Kate Daniels 03 - Magic Strikes

the floor. Derek went down on all fours. His broken legs gave out and he crashed face-first into the meat. I marched to the door and took Julie by the shoulder.
    She tugged my hand off. “No.”
    “We don’t need to see this.”
    In the corner Doolittle swung a heavy leather case onto the table and popped it open. Metal blades gleamed in a neat row.
    “But . . .”
    “No.”
    I pushed her out of the room. Raphael closed the door behind us and helped me carry screaming Julie away.
     
     
    THE KITCHEN CABINETS CONTAINED WOODEN jars identified by handwritten adhesive labels. The jar labeled SUGAR had flour in it. The jar labeled FLOUR held an enormous amount of chili powder, which made me sneeze. The jar labeled CHILI PEPPER contained a Smith & Wesson M&P 45. I growled. I had fallen asleep next to Julie on the couch and woken up five hours later, unable to form rational thoughts because my head pounded.
    “Looking for something?” Dali came up from the hallway.
    “No, I’m dancing the can-can.” Ask a dumb question . . .
    Dali blinked at me. “Would you mind making coffee while you’re dancing? I smell it on the bottom shelf, either first or second jar on the left.”
    I opened the first jar and looked inside. Coffee. The label said BORAX.
    “What’s up with the labels?”
    Dali shrugged. “You’re in the house of a cat whose job is to spy. He thinks he’s clever. I’d be careful with the silverware drawer. There might be a bomb in it.”
    I extracted a small pot and set about boiling coffee.
    “How’s Derek?”
    “I don’t know. The door’s still closed. They’ve been in there for hours.”
    The coffee foamed up. I held it away from the fire, put it back, and let it foam a second time. Dali got the cups. “I found out more about the jewel.”
    I poured coffee into her mug. Dali watched me do it. “I always spill half of it,” she said. “Mine always runs down the side of the pot.”
    Manual dexterity—just about the only thing I was good at. “So what about the jewel?”
    “A couple of old texts say that Rudra Mani has the power to calm beasts and take away the suffering of man.”
    A deeper meaning hidden in the description: the power to suppress a shapeshifter’s animal nature and keep him locked in his humanity. “Does it? Take the suffering away, I mean?”
    Dali looked into her coffee. “Having a shard in you is like having part of you cut off. It’s a terrible feeling. I would prefer to be killed.”
    So would I in the same situation. It was akin to surrendering my magic. I hated the man who’d given it to me. Aspects of it repulsed me and I refused them. But it was a part of me. With it, I felt whole for better or for worse. Using magic made me the person I was born to be. Keeping people from being themselves drove them insane.
    “Rudra is a one of Shiva’s names,” Dali said. “It means ‘strict’ or ‘uncompromising.’ ”
    How fitting. That was what the shapeshifters were, a compromise between beast and man. The gem forced them to become one or the other. I had been thinking about this on the way to the house, while riding the ley line. By then I had grown too numb to worry about Derek—I had described his condition for Julie and it had been like opening an old wound. At first there’d been the sharp slash of pain of a scab being ripped off, and then I’d bled, and the wound had gone numb.
    I thought about the Order instead. About Ted and his true believer’s inability to compromise. Ted wanted humans to remain human no matter the cost.
    A dark storm gathered on the horizon of my mind, with Rudra Mani firmly in its center.
    “Does the name ‘Sultan of Death’ sound familiar to you?” I asked.
    Dali paused, considering, and shook her head. “I have no clue who that is.”
    That reminded me—I still hadn’t checked on the analyses of the molten silver the rakshasas had poured onto Derek’s face. The magic had fallen while I was asleep. I pulled the phone to me. Dial tone. Finally. The phone was one of those erratic devices that sometimes worked during magic. Most people had no idea how it worked. To them, it was almost magic, and sometimes magic waves shared that view.
    I punched in Andrea’s home number. She answered on the second ring. “Hey.”
    “Hey.”
    “I’ve got your results right here,” she said. Not a hint of humor in her voice. “It’s not silver. It’s electrum.”
    Electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of silver and gold with a