Chapter Twenty
I stared at the massive, hunched-backed, hideous creature with muscles piled on top of muscles, a maw bigger than my head, at least twelve feet in height, and with claw-tipped arms almost dragging the floor, and couldn’t think.
This was impossible. The formula that had resulted in the abomination of nature that I was looking at had been destroyed, with its only remaining remnants in the hands of the Corps.
And yet, here it was.
Did we have another traitor in the ranks? Because we’d had them before. In fact, the man who had invented the potion that brought out long-lost versions of magical creatures had been a Corps scientist.
Jenkins had hoped that his handiwork would give us an edge in the war, as creatures like Weres and vamps had once been much stronger and more terrifying than their modern-day counterparts.
But all he’d succeeded in doing was releasing prehistoric monsters onto Las Vegas.
Was there someone we’d missed who had continued his work?
Or was some of the leftover drug still on the streets? Punch, a popular street drug from Faerie, had served as the basis for his potion, and some of his stash had been stolen and sold by the people he’d talked into brewing it for him. But their customers had been human, not Were.
But drugs get sold on, don’t they? And stolen, traded, and generally passed around, and end up in places no one could have anticipated. Like here, I thought, staring at the latest, hideous victim.
But even if that were the case, nothing else made sense.
Like the fact that the body on the floor underneath the floating image was still human-sized, which Relics most definitely were not.
It looked like it had been killed partway through a Change, so someone had had split-second timing, and without magic…
No, just no.
I shielded my hand again to examine the actual body further, kneeling in the middle of the Relic projection because the other side was a heap of roofing.
A pair of dirty sneakers and the sliced-up remains of some faded, stained jeans had been discarded to one side, along with an expensive designer hoodie.
The former went with the victim’s scraggly brown beard and yellowed teeth, which would have been gray if he were a few years older, but the hoodie sold for a thousand bucks plus in shops on the Strip.
He looked like half-street person, half-trust-fund baby who had flown into Vegas for the weekend on Daddy’s private jet.
And gotten into something way worse than cocaine.
Then I turned the corpse over, and had a sudden, violent urge to just run screaming.
And not only because it had been gutted, with the whole body cavity basically empty.
But because of something else that made me want to claw at my throat, to the point that I dropped my face shield and still couldn’t breathe.
“Damn,” Caleb said with feeling, staring at the eye glaring back at us.
The other was missing, and this one was cloudy with death, but that didn’t make it easier to meet. That thing was in a human head but bore no resemblance to anything that had a right to be there. No right at all!
It was huge, to the point that it had cracked the cheekbone as it bulged outward, resulting in the discoloration of the skin that mimicked a black eye. I’d seen one like it before, just prior to its owner trying to kill me. And staring at it this close had taken me right back to that night.
The fight had happened in an RV my fiancé no longer owned, because the monster in question had ripped it in two.
I’d flung open the door, expecting to see Cyrus, who had been out for a run with the boys.
And had instead been confronted with something that looked just like that, and from just about this distance.
It then attacked me and killed Jayden, Jace’s brother, when he tried to protect me.
And almost wiped the floor with a dozen more of our boys thereafter, before a combined effort from all of us had managed to put it down.
The fight had been too close for comfort, and I could feel my blood pressure redlining just thinking about it.
Calm down, I told myself savagely. What the hell is wrong with you? That, part of my brain screamed.
Just… God.
“I’m too old for this shit,” Caleb muttered, staring at the eye, because it was basically impossible to look at anything else.
Rigor had set in, causing the lid to stay open on its own, and leaving us facing the creature’s death glare, frozen in time.
And me doing calculations I didn’t want in my head, to force myself back into some kind of grounded headspace.
Someone had dosed a street person with Punch, which, even in the case of the not-fucked-around-with version, was known to bring out latent abilities in humans.
Jenkins hadn’t invented the wheel; he’d simply upped the effectiveness of the Fey drug, causing it to reach farther back in the genome than the regular street-variety ever could.
But the regular old stuff could still pull forth surprises, some of which might be marketable.
So, somebody had wanted to create a subject for reaping, someone nobody cared about or would miss, and just happened to grab a Were.
He lured his victim out here, away from prying eyes, and administered the souped-up version of the drug that he’d accidentally acquired. And was surprised by what emerged—
No.
Whoever had done this, he’d gotten away, and no one could have done that when taken by surprise by a Relic.
I had barely done that, and I was a trained war mage who’d had a lot of help.
No, someone had known what was coming, had lured a Were here on purpose, and had taken precautions because he wanted a Relic.
And I was pretty sure I knew why.
Hunters were bad, but they were also a menace as old as Weres themselves. The war had created something worse. Something that had seized on the idea of utilizing Were pelts for their magic and taken it further.
A lot farther.
“We have a Reaper,” I said flatly, causing Caleb to curse inventively.
“Reaper?” That was Dimas, his olive skin a little paler than usual, but otherwise looking strangely undisturbed by the state of the body. Possibly because of his days as a street kid in Guadalajara. He looked like a scrawny fifteen-year-old, but he was tough as nails.
“It’s a term for a dark mage who harvests body parts from people with abilities they want,” I said shortly because I didn’t want to go into it, and he didn’t want to know.
Really didn’t, as he and the rest of my students were precisely the sort Reapers would love to get their grimy hands on.
They all had traits deemed undesirable by the magical community that had been “weeded out” of the gene pool through dubious means over the centuries, or at least that was the idea.
But genetics weren’t easily contained, and the “bad blood” kept popping up.
And its lethality made it profitable, which was probably why it frequently ended up in a Reaper’s display case.
“What kind of traits?” Dimas persisted.
“Anything somebody might find useful,” Caleb answered, shooting me a look. We were supposed to be training, and this was a teachable moment. “Reapers run underground parlors where people who want a certain trait can come and get a… graft.”
“A graft?” That was Kimmie.
“Grafts of body parts,” I clarified. “Vamp eyes go for tens of thousands, and Were pelts for many times that. They get the pelts and other stuff from Hunters, who track down and kill the donors, although they aren’t above doing a little harvesting themselves when they get a chance and cutting out the middleman.
But despite the name, Reapers mainly do the implantation, like evil Dr. Frankensteins. ”
That last word slipped out before I could stop it, and I winced, hoping Caleb would just let it go.
But of course not.
“Frankenstein was evil,” he said.
“We aren’t having this discussion again.”
But we were, because it was one of his favorite soapboxes. The kind of thing he could go on about for hours on a stake-out, until I threatened him with some really nasty spells to get him to shut up. And because, I strongly suspected, he needed something to ground him, too.
“The bastard was a raging narcissist driven by scientific curiosity, ego, and the hope of fame and fortune,” he explained, although no one had asked.
“While being devoid of any ethical considerations. It was all about whether he could do something, rather than whether he should. And when his crazy experiment somehow worked out, what did he do? Immediately abandoned his creature because it didn’t look to suit him, leaving it to fend for itself in a hostile world that hated and attacked it!
What happened next was both predictable and tragic, and completely his fault.
He may not have killed anyone, but the monster’s actions were one hundred percent—”
“Yes, thank you, Professor.”
“—on him. I mean, if not evil, what do you call somebody who deliberately makes a creature with zero chance of ever fitting into the world it has to live in?”
“Mom?” Kimmie said, expressionless.
Caleb stared at her for a second, and then the implication hit. “Shit. Shit. Look, I didn’t mean—that is, you guys aren’t—it’s not the same—”
The puffballs tilted. “How so?”
“Well, well, for one thing, Frankenstein carved up dead bodies. His monster wasn’t alive—”
“Smooth,” I told Caleb, who started to look panicked.
“—not to imply that you are monsters! Frankenstein was the monster. I didn’t mean—”
“Then why were we locked up?” she asked simply.
“Uh, well, there are different opinions on that—”
“Yes, none of which think we should be out in society because we might go on a rampage, just like in the book. Isn’t that right?”
“I—well, yes, but—”
“We read it in school, you know. They made us.”
“It—it’s a classic—”