Gunmetal Magic: A Novel in the World of Kate Daniels

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 ofdecay 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.
    I went into the vault and stood in it for a bit, visually examining the contents. It was filled with antiques. A pair of elegant, long-necked cats, pure black, with eyes of what were probably real emeralds sat against the wall. To the left of the cats, a stone tablet as tall as me rested on the floor, carved with figures in robes and weathered with age. To the right, a small wooden chair, gilded with gold and painted with brown, stood, its feet fashioned into the semblance of lion paws.
    On the shelves were an ornate gold necklace resting in a glass box on top of a scarlet velvet pillow; a set of small bottles, crystal wrapped in bands of gold; a wooden cabinet, empty; a large chunk of sea-foam crystal on black velvet with a carving on it—three men on one side and a woman waving good-bye. Or maybe hello.
    Nope, it was probably good-bye. Life was mean like that.
    Age permeated the scene, emanating from the items like an aroma from a flower. How many people had died for these things? I knew of at least four and I had a feeling the body count would continue to climb.
    I called Stefan down and catalogued the vault, item by item, and had him sign the whole thing as a witness. The list was so long my pen was in death throes by the end of it. Something must have been taken out of the vault, but what? I crawled over every inch of the damn place, looking for any indication of a missing item, but the vault was dust-free. No mysterious outline, no empty hooks, nothing that would give me any sort of clue about what had been taken. For all I knew, instead of taking something out, the attackers had put something in. Wouldn’t that be the pits.
    By the time I finally emerged from the tunnel, covered in dirt and bone tired, the sun had almost completed its escape below the horizon. Scene processing was a slow and tedious job. The next time, I’d find myself someone to slave with me.
    Stefan rose from the steel drum on which he was sitting. “Done?”
    “Yes. Any news from Raphael?”
    “No.”
    Either the cops had held him up or he was going to great lengths to avoid me.
    “Stefan, that stuff in the vault is very old. We have no way of knowing if any of it is magic or not. You guys need to keep away from it. Don’t touch it, don’t sniff it, don’t try to transport it. I’ll ask someone with magical knowledge to come down with the Keep. They will move it and quarantine it.”
    Stefan squinted at me. “I get what you’re saying, but you’ll have to talk to Raphael about it. He’ll probably come by here after the cops let him go. You want to leave him a note?”
    Good