Magic Triumphs

Curran loomed next to Teddy Jo. His eyes had gone completely gold. I hadn’t even heard him come in.

“Uh-oh,” Conlan offered.

Teddy Jo realized that now would be a very good time to stop talking and clamped his mouth shut.

Curran stared at him with a singular predatory focus. Teddy Jo straightened and took a step away from the table.

“I am the In-Shinar,” I told him. “I’m not omniscient or omnipotent. I’m not a god. If we want to get technical, that’s your department.”

He didn’t say anything.

I took a piece of paper and drew the sign from the box on it. “What does that look like to you?”

“A bra?” Teddy Jo said.

“That’s our only clue as to who sent the box. Have at it.”

He blinked at the sign for a bit, folded the paper in half, then again, and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans.

“Do you still have the corpse bus?” I asked. Teddy Jo ran a mortuary. It catered to a specific clientele, most of them Greek neo-pagans, and a lot of his income came through his side business: making and selling human freezers, autopsy tables, and body-transporting cars. He scoured junkyards, customized his equipment, and rented it out to the city and the surrounding counties.

Teddy Jo grimaced. “It’s not a corpse bus. It’s a Multiple Recently Deceased Efficient Removal vehicle.”

“You do realize that spells MURDER?” Derek asked.

Teddy Jo gave him a look. “Yes, I do. That’s the point.”

Angel of death humor, what would we do without it? “It would really help if you could get the MURDER bus, load these bodies up, and deliver them.”

Teddy Jo’s eyebrows rose. “Where?”

“Everywhere. Drop a couple at Biohazard, one to the Pack, one to the Casino, one to the Witches. Anyone who should reasonably be made aware that these things exist. Give one to the Order too, what the hell.”

“What do you want me to tell them?” Teddy Jo asked.

“Tell them that these things attacked us. There is something wrong with them, and we need to know where they came from. You want to help? Do this, please.”

“I’ll get the bus,” he said.

* * *

• • •

MIRACULOUSLY THE PHONE worked for Curran and he got through to the Pack on the first try. Dali promised to be right there, and she was bringing Doolittle with her. His next call was to the Guild. He called the medmage and insisted on her coming to Cutting Edge to patch me up. Curran and I had reached an understanding. He didn’t protest when I ran headfirst into danger, and I didn’t argue when he then unleashed a crew of medmages on my wounds. The medmage arrived half an hour later, chanted my wounds closed, warned me to take it easy, which we both knew I would ignore, and left.

Dali was still in transit, which wasn’t surprising. “Right there” in post-Shift Atlanta meant about an hour, maybe two. We used the time to gather the bodies, chain them together in case they rose after death, sweep the ash into an airtight plastic bin, and feed Conlan his second breakfast. I tried to give him cereal. He flipped the bowl and put it on his head. We made the fatal mistake of laughing, and he decided the bowl was an essential accessory and refused to give it up. He also decided that cereal was clearly beneath him and spat it out in various creative ways. Derek ran down the street and came back with a smoked turkey leg from a vendor. Faced with two options, hungry Conlan or Conlan full of turkey meat, I went with the latter.

Teddy Jo returned with the bus. Curran, Derek, and I started loading the bodies, while Julie purified the street. When we were down to three corpses, a Pack van turned around the corner and came to a stop near us. Dali jumped out from the driver’s side, swung the rear doors open, took out a folded wheelchair, then picked up Doolittle. For a moment, they made a slightly comical figure, a tiny Indonesian woman with thick glasses carrying a middle-aged black man about twice her size. Then she set him gently into his chair and Doolittle surveyed us.

Curran and Derek were holding two furry bodies. Teddy Jo and I were locking manacles on their feet. Julie had doused the street with gasoline and set it on fire, holding the hose ready in case it got out of control. And Conlan presided over it all from his high chair in the doorway of the office, completely naked, with a half-eaten turkey leg in his hand and a plastic bowl on his head. He saw Doolittle and waved the turkey leg at him.

“Baddadda!”

Why me?

Dali didn’t blink an eye. “Where is Yu Fong?”

“He’s inside,” Julie said. “I’ll come with you.”

She gave me the hose and they hurried into the office.

“Bada!” Conlan squirmed in his chair.

“Stay,” I told him.

“Dadbadaa!”

“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Curran told him.

After the fire burned itself out, we loaded the last body, except for the one wrapped in chains in our Jeep and the spare I’d stashed, chained into our office body freezer. Teddy Jo drove off, and I went inside.

Yu Fong looked about the same.

“What’s the prognosis?” I asked.

Doolittle turned to me. “He’s stable. He’s in a healing coma.”

“How long will it last?”

“I don’t know,” Doolittle said. “An hour, a day, a century. He might wake up when our grandchildren are old.”

Great. “Is there any way to wake him up?”

“Yes,” Doolittle said. “We can drown or suffocate him. He might wake up or he might die. If he does wake up, his healing process may be irrevocably interrupted, and he may still die.”

“Is there any scenario in which he won’t die?” Julie asked.

“Yes,” Doolittle said. “Let him sleep.”

I rubbed my face. My only witness was doing a version of Sleeping Beauty. Maybe I could scrounge up a Prince Charming to kiss him awake.

“There is something inside him,” Doolittle said.

“What do you mean?”

“There is a foreign object inside him. He might have been stabbed with it or perhaps it’s something he has put inside his own body for safekeeping.”

Shapeshifters occasionally took advantage of their rapid regeneration in weird ways. Before Andrea accepted her true nature, she’d had an amulet that blocked her power embedded in her body. Yu Fong might have done the same.

“Could it be keeping him in a coma?”

“Possibly,” Doolittle said.

“Should we get it out?”

“Not unless you want to risk his life.”

Argh.

“You’re not waking him up,” Dali declared. It sounded a lot like an order.

I looked at her. She stared straight at me, her eyes unblinking behind her glasses. A green sheen rolled over her irises. Trying to dominate. Two years as Beast Lady had taken their toll.

I stared back. “Let me know.”

“What?”

“When you remember that I’m not a Pack member. You’re not my alpha, Dali. Turn the headlights down.”

She glared at me. I waited. I lived with a former Beast Lord. My husband hit me with the alpha stare just this morning, after I told him that I was throwing his old T-shirt away. Apparently, as long as it had an intact collar, he considered it a usable garment, no matter how many holes it had.

“You’re not waking him up,” she repeated, this time softer.

“No, we’re not.” Although I’d have given a year of my life to figure out what he was fighting in the clouds, risking his life for it wasn’t worth it. “Does he have any family? Anyone we should call?”

“His family let him rot in a poacher’s cage for years, while they sliced pieces off him to sell on the black market. I doubt they will give a damn. We’ll take care of him at the Keep,” Dali said.

“No,” Julie said.

Dali ignored her. “We’re best equipped to handle this.”

“I don’t think so,” I told her.

“I don’t need your permission,” Dali said.

“You have no grounds to take him. First, he isn’t a member of the Pack, Dali. You would be kidnapping a citizen of Atlanta. Second, Yu Fong fell and made that lovely crater because he was fighting something in the clouds. Something ancient and magic that was aware of the boundaries and of my power, because once I showed up and shifted magic to shield us, it took off. It will come back to finish the job. Sheltering Yu Fong will make the Keep a target, and you don’t have the power to oppose it. Jim won’t let you keep him.”