Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels 8)

He dragged his hand through his hair. “Something happened in December. Something strange.”

Move along, nothing to see here, no city claiming people are on the premises. “Strange things happen all the time here.”

“No, this was different. It felt like a storm. A magic storm. It rolled through the city and now it feels different. Does it feel different to you?”

Lie, lie, lie. “No.”

Luther searched my face with his gaze. “I’m not crazy.”

No, you’re not. “That’s above my pay grade.”

“It’s like an itch I can’t scratch.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor for that,” Curran said.

Luther pointed his finger at him. “I don’t like you.”

“Bye, Luther.” I grinned.

He walked away. “I will figure it out! I’m not crazy!”

If he ever figured it out, I would have a lot of explaining to do.

•   •   •

“DOES EVERYBODY THINK I am an asshole?” Curran asked.

“Only people who know you or have met you.”

He looked at me for a long second.

“You were a zealous advocate of the Pack’s causes,” I said. “The Pack’s interests are often at odds with human interests. I still love you. Derek still thinks you’re the stuff.”

Derek was kneeling by the scrape on the pavement and inhaling deeply. “Three ghouls. One male and two females. The scent is about fifty hours old, give or take an hour.”

Fifty hours would be just about the time Eduardo would have come to respond to Mrs. Oswald’s phone call on Monday about the wolf griffin.

“Interesting timing,” I said.

“They came here and left along the same trail,” Derek said.

“How long were they here?” Curran asked.

“A few hours.” Derek pointed to a narrow spot between the side of the house and a wooden fence. “They hid there, behind the trash cans.”

Three ghouls just sitting there waiting while the residents of the house left for work. Don’t mind us, we’re just chilling here, behind your trash cans, rubbing our big sharp claws, while your delicious children leave for school. And that wasn’t creepy. No, not at all.

“Why?” I thought out loud. “If they were hiding, there are better places to hide.”

“Mm-hm.” Curran’s face told me he was thinking the same thing. “Bad place to hide but a good place for an ambush.”

I glanced back at Mrs. Oswald’s house. A couple of houses down, the street ended in a cul-de-sac. Only one way in or out.

“Any other scents?” I asked. “Any human scents? Anyone they attacked?”

Derek shook his head.

Curran looked at me. “Does this seem odd to you?”

“Everything about this seems odd to me. Ghouls are solitary. They live near cemeteries, they hide in burrows, and they travel at dawn or during the night. They don’t band into groups and prance about in broad daylight in a residential neighborhood. Unless the owner of that house is a serial killer and he’s got his victims buried in his backyard, there is no reason for them to be here.”

“There are no bodies in the backyard,” Derek said. “I would’ve smelled decomp.”

Sense of humor check, failed.

“The point is, it’s highly unlikely that these two odd things”—I pointed at the trash cans with one hand and at the corpse of the spider-scorpion with the other—“aren’t connected. I think they were waiting for Eduardo.” And I would give a year of my life to know why. “The ghouls we killed in Lawrenceville were answering someone’s call. They said someone was waiting for them. They don’t meet people for coffee or brunch. I think some being is using them for their own means.”

“That would explain their organization and unusual behavior,” Derek said.

“Can you track them?” Curran asked.

“Sure.” Derek smiled.

“Let’s go ask them,” Curran said.

“I’ll get the car,” I said. I would only slow them down on foot.

Fifteen minutes later I chased them in a Jeep. I’d have to send someone back later to pick up George’s car.

Lions weren’t known for their marathon racing abilities, but Curran was a werelion and by human standards he was a superb runner. He and Derek flew down the street at thirty miles per hour, which for them was probably a refreshing pace.

Ghouls came from the Arabic mythos. One of the earliest known references to them occurred in One Thousand and One Nights. The wolf griffins were rumored to have been native to North Africa and were familiar to Berbers. Muslims conquered North Africa around the seventh century BC, so technically there was some tenuous geographical connection between the griffin and the ghouls. And that’s where it all stopped making sense. Ghouls didn’t answer to any higher authority. They weren’t undead, they retained their free will, and all attempts to control them by outside forces usually ended badly. They were cowardly solitary scavengers or predators of opportunity, who dug deep burrows and hid from people and sunlight. I had no idea how the spider-scorpion thing or the cats fit into it.