Darkness Rising (Dark Angels 2)

He didn’t, just clicked off. I swore softly. Riley was going to kill me. She didn’t often have her entire family together for a weekend, and now I had to go spoil things by calling Rhoan away.

Although, to be fair, she’d always considered me part of her extended pack, and she would have killed me if I’d called anyone else.

A steady stream of curses began flowing from the far side of the lockers. Obviously, the other shifter was now awake. I checked the panther’s pulse again, then rose, wincing a little and holding my side as I walked around to the back of the lockers. The second shifter lay on his stomach, and his hands and feet hog-tied behind his back. The rope used to bind him was nothing I’d ever seen before. It looked ethereal, as if it had been pulled from the gray fields themselves.

He twisted his head around and glared up at me. “This is fucking uncomfortable!”

“Good,” I said, a little amused that he’d actually think I’d care. “Who sent you?”

I’d already had the answer from the panther, but it never hurt to double check.

“What’s in it for me if I tell you?”

“I’ll consider releasing you before the Directorate gets here. Now answer the question.”

He studied me for a moment, obviously weighing his options.

“Handberry,” he said eventually. “Or whoever it is that has taken his place.”

“Does that mean someone has taken over ownership of the Phoenix?” The Phoenix was a downmarket bar situated on a street that just happened to be at the intersection of several major ley lines. We’d all but stopped the consortium that had been attempting—through any means necessary—to buy all the properties along the street in an effort to control the ley-intersection, but not all of the consortium’s owners had been caught.

“Like I fucking know or care,” he said. “Handberry was just using the Phoenix as a base of operations, as far as I knew. I doubt this new guy will even go near the place. He sounds way too posh for that.”

Posh or not, that didn’t preclude the possibility that he was there. It was certainly worth checking. “And you’ve never seen the new handler?”

“Nah, he always has his vid-screen off, and we’ve never met him in person.”

“And you don’t find this strange? I mean, Handberry worked alongside you, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, but Handberry was one of us.”

“Meaning a Razan, or a human twisted by magic?”

“Both.”

“So which Aedh do you belong to?”

Something flickered in his eyes. “I can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t,” he said. “The information was burned away when the magic happened.”

And that sounded a little too convenient. “So who gave you the ability to shift shape?”

He shrugged. “We weren’t allowed to see the practitioner.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And how, pray tell, did they achieve that miracle?”

“We were knocked out. Apparently it would have been too painful otherwise.”

Well, given the fact that the magic had twisted their beings at a cellular level, I’d guess that was something of an understatement. It was pointless asking where and when—apparently one of the benefits of being a Razan was a very long life, and though these men looked to be little more than midthirties, they could have been hundreds of years old. And I doubted the shifting ability was new. They were too good at controlling it for it to be a recent event.

Although it seemed odd that these Razan wouldn’t have a stronger connection to their masters than just a telephone number.

But maybe the Razan ranks had levels. Maybe it was only the ones like Handberry who had a direct connection to their master. Maybe the grunts were kept ignorant for safety reasons.

“There’s nothing else you can tell me about the ceremony or the people who performed it?”