Magic Rises

shoulders and powerful chest strained his T-shirt. Carved biceps bulged on his arms. His stomach was flat and hard. Everything about him spoke of sheer physical power, contained but ready to be released. He moved like a cat on the prowl, graceful, supple, and completely quiet, stalking the Keep’s hallways, a lion in his stone lair. If I didn’t know him and I saw him coming in a dark alley, I’d make myself scarce.
    His physical presence was alarming, but his real power was in his eyes. The moment you looked into his gray irises, you knew he would tolerate no challenge to his authority, and if his eyes turned gold, you knew you were going to die. In a fit of cosmic irony, he had fallen in love with me. I challenged his authority on a weekly basis.
    Curran didn’t look at me. Usually when he entered the room, our stares would cross for that silent moment of connection, a quick check of Hey, are you okay? He wasn’t looking at me and his face was grim. Something was seriously wrong. Something besides Maddie.
    Curran walked past me to Doolittle and handed him a small plastic bag filled with olive-colored paste.
    Doolittle opened the bag and sniffed the contents. His eyes widened. “Where . . .”
    Curran shook his head.
    “Is that the panacea?” Meredith spun toward him, eyes suddenly alive again.
    The panacea was produced by European shapeshifters, who guarded it like gold. The Pack had been trying to reverse engineer it for years and had gotten nowhere. The herbal mixture reduced chances of loupism at birth by seventy-five percent and reversed midtransformation in one third of teenagers. There used to be a man in Atlanta who somehow managed to smuggle it in small batches, which he sold to the Pack at exorbitant prices, but a few weeks ago the shapeshifters had found him floating in a pond with his throat cut. Jim’s security crew tracked the killers to the coast. They had sailed out of our jurisdiction. Now Curran held a bag of it. What have you been up to, Your Furry Majesty?
    “There is only enough for a single dose,” Doolittle said.
    Damn it. “Can you get more?”
    Curran shook his head.
    “You must choose,” Doolittle said.
    “I can’t.” Meredith shrunk back.
    “Don’t make her pick.” How the hell could you choose one child over the other?
    “Split it,” Curran said.
    Doolittle shook his head. “My lord, we have a chance to save one of them . . .”
    “I said split it.” Curran growled. His eyes flashed gold. I was right. Something bad had happened, and it wasn’t just Maddie and Margo.
    Doolittle clamped his mouth shut.
    Curran moved back and leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.
    The paste was split into two equal portions. Tony mixed each into a pound of ground beef and dropped it into the cells. The children pounced on the meat, licking it off the floor. Seconds crawled by, towing minutes in their wake.
    Margo jerked. The fur on her body melted. Her bones folded on themselves, shrank, realigned . . . She cried out, and a human girl, naked and bloody, fell to the floor.
    Thank you. Thank you, whoever you are upstairs.
    “Margo!” Meredith called. “Margo, honey, answer me. Answer me, baby.”
    “Mom?” Margo whispered.
    “My baby!”
    Maddie’s body shuddered. Her limbs twisted. The distortion in her body shrank, but the signs of animal remained. My heart sank. It didn’t work.
    “She’s down to two,” Doolittle said.
    The shift coefficient, the measure of how much a body had shifted from one form to the other. “What does that mean?”
    “It’s progress,” he said. “If we had more of the panacea, I would be optimistic.”
    But we didn’t. Tony hadn’t just emptied the bag, he had cut it and rubbed the inside of the plastic on the meat and then scraped it clean with the back of the knife. Maddie was still going loup. We had to get more panacea. We had to save her.
    “You can’t kill her!” Julie’s voice shot into high pitch. “You can’t!”
    “How long can you keep the child under?” Curran asked.
    “How long is necessary?” Doolittle asked.
    “Three months,” Curran said.
    Doolittle frowned. “You’re asking me to induce a coma.”
    “Can you do it?”
    “Yes,” Doolittle said. “The alternative is termination.”
    Curran’s voice was clipped. “Effective immediately, all loupism-related terminations of children are suspended. Sedate them instead.” He turned and walked out.
    I paused for half a second to tell Julie that it