Gunmetal Magic

Page 45

I pulled a small plastic case from my pocket and showed him the disk inside it.
“What’s this?”
“Surveillance footage.”
“The Steel Horse has surveillance cameras?” Beau came to life like a hungry wolf sighting a juicy, crippled rabbit.
“The owner installed them after that scare they had with the pandemic.” A pandemic Kate had stopped before it could kill him and his wife. The Steel Horse welcomed Pack members with open arms, which was why they did nothing to help law enforcement when the Pack kids got in trouble. “He doesn’t advertise this fact. Besides, they only work half of the time, when the tech is up.” I flipped the disk between my fingers. “Shall we?”
Beau took the disk out of its case and slid it into the computer on a small desk in the corner. Black-and-white images filled the screen. Three shapeshifters sitting at a table, with the girl next to Kamal. Two young guys at a table nearby with a collection of empty beer bottles said something. The shapeshifters ignored them. More taunts, this time with the waving of arms. The shorter of the two human teens picked up a basket of chicken bones and dumped it on Kamal’s head. Ascanio got up, picked the guy up, and hurled him through the window. Kamal smacked him upside the head. Ascanio shrugged. The third shapeshifter, Ian, dropped some bills on the table and the group left.
“If Mr. Cooper chooses to press charges, we will do the same,” I said. “Please feel free to retain the disk. I’ve made copies. I do have to ask you to release the boys. I’d be in your debt and they aren’t a flight risk. You know where to find us: the big stone fortress just a few miles outside of town.”
Beau walked to the door and stuck his head out. “Rifsky, get our shapeshifter guests processed out for me, will you? Also, Ms. Nash here is going to leave her information with you for Chuck’s to get his window squared away.”
I suddenly remembered where I had seen the sword. It used to hang in Kate’s apartment. It was her guardian’s sword. Pieces of the puzzle clicked together in my head. She’d used it to get me out of jail. I felt ashamed.
Beau turned to me. “Don’t leave town and all that, Ms. Nash.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Now I owed Beau a favor. Wonderful.
Ten minutes later three guilty-looking shapeshifters met me on the steps. Kamal saw me and did a double take. “I thought Lika was coming.”
I gave him my thousand-yard stare. He shifted uncomfortably in place.
“Let’s try this again, from the beginning. You say, ‘Hello, Beta. Thank you for coming all the way here and subjecting yourself and the Clan to public embarrassment because of my stupidity.’ And I don’t break your arms off.”
“Thank you, Beta,” Kamal and Ian chorused.
I looked at Ascanio. He dropped his gaze to the stairs. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you are.” I started down the street to the parking lot. The three boudas followed me.
A man shoved the door open behind us. Beefy, in his late forties. His face had a lovely red color that probably meant he was about to blow his gasket. “Hey! Hey, you! I want to talk to you!”
I kept walking. “You threw two humans through two different store windows. Enlighten me, what happens when a shapeshifter goes through a sheet of glass?”
“Nothing,” Ian volunteered.
“Stop,” the man snarled. “Stop, God damn it.”
“What happens when a human goes through a sheet of glass?”
Nobody wanted to answer.
“I’ll enlighten you, then: they get bruises, possible broken bones, and multiple lacerations. And because they don’t have the benefit of Lyc-V, their broken bones will take weeks to heal and the lacerations can kill them if the broken glass happens to slice them at the right place. You almost killed them over a bucket of chicken. What in the world were you thinking?”
We turned the corner, hidden from the building by the stone wall.
“We just wanted to intimidate them,” Ascanio said.
The man behind us took the corner at high speed. “You fucking bitch, I said stop!”
The beastkin-crazy Andrea was about to surface. I could feel it.
I looked at him. “Jeff Cooper, I presume?”
“That’s right. You degenerates think you can just come here and push people around.” He stabbed his finger into my chest.
The three boudas went from chastised to baring their teeth in a blink.
“Don’t put your hand on me again,” I said.
He poked his finger into my chest again. “Well, I have something to tell you: don’t let the sun set on you in this county, because…”
I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward, tripping him with my foot. He went down back first and I caught him by his throat, three feet above the ground, lifted him up a bit and bent down to his face. My eyes glowed with murderous red. My voice turned rough with an animal growl. “Listen well, because I won’t be repeating myself, you racist prick. If you make any trouble for me or my people, I’ll hunt you down like the pig you are and carve a second mouth across your gut. They’ll find you hanging by your own intestines. The next time you hear something laugh and howl in the night, hug your family, because you won’t see the sunrise.”
I opened my fingers. He crashed on the ground, his face white as a sheet. He scrambled backward, rolled to his feet, and took off.
The three shapeshifters stared at me, openmouthed.
“That’s how you intimidate people. No witnesses and not a mark on him. Get your asses to the car.”
CHAPTER 12
It was close to noon when I finally walked through the doors of the office. Kate sat at her desk. Grendel sprawled by her feet, an enormous black monstrosity that had more in common with the hound of the Baskervilles than with any poodle I had ever seen. He saw me and wagged his tail.
I paused to pet his head. “The Consort in the flesh. You grace us with your presence, Your Majesty. I’m so honored.” I pressed my hand to my chest, hyperventilating. “I shall alert the media posthaste!”
She grimaced. “Har-de-har-har. Did you have lunch yet?”
“No, and I’m starving. I could eat a small horse.”
“Acropolis?” Kate asked, rising.
“Way ahead of you.” I grabbed the file off my desk and went out the door. “By the way, we have a nice police tail that we aren’t supposed to lose.”
“The more, the merrier.”
When we had both worked at the Order, Parthenon had been our favorite lunch joint. It served the best gyros. Unfortunately, now we were about forty-five minutes away from Parthenon, but we had found Acropolis, half a mile away, which was just as good if not better. It didn’t have Parthenon’s outdoor garden, but we made do with a secluded booth near the window in the back.
We ordered a heap of gyros, tzatziki sauce, a plate of bones for Grendel, and yummy pink-drop fruity drinks. Even with my shapeshifter senses, I had no idea what was in them and we both had decided it wasn’t prudent to ask. Our police escorts, an older woman and a man in his twenties, were seated all the way across the room, by the window. For now we had privacy, at least.
I took the picture of the knife from the file and pushed it toward her. “Ancient knife.”
She pondered it. “This is not battle-ready.”
“Raphael thought it was ceremonial.”
She nodded. “It’s a fang.”
“What?”
“It’s a fang.” She turned the picture toward me. “Wolf, maybe. Here, look.”
She reached down and pulled Grendel’s upper lip up, revealing huge canines. “Exactly the same.”
She was right. The knife was shaped just like a canine tooth. “How did I miss this?”
Kate wiped her hands on the cloth napkin. “I wouldn’t have connected it either, except Curran gave Grendel a pork chop last night and this doofus wolfed it down and got a bone shard stuck in his gum. I had to pull it out and got a close look at his teeth. I can’t seem to impress on the Beast Lord that giving him pork chops is not a good idea. He says wolves eat boars. I say that wolves never had a boar sliced into chops, which makes pork bones very sharp.”
I unloaded the whole story on her, sparing no details. Kate’s eyes kept getting bigger and bigger.
“And here we are,” I finished.
“The place smelled of jasmine and myrrh?”
I nodded.
Kate thought for a long moment. “You said the millionaire’s name was Anapa?”
I nodded. “I checked on it. It’s some sort of small town on the Black Sea in Russia.”
“It’s also in the Tell el-Amarna Tablets,” she said. “In the late 1880s clay tablets were found on the site of an old Egyptian city. The tablets dated to about the fourteenth century BCE. They were probably part of some royal archive, because most of it was pharaohs’ correspondence with foreign rulers.”
“How do you even remember this stuff?”
“Most of the tablets are from Palestine and Babylon,” she said. “It was part of my required education. Anyhow, the tablets are written in Akkadian, and the name Bel Anapa is mentioned. ‘Bel’ meant ‘master’ or ‘lord’ in Akkadian, similar to the Semitic Ba’al.”
“Like the demon Baal?”
Kate grimaced. “Yes. They had this thing where only priests were allowed to say the god’s name, so they just ba’aled their gods. Similar to the way Christians use ‘Lord’ now. So some Greeks ended up thinking that Bel or Ba’al meant a specific god, but it doesn’t: Bel Marduk, Bel Hadad, Bel Anapa, and so on.”
Great. “Which god is Anapa?”
“The Greeks called him Anubis, God of the Dead.”
Whoa.
“The one with the jackal head?” I asked, raising my hands to my head to indicate ears.
Kate nodded.
Okay. No god that had “of the Dead” attached to it could be taken lightly. Hades, Hel, none of them were cuddly puppies.