Gunmetal Magic (kate daniels) Page 12

  After an hour at Deasia’s, I’d tried all of the usual suspects: teal, peach, blue…I even tried a chartreuse, which made me look like a barrel dyed in pea soup. Things that should have looked good on me, because they always had, suddenly didn’t.

  Deasia examined me with the critical eye honed by thirty years of fashion experience. “What is the dress for?”

  “For a formal birthday party at a millionaire’s house.” And I had to look presentable enough to get through the door.

  “Who’s escorting you?”

  “My ex-boyfriend.”

  Deasia’s eyebrows rose. “Ah. Mystery solved. Has he moved on?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to make an impression?”

  “I want to knock his socks off. I want him to see that I’m just fine on my own. I want to be vibrant.”

  “Vibrant or shocking?” Deasia asked.

  “I’ll take shocking.”

  “Wait here.”

  She disappeared between the racks of clothes. I surveyed my latest attempt. A violet, high-waisted number should have been flattering, but it wasn’t. My face had changed, too. I used to be able to pull off fresh and even sweet. The woman who looked at me now looked good in a duster and a pair of guns. Draping pretty purple fabric on me was like coating a razor blade in a Skittles candy shell.

  Deasia reappeared, carrying a hanger with something black and lacy.

  “I appreciate it, but black is not me,” I said. “It washes me out.”

  Deasia fixed a junkyard dog stare on me. “Try it.”

  I took the dress and went to the dressing room. I took the purple monstrosity off and pulled the black dress off the hanger. Black lace over black fabric. Not me. I slipped the black dress on, stepped out, and looked into the three-paneled full-length mirror.

  The black dress hugged me like a glove, stopping about three inches above my knee. Solid black below the waist, the asymmetric gown climbed up diagonally across my chest, over my left shoulder. The left side had a tiny sleeve, but the right shoulder was shockingly bare. A long serpentine shape of a Chinese dragon was cut into the black fabric of the dress. Its head rested on the left side of my chest, its long body slithering between my breasts, just a hair too narrow to be indecent, curving to the right, and sliding down my right thigh. Black, jagged lace overlaid the dragon’s outline, its pattern mimicking the dragon’s scales, giving a sexy glimpse of my bare skin. A single red stone marked the dragon’s eye and as I turned, it shone with the pure ruby glow of a bouda’s eyes.

  Black had never been my color, but it was today.

  Deasia set a pair of black pumps in front of me. I stepped into them, picking up four inches of height.

  Holy shit. I looked aggressive. “This is an evil dress.”

  “Evil can be beautiful,” Deasia said. “Don’t over-accessorize. Pair of earrings, nothing too large, and maybe a bracelet. That’s it. Oh, and this dress calls for a red mouth, Andrea. Scarlet red.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Of course you will. Knock him dead.”

  Raphael wouldn’t know what hit him. Neither would Anapa. And if any evidence of Anapa’s connection to the deaths of the shapeshifters existed, I would do my best to find it.

  When I walked into Cutting Edge’s offices, a man was sitting in my client chair. He was bent over, doing something with his feet, and as he turned his head at my approach, I saw a car seat. A baby lay in it, a little spot of white and pink against the green fabric patterned with cartoon dinosaurs. The man’s face seemed familiar. It took me a second, and then I placed it. Nick Moreau.

  The last time I’d seen him, in June, he’d looked ten years younger. The man who sat in front of me now seemed old and tired, and when he gazed at me, his eyes were devoid of life, as if they had been covered with ash.

  “I told him you were out,” Ascanio said, from the storeroom doorway. “He said he didn’t mind waiting.”

  I sat in the other chair next to Nick. He ran his hand through his light brown hair.

  “That’s my son,” he said.

  “He’s beautiful,” I told him.

  “Would you like to hold him?”

  “May I?”

  Nick picked the baby up and put him in my arms. Baby Rory looked at me with dark gray eyes, puzzled and fascinated, his mouth slightly open. He was nearly bald, his hair a soft peach fuzz on his head. His eyelashes were a happy, sunny blond.

  So tiny. Such a fragile little life.

  “Hey there,” I whispered.

  Baby Rory looked at me and I could see no fear in his eyes. No sadness, no bitterness, nothing jaded. The world was a big wonderful toy and Baby Rory had no idea how badly it had hurt him. I wanted to wrap him in my arms and make it all be okay. I wanted to give him his mother back.

  “He’s beautiful,” I told Nick again.

  “His mother was, too,” he said. “He can’t even talk. He’ll never remember her.”

  Baby Rory cooed and I hugged him to me, gently. How do you tell a baby his mother died? How do you even begin to explain why?

  Nick reached inside his jacket, took out his wallet, and handed me a photograph. On it a woman smiled. Her hair was a mass of cinnamon curls around her face. Here was a pretty girl with freckles on her nose. Her file said she was twenty-six, only two years younger than me. She’d had no idea, but Rianna Moreau had been living my dream. She had a husband who loved her without reservation. She had a fulfilling job she loved. She had Baby Rory. They were a family together and their future looked bright until some asshole came over and robbed them of it.

  Nick’s eyes watered. He squeezed his hand into a fist. “He won’t know that she was kind. He’ll know that she loved him because I’ll tell him, but he will never feel that love. My son is barely born, and his life is already broken.”

  I wished I could say something, but nothing that would come out of my mouth would make his loss easier to bear.

  Baby Rory made little noises, oblivious to his father’s grief.

  “I’ll never see my wife again.” Nick’s voice faltered. He pulled himself back. “I want you to understand. I want you to know what they took from me. To me, she was everything. I can’t even say her name anymore.”

  I reached over and rested my fingers on his clenched fist.

  “Raphael said you’re the best. He said you would find them.” Nick’s gaze searched my face. If only I had the right words…

  “You’re a carpenter,” I said. “You build beautiful things because that’s what you do. Investigation is what I do. I live it and breathe it, I’m trained for it, and I’m damn good at it. Your wife is not a name on the report, Nick. You and your son, you aren’t some meaningless statistic. Rianna is real, and so are the two of you. I know what you had and I know what it’s like to lose it. I understand.”

  I saw the split second when Nick broke down: something in his eyes snapped, the line of his mouth sagged, and he cried. I set Rory back into his car seat and hugged Nick. He shuddered in my arms, not sobbing but spasming, as if the pain inside him was breaking out in short bursts.

  “I can’t promise you success,” I told him, patting his back. “But I promise you I won’t stop looking. I’ll never stop looking. I’ll do everything I can to get you and your son your answers and your justice.”

  In the corner Ascanio stared at us, his eyes freaked out.

  Nick shook, rigid, his voice a low guttural growl with bits and pieces of words coming through. “…Take her from me…”

  “I promise you that when I find them, they will suffer,” I told him. “It won’t bring your wife back, but when we’re done with them, they will never rob anyone else of their life again. You must stay strong, Nick. You must be strong for your son. He still has a father, a tough, fierce father who loves him, who will be there for him.”

  Gradually the shudders stopped. Nick pulled away from me, suddenly, as if just realizing that he had been crying. He picked up the child carrier. Baby Rory yaw
ned.

  “You’ll tell me when you know?” Nick asked.

  “I will.”

  He went out the door. I slumped in my chair.

  Ascanio came over and sat on my desk. “Man, that was heavy.”

  “That’s the other half of the job,” I told him. “You are accountable to the victims of the crime you’re investigating. You accept responsibility for it. They place their trust in you and they expect you to bring them justice. You must never forget that it’s about people. It’s about suffering and loss.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Congratulations—you’re catching on.”

  He frowned. “But I thought you were supposed to be detached. So it’s not personal.”

  I sighed. “You can’t let it get to you, because you still need to focus. You need some distance to be objective. But it’s personal. It’s always personal. You can’t ever forget that there are people involved. You also can’t let your compassion for the wronged cloud your judgment, because there are more important things at stake than getting Nick his vengeance.”

  Ascanio studied me. “What can be more important than that?”

  “Making sure that the guilty never do it again. The people who killed Rianna and the other shapeshifters broke the most sacred of laws—they murdered. Since they did it once, they will probably do it again. First and foremost, we have to make sure we keep them from destroying another life.”

  Ascanio pondered it. “Nick doesn’t see it this way.”

  “Nick doesn’t need to. It’s our job to worry about that, not his.”

  “I think he wanted you to tell him you would find the killer and solve the whole thing.”

  “Yes he did.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because I don’t make promises I can’t keep. Now get off my desk and bring me Doolittle’s report.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The good doctor’s report confirmed what I’d already known: the four shapeshifters, including Nick’s wife, had died of snake poison. I had noted four different bite sizes on the bodies and Doolittle had found one more, which meant five sets of fangs and probably five assailants, unless our killer was a hydra. Or a gorgon. Not that anyone had ever seen a gorgon, but you never knew what fun atrocities magic would commit next.

  The snakes were some sort of vipers, and based on Doolittle’s learned opinion, the largest bite belonged to something with a head the size of a coconut and its poison was lethal to humans in tiny doses and shapeshifters in slightly larger ones. Besides the official report, the envelope contained a small scrap of paper that said, “If you find it, call me immediately. Do not attempt to confront the snake.”

  I wouldn’t confront it. I would shoot it. Repeatedly.

  Jim had run the fingerprints I took off the vault’s door through the database. Out of eight sets, seven belonged to Raphael’s crew. The eighth was a mystery. None of the databases had any hits.

  The trace analysis wasn’t much better. No smoking guns.

  I sifted through the files. Raphael’s crew was a tight-knit bunch, all Clan Bouda and their relatives. Family men and women, they stuck together. They visited the same places, they went to the same barbecues, and they babysat each other’s children. Raphael was very selective in his hiring habits and he hadn’t hired anyone new for eleven months, long before the Heron Building ever came on sale.

  Of the fourteen people currently on the crew, six were mated, with both husband and wife working for Medrano Reclamations; three others were mated to someone else; two were children of other members of the crew; and the three remaining shapeshifters had worked with Raphael for years. They led quiet lives—they worked, they came home, they spent time with their kids.

  Jim’s background check had found zip. This type of environment didn’t exactly provide fertile ground for secret sins. Nobody was a degenerate gambler. Nobody borrowed money from unsavory sources. Nobody seemed to have room in their lives for blackmail, murder, and torrid affairs. And if an affair had occurred, their biggest worry would’ve been their bouda spouses. Boudas were wild until they mated, but once the mating occurred, they went right into possessive, fiercely jealous territory. And their scandals were notoriously public. We loved drama.

  I called around to the local MSDU to a buddy of mine. During my time with the Order, Ted had loaned me to the military a couple of times, and I had earned enough respect there to cash in a favor or two. Lena, my MSDU contact, ran a quick check on Anapa’s criminal history for me. He had none. Either both he and his corporation were disgustingly law-abiding or he knew how to cover his tracks.

  Finally I looked up and nodded at Ascanio. “Get your gear.”

  He grabbed his knife. “Where are we going?”

  “To the library.”

  His enthusiasm visibly deflated and he emitted a tragic sigh. “But ‘library’ and ‘kick-ass’ are two concepts that don’t usually go together.”

  “That’s the nature of the business. Five percent of the time you are killing monsters. The rest of the time, we’re digging through the dirt for a tiny piece of the perpetrator’s pubic hair.”

  “Ugh.”

  I was fighting on two fronts. One, he was a fifteen-year-old boy equipped with the body of a monster and flooded with hormones. He was desperate for an opportunity to let some steam out. Two, he was a bouda. We were an easily bored species. In nature hyenas relied on sight more than scent in their hunting. We didn’t do dogged wolflike pursuit, we didn’t travel single file, and we didn’t typically track. Following the trail of breadcrumbs went against Ascanio’s natural instinct. But as I’ve pointed out to him before, the human part of him was doing the driving. I would prevail.

  “You can always stay here and practice broom drills.”

  “No, thank you,” he said and produced a dazzling smile. The kid was something else. “May I drive?”

  “Yes, you may.” I had to give him something as a consolation prize.

  We locked the office and went on our way.

  “So why are we going to the library?” Ascanio asked.

  I leaned back against my seat. “Don’t take Magnolia. Take Redberry instead.”

  “Why?”

  “Redberry has some sort of weird yellow vines growing on the buildings. I want to check it out. To answer your question, we are going to the library because it’s the only place accessible to the public where we can tap into the Library of Alexandria project.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Years ago—before you were born—people had access to a network of data called the Internet. If you needed an address, for example, you could type it into your computer and it would pop right up, with directions of how to get there. If you needed to look up something like the boiling point of hydrochloric acid, you could do that. Instant knowledge at your fingertips.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria’s library was said to contain all human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground. Since the tech is up, we’re going to dig through that database.”

  “What are we digging for?”

  “Facts. Let’s look at what we have. First, Raphael buys a highly contested building, leaving all other bidders in the dust. Then Raphael’s crew finds a secret vault that wasn’t in any of the documents they had. Someone went to Raphael’s site, attacked the shapeshifters guarding it, and opened the vault. Then they left the site, leaving most of the vault’s contents untouched. What does that tell you?”

  Ascanio frowned. “It wasn’t random.”

  “Right. There are easier places to rob and a guarded tunnel isn’t like a bank. It doesn’t automatically look like something valuable is hidden in it. Also a random robber would
’ve emptied the vault.”

  Ascanio looked at me. “So the thief had to know about the vault and what was in it.”

  There was hope for him yet. “Exactly. We have two avenues of investigation: one, find out who knew about the vault and could’ve accessed it, and two?”

  “Find out what they were after,” Ascanio said.

  I smiled at him. “Good. We know that the building was owned by Jamar Groves. If the Blue Heron had a secret vault, Jamar had to know about it, because he was the one who had put it there. We know that Jamar Groves collected art and antiques. It’s logical to suppose that the secret vault contained Jamar’s personal stash. We also have the catalog of the vault’s contents, which I made at the scene. We’re going to search the archives for any mention of Jamar and his collection and compare it against the list of items in the vault.”

  Ascanio arranged his pretty face into a martyred expression.

  “The Central Library sits on the edge of Centennial Park,” I told him. Over the years the park had exploded in size, swallowing additional city blocks, and the library was one of its victims.

  “So?” Ascanio asked.

  “Centennial Park is owned by the witch covens. They provide security for the library, because it is a depository of knowledge.”

  Ascanio came alive. “Female witches?”

  “Most of them, yes. If you work hard, I’ll let you flirt.”

  The teenage bouda grinned.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “The witch girls are pretty pragmatic.”

  * * *

  Ever since the Shift, the moment when our slow apocalypse in progress began, the plants had decided it was time to wage full-on assault on all things human. Magic fueled the tree growth, and Centennial Park was a shining example of that. In the decade since the Shift the park had tripled in size, taking over the neighboring city blocks. Once the Atlanta witch covens had purchased it from the city as their meeting place, the park had stopped expanding sideways, directing all of its growth upward instead. As we drove up, a dense wall of green greeted us, the tree trunks bound together with thorny vines, as if a three-hundred-year-old forest had somehow sprouted in the middle of the city.