Gunmetal Magic(10)

Stefan cursed and spun away.

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

He bent double and shook his head. “No, I’m good. I’m good.”

I stretched the deflated skin down. Two ragged punctures marked the man’s back, close to the top of the shoulder near the neck. The swelling had hidden them before.

“What is that?”

“A snakebite.”

“Aren’t we immune to snake venom?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. Shapeshifters don’t exactly advertise this fact, for obvious reasons, but yeah, a copperhead bites you, you’ll feel it.”

Stefan blinked at me. “We regenerate broken bones, and we’re immune to disease and poison.”

“We’re very resistant to poison but not immune. Remember Erra?”

Stefan’s eyes darkened. “Yeah. I remember.”

Erra was Kate’s aunt and her secret. Kate’s family was magic, the kind of magic that leveled cities and altered the course of ancient civilizations. Her aunt had slept for thousands of years, but the onset of magic had awakened her, and she came to Atlanta looking for trouble and nearly destroyed the city. One of her creations, which she named Venom, broke into one of Clan Wolf’s houses in the city and poisoned everyone within. They died in agony. It was a wakeup call to the Pack. The shapeshifters could be poisoned, if the poison was strong enough.

“Most diseases are viral or bacterial in nature,” I said. “Lyc-V is a jealous virus, so it terminates these other invaders. Ingested poison is localized to the stomach. The second it tries to enter the bloodstream, Lyc-V will shut it down. A snakebite is another story.”

I rose, pulled a rag from my pocket, and wiped my hands. “The snake injects toxins directly into the body, and these toxins are biological: enzymes, coagulants, and so on. Some just attack the area of the bite, but some attack the nervous system, and Lyc-V doesn’t recognize them as a threat until the damage starts to spread.”

“So what’s this one?”

“Hemotoxic. Probably from a viper. The moment the venom enters the victim, it begins to coagulate blood and clot the blood vessels. Lyc-V exists in all tissues, but most of it is in the bloodstream. Clog the arteries and the virus can’t get to the venom fast enough to destroy it. I once knew a werebuffalo who fell into a nest of rattlesnakes. Looked just like that when we pulled his corpse out.”

Stefan peered at the body. “How did a snake manage to bite him on his back? He wouldn’t have been lying down in the dirt. Sitting, maybe.”

Shapeshifters took personal hygiene seriously. “Filthy animal” was a common insult people hurled our way. The guards wouldn’t have been lying down in loose soil unless they absolutely had to.

“I don’t know.” I took a ruler from my bag and held it up to the bite marks. Three and three-eighths of an inch. Two inches would mean a big snake. Two and a half inches meant a fifteen-foot rattler. Three and three-eighths was crazy.

“I can tell you that if I was an intelligent snake, this is the place I’d bite,” I said. “If you cause coagulation in the arteries leading to the brain, death will follow like that.” I would’ve snapped my fingers, but I was wearing latex gloves.

“So we have giant super-smart vipers who slithered in here, killed our people, opened the vault, stole something from it, and slithered out, undetected?”

“Appears so.”

“Okay. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t something dangerous.”

I flashed him a quick smile and set about processing the scene.



The scene was a nightmare. Raphael’s workers had been in and out of it barely twelve hours ago and two dozen scent signatures clung to the ground, not to mention the stench of decay rising from the bodies. In the Georgia heat, even this deep underground, corpses decomposed fast.

A cursory examination of the bodies showed multiple snakebites. I noted four different fang spans and wrote them down. I divided the scene into rows and searched it, wall to wall, picking up every bottle cap and every hair.

A truck arrived from the Pack to take the bodies back to the Keep, the Pack’s huge headquarters just outside Atlanta that everyone insisted was not a castle, despite it being a dead ringer for one. I jotted down some notes for Doolittle, the Pack’s chief medmage, outlining my snake theory. He would be the one examining the bodies. I packaged the fingerprints I had collected into a large envelope and addressed it to Jim. The Pack had its own fingerprint database, and Jim was in a much better position to identify the prints than I was. I knew the theory behind fingerprint analysis and had been taught some rudimentary skills in the Order’s Academy, but in practice I just saw a bunch of whorls I had no idea what to do with. I also wrote out a quick preliminary assessment for Jim, requested background files on Raphael’s entire workforce, and sent the whole kaboodle to the Keep with the body crew.