Malignant Magic Read online

  “You need ortho. Then plastics. You don’t need vascular.”

  “You didn’t even—”

  He turned and strode out of the room, tossing his gloves in the trash on the way by.

  “He’s a fun one,” Sue said, stepping back into her position by the patient.

  “Fun isn’t how I’d describe him.”

  I tentatively pushed on my magic, trying to see if what I’d done for him had any effect. The sense of magic had stabilized. The cold in my spine was better, little more than a faint trace of nothing.

  Even his blood pressure had stabilized.

  When Jen and Tamara returned, my friend frowned a moment as she looked at me. “What is it?”

  “Vascular.”

  “God. Who?”

  “Bavhish.”

  She glanced back at the door. “Did he even examine him? Last time I had a vascular patient, he barely did anything. Told me to call the surgery team, as if that was my job.”

  I forced a smile, keeping my attention on the patient.

  Who was he?

  For them to have known to send for me meant that he was likely one of Ariel’s pack, but why would she want him to come to me? And what had happened to him?

  There was one person I could go to for help, but I didn’t know if Aron would be willing—or able. In the months since we’d uncovered the strange plan to put the Dark Council at odds with the mage council, I hadn’t seen him all that often. He was supposed to get me an audience with Solera, but so far hadn’t managed to do so. I didn’t blame him. She was fae, one of the Seelie fairies, and I suspected we couldn’t force an audience with her. It would have to be granted. I just wished she were more willing to meet with me. She might have answers.

  After everything I’d been through, answers were what I wanted more than anything. If I could know what I was, then I could begin to better understand it, and maybe even begin to understand my magic. There wasn’t anyone who could help with that otherwise. Not my grandparents. Not the mage council, even if I were to dare go to them and ask for their help. And not even the shifters.

  Now the shifters had sent one of theirs to me.

  Something was taking place. Could it be related to the last attack? We still didn’t know what had happened, other than that someone of power had given the book with the necessary spells to two mages who didn’t know any better than to use it. They had wanted power, and they had been willing to force the issue by playing with magical items they didn’t understand.

  “Kate?” Jen asked.

  I shook myself and looked over at her. “Hmm?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out who wanted me to see this guy.”

  “Maybe it was a setup. They figure you save him, find romance…”

  “He’s not really my type.”

  “Because you don’t have a type. I thought maybe Derek would do it for you, but after he left…”

  I shook my head, turning my attention back to the patient. Now that he was stabilizing, I didn’t have to worry so much about losing him and could get back to medicine—the reason I was here. Not magic, regardless of whether a shifter might drop off one of their own for me to work on.

  “Let’s get another set of vitals, start some bloodwork, and get a shoulder film while we’re waiting on ortho,” I said. It was best to keep my focus on the things I could influence.

  2

  The spring breeze gusted around me, tugging on my hair as I stood on the street outside the hospital. The rest of my shift had been unremarkable, the kind of day that passed quickly. The shifter had gone to have his clavicle fracture repaired, and I hadn’t stopped ortho from doing it, though I’d considered it, especially as I didn’t know whether surgery would prevent him from shifting. Without knowing the physiology behind the shifting—if there even was any physiology and it wasn’t all magic—I didn’t think there was any point. If it came down to it, he could use magic to remove whatever hardware was placed during the surgery.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  I turned to Jen as she pulled her jacket up around her shoulders, looking along the street. “Fine. Just needing some fresh air.”

  “Are you going to the gym to train or just back home?”

  Heading over to the gym might help me clear my head, but I didn’t think tonight was a good night for it. If my message went through, Aron should be here anytime. I just didn’t know if the message did go through. With him, it was difficult to know.

  “Neither. I’m hoping to meet someone.”

  “I’ve been hoping that for you for a while. You really need a night of passion, though I doubt you’ll ever be so kind to yourself to let that happen. You’ve been far too uptight lately.”

  Had I? I didn’t think I had been, but too much had changed over the last year. It was more than my connection to magic. There was my willingness to use it that hadn’t been there before. Regardless of how much I might deny the fact that I wasn’t a magic user, when it came down to it, I had grown much more comfortable with it. And then there were my connections to the magical world. It was Aron and the shifters and even my grandparents. Everything seemed as if it wanted to pull me into the magical world, regardless of how much I might want to stay apart.

  “I’m fine.” When Jen arched a brow, I shook my head. “I really am. Besides, I don’t need all the random guys you like.”

  “They’re not random.”

  “That’s right. You find them with that app, so how could they be random?”

  Jen grinned at me. “Just because I like to swipe right when Johnny isn’t available…”

  A car pulled around the corner, speeding toward us. The windows were heavily tinted, but I didn’t need to see through them to know Aron headed toward me. In all the time that I’d known him, he hadn’t chosen anything inconspicuous. And this navy two-seater BMW—his preferred ride—was definitely not inconspicuous.

  The car skidded to a stop along the curb. “This is my friend.”

  Jen leaned down, trying to look inside. “How you doin’?” she said, grinning at me. “I guess I was wrong about you not letting yourself have a little fun. Who is he?”

  “A friend.”

  “Uh huh. Looks like the kind of friend I’d like to meet… oh.”

  The door opened and Aron stepped out, nodding to me and then Jen. He was dressed in a tight navy blue t-shirt and jeans that only accentuated his physique. Aron was a solidly built man, and not at all the kind I normally found attractive.

  “Are you two together now?” she whispered.

  “Friends.” I opened the passenger door and took a seat. The dark gray leather practically gripped me. “I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll text you later. We need to talk about this. And you,” she said, pointing at Aron, “better be nice to my Katie.”

  I couldn’t see what Aron said, but Jen leaned down and gave me a double thumbs up before I managed to close the door in her face. It might have been better for me to meet Aron without her there. At least then I wouldn’t have to deal with the smirks and questions behind my back.

  When Aron took a seat, he tipped his head in a nod.

  “I didn’t know whether you were going to come.”

  “Your message said it was important.”

  “You got it?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know, the polite thing to do is to respond.” I’d sent a message to him but hadn’t gotten any response back. That wasn’t unusual for him, but it didn’t make it any less annoying.

  “I apologize. I was preoccupied.”

  “A demon?”

  He nodded as he put the car in drive and pulled out into traffic. “Where to?”

  I sighed. We could go back to my place, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Not really. What I wanted was to find Solera and get answers. Even that might not be what we needed to do. “A shifter came into the ER today. Mauled pretty badly. Mostly his shoulder. Broken bone.” I mot
ioned to my collarbone, so he could see which one. “There was a note on him for me.”

  Aron was silent for a while. “Shifters shouldn’t be interested in traditional medicine.”

  “I take it they can heal themselves the same way that mages can?”

  “Better, actually. Changing into their animal form restores injuries.”

  “All of them?”

  Aron hesitated a moment before answering. “Not all. There are some that are too difficult even for shifter magic to overcome.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t able to shift.” He’d arrived dressed and in his human shape.

  “That is troubling.”

  “We should go speak with Ariel,” I said, hating that I suggested it.

  “You wouldn’t have to come.”

  “The shifter came to me. I need to know why. But first, we need to stop at my place. My cat needs to be fed.”

  He frowned at me, as if knowing the true reason I wanted to stop at my place, but nodded.

  We pulled in front of my condo and I raced inside, petting Lucy briefly and making sure she had food—if I didn’t do that, she would definitely sit on my head while I slept—and grabbed the demon sword from within my closet. When I climbed back into Aron’s car, I stuffed it behind the seat.

  “Just in case.”

  When Aron turned the car and headed north onto I35, he accelerated quickly, squeezing between cars without slowing. It was disconcerting, but I’d ridden with him enough that it no longer terrified me the way that it once did. I still didn’t know if he had some way of hiding the car from police. Or maybe he’d used magic to make the car so fast, the police wouldn’t be able to catch us.

  “What else can you tell me about the shifter?” he asked.

  “He might lose use of his arm, but there was something else. When I realized he was a shifter, I detected his magic pouring out of him. I think I sealed it off but don’t know if it held. He was pulled off to surgery before I got the chance to see.”

  “You sent a wolf shifter into traditional surgery?”

  “I didn’t. Dr. Elmer, the orthopedic attending, did.” Elmer was a smallish man, so different than the typical ortho surgeons, including the residents. Most of them looked like old football players.

  Aron laughed. “I’m sure he’ll thank you.”

  “Will it keep him from shifting?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine when he next tries to shift, his magic will absorb whatever is done to him, though I’ve never heard of a shifter having surgery done on them.”

  “Why would Ariel send him to me?” That had to be who had done it, but I struggled to come up with why. If she hadn’t wanted him to have traditional medicine, what would she have thought I could do for him? There was no way she could have expected me to have saved him the way I did. I hadn’t even known that I could.

  “That’s what we need to discover,” Aron said.

  “Great. Another trip to the great north woods.”

  “You don’t like the northern part of the state? It’s quite beautiful, with the forests and—”

  “I don’t like it when I want nothing more than to have a glass of wine and sleep. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “I’ll make sure you’re back in time.”

  “You’ve said that before. I seem to remember getting barely any sleep and suffering through my shift the next day.” I didn’t want to have to go through that again. It was bad enough the last time.

  “If Ariel sent someone to you, there would have been a reason. The shifters keep things within the pack usually. This would be a change, and it makes me uncomfortable.”

  We sped forward, moving at speeds that left me unwilling to even look over at the speedometer out of fear that I would see exactly how fast we were going. I didn’t need to know, especially with how quickly things whipped past.

  The last time I’d been this far out of the city had been when I was with Aron and going to visit the shifter pack for the first time. That visit had been late enough at night that I hadn’t been able to see the landscape change as we left the city, turning from the sprawling suburbs to the smaller outer cities before even those turned into nothing but open land. Billboards plastered either side of the interstate, but we moved past them so quickly that I couldn’t even pay any attention to them had I wanted to.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I asked after sitting in silence for a while. The trees had changed over, now with more pine trees dotting the side of the road.

  “The last time was shortly after we stopped Lexy,” he said.

  “You haven’t seen her since then?”

  There was a moment of hesitation before he said, “No.”

  There was something more to it that he wasn’t saying, much as I knew I shouldn’t feel jealous about his relationship with Ariel, especially as he was free to pursue whatever relationship with her that he wanted. We weren’t anything but friends. Maybe not even that. Colleagues.

  “Why do I get the sense that bothers you?” I asked.

  “Ariel is not usually silent, not when it comes to the pack. We have known each other a long time—” I resisted the urge to say I bet, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference with Aron—“and we share information between each other. The fact that she’s been silent has troubled me for more than a little while. During the last situation, I had hoped she might be able to help me understand more about what was happening, but she didn’t.”

  “What sort of help do you think Ariel might have provided?”

  “There are many kinds of help, but when it came to the Dark Council…”

  I thought I understood. He had wanted help stopping the war. And the shifters hadn’t answered as he had expected. That shouldn’t be surprising, but for some reason, it troubled him.

  “I thought you’ve said the shifters have their own goals and that Ariel has her own motivations.”

  “Hers are often difficult to fully understand,” he said with a nod.

  We passed a casino. That meant Hinkley. Had we really already traveled so far north? We couldn’t be all that far from Duluth, and it felt like barely any time had passed. Could that be how he managed to get places as quickly as he seemed to travel? Aron didn’t remain in Minneapolis all the time, but when he came to visit, there were times when he’d get there fast enough that I believed he lived in the city.

  “The shifters protect the Veil,” he went on. “In that, their interests and the mage council are aligned. That might be the only time they are. The rest of the time is different. What motivates the shifters is often different than what motivates the mage council.”

  “What sort of different agendas might they have?”

  “What you have to remember with shifters is that they put the pack before everything. After ensuring the pack is safe, they look to ensure the safety of their kind. They aren’t always safe where they travel, which is why many of the packs prefer to remain isolated, much like Ariel’s pack.”

  Without knowing the dynamics of the magical world, I wasn’t able to really understand what sort of things the shifters would have to worry about. Was there anything they really needed to fear? With as much magic as they possessed, it seemed difficult to believe there would be anything, but that might only be showing my ignorance. There might be many things for them to worry about.

  “What sort of relationship do the shifters and the vampires have?”

  “About what you’d expect from two supremely powerful magical beings. The vampires mostly leave the shifters alone, preferring a more suburban lifestyle than the rural magic of the shifters. Occasionally the two sides clash, though it’s not so often as you might think. With the need to hold onto the Veil, there remains an uneasy alliance, and it’s one that’s even less comfortable than what the mages have with the shifters.”

  Thinking about the mauling, I had a hard time coming to grips with what must have attacked the shifter. It looked like another shifter had attacked, but what if that was what the attacker had
wanted it to seem like?

  “Do you fear your shifters will have been attacked by the vampires?”

  He glanced over at me. “They are not my shifters. I think Ariel would take offense at anyone suggesting otherwise.”

  “They’re your friends. That’s all I really meant.”

  He grunted, shaking his head in a laugh. “You will need to be careful how you refer to them.”

  “They aren’t here, Aron.”

  “They aren’t, but as we near their lands, you’ll want to be careful. They hear far more than most realize.”

  As I watched the trees streaming by, I had a hard time believing the shifters could listen to our conversation, but then I had been around them when they had allowed me close. There was powerful—and seductive—magic within them.

  We took an exit and started heading west, still streaking across the ground, quickly now and picking up even more speed. Aron barely paid attention to the speedometer and I was forced to trust he could control the car at high speeds.

  A tingle worked over my arms and Aron glanced over at me. “Did you feel it?”

  “I did. Was I supposed to?”

  “We’re passing into the shifter lands. I didn’t know if you were sensitive to their magic.”

  What did it mean that I was? That was one of the things I hoped to learn by finding Solera. I needed to understand the extent of my magic, mostly so that if I continued to need it, I would be able to do so. There were aspects to it I still didn’t understand. Not only was I aware of when magic was used around me, but there was the sensation of death. Why should that be something I could detect?

  “Apparently, I’m sensitive to all sorts of magic. Has Solera responded to your request to meet?”

  Aron glanced over at me before turning his attention back to the road. “She hasn’t. Eventually she will and then—”

  “It’s fine,” I said, looking away. We rocketed along a narrow road with tall pines growing on either side and blocking out the sunlight, giving an overcast quality to the day. I wanted to put the window down and inhale the forest air, but with as fast as we were going, I’d probably only have my hair smacking my face.