Magic Rises(52)

Let’s see: Qur’an, Mythology of Caucasus People . . . I had to have packed a Bible. I know I did.

I flipped the bag upside down. Books scattered on the floor. A small green edition of the Bible flopped down. Got you.

I sat down on the floor and flipped the pages. I was concentrating so hard that when I finally found it, I just stared at it for a few seconds to make sure it was really there. It was in chapter seven, where Daniel described seeing magic beasts in one of his prophetic dreams.

The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

A shapeshifter. A feline shapeshifter with wings, who had the ability to transform into a man.

I racked my brain, trying to recall what I knew about Daniel. He was a Jewish noble who, together with three others, had been taken to Babylon around 600 BC to serve as an advisor at the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, whose chief claim to historical fame was the construction of the Hanging Gardens for his main squeeze. Daniel had many prophetic and apocalyptic dreams and by all accounts lived to a ripe old age, managing to survive the toxic Babylonian politics.

What could Daniel have possibly encountered in Babylon to have this vision? The only remotely similar creatures were the Assyrian lamassu, but there were no records of them being shapeshifters. The Assyrian Empire lay in a region I knew well. The ancient Assyria, Babylon, and Nineveh all were around long before recorded history. They were the cemetery flowers that grew from the dead body of my father’s once-mighty empire.

The clock said it was almost time for the meeting. I’d have to come back to it later. I stacked my books in the corner of the room, grabbed the Bible and the Almanac, made a beeline for Doolittle’s room, and rapped my knuckles on his door.

“Come in!” Eduardo called.

I opened the door. A large room stretched before me, easily as big as Desandra’s suite. Two doors stood open, one on the left leading to a bedroom, the other on the right opening into a bathroom. To the left two tables had been set in the shape of an L. Glass vials and beakers lined the surface. Doolittle sat in the corner of the L looking through a microscope. To the right, two oversized plush couches flanked a coffee table. Derek sat on the closest one, holding cards in his hand. He’d pushed them together into a single stack. Across from him Eduardo lounged, taking an entire couch by himself. He held his cards in a wide fan.

“What do you mean, come in? You don’t even know who I am.”

“Of course we know who you are,” Derek said.

“He smelled you coming,” Eduardo said.

Life with werewolves. Why me?

I dropped into a chair by Doolittle’s table.

He looked at me. A pair of glasses perched on his nose.

“Why do you wear glasses? Doesn’t Lyc-V give you twenty-ten vision?” I asked.

Doolittle tapped his glasses. “Yes, but these give me twenty-two.”

His voice with its coastal Georgia overtones made me so homesick, I almost hugged him.

“How’s the head?”

“Fragrant.” Doolittle opened a cooler that sat next to him. Inside the severed head rested, wrapped in plastic and half submerged in ice.

“Anything?”

Doolittle leaned back. “It’s a shapeshifter. The blood reacts to silver and shows the presence of Lyc-V.”

“Aha! So I’m not crazy.”

“You are most definitely crazy,” Derek said. “But in a deranged, endearing way.”

Eduardo snorted.

“Don’t make me come over there.” I looked at Doolittle.

“They are rambunctious this morning,” he told me. “Unfortunately my resources here are limited. I don’t have access to any of the genetic sequencing methods I have at home.”

There was more to it, I could sense it. “But?”

“But there is the Bravinski-Dhoni test.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Doolittle nodded with a small smile. “That’s because it’s not very useful under ordinary circumstances. It’s not precise. It is, however, very reliable.”

He pushed a wooden rack of test tubes toward me. Each was half filled with blood. A small label identified each test tube: Bear, Wolf, Bison, Hyena, Mongoose, Jackal, Lynx, Badger, Lion, and Rat.

Most of these probably came from our team. “Where did you get the jackal, lynx, and rat?”

“The locals,” Eduardo said.

“Hibla got upset,” Derek elaborated. “When you fought, someone deployed a gate that sealed the hallway. The gate mechanism was guarded.”