I was out doing other things, so Johanna waited twenty-four hours and sent a scout in to check on them. He came back disturbed. I talked to him this morning. He claimed ‘something bad’ was in the building and he wasn’t going near it.”
“Who was it?”
“Garrett.”
Garrett was lazy, but he wasn’t a coward. Maybe there was something bad in the house. “You went there yourself, didn’t you?”
Jim shrugged. “I had to go that way for an errand anyway.”
I rolled my eyes. “You didn’t take anybody with you?”
He looked at me like I had insulted him. Mr. Badass didn’t need anybody to go with him, oh no.
“What happened?”
“I went to the office. The place looked empty. The windows were covered with dirt, like nobody had been there for years.”
Jim and I looked at each other. The Pack had seven offices in Atlanta and the surrounding area and every single one of those would have clean windows. Normal people looked at us like we were filthy animals. The animal part was true, but most of us were sensitive about the filthy part. If you wanted to insult a shapeshifter, you told him he stank. We kept ourselves and our offices clean. Besides, you can’t see angry mobs with pitchforks and torches coming at you through a dirty window.
“I went up to the door.” Jim looked at his cup. “The place smelled wrong. A weird scent, dusty, pungent, and bitter, not something I’ve ever come across before.”
“Like herb dust?”
“No, that wasn’t it. Not anything I recognized. And it was too quiet. There should’ve been four people at the office. Not a damn whisper, no sigh, no sound, nothing.”
Roger worked at that office. And Michelle. I liked Michelle; she was nice.
“I opened the door and smelled blood. The place was empty. There was a symbol on the floor in magic marker.”
“What kind of a symbol?”
He shook his head. His eyes turned distant. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was confused, except Jim didn’t get confused.
“A Chinese symbol,” he said slowly.
“Like a sinograph? Hanzi?”
Jim gave me a blank look.
“Did it look like Chinese writing, Jim?”
“Yes.”
I got up and brought him a piece of paper and a pen. “Draw it for me.”
He picked up the pen and looked at it.
“Jim?”
He growled under his breath. “I can’t remember.”
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Jim didn’t have perfect recall, but he was very close. He practiced, because remembering details was a useful skill for the chief of security. I once watched him draw a complicated tribal tattoo he saw for two seconds completely from memory. He got it nearly perfect. A hanzi character on the floor in the middle of an office smelling of blood—he should’ve remembered it. The symbols weren’t that complicated. Something had fried his memory.
“What was next?”
“I called you.”
We both looked at my answering machine. The screen was dead—the magic had taken down the electricity. No way to tell if Jim had called me.
A green glow sparked in his irises and vanished. Frustration rolled off Jim in a hot wave. He was acting like a person with a concussion, but Lyc-V cracked concussions like nuts. I ought to know, I had gotten enough of them. Thirty seconds, and your brain was like new. Still . . .
“Do you think someone might have whacked you on the back of the head?”
Jim looked at me for a long moment.
“Sometimes trauma to the head results in short-term memory loss.”
“Nobody traumatized my head. Nobody quiet enough to sneak up on me would be strong enough to knock me out. I wasn’t knocked out, I passed out.”
Huh. “Passed out?”
“Yes.”
“What do you remember before passing out?”
“The magic wave hit. I saw a woman.”
“A woman?” Great, now I’ve turned into a manga character who repeated everything everyone said.
“I saw her in the house.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was very beautiful.”
It stung like a slap. “Jim!”
“What?”
Yes, what, Dali? What exactly? “When did you see her? What was she wearing? Concentrate.”
He shook his head. “I was in the doorway. I looked up and she was standing at the back of the room. She was wearing some sort of a long robe or gown. The fabric was almost transparent, like a negligee.”
And he probably took a second to look at her boobies. Awesome.
“She had long dark hair. I told her to come outside. She said, ‘Help me.’ ”
“In English?”
He nodded. “She started backing up into the house and I went after her.”
“Four shapeshifters are missing, the office smells like blood, you see some weird woman in a transparent gown who clearly shouldn’t be in the building, and you run after her?”
“It’s my job to run after her.”
“Without backup?”
“I
I waved my arms. “Fine, what happened next?”
“I remember my legs getting heavy and thinking that something was wrong. Then I woke up in the middle of the floor.”
“How long did you sleep?”
“Eighteen minutes. I woke up tired as hell. I knew I’d pass out again if I didn’t leave, so I got up, locked the door, and got the hell out of there. I knew I’d called you and I thought you might go to the house. The magic was up, so I ran over here, got inside with my key, but you were gone. I went to the bedroom to see if your calligraphy kit was still here, because I knew you would’ve taken it, and then I don’t remember.”
And then he’d fallen asleep on my bedroom floor. “Do you feel any different?”
“I feel tired.”
“Right now? Even after sleeping?”
He nodded.
Jim could go forty-eight hours without sleep and still be as sharp as his claws. That was one of the fun gifts of Lyc-V: improved stamina, immunity to diseases—and crazy homicidal rage, just to spice things up. Something was seriously wrong. If it had been a typical curse, my magic would’ve purged it by now. He had to go to the medic. “We need to see Doolittle.”
“No. No Doolittle.”
“Jim, you keep falling asleep.”
“Doolittle is a surgeon.” Jim bared the edges of his teeth. “If he can’t cut it out or stitch it back together, he doesn’t know what to do with it. I have no symptoms. Pulse rate is normal, temperature is normal. I just fall asleep. You’re Doolittle. I come to you with this story. What’s your first move?”
“Lock you up for observation.”
