Magic Bleeds Read Free Page A

face on it.
    An hour later, when I left for my apartment in Atlanta, I was so tired I fell asleep in my car moments after I steered my vehicle into the ley line and the magic current dragged it off toward the city.

CHAPTER 1
    I RODE THROUGH THE STREETS OF ATLANTA, ROCKING with the hoofbeats of my favorite mule, Marigold, who didn’t care for the birdcage attached to her saddle and really didn’t care for the globs of lizard spit dripping from my jeans. The birdcage contained a fist-sized clump of gray fuzz, which I’d had a devil of a time catching and which might or might not have been a living dust bunny. The jeans contained about a halfgallon of saliva deposited on me by a pair of Trimble County lizards, which I’d Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    managed to chase back into their enclosure at the Atlanta Center for Mythological Research. I was eleven hours and thirteen minutes into my shift, I hadn’t eaten since that morning, and I wanted a doughnut.
    Three weeks had passed since Curran had stood me up. For the first week, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. The anger had subsided now, but the dense heavy stone remained in my chest, weighing me down. Strangely, doughnuts helped. Especially ones drizzled with chocolate. As expensive as chocolate was in our day and age, I couldn’t afford a whole chocolate bar, but the drizzle of chocolate syrup on the doughnuts did the job just well enough.
    “Hello, dear.”
    After almost a year of working for the Order, hearing Maxine’s voice in my head no longer made me jump.
    “Hello, Maxine.”
    The Order’s telepathic secretary called everyone “dear,” including Richter, a new addition to the Atlanta chapter who was as psychotic as a knight of the Order could get without being stripped of his knighthood. Her
    “dears” fooled no one. I’d rather run ten miles with a rucksack full of rocks than face a chewing-out from Maxine. Perhaps it was the way she looked: tall, thin, ramrod straight, with a halo of tightly curled silver hair and the mannerisms of a veteran middle school teacher who had seen it all before and would not suffer fools gladly . . .
    “Richter is quite sane, dear. And is there any particular reason you keep picturing a dragon with my hair on itshead and a chocolate doughnut in its mouth?”
    Maxine never read thoughts on purpose, but if you concentrated hard enough while “on call,” she couldn’t help picking up simple mental images.
    I cleared my throat. “Sorry.”
    “No problem. I always thought of myself as a Chinese dragon, actually. We’re out of doughnuts, but I havecookies.”
    Mmm, cookies. “What do I have to do for a cookie?”
    “I know your shift is over, but I have an emergency petition and nobody to handle it.”

    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    Argh. “What’s the petition?”
    “Someone attacked the Steel Horse.”
    “The Steel Horse? The border bar?”
    “Yes.”
    Post-Shift Atlanta was ruled by factions, each with its own territory. Of all the factions in Atlanta, the People and the Pack were the largest and the two I most wanted to avoid. The Steel Horse sat right on the invisible border between their territories. A neutral spot, it catered to both the People and the shapeshifters, as long as they could keep it civil. For the most part, they did.
    “Kate?” Maxine prompted.
    “Do you have any details?”
    “Someone started a fight and departed. They have something cornered in the cellar, and they’re afraid to let itout. They’re hysterical. At least one fatality.”
    A bar full of hysterical necromancers and werebeasts. Why me?
    “Will you take it?”
    “What kind of cookies?”
    “Chocolate chip with bits of walnuts in them. I’ll even give you two.”
    I sighed and turned Marigold to the west. “I’ll be there in twenty.”
    Marigold sighed heavily and started down the night-drenched street. The Pack