Gunmetal Magic (31 page)

The landing smelled like fresh banana bread. Mrs. Haffey had been baking again. I slid the key into the lock and swung the door open.

A pair of familiar black boots sat in the shoe rack in my foyer, between my black pumps and my yellow work boots.

You’ve got to be kidding me. He didn’t.

“Something wrong?” Roman asked.

On the right, a row of hooks was attached to the wall—I usually hung my rain-dampened jackets there to dry out
before taking them to the closet. A large black leather jacket hung on the middle hook.

I marched into my apartment. What must be a spare set of Raphael’s keys was in the round plastic dish where I normally left mine. In the kitchen a hanging pot rack had been installed over my dining room table. Raphael’s copper-bottomed pots hung from it, and in the corner, his wine cabinet sat next to my spice shelves.

I dashed out of the kitchen, almost knocking Roman over. In the living room three prized swords from Raphael’s collection hung on the walls. A picture of Aunt B in a dark frame was on the bookshelf next to the picture of my mother. Raphael’s beige and brown Jaipur rug covered the floor. He had double-stacked my DVDs in the media case and added his own, all pre-Shift movies he loved: the entire Rocky collection, the
Godfather I
and
II
,
Commando
,
Tropic Thunder
…

I tore into the spare bedroom. I had used it for weapon storage. A new desk sat by the window with a computer on it and a tall filing cabinet next to it. He’d made himself an office! In my spare room! A picture of Raphael and I sat on the desk next to the keyboard. He had his arms around me. I was smiling.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Roman asked.

“No,” I snarled.

“A male roommate?”

I shoved the door to my bedroom open. A second night table stood on the other side of my bed, the perfect match to the one I had. With the same lamp. And his spy novels in a stack on top. I yanked open the closet door. Raphael’s clothes hung on the left side, with his shoes in a row. I pulled open the dresser. His underwear. Condoms. His socks.

He had moved into my apartment. He’d snuck in and made it look like he’d lived here for the last ten years. His scent was everywhere, floating through my territory.

Words failed me. I just stood in the middle of my place, shaking with rage.

Breaking and entering was an essential part of the shapeshifter courtship. The idea was to break into your prospective mate’s territory and get out undetected, proving that you were sleek enough to mate. Some clans left gifts. Boudas played practical jokes. But this? This was going too far.

He’d punked me. Did he expect that after everything that had happened I would think this was charming? Did he think challenging me was funny? I would rip his head off.

“I think you have a boyfriend.”

I inhaled and exhaled slowly. “No, I just know somebody with a really sick sense of humor.”

“Really? Because there is a picture of you and him back in the office.” Roman pointed his thumb back over his shoulder.

“He’s an ex-boyfriend. He is having trouble understanding the word ‘over.’”

“So what, he just moved his stuff in while you were gone?”

“Yes,” I ground out.

“Ballsy.”

No, that wasn’t ballsy. That wasn’t even in the mile radius of ballsy. It was in its own little universe with the word “lunatic” stamped on it. He should be locked in a padded room and never let out.

“Should I leave?” Roman asked.

“No. I promised you a cup of tea; we will drink that tea, God damn it.”

I made a pot of tea in the kitchen. We sat at my kitchen table with MINE scratched on it and drank one cup each, before Roman couldn’t stand it any longer and bailed.

The second he was out the door, I grabbed my phone and dialed Raphael’s number.

“Hey, babycakes,” he said into the phone.

Babycakes? Babycakes! “You want to act psycho? You haven’t seen psycho yet.”

“I’m not worried,” he said. “To go psycho, you’d have to pull that stick out of your ass and we both know that won’t be happening.”

I unclenched my teeth. “You will regret this.”

“Love you, babe.”

The plastic receiver crunched in my hand and the phone went dead. I looked at it. Crushed electronic guts peeked out through the gaps in the broken plastic. I dropped the mangled wreck of the phone on my table and went into the bathroom.

A razor and shaving cream rested on the sink next to my lotion. A second toothbrush greeted me, a twin to mine, except mine was green and this one was blue. He had invaded my
territory. He had put his stuff into it. He, he, he…Aaaaargh! He’d made my place smell like him!

I grabbed the toothbrush. I wanted to break it into tiny pieces and then feed it into the garbage disposal.

No. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I wouldn’t gather all of his things into a large metal trash can, I wouldn’t pour gasoline on it, and I wouldn’t set it on fire. No, nothing so pedestrian.

This, this deserved a special retaliation.

I would have to think of something. Oh yes. He would regret this. He would wish he’d gotten run over by a PAD tank instead.

I woke up early and lay in bed for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling, before my brain finally registered that there was a new chandelier on it. I must not have noticed it last night, when I finally fell into bed, exhausted and enraged. A glossy silver disk of about eighteen inches in diameter was attached directly to the ceiling. Long wavy crystal leaves patterned with ribs of varying textures cascaded from it, suspended by chains hidden within crystal beads. Thin tendrils of crystal, like the curved shoots of a grape vine, hung between the leaves, translucent with light, and between them, on longer gleaming chains, textured crystal spheres, frosted with silver, clinked gently in the light breeze from the open windows. It was beautifully romantic, yet modern, a kind of chandelier a twenty-first-century mermaid might have in her underwater cave or an Ice Queen from an Andersen fairy tale might hang in her palace of ice.

It was exactly the kind of chandelier I would’ve loved to have. Elegant, feminine, romantic, but without a trace of corny cuteness. And I wanted to rip it out of my ceiling. He made me so angry.

I pushed myself out of the bed. The fatigue still napped deep in my bones, but it was growing weaker. No nausea. No ache. My body must’ve won the war with snake venom. Now if I could only win the war with myself.

The magic was down and I was deeply grateful for not having to resort to the kerosene cooker. I went into the office, confiscated Raphael’s monitor, and hooked up Gloria’s tower at my kitchen table. While the computer booted up, I made myself two pieces of Texas toast—a slice of thick bread, buttered on both sides and fried a bit in the pan, and a small steak,
barely seared on both sides. I needed the calories. I boiled some shockingly strong coffee in an ibrik, a little Turkish coffeepot Kate had given me as a gift, and sat down to my breakfast. Mmm, coffee, the breakfast of champions. Delicious and nutritious.

I was halfway through my first cup and knee-deep in Gloria’s files, when someone knocked on my door. The peephole revealed a scowling black man in his early thirties, dressed in black and looking like he wanted to bite someone’s head off. Jim. There were other people in the hallway behind him. What the hell?

I opened the door. Jim stood in my doorway. He was over six feet tall, with short hair, and the kind of muscular build that resulted when you fought for your life a lot. He looked like a thug, and he worked very hard to keep looking like that. Jim liked to be underestimated.

When I first came to Atlanta, I made it a point to read through the background files the Order kept on the shapeshifters. Before Jim’s father went to prison and died there, shanked by an inmate, Jim was taking advanced classes and skipping grades. Jim could’ve been anything he wanted. A doctor, like his father. A scientist. An engineer. But life got in his way. He was the alpha of Clan Cat now and he oversaw the entirety of the Pack’s security, which meant every day he got to spy, discover, and eliminate threats to the Pack. Jim loved his job.

Behind him eight people crowded into the landing: Sandra and Lucrezia from Clan Bouda, both combat operatives; Russell and Amanda from Clan Wolf; two guys I didn’t know; Derek, the third employee of Cutting Edge; and my lawyer, Barabas.

“If this is a lynch mob, you didn’t bring enough people,” I said.

“You don’t answer your phone,” Jim said. His voice was at odds with his face: his face said “bone-breaker,” but his voice said “romantic ballad singer.”

“I crushed it.”

“Why?” Barabas asked.

“I was having relationship issues,” I told him.

Derek grinned. He used to work with Jim before joining Cutting Edge. At nineteen, he had been almost arrestingly
handsome, but then some monsters poured molten metal on his face. We had killed the fuckers, but Derek’s face never healed quite right. He wasn’t disfigured, but he was scarred, and he looked like the type of man you would not want to meet in a dark alley. I’ve seen him walk into a bar and stop the chatter with his face alone.

Jim, Derek, Barabas, and two combat boudas, not counting the other guys. Either they expected me to put up a hell of a fight, or something heavy was about to happen.

“Can we come in?” Jim asked.

And see Raphael’s handiwork? Unfortunately, telling the Pack’s chief of security to shove off would have been extremely unwise, not to mention counterproductive to my investigation. Great. The shapeshifters gossiped worse than bored church ladies. Before tonight the whole Pack would know about Raphael’s stunt. “Of course.”

I watched them file into my apartment. The two boudas nodded at me in passing. This was interesting.

The eight shapeshifters spread through my living room and kitchen and suddenly my apartment seemed too small.

“I thought Raphael had moved out,” Barabas said.

Remain calm. “Actually, we never lived together in my place. I lived at his,” I said. I would not bite Barabas. It wouldn’t be right.

“He was back here last night while she was out,” Jim said. “Him, and a large moving truck.”

“Oh.” Barabas thought about it. His eyes lit up. “Oh!”

Slapping my lawyer was not in my best interests either. I turned to Jim. “You put a detail on my apartment?”

“The second you became a target,” he said.

Well, that just took the cake. I tilted my head. “So good of you to let me know, cat. I’d hate to mistake my babysitter for a threat and accidentally shoot him.”

Jim blinked.
Ha!
I had managed to surprise the spy master.

“So these are new furnishings?” Barabas said, his face pure innocence.

“Don’t tempt me, Barabas.”

The two bouda women made big eyes at the portrait of Aunt B on my shelf.

“Lovely decorations,” Sandra offered and bit her lip, obviously straining not to laugh.

“Yes, the way the light here plays on Aunt B’s face is very nice,” Lucrezia added.

“Fuck you, Lucrezia,” I told her.

Sandra groaned and the laughter burst out of her mouth. She doubled over. Lucrezia dissolved into giggles.

By tonight, not just the Pack, but the shapeshifters in Canada would know what Raphael had done to my apartment. I would murder him.

I crossed my arms on my chest and turned to Jim. “Is there a reason for all of you coming here?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Why do you have your computer on the kitchen table?”

“This is a long conversation.”

“I have time.”

We sat down at the kitchen table and I briefed him on last night while Derek made more coffee for everyone. I explained Anapa in broad terms, the Bone Staff, the volhv, and the knife. At the end, Jim nodded at the computer. “Kyle, see what you can do with that?”

A beefy guy who looked like he bent steel rods for a living sat down at the computer, opened a small briefcase, hooked up some box with blinking lights to the tower, and his fingers started flying over the keyboard. He winked at me, still typing without looking at the keyboard.

“Gloria has no fingerprints on file,” Jim said. “No driver’s license, no city permit for her shop, nothing. She just showed up one day and set up her trinket bazaar.”

“And nobody cared because it was White Street?” How did he know all this?

Jim nodded. “How can I make your life easier?”

If we didn’t have an audience, I might have hugged him. “Gloria and her friends likely murdered Raphael’s people. First, I need to canvas White Street and the Warren and shake some information out. How often was she at the shop, who came to visit her, when did she leave, what did she drive, where she went, and so on. Basic legwork. Second, I need to establish Anapa’s whereabouts.”

“You still like him for this?” Jim asked.

“There’s something weird about him. I have a gut feeling that he is up to his ass in this mess, but he probably wasn’t working with Gloria. Third, I need a ritual knife expert. I left a message for Kate, so that should be taken care of if I can tear her away from Curran’s side for five minutes.”