Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels)

by Ilona Andrews

  Giving advice was easy. Living by it was much harder.

  We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written:

  IM-1: Infectious Magic Area

  Do Not Enter

  Authorized Personnel Only

  A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read:

  Keep out, stupid.

  “We aren’t going to keep out, are we?” Ascanio asked.

  “No.”

  “Awesome.”

  We rolled by another blackened home. To the left a large blue-green shard protruded from the ground at an angle. To the right, by the metal carcass of a fire-stripped truck, another sliver, pale blue, waited to bloody someone’s ankle. The first signs of the Menagerie.

  Here and there more shards punctured the soil, and in the distance, far to the right, a jagged iceberg rose at a steep angle twenty feet high, glowing with translucent green and blue in the morning sun.

  Ascanio squinted. “What is that?”

  “Glass,” I answered.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  Ahead more icebergs crowded in, forming a glacier. “Some of it is from Hollowell Station. Before the Shift, Inman Yard used to be Norfolk Southern’s train yard. It was huge. Over sixty-five tracks in the bowl alone. Not only that, but CSX’s Tilford train yard was right next to it. Together they handled over a hundred trains per day. Then they built the Hollowell Station. It was supposed to be a new, super-modern terminal and most of it was glass. Guess what happened when the magic waves started hitting?”

  Ascanio grinned. “It crashed.”

  “Yes, it did. There were hills of glass everywhere. The magic waves kept causing train crashes, but the railroad hung in there. Over the next few months some railroad employees started to get the idea that the glass hills were multiplying. Nobody else paid much attention to it. Then during the second flare, creatures popped out of the glass and killed half of the railroad workers.”

  “What kind of creatures?” Raphael asked.

  “Nobody knows.”

  Flares—intense, terrible magic waves—came once every seven years. Things that were impossible during normal magic waves became reality during a flare. The flare’s magic held for three days straight and then disappeared for a long while, but its consequences were often deadly.

  “Eventually the military came back to reclaim the yard. There were roughly two hundred trains in there, and some of them were full of goods. The soldiers found that the glass had expanded and encased the trains. When they tried to chip it off, they were attacked by creatures. Nobody ever figured out what the creatures were, but they caused multiple casualties. Finally the MSDU gave up and cordoned off the Inman Yard with barbed wire. The glass never stopped growing. Helicopters were still flying once in a while back then, so one of the reporters looked at the place from above and dubbed it the Glass Menagerie.”

  Ahead two glass icebergs met above the road, fused into a massive arch. We passed under it and into the labyrinth of glass. Peaks of green, blue, and white towered above us, some connected, some standing apart, some curving, others perfectly sheer. The light turned turquoise, as if we were underwater. The glass cliffs crowded the crumbling road, painting the ground with colored shadows.

  The back of my head itched, the nerves prickling, as if some invisible sniper had sighted me from the scope of his rifle. Someone was watching us from the icy depths. Ascanio fell silent, focused and tense. He’d sensed it, too.

  The road in front of us glittered.

  “Stop,” I said.

  The Jeep came to a stop.

  A sheer ridge of glass crossed the road. A few yards before it reached the asphalt, it had shattered into a heap of shards. An identical heap marked the other side. Bell Recovery must’ve blasted through it. Kyle Bell was trying to reclaim the trains. The metal alone would be worth a fortune, not to mention the contents of the cars. Once reclaimed, he would have to transport the metal out and he needed a road in decent repair. Except now there was broken glass all over it.

  I got out of the vehicle and padded forward, careful not to step on anything too sharp. My paw-feet were calloused, and Lyc-V would seal any cuts the moment they were made, but it would still hurt. Ascanio followed me.

  The shards littered the asphalt, large slivers of glass at the edges, and smaller crushed glass dust in the center. I crouched for a better perspective. Crushed glass ran in two parallel rows.

  “Track vehicle,” I said. “They’re using a tractor or a bulldozer.” The glass would slice our tires into shreds. “Park the Jeep. We’re going on foot.”

  We hid the Jeep behind a glass mountain and shut off the engine. The sudden silence made my ears ring. I took a crossbow and a longbow out of the vehicle.

  “Why two bows, mistress?” Ascanio asked, sinking a sudden English accent into his words.

  “The crossbow has more power but takes longer to reload.” I strung the longbow. “Sometimes you have to shoot fast. And can you go ten minutes without being a smartass?” I grabbed the quiver.

  “I don’t know, I’ve never tried, mistress.” He shook his head. “But arrows bounce from monsters.”

  “These don’t.” I pulled one out and showed him the incantation written on the arrowhead. One of the Military Supernatural Defense Unit’s mages wasn’t averse to moonlighting. He was expensive but worth it. “But if you have doubts, why don’t you go stand over there. I’ll shoot you and we’ll find out if it hurts.”

  “No thanks.”

  I picked up the spare bow and the second quiver and handed it to him. “Then shut up and carry this.”

  I started forward at an easy jog, skirting the road. Ascanio followed a couple feet behind. The glass swallowed all footsteps and we glided like two shadows.

  A flicker of movement appeared in the corner of my eye. Something crouched atop the glass ridge to the left. Something with a long tail that hid in the shadows. I kept running, pretending I didn’t see it. It didn’t follow.

  A muted roar announced water engines being put to good use. We passed under another glass overhang, running parallel to the road. Ahead the ribbon of asphalt turned, rolling through the opening between the glass peaks into the sunlight. I slowed and padded on silent feet to the nearest iceberg ledge, about fifteen feet off the ground. Too smooth to climb. I gathered myself into a tight clump and jumped. My hands caught the glass edge, and I pulled myself up. Ascanio bounced up next to me. We crawled along the ledge to the opening.

  A clearing stretched in front of us, about half a football field long. To the right the ground climbed up slightly, the slope studded with pale green glass boulders. A large construction shelter perched on top of the raised ground, its durable fabric stretched over an aluminum frame. To the left a mess of glass bristling with shards curved away, deeper into the glass labyrinth. The tail end of an overturned railroad car stuck out of shards.

  An enchanted water engine sat nearby, powering up a massive jackhammer that two construction workers with hardhats and full facial shields pointed at the glass encrusting the train car. Eight other workers, wrapped in similar protective gear, pounded away at the glass with hammers and mining picks.

  Three guards milled about the perimeter, each armed with a machete. The nearest to us, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his mid-thirties, looked like he wouldn’t hesitate to use his. With the magic up, guns wouldn’t fire, but the security seemed too light for a reclamation in the Glass Menagerie. They must’ve had something else up their sleeves.

  “You see what they’re doing?” I murmured to Ascanio.

  “They’re trying to salvage that railcar,” he said.

  “Why is it illegal?”

  He thought about it. “It doesn’t belong to them?”
/>   “Technically the railroad has gone out of business, so this is abandoned property. Try again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are we sitting on?”

  He looked down at the turquoise surface under our feet. “Magic glass.”

  “What do we know about it?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Exactly. We don’t know what makes it grow and we don’t know what would make it stop.”

  “So anything they take out of that rail car could sprout glass,” Ascanio said.

  “Precisely. They’re going to sell whatever they reclaim and they won’t tell the buyer where they got it. And when another Glass Menagerie sprouts someplace, it will be too late.”

  “Shouldn’t we do something about it?”

  I held up my empty hand. “No badge. We can report it when we get out of here and see if PAD wants to do something about it.” Besides, it wasn’t our job to report it and I was pretty much done with acts of civic responsibility. It wasn’t my problem.

  “They have to know that what they’re doing is illegal,” I said. “And this area is dangerous, so they should have more than three bruisers walking about with oversized knives. They have some security we’re not seeing. Be ready for a surprise.”

  Ascanio’s eyes lit up with an eerie ruby glow. “Can I shift now?”

  “Not yet.” Shifting took a lot of energy. Change your shape twice in rapid succession, and you would have to have some downtime. I needed Ascanio fresh and full of energy, which meant once he shifted, he’d have to stay that way.

  We jumped off the ledge and walked down the road straight into the guard. He saw my face and drew back.

  “What in the bloody hell are you?”

  “Andrea Nash,” I said. “This is my associate, Robin of Loxley.”

  Ascanio saluted with the bow. Thankfully no Latin spilled out.

  “I’m investigating a murder on behalf of the Pack. I need to talk to Kyle.”

  The man stared at me. This was clearly outside of his normal duties.

  “You got some sort of ID on you?”

  I handed him my ID—a miniature copy of my PI license endorsed by the Georgia Secretary of State with my picture on it.

  “How do I know it’s you?” he asked.

  “Why would I lie?”

  He mulled it over. “Okay, you’ve got something that says you’re from the Pack?”

  Ascanio coughed a bit.

  I swept the hand from my forehead to my chin, indicating my face. “Do I look like I need to prove I’m from the Pack?”

  The guard pondered me. “Okay, fine. Come with me.”

  We followed him to the tent. It looked bigger close up, almost forty feet tall. Inside, a middle-aged man pored over some charts next to a taller, thinner man with acne scars on his narrow face. Both wore hardhats.

  The middle-aged man looked up. Stocky, well muscled, he might have been quick at some point in his youth, but probably not. He looked like one of those linemen that plant themselves in front of the quarterback, except in his case he’d let himself go a bit and most of his muscle now hid behind a layer of fat. His hair was gray and cropped short, but his dark eyes were sharp. He didn’t look friendly. He looked like the kind of guy who could order a shapeshifter murder.

  Kyle gave me a once-over and focused on the guard. “What the hell is this?”

  “Some people from the Pack want to talk to you,” the guard said. “About some murder.”

  Kyle leaned back, his face sour. “Tony, do you remember that time I told you to just let any asshole in here?”

  The guard winced. “No.”

  “Yeah, I don’t remember that either. Felipe, you remember that?”

  “No,” the taller man said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Tony paused, obviously confused. “So what do I do?”

  “Throw them the fuck out. If I want to talk to any ugly bitches or punk kids, I’ll tell you.” Kyle looked back to his papers.

  Tony put his hand on my forearm. “Come on.”

  “Take your hand off of me, sir.”

  The guard pulled me. “Don’t make this hard.”

  “Last chance. Take your hand off of me.”

  Kyle looked up.

  Tony tried to yank me back. I raised my arm up sharply and elbowed him in the face. The blow knocked him back. Tony dropped his machete. It bit into the dirt, handle sticking upright. Blood gushed from his nose, its scent piercing me like a shot of adrenaline.

  “Sit on him,” I said.

  Ascanio tripped Tony, pulled him to the ground, facedown, and leaned one knee on his back. “Don’t move, sir.”

  He remembered. I felt so proud.

  Tony tried to push up. “Get off of me!”

  “Do not struggle, or I’ll be forced to break your arm.”

  Tony shut up.

  Kyle looked at me. Behind him, Felipe carefully took a couple of steps back.

  “We can talk about the murders now.” I smiled.

  “And if I don’t feel like talking?”

  “I’ll make you,” I said. “I’ve had an unpleasant day and four of our people are dead. I feel like having some fun.”

  “You shapeshifters are getting ballsy,” Kyle said. “You think you can just come in anywhere and screw with regular decent people.”

  “As a matter of fact, I can.” I looked at him.

  “The boys down at PAD will just love that,” Felipe, the taller man behind Kyle, said.

  Ha! He was threatening me with cops. “The boys down at PAD won’t give a shit. This area is designated as IM-1. You are here in violation of two city ordinances, one state and two federal statutes. Anything you reclaim is contaminated with magic of unknown origin. Taking it out of here is punishable by a fine of not more than two hundred thousand dollars or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or both. Selling it will get you another dime in a state penitentiary.”

  Kyle crossed his arms. “Is that so?”

  “Greed is a terrible thing,” I said. “When you extract your metal and sell it to a builder, and then the new school or hospital in the city starts sprouting glass, they will come looking for you. At the moment, it’s not my problem. I’m here to ask questions. Answer them and I’ll thank you and go away. Do keep in mind that if you piss me off, I can slaughter the lot of you and nobody will give a crap.”

  And I could. I could just twist his head off and nobody would be the wiser. This was the Glass Menagerie and if he died, the cops would just think he got what was coming to him. Now there was an interesting thought.

  A creature walked into the tent, moving on all fours. It used to be human, but all fat had been leeched off it, replaced by hard, knotted muscle and skin stretched so tight, it looked painted on. Its head was bald, like the rest of its repulsive frame and the two eyes, red and feverish with thirst, bore into me like two burning coals. Its oversized jaws protruded, and as it opened its mouth, I glimpsed two curved fangs.

  A vampire. The revolting stink of undeath swirled around me, raising my hackles in instinctive disgust. Ew. Well, that explained the light security. They had an undead guarding them. And where there was a vampire, there was a navigator.

  Infection by the Immortuus pathogen destroyed a human’s mind. No cognizance remained. Vampires were ruled only by instinct and that instinct screamed, “Feed!” They did not reproduce. They did not think. They hunted flesh. Anything with a pulse was fair game. Their blank minds made perfect vehicles for necromancers. Called navigators, or Masters of the Dead, if they had talent and education, necromancers piloted vampires, driving them around telepathically like remote-controlled cars. They saw through the vampire’s eyes, they heard through its ears, and when an undead opened its mouth, it was the navigator’s words that came out.

  Most of the navigators worked for the People. The People and the Pack existed in a state of uneasy truce, hovering on the verge of full-out war. If the People were running security
for this site, my life would get a lot more complicated.

  A man followed the vampire. He wore ripped jeans, a black T-shirt that said MAKE MY DAY in bloody red letters, and sported a dozen rings in various parts of his facial features. He could’ve been one of the People’s journeymen, but it was highly unlikely. Strike one, he followed his vampire instead of sitting somewhere outside being inconspicuous, pulling the undead’s strings with his mind. Strike two, the People’s journeymen looked like they just emerged from arguing a case before the Supreme Court. They wore suits, had good shoes, and were impeccably groomed.

  No, this knucklehead had to be a freelancer, which meant I could kill him without diplomatic consequences, if he didn’t kill me first.

  “Where the hell have you been, Envy?” Kyle said.

  I looked at him. “Envy?”

  Ascanio chortled.

  “Around,” Envy said.

  “I want them gone,” Kyle said. “Do your fucking job.”

  The vamp hissed. Envy smiled, showing bad teeth.

  Ascanio gathered himself. “Can I shift now?”

  “No.” I turned, stepping closer to the machete Tony had dropped on the ground and looked at the navigator. “You have a chance to walk away. Take it.”

  “Can I kill them?” Envy asked.

  “You can do whatever you want,” Kyle told him.

  I had to do this fast. Getting into a hand-to-hand brawl with a vampire would end badly. I would’ve preferred to wrestle an enraged mama grizzly. “Walk away. Last chance.”

  Envy grinned. “Pray, bitch.”

  “Are you affiliated with the People?” I asked.

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  Outside, glass shattered. A scream tore through the quiet, the raw painful scream of a man experiencing sheer terror. Two more followed.

  “What the hell now?” Kyle growled.

  We piled out of the tent.

  The rail car had split open at the top, like a can of bad beans, and creatures poured out, climbing onto its roof. Thick pale-gray hide covered their squat, barrel-chested bodies, supported by six muscled bearlike legs. Hand-paws tipped each limb, and their long dexterous fingers carried short but thick ivory claws. A narrow carapace ran along their backs and when one of the creatures reared, I saw an identical bony shield guarding its stomach and chest. The carapace terminated in a long, segmented tail with a scorpion stinger. They had large round heads with feline jaws and twin rows of tiny eyes, sitting deep in their sockets. The eyes stared to the front, not to the side. That usually meant a predator.