seventies, for all I knew. The skin on his forehead was olive, a warm shade particular to those from the Indian subcontinent. That was the only patch of exposed skin left undamaged. Large blisters swelled everywhere else on his cheeks, neck, and arms, the skin peeling up from muscle, stretched taut and completely black.
Another Polaroid.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Stefan said.
I had. “Has the ME been through here?”
“Yeah. But we chased them off.”
That’s right, even if Pack members died outside of the Pack’s territory, the Pack still had the right to claim their bodies. And technically the building was Pack property, since Raphael had bought it. I should’ve remembered that. Getting rusty, Ms. Nash. Getting rusty.
I handed him the Polaroid camera. “Could you hold on to this for a second?”
He took the camera. I pulled a knife from my belt and sliced the man’s shirt straight down his chest. The thin fabric parted easily. I made a cut through each sleeve and gently turned the body on its side. A large swelling marked the top of the left shoulder, just above the clavicle. I flicked the knife across the bottom edge of the blister. Body fluids gushed out, black and streaked with blood. The stench hit me instantly, the foul, putrid reek of rotten flesh.
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.
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.
