Gunmetal Magic (13 page)

I went to check the mailbox, while Ascanio trotted off to the back.

The metal box was empty. No mail. Hmm.

“I found shomeshing!” Ascanio called.

I made my way to the back. The narrow space between the building and the fence opened into an enormous back lot, filled with random metal junk. Tiny creatures, fuzzy and quick, with long chinchilla tails, skittered over the refuse. The gravel lay unevenly. It looked like something had been dragged out.

Ascanio greeted me in the back, holding up a flat tire, with a jagged chunk of metal embedded in it. He stuck the tire under my nose. The scent of automotive lubricant wafted up. Fresh. Car grease changed its scent in the open. This was a recent blowout.

Someone had driven into this lot probably during the last week, no more than ten days ago for sure. I held up the tire. It wasn’t just flat, it must’ve exploded. The vehicle to which that tire belonged couldn’t have gotten very far. I looked back at the drag marks. Someone had been towed out. That was the most likely explanation.

The dirt on the board blocking the door was months old. Magic had killed most of the cell phones—if you had a working one, you were likely in the military. So how did this person get themselves out of their blown tire predicament?

I jogged to the street, with Ascanio at my heels. Two hundred yards down the road, a tall sign announced Downs Motor Care.
Aha.

I pointed at the sign. “This would be a clue.”

Ascanio chortled next to me. It sounded like something out of a nightmare.

We walked to Downs Motor Care, which consisted of a parking lot littered with car parts and filled with random clunkers of both the mechanical and the magical persuasion. A large metal garage sat in the back. Two of the garage’s four doors were open. In the first door, a man dug under the hood of a Dodge truck.

“Afternoon!” I called out.

The man spun about, saw us, and hit his head on the Dodge’s hood. He was young, in good shape, with a face that looked like something had chewed on the left side of it and spat him out.

The mechanic yanked a large wrench from the nearby table. “What do you want?”

I held up twenty bucks. Six months ago I would’ve flashed my Order ID. He would have instantly been put at ease and I would have gotten my information. But in the past couple of months of working with Kate I had learned that the private sector paid for the answers to their questions. It chafed me, but I needed to find the killer.

“Looking for some information, sir,” I said.

Ascanio showed him the tire.

The mechanic studied us for a long moment. “Put the money on the ground. Pin it with a rock and don’t come any closer.”

I should probably rethink running around in beastkin shape, especially if I kept getting bloody. All my witnesses seemed to be disturbed by it.

I put the twenty under the rock. “Did you tow someone out of Garcia Construction in the last week or so?”

The mechanic rested the wrench against his chest. “Yeah.”

“Who was it?”

“Some woman.”

“Was she one of Garcia’s regulars?”

He shook his head. “Never seen her before.”

“What did she look like?”

He frowned. “About early forties, nice dress, good shoes. Well put together. Looked like a businesswoman to me.”

“Did she mention what her name was or what she was doing there?”

“No. I changed the tire, she paid me, that was it.”

“How did she pay?”

“Gave me a check.”

I blinked at him a couple of times, before I remembered that fluttering my eyelashes didn’t exactly go over well in my current shape. “You took a check from some woman you don’t know?”

“It was a check from her business. I called it into the bank; they said it was good.”

“What sort of business?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Store of some sort or the other. Art something.”

Interesting. “Any chance you can find that cancelled check?”

“I have work to do,” he said. “I’m busy.”

I showed him a card, bent down, and put it under the rock. “If you happen to run across the check, there is another fifty bucks in it for you. The address and phone number are on the card.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Like I said, I’m busy.”

“Thank you for your time.”

I walked off.

“Now what?” Ascanio asked.

“Now we go to the office and bathe.”

I was sitting in the office, with my beastkin feet on the desk and a bottle of Georgia Peach Iced Tea, custom-made for me by Burt’s Liquor, where I’d made a strategic stop before arriving at the office. Outside the barred window, evening had dimmed the sky to a deep purple. Ascanio was in the back, trying to scrub himself clean in the office shower. He’d caught a nap on the way back to the office, so I expected him to emerge in his human shape and at least semi-conscious.

I sipped my drink. All in all, a productive day. A hell of a lot of excitement.

Footsteps. I twitched my furry round ear, listening. Light stride, sure steps…Kate.

The door swung open and Kate walked in. Her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with blood and she was carrying a severed vampire head. The T-shirt had a smiley face on it.

In my natural untanned state I was pale. If you put me into a pitch-black room, my face would probably light up like the moon. That’s why I cultivated a sun habit that resulted in a mild pigment formation in my skin. I liked to call this tan golden brown. My favorite cosmetics company, Sorcière, which had a slightly cannibalistic tendency to name all their foundation skin tones after food, liked to call my tan “cream.” Cream was only a couple of shades darker than the palest “milk.” If I really baked myself, I could get all the way to “vanilla blush,” which meant pale beige.
Woo-hoo.

Kate would need “dusky honey” at the very least. I knew this because a few weeks ago I had to explain to her what concealer was and why she couldn’t use it by itself on the strange rash we got after clearing some odd rat-critters from an old warehouse. Putting concealer and foundation on Kate turned out to be a losing proposition, because after the first five minutes it bugged her and she kept rubbing her face until she looked like a clown who got painted up in the dark.

Her hair, put away into a long braid, was chocolate brown
and her eyes were dark too, framed in dense black eyelashes, and oddly cut, large, but slightly elongated with curvy corners. The first time I saw her, I had stared, trying to figure out what the heck she was. There were shades of India there, or maybe Arabia, or possibly a touch of Asia. She could twist it any way she wanted, depending on makeup, which she rarely wore.

At first glance you looked at Kate and thought “fighter,” maybe merc. Five inches taller than me, she was all muscle—well, and some boobs—but mostly muscle. She moved like a predator and when she got pissed off, she exhaled aggression, like hot breath on a winter evening. Still, men looked, until they saw her eyes. Kate’s eyes were crazy. It was that hidden-deep crazy that told you that you had no idea what the hell she would do next but whatever it was, the bad guys wouldn’t like it.

Kate looked at me for a long second. “Hey.”

I saluted her with my bottle. “Hey.”

Kate went into the kitchen, pulled a ceramic dish from under the sink, sat the vamp’s head into it, put it in the fridge, and washed her hands. She came back, slipped the sheath off her back with her sword still in it, hung it on my client chair, and plopped into it.

“What are you drinking?”

“Georgia Peach Iced Tea. Want some?” I offered it to her with my claws.

“Sure.” She took a sip, and coughed with a grimace. “What the hell is in this?”

Heh-heh. Lightweight. “Vodka, gin, rum, sweet and sour, and peach schnapps. Lots of peach schnapps.”

“Do you actually get a buzz from this?”

“Sort of.” Lyc-V made it very difficult to get drunk. “It lasts for about thirty seconds or so and then I need another gulp.”

Kate leaned back against her chair. “Where is the bane of my existence?”

“In the shower, freshening up.”

“Oh God, who did Ascanio screw now?”

“No, no, he’s covered in blood.”

“Oh good.” She sighed and stopped. “The kid is covered in blood and we’re relieved. There is something wrong with us.”

“Tell me about it.” I took another swig. “Not going to mention my beastkin appearance?”

“I like it,” she said. “The torn pants and gore-stained T-shirt is a nice touch.”

I wiggled my toes. “I was thinking of painting my claws a nice shade of pink.”

Kate glanced at my feet. “That would take a lot of nail polish. What about some golden hoops in your ears instead?”

I grinned. “It’s a definite possibility.”

“What happened?” Kate asked.

“I saw Raphael this morning. I’d called him last night, because Jim put me on some shapeshifter murders and I needed to interview him. I wanted a chance to apologize.”

Kate took my bottle and drank from it. “How did it go?”

“He replaced me.”

The bottle stopped in Kate’s hand, three inches above the table. “He what?”

“He found another girl. She is seven feet tall, with breasts the size of honeydew melons, legs that start at her neck, bleached blond hair down to her ass, and her waist is this big around.” I touched my index and thumb claws. “They are engaged to be engaged.”

“He brought her
here
?”

“She sat in that chair right there.” I pointed at the other client chair. “I’m thinking of burning it.”

Kate put the bottle down. “Did you punch him?”

“Nope.” I took a long swig. The alcohol burned my tongue. “After he told me that his new sweetheart’s best quality is that she isn’t me, it didn’t seem like it would make any difference.”

“Is she a shapeshifter?”

I shook my head. “A human. Not a fighter. Not that bright either. I know what you’ll say—it’s my own fault.”

“Well, you did check out of his life,” Kate said. “You checked out of my life for a while.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I took a deep breath. There was no action to displace the pain now. No escape. The ache settled in my chest and scraped at me with sharp little claws.

“Are you going to fight for him?” Kate asked.

I looked at her. “What?”

“Are you going to fight for him, or are you going to roll over on your back and take it?”

“Look who’s talking. How long did it take you and Curran
to have a conversation after that whole dinner mess? Was it three weeks or more like a month?”

Kate arched her left eyebrow. “That’s different. That was a misunderstanding.”

“Aha.”

“He brought his new main squeeze here after you called him with a peace offering. That’s a slap in the face.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. I know.” I growled, deep in my throat.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Nothing is free,” Kate said. “If you want it, you have to fight for it.”

Coming from a woman who had fought off twenty-two shapeshifters to stay by Curran’s side, that was a statement based on experience.

“I’m thinking about it.” Thinking if I wanted to fight for Raphael. What he did to me was cruel. I hurt and I wanted revenge more than anything else. But at the same time, who was I to stand in the way of his new happiness? Whatever Rebecca was giving him, he clearly needed it, otherwise he wouldn’t have made plans for their engagement. “How did your day go?”

“I got some head. It was vamp, but still.”

I stared at her. Kate was the last person I would have expected to make that joke. Well, someone had loosened up since mating. “That good, huh.”

“Yup.”

“I have a glass monster corpse for you. It’s in the freezer.”

Kate grinned a deranged smile. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s a bribe for putting up with my psychotic break.”

A car engine roared outside.

“That’s my ride,” Kate said.

The door swung open, and Curran shouldered his way in. Muscular, built like he fought for his life every day—which wasn’t too far from the truth—Curran moved like a beast who knew he was at the top of the food chain. When he walked into a room, he owned it and you knew that if you disagreed, he would prove it to you. Judging by the blood spatter on his T-shirt, he had done it today already.

I rose. It’s polite to afford monarchy its due. If you don’t, they get royally pissy.

Curran’s thick blond eyebrows furrowed. We didn’t really get along that well, mainly because I complicated his life. A good portion of the older shapeshifters believed in killing beastkin, and my existence meant he would have to resolve this prejudice sooner or later. On top of that I was a shapeshifter and I wasn’t in the Pack. He managed to ignore this fact, probably because Kate and I were best friends. However, I had spent the whole day galloping around the city in my beastkin shape. Ignoring me was no longer an option.

Kate stepped next to him and kissed him. He turned to her, focusing on her completely, as if they were alone in the room. That’s what mating meant. It stabbed at me a little. There was a time I’d had that, too.

“Hold on, let me grab the vamp head.” Kate went into the back.

The Beast Lord looked at me. “I see you’ve decided who you want to be.”

“I’m working on it.”

“I’ll see you in a couple of days, then.”

If I didn’t present myself in three days or make some sort of arrangement to do so, he would take it as an open challenge. To present myself, I would have to swallow my pride, put aside the memories of my tormented childhood, and go back to Aunt B, a bouda and the woman I had slapped. The woman who had sent two boudas to thrash me. I would have to bow my head and apologize and ask to be admitted into her clan.

I’d rather eat dirt.

“I hope so,” I said.

“The Pack isn’t so bad, Andrea,” he said quietly. “And loyalty goes both ways.”

“I know,” I said. “I just…I feel like I failed.” What the hell was I doing having a heart-to-heart with the Beast Lord? “I worked so hard at my previous life. Joining the Pack is the last nail in that coffin.”

“The only thing you failed at was pretending to be something you’re not. And you got away with it for a very long time.” Curran shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody in the Pack
will judge you for what you are or whose daughter you are. You have my word on it.”