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blood gushing from her arm. When he'd worked as a cop one of his most useful skills had been the ability to walk into a crime scene and know instantly what had happened. And now in his work for the Illuminati he still had that ability. The crimes were just different.
     
    The girl on the table was gifted. She probably wasn't very powerful nor trained in her gift – if she had been the witch wouldn't have been able to catch her or bind her so easily – but she still had a trace of the magic in her. And the witch had been planning on stealing it. Actually she'd been planning on taking everything from her. Her magic along with her life energy. There were no actual vampires in the world as far as he knew, but this woman was as close to one as he would ever find.
     
    “Bastard!” The witch screamed it at James, though it was difficult to make out exactly what she was calling him as her nose and throat were filling with blood.
     
    Of course just then she didn't look very much like a vampire. Not as she tried to sit up on the stone floor and then fell back and cursed him with all the bile she could find. Not as she held a hand up to her nose and tried to stop the bleeding. She didn't look like much of anything really. Not even a witch. She looked broken.
     
    And she should, James thought.
     
    James didn't care what she called him. He didn't care that she might still be trying to spell him. Her voice was badly muffled as the blood ran down the back of her throat. But he knew that shortly she would recover and he had to make sure she was harmless before that. Even with all the protections he had had cast on him, he wasn't game to risk being spelled. So he crossed the room to reach her, grabbed her by the collar and rolled her over on to her front. And then while she was lying there, trying desperately to summon up a spell to hit him with, he put a knee in the small of her back, pulled her arms up brutally behind her back and cuffed her.
     
    Now she was harmless.
     
    Of course the cuffs he used weren't standard police issue hand cuffs. She could have unlocked those with ease once she'd regained control of her voice and her pain. If she had the right magic that was. The blood magic he doubted would make her strong enough to snap them. She wasn't a mega. And if she could bend thoughts the chances that she could also bend metal were small. Those among the gifted who had more than one gift usually had gifts that were closely related. But he wasn't a policeman anymore and she wasn't a simple criminal. So instead of police issue steel cuffs he was using cold steel manacles. Thick, heavy, iron manacles that looked as though they'd been crafted by a blind man from the middle ages with little in the way of talent.
     
    Cold steel though was something that every witch or wizard feared. It was the basest of irons with a tiny bit of carbon added to the mix, beaten into shape by hammers and sweat instead of forged. It was crude and rough. But it had one property that modern forged steel didn't. It blocked magic. He didn't know why exactly. He wasn't gifted so he couldn't feel what it did. But he understood that it was something to do with the crudity and toil that went into making them.   But the only thing that mattered to him was that the moment the shackles clicked shut around her wrists he knew she was harmless.
     
    After that he left the rogue lying there cursing him bitterly and rushed back to her victim. She was the one who needed his attention.
     
    The girl was still lying there, craning her neck around as far as she could to try and see what he was doing, her eyes wide with either fear or hope. He thought she looked even younger than he'd initially guessed. Maybe only fourteen. A year older than his own daughter. Fourteen and terrified – and barely conscious. He started working on her bindings and tried not to think about what sort of monster would do this to a young girl.
     
    “You're going to be alright kid.” James