a painful knot. I could’ve been shot and I would have never seen him again. That was a new and unwelcome feeling. Great. Now I had anxiety. Maybe if I slapped myself real hard, I’d snap out of it.

  I forced the words out. They sounded strained. “Who snitched?”

  “We have people monitoring police radio frequencies. They gave Jim a heads-up in case our security had to storm the PAD offices and bust you out of there. I found out when I saw Jim walking down the hallway snickering to himself.”

  I made a mental note to punch Jim in the arm the next time I saw him. “Thought it was funny, did he?”

  “I didn’t think it was funny.”

  I bet. “People were about to die and I could save them. There was a girl . . . Anyway, I’m not hurt. I’ll be home for dinner.”

  “As you wish,” he said.

  My heart made a little jump. I love you, too.

  The tension in his voice eased. “You sure you don’t need your Prince Charming to come and save you?”

  The knot in my stomach evaporated. My Prince Charming, huh. “Sure, do you have one handy?”

  “Oh, I think I could scrounge one up somewhere. As often as I have to rescue you . . .”

  “I’m going to kick you in the head when I get home. Repeatedly.”

  “You could try. You probably need the exercise since you sit on your butt in the office all day.”

  “You know what, don’t talk to me.”

  “Whatever you want, baby.”

  Now he was just jerking my chain. I growled at the phone.

  “Hey, before you hang up—I sent Jackson and Martina down to track Julie. We should know something tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up. Rescue me. Bastard. I wouldn’t just kick him, I would kick him so hard he’d feel it.

  “Nothing changed, I see.” Andrea grinned. The smile looked a bit brittle around the edges. “Still enjoying your honeymoon? It’s all rainbows, and sugar hearts, and chocolate kisses?”

  I crossed my arms. “Where is my dog?”

  “In my truck, eating the upholstery.”

  We both looked at the blood. If we let Grendel in, he’d try to lick it.

  I went to the back room and got rags, peroxide, and a bucket. Andrea set her rifle aside and pulled up her sleeves.

  We knelt and began to mop up the stain.

  “God, that’s a shitload of blood.” Andrea grimaced. “Do you think the girl will survive?”

  “I don’t know. She took several shots from an M240B. Her leg is all tore up to hell.” I squeezed the blood from the rag into the bucket.

  “How did it happen?” she asked.

  I wanted to grab her and shake her until she told me where she had been these past months. But at least she was here and she was talking. I would get the story out of her sooner or later.

  “Ghastek called. Said they had a loose vamp and it was heading my way. I went out there and chained it up. I had it wrapped around the tree, then Ghastek got close enough to grab it. His guys and the PAD’s First Response showed up with the big gun. They had some words, and then Ghastek fainted.”

  Andrea paused, her hands on a bloody rag. “What do you mean, fainted?”

  “Took a dive. Kissed the pavement. Swooned like a Southern belle after her first kiss. Had a dreadful case of the vapors.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “His eyes rolled up and he went down, like someone knocked him out.” I dumped some clean water on the floorboards. “Then the vamp’s eyes ignited red and the PAD opened fire. Ghastek had three people with him. The man was cut down in the first second or two and the bloodsucker went for him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I got the four of us in here and barred the door, and the rest you know.”

  Andrea sighed. “It’s not good to deny the PAD access. They don’t like that.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Like where she’d been these past two months. Maybe she’d joined a nunnery. Or the French Foreign Legion.

  “You could’ve called the Casino. They would’ve unleashed a horde of lawyers.” Andrea poured peroxide onto the wet wood.

  I straightened. “The First Response Unit is all trigger-happy jocks. They were still swimming on the high of taking out a bloodsucker. I listened to them pound bullets into the pavement for nearly five minutes. It was overkill. The only way their day could have gotten better would be if they could kill another vampire. Or perhaps several. If I called the Casino, no matter what I said, the People would send a vamp out. That’s their default response. The PAD would shoot it, and the People would retaliate. It would spiral out of control, and I wanted everybody calm so I could keep Emily breathing.”

  “Did Ghastek say why they had a loose vamp running around?”

  I grimaced. “Something about a pregnant girl fainting.”

  Andrea wrinkled her nose in a telltale shapeshifter sneer. “I smell bullshit.”

  She was right. Two navigators, both fainted while piloting the same vampire? Ghastek fainting? That just didn’t happen.

  I got a dry rag and wiped up the peroxide. The stain didn’t look too bad now. Still, once blood stained something, it stayed there forever, even if you could no longer see it. My office was christened in Emily’s blood. Yay.

  I dumped the rag into the bucket and looked at Andrea. “My day didn’t go well.”

  “I see that.”

  “The PAD probably wants to shut me down, the People will find some way to blame me for the slaughter of the vampire and expect restitution, and Curran found out that I risked my life to save a Master of the Dead, which means I’ll have a lot of explaining to do at dinner, because Curran believes I’m made of glass. If I had been shot and the Pack found out that the Beast Lord’s mate and sugar woogums had been injured as a result of the People’s fuckup, they would have collective apoplexy and storm the Casino.”

  “Aha,” Andrea said. “I’m going to ignore that you just referred to yourself as ‘sugar woogums.’ Is there a point to this story?”

  “The point is, I have no patience left. You will tell me where you went when you vanished. Now.”

  Andrea raised her chin, as if daring me to take a swing. “Or?”

  Or what exactly? “Or I will punch you right in the face.”

  Andrea froze. For a second I thought she would bolt for the door. She sighed instead. “Can I at least get some coffee first?”

  WE SAT IN THE KITCHEN AT THE OLD, SCARRED TABLE, and I poured two-hour-old burned coffee into our mugs.

  Andrea looked into her cup. “I was on the north side of the gap when your aunt appeared for her final showdown. I was still pissed off about . . . things and it messed with my head. So I picked out a nice spot for myself on a pile of debris right on the lip of the gap and set up my rifle. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When your aunt made her grand entrance, I tried to shoot her in the eye. Except she moved and I missed. And then she started blasting fire all over. That’s where the lack of clear head bit me in the ass—I had no exit strategy. She barbecued me like a rack of ribs. By the time they peeled me from that debris, I had third-degree burns over forty percent of my body. The pain was too much. I
passed out. Apparently I changed into my other self in the hospital bed.”

  Shit. Lyc-V, the shapeshifter virus, stole pieces of the host’s DNA and dragged them over to its next victim. Most of the time animal DNA transferred over from animals to human hosts, resulting in a wereanimal: a human who took on beast shape. Once in a while the process happened in reverse, and some unfortunate animal ended up as an animal-were. Most of them were pathetic creatures, confused, mentally shortchanged, and unable to comprehend the rules of human society. Laws meant nothing to them, and that made them unpredictable and dangerous. Regular shapeshifters murdered them on sight.

  However, every rule had an exception, and Andrea’s father, a hyenawere, had been one. Andrea remembered very little of her father. She once said he had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. That didn’t prevent him from mating with Andrea’s mother, who was a werehyena, or bouda, as they preferred to be called. His blood made Andrea beastkin, and she went to great lengths to hide it. She joined the Order as a human, subjected herself to torturous methods to pass all the necessary tests, graduated from the Academy, and excelled at being a knight. She was on the fast track climbing the Order’s chain of command when a case went sour and got her transferred to Atlanta.

  The head of Atlanta’s Order chapter, Knight-protector Ted Moynohan, knew that something was wrong with Andrea, but he couldn’t prove it, so he kept her on support duty. Ted didn’t play nice with shapeshifters. In fact, he didn’t even consider them human. That was one of the reasons I left. Despite it all, Andrea remained fanatically loyal to the Order. For her, the Order meant honor and duty and a sense of serving a higher cause. Shifting in the hospital bed had blown her closet door wide open.

  Andrea kept her gaze firmly in her cup. Her face had a strained blank look, her jaw set, as if she were dragging a heavy boulder up a mountain and she was determined to make it to the top.

  “The thing with your aunt didn’t go well. Ted had called in reinforcements from everywhere. Twelve knights died, among them two masters-at-arms, one diviner, and a master-at-craft. Seven others were severely injured. The Order conducted a hearing. Since my cover had been blown anyway, I thought it would be a good time to make a case that someone like me could be of use to the Order.”