Free Kate Daniels 01 - Magic Bites by authors_sort Page A

hold my own.
    His lips parted, releasing a snarl. I swung my blade, judging the distance between us.
    If we fought, and if I survived, I’d never find out who killed Greg. The Pack would tear me to shreds. This was getting me nowhere. I had no choice but to lose face. I stopped and lowered my blade. The words didn’t want to leave my mouth, but I forced them out anyway. “I’m sorry. I’d love to play but I’m not my own person at the moment.”
    He smiled.
    I did my best to ignore the condescension I saw in his face. “My name is Kate Daniels. Greg Feldman was my legal guardian and the closest thing to a family I’ve had for many years. I want to find the scum who killed him. I can’t afford to fight you and I won’t show off my magic. I just want to know if the Pack had something to do with Greg’s death. Once I find the killer, I would be more than happy to indulge you.”
    I offered him my hand. He halted, studying me, and then the fur melted away, absorbed through the follicles that produced it. The Beast Lord took my hand in his human palm and shook.
    “Fair enough. Right now I’m not my own person either,” he said. Being a Beast Lord, he probably never was.
    The gold in his irises shrank to mere flecks. His control was unbelievable. The most adept of shapechangers could choose between three forms: human, animal, and beast-man. To change a part of your body into one form while keeping the rest of it in another, as he had, was incredible. Before this night, I would have said it couldn’t be done.
    The Beast Lord sat down on the dirty floor. I had no choice but to follow, feeling like an idiot for dusting my jeans off earlier.
    “If I prove to you that the Pack had no interest in removing the diviner, will you share?”
    “Yes.”
    He reached into his sweatshirt, produced a black leather folder zipped shut, and offered it to me. I held my hand out, but he retracted it before my fingers touched the supple leather. I wondered if he was quicker than me. It would be interesting to find out.
    “Between us,” he said.
    “Understood.”
    I took the folder and unzipped it. Inside were photos. Shots of corpses, some human, some partially animal, mangled and bloody. The bright, awful crimson dominated the images, making it difficult to analyze them. I looked over the photographs anyway. Corpse after corpse after corpse, torn, disemboweled, drenched in their blood. It made me ill.
    “Seven,” I murmured, holding the pictures by their edges as if the blood on them would stain my fingers. “Yours?”
    “Every one.” He reached over to tap one of the shots. “This one. Zachary Stone. The alpha-rat. Tough, vicious sonovabitch.”
    I tried to see beyond the blood, focusing on the injuries. “Something chewed on him.”
    “Something chewed on five of them. And would have chewed on the other two as well if it wasn’t scared away.”
    A little light went off in my head. “Greg was working on this.”
    “Yes. And keeping it quiet. The People want power. They lust after it the same way their vampires lust after blood. They see us as rivals and they’ll attack any weakness. To admit that we can’t take care of our own is a weakness. Nataraja would cream his jeans if he knew.”
    “You think they are responsible?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, his face grim. “But I’m going to find out.”
    It made sense. The Order had little love for the Pack, which was too organized and dangerous for their liking, but faced with a choice between the People and the shapeshifters, the Order would side with the Pack. Greg could have been tailing a vampire when something killed him, preventing him from revealing what he saw or was about to see. The vampire could have been caught in a struggle. Or the vamp could have been following Greg when something killed him because he was getting too close. Or . . .
    “I would like to speak to Corwin,” I said.
    His face showed no reaction. “Is he a suspect?”
    There was no point