“I went up to the door.” Jim looked at his cup. “The place smelled wrong. A weird scent, dusty, pungent, and bitter, not something I’ve ever come across before.”
“Like herb dust?”
“No, that wasn’t it. Not anything I recognized. And it was too quiet. There should’ve been four people at the office. Not a damn whisper, no sigh, no sound, nothing.”
Roger worked at that office. And Michelle. I liked Michelle; she was nice.
“I opened the door and smelled blood. The place was empty. There was a symbol on the floor in magic marker.”
“What kind of a symbol?”
He shook his head. His eyes turned distant. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was confused, except Jim didn’t get confused.
“A Chinese symbol,” he said slowly.
“Like a sinograph? Hanzi?”
Jim gave me a blank look.
“Did it look like Chinese writing, Jim?”
“Yes.”
I got up and brought him a piece of paper and a pen. “Draw it for me.”
He picked up the pen and looked at it.
“Jim?”
He growled under his breath. “I can’t remember.”
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Jim didn’t have perfect recall, but he was very close. He practiced, because remembering details was a useful skill for the chief of security. I once watched him draw a complicated tribal tattoo he saw for two seconds completely from memory. He got it nearly perfect. A hanzi character on the floor in the middle of an office smelling of blood—he should’ve remembered it. The symbols weren’t that complicated. Something had fried his memory.
“What was next?”
“I called you.”
We both looked at my answering machine. The screen was dead—the magic had taken down the electricity. No way to tell if Jim had called me.
A green glow sparked in his irises and vanished. Frustration rolled off Jim in a hot wave. He was acting like a person with a concussion, but Lyc-V cracked concussions like nuts. I ought to know, I had gotten enough of them. Thirty seconds, and your brain was like new. Still . . .
“Do you think someone might have whacked you on the back of the head?”
Jim looked at me for a long moment.
“Sometimes trauma to the head results in short-term memory loss.”
“Nobody traumatized my head. Nobody quiet enough to sneak up on me would be strong enough to knock me out. I wasn’t knocked out, I passed out.”
Huh. “Passed out?”
“Yes.”
“What do you remember before passing out?”
“The magic wave hit. I saw a woman.”
“A woman?” Great, now I’ve turned into a manga character who repeated everything everyone said.
“I saw her in the house.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was very beautiful.”
It stung like a slap. “Jim!”
“What?”
Yes, what, Dali? What exactly? “When did you see her? What was she wearing? Concentrate.”
He shook his head. “I was in the doorway. I looked up and she was standing at the back of the room. She was wearing some sort of a long robe or gown. The fabric was almost transparent, like a negligee.”
And he probably took a second to look at her boobies. Awesome.
“She had long dark hair. I told her to come outside. She said, ‘Help me.’ ”
“In English?”
He nodded. “She started backing up into the house and I went after her.”
“Four shapeshifters are missing, the office smells like blood, you see some weird woman in a transparent gown who clearly shouldn’t be in the building, and you run after her?”
“It’s my job to run after her.”
“Without backup?”
“I am the backup.”
I waved my arms. “Fine, what happened next?”
“I remember my legs getting heavy and thinking that something was wrong. Then I woke up in the middle of the floor.”
“How long did you sleep?”
“Eighteen minutes. I woke up tired as hell. I knew I’d pass out again if I didn’t leave, so I got up, locked the door, and got the hell out of there. I knew I’d called you and I thought you might go to the house. The magic was up, so I ran over here, got inside with my key, but you were gone. I went to the bedroom to see if your calligraphy kit was still here, because I knew you would’ve taken it, and then I don’t remember.”
And then he’d fallen asleep on my bedroom floor. “Do you feel any different?”
“I feel tired.”
“Right now? Even after sleeping?”
He nodded.
Jim could go forty-eight hours without sleep and still be as sharp as his claws. That was one of the fun gifts of Lyc-V: improved stamina, immunity to diseases—and crazy homicidal rage, just to spice things up. Something was seriously wrong. If it had been a typical curse, my magic would’ve purged it by now. He had to go to the medic. “We need to see Doolittle.”
“No. No Doolittle.”
“Jim, you keep falling asleep.”
“Doolittle is a surgeon.” Jim bared the edges of his teeth. “If he can’t cut it out or stitch it back together, he doesn’t know what to do with it. I have no symptoms. Pulse rate is normal, temperature is normal. I just fall asleep. You’re Doolittle. I come to you with this story. What’s your first move?”
“Lock you up for observation.”
“Exactly. I don’t need to be locked up.”
“How do you know something isn’t interfering with your regeneration?”
Jim pulled a knife from his waist sheath so fast I barely saw it. The bluish metal flashed, slicing across his forearm. Blood swelled. The scent hit my nostrils, sending goose bumps over my arms. As I watched, the cut knitted itself back together, the skin and muscle flowing to repair the damage. Jim wiped the blood from his skin and showed me his forearm. The thin line of the scar was already fading.
“I’m not sick and my virus is working. Whatever this is, it’s magic. Four of our people are missing, and you’re the only magic user I have. I can’t just leave them in there.”
“They might be dead.”
“If they’re dead, we need to know.” He leaned forward, his brown eyes looking straight into mine. “Help me, Dali.”
He had no idea, but when he looked at me like that, I would’ve done anything for him. Anything at all.
I got up. “Let me get my kit. We need to go see that house.”
THE NORTHEASTERN OFFICE of the Pack sat on Chamblee Dunwoody Road, well back from the road behind a carefully cut lawn. Tall pines framed it on three sides, with four picturesque trees shading its parking lot. To the right, another copse of pines bordered a large open field converted into pasture. To the left, behind the buffer of greenery and a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, rose short stubby apartments. The guard at the gate gave us a nasty look as we thundered on by and clutched at his crossbow just in case. Silly man.
I steered the Prowler up the curving drive to the office’s lot, parked, and shut off the vehicle. The enchanted water engine took at least fifteen minutes to warm up, but leaving it running made no sense. The engine made so much noise I had trouble thinking. Besides, Pooki’s top speed during magic barely scraped fifty miles per hour, and if we had to bail, both Jim and I could run much faster than that.
We stepped out into the night. Painted an ugly olive color, the office looked like two separate buildings had been jammed together: The left half resembled a ranch house while the right was a two-story Queen Anne with green shutters.
The wind brought with it a salty metallic scent that burned my tongue. Blood. Jim bared his teeth at the building.
I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to sense the magic. In my head, the house turned dark. Long translucent tentacles of magic slivered from inside it, sliding back and forth over the walls, out the windows, over the roof, clutching at the siding and tiles.