Magic Bites(34)

A short woman with very curly blond hair waited for us. Some unspoken communication must have passed between her and my guide, and she looked at me. “This way, please.”

I followed her through another door to a round room. A spiral staircase pierced the floor, stretching both up and down. I looked up and saw coils of stairs merging with darkness.

“This way, please,” the woman repeated and led me down the stairs. We descended, making several loops, until my escort stepped into a dark side hallway. The hallway terminated in another heavy wooden door, and the woman pushed it open, motioning me inside. I stepped through.

A huge oval room lay before me, bathed in a comfortable glow of electric lights softened by opaque glass. The room sloped down gently, like a college auditorium, to culminate in a flat stage. On the left side of the stage, next to a door, fire burned brightly in a foot-wide metal brazier, its smoke sucked away into a vertical shoot. A smooth slanting path led from the doorway to the stage.

The rest of the sloping floor was terraced, segregated into five-foot-wide “steps,” and on the steps, on uniform blue blankets, rested the shapechangers. Most were in a human form; some reclined by themselves; some sat together with their families, one family to a blanket, as if they had gathered for some sort of underground picnic. With a shock I realized there were more than three hundred of them. Many more.

And Curran was nowhere in sight.

The door closed behind me with a click. As one, the shapechangers turned and looked at me.

I wondered what they’d do if I asked to borrow a cup of sugar.

Behind me the door opened and two large males stepped inside, breathing down my neck. I got the message and started down the path to the stage. Ahead several males stood up from their blankets and barred the path midway down.

The welcoming committee. How nice.

I crashed to a halt before the men. “You’re in my way,” I said.

“Really?” The kid couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old, with an open face and longish brown hair. His brown eyes laughed at me, and I knew this was a setup. And I knew who orchestrated it. They wouldn’t blow their noses without Curran’s say-so.

“Really,” I said, knowing what was coming.

“From where I’m standing, you’re in our way,” an older, stocky male said. A corner of his mouth curved, trying to hide a smile. He enjoyed the game.

A tall male, shaggy with red hair, called out from his blanket, “Hey, Mik, don’t you know to step aside for a lady?”

“I don’t see a lady here.” The stocky male leered at me.

A wave of catcalls and growling rolled through the room, so sudden it might have been choreographed. Mik kept sizing me up. Even his leer seemed rehearsed. There was no threat here, only a test of what I would do. I had to resolve it quickly and without direct violence or the Pack would never work with me. The sheer stupidity of the situation was staggering.

The males grew bolder. The kid grinned. “What do you say, baby, let’s you and me go to the side and I’ll show you a good time.”

The group exploded with laughter—this one must have been an improvisation. The kid, pleased with himself, reached out and his fingers brushed my cheek. The moment his skin touched mine, I whispered a single word so quietly that even I couldn’t hear my voice.

“Amehe.” Obey.

The word of power pulsed through my skin to his. The rush of so much magic leaving my body nearly brought me to my knees. The kid stiffened. The others did not notice, absorbed in making noise.

“That’s a good one, Derek,” Mik said. “I think she could take all of us on, unless you mind sharing.”

I looked at the kid and said, “Protect me.”

His body exploded into motion, the mist of body fluids drenching the floor. A sleek lupine shape hit the older male, knocking him off balance. Mik fell on his back, and the huge gray wolf was on top of him, fangs bared in a vicious feral snarl a hair away from his throat.

“Hold him,” I said.

The wolf growled low, black lips quivering.

The room was suddenly quiet as a tomb. I hoped it wouldn’t be mine.

“Derek,” Mik said in a hoarse voice, the weight of the wolf on his chest making it difficult for him to speak. “Derek, it’s me.”

The wolf snarled.

“Don’t move,” I advised, reaching back and pulling Slayer from its sheath. It made a soft metallic whisper as it left the scabbard and the gazes of the shapechangers fastened on the enchanted blade.

A woman rose from her seat to my left. Her lips quivered in a telltale precursor to a snarl. “What the hell did you do to him?”

I glanced around the room. The mood had changed. The game had ended, and their eyes burned like fire. The hair on their heads bristled, and the smell of murder was in the air.