Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews Page B

well, and when the cheap project apartments east of it crumbled and split, a slow but steady trickle of homeless refugees filled the mobile park. They pitched tents on the manicured lawns, bathed in the communal pool, and cooked on the outdoor grills. The cops chased out the squatters, but they just kept coming.
    Then one night the magic hit especially hard, and the manufactured homes warped. Some expanded like glass bubbles, some twisted, others stuck together merging into hives. More yet divided and grew additions, and when the dust finally settled, a fifth of the inhabitants had vanished into the walls. To the Outside . Nobody could ever figure out what theOutside was, but it was definitely not anywhere in the normal world. The retirees fled, but the refugees had nowhere to go. They moved into the trailers and stayed put. Once in a while somebody would disappear, as each new magic tide twisted the Honeycomb a little more. A fun place to live if you were into that sort of thing.
    “How can we find out where Esmeralda lives?” Julie puffed behind me. “I only know she lives in the Honeycomb. I don’t know where exactly.”
    “You hear that whooming? The Honeycomb changes all the time so they have to have some sort of beacon. It’s probably at the entrance, which should be guarded by somebody. We’re going to go there and ask nicely where Esmeralda lived.”
    “What makes you think they’ll tell us?”
    “Because I’ll pay them.”
    “Oh.”
    And because if they don’t tell me, I will pull out my Order ID and my saber and make myself very hard to ignore.
    I wasn’t wild about heading into the Honeycomb with a little girl in tow, but considering the neighborhood, she was safer with me than without me. I wondered how she got down there in the first place…
    “How did you get down into the Gap?”
    “We hiked from the Warren. There’s a trail.” A little light went off in her eyes. “But I probably can’t find it now. So if you send me back, I’ll just wander around without any water or food.”
    Why me?
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    The street turned slightly, bringing us into view of wide-open chain-link gates. Just in front of them a man in faded jeans and a leather vest worn over his bare chest sat on an overturned oil drum. An unlit cigarette drooped from his lips. To the left of him sat an old military truck, its back end pointing toward the gate. Despite rust stains and dents, the truck’s tires and canvas top looked to be in good condition.
    The canvas probably hid some heavy-duty hardware, a Gatling gun or a small siege engine.
    On the other side of the man sat a huge rectangular tank. Soft emerald-green algae stained the glass walls, obscuring the murky water within. A long section of metal pipe stretched from the tank and disappeared beneath the twisted remains of a trailer.
    The man on the drum leveled a crossbow at me. The crossbow looked a lot like a good old-fashioned, flat-sided Flemish arbalest. The prong gleamed with the bluish-gray shade particular to steel, not the brighter, pale aluminum of cheaper bows, meaning the bow’s draw weight probably ranged to two hundred pounds. He could put a bolt into me from seventy-five yards away and he wanted me to know that.
    Whoom. Whoom.
    An arbalest was a decent weapon, but slow on reload.
    The man eyed me. “You want something?” The cigarette remained stuck to his lower lip, moving as he spoke.
    “I’m an agent of the Order investigating the disappearance of witches belonging to the Sisters of the Crow coven. I was told the head witch lived in the Honeycomb.”
    “And who is that?” He pointed to Julie behind me.
    “Daughter of a witch in Esmeralda’s coven. Her mom’s missing. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
    “No. You got an ID on you?”
    I reached for the leather wallet I carried on a cord around my neck and took out my Order ID. He motioned me closer. I approached and passed it to him. He turned it over. The small rectangle of