Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [180]
They wanted him to go spy. He would be off in danger on his own. Her throat constricted. No. They hadn’t had nearly enough time together.
“I’ll go get dressed,” William growled.
“Both of you, m’lord.”
“I get to go?” Cerise jumped to her feet.
“Yes, my lady. That is, unless you refuse. Lord Sandine is bound by our agreement, but you are—”
“Save it,” she told him. “I’ll be right there. Let me just get my sword.”
Read on for an exciting excerpt from
the next Kate Daniels novel
MAGIC SLAYS
by Ilona Andrews
Coming June 2011
from Ace Books!
I sat in my new office, between my enchanted saber and a stack of bills, and contemplated my sanity. Right now it was very much in question.
The amount of money I didn’t have was shocking.
The world’s pulse skipped a beat. The twisted tubes of feylanterns in the walls of my office faded to black. The ward that guarded the building vanished. Something buzzed in the wall, and the electric floor lamp on the left blinked and snapped to life, illuminating my desk with a warm yellow glow. I reached over and turned it off. The electric bill was killing me.
Magic had drained from the world, and technology had once again gained the upper hand. People called it the post-Shift resonance. Magic came and went as it pleased, flooding the world like a tsunami, dragging bizarre monsters into our reality, stalling engines, jamming guns, eating tall buildings, and vanishing again without warning. Nobody knew when it would assault us or how long each wave would last. Eventually magic would win this war, but for now technology was putting up one hell of a fight, and we were stuck in the middle, struggling to rebuild a half-ruined world according to new rules.
Lots of people found ways to make money off the magic chaos. First, there was the Mercenary Guild. Mercs cleared magic hazmat for the right price and asked no questions. I had been a member of the Guild for more years than I cared to admit, and although I was still a merc and carried a Guild card with my name, Kate Daniels, printed on it in pretty letters, I hadn’t worked full-time for the Guild in over a year.
Then, there was the Order of Merciful Aid. The Order offered to help everyone, rich and poor, criminal and law-abiding citizen—as long as they were human. Once you entered into a contract with the knights, you gave them broad, sweeping authority over your life to dig as deeply as they needed to resolve the problem. The Order was feared and respected, and I had worked for it as well. I never made a full-fledged knight. One had to graduate from the Academy to do that, and I had dropped out. The best I managed to become was an agent, a half-assed knight, with all of the responsibility but only a fraction of the authority. Still I had a good run there and got to help some people along the way. But the Order had its own agenda: the survival of the human race at any cost. It turned out that our definitions of human didn’t match. I quit.
Two months after my fall from the Order’s grace, I started my own business, Cutting Edge Investigations, bankrolled by the shapeshifter Pack. The shapeshifters had advanced me a very large loan in return for a slice of my currently nonexistent profits. I took out an ad in a newspaper, I put the word out on the street, the office had been open for a month, and so far nobody had hired me to do anything.
I’d thought I had built a decent reputation in Atlanta. Apparently, not decent enough to drum up any business. If things kept going this way, I would be forced to run up and down the street screaming, “We kill things for money.” Maybe someone would take pity and throw some change at me.
The phone rang. I stared at it. You never know. It could be a trick.
The phone rang again. I picked it up. “Cutting Edge.”
“Kate,” a dry voice vibrated with urgency.
Long time no kill. “Hello, Ghastek.” And what would Atlanta’s premier Master of the Dead want with me?
The Masters of the Dead piloted vampires. When a victim of Immortuus pathogen died, his mind and ego