We stared at each other.
“We should spar,” he said. “We will both feel better.”
Yes. I needed to punch and kick and do things so badly, my limbs ached. “That’s a good idea. No; that’s the best idea ever.”
Someone knocked on the front door. Derek sniffed the air, picked up a large knife, and hefted it in his hand.
“What?” I asked.
“The pervert,” Derek said, and started toward the door.
Oh no, you don’t. “I’ll get it.”
I beat Derek to the door and swung it open. A man stood on our doorstep, wearing gray pants, a light-gray button-down shirt rolled up to the elbows, and tired dark shoes. Bald. Average height, average build, unremarkable features, neither handsome nor ugly. You’d pass him in a crowd and never give him a second glance. Saiman in his neutral form, a clean slate for a polymorph who could impersonate any human on the face of the planet. Behind him a dark van with tinted windows waited in our driveway.
I checked his eyes for the usual sharp intelligence. It was there, together with apprehension.
“What’s the emergency?”
“Emergency?” Saiman raised his eyebrows.
“Yes. What bad thing happened to make you show up here? What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
I rubbed my forehead. “My husband is generally frustrated and so am I, so it’s in everyone’s best interests if you tell me why you’re here quickly.”
Saiman hesitated for a moment. “I don’t have a body.”
I reached out and touched his shoulder with my index finger. “I’ve just conducted a field test and it appears you do have a body. Good night.”
“I didn’t get a body. Biohazard, the Order, and the Pack received a body. I’m the best arcane expert in Atlanta, with a state-of-the-art lab, and you haven’t sent me one.”
Oh. “I didn’t send you a body because you would charge me an arm and a leg for it.” There were way too many puns in that sentence for my liking. “I’m not interested in your services. Your price is too high.”
Saiman took a deep breath, as if he were about to jump off a cliff. “I’ll examine it gratis.”
I pinched my arm.
A hint of the old Saiman’s arrogance crept into his eyes. “Really, Kate, this is childish.”
I turned back to the kitchen and called out, “Saiman is here and he wants to help us for free.”
Derek clamped his hand to his chest and dropped to the floor.
“Oh gods!” Julie waved her hands. “Hide the children. The Apocalypse is coming. The werewolves are fainting!”
Saiman spared them a single glance. “They were perfectly reasonable before. This is the result of prolonged exposure and proves my theory.”
“And what would that be?”
“You’re contagious.”
Julie rushed over to Derek. “No, no, that’s okay. He hasn’t fainted. He just has the vapors! False alarm.”
Saiman looked to be in physical pain. “None of this is funny.”
“All of that ability to transform and you can’t develop a sense of humor. Cheer up, Saiman. The ice of Jotunheim is far away. Your folks won’t know if you crack a smile.”
Saiman sighed, opened his mouth, and froze, his gaze fixed behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Curran loomed in the hallway. My husband had a talent for emanating threat simply by standing still, and right now he was exercising this gift to its full extent. If menace were heat, the walls around me would’ve caught on fire.
“I’m here to help,” Saiman said quietly.
Derek rolled to his feet.
“What’s the catch?” I asked. “What do you want? I don’t want to owe you anything.”
“Nothing. No strings attached.”
There were few absolute truths in this world, but the fact that Saiman never did anything without expecting a payoff was surely one of them.
“Can you transform during tech?” Curran asked.
Saiman drew himself to his full height. “Yes.”
“Good. Come inside.”
“Excuse me.” Saiman stepped into the hallway and walked past me to the kitchen.
His Furriness was so laser focused on the blond dude, he was willing to work with Saiman. And this wouldn’t end badly. Not at all.
“Kate tried to fire call her father tonight,” Curran said.
“Fire call?” Saiman asked me.
“Later,” I told him.
“Someone cut in. I want to know what he looked like,” Curran said. “Can you do this?”
Saiman smiled. “Of course.”
“Good. Julie, get the Polaroid camera.”
Saiman rubbed his hands together. The skin on his face crawled, as if a pool ball rolled under it. My stomach screeched in alarm and tried to empty itself.
“Really?” Derek raised his eyebrows.
“He’s a weird pervert, but he is our weird pervert and he came here to help. Let him help,” I said.
Derek frowned.
Curran gave him a hard look. “When you have to, use every resource available.”
“Ready when you are,” Saiman said.
There was no escaping it. I sighed and started. “Square jaw . . .”
Five minutes later, my fire-call visitor stood in front of us. He was still wearing Saiman’s clothes, but the face and hair belonged to the man in the fire.
“Yeah,” Derek volunteered. “That’s him.”
Curran examined him, his jaw set. Julie snapped a few pictures. “You didn’t say he was handsome.”
Thanks, just what I needed. “He was handsome, but there was something wrong with him.”
“In what way?” Saiman asked.
“His eyes were . . .” I struggled to describe them. “Cold. Not exactly flat, but remote. It was like looking into the eyes of a gator.”
“Interesting,” Saiman said.
“Does he look like any ancient you know?” Derek asked.
“Nimrod and Astamur are the only ancient humans I’ve met in person,” Saiman said. “They don’t exactly wander about like stray cats.”
I got up. “I’ll be right back. If I come back and our guest is injured, I’ll be very put out.”
Julie opened her eyes as wide as they would go. “Injure? Us?”
I went upstairs and brought the box down. “I need you to look at this.”
Saiman collapsed into his neutral shape and examined the box, lifting the lid with his long slender fingers. “Is this an artifact?”
“It was left on my doorstep.” I told him about the boy burning. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.
“To burn a body alive but make the human immune to the pain . . .” he murmured. “How would you even begin to go about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“If this is a message, there should be some way to attribute it. Unless this being’s arrogance is so great, they believe they would be instantly recognized.”
“My aunt indicated the box is a generic way to declare war,” I explained.
“And you found nothing in the box or on the knife?”
“Nothing except this shape.” I drew the symbol for him.
“Arsenic? Curious,” he murmured.
“I have a body for you if you’re still interested,” I told him. “I took one to show my father.” Which was one of the reasons the trip had taken so long. We had to stop by the office and pull the spare out of the freezer.
“I am.”
Curran followed us to the Jeep and carried the body bag wrapped in chains to Saiman’s dark van. Saiman and I watched him.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“We’ve had our ups and downs. We are associates. Sometimes business partners. To your father, I’m a bag of magically potent blood. He chained me in a stone cell with a barred, narrow window. Every day at sunrise your father’s soldiers would walk into my cell and shatter the bones of my legs with a hammer, so he could take full advantage of my regeneration. I couldn’t slow it down. My body would rebuild my bones and make more blood, and every evening the soldiers returned to drain it. I sat in that cell, staring at the sliver of the sky, and I knew nobody was coming for me. I would be there until I died.”
We’d had this conversation before, but I didn’t want to interrupt to remind him.