Kate Daniels 03 - Magic Strikes

break under all the food they had requested.
    “These grits are terrible.” Doolittle grimaced and dropped another dollop of butter into his bowl.
    Dali licked her spoon. “The cook must be a blind man with two left hands.”
    “How can you ruin grits—that’s what I want to know?” Raphael shrugged. “They’re barely edible when fixed properly.”
    “I’ll tell your mother you said that,” Doolittle told him.
    “The corn bread is a brick.” Jim took the yellow square and knocked on the table with it. “The sausage is like paper.”
    “Maybe they’re hoping to starve us,” Andrea quipped.
    “More like they’re fixing to give us a hell of a stomach-ache.” Curran loaded more bacon on his plate.
    For people who frequently turned into animals and ate their prey raw, they sure were a choosy lot.
    “Kate makes good sausage,” Jim said.
    Six pairs of eyes stared at me. Thank you, Mr. Wonderful. Just what I needed.
    “Oh yeah.” Andrea snapped her fingers. “The links? The ones we had the beginning of the month? I didn’t know you made those. I thought they were bought. They were so good.” Her smile was positively cherubic. Of all the times not to be able to shoot laser beams out of my eyes . . .
    “What do you put into your sausage, Kate?” Raphael wanted to know, giving me a perfectly innocent look.
    Werejaguars with big mouths with a pinch of werehyena thrown in. “Venison and rabbit.”
    “That sounds like some fine sausage,” Doolittle said. “Will you share the recipe?”
    “Sure.”
    “I had no idea you were a sausage expert,” Curran said with a completely straight face.
    Die, die, die, die. . . .
    Even Derek cracked a smile. Raphael put his head down on the table and jerked a little.
    “Is he choking?” Dali asked, wrinkling her forehead.
    “No, he just needs a moment,” Curran said. “Young bouda males. Easily excitable.”
    “Who are we fighting today?” I asked, wishing I could brain him with something heavy.
    “Rouge Rogues,” Jim said.
    “That’s a joke, right?” Andrea’s eyebrows crept up.
    Jim shook his head. “No. Led by a Frenchman. He calls himself Cyclone. A bad bunch.”
    “The Frenchman knows me,” I said.
    Jim’s gaze fixed on me. “How well?”
    “Well enough,” Curran said. “He’s scared of her.”
    “Did he ever see you fighting?” Andrea asked.
    “Yes. A long time ago.”
    “How long?” Jim asked. “How well does he know how you fight?”
    If he tried to take me out of this fight, I’d rip him to shreds. “It was twelve years ago in Peru. I seriously doubt he remembers the finer points of my swordwork.”
    “What were you doing in Peru?” Raphael asked.
    “Fighting in Hoyo de Sangre .” I watched it sink in. Yes, I was thirteen. No, I didn’t want to talk about it. “As I said, it’s irrelevant. He’s a professional gladiator. He tours from arena to arena, drawn by prizes. He’s a strong air mage and he favors basic powerful spells. He’ll likely try an air lock or a hold. What else does he have on his team?”
    Jim looked as if he’d bitten a lemon. “Assuming they will bring their best, he’s got a troll as their Stone, a golem Swordmaster, and a vampire Shiv. A very old vampire.”
    “How old?” I asked.
    “Olathe old,” Jim said.
    Inwardly I cringed. Olathe, Roland’s former concubine, had used ancient vampires so old, they had to have become undead before the Shift, the first magic wave, when technically they weren’t supposed to have existed. A vampire was an abomination in progress. The older a vampire grew, the more pronounced were the changes the Immortuus pathogen inflicted onto its once-human body and the more dangerous it became.
    “The golem is silver,” Jim said. “Sprouts blades in weird places. Preternaturally fast. Can’t be cut; can’t be pierced. The troll’s hide is also nearly impossible to penetrate. I saw a spear bounce off. It worries me.”
    It would worry anybody. The vampire alone, even if the other three were paper cutouts, would give me a pause. As it was, the lineup was nearly impossible to beat. The vamp was deadly and wickedly fast. With two extra fighters and a mage, keeping the vamp from Dali would be nearly impossible.
    Olathe had gotten her vampires from Roland’s stable when she had fled him. Where did Cyclone get an ancient vampire, especially with the People’s Warlord sitting right there in the stands?
    I could crush the vamp’s mind, but not without giving