“But marids are described as giants,” Luther pointed out.
“True. I have something for you.” I reached into my backpack and pulled out my bag of dirty glass. “We found a ring of this around Eduardo’s car. I think it’s melted sand that was used as a teleportation anchor. We need to know where it’s from.”
Luther grabbed the bag and held it up so the light of the feylantern shone through it. He squinted. “What is that squirmy shiny thing inside the glass?”
The only thing inside that glass was dirt. I had looked at it through a magnifying glass. I sighed. “Luther, we don’t all have magic vision. We can’t see what you see.”
He pulled the ziplock bag open and passed his hand over the glass. “Ooo. This is something.”
“What is it?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know yet, but it’s not nothing.”
Mages. Clear as mud.
“You think there’s a three-wish cycle?” Luther asked. “He grants three wishes, then possesses the body? Why?”
“I don’t know. Can I talk to Mitchell?” I asked.
“You can try. I tried last night. I even brought very delicious carrion with me, but he wouldn’t come out of his burrow.”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
“Okay,” Luther said. “I’ll get the tranquilizer gun in case the magic fails.”
“Is this dangerous?” Julie asked.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’ll need you to stay with Luther. You can see everything from the balcony.”
“But—”
“If you come with me, Mitchell might not come out.”
Her face fell. “Fine.”
Luther came out of the back room carrying an oversized rifle. “Shall we?”
We followed him out of the examination room, down the hallway, to a door leading to the outside. Luther pulled a key chain out of his pocket, flipped through the keys with one hand until he found the right one, and unlocked the door. We stepped out onto a private concrete balcony running along the side of the building for about fifty feet. In front of us a large lot stretched, secured by a twenty-foot stone wall topped with coils of razor wire. The wire had some silver in it and the light of the rising moon coated it in a bluish glow. Trees dotted the lot, some normal, some odd and twisted. On the left, black tar-like goo oozed from one of the trunks. On the right, a group of bushes with small red leaves sprouted two-foot-long bright orange thorns. Tiny blue spheres floated in the grass, moving in different directions. Magic pooled and coursed through it, twisting between the trees and leaking from the leaves and spiraling into the ground. Even the ground itself was changed. Sharp outcroppings of translucent citrine-colored crystal cut through the surface like the fins of mythical sea serpents swimming under water. Here and there small veins of pale white rock stretched to form knobby protrusions about a foot high and buttressed to the ground by thin roots.
“What is this?” Julie asked.
“The dumping ground. This is where we put things we want to study,” Luther said.
“This is where they put things when they have no idea what they are or what to do with them,” I told her. “Luther, don’t bullshit my kid.”
Luther rolled his eyes. “Yes. What she said.”
“What if they get out?” Julie asked.
He pointed up. Julie leaned out. I knew what he was pointing at, but I glanced over all the same. Massive catapults and guns lined the roof of the building, pointing at the dumping ground. Anything that tried to leave would be pounded to a bloody pulp.
I stripped off my jacket and pulled off my boots.
“So why do you keep a ghoul in there?” Julie asked.
“Because he used to be one of us,” Luther said. “Mitchell was a brilliant guy. He studied ghoulism and we all thought he would crack it. Turned out he was a point zero zero zero two percenter.”
“Oh.” Julie nodded. “That makes sense.”
Mitchell and I went way back. I knew him when he was still human. He was one of those health nuts who did things like running punishing marathons and then got upset if he wasn’t one of the first ten to cross the finish line. When his transformation hit and he disappeared, Biohazard hired me to find him and bring him back quietly, because they felt responsible for him. Every time a new case of ghoulism became public, people freaked out, which was why the PAD eliminated all new ghouls with extreme prejudice. Nobody at Biohazard wanted Mitchell to be hunted down and shot.
Only two people out of every ten thousand, 0.0002 percent, were susceptible to ghoulism, and evidence showed that they were probably related to each other. Statistically, a citizen of Atlanta had a higher probability of being mauled by a shapeshifter, but every new case of ghoulism invariably caused a panic, because for those two out of ten thousand there was no cure. Shapeshifters were still human. They lived in houses, held jobs, had kids, and led semi-normal lives. But ghouls hid in cemeteries and gorged themselves on corpses.