Read Kate Daniels 01 - Magic Bites for Free Online Page A

sterile hair net. Dark circles surrounded her eyes and the skin on her face sagged a little.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “Nahh, don’t worry about it,” she said, fumbling with the keys. “It didn’t hurt to take a walk.”
    She unlocked the gate and swept past me. I followed her to a reinforced steel door. She opened two locks, stepped back, and barked, “It is I, Julianne, who commands you, and you shall do my bidding. Open!” The magic shifted subtly as the spell released the door. Julianne swung it open. Inside, on a metal table riveted to the floor, lay a nude body. Stark against the stainless steel, it was a queer shade of pale, whitish pink, as if it had been bleached. A silver-steel harness enclosed the cadaver’s chest. A chain as thick as my arm stretched from the harness to a ring in the floor.
    “We usually just collar them, but with this one . . .” Julianne waved her hand.
    “Yeah.” I glanced at the stump of the neck.
    “Not that he’ll rise or anything. Not without a head. Still, if anything . . .” She nodded toward the blue circle of a panic button on the nearest wall. “You armed?”
    I unsheathed Slayer. Julianne jerked back from the shimmering blade. “Whoa. Okay, that’ll work.”
    I slid the saber back into its sheath. “There was a second body brought in with this one.”
    “Yeah. Kind of hard to forget that one.”
    “Any trace evidence?”
    “Nice try.” Julianne smirked. “That’s classified.”
    “I see,” I said. “What about an m-scan?”
    “That’s classified, too.”
    I sighed. Greg with his dark eyes and perfect face, mangled and broken, locked away in some cubicle in this lonely, sterile place. I fought the urge to double over and cradle the empty space in my chest.
    Julianne touched my shoulder. “Who was he to you?” she asked.
    “My guardian,” I told her. Apparently my efforts to appear impartial had suffered a spectacular failure.
    “You were close?”
    “No. We used to be.”
    “What happened?”
    I shrugged. “I grew up and he forgot to notice.”
    “Did he have any kids?”
    “No. No wife, no children. Just me.”
    Julianne glanced at the vampire’s corpse with obvious disgust. “You’d think the Order would have enough sensitivity to assign someone not related to this mess.”
    “I volunteered.”
    She gave me an odd look. “How about that. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
    “So do I. There is no chance you’d let me glance at the m-scan?”
    She pursued her lips, thinking. “Did you hear that?”
    I shook my head.
    “I think someone’s at the gate. I’m going to go and check on it. I’m putting my binder right here. Now, these are confidential reports. I don’t want you looking at them. In particular, I don’t want you looking at the reports from the third of this month. Or taking any copies out of this file.” She turned and marched out of the room.
    I flipped through the notebook. There were eight autopsies on the third. Finding Greg’s didn’t prove to be a problem.
    The trace evidence consisted of four hairs. In the origin column someone penciled Un. Psb Feline der. Unidentified, possibly a feline derivative. Not a feline shapeshifter. They would’ve pegged it as Homo sapiens with a specific felidae genus.
    The long folded sheet of the m-scan came next. Obeying the shake of my hand, it unfolded to its full three feet, presenting a graph drawn by the delicate needles of the magic-scanner. The faint colored lines on the graph wavered, a sure sign of many magic influences colliding in one spot. It was inconclusive by the most lax of standards and no court would have permitted it into evidence. The small header in the top corner identified it as a copy. Oh, goodie.
    I squinted, trying to make sense of it. Greg’s body had continued to release its magic even after his death and the scanner recorded it as a sloping gray line, sometimes an inch wide, sometimes almost invisible. The deep jagged purple cutting across it had to