Magic Steals by Ilona Andrews

Author:Ilona Andrews [Andrews, Ilona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BluA
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 2016-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next Kate Daniels novel

MAGIC BINDS

Coming September 2016 from Ace

The skull glared at me out of empty eye sockets. Odd runes marked its forehead, carved into the yellowed bone and filled with black ink. Its thick bottom jaw supported a row of conical fangs, long and sharp like the teeth of a crocodile. The skull sat on top of an old STOP sign. Someone had painted the surface of the octagon white and written KEEP OUT across it in large jagged letters. A reddish-brown splatter stained the bottom edge, looking suspiciously like dried blood. I leaned closer. Yep, blood. Some hair, too. Human hair.

Curran frowned at the sign. “Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?”

“I don’t know. He’s being so subtle about it.”

I looked past the sign. About a hundred yards back, a large two-story house waited. It was clearly built post-Shift, out of solid timber and brown stone laid by hand to ensure it would survive the magic waves. But instead of the usual simple square or rectangular box of most post-Shift buildings, this house had all the pre-Shift bells and whistles of a modern prairie home: rows of big windows, sweeping horizontal lines, and a spacious layout. Except prairie-style homes usually had long flat roofs and little ornamentation, while this place sported pitched roofs with elaborate carved gables, beautiful bargeboards, and ornate wooden windows.

“It’s like someone took a Russian log cabin and a pre-Shift contemporary house, stuck them into a blender, and dumped it over there.”

Curran frowned. “It’s his . . . What do you call it? Terem.”

“A terem is where Russian princesses lived.”

“Exactly.”

Between us and the house lay a field of black dirt. It looked soft and powdery, like potting soil or a freshly plowed field. A path of rickety old boards, half rotten and splitting, curved across the field to the front door. I didn’t have a good feeling about that dirt.

We’d tried to circle the house and ran into a thick, thorn-studded natural fence, formed by wild rosebushes, blackberry brambles, and trees. The fence was twelve feet tall and when Curran tried to jump high enough to see over it, the thorny vines snapped out like lassos and made a heroic effort to pull him in. After I helped him pick the needles out of his hands, we decided a frontal assault was the better option.

“No animal tracks on the dirt,” I said.

“No animal scents either,” Curran said. “There are scent trails all around us through the woods, but none here.”

“That’s why he has giant windows and no grates on them. Nothing can get close to the house.”

“It’s that, or he doesn’t care. Why the hell doesn’t he answer his phone?”

Who knew why the priest of the god of All Evil and Darkness did anything?

I picked up a small rock, tossed it into the dirt, and braced myself. Nothing. No toothy jaws exploded through the soil, no magic fire, no earth-shattering kaboom. The rock just sat there.

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