Kate Daniels 06 - Gunmetal Magic Read Online Free PDF

name of which I didn’t know sat across the street, next to a tent.
    A reinforced tunnel led inside the hill, with two shapeshifters standing guard. The one on the left, in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, was a male bouda in his late thirties, lean, dark, with an easy smile. I’d met him before—his name was Stefan and he and I had no problems. Like most boudas, he was good with a knife and occasionally, if his opponents really pissed him off, he would scalp them after he killed them.
    The other shapeshifter, on the right, was larger, younger, and dark-eyed, with chestnut hair cropped short. I inhaled his scent. A werejackal.
    I came to a halt before the tunnel. Stefan’s eyes widened. “Hey, you.”
    “Hey, yourself.”
    The jackal gave me a long look. I wore a white long-sleeved shirt, brown pants, and a leather vest over it. The vest’s main advantage was its million pockets. My two Sigs rested in twin shoulder holsters. The jackal’s nose wrinkled. That’s right, I don’t smell like a normal bouda.
    “Jim sent me,” I told Stefan.
    Stefan raised his eyebrows. “That Jim?”
    “Yup. Did Raphael make it back from the cops?” My insides clenched up.
    “Nope.”
    Thank God. I was a coward. A terrible, sad coward. “I need to examine the scene.”
    The jackal finally identified the scent. “You’re…”
    Stefan sidestepped, casually stomping on the jackal’s foot with his steel-toed work boot. “She’s point on this case. Come on, Andrea, I’ll show you around.”
    He ducked into the tunnel. I took off my shades, tucked them into a vest pocket, and followed him. A dry stone odor greeted us, mixed with something else. The secondary scent coated my tongue and I recognized it: it was the faint, barely perceptible reek of early decomposition.
    When magic attacked a tall building, it gnawed on the concrete first, attacking it in random places until it turned into dust. Eventually the building crashed like a rotten tree. Concrete and breakable valuables perished, but metal and other valuable scrap endured. Reclamation companies went into the fallen buildings and salvaged the metal and anything else that could be sold.
    Fallen wrecks like this one were unstable. It took a special kind of insanity to burrow into a building that could collapse on your head at any moment. Shapeshifters turned out to be well-suited for it: we were all insane to start with, enhanced strength let us work fast, and Lyc-V-fueled regeneration knitted broken bones together in record time.
    Whatever other faults Raphael had, he made sure to keep the broken bones to a bare minimum. The passageway was sixfeet wide. Thick steel beams and stone pillars supported the roof and metal mesh held back the walls. I was five foot two, but Stefan had six inches on me, and he didn’t have to duck either. A string of electric lights ran along the ceiling, blinking dimly. Dimly was plenty. We paused, letting our eyes adjust to the gloom, and walked on.
    The tunnel angled down.
    “Tell me about the building,” I asked.
    “It fell about seven years after the Shift, right in line with the Georgia Power building behind the Civic Center. Before it crashed, it was a thirty-floor tower of blue glass shaped like a
V
. Built and owned by Jamar Groves. Jamar was a real estate developer and this baby was his pride and joy. He called it the Blue Heron Building. People told him to evacuate, but he got it into his head that the building wouldn’t fall. He’s still here somewhere.” Stefan nodded at the ceiling. “Or at least his bones are.”
    “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