Kate Daniels Book 1 - Magic Bites Read online

  The enchantment must have cost a small fortune, and although it had kept the high-rise standing so far, there was no guarantee it would continue to do so. I thought it would. The entire setup had that bizarre illogic peculiar to complex magic. Understanding it required a mind with a specific twist—just like quantum physics. Whatever the future held for Champion Heights, the owners had already recouped their investment several times over. Many couples would be happy to retire on what they charged for a year's rent.

  I parked Karmelion in a lot among the Cadillacs, distinguished Lincolns, and bizarre mechanisms designed to transport their drivers during the magic waves. There was no convenient way to carry an m-scan, so I folded it and slid it between the pages of my Almanac. The night wind came, bringing smells from far away: a touch of wood smoke, the aroma of seared meat. I crossed the lot and made my way up the concrete stairs, flanked by some picturesque shrubbery, to the revolving glass doors. Enchanted glass lost a little of its transparency, but I had no trouble making out the heavy metal grate barring the lobby and the small cage with the guard who leveled a shock crossbow at me.

  I reached to my left and pressed the button of the intercom. It hissed.

  "Fifteenth floor, one fifty-eight, please."

  His voice came back, distorted by the static. "Code, please."

  "Forth he fared at the fated moment, sturdy Scyld to the shelter of God." Without the code he would keep me outside while he queried one fifty-eight and even then I wouldn't get in without being frisked and surrendering Slayer. Parting with my saber was not an option.

  The metal grate slid aside. "Proceed."

  A revolving door admitted me to the lobby, flooded with the light of feylanterns. My steps, loud on the tiled floor of polished red granite, sent little echoes scurrying into the corners. I approached the elevator. The magic was still up, but I'd visited Champion Heights in the middle of a magic fluctuation before. Their elevator worked no matter the circumstances.

  A luxurious green carpet lined the fifteenth floor. The pile was thicker than some mattresses I've seen. Sinking into it, I made my way to the metal door marked 158, pressed the button of the bell, and knocked in case the magic had short-circuited it. Nobody home.

  The metal box of an electronic key card reader, about six by three inches, secured the door. Like all things in Champion Heights, the lock was not what it seemed, magic masquerading as tech. Slayer whispered as it left its sheath, and I slid its blade into the narrow slit of the key card reader. Concentrating on the saber, I put my hand onto the blade. A jolt of magic pulsed from my fingers.

  Open!

  The lock clicked and the heavy door gave under the pressure of my palm. Retrieving Slayer, I stepped inside and locked the door behind me.

  Reaching for the feylantern, I turned the round handle and a wide tongue of blue flame flared into existence, illuminating the apartment. I would never make a living as an interior decorator. My home was a comfortable chaos, my furniture mismatched but highly functional. The esthetic properties of any given piece were secondary to its convenience, and luxury for me meant having a small table by my couch to support a reading lamp and a mug of coffee.

  Not so here. The moment I stepped into this apartment, it was clear that its owner had crafted his environment with a deliberate goal in mind. I was looking at years of selective purchases made by a person for whom the word "sale" held no meaning. The furnishings, the carpet, the spare decorations—all blended to present a distinctive whole, and looking at it produced the same feeling as viewing the reconstruction of an African savannah in a zoo. It was a harmonious but alien habitat of glass, steel, and white plush, all ellipses and curves. Three doors led from the room, one to the bedroom, another to a bathroom with a double sink and a walk-in shower, and the third to the lab.

  The spell-haze did not affect the view from the inside and huge windows offered a vision of midnight Atlanta under the endless black sky. The weak light of the single feylantern caressed the window glass, rendering it invisible, and permeated the darkness outside as if the apartment itself was but a piece of midnight sky, defined by glass and stone but not separated from the world outside. If I stood very close to the window, I could imagine that I was flying high above the city…

  As I watched, the tech hit. Thousands of tiny lights sparked into existence, like jewels among the folds of black velvet and the street lamps flooded the avenue below me in man-made sunshine. The feylantern flickered and died, and bright electric lights came on inside the apartment, murdering the illusion and separating me from the infinite blackness. The glass became impenetrable, and I stood confined by it as if locked in the middle of a transparent cage. Suddenly I felt vulnerable so I turned off the lights, all but a single reading lamp of steel and opaque glass.

  I washed my face and arms up to my elbow, dried them with a fluffy white towel I found hanging on a hook near the sink, and took up residence on the ultramodern couch. Curran's question nagged me: why would the knight-protector give Greg's investigation to a no-name merc? On the surface, it made no sense. I finally managed to look past my own ego. One of the Order's own was dead, a well-known man of substantial power. They wouldn't handle it themselves. They would bring in a crusader.

  The crusaders served as the Order's equivalent of a lancet. Got a nasty boil ready to rupture—throw a crusader at it. Loners, highly skilled and deadly, they were great at what they did and after they did it, they returned to where they came from. Ted expected me to "investigate the crime," meaning he expected me to make lots of noise and draw attention to myself, while the crusader quietly worked under my smoke screen. It chaffed at me for about two seconds, but in the end both parties got what they wanted: Ted got his lightning rod and I got to search for Greg's killer. Everybody won.

  I flipped open the Almanac and pulled the m-scan and the folded cutout of the article Bono had given me from between the book's pages. Glancing at the m-scan one last time, I slid it onto the glass table, unfolded the article, and began to read. The owner of the apartment would arrive shortly. He rarely stayed out past two in the morning—he thought 3:00 a.m. to be an unlucky hour.

  IT WAS CLOSE TO TWO O'CLOCK WHEN A SINGLE cab made its way up the avenue below me. I raised binoculars to my eyes.

  The door of the cab opened and a blonde stepped onto the pavement. She was tall and very slender. The short black dress clung to her narrow hips and long waist, flaring to artfully enclose breasts that looked too large for her body. Her hair, so pale it shimmered white, fell to her shoulders without a trace of a curl.

  Her face was perfectly formed, with high prominent cheekbones, aquiline nose, huge eyes, and a full mouth. As she strode to the highrise, her face wore an expression which on someone less attractive would be called a sneer. Elegant, graceful, and arrogant in her beauty, she was like a young Arabian horse, haughty and cruel and an irresistible challenge to any male.

  A lone passerby stopped, struck by the sight of her. I thought he whistled but could not tell for sure. The blonde ignored his presence without even trying; for her, he simply did not exist. I put away the binoculars and returned to my Almanac.

  Five minutes later the lock clicked and the blonde walked through the door. She saw me and stopped. The sneer vanished. "Oh, good. I have something for you."

  Not again.

  She went to the kitchen, retrieved several protein cans from a cabinet, and put them onto the bar. A bag of dried apricots joined the cans, together with a bag of sugar, a block of chocolate, and an oversized blender. She took a carton of eggs from the fridge and cracked three into the blender. Two handfuls of apricots followed, with several cups of sugar, the chocolate, and the contents of at least six cans. "Ice water," the blonde murmured, nodding to the drink I had gotten myself. "You could've gotten something from the bar."

  "I wanted water," I said.

  The blonde smiled, a strange expression on her face, and turned on the blender. The blades spun, converting the contents into a thick uniform paste
. She unplugged the blender, detached the top with a practiced twist, and drank straight from it.

  "What is it, about two-thirds of a gallon?" I asked.

  She stopped drinking for a moment. "Closer to three-quarters, actually."

  She finished and unceremoniously pulled her dress over her head. I looked at my book again.

  "Are you uncomfortable?" the blonde laughed, stripping her stockings.

  "No, just giving you a bit of privacy." And hoping to miss the glorious moment when my stomach would clench and squirt its burning contents into my throat.

  "You could just admit that I make you ill."

  "There is that."

  "How do you like her?" the blonde asked.

  I glanced up and saw her standing nude on the floor. "Not bad for an ice queen. The breasts are too large."

  The blonde grimaced. "Yes, I know."

  "Why a woman?" I wondered.

  "Because I deal in information, Kate, and men tend to blab their secrets to beautiful women." She smiled. "As you well know."

  "I usually have to threaten men with bodily harm before they tell me secrets."

  "Then I feel sorry for those men. They obviously have poor taste. Do you know who makes the converters that go into our feylamps?"

  "I have no idea."

  "There are four companies, actually. By the end of the week the city council will decide which one of them gets a municipal contract for the next three years. Right now there are three people in this city who know how they will vote."

  "Let me guess, you're one of them?"

  The blonde didn't answer, but her smile widened just a little, permitting a brief glimpse of white teeth. Even a financial moron like me knew the price of that kind of information had to be astronomic.

  Her muscles moved, stretching, twisting, as if a tangle of worms suddenly came to life under her skin. My stomach lurched. I clenched my teeth and tried to keep my dinner where it belonged. The blonde's pelvis shifted, her shoulders grew broad, her legs thickened, while her breasts dissolved, forming a massive male chest. Ropes of muscles coiled, shaping powerful legs and huge arms. The bones of her face crawled, the nose thickening, the jaw becoming strong and square. The eye color darkened to piercing intense blue. The hair dissolved and grew again, this time turning dark brown. I blinked and a man stood before me. Muscular with the crisp exactness of a professional body builder, he was towering and quite well endowed. Blue eyes glared at me from the flat face of a born fighter—no sharp edges, no jutting bone to shatter under a punch. A bit of armor and he would earn the loyalty of any barbarian horde.

  "What do you think?" he asked, his voice deep and commanding.

  I eyed him. "Impressive, but too much."

  He leaned toward me, the blue eyes smoky with a promise I was sure he could fulfill. I tried not to think of the bedroom.

  "Too much?"

  "Yes. I like the menace. It's very masculine, but he looks like he would screw everything in sight and call me 'wench'."

  The barbarian king before me rubbed the bridge of his nose. "What exactly leads you to that conclusion?"

  "I'm not sure. Something in the eyes, I think."

  "So it's a no?"

  "It's a no."

  "I'll have to work on him."

  The barbarian deflated, his awesome musculature slimming into a leaner build. The hair vanished, leaving the head bald, and the face grew longer, with intelligent dark eyes and a large nose. The man I knew as Saiman strode to the bar and drew a glass of water from the sink faucet.

  "Business?" he said, glancing at the m-scan.

  "Yes."

  He nodded, drained his glass and refilled it.

  "I can't feel a trace of magic," I said. "Yet you seem to have no problem metamorphosing. Why is that?"

  He arched an eyebrow at me—a gesture so much like my own that I could've sworn he copied it from me. It was likely. Saiman often mimicked the mannerisms of his clients. He did it consciously, knowing it unnerved them.

  "The key word is 'seem'. Metamorphosis now requires concentration, while during the magic tide it flows naturally. But to answer the essence of your question, I believe my body stores magic. Like a battery. Perhaps it even produces its own."

  He downed the second glass and approached the couch. "How long have I kept you waiting?"

  "Not too long."

  For a moment I thought he would make a comment about the view, and then I wouldn't be able to help myself and have to ask him to shield his own 'view' with some clothes. Fortunately he withdrew to the bedroom.

  Saiman was driven by the desire to create his own Uberman, a super-male that would be irresistible to women. The sexual aspect of his quest interested him much less than the scientific motivation to craft an image of a perfect human being. He engaged in this pursuit of an ultimate shape for purposes unknown, for I truly had no idea what he would do with his Uberman if he ever succeeded. He approached the challenge with the same methodical logic he applied to everything, attempting to gather feedback from a wide pool of subjects, most of whom had no idea what he truly looked like.

  Long ago I argued that his Uberman simply could not exist. Even if he did succeed in creating an image of the essential male, it would fail his expectations. Too much depended on the interaction between two human beings, and ultimately it was that interaction that led to intimacy. He debated me with great passion and I had learned not to argue anymore.

  We met during a merc gig a year ago, bodyguard detail. All mercs did one sooner or later, and it was just my luck I drew Saiman. He was injured at the time, confined to his bed by a postoperative complication from a stomach surgery. His body kept changing while it fought the infection and he proved very difficult to guard. I managed to kill two of the assassins sent to dispatch him. He killed the third with a pencil through the eye. I thought I had botched the job but he had seemed grateful ever since. I didn't complain. His services didn't come cheap.

  Saiman returned wearing loose clothes of dark blue that were cut like common sweats but looked too expensive to be soiled by that moniker. He looked at the Almanac still opened in my lap, the article Bono had given me a few days back laying on the page.

  "Cut from the Volshebstva e Kolduni. What a pretentious title. As if writing 'Spells and Warlocks' in Russian would somehow lend them more credibility. I didn't know you read that trash."

  "I don't. The article was given to me by an acquaintance."

  "The problem with those rags is that the people who publish them don't realize that magic is fluid. They print erroneous information."

  It was an old argument and a valid one. People affected magic just as magic affected them. If enough people believed something to be true, sometimes the magic obliged and made it true.

  Saiman scanned the article. "It's incomplete and full of garbage as always. They classify the upir as a corpse-eating undead. Look, they correctly state the upir has an enormous sexual appetite, but are unaware of the contradiction: an undead has no urge to mate, therefore an upir cannot be undead. They also mention that it will try to mate with anything mammal it can secure long enough to achieve a climax but fail to note that the product of such union usually survives to serve the upir." He dropped the article in disgust. "If you ever need to know more about this creature, let me know."

  "I will."

  "So what brings you to my humble abode?"

  "I need an m-scan evaluated."

  He arched his eyebrow again. I could learn to hate him. "Very well. I'll charge you by the hour. Our usual discount starting…" He glanced at his watch. "Now. Do you want a complete workup?" he asked.

  "No, just the basics. I can't afford the fancy stuff."

  "Cheap client?"

  "I'm working pro-bono."

  He grimaced. "Kate, that's a horrible habit."

  "I know."

  He took the chart, holding it gently with his long fingers.

  "What interests you?"

  "A series of small yellow lines towa
rd the bottom."

  "Ah."

  "What would register yellow? And how much is the answer going to cost me?"

  "A great question. Let me run a test to make sure this isn't a mechanical failure."

  I followed him to the lab. A forest of equipment that would make the personnel of an average college lab giddy with joy rested on black surfaces of flame-resistant tables and counters. Saiman donned a green waterproof apron and a pair of slick opaque gloves, reached under the table and produced a ceramic tray. With a practiced, economic movement, he took the tray to a glass cube in the corner.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "I'm going to scan the m-scan to pick up any residual traces of magic. Full enclosure. I don't want any contamination."

  "I can't afford it."

  "It's free. Your altruism infected me. You still have to pay for my time, of course."

  He touched a lever and the cube rose upward on a metal chain. Saiman slid the tray onto the ceramic platform and lowered the cube, so the glass enclosed the tray. His fingers danced across the keyboard and an explosion of green color flooded the cubicle. It died, flashed again, died, and a printer chattered on a different table, belching a piece of paper.

  He ripped it free and handed it to me. It was blank—a control to make sure no magic traces contaminated the tray.

  Saiman attached the m-scan to the tray, slid it into the cube and repeated his elaborate high-tech dance. This time the printer produced an exact copy of my m-scan.

  Saiman pondered it for a moment and leaned against the table, m-scan in hand. "The problem is, the m-scanner is imperfect."

  My heart sank. "So, it's a malfunction?"