Magic Rises

the high-pitched desperate shriek turning into a gurgle, and sagged on top of me. The four-hundred-some pounds pinned me in place. I strained. The body didn’t move. Damn it.
    Suddenly the weight was gone. The dolphin hovered three feet above me and was tossed unceremoniously aside. A gray monster stained with blood crouched by me.
    Curran.
    “You’re taking a nap? Come on, Kate, I need you for this fight. Stop lying around.”
    You sonovabitch. I rolled to my feet and grabbed my sword. “You must think you’re funny.”
    A weredolphin threw himself at us from the right. Curran tripped him and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back, and I sliced the pirate’s throat and punctured his heart with two quick strikes.
    “Just saying, you have to pull your own weight. A hot body and flirting will only get you so far.”
    Hot body and flirting, huh. When I’m done killing people . . . “Everything I do, I learned from you, boy toy.”
    Another pirate rushed us. I dropped, slicing the tendons behind his knee, while Curran headbutted him and ripped out his throat. The pirate fell.
    “Boy toy?” Curran asked.
    “Would you prefer man candy ?”
    The deck was suddenly empty. Blood painted the ship. Gray corpses lay here and there, torn and savaged by claws and teeth. A huge shaggy Kodiak bear prowled the deck, his muzzle dripping gore. The last pirate still on his feet was running toward Andrea and Raphael near the bow. Andrea raised her crossbow. She was still in human form. Raphael stood next to her, light on his feet, his knives dripping red. A trail of bodies led to them, bristling with crossbow bolts. The pirate rushed her. She sank two bolts into his throat. He gurgled, his momentum carrying him forward. Raphael let him get within ten feet and cut him down in a fury of precise strikes.
    Past them a black panther the size of a pony slapped a weredolphin with a huge paw. The shapeshifter’s skull split, crushed like an egg under a hammer.
    On the left a humanoid creature crawled onto the deck, lean, furry, with a round head and short round ears. Disproportionately long, sharp brown claws protruded from his oversized fingers. He strained and heaved another, much larger body onto the deck. It landed in a splash of water and a shaggy pile of brown fur, turned over, and vomited salt water from a half-human half-bison muzzle. Eduardo.
    The reddish beast sank next to him, baring sharp white teeth. His bright red eyes, the color of a ripe strawberry, had a horizontal pupil, like that of a goat. They made him look demonic. I knew of only one shapeshifter with eyes like that—Barabas.
    “Why don’t you know how to swim?” His diction was almost perfect.
    Eduardo unloaded more water on the deck. “Never needed to.”
    “We are crossing an ocean. It didn’t occur to you to learn?”
    “Look, I’ve tried. I walk into a pool, I thrash, and then I sink.”
    Ahead the flotilla of boats fled behind the island. Bodies littered the deck. I counted. Fourteen. None of them ours. We were bloody, hurt, but alive. The pirates weren’t.
    What a waste of life.
    And I’d loved it. I loved every second of it: the blood, the rush, the heady satisfaction of striking and seeing the cut or thrust find its target . . . Voron had succeeded. I was raised and trained to be a killer, and nothing, not even happy peaceful weeks in the Keep with the man I loved, could change that. I’d come to terms with what I was a long time ago, but sometimes, like right now, looking over the deck strewn with corpses, I felt a quiet regret for the person I could’ve been.
    Curran, naked and covered with blood, wrapped his now-human arm around me. “You okay?” he asked quietly.
    I nodded. “You?”
    He grinned and squeezed me to him. My bones groaned.
    “Congratulations,” I squeezed out. “I survived the fight, but your hug did me in.”
    He grinned and let me go. We’d both made it.
    “We have a live one,” Raphael called out.
    We crossed the deck to where he crouched. A young man, maybe early twenties, with a mass of dark curls, laid on his back, his right leg twisted under at an odd angle, his face contorted by pain. Raphael held the point of his knife over the man’s liver.
    The man’s gaze fastened on Saiman. He held up his hand and said something, his words tumbling out in a rush.
    Saiman asked something. The man answered.
    Saiman turned to Curran. “He has some information that would be of particular interest to you. He will