“Please don’t leave me here with her,” Ascanio murmured.
I looked at him. “Did Kate tell you to stay put?”
“Yes.”
“Then stay put. Study your epic, get yourself straightened out, and I’ll take you with me next time.”
I turned and walked out of there before he did any more begging.
White Street received its name when an unnatural snowfall covered it with two feet of pristine powder. The snow refused to melt for a couple of years and most residents had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. If a street’s magic could sustain two feet of snow in the middle of the scorching Atlanta summer, there was no telling what else it could do. By the time the snow finally melted, most of the people living in its buildings had fled. As I drove down the crumbling pavement, the abandoned houses stared at me with dark rectangles of empty windows, like the black holes of a skull’s orbits. If I wasn’t a seasoned former member of law enforcement, I’d admit that the place gave me the creeps, turn my vehicle around, and drive away screaming like a little girl.
Gloria’s Art and Antiques occupied a large rectangular building. The front facade was a typical two-story brick affair, but the structure extended from the street, over a city-block deep. Enough space there to warehouse a lot of antiques. Or a small herd of tanks. Or some vicious magical elephants…
I checked my Sig-Sauers and tried the door. Unlocked. I swung it open. A little bell chimed with a silvery tone as I stepped inside. In front of me, a narrow room stretched, framed by twin glass counters. The floor was polished wood, the counters glass and steel, the walls a silvery gray. The whole place was the exact antithesis of antique.
The air smelled of jasmine, not the purified scent of the perfume, but real jasmine: dark, slightly narcotic, with a hint of indole. There was something ancient and savage in that scent and it set my teeth on edge.
I walked over to the counter on the right and examined the contents of the glass case. A magnifying glass with an ornate metal handle. A metal toy car with faded, half-peeled-off green paint. A small round box filled with blue and white glass beads. A cheap pocket watch. Some coins, an assortment of beat-up knives, a set of antique glasses, dark red at the bottom and gold-yellow on top, a glass punch bowl with a grape pattern on the side and an odd yellow patina…This was crap. You could find pricier stuff at a flea market. Did she have a warehouse full of this junk?
A tall woman strode from the depths of the store. She wore a brown and beige suit. Her light brown hair was coiled into a complex arrangement on her head. Her eyes behind black-rimmed glasses were dark and calm. Neat, trim, professional.
“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you find anything?”
“Hi. Are you Gloria?”
“Yes.” The woman nodded.
“My name is Andrea Nash,” I said. “I’m investigating a multiple homicide on one of the Pack’s business sites.”
Gloria stepped behind the left counter and walked toward the door. I had to turn to keep facing her.
“Multiple homicides?”
She was up to something. “Yes.”
“Who was killed?” Gloria set a large plastic bin onto the counter.
“Some shapeshifters. They were employees of a reclamation company.”
“That sounds tragic.” Gloria offered me a smile. “But I don’t know what it has to do with me.”
She stood, one hand on the bin, her muscles tense. Normally I’d make slow circles around her, pulling the evidence out of her a little at a time, but she was too keyed up for that. Strategic decision time. Anapa was likely after the ceremonial knife. She could be, too. She could be working for him even.
I took a gamble. “Give me the knife, Gloria.”
She hurled the contents of the bin at me. I ducked right, but not fast enough. A clump of ribbons hit me in the chest and fell apart into two dozen slithering cords around my feet.
Snakes.
The blistered bodies of Raphael’s crew flashed before me. Getting bitten meant death. I jumped up and to the right, trying to put some distance between me and the knot of terrified snakes, landed on the clear floor, and drew my Sigs. Behind me a heavy metal grate slammed in place over the door.
Trapped.
I spun and saw Gloria crouching on the counter. What the hell now?
Gloria opened her mouth. Her jaws unhinged and the mandible split in half, opening even wider. Her lips curled back, baring her teeth and turning her face into a grotesque mask. Twin fangs slid from the recesses in her gums, above her human canines.
Whoa.
Gloria crouched down.
“Don’t!” I barked. I couldn’t get bitten and I needed her alive, because whatever she knew would die with her.
Gloria jumped. It wasn’t a martial arts kick. She just leaped at me like there were springs in her legs, mouth open, fangs exposed.
I fired. Two shots bit into her stomach, the third and fourth took her in the chest, and then she crashed into me. Her hands crushed my arms, pinning them to my sides. Four bullets and she hadn’t even slowed down. She should’ve been dead or bleeding.
I tried to rip my arms free, but she clamped me down, her hands like steel pinchers, and bit down, aiming for my throat. Hell, no. I smashed my forehead into her face. She reeled back, her nose a broken mess of red tissue. I ripped my left arm out of her grip, the second Sig still in my fingers. Gloria bit my right arm, puncturing the skin straight through my shirt, and I put the Sig to her ear and pumped three rounds into her skull.
Blood sprayed the floor, littering it with chunks of brain tissue and shattered skull bone. Gloria sagged down and crumpled by my feet.
Well, that had gone great. Gloria and her secrets were dead, and I’d gotten myself bitten and was about to join her. How in the world had this gone wrong?
My arm burned. I ripped my sleeve off carefully, keeping my right arm still. A single puncture marked my arm near the elbow—she had only gotten one fang in, but one was enough. The tissue around the bite had turned bright red. The beginning of a swelling stretched the skin to hot hardness.
If Raphael’s people were any indication, I had minutes before the venom killed me.
The best method to prevent the spread of snake venom came from Australia and involved applying a broad tight bandage, complete with a sling and a splint to my arm. The venom had to move through the body through the lymphatic system before entering the bloodstream. The idea was to compress the tissue, preventing the lymph from moving to and from an injured limb.
I couldn’t bandage myself without moving my affected arm, and even then I couldn’t do it right and tight enough. All I could do was apply a tourniquet and hope my arm and I survived.
I pulled gauze from my pocket and bound my arm above the bite site, cutting off the flow of blood and lymph to my arm. It would have to do.
Gloria was still very dead on the floor. The rational, collected part of me took over. One, Gloria had giant fangs. Two, she was venomous. Three, she was connected to a reclamation company that bid on Raphael’s building. If she wasn’t part of the posse that had killed Raphael’s people, she’d definitely met them for brunch. I finally had my lead, except I was dying. If the venom finished me off, the cops would never release the crime scene to the Pack. I wasn’t an official member, and I wasn’t registered as a shapeshifter with the city, which made this crime scene fall into the jurisdiction of PAD. The Pack, and whoever would take over the investigation after me, would not get a crack at any evidence Gloria’s body offered. I had to preserve whatever evidence I could.
I took out the Polaroid camera from the pocket on my belt, pulled the woman’s lip back, and took a shot. The camera printed the photograph. I flipped it over, wrote “Property of Jim Shrapshire” on it, stuck it inside my shirt, and slid the camera back. If I died, the cops would find it and ask Jim about it, which would mean he would see it and make his own conclusions. Here’s hoping I hadn’t just killed myself.
I wal
ked across the floor toward the phone. A couple of snakes struck at my combat boots as I walked past, but none of them connected. I reached over and pressed the lever on the wall, raising the metal grate over the door, climbed up on the counter to get out of their range, picked up the phone, and dialed the office.
“Cutting Edge!” Julie chirped into the phone.
“Give that to me,” Ascanio growled.
“This is Andrea. Put me on speaker.”
“Done,” Julie said.
“Listen to me very carefully. I’m at Gloria’s Antiques on White Street. I’ve been bitten by a poisonous snake, probably a viper, the same kind that killed Raphael’s people. I’m dying. Call the paramedics, give them Gloria’s address, tell them to bring antivenom. Next, call Doolittle and repeat what I just told you. Then call Jim and tell him the same thing. Tell him the paramedics have been called. Do not open the door of the office to anyone except Kate. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Julie said, her voice flat.
“Good.” I hung up.
My metabolism was probably twice as fast as that of a normal human. The faster the metabolism, the faster the spread of venom through the body. I had to keep calm. The more I worried, the more I moved and the faster I would die.
I lay flat. Below me snakes slid around on the floor, their scales making the faintest of whispers against the floorboards. My arm burned. My forehead felt clammy. Sweat broke out along my hairline. Nausea came, squirming from my stomach into my throat.
I concentrated on breathing. In and out. Calm.
In.
Out.
I would survive this. No final thoughts, no regrets, no worrying about things I should’ve said and done. I would survive this.
In.
Out.
I wanted to run outside, to jump into my car, and drive myself to the emergency room. I would be riding to my death.
In.
Out.
I tasted metal in my mouth.
In.
Out.
A fever started, burning slowly just under my skin.
In.
Out.
I can do this. I will survive this. I will get justice for the four families. I will resolve things with Raphael. I have too much to live for.
I just had to not move.
My breath was coming in short gasps. So much for my calm breathing. I didn’t want to die.
The pain pierced my chest. My heart fluttered. I was hot, so very hot…
A man in firefighter yellow busted through the door and swore. “Snakes! There are fucking snakes in here!”
I closed my eyes.
“Run that by me again?” Detective Collins, a tall, fit, Caucasian man in his early forties, leaned toward me. “She jumped at you and you shot her four times in half a second?”
“Yes.” I shifted inside the blanket the paramedics had wrapped me in. I was sitting in the chair, by the counter from which Gloria had leaped at me. The first responders sank fifteen vials of antivenom into my body and when that didn’t quite do the trick gave me five more. My head swam and I felt cold and clammy. Any other time I’d be miserable, but now being sick and woozy just confirmed that I was alive.
“What happened next?”
“She grew fangs and bit me.”
“With her fangs?”
“Yes.”
Detective Tsoi, a dark-haired Asian female in her late thirties, arched her pretty eyebrows at me. “So would you say she was like a snake?”
I looked at her. Behind Tsoi, Animal Control packed the last of the snakes into bins.
“I just want to be sure that we’re on the same page,” Tsoi said. “Are we talking about snake people?”
“Yes.”
Tsoi and Collins looked at each other.
“Everybody knows there is no such thing as reptilian shapeshifters,” Collins said.
“I didn’t say she was a shapeshifter.” And that wasn’t strictly true either. There were reptilian shapeshifters; they just weren’t the product of Lyc-V.
Tsoi pondered me. “Your file says you were discharged from the Order due to post-traumatic stress. You failed your psych eval?”
“I’m not crazy.” My head hurt and I still wanted to vomit. Every word was like a hammer to my head.
“Nobody says you are,” Collins said. “Nobody even mentioned the c-word.”
I took a deep breath, trying to keep what little liquid was left in my stomach from geysering out. They knew I was weak and they were trying to squeeze everything they could out of me, hoping I’d slip up. I didn’t blame them. In their place, I would’ve done the same thing. Get as much as you can while you can. They’d Mirandized me the moment I was conscious, which meant I was detained and this wasn’t a routine conversation.
“She isn’t crazy,” the ME said, straightening from where he was examining the corpse. “Got two retractable fangs here. Also something going on with her temporomandibular joint. Look at this.” He pulled Gloria’s lower jaw down. Her mouth gaped, not quite as wide as the maw of a snake, but far wider than any human skull had a right to open.
“Snake people.” Collins stared at him. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
The ME spread his arms. “Hey, I call them like I see them. I tell you fangs and a jaw that opens one hundred degrees. You can draw your own conclusions from there.”
“Isn’t there some sort of a cult who thinks there are secret snake people?” Tsoi said.
“No, those are Reptilians,” the ME said. “They’re supposed to be more like lizards.”
“I shot her four times,” I said. “It didn’t even faze her.”
“EnGarde Deluxe,” the ME said. “Tactical concealed bulletproof vest. She was wearing one under her jacket.”
Well. That explained a few things.
Collins heaved a sigh and turned to me. “What are you doing here?”
Three days ago I would have cooperated, out of habit, and because I was hardwired by the Order to play nice with the PAD. But now I was playing for the Pack’s team and I would sit here and keep my mouth shut, until they sent in my backup, hopefully in the form of a lawyer. “No comment.”
Collins fixed me with a heavy stare. “Don’t tell me you drove all the way to White Street to go shopping.”
“No comment.”
“Seriously? You’re seriously going to do this?” He sounded personally offended.
“Yes.”
Collins shook his head. Tsoi arranged her face into a sympathetic expression. “Listen, all of us here know that this is connected to the four murders on your ex-boyfriend’s reclamation site. Level with us. We’re all good guys here. We’re all on the same side.”
These two were good. It had been less than two hours since the PAD uniformed cops, who had shown up right after the paramedics, had detained me at the crime scene. Collins and Tsoi, who had appeared half an hour ago, already knew who I was. They knew my job history, they knew my connection to Raphael, and they were obviously sore about losing the case of Raphael’s crew to the Pack’s jurisdiction. I bet they were the responding detectives to that crime scene.
I understood their frustration. Four murders in the middle of the city—of shapeshifters, no less, who were stronger and faster than most—didn’t sit well with the general public. It’s not that we were popular, but if this unknown threat could take on four shapeshifters at once, an average Joe didn’t stand a chance. People tended to panic easily nowadays, and the PAD was feeling less than pleased about being locked out of the investigation.
“Come on, Nash,” Collins said. “Help us out here. What were you doing here?”
“No comment.”
They stared at me. I knew that stare. I had given it myself a few times. It said, “We got you and you’re not leaving, but we’re willing to listen and if you just talk to us, all of this will go away.”
Laymen think cops are stupid. They see some guy with a bulldog face and assume that he’s dumb and they can talk
their way out of whatever trouble they got themselves into. But that bulldog-faced cop has a degree, three hundred homicide investigations under his belt, and over three thousand hours in the interrogation room. You’re not winning that fight. If you just stopped and thought about it, you’d keep your mouth shut. But when you’re put on the spot, you want to explain your side of the story. You want someone to understand, you want sympathy, and you want to get out from under that stare.
Explaining yourself is a powerful urge. I’d seen people who knew better, attorneys, experienced cops, and even knights of the Order crack under pressure and say stupid things just to explain themselves. I would not be following their example.
“Nash, don’t bullshit me. Do I need to define obstruction of justice to you?”
“No comment.”
“Andrea, not another word.” A lithe, muscular man shouldered his way to us, moving like an acrobat: graceful, sure, and weightless. He was on the near side of thirty, handsome, with green eyes and sharp features. His short hair, bright orange-red, had been brushed straight up and spiked, standing up like needles on a frightened hedgehog. Barabas. Technically, he was a member of Clan Nimble, but he’d grown up in Clan Bouda. He was Kate’s adviser on the Pack’s law and from what Raphael had told me, nasty and vicious in a fight.
“Perhaps I need to define obstruction of justice for you, Detective.” Barabas’s face took on a dangerously focused expression. “‘Obstruction of justice’ is an attempt to interfere with administration and due process of the law. To be guilty of obstruction of justice, a person must knowingly and willfully obstruct or hinder a law enforcement officer in the lawful discharge of his official duties by violence, destruction of evidence, bribery, corruption, or deceit. Note the emphasis on deceit. Therefore, to charge my client with ‘obstruction,’ you must prove that my client has been deceitful. My client isn’t lying. She’s refusing to answer, as is her right under the Constitution, which, the last time I checked, was still the supreme law of this land. But nice try.”
Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels) Page 18
