Magic Claims (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years, #2; Kate Daniels, #10.6)

I handed the paper to him. He took it and looked at it. His face showed no emotion.

I lifted the vampire upright. It’d been undead for about fifteen years, and its hips had shifted to quadrupedal locomotion, but even the oldest vampire still possessed the ability to imitate the human posture. I put my arms down, slightly apart from my body, with the hands held up and turned around on my toes. Then I crouched slightly, bounced back up, put one hand on my hip, and held the other arm to the side, bent at the elbow, with my fingers together.

“What is this?” Barrett asked.

“I believe it’s a little teapot,” Claudia said, completely deadpan. “Short and stout. See, there is its handle and there is its spout.”

“Cute,” Barrett said.

His magic clamped on the vampire’s mind, gripping me in a steel vise and trying to force me out. Wow. Barrett packed some serious power.

In its unpiloted state, a vampire’s mind was an empty shell, a car without a driver rocketing forward at full speed and, like a runaway car, the undead wrecked anything it came across. Once a navigator took the driver’s seat, getting them out was a lot harder than simply grabbing an unpiloted vampire. It wasn’t a matter of skill but of raw power, which was why Barrett had dropped what he was doing and ran over here to see who had won the tug of war over his vampire. And the tech was up. Navigators, like shapeshifters, stored magic like a battery, which allowed them to navigate even when the magic was down, but doing this song and dance during tech was considerably harder.

The pressure intensified. He was really going for it now. This was what a walnut must feel like in a nutcracker. That wasn’t all of it though. He was still holding back.

Let’s see what you’ve got.

I shook the vampire and tilted it to the side. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out.

A blast of power smashed into me. Like being buried under an avalanche. A massive weight crashed into my mind, squeezing, bombarding me, trying to crush me out of the driver’s seat.

There it is. Welcome to the game.

Barrett’s power hammered at me. It was a good, powerful punch. It even drew some blood. But I was the daughter of the Builder of Towers. My father had brought the undead into existence. I had ignored this side of my power for years, but I’d used the last decade to make up for it.

The pressure ground at my mind. Barrett stared at the vampire with a terrible intensity.

It was time for a reality check.

I raised my arms, did a pirouette to build up momentum, extended my leg to the second position, whipped it to the back of the supporting knee, bringing it to the front, and turned en dehor. A fouetté.

Barrett’s eyes widened. He clenched his fists and pushed with everything he had.

One turn, two, three. I kept spinning. Turn, and turn, and turn, ten, fifteen, eighteen…

Uncertainty shivered in Barrett’s eyes. The three knights were staring at the vampire like they had never seen one before.

Twenty-four, twenty-six…

He must have thought of himself as an unstoppable force but, in the mind of an undead, I was truly an immovable object.

Thirty…

The pressure eased just a hair. It was barely less than it had been, but it still meant surrender. Barrett was running out of his magic reserve. I won.

I finished the last fouetté, landed, and raised my right arm, inviting applause. Nobody clapped. Party poopers.

I let go. The transition back to only one pair of eyes and ears was always slightly nauseating. I stayed still in the armory, listening.

Barrett would’ve grabbed the undead instantly, but we both knew what had happened. He didn’t win. I let him have his undead back.

“I don’t know who you brought in,” Barrett said, his voice low and full of contained menace. “But I’ll find out.”

A door swung open. I waited. A minute crawled by. Another…

“He’s gone,” Claudia called out.

I opened the door and trotted out. “You didn’t clap. My feelings are hurt.”

Claudia gave me a slow golf clap, and the other two knights followed. They were looking slightly freaked out.

Claudia squinted at me. “Who are you?”

“Someone who really wants to talk to Isaac Silverstein.”

Claudia got up. “I’ll ask him. No promises. Sit tight.”

I sat in a client chair. Claudia opened a door leading to an interior staircase and left.

How was it that she didn’t know who I was? My file in the Order’s database should’ve been a mile long.

Unless they had sealed it. I had seen that before, during my tenure with the Order in Atlanta. The file on my father was invisible to me. I didn’t have the clearance to know it existed. Andrea, my best friend and, at the time, a high-ranking knight, could only see a very brief summary that amounted to a warning sign and had to call in favors to learn more.

As a knight-protector, the head of her own chapter, Claudia should’ve had a high enough clearance, but then Wilmington was a lot smaller than Atlanta or Charlotte.

I wonder how tightly they have my file locked up...

I heard Claudia coming down the stairs. The door swung open, and she emerged. “He’ll see you.”

“Thank you.”

“I hope you’re ready for Barrett,” Claudia said. “He won’t let it go. You didn’t see his face as he walked out. That man was pissed off. He’s going to make it his purpose in life to find you and make you suffer every humiliation his psychotic mind can think up.”

“He won’t find out, unless one of you three tells him.”

“He will find out,” Claudia said, “because you enjoy screwing with him. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up.”

Slipping up wasn’t in the cards. I planned to keep Barrett ignorant for as long as I could. “Thank you for the warning.”

“Take care,” Claudia said.





3





Isaac Silverstein looked like a knight-pathfinder. A shade under six feet tall, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, he had the lean build of a long-range hiker, a perfect balance between flexibility, endurance, and moderate calorie needs. His navy sweatshirt hung off his shoulders, and his dark brown lightweight pants were tapered to his legs, loose enough to allow freedom of movement but tight enough not to snag on the brush. He wore serious hiking boots that looked like they had seen a lot of miles in a rough terrain. We weren’t anywhere near a hiking trail, so he must be wearing what he felt comfortable in.

Isaac’s tousled hair, cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top, was a cooler shade of brown, more ash than red. His skin wasn’t that pale naturally, but it didn’t have even an echo of a tan, which told me he’d stayed the whole summer inside the chapter.

His hooded blue eyes still held a hint of the “woods” stare, however. Human eyes were expressive. We communicated with our glances as much as with our mouths. When shapeshifters hunted in the forest, their eyes lost emotion and communicated nothing. They simply watched, observing their prey, tracking it, cataloguing danger and weakness, and if you happened to meet their gaze, your mind might not even recognize that you were looking at a human. Isaac’s eyes were a bit like that.

I paused in the doorway.

“Come in,” he said.

I stepped inside.

Isaac’s office was square, with a window in the wall opposite the door. On both sides of the window, mounted weapons waited—a bow with a quiver and an assortment of knives and bladed weapons that doubled as tools: axes, tomahawks, and machete-style short swords.

A desk sat on the left, filled with neat, orderly stacks of papers. Behind it, floor-to-ceiling shelves held books, rolled-up scrolls, chunks of twisted roots, jars of dried herbs, and other assorted things an outdoorsman might find in the woods and drag home.

The wall opposite the desk, on my right, was covered by a curtain.

“Claudia wants me to talk you out of it,” Isaac said. He had a quiet voice, slightly raspy.

“Claudia is a good person.”

“Would it work?”

“No.”