Magic Rises

moment I removed the blade, it would go for my throat. Slayer was taking too long. We couldn’t hold it.
    “Drop it.” I jerked the blade free. Derek hurled the vamp out and onto the stone floor. The pale body landed with a wet thud, and I beheaded it with one quick stroke. The vamp head rolled toward Desandra. She nudged it with her foot and wrinkled her nose. “Stinks, doesn’t he?”
    I wiped Slayer down.
    Derek rolled to his feet and stuck his head into the opening. “I can see a ten-foot-wide passage to the side with a vertical shaft at the end.” He indicated a rough rectangle of the wall. “This is plaster. Looks like the size of a small doorway. The rest is stone.”
    A light staccato of steps came down the hallway and four djigits ran into the room and halted.
    “Tell Hibla we need maid service,” I said. “We could handle trash in our room and an odd smell, but now we have a dead body. If this continues, we won’t be able to give your hotel a decent rating.”
    “Yeah,” Derek said, his voice completely deadpan. “The continental breakfast better kick ass or we’ll complain to the manager.”
    * * *
    Dinner was served at midnight. I had expended some calories—Doolittle’s healing made the body burn through food with wild abandon—and I was so ravenous, I could’ve eaten one of those mountain goats in the courtyard raw.
    Sitting still while Desandra napped and the castle staff poured alcohol on the vampire blood, set it on fire, and then scrubbed it off the floor, diligently ignoring my questions such as “How did a vampire get into the castle?” and “What was it doing in the wall?” gave me a lot of time to think.
    I started thinking about Curran and Lorelei, decided it would drive me nuts, and focused on the winged shapeshifters instead. I wished I had access to the Keep’s library. I wished I could call a couple of people and ask them if they’d ever heard of something like that. But I had no resources beyond what was in my head and what few books I’d brought with me. Fixating on lamassu would do me no good; there was no indication that lamassu were shapeshifters. When an investigation first began, you simply collected facts. I was still in the collecting-facts stage. Drawing conclusions at this point would cause me to select facts that supported my theories and ignore those that didn’t. That was a slippery slope at the end of which lay more dead bodies.
    Magic had ways of spitting out new and bizarre things into the world, so just because I hadn’t heard of them didn’t mean these guys didn’t have a long and bloody history somewhere. Up until now, I would’ve questioned the existence of weredolphins as well, but having killed a few turned me into a believer. If a werewhale waddled into the castle, I wouldn’t blink an eye. I’d look for a harpoon, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
    So suppose this was some odd scale-covered weirdo type of never-before-seen shapeshifters. Why wasn’t Hugh turning the castle upside down looking for them? Hibla struck me as smart and capable but also a bit inexperienced. That wasn’t a strike against her—it was unlikely that this castle had ever been attacked and she cared about keeping it safe, so much so that she’d swallowed her pride and come to me for help. Considering how everybody and their mother had been lamenting the fact that I was not a shapeshifter and, therefore, must be inferior, Hibla’s coming to me was nothing short of a miracle.
    So she didn’t have the experience to deal with it, but Hugh had experience in spades. Why wasn’t he taking any action?
    The better question was, did he engineer this whole thing? If this was some sort of elaborate setup, I couldn’t see what he had to gain by it, but I couldn’t mark him off the list of potential suspects either, just like I couldn’t cross out Jarek Kral, the Volkodavi, or the Belve Ravennati.
    I would have loved to eliminate one suspect. Just one. It didn’t even matter which one. If I could drop one faction from the list, I would do a jig right there in front of everyone and weep for joy.
    The cleaning staff left. Derek raised his head and sniffed the air.
    If somebody ever hired us for another bodyguarding job, I’d fight tooth and claw to bring Derek with us. He smelled people coming before I ever heard them.
    “Who is it?” I asked.
    “Isabella,” he said.
    The matriarch of Belve Ravennati was coming to pay us a visit.
    “I don’t want to talk to