Magic Bleeds by Ilona Andrews Page B

generated good gigs, but they frequently required more than one body. Usually he cut me in on it, mostly because he couldn’t stomach working with anybody else. During that time I learned that, with Jim, the Pack always took precedence. He could have the guy we hunted by his throat, but one call from the Keep, and he’d walk away without a word.
    He was probably going out of his mind. Shapeshifters spent all their life thinking they were free of disease. Last night had ripped their immunity away from them.
    I colored the doodle’s nose black and added a spiky mane of wild hair.
    “Kate?” Jim said into the phone. Jim looked like he broke bones for a living, but his voice was heavenly.
    “What the hell took you so long?”
    “You say the sweetest things to me, honey bear,” I told him. “I was trying to track down the Mary who killed Joshua.”
    Jim growled a little, but didn’t bite back. “He was only twenty-four years old. A werecoyote, good guy.
    He worked for me once in a while.”
    I gave the doodle two sharp horns. “I’m very sorry.”
    “Biohazard told me he was infected with syphilis and it ate him from inside out.”
    “That’s . . . accurate.”

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    “They won’t release the remains to us.”
    I knew where he was coming from. “Doolittle wants a sample to analyze?”
    “Yeah.”
    Doolittle was the Pack’s medic and the best medmage I’d ever had the privilege of driving to the brink of near insanity. He was the reason why my friend Derek still had a face. He was also the reason why I was still around at all.
    “Jim, Joshua was extremely contagious. Pieces of him fell off, grew pale fuzz, and crawled across the pavement. Biohazard torched him down to his skeleton, which they locked in a hermetically sealed coffin and then cremated. They would’ve dropped a nuke onto the parking lot if they thought they could get away with it.”
    “Is there anything left?”
    I drew claws on the doodle’s arms. “Unfortunately, no. Georgia Code, Title 38: under Georgia Supernatural Emergency Management Act of 2019, in the event of a clear threat of epidemic, Biohazard has broad emergency powers, which trump everything, including the Pack’s claim on the remains. As far as I know, they didn’t even keep a sample for themselves. It was extremely virulent, Jim. It slithered over salt and fire. If it got out, most of the city would be infected by now.”
    The poodle raised his head, a low warning rumble rolling deep in his throat.
    I looked at him.
    “Visitor,” Maxine’s voice whispered in my head.
    “I’ll have to hang up in a minute, so very quickly,” I murmured into the phone. “There were other shapeshifters in the bar. Why did they leave?”
    He hesitated.
    “Jim. We went through this before: I can’t help you if you don’t level with me.”

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    “They were driven out. Something that bastard did terrified them out of their minds.”
    “Where are they now? I need to interview them.”
    “You can’t interview Maria. She’s under sedation.”
    “What about the rest?”
    There was a tiny pause. “We’re looking for them.”
    Oh crap. “How many are missing?”
    “Three.”
    There were three panicked shapeshifters lost in the city, each a spree killer in waiting. If they went loup, they’d paint the city red. Could this get any worse?
    An emaciated shape scuttled into my office with preternatural quickness and perched in my client chair.
    It might have been a man at some point, but now it was a creature: gaunt, hairless, corded with dried muscle as if someone had stuck it into a dehydrator for a few days and all of the fat and softness had drained from it. The vampire stared at me with glowing eyes and in their red depths I sensed a terrible hunger.
    The attack poodle exploded into wild barking.
    Why did I even bother asking that