I caught the familiar scuttling sound behind me, coming from the master bedroom.
“I thought the Order didn’t allow shapeshifters.”
“They don’t. When they figured me out, they fired me.”
The scuttling chased us.
“That’s bullshit right there.” Mr. Haffey shook his head. “And discrimination. You talk to your union rep?”
“Yes, I did. I fought it as long as I could. Anyway, they retired me with full pension. I can’t appeal.”
Mr. Haffey gave me an appraising look. “You took it?”
“Nope. Told them to shove it.”
I dropped him to the floor as gently as I could and spun, shotgun ready.
A huge pale insect lunged at us. I pumped two slugs into it and it thrashed on the floor. I gathered Mr. Haffey up and double-timed it to the door.
“Listen, most of my contacts have retired, but a few of us have kids in the department. If you need a job, I can probably fix up something. The PAD will be glad to have you. You’re a hell of a shot. Shouldn’t let that go to waste.”
“Much appreciated.” I smiled. “But I’ve got a job. I work for a business. My best friend owns it.” I started up the stairs.
“What sort of business?”
“Magic hazmat removal. Protection. That type of thing.”
Mr. Haffey opened his eyes. “Private cop? You went private?”
That’s cop mentality for you. I tell him I’m a shapeshifter and he doesn’t blink an eye. But private cop, oh no, that’s not okay.
“So how’s business?” Mr. Haffey squinted at me.
“Business is fine.” If by fine, one meant lousy. Between Kate Daniels and me, we had a wealth of skills, a small sea of experience, and enough smears on our reputation to kill a dozen careers. All of our clients were desperate, because by the time they came to us, everybody else had turned them down.
“What does your man think about that?”
Raphael Medrano. The memory of him was so raw, I could conjure his scent by just thinking about him. The strong male healthy scent that drove me crazy…
“It didn’t work out,” I said.
Mr. Haffey shifted, uncomfortable. “You need to drop that silliness and get back in uniform. We’re talking retirement, benefits, advance in rank and pay…”
I ran up to my door. “Mrs. Haffey!”
The door swung open. Mrs. Haffey’s face went slack. “Oh my God, Darin. Oh God.”
In the distance the familiar sirens blared.
The cavalry arrived with guns and in large numbers. They loaded Mr. Haffey into an ambulance, thanked me for my help, and told me that since I was a civilian, I needed to keep the hell out of their way. I didn’t mind. I’d killed most of what was down there and they had gotten all dressed up and gone through the trouble of bringing flamethrowers. It was only fair to let them have some fun.
I tended the cut on my leg. There wasn’t much to do about it. Lyc-V, the virus responsible for shapeshifters’ existence, repaired injuries at an accelerated rate, and by the time I got to it, the gash had sealed itself. In a couple of days, the leg would be like new, without scars. Some Lyc-V gifts were useful. Some, like berserker rage, I could live without.
I was scrubbing the bug juice off my face with my makeup removal washcloth, when the phone rang. I wiped the soap off my face and sprinted into the kitchen to pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Nash?” a smooth voice said into the phone.
The smooth voice belonged to Jim, a werejaguar and the Pack’s security chief. He usually went by Jim Black, if you didn’t know him well. I’d dug through his background during my tenure with the Order. His real name was James Damael Shrapshire, a fact I kept to myself, since he didn’t advertise it.
Atlanta’s Shapeshifter Pack was the strongest in the nation, and my relationship with it was complicated. But the Pack backed Cutting Edge, the business Kate owned and for which I now worked. They had supplied the seed money and they were our first priority client.
“Hey, Jim. What can I do for you?” Jim wasn’t a bad guy. Paranoid and secretive, but then cats were odd creatures.
“One of our businesses got hit last night,” Jim said. “Four people are dead.”
Someone obviously had a death wish and that someone wasn’t very bright, because there were much easier ways of committing suicide. The Pack took care of their own and if you hurt their own, they made it a point to take care of you. “Anybody I know?”
“No. Two jackals, a bouda, and a fox from Clan Nimble. I need you to go down there and check it out.”
I headed into the bedroom. “No problem. But why me?”
Jim sighed into the phone. “Andrea, how many years did you spend as a knight?”
“Eight.” I began pulling my clothes onto the bed: socks, work boots, jeans…
“How many of those did you spend on active cases?”
“Seven.” I added a box of ammo to the clothes pile on the bed.
“That’s why. You’re the most experienced investigator I’ve got who’s not tied up in something, and I can’t ask the Consort to look into it, because A) she and Curran are working on something else and B) when the Consort gets involved, half of the world blows up.”
Kate the Consort. The title still made me grin. Every time someone used it, she got this martyred look on her face.
“This mess looks to be complicated and the cops are in up to their elbows. I need you to go down there and untangle it.”
Finally. Something I could actually sink my teeth into.
I held the phone between my shoulder and my ear and took a pencil and a notepad off the nightstand. “You’ve got an address?”
“Fourteen-twelve Griffin.”
Griffin Street ran through SoNo, one of the former financial districts, sandwiched between Midtown and Downtown. The name came from “South of North Avenue.” It was a bad, unstable area, with old office buildings crashing down left and right.
“What were the shapeshifters doing there?”
“Working,” Jim said. “It’s a reclamation site.”
Reclamations. Oh no. No. He wouldn’t do that to me. I kept my voice even. “Who was in charge of the site?”
Please don’t be Raphael, please don’t be Raphael, please don’t…
“Medrano Reclamations,” Jim said.
Damn it.
“Raphael is being questioned by some cops, but I’ve sent some lawyers down to make sure they don’t keep him. He’ll join you as soon as they spring him out of there. Look, I know things aren’t good between you and Raphael, but we all have to do things we don’t want to do.”
“Jim,” I cut him off. “I’ve got it. A job is a job. I’m on it.”
CHAPTER 2
It took me forty-five minutes to make my way through the twisted wreck of the city to SoNo. The magic had really done a number on Atlanta. Downtown had suffered the most, but both Midtown and Buckhead had taken a beating. Once-stately skyscrapers lay in ruins, like the gravestones of human hopes, toppled on their sides. Overpasses crumbled into dust and new wooden bridges spanned the asphalt canyons. Debris choked the streets. Atlanta was still alive and kicking and the city was rebuilding little by little, but the sheer weight and volume of the fallen concrete made it problematic. I had to make a wide circle north around the wreckage.
On the corner of Monroe and 10th Street, something fluorescent had exploded, drenching the walls of the new houses in electric orange that smelled like day-old vomit. The city Biohazard crew narrowed the traffic to a single lane guarded by two guys with stop signs, who let the vehicles and riders through a few at a time, while the rest of the Biohazard team washed the orange pus down with fire hoses.
Around me, the morning traffic neighed, brayed, and defecated on the street. Gasoline vehicles failed during magic. My Jeep had two engines, one gas and the other enchanted water, so even when technology was down, my car still got me where I needed to go, reliably but not very fast. Buying a reconditioned car like mine was expensive, so most people opted for horses, camels, and mules. They worked whenever. They just didn’t smell very good. It was the middle of May, and a hot one at that, and the reek rising from the pavement would have sent anyone running for cover.
To my left a man atop a white horse leveled a crossbow at the stop sign. The string twanged and a bolt punched through metal, right into the O. Bull’s-eye.
The Biohazard guy thrust the injured sign against the Biohazard service truck, pulled a shotgun from the truck bed, and leveled it at the crossbowman.
“Make my day, bitch! Make my day!”
“Fuck you and your sign!”
“Hey,” a woman yelled. “There are children here!”
“Piss off!” the rider told her and pointed the crossbow at the Biohazard dude. “Let me through.”
“No. Wait your turn like everybody else.”
I could tell by their faces that neither of them would shoot. They’d just talk shit and waste everyone’s time and as long as the Biohazard guy bickered with the moron on the horse, he wasn’t waving the traffic through. At this rate I would never make it to my crime scene.
“Hey, dickhead!” one of the other drivers yelled. “Get off the road!”
“This here is a Falcon Seven,” the rider told him. “I can put a bolt through your windshield and pin you to your seat like a bug.”
A direct threat, huh? Okay.
I pulled down my sunglasses a bit so the rider would see my eyes. “That’s a nice crossbow.”
He glanced in my direction. He saw a friendly blond girl with a big smile and a light Texas accent and didn’t get alarmed.
“You’ve got what, a seventy-five-pound draw on it? Takes you about four seconds to reload?”
“Three,” he said.
I gave him my Order smile: sweet grin, hard eyes, reached over to my passenger seat, and pulled out my submachine gun. About twenty-seven inches long, the HK was my favorite toy for close-quarters combat. The rider’s eyes went wide.