Magic Bleeds (Kate Daniels 4)

“Did you not hear?” The woman stared at me, incredulous.

“I have a Mary with pandemic potential who pilots undead mages and who is fixing to raid my house. Everyone I’ve ever known is about to become a target. Being banned by the Temple is the least of my worries.”

EVERY STEP I TOOK JABBED A DULL, COLD PAIN INTO my side. My skin felt wet under the dressing. The wound had come open. The Temple medic was very good, but the cut simply hadn’t had enough time to heal. At least the dressing had been well applied, so the blood should stay put.

I made it to the bridge and slumped into the snowdrift. Grendel licked me and ran away to paint the snow yellow.

I had to get home.

A car shot across the bridge way too fast. Metallic black, it had the body of a hot rod that had somehow sprouted Indyracer-style front wheels. Painted red flames stretched from its front over the hood, licking a bizarre horned skull with the words DEMON LIGHTNING painted above it. Its backside bubbled up, struggling to contain a monster of an enchanted water engine.

The car hurtled past me, braked in a spray of snow, and stopped two feet away. The driver side window slid down, revealing a tiny Indonesian woman. I’d met her before. She was the Pack’s resident mythology expert. She was also a vegetarian, and when she turned into her animal, which happened to be a cross-eyed white tiger, she refused to bite anything that would bleed into her mouth.

She was also blind as a bat.

Dali peered at me through her glasses and nodded at the car. “Get in!”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Get in, Kate!”

“What the hell is this?”

“That’s a 1999 Plymouth Prowler. Also known as Pooki.” I bet Jim thought he was funny. “Dali, you can barely see. You can’t drive.”

Dali stuck her nose in the air. “Watch me.”

No choice. I screamed for Grendel, stuffed him into the car, got in, and buckled my seat belt.

Dali floored it. Snow burst on both sides of the car and we shot forward. The wooden planks thudded under the Prowler’s weight. The bridge curved ahead. Dali showed no indication of slowing down.

“Dali, there is a turn.”

The turn rushed at us.

“Dali . . .”

The Prowler sped up, straight as an arrow.

“Turn! Turn left!”

The wooden rail loomed before us. The Prowler veered left, turning so sharply it almost careened. I held my breath. For a second we were weightless, and then all four wheels landed on solid ground.

“I saw it.” Dali pushed her Coke-bottle glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I’m not blind, you know. Hold on to your seat, there is another turn coming up.”

If I survived this, I’d kill Jim with my bare hands.

The car squealed and missed the rail by a hair.

Dali’s happy face swung into my view. “I know your kryptonite.”

“What?”

“Kryptonite. It’s the rock that could take down Superman?”

I stared at her.

Dali grinned. “You’re scared of my driving.”

It wasn’t driving. It was suicide by car. “I need to tell you about Erra.” I clenched my fists as the car fishtailed.

“So you can tell Jim.”

Dali made a face. “Why do I get the privilege?”

“Because you’re a Pack expert with a proven record and you can back up what I say with your own research. He’ll listen to you and I don’t have time to explain things to him myself right this second.”

She looked at me. “Kate? Is this something really, really bad? Because you have that clenched-teeth look . . .”

“Watch the road!”

She swerved, avoiding an overturned wreck of a truck. “I have it under control.”

“What do you know about Babylon?”

“Not much. My expertise is in the Asian region. It was a Mesopotamian city-state that sprung up around the third millennium BCE and eventually grew into an empire. Sargon of Akkad claimed to have built it. Mesopotamia is considered to be the cradle of civilization and Babylon is mostly famous for the Code of Hammurabi, which was the first written code of laws, and the Hanging Gardens, which was the first time a man had to restructure the city to get laid. I think the name means ‘Gateway of the Gods,’ although nobody quite knows why.”

Her definition of “not much” needed work. “It was called Gateway because it was the first city built after Eden.”

She turned back to the windshield. “Babylon dates back to three thousand years before the Common Era. It’s too recent.”

“That’s the new Babylon. The old Babylon was almost completely built with magic, and when the tech came, it crumbled to the ground, just like that.” I pointed at Downtown’s architectural graveyard through the window.

“The old Babylon was over twelve thousand years old when the Common Era rolled around.”

“How do you know this?”

“Not important. Have you ever read the poem of Erra?”

“No.”

“It’s a poem that acts as an amulet against diseases in general and a god called Erra in particular. It was found chiseled on stone tablets all over Babylon. More copies of it exist than there are copies of the Gilgamesh epic.”

Dali whistled. “Gilgamesh was their big daddy.”

“Yes, but they weren’t that scared of him. They were very scared of Erra, so scared, they cut the poem into every available stone surface. According to the story, Erra was the god of plagues, fear, and madness. He had seven warriors at his disposal: Torch, Tremor, Deluge, Gale, Beast, Venom, and Darkness. The first four had elemental powers.”

“Fire, Earth, Water, and Wind.” Dali nodded.

“Beast was a monster. Venom is self-explanatory.”

“And Darkness?”

I shook my head. “Nobody knows.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t you just love when that happens?”

“The poem goes on about how Erra and his advisor called Ishum came to Babylon and destroyed it. The poem is also wrong. Erra wasn’t the one in charge, Ishum was. The Babylonians were so terrified of Erra, they put him in charge just to be on the safe side. They also made him male.”

“Wait, Erra was a girl?”

“Yes. Erra is a woman and Ishum is Roland.”

Dali said nothing. She clenched the wheel tighter—her knuckles turned white.

I kept going. “About 6200 BC, Roland and Erra were running around and conquering Mesopotamia. They were young and this was their first big war. They came across Babylon, which was ruled by Marduk, who was unimaginably ancient by this point. He used to be monstrously powerful, but he had grown old and senile. The world moved on. Marduk didn’t and he knew it. He was content to rule Babylon, his last city, the gem of the ancient world. It was a large thriving metropolis, built almost entirely with deep magic, and he was very proud of it.