Eats magic

"Follow an injured wizard?" he asked. "Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal."
"It eats magic?"
Morgan nodded. "Adds its victims' power to its own."
"So what you're telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it's stronger for having killed Kirby."
He shrugged. "I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater."
I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan's upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. "Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter."
Morgan shook his head. "Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn't as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson."
"Point," I said, slipping the needle into his arm. "Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?" I thought about it. "The skinwalker's got to go back to his home territory, though?"
Morgan nodded. "The longer he's away, the more power it costs him."
"How long can he stay here?" I asked.
He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. "More than long enough."
"How do we kill it?" I frowned as I missed the vein again.
"Give me that," Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.
I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.
"We probably don't," he said. "The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool's game. We avoid it."
I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. "Pretend for a minute that it isn't going to cooperate with that plan."
Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. "There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power-and it isn't likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either."
"It's a tough target," I admitted. "It knows magic, and how to defend against it."
"Yes," Morgan said. He watched me pick a preloaded syringe of antibiotics from the cooler. "And its abilities are more than the equal of both of us put together."


Turn Coat Chapter 7, Page 53-54