Magic Rises

you’ll never see his face again. In the morning, this castle will be a bonfire and we’ll sail home.”
    I’d have to word this carefully. People were listening to us. I whispered back to him. “If we sail down the coast southwest, we’ll pass by the ruins of Troy. Do you remember the story of Paris and Helen?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    Troy’s favorite son and badass archer, Paris, had sailed to Sparta. He came under a banner of truce. The Spartan king treated him as an honored guest, and then Paris stole the king’s wife, Helen, and emptied his treasury. Nobody really knew if he kidnapped Helen or if she went with him. Her husband could’ve loved her or beaten her every day. But the whole of Greece united against Paris. At the end, Troy was a smoking ruin.
    I kissed his jaw. “The bow and arrow was never your thing.”
    He locked his teeth, making his jaw muscles bulge.
    We promised to be impartial. We came in peace. If we broke that peace and started a bloodbath, we’d get a bloodbath in return. Nobody would see it as an act of a man trying to save the woman he loved from her father’s warlord. The European packs would spin it as an act of betrayal from a man who couldn’t handle being insulted.
    Attacking Hugh would be an act of war. Not to mention that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that even if both of us fought him, we’d survive that confrontation. Whatever the outcome, Roland would have an excuse to burn the Keep to the ground. He already viewed the Atlanta Pack as a threat, and this would be the tasty icing on his massacre cake. By the time we got home, people we knew and cared about would be dead.
    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
    “For what?”
    “It’s because of me.” I was the reason we were all trapped here. I didn’t cause it, but I was the reason for it.
    He pulled me to him and squeezed me. “You’re worth the fight,” he said in my ear.
    He had no idea how much I loved him.
    “We all volunteered,” he whispered. “And without you, we wouldn’t have a shot at the panacea. We need it desperately.”
    We fell silent. For a long moment I simply enjoyed being next to him. If only this could last . . .
    “He hasn’t attacked me on sight,” I whispered. “That means he’ll want to talk to me.”
    “No,” Curran said. “Not alone.”
    “Sooner or later this conversation has to happen. If he planned on killing me, why go through all this trouble? He knew where I was. He could’ve just put a sniper on the roof across the street from Cutting Edge and put a bullet through my head as I unlocked the office.”
    Curran exhaled his frustration. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.”
    “I know,” I whispered. “And I’ll do the same for you.”
    We shouldn’t have come here. I closed my eyes. I had to sleep. Tomorrow would be another day, another fight. Tomorrow Hugh would approach me and I had to be sharp. Once I figured out what his angle was, things would become a lot simpler.

CHAPTER 9

    I opened my eyes. The magic was down and Curran was gone. The clock said ten past seven. Plenty of time to get dressed and make it to Doolittle’s quarters in time for the meeting.
    A plate waited for me on the table, covered with a piece of paper. The paper said in Curran’s rough scrawl, Went to talk to Mahon. Packs want to meet to “discuss issues.” Don’t forget to eat.
    Under the paper, the plate contained two eggs and a lion-sized piece of ham. I ate a third of it, brushed my teeth, put on my jeans, and strapped on my sword. New day, new battle.
    Our bags had been brought in from the ship. I dug through them and pulled out my beat-up copy of the Almanac of Mythological Creatures . I’d read it cover to cover so many times that I had memorized entire pages, but sometimes looking at it helped me connect the dots.
    I’ve never heard of shapeshifters turning into winged cats, but since Lyc-V was present in the blood, most likely the mechanism of the transformation was the same: the virus infected some creature and then infected a human. The first step was to figure out what the creature was.
    Winged cats weren’t the most common motif in mythology, but they did occur. Freja, a Norse goddess, had a chariot that was pulled across the sky by two giant cats, Brygun and Trejgun, who probably had wings. They were blue and not orange and didn’t change shape. The Sphinx was a feline with wings and a serpent’s tail, but also a female face.