Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful to so many people:
Thank you, Anne Sowards, my editor, for your wisdom, your guidance, and most of all your faith in my ability as a writer. You took a mess and shaped it into a book.
Thank you, Rachel Vater, my agent, for your tireless devotion to your clients. You’re the best thing that could happen to a writer’s career.
Thank you, Cam Dufty, Ace’s editorial assistant and quite possibly the most patient woman the world has ever known, for your help with copyedits and a million other things. I owe you a chocolate martini.
Thank you, Kristin del Rosario, the interior text designer, for the gorgeous layout and for making the book a reality.
Thank you, Judy Murello, the art director, for the spectacular cover design, and thank you, Chad Michael Ward, the artist, for creating fantastic cover art.
Thank you, Valerie Cortes, Ace’s publicist, for tirelessly promoting the books in the Kate Daniels series.
Thank you, all of the generous people who have suffered through my beta drafts, for making this book so much better than how it started out: Charlene Amsden, Bianca Bradley, Susan E. Curnow, Shannon Franks, Elizabeth Hull, Jackie M., Jill Myles, Reece Notley, Lizane Palmer, May, S. K. S. Perry, G.
Jules Reynolds, Lys Rian, Melissa Sawmiller, Sonya Shannon, P. J. Thompson, Heidi Tallentine, and Amber van Dyk.
Finally, thank you, all of the people who read the Kate series. Your e-mails keep me going.
CHAPTER 1
THE PHONE RANG IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. THEmagic wave was in full swing, and the phone shouldn’t have worked, but it rang anyway, again and again, outraged over being ignored, until finally I reached over and picked it up.
“Yehmmm?”
“Rise and shine, Kate.” The smooth cultured voice on the line suggested a slender, elegant, handsome man, all things that Jim was not. At least not in his human shape.
I clawed my eyes open long enough to glance at the windup clock across the room. “Two in the morning. Some of us sleep during the night.”
“I’ve got a gig,” Jim said.
I sat up in the bed, wide-awake. A gig was good—I needed the money. “Half.”
“Third.”
“Half.”
“Thirty-five percent.” Jim’s voice hardened.
“Half.”
The phone went silent as my former Guild partner mulled it over. “Okay, forty.”
I hung up. The bedroom lay quiet. My curtains were open and moonlight sifted into the room through the metal grate shielding the window. The moonlight acted as a catalyst and the metal bars glowed with a weak bluish patina where the silver in the alloy interacted with the ward spell. Beyond the bars, Atlanta slept like some hulking beast of legend, dark and deceptively peaceful. When the magic wave ended, as it inevitably would, the beast would awaken in an explosion of electric light and possibly gunfire.
My ward wouldn’t stop a bullet, but it kept the magic hazmat out of my bedroom, and that was good enough.
The phone rang. I let it ring twice before I picked it up.
“Fine.” Jim’s voice had a hint of a snarl in it. “Half.”
“Where are you?”
“In the parking lot under your window, Kate.”
Calling from a pay phone, which shouldn’t have worked, either. I reached for my clothes, left by the bed for just such an occasion. “What’s the gig?”
“Some arsonist wacko.”
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, I WAS WINDING MYway through an underground garage and cursing Jim under my breath. With the lights knocked out by magic, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my nose.
A fireball blossomed in the pitch-black depth of the garage. Huge, churning with violent red and yellow, it roared toward me. I jumped behind the concrete support, my throwing knife sweaty in my hands. Heat bathed me. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and then the fire hurtled past me to burst in an explosion of sparks against the wall.
A thin gleeful cackle emanated from the garage depths. I peeked out from behind the support in the direction of the sound. Nothing but darkness. Where was the tech shift when you needed one?
Across from me at the next row of supports Jim raised his hand and touched his fingers to his thumb a