This wasn’t my first case and this wasn’t my first murder. It was a chance at work that mattered and I would not blow it by making a spectacle of myself.

Fourteen-twelve Griffin resembled a small hill of twisted metal, decorated with chunks of concrete, mixed with dirty marble, piles of shattered bluish glass, and fine gray dust, the result of magic’s fangs grinding at the substance of the building. A backhoe and some other heavy-duty construction vehicle the name of which I didn’t know sat across the street, next to a tent.

A reinforced tunnel led inside the hill, with two shapeshifters standing guard. The one on the left, in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, was a male bouda in his late thirties, lean, dark, with an easy smile. I’d met him before—his name was Stefan and he and I had no problems. Like most boudas, he was good with a knife and occasionally, if his opponents really pissed him off, he would scalp them after he killed them.

The other shapeshifter, on the right, was larger, younger, and dark-eyed, with chestnut hair cropped short. I inhaled his scent. A werejackal.

I came to a halt before the tunnel. Stefan’s eyes widened. “Hey, you.”

“Hey, yourself.”

The jackal gave me a long look. I wore a white long-sleeved shirt, brown pants, and a leather vest over it. The vest’s main advantage was its million pockets. My two Sigs rested in twin shoulder holsters. The jackal’s nose wrinkled. That’s right, I don’t smell like a normal bouda.

“Jim sent me,” I told Stefan.

Stefan raised his eyebrows. “That Jim?”

“Yup. Did Raphael make it back from the cops?” My insides clenched up.

“Nope.”

Thank God. I was a coward. A terrible, sad coward. “I need to examine the scene.”

The jackal finally identified the scent. “You’re…”

Stefan sidestepped, casually stomping on the jackal’s foot with his steel-toed work boot. “She’s point on this case. Come on, Andrea, I’ll show you around.”

He ducked into the tunnel. I took off my shades, tucked them into a vest pocket, and followed him. A dry stone odor greeted us, mixed with something else. The secondary scent coated my tongue and I recognized it: it was the faint, barely perceptible reek of early decomposition.

When magic attacked a tall building, it gnawed on the concrete first, attacking it in random places until it turned into dust. Eventually the building crashed like a rotten tree. Concrete and breakable valuables perished, but metal and other valuable scrap endured. Reclamation companies went into the fallen buildings and salvaged the metal and anything else that could be sold.