Magic Strikes (Kate Daniels 3)

He left the room. It was me and Jim.

In a fight, Curran was death. He'd never liked me. He'd warned me to stay away from the Pack's power struggles. I'd get no leeway this time.

"Jim?"

He looked at me and I saw it, right there, shining clear through all his mental shields: fear. Jim was terrified. Not for himself - I'd known him for a long time and threats to his personal well-being didn't inspire terror in him. He was off balance, as if he'd been knocked down in the dark and had sprung to his feet, not sure where the next blow would come from.

He had "his reasons," and I needed to know them. "Tell me why I shouldn't call Curran right now and blow this whole thing out of the water."

Jim looked into his glass. Muscles clenched on his arms. A brutal internal battle was taking place inside him, and I wasn't sure which side was winning.

"Seven years ago, a string of loup infestations hit the Appalachians," he said. "I had just started with the Pack. They brought me along as an enforcer. Tennessee let us in right away, but it took North Carolina two years to decide they couldn't handle that shit on their own. We went in. It's all mountains. Old Scotch-Irish families, separatists, religious nuts, they all run there and squat on their own personal mountaintops and then they breed, and their kids set up trailers and cabins right there, a spit away. People come there to be by themselves. Everybody minds their own business. Nobody talked to us. Families had gone loup, entire clans, and nobody knew. And sometimes they knew and didn't do anything about it. You've been to the Buchanan compound. You know what we found."

Death. They found death and kiddie pools full of blood and half-eaten children. Women and men, raped, torn to pieces, and raped again, after they were dead. People flayed alive. They found loups.

"We were combing through Jackson County when the local cops called us. A house had caught on fire on Caney Fork Road, but none of them wanted to go up there. Claimed Seth Hayes owned the house and he shot trespassers on sight. Since we were close and would get there faster, could we please swing by."

Bullshit. The cops knew Hayes had gone loup. Probably known it for a while. Otherwise why call shapeshifters about a house fire?

"The place sat on the edge of a damn cliff. Took us an hour to come up on the house. The building was a ruin by that point. Nothing but charred coal and greasy smoke and that stink.

The loup stink."

I knew that smell. Thick, musky, sour, it overlaid your tongue with a harsh, bitter patina and made you choke. The scent of a human body gone spiraling out of control into the depths of Lyc-V's delirium. I had smelled it before. Once it stained you, you never forgot it.

Jim kept on, his voice flat. "The kid sat in the ash. He'd dragged two bodies out, what was left of his sisters, and just sat there, waiting for us to finish him off. Filthy, skinny, starved kid covered in his dad's blood. He stank like a loup. I thought we should kill him. I looked at him and thought 'loup kid' and said so. Curran said no. Said we'll take the kid with us. I thought the man was crazy. The shit that kid had been through, he wasn't even human anymore. I looked at him and saw nothing left. But Curran went and sat with the kid, and talked him into following us. The kid didn't speak. I didn't think he knew how."

Jim drew his hand over his hair. "We didn't even know his name, for fuck's sake. He just followed Curran everywhere like a tail: to the gym, to the Keep, to the fights. He'd sit by the door while the council meetings ran, like a dog. Curran would read books to him. He'd sit and read to the kid and then ask his opinion. He did this for a month until one day the kid answered."

Jim's eyes blazed. "Now the kid has a half-form better than mine. Taught himself to speak in it. Might be the wolf-alpha one day. I can't do it to him."

"Do what?"

"I have to fix it, Kate. Give me a chance to fix it."

"Jim, you're not making sense."

Doolittle walked back inside, a platter of hush puppies in his hand. "She doesn't have your frame of reference, James. Let me take over." He sat and pushed the hush puppies my way.

"When a shapeshifter suffers a great deal of stress, be it physical or psychological, it stimulates the production of Lyc-V. The virus saturates our bodies in great numbers. The higher the virus swells and the faster it spikes, the greater are the chances of the shapeshifter going loup."

"That's why the greatest risk of loupism coincides with the onset of puberty." I nodded.

"Indeed. Derek is under a great deal of stress. Something is blocking him, and if we manage to successfully remove the block, the virus will bloom inside him in huge numbers very quickly. It will be a biological explosion."

His words sank in. "Derek might go loup."

Doolittle nodded. "It is a definite possibility."

"How definite?"

"I'd estimate a seventy-five percent chance of loupism."

I rested my elbow on the table and put my forehead on my fist.

"If Curran becomes aware of the situation, and if Derek becomes a loup, Curran will have to kill him," Doolittle said. "It will be his duty as the Beast Lord. The rules of the Pack dictate that when a member of the Pack becomes a loup, it's the duty of the highest alpha present to destroy them."

God. For Curran, killing Derek would be like killing a son or a brother. He'd worked so hard to bring him out after Derek had teetered on the edge of loupism. To have him fall into insanity now would . . . He'd have to kill him. He'd do it himself too, because it was his duty.

It would be like me having to kill Julie.

Doolittle cleared his throat. "Curran has no family. He's a survivor of a massacre. Mahon raised him, saving him in much the same way he saved Derek. Killing Derek will inflict severe psychological damage," Doolittle said. "He will do it. He has never shunned his responsibilities and he wouldn't want anyone else to bear the weight. He has been under a lot of pressure in this last year. He's a Beast Lord, but in the end he's only a man."

In my head, I pictured Curran standing by Derek's body. It was in my power to spare him that. Not for Jim's sake, but for his own. You should never have to kill children you saved.

He would be furious. He'd rip Jim to pieces.

"He gave us three days," I said. "If we don't resolve this by the end of those three days, I'll go to him. I'll tell him. If Derek goes loup before that, I will kill him." Please, God, whoever you are, please don't make me do this.

"That's my responsibility," Jim said.

"No. Curran accepted an offer of assistance from the Order. That means that in the matters of this investigation, I outrank you. It's my responsibility and I'll take care of it." I had three days. I could do a lot in three days.