Ilona Andrews: Gunmetal Magic

“Went down with his ship?” The stench of decomposition was getting stronger, clinging to the walls of the tunnel like a foul patina.

“Yep. Jamar was a weird guy, apparently.”

“Only poor people are weird. Rich people are eccentric.”

Stefan cracked a grin. “Well, Jamar owned a huge art collection and he had some interesting ideas. For one, he had a Roman-style marble bathhouse on the second floor.”

“So you’re after the marble?” I asked.

“Screw the marble. We’re after the copper plumbing. The whole structure had old-school copper pipes. Copper prices are through the roof right now. Even copper wiring is expensive. Of course, if you smelt the plastic off of it, it’s worth twice as much, but we won’t be doing that. The smoke is toxic as hell, even for us. There is steel, too, but the copper is the real prize. That’s why Raphael bought the building.”

“He bought the building?” A few months ago when Raphael and I were together, he mostly did work for hire: the owners of various buildings would employ him to reclaim the valuables for a percentage of anything he recovered.

Stefan grinned. “We can do that now. Playing with the big boys.”

The tunnel kept going, lower and lower, burrowing down.

“Why dig so deep under the building? Why not come from the side?”

“The Heron is a toppler,” Stefan said. “It went over right above the sixth floor. And it never caught fire.”

Magic took buildings down in different ways. Sometimes the entire inner structure collapsed and the building imploded in a fountain of dust. More often, the magic weakened parts of the building, causing a partial collapse until the whole thing crashed, toppling on its side. Topplers were valuable, especially if they didn’t catch fire, because anything underground had a decent chance of surviving.

“We were trying to get into the basement,” Stefan confirmed. “There are fire-suppression and heating systems down there, generators, access to both freight and regular elevator shafts—that’s a lot of metal right there. And you never know, sometimes you can get computer servers out. Stranger things have survived a fallen building. Here we are.”

Ahead the passageway widened. Stefan flicked the switch and the twin lamps in the ceiling flared into life. We stood in a round chamber, about twenty-five feet wide. Four bodies lay on the dirt floor, two men and two women. At the far wall, a six-foot-tall disk of metal thrust out, revealing a round tunnel filled with darkness—a vault door left ajar.

“A vault?”

Stefan grimaced. “It wasn’t on any of the blueprints and none of the building-related correspondence we had access to mentioned it. We were merrily digging our way up and ran into it last night. We screwed around with the door for about an hour, but we didn’t have the right tools for it, so Raphael posted two guards here and two by the entrance, and we cleared out. A locksmith was supposed to come in this morning and open the sucker. Instead we found this.”

Four people dead, sprawled in the dirt. Last night they had hugged their loved ones before going on their shift. They had made plans. This morning they were my responsibility. Life was a vicious bitch.

“Okay, let me see the log.”

“The what?”

“The crime scene log? The record of who’s been down here and at what time?”

Stefan gave me a blank look.

“Eh…”

God damn it. I took a small notebook and a pen out of my vest pocket and kept my voice friendly. “I tell you what, we’ll start one. Here, I’ll be the first.”

I marked the date at the top of the page and wrote: “Andrea Nash. Time In: 8:12 a.m. Time out: ___________. Purpose: Investigation.” I signed it and passed the notebook and the pen to him.

“Now you write yourself in. When people come to pick up the bodies, you make them write themselves in, too. We need to keep a record of who comes and goes down here.”

I set my crime scene bag on the side, opened it, took out gloves and put them on. Next came the Polaroid Instant Digital camera and a stack of paper envelopes for crime scene photos and evidence. Other cameras took better pictures, but magic played havoc with digital data. Sometimes you’d get crystal-clear high-definition images, and sometimes you’d end up with a blurred gray mess or nothing at all. Polaroid Instant Digital cameras produced photos faster than anything else on the market and stored the image digitally as a bonus. It was as close to an instant record of evidence as we could get.

“Have the bodies been moved at all?”

Stefan shrugged his shoulders. “Sylvia found them, she checked their pulses, examined the vault to see that nobody was there, and backed right out of the dig. We know the drill.”

If they knew the drill, they would’ve kept a log. “Where is Sylvia now?”

“With Raphael, being hassled by the cops.”

In legal terms, the Pack had similar rights to a Native American tribe, with the ability to govern itself and enforce its own laws. If a shapeshifter died in the Pack’s territory, it was a Pack matter. These shapeshifters had died within city limits, and the PAD wanted in on the action. They weren’t exactly shapeshifter fans, with a good reason.

We lived in the gray zone between beast and human. Those of us who wanted to remain human lived by the Code, a set of strict rules. The Code was all about discipline and moderation and obeying the chain of command. Sometimes the human brakes failed, and a shapeshifter threw the Code out the window and went loup. Loups were sadistic, murderous freaks. They reveled in killing, cannibalism, and every other violent perversity their insane brains could think up. The Pack put them down with extreme prejudice, but that didn’t keep the PAD from viewing every shapeshifter as a potential spree killer. Whenever a shapeshifter murder occurred in the city, they tried to muscle in on it.

Not that they would accomplish anything. The Pack’s lawyers were ravenous beasts.

I crouched by the nearest body and aimed the camera. The flash flared, searing the scene with white light for a fraction of a moment. The camera purred, printing out the image. I pulled it out and waved it a bit to dry, before sliding it into a paper envelope.

The dead man appeared to be in his late fifties. Shapeshifters aged well, so he could’ve been in his seventies, for all I knew. The skin on his forehead was olive, a warm shade particular to those from the Indian subcontinent. That was the only patch of exposed skin left undamaged. Large blisters swelled everywhere else on his cheeks, neck, and arms, the skin peeling up from muscle, stretched taut and completely black.

Another Polaroid.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Stefan said.

I had. “Has the ME been through here?”

“Yeah. But we chased them off.”

That’s right, even if Pack members died outside of the Pack’s territory, the Pack still had the right to claim their bodies. And technically the building was Pack property, since Raphael had bought it. I should’ve remembered that. Getting rusty, Ms. Nash. Getting rusty.

I handed him the Polaroid camera. “Could you hold on to this for a second?”

He took the camera. I pulled a knife from my belt and sliced the man’s shirt straight down his chest. The thin fabric parted easily. I made a cut through each sleeve and gently turned the body on its side. A large swelling marked the top of the left shoulder, just above the clavicle. I flicked the knife across the bottom edge of the blister. Body fluids gushed out, black and streaked with blood. The stench hit me instantly, the foul, putrid reek of rotten flesh.

Stefan cursed and spun away.

“If you’re going to puke, kindly do it in the tunnel.”