“I’m done with this game,” Curran snarled.
I pushed the disconnect button and pressed Maxine’s extension. “Maxine, if he calls again, please don’t put him through.”
“Dear, that was the Beast Lord.”
“Yes, I know. Please screen his calls.”
“Very well.”
I looked back at the paper. The hairy man laughed like a woman. Just like the undead mage.
Why the hell was Curran calling me anyway?
I picked up the phone and dialed Christy’s number. Christy was my closest neighbor—she lived only a few minutes down the road from my house near Savannah. She answered on the first ring.
“Hey, it’s Kate. How are you?”
“Fine, fine. What’s up?”
I’d regret this later. “I need a favor. Could you go up to my house and see if there is a note anywhere by my door?”
A month had passed. Unless he stuck it under the screen door, which had glass panels, even if the note had been there, it would be long gone.
“Sure. I’ll call you back in a few. Your job number, right?”
“No, my apartment is better. Thanks.”
I hung up. Even if there was a note, it changed nothing. Nothing at all.
If the big and shaggy man who attacked Barb’s bar did laugh like a woman, and if the second intruder was the Steel Mary, it meant they were batting for the same team. Was it a new faction trying to carve a territory in Atlanta? Argh. The deeper I dug, the more confused I got.
I went back to the evidence photos. A wide image of the bar. The inside of the Barbwire Noose had been demolished. Everything that could have been broken was. Splintered chairs. Crushed tables. Shattered glass. Holes in the walls. A chaotic twisted wreck that might have been a pool table at some point. The definition of “fury” in the dictionary had this picture under it.
One of the shots captured an amulet, photographed under wooden debris. Two inches long, the amulet resembled a hollow silver scroll with a piece of paper peeking out on one side. It was a common amulet: the scroll contained a piece of paper or parchment with a protective spell. The caption under the picture said: SEE EXHIBIT A.
I opened the lead box. Inside, in a small plastic bag, waited a piece of parchment. It was two inches wide and about four inches long, with tattered yellow edges that had been creased and torn too many times. Gently I flipped it over.
Blank.
Just once, just once I would’ve liked evidence that wouldn’t make me jump through burning hoops.
The notation stated that the parchment was found inside the amulet and it was blank. Whooptidoo. According to the follow-up, Ori lived alone. One of the carpenters he worked with stated that Ori was afraid of getting sick and carried the amulet as a protection against disease. She didn’t know what sort of magic it had or how he got it.
I dug around until I unearthed the lab report. It had Gone With the Wind ambitions—at least two inches thick. I started with the first test.
All evidence had to be routinely m-scanned. The m-scanner picked up traces of magical residue and recorded it as colors: blue for human, various shades of red and purple for undead, green for most shapeshifters. The m-scan of my parchment was blank, too. Lovely.
The next item was titled “Franco Emission Test (FET).” I hadn’t the foggiest what that was.
I pulled a reference volume of magic laboratory procedure off the shelf. Apparently FET involved placing the object of interest on a white sheet of paper, exposing it to intense chant or an item emitting heavy-duty magic, and then m-scanning it. If the tested object had no enchantment, it would saturate with magic, if only for a few moments, enough to be picked up by m-scan. The copy of the post-FET m-scan showed a pale blue piece of paper with a nice parchment-sized blank space in the middle. The parchment had an enchantment. Surely, one of the tests would nail it down.
Thirty minutes later I had learned way too much useless trivia about what bored Savannah PAD mages did for fun. Their conclusions after seventeen tests on the parchment amounted to: it’s blank, it’s magic, we don’t know what it is, and we can’t read it. Toodles.
Something good had to be on the parchment, something that made Ori stake his life on it. I picked up the bag and held it up to the window, letting the light shine through. Nothing but parchment grain.
A door clanged to the left, followed by heavy steps echoing through the hallway. The knight-protector entered my office, growled at my attack poodle, and sat down in my client chair. Wood and metal groaned, accepting his weight. Ted fixed me with his flat stare. “What do you have?”
CHAPTER 10
“YOU DON’T HAVE MUCH,” TED SAID AFTER I HAD laid out my case.
“I’ve had the case for thirty-six hours.”
“Thirty-eight.” Ted leaned forward and glared at me with his lead eyes.
Ted had a fondness for Western clothing. Today he wore jeans, cowhide boots, and a turquoise shirt with black patches on the shoulders, each patch embroidered with a white Texas star. Ted Moynohan, channeling a cattle rustler at the prom.
Trouble was, the knight-protector ran about forty pounds too heavy for the outfit. Not exactly fat, but thick across the chest and carrying the beginnings of a gut, Ted had the build of an aging heavyweight boxer. He wouldn’t run up a staircase for fun, but if you slammed a door in his face, he would punch through it and knock you out with the same blow.
Despite the outfit, being on the receiving end of that stare was like peering into the mouth of a loaded .45 with the safety off. I wondered what he would do if I screamed and fainted.
His voice was low, almost lazy. “What is the Order’s primary directive?”
“To ensure the survival of the human race.”
He nodded. “We keep the order. We force monsters to coexist. We ensure peace. Forty-eight hours ago, this city functioned. As we sit here, the People are paranoid that someone has better undead than they do and is coming after their slice of the pie. The shapeshifters are pondering their own mortality and imagining their children dying of epidemics. The mercs are flailing because the Guild’s head has been chopped off. Biohazard wants to declare a citywide quarantine and PAD is shaking down every homeless person in a dirty cloak. The city is headed to hell in a hand basket. Do you know what happens when monsters, thugs, and cops get scared?”
I knew. “They stop playing nice.”
“We must restore order. We have to simmer Atlanta down at any cost, or it will boil over with panic and chaos. If I had a female knight more competent than you with better experience and a longer track record, I’d pull you off this petition and give it to her.”
What is Andrea, chopped liver? “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Assigning this petition to a man is out of the question. I have to rely on an Academy dropout with a discipline problem and a big mouth.”
I wanted to jump on the table and kick him in the mouth. “My heart bleeds in sympathy.”
Ted ignored me. “You have the full power of the Atlanta Chapter behind you. Fix this mess. What do you need to make it happen?”
The urge to pull off my ID and hand it to him was so strong, I had to fight not to touch the cord around my neck. Here, you deal with it. You try to run around with the weight of a possible pandemic riding you, you carry the responsibility for people dying, and I’ll sit back and tell you where you fall short. A year ago I might have done it. The memory of Ori’s crumpled body flashed before me. But then again, maybe not.
I squished my pride into a ball, sat on it, and plucked the lead case from the evidence box. “This is the parchment that stopped him before. I need to know what was written on it. I need to know what hurts him and who he is.”
“You need an expert.”
I nodded. “I want to take it to Saiman.”
“The polyform. He refuses to work with the Order.”