Gunmetal Magic: A Novel in the World of Kate Daniels

someone like Roman. We could start fresh and clean. I looked at the dark wizard. Really looked at him. He had the most wicked eyes, dark and full of a strange fire.
Here goes.
    I leaned over and kissed him. His lips covered mine. He was good at kissing, not really claiming or demanding, but enticing, almost charming. And I felt nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. No heat, no spark. Nothing.
    Stupid Raphael. I wished so badly I could be rid of him, but when he kissed me, I wanted to throw him on the bed and make him nuts. When Roman kissed me on the mouth, it felt like a peck on the cheek.
    We broke apart. Roman grinned. Well, one of us had enjoyed it.
    Roman’s gaze fixed on something over my shoulder. I glanced back and saw the fishing net hanging off the hook.
    “That can kill you,” he said. “You better stand closer to me.”
    “Any closer and we’ll be rubbing against each other.”
    “Now that’s an idea…This can kill you, too.” He pointed at the monkey bust. “Also that.” The sandglass. “And those”— he pointed at the stone spheres—“those can kill everyone if used properly. This is like an armory for a mage.”
    Roman pushed himself from the shelf, one arm protectively around my shoulder. “I think I need to see that staff now.”
    I led him down to the office. “It’s in a glass case here. I didn’t touch it.” I realized he wasn’t next to me and turned. Roman stood in the doorway, his gaze fixed on the staff, his mouth slack.
    “Kostyanoi posokh,”
he whispered.
    “What?”
    “The Bone Staff. Here, hold this!” Roman thrust his stick at me.
    I shook my head. “No. It bites things. I’ve seen it do it.”
    “He will behave,” Roman promised.
    I gripped the staff. It turned and stared at me with its vicious raptor eyes. Its beak opened a fraction of an inch. I bared my teeth and pantomimed breaking it. The beak snapped shut.
    Roman dug in the pouch at his waist, pulled out a handful of moist black soil, and tossed it at the floor in front of the case. He knelt on the dirt, said something in Russian, and squeezed his eyes shut.
    Nothing happened.
    Roman cautiously opened one eye, then the other.
    “No big kaboom,” I assured him.
    The black volhv rose. “You got any more of those gloves?”
    I pulled a pair out of my duffel and passed them to him. He slipped the gloves on, opened the case, and carefully took the staff out. The top of the staff flowed like molten wax forming an outline of a serpent mouth with two glistening fangs. The Bone Staff hissed. The bird staff in my hand screeched.
    “Shhh,” Roman murmured. “
Tiho
,
tiho
, easy.”
    The serpent melted back into the bone. A moment later the bird realized it was screaming by itself and shut its beak.
    “We’ve been looking for this for eight hundred years.” Roman shook his head. “How did it even get here? When you described it, I thought it might have been a duplicate someone made to show off, but this? This is the real thing. I can feel the power through the gloves even.”
    “So this is some sort of artifact?” I asked. I felt so tired all of a sudden. I had to make sure not to get bitten again. The snake venom was turning me into an old decrepit woman.
    “The Bone Staff belonged to the Black Volhv, the head priest of our god,” he said. “It’s been missing for centuries, since the Mongols invaded Russia. Eventually the Horde came to the town of Kitezh on Lake Svetloyar. It was the last of the great pagan strongholds. But the magic was already weak, and the Mongols were too many, so the volhvi decided to work one last spell to keep the holy relics from the Horde. They sank the city.”
    “What do you mean, sank?” I asked.
    “Buried it in the lake. The whole thing. The Bone Staff was supposed to have been lost with the city, but then years later a respected old volhv, who was just a boy when Kitezh sank, claimed on his deathbed that the staff and other relics had been smuggled out of the city by him and two others before the place went under.”
    “So this is a holy relic?”
    “Yep. The bones are supposed to belong to a Black Serpent Guhd. My dad will shit himself.”
    He was a walking encyclopedia of magic expertise. Just what I needed, except the picture of my knife was stuck in a nonfunctioning computer. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen off the desk and sketched the knife one-handed, still holding on to the staff. “Do you know anything about a knife? Looks somewhat like this?”
    Roman