Magic Tides (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years #1)(33)

He looked around at everyone else, his eyes a bright, furious gold. “Nobody says a word about this to Kate. Am I clear?”

Everybody said yes at the same time.

Dad turned back to me. “Right now, I need to go and find your mom. I’m sure she’s fine. The guy on the ship is probably not a god but you never know. Conlan, I’m very proud of you. Let’s keep the part about you, her beloved eight-year-old son, killing a giant wereboar and waving its head around, to ourselves. This will be our little secret. This is a shapeshifter thing, and your mom doesn’t always understand shapeshifter things.”

He dropped the minotaur head on the ground.

“I promise,” I told him. Mom loved us, but she also worried a lot.

Mr. Keelan cleared his throat. “If I might make a small suggestion. Troy is a decent medmage. Perhaps it would be good to have him along with you?”

The male jackal spoke up. “I trained under Doolittle. I’m certified to treat shapeshifters and humans.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Dad told him. “I’d be happy to have you come with.”

Dad turned to me again and paused. “Conlan, you’re in charge until we get back. You’ve earned it.”

Dad said I earned it. I stood up straighter.

His eyes flashed gold. “But if Keelan stays a bit, listen to what he has to say.”

“You go and find the Consort, my lord. The boy and I will take care of everything here. Nothing to worry about.”

As I watched Dad and Troy break into a run heading down the road, Mr. Keelan clamped his big hand on my shoulder. “Nothing better than a good fight before breakfast. Still, perhaps we could start by tidying up a bit, eh? We wouldn’t want your mother coming home to a messy house, would we?”

Ms. Jynx exhaled and finally stopped shaking.

“Got a hold of yourself?” Keelan asked.

She nodded. “What I want to know is where the hell did they get the fucking minotaurs?”

“From the Labyrinth,” Troy’s sister said.

“Duh!” Ms. Jynx said. “Seriously, Helen?”

“No, I mean it. For real. Troy and I are Greek. Our uncle knows a lot of people in our community, so when we got stationed here by the Pack, we went to pay our respects. They warned us about the minotaurs. There is the Labyrinth in Crete. It’s a magic space like Unicorn Lane. The minotaurs live there. They are always male, so they have to kidnap women to reproduce.”

That was pretty much what Grandfather had said.

“They’re territorial and they have disputes with each other,” Ms. Helen said. “These three were a father and his sons. They were forced out, so they boarded the first ship they could find and ended up here two years ago. They destroyed the local gangs and built their own.”

Mr. Keelan’s eyes went green. “And you kept it to yourself?”

The werejackal raised her hands. “It never came up?”

“Helen, for future reference, this is the kind of information I need to have as your alpha. Do we understand each other?”

She nodded. “Yes, Alpha.”

“Good. Let’s go clean up.”

“Okay, I get the minotaurs, but what about the pigs?” Ms. Jynx asked.

“Clean up, Jynx,” Mr. Keelan said. “You’ve met the Consort before. Focus on what’s important.”



IT TOOK an hour to get all the corpses and body parts into a pile. It took longer for them to burn in the bonfire. I even had to feed some of my magic into it to get it hot enough. Once it got going the smell and the smoke were awful.

When we were done, Mr. Keelan took my wereboar’s head and placed it on the ground in front of the fire. Right next to the head of the largest minotaur.

“Well, that’s the last of them.” Then he stood back and just looked at them for a while. “Great big bastards, weren’t they? I don’t know about the minotaurs, but the two hogs smelled like wereboars to me. Usually, shapeshifters turn back to human after death but not these pigs.”

“They were cursed,” I said.

Mr. Keelan raised his eyebrows at me.

Ms. Jynx ran over to us. “Good news! I figured out the pigs! They are—”

“Cursed,” Mr. Keelan said.

She blinked at him. “How did you know?”

He nodded at me.

“I tasted the magic when I bit off his ear,” I explained. “It was witch magic. Very strong.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Mr. Keelan asked. “Do we need to purify you somehow?”

My grandmother had been a witch and Mom was one too, when she needed it. I knew how to protect myself, but it didn’t matter, because the curse was very specific. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, anyway,” Ms. Jynx said. “I had a chat with that fire mage. She took an arrow in the knee, and she doesn’t deal with pain well, so she was very cooperative. Apparently, the two werehogs are local boys, Buck and Grady. They are—were—first-grade assholes. They did home invasions, collected gambling debts, assaulted people, your low-level muscle shit. Somehow, they got the bright idea to break into a house of a powerful local witch. They went in human and came out as that. Apparently, she told them that since they lived their lives like pigs, she would make their outside match their inside. So yeah. They didn’t turn back because they couldn’t. They are permanently stuck like that.”