Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim . . .
In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful,
I seek refuge in the Lord of the dawn,
From the evil of that which He has created,
And from the evil of intense darkness, when it comes,
And from the evil of those who cast (evil suggestions) in firm resolutions,
And from the evil of the envier when he envies . . .
Surat al-Falaq, one hundred and thirteenth chapter of the Qur’an. The entire box was covered in protective verses.
“He already had the box,” Nitish said. “He needed us for the koftgari.”
Islam protected its followers against the supernatural. Whatever the stranger was going to put into that box, he counted on divine assistance to keep it in there.
“I looked inside the box,” Nitish said. “The inside of it was smooth and looked like bone.”
“Ivory?”
“No. Bone. Like the inside of a skull.”
Better and better.
“Can I see it?”
“He picked it up two days ago. He didn’t even ask about the knife. I don’t think he remembered that he had ordered it.”
• • •
I STARED THROUGH the windshield at a chain barring Cutting Edge’s parking lot. The chain secured the parking lot at night. It was almost eleven a.m. It should be lying by one of the posts. Instead here it was, keeping me from driving in.
Derek usually came to Cutting Edge by eight in the morning. Failing that, Curran should have been back from his trip to the Mercenary Guild. He might have gotten held up at the Guild, but it was unlikely. After his response to Bob’s tirade, none of the mercs would screw with him. That errand should’ve taken fifteen minutes. Did he get himself into some sort of trouble at the Guild? My imagination painted the Guild in ruins and my honey-bunny emerging from the wreckage roaring and swinging around the limp bodies of the Four Horsemen.
That would be hilarious.
Okay, this wasn’t the most productive line of thinking.
Talking to Saiman had clearly put me into a foul mood. In my head, my dead aunt murmured, People are fish. They die. You remain. Saiman was right, in a sense. I was tainted, but not because I was doomed. I was tainted because I had power, the kind of power that corrupted and turned people into warped versions of themselves. I was warped enough as it was.
I parked in front of the building and tried the door. It was predictably locked. I unlocked it and walked inside, into a large main room. The shades were still down. I pulled them up, letting the light illuminate the wide room with four desks. There used to be only two desks, one for me and one for Andrea Nash, but now Andrea was busy running Clan Bouda. She was also pregnant. We tried to have lunch every Friday, and the last time we went, she ate four pounds of barbecued ribs by herself. She wanted to eat the rib bones too, but I talked her out of it. Then she pouted and called me a downer.
Now her desk stood empty, as she had left it. She claimed she would come back to it, but I doubted it. My desk was to the right of hers, Derek’s directly behind mine and Curran’s behind Andrea’s. None of the desks had any notes on them. Great.
I landed in my chair. Saiman was right about one thing: if I fell, the city would fall with me. Being my ally was a death warrant. How the hell was I going to keep them all safe? I couldn’t even find Eduardo. Before, I was only responsible for my own safety. Then I became responsible for the safety of my friends, then for the safety of the Pack. Now I had to safeguard the city. My obligations kept escalating and not in a good way.
I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the city.
None of it would have happened if I hadn’t claimed Atlanta. But letting my father add it to his growing empire would’ve been worse. My father understood the concept of democracy and free will. He just felt that they should be exercised within the frame of his own will. My father had been a king, a tyrant, and a conqueror. He was never elected to the office. He would probably laugh at the idea. And if he did somehow decide to hold elections, he would magic the masses into electing him, because he would honestly believe that he was best qualified to rule wisely.
Having a pity party for myself accomplished nothing. It didn’t help Eduardo at all. I had to find someone to analyze my glass. The sooner the better. And I had to find a way into the Guild.
I checked the answering machine. Three messages. I pushed the button.
“Hey, you twisted goon,” Luther’s voice said from the machine. “I had my bug guy check your giant bug. It’s a wind scorpion, also known as a camel spider, a solifugid, which makes it an arachnid. The largest species grow about six inches, including legs, and they’re not venomous or dangerous to humans. We have a few of these guys in Arizona, but my guy says this one is likely from the Middle East or North Africa. It’s not too late to tell me what you know. Call me back, if you have any decency left.”
Ghouls, wolf griffins, inscriptions in Arabic, and now wind scorpions. All of this pointed at the same geographical area. Trouble was, I had no idea how it all fit together. I couldn’t tell Luther what I knew since I didn’t know anything. Maybe if I went outside and gave alms to the poor, some mystic old lady would sell me a magic lamp with a cooperative djinn to answer all my questions.
The machine clicked, rolling over to the next message. “Hi, it’s Barabas. Please call me as soon as you get this.”
I dialed the number. Just what I needed, another emergency.
The phone rang once and Barabas picked it up. “Hey. I think I found a loophole.”
Cancel the freak-out about another emergency.
“Talk to me about the Guild stopgap measure.”
Good morning to you, too. “The stopgap is a hiring freeze. The Guild’s mercs are contractors, but they still have to formally be hired by the Guild. If the Guild judges that there are too few jobs per merc, the stopgap kicks in until there are more jobs or fewer mercs.”
I started drawing a cliff on a piece of paper.
“They’re on stopgap right now,” Barabas said.
“It doesn’t surprise me. The place is falling down around them.” I added a bunch of stick figures to the cliff and drew a falling dollar bill under it.
“From my review and the information I received from Jim, it appears that administration staff is central to the Guild being able to turn a profit.”
“Yes. The Clerk is the grease that makes the gears go around.”
“Correct me if I am wrong. Bob Carver and his Horsemen wanted to access the pension fund. They tied up the Guild’s budget, so the admin staff stopped getting their pay. They walked off. Without the Clerk and his staff, there is no effective distribution of jobs. Nobody is taking, assigning, or tracking the jobs, so customers become angry when nobody shows up. The Guild’s business dries up, which results in a financial shortage. It’s a Catch-22.”
“Exactly.” I added a stick figure diving after the dollar bill and wrote Bob above its head. “The Guild needs money to rehire the admins, but they need admins to make the money in the first place.”
“We need to break this vicious circle.”
“How?”
“There is a provision in the manual that permits each individual merc to contribute money to the Guild and earmark where it goes.”
I rubbed my face, but rubbing failed to produce any great insights. “Are you suggesting we give the Guild our money?”
“Yes.”
“Barabas, it’s a sinking ship already. You want to throw good money after bad?”
“Hear me out.”
Famous last words. “Okay.”
“We inject cash into the Guild under the condition that it will be spent specifically to rehire the admin crew. The Clerk comes back, the jobs—”
“Gigs.” If he insisted on this foolishn
ess, he might as well start using correct terms.
“The gigs are once again properly assigned. Mercs once again make money. It gives us instant goodwill.”
“What will happen when that money runs out?”
“We need to make sure that the money lasts until the Guild’s finances bounce back. We use the goodwill we earned and our shares to break the budget lock. People don’t like chaos. Chaos means they can’t earn money. They need strong leadership. We need to develop a reputation as the people you come to when you have a problem you need solving.”
“How much money would we need?”
“My budget projections indicate we need at least $142,860 to bankroll admin operations with a skeleton crew for the next four months, which is how long I estimate we’ll need before the Guild becomes financially solvent.”
I chewed on that number.
“Kate?”
“Give me a second.”
“It’s a doable number. Curran gave me a $300,000 budget.”
Wow.
“Kate?”
Well, he spent millions on the forest, why not the Guild. “Go on.”
“The individual contribution is capped at $50,000. Jim doesn’t want any Pack members involved, and the stopgap prevents us from enrolling Curran or anyone else. We are stuck. We don’t have enough people to donate the necessary money.”
“For the record, I think this is a terrible idea.”
“I will be sure to note your objection,” Barabas said.
“Look in the membership chapter under corporations. I can enroll up to three people as my auxiliary support. The flip side of this coin is that if they screw up, I’ll be directly penalized.”
“I saw that. That requires you to be a corporate member for at least six months.”
“I’ve been a corporate member for over a year. I converted my membership when Curran gave me Cutting Edge. A very smart Pack lawyer with spiky red hair advised me to do it for tax purposes.” Also, the Guild had good dental insurance for its corporate members.
“Pack lawyers give good advice,” Barabas said. “Even if they don’t always remember it. I’ll call you back.”
He hung up.
Well. I guess Curran did take care of it.
If we were going to take over the Guild, we’d need the Clerk. I flipped through the phone book. I had no idea where the Clerk was, but I knew where Lori would be. She was his favorite protégé, because, as he had confided to me once late at night, she had more than half a brain. Lori’s parents, Karen and Brenda, ran a bakery off Campbellton Road, which was called Sweet Cheeks. I remembered because I had stopped by there to buy a cake pop once, and one of her mothers—I thought it was Brenda, but I wasn’t sure—teased me about my sword until Lori came out and told her to stop messing with me.
Ah, here it is. I dialed the number.
“Sweet Cheeks Bakery.”
“Can I speak to Lori, please?”
“Hi, Kate, what can I do you for?”
Nice to be recognized. “You wouldn’t know where to find the Clerk?”
Lori sighed. “You know how he always talked about running a bar when he retires?”
I didn’t, but that didn’t matter. “Did he buy a bar?”
“He’s got himself a job at the Steel Horse. He says he wants to get a feel for the business.”
The Steel Horse was a border bar that sat on the invisible boundary between the Pack and the People’s territory within Atlanta. It was a neutral watering hole and I had a lot of pull with its owners. “Hypothetically speaking, if someone offered you your old Guild job back, would you be interested?”
There was a pause before an urgent whisper filled my ear. “Kate, you get me out of here, I’ll buy your drinks for a year. If I have to pipe cream on one more carrot cupcake, I’ll stab myself.”
“Thanks for your help.”
I hung up. The Steel Horse wouldn’t open for another hour or two.
The answering machine’s light blinked at me. That’s right. More messages.
I pushed the answering machine’s button again.
“This is the attendance department of Seven Star Academy. Your student, Julie Lennart-Daniels, has been marked absent in the following periods . . .”
Julie didn’t skip school. I went cold.
“First . . .”
She wasn’t sick this morning.
“Second . . .”
Curran would’ve taken her straight to school.
“And third.”
She was absent for the entire morning. Curran and she never made it to school.
“Please provide the necessary documentation within two business—”
The magic wave washed over me. Damn it, just what I needed.
I grabbed the phone and dialed the Seven Star Academy. Work, damn you.
A beep. Another . . .
“Seven Star Academy, this is Emily.”
“My name is Kate Daniels. Did Julie ever come to school today?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Please call me as soon as she shows up.”
I hung up and dialed the house. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring . . .
What the hell could’ve happened?
“Leave a message,” my own voice said.
“Curran, where the hell are you? I can’t find Julie. Julie, if you are there, pick up the phone. You are not in trouble. I just need to know if you are safe.”
Silence.
I hung up and dialed Barabas.
“I don’t have it yet,” he said.
“Did you see Curran leave this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have Julie with him?”
“Yes.”
“Is he back?”
“No. I was here all morning. I would’ve heard the car.”
“Call me if you see him. Please.”
I hung up.
Julie and Curran were gone. Just like Eduardo. It would take an army of ghouls to take Curran down. He would die before he let them have Julie. Where could he have gone with her?
I dialed the Keep, the front guard station.
“You’ve reached the Pack . . .” Artie said.
“It’s me.”
“Consort . . . I mean, not Consort. Ex-Consort?”
“Is Curran at the Keep?”
“No. Neither of you can be at the Keep until your ninety-day separation is over—”
I hung up.
Julie used to be a street kid. If she hadn’t been kidnapped by ghouls, then she’d skipped school and finding her would be next to impossible. Finding Curran would be easier. Once I found him, he could tell me if he had dropped her off at school. He was going to go to the Guild first. I dialed the Guild’s number. I would make one of those assholes tell me if he was there.
A rapid disconnect signal wailed in my ear like a runaway heartbeat. What the hell . . . ? I dialed a number that went directly to Mark’s office. The phone clicked once, twice, and screaming punched my ear, the raw high-pitched howl of human terror. “Help! Help me!”
A heavy crash drowned out the voice and a familiar young voice shrieked. “He’s coming!”
Julie.
The Guild was less than twenty minutes away by horse. I ran out the door.
CHAPTER
10
I WAS A block away from the Guild when a chunk of brickwork the size of a car flew over a building, darkening the sun. I jerked Cuddles to the left. She veered and the brickwork crashed into the pavement with a loud thud, ten feet from where we were just a moment ago. Bricks scattered on the street, bouncing on the pavement. A body fell onto the bricks with a wet splat and lay there limp, like a rag doll. A familiar head lolled, blood pouring from his mouth, dead eyes staring up at the indifferent sky. Leroy. Holy crap.
&
nbsp; Cuddles broke into a gallop. We charged down the road, swung around the corner, and shot out onto the short stretch of Phoenix Drive that led to the Guild.
A huge pair of legs blocked my view. Covered with curly dark hair, they rose at least thirty feet before terminating in a flabby wrinkled ass. The feet, at least nine and a half feet long, glowed with orange, like metal just pulled from the forge. Heat scorched me, as if I had flung open the door of a stove with a fire raging inside. I smelled the tar-tinted stench of melting asphalt, the road around the giant softening like the wax of a burning candle.
Cuddles skidded to a stop, shocked. I remembered to close my mouth.
Behind the giant, the Guild’s heavy ten-foot-tall doors stood slightly ajar, dented and bent out of shape. He must’ve kicked or punched them, but the reinforced steel held, so he changed his strategy and went from the top, like a bear trying to dig into a beehive. The doors wouldn’t last too much longer—the metal was beginning to glow. Sooner or later the heat from the giant’s feet would melt it.
Where were the cops when you needed them? Why wasn’t the PAD shooting this man-mountain with everything they had? They lived for this shit.
The colossus turned, showing me his pale back, then his stomach, his skin wrinkled and saggy, as he somehow managed to be thin and flabby at the same time. If he were a normal size, I’d say he was about fifty years old. His head was level with the fifth, half-ruined floor of the Guild. That put him at over sixty-five feet tall.
If Julie was trapped inside the Guild, Curran had to be with her. Why wasn’t he out here, fighting? If Curran was inside, the giant should be dead. Was he injured? I’d seen him walk through fire on broken legs.
I had to get inside.
I shoved the cresting fear aside. Calm washed over me. If Julie and Curran were inside, then the fastest way to help them would be to remove the giant. I could panic later.
The heat emanating from his feet was overpowering. No way for a ground strike. No way through that door either. I had to get up to his level, and all of the neighboring buildings were too far to make that jump. Drawing him off would be better. If I could get him to chase me, I could lead him where I wanted him. It was a long shot, but I had to try.