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Magic Breaks Ilona Andrews 38960K 2023-09-01

So, I suppose, I’ll begin at the beginning The world has suffered a ic apocalypse As expected, it was coy and ic existed in perfect balance, but then caic Creatures of terror and beauty roaodlike power built entire cities overnight and rained winged snakes and ethat s? Why, that could never go wrong or lead to horrible atrocities Just read the Bible) Finally the balance between ic receded The cities wrought by ic crumbled, their wonders turned to dust, and their beasts became myth

Fast-forward five thousand years It’s the early twenty-first century and we’ve created a civilization based on technology Once again, we upset the balance and eance to slap us upside the head It floods the planet in waves One uns fire, and electricity keeps the ic wave drowns the area, choking guns and spawning creatures with night, thefire and switch back to rifles

This apocalypse is called the Shift The Shift destroyed the technological civilization Air travel is no longer possible, because planes fall out of the sky when the ic hits The Internet is all but dead, because half of the tiic chomps computer parts into dust Cell phones do not work, unless you’re in the h-rises and skyscrapers have fallen, gnawed to nubs by oes on and people survive And in the new post-Shift Atlanta, new factions and powers came into play

First, there is the Pack As mentioned, I am a shapeshifter and I work for the Pack, so I have a vested interest in explaining exactly e are and e do The Pack is the second-largest shapeshifter organization in the country and has over fifteen hundredto the species of their beast, so boudas, wolves, and so on Each clan is led by a pair of alphas Together the alphas ht us, thereis known as the Beast Lord, because we, as red-blooded Americans, have an issue with e of the Pack when he was fifteen by defeating a mad werebear nobody could touch He unified us He persuaded the alphas to collectively purchase land and he built the Keep, our fortress, giving us a safe place to be ourselves He iht us that abuse won’t be tolerated Because of hiether in relative prosperity When Curran says juround shakes Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have bouts of assleness, but all things considered, they are forgivable He’s also a really scary bastard who is fond of "overnance More on that later

We, the shapeshifters, are vieith open suspicion by the rest of Atlanta Our existence is the result of the Lyc-V virus, and so us into loups Loups are vicious, insane, cannibalistic murderers There is no cure for loupiso extensiveto keep our e fails, there is panacea, an herbal concoction cooked with ic It won’t cure loupism, but about thirty percent of the tiress More on that later, also In the eyes of the general public, every shapeshifter is a potential loup and "olf" is still a dirty word

Next up we have the People They are a nationwide organization, with offices in every major city The People pilot the undead, specifically vampires, for fun and profit, but if you ask them, they do it for some dubious scientific purposes Vaen, which leads to the death and subsequent reani it doesn’t require, including internal organs, hair, genitalia, and consciousness A vaer They don’t speak; they don’t think; they kill anything with a pulse, and stopping one requires a heavy-duty antipersonnel howitzer or decapitation Mincing them into small pieces has also been known to work, as the Consort has proven on le vampire on the loose in the city results in the immediate evacuation of a ten-block radius and the dispatch of several ele SWAT team will run out of ammo before they take it down

The necrorab hold of a va their will on that blank canvas This is called piloting The navigators pilot the vampires like remote-controlled cars They see what the undead sees, they hear what he hears, and when a vaator’s voice coer while sipping coffee in the arators call themselves Masters of the Dead, because modesty is clearly their most prized virtue

The People make their headquarters in the Casino, while our HQ is in the Keep The People are the Pack’s biggest competition within the city When we butt heads, people die; so a while ago, in an effort to cut down on possible bloodshed, we nominally divided the city into their "territory" and ours It’s a bit complicated with specific streets and areas, but for simplicity’s sake, north and northeast are ours and south and southwest are theirs When you hear one of us say "city territory," that’s e mean We don’t own property in each other’s specific areas, and we patrol our iht now the People are ele The head of the Atlanta office retired--or perhaps they killed him off, nobody knows--and two of the Masters of the Dead aretheir way to the top spot One is Ghastek, who is quite brilliant, coerous, and wrapped in a protective shell of world-weary arrogance Basically a know-it-all with the expertise and a pack of vampires to back it up The other is Mulradin, of e know little except that he is a family s, such as "Holy shit!" in the earshot of his wife, whoexposed to such coarseness Bite me

Here’s the kicker: most people don’t know it but the entirety of the People answer to one odlike powers? Turns out that when an to disappear from the world, not all of those wizards died Some of them went into hibernation Thousands of years later, the Shift woke one of them up Think about it Here’s a man unconstrained by ethics and , a law unto himself, who has lived for thousands of years with the power to crush thousands of lives with one single push ofnuclear bomb A man so powerful, he doesn’t need a na in all capitals The Father of Undeath The Builder of Towers

He calls himself Roland now I asked the Consort why and she showedof Roland It’s a twelfth-century ballad about a knight who is ambushed because of treachery and refuses to blow his horn out of pride until all of his soldiers are dead and he finally blows so hard, his temples burst and he dies a o, Roland created vampires and now he runs the People from his territory in the Midwest There are stories and hout folklore, the Torah, the Bible, and other holy books under different names Apparently, Roland has two coineer He builds empires He can’t help hihtenment is under his rule Democracy isn’t a concept he considers relevant, which is really bad news for us Second, he falls in love He falls in love a lot and makes children, and sooner or later, these über-powerful children turn on him and he has to kill them For example, Abraham was one of his; they had some sort of a spat, and Roland exiled him until Abraham finally died later in poverty Not exactly the way the Bible tells it, but there you go

Before Roland went into hibernation, he apparently swore off procreation But after he woke up during the Shift, healive Same reason why people have sex after funerals Roland fell in love with a woman called Kalina She wanted to have children and he apparently was cool with it, until a child was conceived, a daughter, and then Roland decided to pull the plug and to kill her in the woic of compulsion, and she was desperate to save her baby She bewitched Roland’s warlord, Voron, and ether they ran away Kalina gave birth, but Roland eventually caught up with them Kalina realized that of the two of the the baby, so she told him to run and stayed behind to confront Roland She stabbed hih the eye and he killed her

Not a happy story

So here is Voron, a cold ruthless bastard, a really talented fighter as supposed to lead Roland’s aruy who probably killed hundreds of people to get that good, and now he is alone with this baby His brain is peric So he looks at this tiny cooing hter of probably the only woman he ever loved, and he doesn’t say to hi of her I’ll raise this child and I’ll do everything in uard her, and protect, and love her, and make sure she has a happy life" No, he looks at her and he thinks, "I’et even" Because he is that kind of a cold ruthless bastard

He takes this baby and he hones her and shapes her, until she turns into a living weapon She can kill you with her sword She can kill you with a toothpick She can kill you with her bare hands I’et bored, I play with et bitten, because I’ snake Sos her sword, I can’t see it She’s that fast

So while this little girl is growing up, she and Voron roa; onewith soladiator pit in Brazil The entire ti her how her father killed her mother and hoould kill her if she was ever discovered All that is true But Voron also tells her that the only way for her to survive is to kill Roland She learns how to end hue that was done to her as a child is staggering But that’s not the worst thing

Voron set out to make her into a perfect assassin, but he didn’t teach her any eneral es, but she didn’t practice the blood ic--first, because nobody could teach her and second, because Voron thought it would give her away But there is a third reason There was no need for it, because Voron knehat Roland was capable of He knew that Kate’s skill was sufficient for her to cut her way to Roland, but she would have no chance against her father That was the crux of his revenge He raised this child from the time she was a baby solely so one day he could watch Roland kill or be killed by his own flesh and blood I’ll let that sink in a little bit

He didn’t get a chance to see it for himself Roland decided he needed a nearlord, so he took Voron’s best pupil, the boy he raised like a son, and h d’Ah d’A Voron since his betrayal One day, when Kate ay froh found him and killed him He claims to be sole word that co bastard’s mouth