Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels 8)

A beige woman’s shoe with a high heel lay on the ground midway up the driveway. A little farther on, a matching beige purse lay on the lawn. Mrs. Oswald must’ve come out, seen something that alarmed her, and run back inside, dropping her purse and her shoe. Whatever she saw scared her so much, she just left her things sitting there.

I rolled my window down. Curran did the same.

“I don’t smell any blood,” he said.

No blood was odd. If this was the house, Leroy and Mac should’ve gotten here by now. They’d left almost an hour before us. The street was empty. Where the hell were those idiots?

“Eduardo’s scent is here too, but old and faint. I do smell something odd. Smells like a wolf.”

“A wolf?”

He nodded. “With a touch of bittersweet scent to it.”

From what the mercs had said, the creature threatening Ms. Oswald’s cats had wings. A wolf with wings? Russian mythology included a wolf with wings, and a prominent volhv, a Russian pagan priest, had one as a pet. I really hoped the Russians weren’t involved. Dealing with volhves meant dealing with witches, and claiming Atlanta had not endeared me to them in the least.

We sat quietly.

Minutes dragged by.

A high-pitched shriek rang from the sky above. It started on a high note, a forlorn mourning cry, and built on itself, growing harsher and sharper until it shredded the air like a high-velocity crossbow bolt. A dark shape swooped from the sky and rammed the bars. The steel grate shuddered from the impact. For a moment I thought it would fall out of the brickwork, but the bars held.

The creature fell to the ground, landing on all fours. Gray fur covered its lean body, sheathing its flanks and long lupine tail. Its legs terminated in furry, owl-like feet armed with sickle-shaped talons the size of my fingers. Two massive wings spread from its shoulders. The beast turned toward us. An eaglelike head crowned its powerful neck, complete with a dark beak the size of a hatchet.

“Kate?” Curran asked.

“It’s a wolf griffin,” I murmured. “Lion griffins come from Crete and Greece. This guy is from North Africa. They are mentioned in Berber folklore. Something about a giant bird and a wolf mating.”

“Anything I need to know?” Curran asked me. “Does it spit fire?”

I’d run across a wolf griffin only once. “Not that I know of. The one I encountered before didn’t, but I can’t guarantee this one doesn’t.”

The wolf griffin ducked its head and fixed us with an unblinking predatory stare. It was at least forty inches at the shoulder.

“Do we take care of it or do we wait?” I wondered.

“We could kill it.” Curran focused on the griffin. “That way when those two scumbags show up, we don’t have to deal with them and the griffin at the same time. Besides, we need to get into the house to talk to the owner, and that’s not happening until this thing is dead.”

We both looked at the griffin.

“This is the second cat-hunting creature Mrs. Oswald reported,” I thought out loud. “Someone or something is deliberately targeting her cats. If we kill it, there is a good chance that Mrs. Oswald’s mysterious nemesis would just send something else.”

“It’s not our job,” Curran said.

“I know, but what if something worse shows up the next time?”

The griffin spread its wings, took a running start, and flew up. We watched it rise with every beat of its wings, until it became a dot among the clouds. We didn’t even know if Mac and Leroy would do this job. Maybe they’d decided not to show up.

The griffin swooped down and rammed the bars again. They bent. He hung on for a long moment, his claws scraping at the glass, and dropped down to the driveway.

“The next time he hits, he’ll get through,” I said. If he managed to get inside, whoever was hiding inside the house would get ripped to pieces. This was no longer about cats.

“We net it,” Curran said. “I can wound its wings and we’ll wrap it in the net.”

“Once we’re done with Mac and Leroy, we can let it run home,” I finished. Tracking it through the air would be hard, but tracking it on the ground would be a piece of cake. “Right to its owner.”

“Sounds good to me.” Curran narrowed his eyes, measuring the distance between us and the griffin. “Mind playing bait again, baby?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Curran and I opened our doors at the same time. I slipped out, held my arms out to make myself bigger, and moved forward. The wolf griffin focused on me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Curran gliding soundlessly across the pavement.