Magic Strikes (Kate Daniels 3)

I shook my head. "I have this picture of what my dad wanted me to be, and I can never measure up. And I don't want to. I have my rules. I stick to them. That's hard enough as it is.

If that means my dad would spit in my face, so be it."

ALMOST TWO HOURS HAD PASSED BEFORE SAIMAN made it to the room. He strode briskly inside, his face flushed.

"The bug?"

Jim held out a small, flesh-colored disk the size of a quarter. "A transmitter," he said. "The deeper into the body you shove it, the better. Make him swallow it. We don't want it found."

Saiman accepted the transmitter and crossed the floor to the door in the opposite wall, swiping the bundle of canvas on the way. He entered and shut the door behind him.

Minutes stretched by. Behind the closed door something thumped.

"Think he can do it?" Jim asked.

"Nope. But we don't have a choice."

We sat some more. Above us something howled in the Pit, sending a dull hum of resonance through the ceiling.

"Cold," Jim said.

A moment later I felt it too, a dry, intense cold emanating from the door that hid Saiman. I rose. "I'll go check on him."

I knocked. The wood of the door burned my fingers with ice. "Saiman?"

No answer.

I pushed the door and it swung open, admitting me inside. The room curved to the right and I saw only a small section of it, illuminated by the bluish glow of the feylanterns: a shower stall, its curtain pulled aside. A long icicle dripped from the metal showerhead.

"Anybody home?"

A layer of frost slicked the floor under my feet. I turned to the right, moving slowly. My shoes slid a little. I caught myself on the wall and saw him.

He sat slumped on the bench, his enormous back knotted with hard clumps of muscle beneath skin so white and smooth, it seemed completely bloodless. Coarse hair fell down his back in a long blue-green mane. A fringe of hair trailed the vertebrae of his spine, disappearing into ragged pants of wolf fur. Sitting, he was taller than me, too huge to be a man.

"Saiman?"

The being turned his head. Piercing eyes stared at me, distant, pale blue, yet lit from within with power like two chunks of ice that somehow stole the fire of a diamond. He had the face of a fighter carved with exacting precision by a master sculptor: terrifying, forceful, arrogant, and touched with cruelty. His eyes sat sunken deep into their orbits, guarded by a thick ridge of blue eyebrows. His cheekbones were pronounced, his nose wide, and the line of his jaw so strong he could have bitten through bones with little effort. Gone was the philosopher, the urbane erudite, who pontificated on the meaning of luxury. Only a primitive remained, hard, cold, and ancient as the ice that hugged the bench on which he sat.

I wanted to raise my hands to shield myself from that gaze. Instead, I made myself walk to the bench and sit by him. He made no movement. Next to him, I looked like a toddler.

"This is the original form?" I said softly.

"This is the form of my birth." His voice was a deep, contained bellow.

"And the golden dancer on the roof?"

"He's what I could have been. What I should have been. There is enough of him in my blood to let me assume his shape with infinite ease, but I don't delude myself. This is the true me.

One can't deny blood."

On that we were in agreement.

Above us something thumped. The noise of the spectators swelled. Saiman raised his monstrous head to the ceiling. "I'm frightened. I find it richly ironic. What a ridiculous notion."

He raised his massive arm, the forearm sheathed in silver-blue hair. His fingers shook.

"It's natural," I said. "Only the insane aren't scared before the fight. They can't imagine dying."

"Do you feel fear, Kate?"

"Always."

"Why do you do it, then?"

I sighed. "Fear is pain. It hurts. I sink into it and use it like a sharpening stone gliding against a sword. It makes me better, more aware. But I can't be scared for too long, or it will wear me out."

"How do you make it stop?"

"I kill."

The blue eyes regarded me with a strange look, half-terror, half-surprise. "That's it? No noble purpose?"

"There isn't always a noble purpose. There is usually a reason. The need to save someone or something. Your friend, your lover, an innocent who doesn't deserve to be hurt. Sometimes it's a purely selfish reason. One might fight for their body, their good name, or their sanity.

Sometimes it's just a job. But deciding to fight and doing it are two different things."

"How can you live like that? It seems unbearable."

I shrugged. "Like you, I harbor no illusions. I was conceived, born, raised, and trained with one purpose in mind: to become the best killer I could be. It's what I do." So eventually I can kill Roland, the most powerful man on Earth.

"It's time," Jim's voice said from beyond the door.

A long, deep sigh issued from Saiman. He rose. His head nearly brushed the ceiling. Eight and a half feet tall. Wow.

"Do you prefer the Aesir?"

The word hit me like a bolt of lightning. Pieces fell into place in my head: Saiman, golden and high on magic, dancing on the roof and celebrating "the time of the gods," his fluid changes of shape, his self-interest, his ego, and him now, an enormous monster, a giant of a man. I gaped at him. He wasn't supposed to exist.

"My other shape, Kate. Do you like it?"

"Yes," I said, managing to make my voice even. "So are you all god or did one of your divine relatives get fresh with a human?"

For the first time Saiman smiled, displaying white teeth that would've been at home in the mouth of a polar bear. "A quarter. It's enough. The rest is frost and human."

He scooped the canvas bundle off the floor. The fabric fluttered down, revealing a four-foot-long club studded with metal spikes thicker than my fingers. Saiman bent and stepped through the doorway. I heard a startled growl from Jim.

Saiman kept going, out of the room, into the hallway, each step like two of mine. Jim's teeth were bared in a snarl.

"Come on." I swiped Slayer and chased Saiman into the hallway. The Red Guards hugged the walls as he passed by.

Jim caught up with me. "What the fuck is he?"

"Vikings," I managed, breaking into an outright run.

"What about Vikings?"

"Vikings called their gods Aesir."

"That tells me nothing."

The Gold Gate loomed before us, and through its lit rectangle I saw the Pit and the sea of spectators. Saiman paused in the gloom, his club resting on his shoulder.