Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels 8)

He nodded. “You said they quarantine the bodies. Would he keep the wind scorpion on ice?”

Knowing Luther? Yes, he would keep it on ice and screw with it until someone higher up lost their patience, took it away from him, and set it on fire. I knew what Curran was thinking. If the wind scorpion also emitted bronze-colored magic, we would have confirmation that everything we’d encountered so far was connected.

“Luther promised me access to Mitchell.” I glanced at Julie over my shoulder. “Would you like to go to the PAD morgue with me to look at weird remains and then visit the PAD’s pet ghoul?”

Julie wrinkled her nose. “I could do that or spend the evening writing an essay for Contemporary English on an extremely boring book about people living in a pre-Shift small town, which has absolutely no bearing on my life and helps me not at all. I don’t know, both options are so enticing . . .”

“I think this new school made your sass even worse,” I said.

“You made me worse,” Julie said. “I’m your punishment.”

I shook my head. “Anyway, everything we’ve run across while trying to find Eduardo comes from Arabian mythology, which means it comes from the same geographical region as my magic. Same as my father’s magic.”

“You think Roland is behind this?” Curran asked.

“I don’t know. I do know that the giant was immune to my power words. My magic bounced off it and there was hell to pay. I can’t risk using a power word against this creature again or my head will explode.”

“We just lost one of our biggest guns,” Derek summed up.

“Not necessarily,” Curran said.

“I can’t attack it with power words directly, but I can attack the environment around it. My magic doesn’t work only against the creature itself. I used a power word on ghouls who were clearly answering this creature’s call, and it worked as intended.”

“Why?” Derek asked.

“Because there are some very key differences between the ghouls, the griffin, and the giant,” I said. “Let’s assume that some being, some Summoner, is behind all of this. He has some sort of agenda, but he is limited because he can only accomplish his goals during magic, so he somehow finds a way to control the ghouls and uses them to do his bidding. My power words work against them because while they are under the Summoner’s control, they still retain their own magic.”

“That makes sense,” Derek said.

“Good. Now, a griffin is a summoning, something the Summoner pulled out of thin air. It’s an expression of his magic, so my power words may or may not work on it. I don’t think the giant is a summoning, because he was clearly wearing an object of power. It was shiny. I saw it in his ear. I think it might have been a piece of jewelry of some sort.”

“How do you know it was an object of power?” Julie asked. “Maybe it was just some random earring.”

“Because the giant was naked except for it and it was clearly too small for him. That object most likely turned him into a giant, and he probably started out as a person, not a summoning. For that kind of transformation to take place, the Summoner would have to imbue the human body with his power completely.”

“I get it,” Julie said. “The Summoner possessed the person and turned him into a giant, which makes the giant an avatar. It’s almost as if the Summoner himself became the giant.”

“Exactly. My power words work on the creatures he controls, they might work on the creatures he summons, but they sure as hell don’t work on him directly.”

“No power words,” Curran said.

“I agree,” Julie said.

“I have no plans to use power words unless I absolutely have no choice.” I made a mental note to ask Luther if the object of power had been recovered. It felt like I was missing something, some vital piece, but when I reached for it, I found nothing.

“I don’t understand why he attacked the Guild.” Derek grimaced. “What was the point?”

“Revenge,” Curran said. “Look at it from his point of view. First, he decides he has something against cats and starts attacking the Oswald family. He summons a tick. Eduardo, a merc, comes and kills it. Then Kate and I kill some of his ghouls. Then he summons a wolf griffin, and two mercs from the Guild kill it. He turns the griffin into a wind scorpion, and Kate and I, who had just come from the Guild, kill it. Then you, Ascanio, Julie, and I go into the MARTA tunnels and kill more of his ghouls. If I were him, I’d be pissed off and come over to the Guild to make the mercs pay and to make sure they stopped screwing with me.”