Gunmetal Magic (Kate Daniels #5.5)(109)
Author: Ilona Andrews

Ghastek took out the copy of Julie’s drawing. “I’ve studied this subject extensively and I’ve never seen a rune like this.” Ghastek pointed to a symbol that looked like an X with a double left diagonal arm.

Well, of course. He didn’t know it, therefore it couldn’t possibly be a rune. “Both Fehu and Ansuz runes have double arms. Why couldn’t this rune have one? If you tossed it into a collection of runes and told a layman to pick out one that doesn’t belong, he wouldn’t grab that one.”

Ghastek gave me a condescending look. “The term ‘layman’ refers to a nonexpert by definition. Of course a nonexpert wouldn’t be able to single out this rune, Kate. We could throw stars and spirals into the mix and he would be unlikely to pick those out either.”

You conceited ass.

Curran cleared his throat.

I realized I had taken a step toward Ghastek. No killing, no punching, no destruction of property. Right.

“We’re taking this matter to an expert,” Curran said.

“I think it’s prudent, considering the circumstances.”

Oh, well, so good of him to give us his permission.

“Where is this expert?” Ghastek asked.

“At the Norse Heritage Foundation,” I told him.

Ghastek wrinkled his face into a semblance of a disgusted sneer, as if he’d just stuck his head into a bag of rotten potatoes.

“You’re going to see the neo-Vikings?”

“Yes.”

“They’re ignorant, loud buffoons. All they do is sit in their mead hall, get drunk, and punch each other when their masculinity is threatened.”

“You don’t have to come,” I told him.

Ghastek let out a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. I’ll get my vampire.”

CHAPTER 5

I was riding a horse called The Dude. The Dude, who also answered to Fred if he was feeling charitable, was what the Pack stables had called a “Tennessee Walker Blue Roan.” The blue roan part was somewhat true—the horse under me was dark gray, with the colors nearing black toward the head and the ankles. The Tennessee Walker part…Well, some Tennessee Walker was probably in there, but most of it was definitely a coldblood horse. A massive coldblood horse, close to twenty-five-hundred pounds. I was betting on a Percheron. Sitting atop The Dude was like riding a small elephant.

The presence of a vampire presented Curran with a dilemma. He refused to ride a horse, but he refused to let me travel in the company of an undead without backup either, so a compromise had to be reached. We stopped by the Cutting Edge office to get Andrea. Unfortunately, she was out. Apparently some shapeshifters had been murdered and Jim had pulled her in to head that investigation, a fact that he, of course, had neglected to mention. We kidnapped Derek and Ascanio instead.

Derek was our third employee. Once my sidekick, then Jim’s spy, then a chief of Curran’s personal guard, he was now working for Cutting Edge to acquire experience and figure out what it was he wanted to do. When I’d first met him, he’d been barely eighteen and pretty. Now he was close to twenty. Some bastards had poured molten silver on his face. The bastards were now dead, but he’d never healed quite right.

Ascanio was our intern. He was fifteen, as beautiful as an angel, and a bouda or werehyena. Bouda children rarely survived adolescence, as many of them lost the fight for their sanity and went loup—so Ascanio was treasured, babied, and spoiled beyond all reason. Unfortunately, he’d gotten in trouble one too many times and was turned over to me to train, because it was decided I was least likely to kill him.

Derek and Ascanio rode their horses behind me, bickering quietly about something. Ahead of me, the lime-green nightmare that was Ghastek’s vampire trotted along the road in a jerky, looping gait. Most vampires eventually lost their ability to run upright, reverting to quadruped locomotion as the Immortuus pathogen reshaped its victim’s body into a new nightmare predator. I had come across very old vamps before. They didn’t even resemble their former human shapes. But the vamp Ghastek piloted was only a few months old. It loped forward, switching between scuttling along the ground one moment, and shambling two-thirds upright the next like some grotesque puppet on the strings of a drunken puppeteer.

Next to the vampire cantered a freakishly large black poodle. His name was Grendel, he was my dog, and while he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, he loved me and he was handy in a fight.

A few dozen yards behind us, an enormous lion trotted. When shapeshifters transformed, their animal forms were always larger than their natural counterparts, and Curran the Lion wasn’t just large. He looked prehistoric. Colossal, gray, with faint darker stripes staining his fur like whip marks, he moved along the road at an easy pace, seemingly tireless. Which was why I’d ended up with The Dude. I had walked into the stables and told them I’d be traveling between a vampire and a lion the size of a rhino and I needed a horse that wouldn’t freak out. True to the stable master’s recommendation, The Dude seemed unflappable. Occasionally, when Curran flanked us, he would flare his nostrils a bit while the other two horses shied and made panicked noises, but mostly The Dude just pounded his way forward in a straight line, convinced that the lion was a figment of his imagination and that the vampire ahead of him was just Grendel’s deformed mutant brother.

We were our own three-ring circus. Sadly, we had no audience: to the left of us the forest rose in a jagged line, and to the right a low hill climbed up, rocks and grass, before running into another line of trees at the apex.

“I’ve never met the neo-Vikings,” Ascanio said.

“A good portion of them are mercs,” I said over my shoulder. “They’re a rowdy lot and not really what you would call true to tradition. Some are, but most are there because they saw a movie or two in childhood and think ‘Viking’ is a noun.”

“It’s not?” Derek asked.

“No. Originally it was a verb as in ‘to go viking.’ The Norse Heritage guys wear horned helmets, drink beer out of a giant vat, and start fights. As neo-Viking communities go, they are better off financially than most, so they can afford to have some fun.”

“Where do they get their money?” Derek asked.

I nodded at the curving road. “Around that bend.”

A couple of minutes later we cleared the curve. A vast lake spread on our left. Blue-green water stretched into the distance, tinted with bluish haze. Here and there green islands ringed with sand thrust through the water. To the right, an enormous mead hall built with huge timbers rose from the crest of a low hill like the armored back of some sea serpent. As we stood there, two karves, the longboats, slid from behind the nearest island, their carved dragon heads rising high above the lake’s surface.