Gunmetal Magic (44 page)

Raphael lunged, shockingly fast.

The black threads snapped, binding around Raphael’s wrist. Roman leaned back and drove a crushing sidekick into the top of Raphael’s hip. It sounded like a sledgehammer pounding into a stud. I’d seen it before. It was a sambo kick, part of a personal defense martial art the Russians practiced.
Ow. Ow, ow, ow.

Raphael grabbed the black threads and pulled. Roman strained, pulling back.

A small boy ran through the stone arch and headed for the two of them. I jumped off the bench, ran, and caught him.

“Hi!” he said.

I lifted him off the ground. My rebroken arm screamed a little and I shifted his weight to the other. “Hi.”

“They’re fighting!” the boy told me, pointing at the two men.

“Yes, they are. Where are your parents?”

A couple ran through the arch, a tall man and a dark-haired woman in her late thirties, followed by a teenage girl.

“Dylan!” The woman reached for the boy. “I’m so, so sorry. We just wanted to pay our respects to the alpha. We were told he would be here. We didn’t mean to interrupt. We’re trying to get admitted into Clan Bouda…”

I looked at her face, and recognition punched me in the gut.

Michelle.

Michelle Carver, who put a nail through my hand when I was five, because she thought it was funny to hear me scream. Michelle Carver, who pelted me with bricks, after Candy broke my legs. All I could do was crawl and Michelle chased me and threw bricks and rocks at my head. Michelle, who cheered while the bitch alpha beat my mother to a bloody pulp. Michelle “Hit her again, Candy!”

I had killed every last one of them. Every last one, except
her. She had gone missing a couple of years before I came back and wiped that sadistic clan of bouda bitches off the face of the planet. I had tried to find her, but she had done a good job of covering her tracks.

Raphael let go of the threads. “Andrea?”

I was holding Michelle Carver’s child in my hands.

I let go of the boy. He slid to the ground.

“Andrea?” All blood drained from Michelle’s face. “Andrea Nash?”

She backed away from me.

Raphael started toward me.

“Do you know what she is?” A hysterical note vibrated in Michelle’s voice. “She’s beastkin.”

The world suddenly became very simple. I moved. Her mate tried to stand in my way. I backhanded him, and he went flying. I grabbed Michelle by her throat and drove her into the wall, pinning her in place. My arm had fur, and my hand had claws, and Michelle’s blood squirting under her skin through her jugular tickled my fingers.

“Tell me again what I am.” I smashed the back of her head into the brick. “Tell me again.”

Michelle croaked in my grip. She made no move to shift. She had no warrior form. She was never the strongest. No, she just liked to yip on the sidelines, picking on someone weaker out of fear. It changed nothing.

“This woman did something bad to you?” Roman asked.

“This woman tortured me and my mother.”

Roman shrugged. “If you want to do her, do it quick. I’ll go watch the entrance for you.”

He was gone. All that was left was me and Michelle’s pale, soft throat. The world was red. So, so red, and every time I exhaled, it was growing angrier and redder.

Raphael’s hand rested on my shoulder. He stroked me, firm fingers caressing my fur. “You have the right. It would feel good.”

It would feel great. He had no fucking idea how great it would be. I wanted to tell him that I finally caught her. I had told Raphael about her before. I wanted to tell him now how much I wanted to rip her apart, but all that came out was a snarl.

“I know you.” Raphael put his arms around me, his mouth close to my ear, his voice soothing. “If you kill her in front of
her children, it will haunt you for the rest of your life. Let go, babe. Let her go.”

No! No, she didn’t get to get away with this. No! Everybody else had paid, she would pay, too.

My injured arm hurt. The pain was so raw, so fresh.

She would pay. This weak, cruel waste of a human being. This piece of shit that tormented my childhood. She was the reason I’d woken up holding the fucking butcher knife. She was the reason Doolittle had had to take a saw to my arm. She would pay!

“Let her go, honey. Let her go, Andi. For your own sake. For me. For us.” Raphael kissed my fur just below my ear. “Let her go.”

I wanted to sink into the red. I wanted to see her blood on my hands. But his voice held me back.

“Stand down,” he said. “Her children are watching. Stand down, honey.”

I heard a tiny high-pitched sound, wailing at my side, and I realized it was the little boy bawling in hysterical fear. His sister sobbed.

“You are better than this, Andi. Do the right thing. Walk away.”

As I forced my fingers open, all the pain of my memories and all my frustration tore out of me in a sharp short scream. I spun and walked away, to the other wall, as far away from her as I could.

“She’s beastkin,” Michelle breathed out. “She’s—”

“She’s the clan beta and my mate,” Raphael said.

Michelle staggered back as if he had hit her.

Raphael’s eyes were two burning pools of blood-red fire. “Your application to the clan is denied. Gather your family and leave. If you’re in my territory by sundown, I’ll hunt you down and drag you before the clans to be tried for torture, abuse of a child, and whatever other charges our lawyers will level against you. You will be found guilty, you will suffer, and you will be executed. Your children will become the wards of the Pack and they’ll loathe your name by the time they grow up.”

Michelle picked up the prone body of her husband. Her daughter grabbed the boy and they ran out.

Raphael walked to me and wrapped his arms around me.

My anger broke out in tortured sobs. Tears wet my eyes. “I had her.”

“I know.”

“In my hands.”

“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you, I’m proud of you. It was the right thing.”

“No!” I couldn’t stop crying. I wasn’t sad, I just couldn’t contain it. “She should be dead. That would be the right thing.”

“For her, but not for you. It would eat you alive. It’s not who you are.”

I crumpled down on the ground and cried. I’d learned not to cry back then, because the more I cried, the more excited they would get, but I could cry now. Nobody would stop me, and so I sat there and let it all pour out, while Raphael held me and whispered calm, loving nonsense into my ears.

I could not kill Michelle. I couldn’t scar her children the way she had scarred me. But I could join the Pack and make sure that no other little girl had to face my choices. No other little bouda would be hiding, scared and alone, dreading to be found and abused again. Not on my watch. Not as long as I breathed.

Gradually my sobs died down. We sat together, Raphael and I.

“For the record, I had him,” Raphael said. I could tell by his voice he was baiting me. There was comfort in the familiar needling, and right now I desperately needed it.

“Didn’t look that way from where I stood. He had you all wrapped up.”

“That’s what you think,” he said.

“That is what I think.”

“Handling that purple carpet must’ve done some permanent damage,” Raphael said.

“To you.”

He leaned over and murmured, “I’m not the one with purple stains on my butt.”

Oh, it’s like this, then? “Would you like to be?”

He grinned and nodded.

“Maybe you needed backup to help you with Roman,” I told him.

“I don’t need backup. I can take him with one hand tied behind my back.”

“He had one hand tied behind your back.”

“Maybe it looked like that from where you were sitting…”

That’s how Jim’s messenger found us, sitting on the ground, bickering and flirting. Jim’s teams had returned from the Warren, the poor neighborhood by White Street, and they had brought information about Gloria back with them.

I sat at a large conference table filled with food and reports. Jim sat across from me, and Chandra, Clan Jackal’s designated expert on ancient Egypt, sat to my left. Between us teetered small mountains of paperwork—all of the information Jim’s team had squeezed out of the inhabitants of the Warren. Derek joined us after the first fifteen minutes. We were looking for clues. Somewhere at this very moment, Gloria’s associates were preparing to raise Apep from the dead. We needed to know where that location could be, and Gloria was our only link.

We’d been at it for hours. So far I had made two piles: a big pile of stuff I’d gone through and didn’t consider relevant, and a very tiny pile of paper that might be something. I’d covered half a legal pad in notes. I was hungry again. The lunch hour came and went without us finding a smoking gun.

“It would be nice if there was a map,” Chandra said. “With a town circled on it.”

“And a note that said ‘Secret Hideout Here’?” Derek added.

I scrutinized the paper in front of me. Gloria had used a private shipping service, which was faster and more reliable than the post office, but which also forced their customers to declare the exact contents of their packages. In the event your package decided to sprout tentacles when the magic hit, they wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.

This particular operative, whose name was Douglas, had tracked down the shipping company Gloria used and offered their rep an outrageous bribe for the manifest of everything delivered to Gloria’s doorstep. Handmade soap, thirty bucks a bar. Expensive perfume. Pricy bath salts. Someone was living high.

Doolittle walked through the door. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I’m saving the world,” I told him.

Doolittle looked mournful. “I’ll make us some hot chocolate.”

I went down the list of deliveries: books, blah-blah, more soap, antimosquito cream. Hmm. Georgia was in the grip of a drought. I hadn’t seen a mosquito in ages.

“Mosquito cream,” I said.

Derek raised his pen. “Boots. She went down to Carlos’s Footwear and got herself a pair of rubber boots two days before you killed her. Some kids from the Warren nagged her for change and she told them to piss off.”

Fatal mistake. Never upset the street kids.

“So we have water,” Jim said.

“In the original myth, Apep lived in the river,” Chandra said.

“Could he be somewhere in the Chattahoochee?” Derek asked.

“No.” Jim tapped the paper. “Too risky. The Chattahoochee is too shallow and too well patrolled. Half of the city’s shipping comes through it. The army would napalm a giant snake the moment they saw it.”

“So we either have lakes in the north or…” Derek pulled out a map. “Or the Suwanee.”

“The Suwanee River would work,” Jim said. “It’s deep and black water.”

I dug through the manifests. “She put in an order with the teamsters for a large crate shipment to be shipped a couple of weeks ago. Supposedly glassware. It’s going to…Waycross.”

“Waycross, Georgia?” Jim asked.

“Yep.”

“That’s right on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp,” Derek said.

“There are also crate orders for Augusta and Tallahassee,” I said.

“We need a confirmation.” Jim dug through his papers.

Derek and I burrowed into our stacks.

“Pontoon!” Derek announced twenty minutes later. “She bought a pontoon boat.”

“When?” I looked through my notes on the shipping records.

“On the fourteenth. Took it off the lot.”

“She shipped a large crate of antiques down to Folkston on the fifteenth. Where is Folkston?”

“The east edge of the Okefenokee.” Jim rose. “We got her.”

“You can’t be involved,” I reminded him.

“No, we can’t help you fight,” Jim said. “There is a difference. Nobody says we can’t scout the swamp and mark the way for you. You won’t go in blind.”

“I’ll get on the phone,” Derek said.

They left the room.

Doolittle put a cup of hot chocolate in front of me. “Drink this before you go.”

I sipped it. It had to be half sugar. “It’s delicious.”

Doolittle patted my arm. “It’s good for you. A little sugar goes a long way.”

Little, huh?

“Thank you,” I told him. “You were always kind to me. Not many people are. I will never forget it.”

“You are coming back.” Doolittle fixed me with his stare.

“Sure.” I got up and hugged him.

Raphael, Roman, and I rode the ley line out of Atlanta. The magic current ran whether the magic was up or down, but when tech ruled, like it did now, the ley line speed dropped to a mere forty miles per hour. It took us several hours to get there. The magic finally spat us and our cargo out right between Waycross and Folkston into the open arms of a shapeshifter woman with a Pack Jeep. She was short, dark-haired, and had a sprinkling of freckles on her nose.

“Here is your ride.” She held out the keys. Raphael took them. “Go down that road, take the right fork, then the second left. You’ll come to the pier. There are two pontoon boats there. Take them. The way through the swamp is marked with strips of white fabric. Good luck.”

She walked away.

We loaded the cargo into the Jeep, and me and my Heckler & Koch UMP submachine gun called shotgun. Roman crawled into the backseat.

Twenty minutes later we pulled up before the wooden pier. In front of us a narrow channel curved into the green wall of trees and underbrush. Two pontoon boats floated on the water the color of black tea.

A crate sat on the pier. On the side someone had written in black marker, “A present from Uncle Jim.”

Raphael pulled the top off the crate. Pixilated ACUs—Army Combat Uniforms—in lovely randomized patterns of greens and browns, perfect for the swamp.

“I like this uncle.” I found the shortest set and stripped off my jeans.

Roman opened his eyes wide, as if he had never seen a woman in underwear before.

Raphael threw a set at him. “Don’t just stand there.”

“You want me to wear these?” Roman looked at the ACUs and put his hand over his chest, as if protecting his black robe. “That’s not right.”

“You have a problem with pants?” Raphael asked.

Roman pulled his robe apart, revealing a pair of black jeans underneath. “I always wear my pants. I just don’t want to deal with that retarded outfit. I don’t even know how to put it on.”