Gunmetal Magic: A Novel in the World of Kate Daniels

human back to my father. This almost never happens because people don’t run around the wilderness biting animals.”
    Even when shapeshifters encountered their natural counterparts while in beast form, most wildlife gave us a wide berth. A hundred-pound wolf looked at a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound werewolf and pretty quickly decided to run for the hills.
    “Nobody could ever figure out how my father managed to get himself infected. He didn’t have enough brain power to explain what happened to him. Clarissa thought that my father was the funniest thing ever. They put a spiked collar on him and would lead him on a leash while he was in his human form. He couldn’t really talk, except for a handful of words like ‘no’ and ‘hungry.’ He was mentally deficient. Clarissa thought it would be oh so hilarious to have him rape my mother. He didn’t know what he was doing. He just knew that there was a female provided for him, so he mated. My mother was barely sixteen. I was born nine months later and they started beating me when I was still a toddler. For my mother, her chief tormentor was Crystal. For me, it was Candy, Clarissa’s younger daughter.”
    “Didn’t your mom trrrry to prrrotect you?”
    “She tried, but they would gang up on her. She used to bait them when they would start on me, because they would switch over to her instead. They told her that if she left, humans would kill her and me. She had no money and nowhere to go. On my eleventh birthday Candy and her flunkies set me on fire. My mother realized that sooner or later they would kill me. As soon as I healed enough to move, my mother grabbed me and ran. We ran clear across the country. They never came after us.”
    A memory flashed before me, my mother and I huddling in the bathroom in some hotel room, wrapped in a blanket, both of us shivering because some stray noise outside reminded us of Clarissa’s voice.
    “I didn’t mean to upsshet you.”
    “I know. Finish your food.”
    He looked at the ribs. “Not hungrrry anymorre.”
    “It’s okay,” I told him. “Don’t let it go to waste.”
    He bit into the rib. “Did you ever go back?”
    I smiled at him. “What do you think?”
    He blinked.
    “Funny thing about that pack,” I said. “A few years ago someone went over there and wiped them out. Must’ve been some sort of marksman, because most of them had been shot from a distance. Very clean shots, with silver bullets.” I leaned over and touched a spot at the base of his skull about half an inch below his earlobe. “Apricot. Also known as medulla oblongata. It’s an area of the brain that controls involuntary functions: breathing, heart rate, digestion. It is the only place in the shapeshifter body that guarantees instant death when hit by a silver bullet. Very small target.” I held my fingers a little over an inch apart. “Tiny. Takes a lot of practice.”
    Ascanio’s eyes were huge on his bouda face.
    Not everyone got a clean death. Some were more up close and personal. Not everyone died either. There were four children—all boys—and three adolescents—two girls and a boy—in chains. The next generation, new victims of Clarissa’s tender love and care. They made it.
    “What happened to yourrr dad?”
    “He died about two years after we ran away. He was a hyena and they only live about twelve years or so in the wild. He probably lived twice that. If you’re done eating, we need to get a move on.”
    He hopped off the wall.
    We wiped our faces with the towel from the Jeep, returned the pan, and drove out.
    “Whereee to now?” Ascanio asked.
    “Garcia Construction.” I highly doubted that we would even be allowed to enter Anapa’s HQ in our current shapes.
    Garcia Construction had an address on the east side of the city, in the tangle of newly renamed streets, and it took us a good hour and a half to find it. The building sat in the back of a lot behind a chain-link fence, but the gate stood wide open. We parked on the street and breezed right in. Gravel crunchedunder my paw-feet. I really hated gravel. It was sharp, it got stuck between your toes, and it didn’t exactly provide a stable surface.
    Random dirt and refuse littered the gravel lot before the structure. The building itself was nothing special: built post-Shift, with magic in mind. Just a brick box, with barred dusty windows and a barred door, a standard house for a world where monsters spawned out of thin air and tried to break into your house