Kate Daniels 01 - Magic Bites

and the third to the lab.
    The spell-haze did not affect the view from the inside and huge windows offered a vision of midnight Atlanta under the endless black sky. The weak light of the single feylantern caressed the window glass, rendering it invisible, and permeated the darkness outside as if the apartment itself was but a piece of midnight sky, defined by glass and stone but not separated from the world outside. If I stood very close to the window, I could imagine that I was flying high above the city . . .
    As I watched, the tech hit. Thousands of tiny lights sparked into existence, like jewels among the folds of black velvet and the street lamps flooded the avenue below me in man-made sunshine. The feylantern flickered and died, and bright electric lights came on inside the apartment, murdering the illusion and separating me from the infinite blackness. The glass became impenetrable, and I stood confined by it as if locked in the middle of a transparent cage. Suddenly I felt vulnerable so I turned off the lights, all but a single reading lamp of steel and opaque glass.
    I washed my face and arms up to my elbow, dried them with a fluffy white towel I found hanging on a hook near the sink, and took up residence on the ultramodern couch. Curran’s question nagged me: why would the knight-protector give Greg’s investigation to a no-name merc? On the surface, it made no sense. I finally managed to look past my own ego. One of the Order’s own was dead, a well-known man of substantial power. They wouldn’t handle it themselves. They would bring in a crusader.
    The crusaders served as the Order’s equivalent of a lancet. Got a nasty boil ready to rupture—throw a crusader at it. Loners, highly skilled and deadly, they were great at what they did and after they did it, they returned to where they came from. Ted expected me to “investigate the crime,” meaning he expected me to make lots of noise and draw attention to myself, while the crusader quietly worked under my smoke screen. It chaffed at me for about two seconds, but in the end both parties got what they wanted: Ted got his lightning rod and I got to search for Greg’s killer. Everybody won.
    I flipped open the Almanac and pulled the m-scan and the folded cutout of the article Bono had given me from between the book’s pages. Glancing at the m-scan one last time, I slid it onto the glass table, unfolded the article, and began to read. The owner of the apartment would arrive shortly. He rarely stayed out past two in the morning—he thought 3:00 a.m. to be an unlucky hour.
     
     
    IT WAS CLOSE TO TWO O’CLOCK WHEN A SINGLE cab made its way up the avenue below me. I raised binoculars to my eyes.
    The door of the cab opened and a blonde stepped onto the pavement. She was tall and very slender. The short black dress clung to her narrow hips and long waist, flaring to artfully enclose breasts that looked too large for her body. Her hair, so pale it shimmered white, fell to her shoulders without a trace of a curl.
    Her face was perfectly formed, with high prominent cheekbones, aquiline nose, huge eyes, and a full mouth. As she strode to the highrise, her face wore an expression which on someone less attractive would be called a sneer. Elegant, graceful, and arrogant in her beauty, she was like a young Arabian horse, haughty and cruel and an irresistible challenge to any male.
    A lone passerby stopped, struck by the sight of her. I thought he whistled but could not tell for sure. The blonde ignored his presence without even trying; for her, he simply did not exist. I put away the binoculars and returned to my Almanac.
    Five minutes later the lock clicked and the blonde walked through the door. She saw me and stopped. The sneer vanished. “Oh, good. I have something for you.”
    Not again.
    She went to the kitchen, retrieved several protein cans from a cabinet, and put them onto the bar. A bag of dried apricots joined the cans, together with a bag of sugar, a block of chocolate, and an oversized blender. She took a carton of eggs from the fridge and cracked three into the blender. Two handfuls of apricots followed, with several cups of sugar, the chocolate, and the contents of at least six cans. “Ice water,” the blonde murmured, nodding to the drink I had gotten myself. “You could’ve gotten something from the bar.”
    “I wanted water,” I said.
    The blonde smiled, a strange expression on her face, and turned on the blender. The blades spun,