Kate Daniels 03 - Magic Strikes

Jim to pieces.
    “He gave us three days,” I said. “If we don’t resolve this by the end of those three days, I’ll go to him. I’ll tell him. If Derek goes loup before that, I will kill him.” Please, God, whoever you are, please don’t make me do this.
    “That’s my responsibility,” Jim said.
    “No. Curran accepted an offer of assistance from the Order. That means that in the matters of this investigation, I outrank you. It’s my responsibility and I’ll take care of it.” I had three days. I could do a lot in three days.
    Jim’s eyes flashed.
    “Deal with it,” I told him and looked at Doolittle. “What would keep a shapeshifter from shifting?”
    “Magic,” he said. “Very powerful magic.”
    “Feeding comes first, mating second, and shape-changing is third. Hard to override it,” Jim ground out.
    “But the Reapers did override it. They held the key to it. And they damn near obliterated Derek.” I clenched my teeth.
    “Your sword’s smoking,” Doolittle murmured.
    Thin tendrils of smoke snaked from Slayer in my sheath, the saber feeding on my anger.
    “Nothing to worry about.” I drummed my fingertips on the table. “I could possibly manage to take the Reapers into custody. But I have no reason to hold them. First, we have no proof they took out Derek.”
    “They would smell of his blood,” Jim said.
    “So do I. There was enough of his blood in that plaza to stain anyone who came into contact with it. That’s not enough. Did you m-scan the scene?”
    “Blue and green across the board.” Jim shrugged in disgust.
    The m-scan recorded the colors of residual magic. Blue stood for human and green stood for shapeshifter. It told us absolutely nothing. Maybe if I prayed to Miss Marple, she’d hook me up with a clue . . .
    “Another problem with bringing them in,” I said, “is the Games themselves. Let’s say I bring them in. I’ll have to ask questions like ‘What were you doing in that plaza?’ If they admitted to being a team in the Games, I’d have to follow up on it. I can’t just ignore the existence of an underground gladiatorial tournament. The cops, Order, and MSDU have to know the Games are going on. The fact that they take place at all means a lot of money and influence are backing them up.”
    Jim nodded. “You’d get shut down before the investigation ever hits the ground.”
    And that was why I liked working with Jim. He didn’t waste any time on calling me a coward, on baiting me, and suggesting I was afraid of the pressure. He understood that if the powers that be came to bear on me, the investigation would become difficult and my progress would be slower than molasses in January. He simply acknowledged it and moved on to the next possible avenue. No angst, no bullshit, no drama.
    “So officially, we both can do nothing,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    Doolittle just shook his head and ate his hush puppies.
    “I take it we’ll have to fight in the Games to get to the Reapers.”
    “Yeah.”
    “How come you never invite me to the easy jobs?” I asked him.
    “I like to challenge you,” he said. “Keeps you on your toes.”
    I leaned forward and drew a line across the tablecloth with my finger. “Unicorn Lane. Thirty-two blocks long and ten blocks wide. Long and narrow.” It used to be thirty blocks long and eight blocks wide, but the flare boosted it and Unicorn grew, swallowing more of the city. “As I understand it, the Reapers go in there and vanish. And your guys can’t track them down.”
    “Your point?”
    “You remember the firebird capture from the summer two years ago? Half of Chatham County was burning and the bird smelled like smoke. You couldn’t track it and it burned through every trap we had.” And he had been pissed off as hell about it, too.
    Jim frowned. “I remember. We baited it with a dead possum that had a tracker in it.”
    “Can you get your hands on a tracker like the one we stuck into the possum?”
    “It can be done.”
    “What’s the maximum range of the tracker?”
    “Twenty-five miles, if the tech is strong.”
    I smiled. More than enough to cover Unicorn Lane.

CHAPTER 14

    JIM SCOWLED AT SAIMAN’S DOOR. “THE PERVERT,” he said.
    “He prefers to think of himself as a sexual deviant.”
    “Semantics.”
    We’d talked our plan over on the way through the city. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a slight improvement over my usual “go and annoy everyone involved until somebody tries to kill you.”