Magic Steals (Kate Daniels #6.5)(18)

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BEING a shapeshifter had its disadvantages. For one, smells ordinary to normal people drove you nuts. If you burned something in the kitchen, you didn’t just open the windows, you had to open the entire house and go outside. It meant the dynamics within the shapeshifter packs and clans were unlike those of a human society. And by the way, most of those dynamics were bullshit. Yes, we did take some of the traits of our animal counterparts: cats had a strong independent streak, bouda—the werehyena—females tended to be dominant, and wolves exhibited a strong OCD tendency, which helped them survive in the wild by tracking and then running game over long distances. But the entire pack hierarchy was actually much closer to the dominance hierarchy of wild primate groups, which made sense considering that the human part of us was in control. And of course, the most important disadvantage was loupism. In moments of extreme stress, Lyc-V, the virus responsible for our powers, “bloomed” within our bodies in great numbers. Sometimes the bloom triggered a catastrophic response and drove a shapeshifter into insanity. An insane shapeshifter was called loup and there was no coming back from that road. Loupism was a constant specter hanging over us.

But right now, as I poured water over my arms to wash away the blood, I was grateful for every single cell of Lyc-V in my body. My gashes were knitting themselves closed. If you watched close enough, you would see muscle fibers slide in the wounds. It was incredibly gross.

Amanda was sitting on the floor, holding her son and rocking back and forth. The boy looked like he wanted to escape, but he must’ve sensed that his mother was deeply upset and so he sat quietly and let her clench him to her. Cole hovered over them, holding a baseball bat and wearing that tense, keyed-up expression on his face men sometimes get when they are terrified for their families and not sure where the danger was coming from. Right now if a butterfly happened to float past Cole on fuzzy wings, he would probably pound it into dust with his bat.

Mr. Dobrev was staring at the hag’s head Jim left sitting on the counter. He’d walked around the store for a minute or two, surveying the damage, and then come back to the head and stared.

“Mr. Dobrev,” I called. “She’s dead.”

“I know.” He turned to me. “I can’t believe it.”

“You said you saw her in a painting before?”

“When I was a boy. She looked exactly like that.”

I was right. I was completely right. Good. Good, good, good, I hated not knowing what I was dealing with.

Jim stepped through the door, pale-faced Brune behind him.

“Where is Steven?” I asked.

“He grabbed a bicycle and went to his daughter’s school to check on her,” Brune said.

Well, I could certainly understand that.

Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“I’m okay,” I told him.

For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.

“We thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It’s not. It’s curse based, Jim.”

He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.

“Most magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn’t also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can’t be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“So when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knew it was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”

“Logically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.

“That’s what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don’t know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It’s not a mythological being. That’s something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”

“Amanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”

“This magic isn’t spell based or talent based. It’s curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn’t met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let’s say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”

Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”

I waved my hands at him. “That’s not the point.”

“No, that’s the kind of information I need to know.”

“Okay, probably I could.”

Jim’s expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

“Jim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can’t get it anyway; you’re a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”