Magic Tides (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years #1)(9)

The headless body teetered and crashed to the floor.

Everything stopped. The firebug, who’d scrambled up, froze with her hands halfway up. Even Dewane forgot to moan about his ruined knee.

I picked up Jace’s head by his hair and held it in front of the poster. “Who did you sell him to?”

The traffickers gaped at me.

I looked back at them. “He can’t answer me, but one of you can. I’ll go through you one by one, and I’ll kill the last of you very slowly. You won’t die until you tell me what I want to know. Don’t be last.”

“Onyx,” Lantern Jaw said. “He’s a necromancer with the People.”

Damn it all to hell. Talking to the People was the last thing I wanted.

“Was this a random grab or a special order?”

“A special order,” he said. “He asked for the kid by name. I don’t know why. Jace didn’t ask.”

I dropped the head. “Good.”

The firebug glared at me. Her hands twitched.

I pinned her down with my stare. “Try me.”

The woman looked into my eyes. All the fight went out of her. She swallowed and shook her head.

A wise decision, but she gave up kind of quick.

“This is done.” I indicated the house around us with Sarrat’s point. “This criminal enterprise is finished. Your gang is finished. If I see you again, I’ll kill you. Leave here, take nothing.” I pointed at the firebug. “You stay.”

The shorter trafficker looked at Lantern Jaw. “Are we just …”

“Yeah.” Lantern Jaw skirted around Jace’s body and headed to the door.

“What about Dewane?” the shorter guy said.

“Fuck Dewane.” Lantern Jaw went out the door.

The shorter guy blinked, thought about it, then grabbed Dewane’s arm, strained, and got him upright. They struggled past me. At the doorway, the shorter man bared his teeth at me.

“This isn’t fucking over. We’ll come for you.”

“Fort Kure, on the beach. You can’t miss it. Get the whole gang, get your friends, their friends, and people they know. Bring everybody. Save us all some time.”

They staggered outside.

I went to the cage with the little boy. It was locked with a simple padlock. I looked at the firebug. She grabbed the lock. Her fingers shook so it took her three tries to get it open. I took the little boy out of the cage. He was so thin, he weighed almost nothing. His fingers were bruised and there was a burn on his right forearm, where someone had put out a cigarette. He stared at me with big, dark eyes. I hugged him gently, and he clung to me, as if afraid I would disappear.

“Are there more?”

The firebug nodded.



THERE WERE three more in cages in the basement. Two boys and a girl, none over the age of six. The girl and the oldest boy knew their addresses, the two younger kids only knew their first and last names, but it was enough to go on.

We put two boys onto Thomas’ horse. I settled the little girl on to Cuddles and lifted the smallest boy into the saddle in front of her.

“Hold on to him, kiddo.”

She nodded. She was short and dark-haired, with round cheeks and dark brown eyes, but something about her reminded me of Julie. Maybe it was the way she hugged the little boy. Like she had decided that this was her job and was determined to do it.

The firebug waited for me on the lawn. I surveyed the house and the three vehicles in the driveway. “Torch it.”

She did a doubletake. “There are money and weapons in there…”

“I know.”

She raised her hands. Magic swirled inside her, slow and sluggish. Moments crawled by. Her power was moving now, a ghostly outline of a pinwheel of flames forming between her fingers. She strained, spinning it more and more tightly with her hands, winding it into an invisible ball until it glowed with nearly white light. She held it there for as long as she could, trying to build it up, but it broke free. The fireball ignited to life, streaked to the house, and smashed into the front window.

Thunder pealed, the sound of magic bursting from containment of the spell. Glass exploded, and flames surged in the living room.

The firebug waved her arms around. Now her earlier hesitation made sense. She needed a lot of time to get her power going, while I only needed a fraction of a second to swing my sword.

Twin flame jets erupted from the woman’s hands and washed over the house and the cars.

Pre-Shift, this would have gone down completely differently. There would have been a formal investigation and warrants issued by the court. There would be due process, a trial, and public outrage. Now it was just me.

It wasn’t that cops were inept or corrupt. It was that they were stretched thin, and the power difference between them and the magically juiced-up criminals was often too vast. We lived in an unsafe age where one individual could overpower thousands if their magic was strong enough. My father was the living example of how that setup could go catastrophically wrong. Given a choice, I would take the pre-Shift system over ours any day.

The house was fully engulfed now, and the firebug was breathing hard and sweating.

“Stay here until it burns itself out.”

“You’re letting me go?” she asked.

I nodded. “If I find out that this neighborhood burned down because you took off, I’ll find you.”