Magic Bleeds by Ilona Andrews Page A

MY LIST OF DEADLY DISEASE-RELATED deities had grown to unwieldy proportions. In Greece both Apollo and his sister, Artemis, infected people with their arrows. Also from Greece hailed the nosoi, daimones of pestilence, disease, and heavy sickness, who escaped the confines of Pandora’s jar. In the myths, nosoi were mute, and my guy definitely spoke, but I’ve learned not to Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    take myth as gospel.
    The list kept going. Every time an ancient man stumbled, there was a god ready to punish him with an array of agonizing maladies. Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, was known as the goddess of disease; Japan was riddled with plague demons; the Mayans had Ak K’ak, who was the god of both disease and war and looked to be a good candidate, considering Joshua’s killer started a brawl; the Maori boasted a disease deity for each body part; the Winnebago Indians tried to secure blessings from some two-faced god they called Disease-Giver; the Irish had the plague-bringer Caillech; and in ancient Babylon, Nergal gave out diseases like they were candy. And that wasn’t even counting deities who, while not specializing in illnesses, used an odd plague here and there when the occasion called for it.
    I needed more data to narrow this down. My butt hurt from sitting still for too long. I’d fed the dog four hush puppies so far and curiously he seemed no worse for wear. I half expected him to blow up or upchuck on the carpet. Attack poodle with the stomach of steel.
    When my eyes glazed over, I took a break and called Biohazard.
    “A shapeshifter?”
    “Werecoyote,” Patrice said.
    “How sure are you of this?”
    “Without a shadow of a doubt. Several pissed-off Pack members showed up at my office demanding his remains.”
    “How is that possible? Shapeshifters don’t get sick.”
    “I don’t know.” A note of worry vibrated in Patrice’s voice. “Lyc-V is a jealous virus. It exterminates all other invaders with extreme prejudice.”
    If the plague did that to a shapeshifter, what would it do to a regular human?
    The rest of the conversation went in a similar vein. The guy in a cloak now had an official code name—the Steel Mary. The attack poodle was all dog, the Good Samaritan was gone forever, and we were all out of clues as to the Steel Mary’s identity. The statements of eyewitnesses proved useless. The medmages had crawled all over the scene and discovered diddly-squat. No names of forbidden gods written in blood on the wall. No accidentally discarded matchbooks from five-star hotels. No mud prints made with one-of-a-kind mud found only three feet to the left of some famous landmark. Nothing. I asked Patrice if she thought praying to Miss Marple would help. She told me to stuff it and hung up.

    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    PAD was next in line. Williams mostly flexed his muscle and rattled his sabers, because PAD hadn’t been called to the scene and Biohazard got all the glory, but after my vivid description of Joshua’s nose falling off, the good detective decided that he had a very pressing and very full caseload, and while he would love to assist my investigation in any way possible, he was simply swamped. Regretful, that.
    I checkmarked the three pink slips from Patrice and Williams and called Jim, because I had to. One had to take pains to be polite when dealing with the Pack’s security chief. Even if that chief was your buddy.
    A male shapeshifter named Jack put me on hold. I flipped the pink slip over and doodled an ugly face on it.
    Jim and I went way back. Before my job as a liaison between the Order and the Mercenary Guild and his job as the Pack’s head spook, we both earned our cash as mercs, contractors for the Mercenary Guild. The Guild assigned each merc a territory. Mine happened to be crap, and well-paying gigs came my way very rarely. Jim’s territory, on other hand, often