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"What do you want, Riley?"
Pleasantry, which I was never going to get talking to her. But I guess I wasn't overly generous with it myself, so I was hardly in a position to bitch.
Which had never stopped me before.
"Jack around anywhere?"
"One moment, please."
The sound of heels clicking came through the earpiece, meaning Jack was somewhere other than his desk. "Riley?" he said, after a moment. "Did you take care of our mage?"
"Not exactly."
"What happened?"
"Quinn happened." And just mentioning his name had the barely settled anger rising again.
Jack sighed. "What's he done this time?"
"He's just kidnapped our little mage."
"What?"
"Yeah. We did foul the pentagram through which she was calling the demons, which according to him was better than destroying it, because it will force her to expend more energy making a new one."
"In dark spells, it's usually the magician's blood that fuels the summoning. Fouling it won't actually stop her using it, it'll just prevent her from calling through certain types of entities."
"Meaning I should have destroyed it?" That Quinn had spun yet another lie?
"She would have sensed the destruction. It might have driven her - and the rest of them - underground." He paused, and the sound of liquid hissing into a cup came down the line. He was either in the day-shift operations room or the foyer, where the other coffee machine was situated. "What happened after that? How come Quinn kidnapped the mage and why aren't you with him?"
"Because the bastard pulled his vampire wiles on me - embedded an order to go home while our telepathic line was open."
"Game man. Has he still got his balls?"
I grinned, and very much suspected there was nothing pleasant about it. Amusement wasn't high on my list of emotions right now. "For the moment. I did make an interesting discovery in the process of going home, though - becoming a wolf actually transmutes the compulsion."
"Does it? That's interesting."
"Yeah. Once I'd discovered that, I naturally headed back to see what Quinn was up to. That's when I discovered he could not only make himself totally invisible to all senses except scent, but that he could also fly."
"What?"
"Well, I'm not actually sure if he was flying. I couldn't see wings or anything. He seemed to be more drifting."
"Even very old vampires cannot fly."
"But before he was vampire, he was half-human and half something else," I corrected. "And that other half is something that doesn't exist anymore."
"Only birds - or bird-shifters - fly."
"So do gryphons. So do a hundred other things that can't be classified as birds."
"None of which Quinn is."
I raised my eyebrows. "Then you know what he is?"
"Nope. I only know what I've been told."
