“I’ll get there—”
“Then get there!”I snarled before reining myself in.This wasn’t Caleb’s fault.“Sorry,” I said, and meant it.
“No problem,” the black eyes were steady on mine.“You’ve had a day.I’m just trying to be thorough and go in order, so this makes sense.”
I nodded, swallowed, and focused on what else he’d said.“You still think a norm was behind this?”
“Well, you saw the scene.There was no magic on the premises except the bought kind, and thatOccultowas shit-tier.A Reaper would never have had the thing, especially not while running a highly illegal racket in what could be classified as magical weapons right on the Corps’ doorstep.But a norm might.”
“A norm would have been dead in a second against a Relic!Hell, you almost were, and you’re...you.Without magic—”
“But in his line of work, you don’t need it, do you?”Caleb said, bizarrely insistent.“He lures in his victims, probably promising drugs, maybe the very Punch he uses to see if they have any fun abilities hiding under their skin.Thenbam.They’re now drugged off their asses, allowing him to restock without anybody being suspicious—”
“Except he was using a potion that createsRelics,” I interrupted, because this was ridiculous.“Who shrug off everything—and I do mean everything.And the victim was killed when he was partway through a Change, something that takes seconds.No way in hell a norm did that.”
Caleb picked up the ampule and turned it around in his fingers, letting it catch the light.“There...is a way.”
And something in his tone told me that we’d finally come to the crux of it.“Okay, what’s your theory?”I asked.
And immediately wished I hadn’t.Because he suddenly looked like a man who desperately wanted to be somewhere else.“That they shared a bottle.”
“What?”
“You know as well as I do that not everybody on the streets is a user, but pretty much all of them drink.It’s bleak out there, and if you’re not a drunk when you start, it usually doesn’t take long.So when a particular victim wasn’t into drugs, the perp pulled out a bottle.
“He’d previously laced it with what he thought was the usual stuff, just Punch, a common street drug which he’d already consumed plenty of himself with no ill effects.And maybe this bottle tasted a little off, or smelled a little bad—”
“A little?”Cyrus said, because he had the best nose in the clan, and it had been twitching unhappily ever since that ampule made an appearance.
“—but in a strong enough concoction, like whiskey, would you notice?Especially when you don’t smell so good yourself?They don’t.And the victim shortly thereafter goes crazy as Jenkins’ brew hits his system, causing him to start to Change—”
“Which would have been it,” I said sourly.
“Usually, yes.But not this time.Because our perp has started to feel a bit weird himself.”
He suddenly leaned forward across the table, his face intent.“Think about it, Lia.How else could he have survived?Because of that little ax?Because of the disorientation following a Change, which in the case of Relics lasts no time at all?I managed to get off one hit on you, and that was by pure luck.You moved so fast I could barely track you with my eyes, and shrugged off what I did hit you with like you barely felt it.”
“I felt it,” I said, remembering.
But he just shook his head.“Couldn’t tell it by me.And honestly, even if I’d known what was coming and had had time to prepare, I don’t think it would have made much difference.Where Relics are concerned, norm or mage—it doesn’t matter.But thereisa difference between the two—a big one.”
I frowned at him.“I’m not sure I understand.”
He sat back and ran a hand over his face.“Think about it,” he said again.“I have been all afternoon.And while I don’t like it, it makes sense when nothing else does.
“Humans didn’t go through the ‘weeding out’ process that the magical community did.There was no pruning of abilities there, which they weren’t supposed to have anyway.And we didn’t patrol them, because who cared if their ten-times great-grandma had something a little weird about her?As long as it wasn’t active, it wasn’t our problem.And that went on for a lot longer than ten generations.
“We’ve never properly patrolled the human community because we can’t; there’s simply not enough of us.Nobody kept up with who married whom, what genes were passed down, or any of it.The elaborate genealogies all of us have, even low-tier magic users?The kind that are recorded, are known, and that sometimes prohibit reproduction between two lineages?Yeah, they got none of that.
“Which means that anything—anything at all—could be lurking in the human genome, including abilities long since culled from the magical gene pool.”
“Like what?”I demanded.
“Weird magic; maybe even very weird.The kind that we don’t know how to detect because nobody living has seen it or even heard of it.It’s been lost to time, like your new abilities.Or it was, until somebody got his hot little hands on some modified Punch and—well, he rousedsomething.
“Maybe early today, maybe a week ago, or a month—who knows?But during one of his sessions with a prospective victim, he ingested something that woke up an ability he never knew he had.One that allowed him to reap not just Weres but Relics and sell their abilities to the highest bidder.And we both know who that probably was, don’t we?”
“Son of abitch,” I said.
