Magic Rises (15 page)

“For what?”

“It’s because of me.” I was the reason we were all trapped here. I didn’t cause it, but I was the reason for it.

He pulled me to him and squeezed me. “You’re worth the fight,” he said in my ear.

He had no idea how much I loved him.

“We all volunteered,” he whispered. “And without you, we wouldn’t have a shot at the panacea. We need it desperately.”

We fell silent. For a long moment I simply enjoyed being next to him. If only this could last . . .

“He hasn’t attacked me on sight,” I whispered. “That means he’ll want to talk to me.”

“No,” Curran said. “Not alone.”

“Sooner or later this conversation has to happen. If he planned on killing me, why go through all this trouble? He knew where I was. He could’ve just put a sniper on the roof across the street from Cutting Edge and put a bullet through my head as I unlocked the office.”

Curran exhaled his frustration. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.”

“I know,” I whispered. “And I’ll do the same for you.”

We shouldn’t have come here. I closed my eyes. I had to sleep. Tomorrow would be another day, another fight. Tomorrow Hugh would approach me and I had to be sharp. Once I figured out what his angle was, things would become a lot simpler.

CHAPTER 9

I opened my eyes. The magic was down and Curran was gone. The clock said ten past seven. Plenty of time to get dressed and make it to Doolittle’s quarters in time for the meeting.

A plate waited for me on the table, covered with a piece of paper. The paper said in Curran’s rough scrawl,
Went to talk to Mahon. Packs want to meet to “discuss issues.” Don’t forget to eat.

Under the paper, the plate contained two eggs and a lion-sized piece of ham. I ate a third of it, brushed my teeth, put on my jeans, and strapped on my sword. New day, new battle.

Our bags had been brought in from the ship. I dug through them and pulled out my beat-up copy of the
Almanac of Mythological Creatures
. I’d read it cover to cover so many times that I had memorized entire pages, but sometimes looking at it helped me connect the dots.

I’ve never heard of shapeshifters turning into winged cats, but since Lyc-V was present in the blood, most likely the mechanism of the transformation was the same: the virus infected some creature and then infected a human. The first step was to figure out what the creature was.

Winged cats weren’t the most common motif in mythology, but they did occur. Freja, a Norse goddess, had a chariot that was pulled across the sky by two giant cats, Brygun and Trejgun, who probably had wings. They were blue and not orange and didn’t change shape. The Sphinx was a feline with wings and a serpent’s tail, but also a female face. It had the power of speech, and again, no scales. Griffins had eagle heads, so I could rule them out. I’ve seen a manticore, and that was not one.

I dug through the bags, looking for more books.
The Heraldic Bestiary
informed me that a winged lion was a symbol of Saint Mark and Venice. That didn’t exactly help, unless Lorelei was from Venice and had brought over a posse of winged predatory cats to kill all of us and kidnap Curran.

Boy, she really managed to get under my skin.

No, most likely Saint Mark’s lion was a reference to the four prophets from Ezekiel. Matthew was portrayed as a human, Mark as a lion, Luke as a bull, and John as an eagle. I could check Revelation; it was always good for all sorts of strange beasts . . .

Something nagged at me. I concentrated on it. Revelation. To really understand Revelation, one had to read the book of Daniel. At some point I must’ve come across something in the book of Daniel that was relevant to this, because my brain was telling me to go and look at it.

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.”

“Let me guess, the local guard was murdered in a horrible way.”

“Probably,” Derek said. “The body is missing but there was a lot of blood. Hibla wants to know what’s going on.”

Doolittle picked a pipette and dipped it into the Wolf test tube. “The essence of the test is based on the assimilation properties of Lyc-V. When faced with new DNA, it seeks to incorporate it.”

He uncorked the Bear test tube and let two drops from the pipette fall inside. The blood turned black, swirled, and dissolved.

“Assimilated,” I guessed. The Lyc-V had chomped on the foreign DNA.

“Precisely.” Doolittle picked up a test tube marked Bear II. “The blood in this test tube is from Georgetta, but the blood in front of you is from her father.”

He sucked a couple of drops from George’s test tube and let them fall into Mahon’s blood. Nothing happened.

“Same species.”

“But wouldn’t the difference in human DNA affect it?”

“It does, but you won’t see a dramatic reaction.” Doolittle leaned forward. “We’ve tested the blood from the man you killed against all of these. Every single one gave a reaction.”

“Even the lynx and lion?”

Doolittle nodded. “Whatever it is, it may look feline, but it’s not. If it is, its DNA is significantly different from that of a lynx or a lion.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“We try to get more samples,” Doolittle said.

That would be problematic, to say the least. I tried imagining walking over to the Volkodavi or Belve Ravennati and telling them, “Hi, we suspect that one of your people might be a terrible monster; can we have your blood?”

Yeah. They would just fall over themselves to donate a sample.

“I could pick a fight,” Derek said. “Get some blood that way.”

“No fights. We start nothing. We only react.”

“That’s exactly what I said.” Doolittle fixed Derek with his stare. “Also, Kate, if you do run across another specimen, do try to keep him or her alive until I get there.”

Ha-ha. “Will do, Doc. My turn.” I opened the Bible and showed him the verse from Daniel.

Doolittle read it, raised his glasses onto his forehead, and read it again. “I’ve read the Bible hundreds of times. I don’t remember reading this.”

“You weren’t looking for it.”

Derek came over and read the verse.

I brought them up on Daniel’s brief history. “The beasts in Daniel’s dream are usually interpreted to mean kingdoms, in this case Babylon, that will eventually fall from glory. But if taken literally, it could mean a shapeshifter.”

“Were there winged cats in Babylon?” Doolittle asked.

“The only thing close were the lamassu,” I told him. “Lamassu served as the guardians of ancient Assyria. Assyria spanned four modern countries: southern Turkey, western Iran, and the north of Iraq and Syria. Assyrians liked to do war, and they fought with Babylon, Egypt, and pretty much everyone they could reasonably conquer in ancient Mesopotamia for about two thousand years. Around six hundred BC, Babylonians, Cimmerians, and Scyths, all the nations who had once paid Assyria tribute, finally banded together and sacked it. We don’t have many records of the Assyrians. They left behind some ruined cities and stone reliefs depicting fun things like impaling entire villages of subjugated people and riding around in chariots hunting lions.”

“Amusing people, the ancient Assyrians,” Derek said. “They hunt, they sing, they dance, they impale people.”

A joke. Finally. “Pretty much. They also built lamassu, massive stone statues that guarded the city gates and the entrances to Assyrian palaces.”

I opened the
Almanac
and showed them the picture of the colossal statues. “Bearded human face, body of a lion or a bull, and wings.”

“Why five legs?” Doolittle asked.

“It’s conceptual: from the front the lamassu seem to be standing still, but from the side they appear to walk. Here is an interesting thing: Assyria wasn’t that far from here, about a thousand miles southwest as the crow flies. It’s a thousand miles of mountains and terrible roads, but in country terms, ancient Assyria and ancient Colchis were practically neighbors.”

Derek frowned at the picture.

“But they have human faces,” Eduardo said. “And no scales.”

I nodded. “And that’s a problem. Also there are dozens of theories as to who or what the lamassu represent, but not one of them says they were evil or that they ate people. They are viewed as benevolent guardians. People have found amulets with lamassu and protective spells on them, and modern Assyrians still have their images in their houses.”

Doolittle studied the picture. “To show a creature with five legs demonstrates understanding rather than observation.”

“What do you mean, understanding?”

“They didn’t simply follow nature’s blueprint and make exactly what they observed,” Doolittle said. “They understood the difference between perception and reality, and they portrayed a concept rather than the exact copy of what they could see.”

Doolittle took a piece of paper and a pen and began to draw. “When we are born, we start out with concrete thinking. We perceive only what we see and hear.” He showed us the piece of paper. On it a dove soared above a crushed birdcage.

“What do you see?”

“A bird flying away from a broken cage,” Derek said.

“What does it symbolize?”

“Freedom,” I said.

“What else?”

“Escape,” Eduardo said.

Doolittle turned to Derek.

“Leaving what is safe so you can be more,” Derek said. “The cage is what the bird knows; the sky is all the things he still wants to do, even if it’s a risk.”

“Ah!” Doolittle raised his index finger. “All those are examples of abstract thinking. Our entire culture is based on the idea that a single concept can have many different interpretations. We actively encourage the development of this skill, because it helps us solve our problems in new ways. So did the ancient Assyrians, apparently. When looking at the lamassu, we have to consider not only what it is but what it may represent. We can’t simply take it at face value.”