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and ended up with two dozen of Andrea’s bullets in her brain. There was a limit to how much shapeshifters could heal, and Andrea was a crack shot. They relocated her to Atlanta, and although she didn’t have any trace of Lycos Virus in her blood and wasn’t in any danger of sprouting fur and claws, Ted kept her on the back burner.
Andrea took the bolt to the magic scanner, raised the glass hood, slid the bolt onto the ceramic tray, lowered the cube, and cranked the lever. The cube descended and the m-scanner whirled.
“Andrea?”
“Mmm?”
“The tech’s up,” I said, feeling stupid.
She grimaced. “Oh, Christ. Probably won’t get anything. Well, you never know. Sometimes you can pull some residual magic imprints even during tech.”
We looked at the cube. We both knew it was futile. You would have to scan something really saturated with magic to get a good m-scan during tech. Like a body part. The m-scanner analyzed the traces of residual magic left on an object by its owner and printed them in a variety of colors: blue for human, green for shapeshifter, purple for vampire. The tone and vividness of the colors denoted the different types of magic, and reading an m-scan correctly was practically an art form. The traces of magic on a bolt, probably held very briefly, were bound to be miniscule. I knew of only one man in the city who had an m-scanner high-speed enough to register such slight residual magic during tech. His name was Saiman.
Trouble was, if I went to him, it would cost me an arm and a leg.
The printer chattered. Andrea pulled the print out and turned to me. Her face had gone a shade whiter.
A wide slice of silvery blue cut across the paper.Human divine. That in itself was not remarkable.
Anybody who drew their power from deity or religion registered ashuman divine : the Pope, Shaolin monks, even Greg, a knight-diviner, had registered silver-blue. The problem was, we shouldn’t have been able to get an m-scan at all with the tech up.
“What does this mean? Is the residual magic just incredibly strong on this thing?”
Andrea shook her head. “The magic waves have been really erratic lately.”
We looked at each other. We both knew what rapid-fire waves meant: a flare. And I needed a flare like I needed a hole in the head.
“You have a petitioner,”Maxine’s voice said in my head.
I grabbed my m-scan and went into my office.
CHAPTER 2
I LANDED AT MY DESK. A FLARE WAS COMING. IFnormal shifts were magic waves, a flare was a magic tsunami. It started as a series of shallow magic fluctuations, quickly falling and rising, but never leaving the world. During those short waves, the magic didn’t completely fall, coming back stronger and stronger until it finally drowned us in an enormous surge.
Theory said that magic and tech used to coexist in a balance. Like the pendulum of a grandfather clock