Gunmetal Magic (9 page)

Next to her Deb raised her arms. No warrior form, but she was good at boxing.

Carrie’s eyes stared at me, shining with ruby light. She outweighed me by a hundred pounds. She thought the fight was in the bag.

Inside my head, Michelle’s squeaky voice mocked from the depth of my memories,
“Hit her again, Candy. Hit that beastkin bitch. She deserves it.”

Never again.

Carrie charged me. She thundered across the pavement and lunged at me, swiping with her right arm diagonally and down, trying to gash my chest open. I leaned back. Her claws sliced through the air, an inch from my chest. I caught her wrist, yanked her massive arm straight and smashed the heel of my hand into the back of her elbow. The cartilage crunched, the joint popped, dislocated, and her arm bent the wrong way, its elbow inside out. Carrie howled and dropped to one knee, her right leg bent, her left almost flat on the ground. I stomped on that weak calf. I sank all the power of my hip and butt muscle into it. Like getting hit with a jackhammer. The leg didn’t stand a chance. Carrie screamed as the bone broke.

Deb bladed her body, standing sideways, trying to present less of a target. Her hands were up, curled into fists.

I took a step, spun, and hammered a roundhouse to the back of her thigh. My shin smashed into her leg. Her knee bent, her thigh suddenly powerless. She gasped, dropping her guard, and I turned, swinging into the punch, and landed a haymaker to the side of her head.

The blow took her off her feet. She flew, rolling, and smashed into the stone wall bordering the parking lot.

That’s right. No shapeshifter would ever beat on me again while I curled into a ball on the ground. Especially not a bouda.

Carrie sprawled facedown on the pavement, out cold. The pain must’ve been too much and Lyc-V had shut her down while it made repairs. Deb moaned weakly by the wall. Ascanio still stood by the door, his eyes opened wide, his face glazed over with shock and something suspiciously resembling admiration.

I walked over to Deb, grabbed her hair, and pulled her face up. She stared at me, her eyes terrified.

“Now you listen to me,” I said. “You tell the clan that I’ll come to see Aunt B when I’m damn good and ready. And if I catch any of you at my place of business or near my apartment, you will regret it.”

I let go of her and straightened. “Ascanio! I need that motor running.”

He ran to the Jeep and began to chant. Fifteen minutes later we drove out of the parking lot. As we turned, I saw Deb pick herself up and stagger over to Carrie. For better or worse, she would deliver my message. I was sure of it.

Bell Recovery was headquartered in a sturdy brick building on the edge of a large industrial yard on the southwest side of Atlanta, all ugly ruins surrounded by bright green growth. Nature waged a relentless assault on the city. People burned it and cut it, and still it came back, fed by magic and growing faster than ever.

Ascanio parked and didn’t bother shutting off the engine. It would take too much chanting to start it back up and considering the Pack’s paw stenciled on its door and the fact that I exited it flashing my claws and teeth, there wouldn’t be anyone dumb enough to try to steal it.

Ascanio and I marched through the front doors.

A harried receptionist raised her head from the papers on her desk and jumped a little in her seat. She was middle-aged and her hair had been dyed an unnaturally red color.

“Good morning,” I said, smiling.

She pushed her chair as far back as it would go.

“We’re here on behalf of the Pack to chat with Kyle Bell.”

“He’s on site,” the receptionist said. Her eyes told me she would answer any question just to get us out of her office.

“Where would that be?”

She swallowed. “The east end of Inman Yard.”

You don’t say.
“At the Glass Menagerie?”

The receptionist nodded. “Yes.”

“Thank you for your cooperation, ma’am.”

We headed back out to our Jeep.

“Kyle Bell is either really ballsy or really stupid. Probably both.”

“Why?” Ascanio asked.

“Because doing any sort of reclamation at the Glass
Menagerie is suicidal. Especially with the magic up. It’s also illegal. And now we have to drive through the Burnout to get there. I hate the Burnout. It’s depressing.”

We got back into our Jeep.

“Take the right, then another right. We need to get on Hollowell Parkway and make a left there.”

“What’s the Glass Menagerie?” Ascanio asked, steering the Jeep out of the parking lot.

As far as I knew the Glass Menagerie was off-limits to adventurous Pack persons below eighteen. For a good reason, too. “You’ll see.”

As the road climbed north, the landscape changed. The ruins of warehouses and the greenery remained behind. Around us old husks of burned-out houses crouched, accented by an occasional spot of green.

Being stuck holding the fort at the Order left me with a lot of free time, so I had read guidebooks and familiarized myself with the city maps. In my spare time I’d jogged through random Atlanta neighborhoods on the off chance I might have to visit them in my professional capacity. My guidebooks mentioned that years ago a devastating fire had swept through the western section of Atlanta, taking out the older residential neighborhoods north of 402. The fire had burned with an intense, unnatural orange and raged for almost a week despite heavy rains and many attempts to put it out. When it was finally over, the land had lost its ability to support plant life. In other parts of Atlanta, any spot of clear ground was immediately claimed by vegetation that grew like it was on steroids. The Burnout remained weed-free for a decade. The plants were finally coming back—kudzu draped a crumbling wall here and there and bright yellow dandelions and crimson bloody dandies, the dandelion’s magic-altered cousins, poked out between the fallen bricks.

A few months ago, during Indian summer, Raphael and I had a picnic under a giant oak in a field outside the city. I had always wanted to have one of those movie picnics with a red-and-white checkered cloth and a wicker basket. We ate take-out fried chicken, washed it down with root beer and cream soda, and lay about on our tablecloth. I had picked a bunch of dandelions and bloody dandies and made two flower crowns.

It seemed so stupid now. What the hell did I do that for? Like some besotted silly ten-year-old.

“Why didn’t you just fight Rebecca?” Ascanio asked. “You’d win.”

“Of course I would win. Even if she spat frag grenades and sweated bullets, I’d win. She’s a human. I’m a shapeshifter with ten years of combat experience and some of the best martial education you can get.”

“In nature you have to fight off your competition.”

In nature, huh?
I’d heard that one before. “In nature, hyena cubs are born with open eyes and a full set of teeth. They start fighting from the moment they come out of their mother. They dig tunnels in the den, too small for adults to get through, and they fight there. About a quarter of them don’t grow up. So if this was nature and you were a twin, you’d have to murder your newborn sister or brother. Should we dump all of the bouda babies into a playpen and let them starve until they start killing each other?”

Ascanio frowned. “Well, no…”

“Why not? It’s natural selection. Just like nature.” I wrinkled my nose. “Boudas love this argument, because it gives them an excuse to do all the wrong things. ‘I’m sorry I screwed your sister and got my penis stuck in your German shepherd. It’s in my nature. I just couldn’t help myself.’”

Ascanio snorted.

“Don’t be that guy,” I told him. “It’s bullshit reasoning. We are not animals. We are people. And a good thing too, because it wasn’t hyenas who conquered the world. And yes, I know it’s ironic as hell, given that I’m all fur and claws right this second, but the human part of me is still in the driver’s seat. We all know what happens when the animal side starts running the show.”

“We go loup,” Ascanio said.

“Exactly.”

Loupism was a constant threat. It claimed fifteen percent of shapeshifter children, some at birth, some in adolescence, forcing the Pack to humanely terminate them. For boudas, the number was even higher—almost a quarter. Both of Raphael’s brothers had gone loup and Aunt B had had to kill them. That’s why any surviving adolescent in the bouda clan was treated like a treasure.

If I ever had babies with Ra…The thought twisted in me like a knife in the wound. There would be no little bouda babies. No Raphael. That door slammed shut and I needed to put him out of my mind. In this life you’re lucky if you get one shot at happiness, and I had missed mine. The fact that it was a joint screwup just hurt more.

Water under the bridge.

“But she is stupid,” Ascanio said. “She insulted Aunt B!”

“And for that we should rip her throat out?” I glanced at him.

“Well, no.”

“Suppose I did beat the snot out of her. What would it accomplish? In nature animals fight to demonstrate superiority. The more powerful you are, the better your genetic material is. Stronger animal, stronger babies, a better chance of survival for the species. Raphael already knows I’m a better fighter and he chose her over me anyway. That’s a lesson for you—when you get a chance to be happy, you take it and you treat the other person the way they deserve to be treated. Don’t take things for granted.”

Giving advice was easy. Living by it was much harder.

We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted
DANGER
in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written:

IM-1: Infectious Magic Area
Do Not Enter
Authorized Personnel Only

A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read:

Keep out, stupid.

“We aren’t going to keep out, are we?” Ascanio asked.

“No.”

“Awesome.”

We rolled by another blackened home. To the left a large blue-green shard protruded from the ground at an angle. To the right, by the metal carcass of a fire-stripped truck, another sliver, pale blue, waited to bloody someone’s ankle. The first signs of the Menagerie.

Here and there more shards punctured the soil, and in the distance, far to the right, a jagged iceberg rose at a steep angle twenty feet high, glowing with translucent green and blue in the morning sun.

Ascanio squinted. “What is that?”

“Glass,” I answered.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Where did it come from?”

Ahead more icebergs crowded in, forming a glacier. “Some of it is from Hollowell Station. Before the Shift, Inman Yard used to be Norfolk Southern’s train yard. It was huge. Over sixty-five tracks in the bowl alone. Not only that, but CSX’s Tilford train yard was right next to it. Together they handled over a hundred trains per day. Then they built the Hollowell Station. It was supposed to be a new, super-modern terminal and most of it was glass. Guess what happened when the magic waves started hitting?”

Ascanio grinned. “It crashed.”

“Yes, it did. There were hills of glass everywhere. The magic waves kept causing train crashes, but the railroad hung in there. Over the next few months some railroad employees started to get the idea that the glass hills were multiplying. Nobody else paid much attention to it. Then during the second flare, creatures popped out of the glass and killed half of the railroad workers.”

“What kind of creatures?” Raphael asked.

“Nobody knows.”

Flares—intense, terrible magic waves—came once every seven years. Things that were impossible during normal magic waves became reality during a flare. The flare’s magic held for three days straight and then disappeared for a long while, but its consequences were often deadly.

“Eventually the military came back to reclaim the yard. There were roughly two hundred trains in there, and some of
them were full of goods. The soldiers found that the glass had expanded and encased the trains. When they tried to chip it off, they were attacked by creatures. Nobody ever figured out what the creatures were, but they caused multiple casualties. Finally the MSDU gave up and cordoned off the Inman Yard with barbed wire. The glass never stopped growing. Helicopters were still flying once in a while back then, so one of the reporters looked at the place from above and dubbed it the Glass Menagerie.”

Ahead two glass icebergs met above the road, fused into a massive arch. We passed under it and into the labyrinth of glass. Peaks of green, blue, and white towered above us, some connected, some standing apart, some curving, others perfectly sheer. The light turned turquoise, as if we were underwater. The glass cliffs crowded the crumbling road, painting the ground with colored shadows.

The back of my head itched, the nerves prickling, as if some invisible sniper had sighted me from the scope of his rifle. Someone was watching us from the icy depths. Ascanio fell silent, focused and tense. He’d sensed it, too.

The road in front of us glittered.