Andrea chewed on her lip. “You know that I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself, and I don’t need a man to fight my wars for me. And if I wasn’t with Raphael, I would still be totally fine, and good at my job, and happy at times.” She took a deep breath. “With that in mind . . . A real broken heart never goes away. You can pull yourself together and you can function, but it’s not the same.”
I couldn’t drag this hurt around me for the rest of my life. I’d implode. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“I’m not finished. The thing is, people have a remarkable potential to injure you, but they also have a great power to help you heal. I didn’t understand this for the longest time.”
She leaned forward. “Raphael is hot and loaded and the sex is great, but that’s not why I’m with him. I mean, those things don’t hurt, but that’s not what keeps me there.”
If I had to guess, it would be respect for Raphael’s perseverance. Raphael, a werehyena, or bouda as they preferred to be called, loved Andrea beyond all reason. He courted her for months—unheard of for a bouda—and refused to give up until she finally let him into her life. The fact that he was the son of Aunt B, the bouda alpha, made things complicated but neither Raphael nor Andrea seemed to care.
Andrea smiled. “When I’m with him, I can feel myself getting better. It’s like he’s picking up broken pieces of me and putting me back together, and I don’t even know how he’s doing it. We never talk about it. We don’t go to therapy. He just loves me and that’s enough.”
“I’m happy for you,” I told her and meant it.
“Thank you. I know you’ll tell me to fuck off, but I think Curran loves you. Truly loves you. And I think you love him, Kate. That’s rare. Think about it—if he really stood you up, why would he be pissed off about the whole thing? You both can be assholes of the first order, so don’t let the two of you throw it away. If you’re going to walk away from it, at least walk away knowing the whole picture.”
“You’re right. Fuck off. I don’t need him,” I told her.
Andrea sighed quietly. “Of course you don’t.”
“More tea?”
She nodded. I poured her another cup and we drank in my quiet kitchen.
Later she left.
I took a small dish from the counter, pricked my arm with the point of my throwing knife, and let a few red drops fall into the dish. My blood brimmed with magic. It coursed just beyond the surface.
I pushed it.
The blood streamed, obeying my call, growing into inch-long needles, then crumbling into dust. The needles had lasted half a second? Maybe less.
At the end of the Midnight Games, when I lay dying in a golden cage, my blood felt like an extension of me. I could twist and shape it, bending it to my will, solidifying it again and again. I’d been struggling to replicate it for weeks and had been getting nowhere. I’d lost the power.
Blood was Roland’s greatest weapon. I didn’t cherish the prospect of facing Hugh d’Ambray without it.
The attack poodle stared expectantly at me. I washed the blood down the drain, sat on the floor so he could lay next to me, and petted his shaved back. If I closed my eyes, I could recall Curran’s scent. In my head, he grabbed me and spun around, shielding me as his body shook under the impact of the glass shards.
I felt terribly alone. The poodle must’ve sensed it because he put his head on my leg and licked me once. It didn’t help but I was grateful all the same.
CHAPTER 9
AN ODD CHOMPING NOISE CUT THROUGH MY SLEEP. My eyes snapped open.
Pieces of garbage lay strewn across my carpet, next to an overturned trash can. In the middle of it, the attack poodle methodically devoured my trash. As I watched, he tore a piece from a potato peel, raised his muzzle to the ceiling, chewing it with a nirvana-like rapture printed on his face, and bent down for more. A black substance stained his paws and muzzle. It had to be paint. Julie had gone Goth on me a couple of months ago. When she wasn’t at the boarding school, she stayed with me. She had picked the library as her bedroom and I’d let her paint it black. The poodle had gotten into her paint can.
“You’re so dead.”
Chomp, chomp, chomp.
The magic wave was still up and my apartment was freezing cold. I had a hard time sleeping in sweatpants—something about sweats under a blanket just didn’t agree with me—but this morning I definitely regretted my decision. My toes were so cold, it was a wonder they didn’t break off. I grabbed the blanket, stood up on my bed, and put my hand against the vent. Nothing. The building’s boiler was in its death throes. It had cut out twice in the past month. Even if all of the tenants pooled their money, we still couldn’t afford to replace the damn thing. Especially considering that we had already bought coal for the winter.
That left me with plan B. I glanced across the room to a small woodstove, half-covered by stacks of books. Building a wood fire right now seemed impossibly hard, so I bravely dropped the blanket and pulled on sweats as fast as I could.
Once dressed, I checked the head in the fridge. Still no decomposition. This whole investigation took the notion of “normal” undead behavior out back and blew its brains out with a sawed-off shotgun.
I walked the dog, sorted out the garbage, which took nearly twenty minutes, and tried the phone. Dial tone. No rhyme or reason to it, but one doesn’t look a gift phone in the mouth. I called to the Casino before the phone line decided to cut out on me. In ten seconds Ghastek came on the phone.
“I sincerely hope you have news, Kate. It’s been a long night and I was resting.”
This was likely the stupidest thing I could’ve done, but I had no idea who else to ask. “Are you familiar with the Dubal ritual?”
There was a tiny pause before he answered. “Of course. I’ve performed it on several occasions. However, I’m surprised you’re aware of it.”
He wouldn’t ask me how I knew about it, but he had to be dying of curiosity. Nobody except my guardian’s ex-wife knew I was able to pilot undead. The Dubal ritual required a great deal of raw power and a lot of knowledge. Ghastek viewed me as a thug. The idea that I was capable of it would never cross his mind and that’s the way I preferred it. “What would cause the ritual to fail?”
“Describe the manner of the failure.”
“Instead of the identity or location of the undead’s former navigator, the person performing the ritual saw themselves in the blood.”
Ghastek hummed to himself for a long breath. “The Dubal ritual lifts the imprint of the navigator’s mind from the undead’s brain. The blood streaming from the head isn’t central to the ritual; in fact, any dark surface will do. The dark background simply makes the image stand out more. If you stare for a few seconds at a lamp, then close your eyes or look at a dark object, you’ll see the glowing outline of the lamp. This phenomenon is called negative afterimage. The same principle applies here, except that the image is acquired from the mental footprint left on the brain of the undead.”
I filed that tidbit away for future reference. “Aha.” “There are two factors that could cause the practitioner to see themselves. One, too much time had passed or the undead had been unpiloted. How quickly was the ritual performed?”
“Within two hours of death.”
“Hmmm. Then the time lapse shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve been able to pull a reasonably decent image six hours after the termination of the undead. In this case we’re left with possibility number two: the navigator’s will was much stronger than that of the practitioner. If the navigator realized the undead was about to be terminated, he or she could shock it with a mental surge. We refer to it as searing. A seared brain is difficult to read. Lifting the image becomes a matter of raw power rather than skill. Is there a possibility that the navigator is much stronger than the practitioner?”
“Unlikely.” I had little skill, but in the raw power department, I would blow even Ghastek off the scale.