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“Nice.”
Blood-red and fletched with three black feathers, the bolt looked about two feet in length. Three inch-long black lines marked the shaft just before the fletch: nine marks in all.
“This is a carbon shaft. It can’t be bent. Very durable and expensive. Looks like a 2216, designed to bring down medium-sized game, deer, some bear…”
“Human.” I leaned against the wall and sipped my coffee.
“Yeah.” Andrea nodded. “Good power, good trajectory without any significant sacrifice in speed. It’s a man-killer. Look at the head—small, three-blade, weighs about a hundred grains. Reminds me a lot of a Wasp Boss series. Some people go for mechanical broadheads, but with a good crossbow the acceleration is so sudden, it opens the blades in flight and there goes your accuracy down the drain. If I were to pick a broadhead, I’d pick something like this.” She twisted the bolt, letting the light from the window play on the blades of the head. “Hand sharpened. Where did you get this?”
I told her.
She frowned. “The fact that you didn’t hear the bow go off probably means it’s a recurve. A compound crossbow ‘twangs’ at release. Can I fire it?” She nodded at a man-shaped paper target pinned to the far wall, which was sheathed in several layers of corkboard.
“Sure.”
She put on gloves to keep the magic residue to a minimum, took a small crossbow off the bench, loaded, swung it up, and fired, too fast to have aimed. The bolt whistled through the air and bit into the center of the man’s forehead. Bull’s-eye. And here I was, unable to hit a cow at ten yards with a gun.
The feylanterns flickered and faded. On the wall, a dusty electric fixture flared with soft yellow light. The magic wave had drained and the world had shifted from magic back to tech. Andrea and I looked at each other. Nobody could predict the duration of the shifts: the magic came and went as it pleased. But the waves rarely lasted less than an hour. This one had been what, fifteen minutes?
“Is it me, or is it shifting more than usual?”
“It’s not you.” Andrea’s face looked a bit troubled. She freed the bolt. “Want me to scan it for magic?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.” Magic had the annoying tendency of dissipating over time. The sooner you could scan your evidence, the better your chances of getting a power print.
“Trouble?” She leaned to me. “I’ve been off-line for two months. It’s killing me. I have cobwebs growing on my brain.” She pressed her finger below her right eye, pulling the lower eyelid down. “Look for yourself.”
I laughed. Andrea worked for a Chapter out West and had run into some trouble with a pack of loups raiding the cattle farms. Loups, the insane cannibalistic shapeshifters who had lost the internal battle for their humanity, killed, raped, and raged their way from one atrocity to the next, until someone put the world out of their misery.
Unfortunately, loups were also contagious as hell. Andrea’s partner knight became infected, went loup,