Cover

Praise for the Kate Daniels novels

MAGIC SLAYS

“Delivers nonstop action and a few surprises while adding considerable background and depth to Kate’s character as she begins stretching her magic usage…top-notch urban fantasy.”

—Monsters and Critics

“Fast, witty, and descriptive. Kate is a strong female lead and Curran is perfect for her.”

—LoveVampires

“Simply amazing. The Kate Daniels series honestly gets better with each new release. I had high hopes for this book, and the authors simply blew me away with the quality and depth of this story.”

—Night Owl Reviews

“It takes both talent and hard work to keep a series consistently high quality…Andrews’s intricate, detailed world-building provides such a rich backdrop for the story that it nearly becomes a character itself. Add in clearly defined and layered characters, not to mention amazing kick-butt action, and you’ve got one unbeatable series. No one does it better!”

—RT Book Reviews (4½ stars, Top Pick)

“The conclusion is heart-stopping as Kate fights to secure Atlanta’s survival in a dramatic finale that left me satisfied but ready for book six. Ilona Andrews once again hits a game-winning home run with Magic Slays.”

—Smexy Books

MAGIC BLEEDS

“At times I felt like I needed to take a break from the book due to [its] just being too engrossing, too brilliant for my little heart… Magic Bleeds is the best yet of this series!”

—Night Owl Reviews

“Ilona Andrews is one of the few authors whose books just keep getting better…It’s books like Magic Bleeds that make television and movies seem like an inferior form of entertainment.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“I have read and reread this book, and it’s perfect. The action, the romance, the plot and suspense…I cannot wait for the fifth in the series.”

—Smexy Books

“Balancing petrifying danger with biting humor is an Andrews specialty, leaving readers both grinning and gasping. Put this on your auto-buy list immediately!”

—RT Book Reviews

“Delivers on the promise of ‘One hell of a good read.’ You will not be disappointed!”

—ParaNormal Romance.org

MAGIC STRIKES

“Andrews’s crisp dialogue and layered characterization make the gut-wrenching action of this first-person thrill ride all the more intense…mesmerizing.”

—RT Book Reviews (4½ stars, Top Pick)

“Andrews blends action-packed fantasy with myth and legend, keeping readers enthralled. Magic Strikes introduces fascinating characters, provides a plethora of paranormal skirmishes, and teases fans with romantic chemistry.”

—Darque Reviews

“Ilona Andrews’s best novel to date, cranking up the action, danger, and magic…Gritty sword-clashing action and flawless characterizations will bewitch fans, old and new alike.”

— Sacramento Book Review

“Doses of humor serve to lighten the suspense and taut action of this vividly drawn, kick-butt series.”

—Monsters and Critics

“From the first page to the last, Magic Strikes was a riveting, heart-pounding ride. Story lines advance, truths are admitted, intriguing characters are introduced, and the romance between Kate and Curran develops a sweetness that is simply delightful.”

—Dear Author

“Write faster…I absolutely love the relationship between Curran and Kate—I laugh out loud with the witty sarcasm and one-liners, and the sexual tension building between the couples drives me to my knees, knowing I’ll have to wait for another book.”

—SFRevu

MAGIC BURNS

“Fans of Carrie Vaughn and Patricia Briggs will appreciate this fast-paced, action-packed urban fantasy full of magic, vampires, werebeasties, and things that go bump in the night.”

— Monsters and Critics

“With all her problems, secrets, and prowess both martial and magical, Kate is a great kick-ass heroine, a tough girl with a heart, and her adventures…are definitely worth checking out.”

—Locus

“With a fascinating, compelling plot, a witty, intelligent heroine, a demonic villain, and clever, wry humor throughout, this story has it all.”

—Fresh Fiction

“A new take on the urban fantasy genre, the world Kate inhabits is a blend of gritty magic and dangerous mystery.”

— The Parkersburg News and Sentinel

“If you enjoy Laurell K. Hamilton’s early Anita Blake or the works of Patricia Briggs and Kim Harrison, you need to add Ilona Andrews to your reading list.”

—LoveVampires

“Andrews…demonstrates her mastery at balancing dark humor, clever mystery, and supernatural jeopardy. Andrews is the total package!”

—RT Book Reviews (4½ stars, Top Pick)

MAGIC BITES

“Treat yourself to a splendid new urban fantasy…I am looking forward to the next book in the series or anything else Ilona Andrews writes.”

—Patricia Briggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fair Game

“Andrews shows a great deal of promise. Readers fond of Laurell K. Hamilton and Patricia Briggs may find her work a new source of reading pleasure.”

—SFRevu

“Andrews’s edgy series stands apart from similar fantasies…owing to its complex world-building and skilled characterizations.”

—Library Journal

Ace Books by Ilona Andrews

The Kate Daniels Novels

MAGIC BITES

MAGIC BURNS

MAGIC STRIKES

MAGIC BLEEDS

MAGIC SLAYS

The World of Kate Daniels

GUNMETAL MAGIC

The Edge Novels

ON THE EDGE

BAYOU MOON

FATE’S EDGE

eSpecials

MAGIC MOURNS

MAGIC DREAMS

Title Page

GUNMETAL
MAGIC

ILONA ANDREWS

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

Dedication

To the fine people of Texas,
who have taken us in and treated us as their own

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the core, Gunmetal Magic is a book about a deeply damaged person finding her place in life, and in the beginning stages, it was also a very damaged book in need of help. We would like to thank Anne Sowards, our editor, for once again making it better, and our agent, Nancy Yost, for invaluable advice and friendship.

We’d like to thank the following people for making the book a reality: Production editor Michelle Kasper and assistant production editor Andromeda Macri for overseeing the production and putting up with our craziness, and editorial assistant Kat Sherbo for her patience and attention to detail. Special thanks to the long-suffering art department, cover designer Judith Lagerman, and artist Tony Mauro. We deeply appreciate everything you’ve done on our behalf. We’re grateful to the interior designer Laura K. Corless for making a manuscript into a beautiful book, and to publicists Rosanne Romanello and Brady McReynolds for tirelessly promoting the book.

In addition, we owe thanks to Marsheila Rockwell, Sue Staltare, Susann Max, and Shannon Martinez for their expertise with reclamations, construction, and fallen buildings. Thank you to Shiloh Walker for her knowledge of snakebites and explanation of medical terms, and to Cassandra Brulotte for her legal expertise. Any errors of law, medicine, or construction found in this book are due purely to us and not to them.

Thank you to our beta readers for suffering through the first draft.

Thank you to Jeaniene Frost for being there and to Jill Myles and Meljean Brook for the tea war.

Finally, we’d like to thank our readers—thank you for making it all possible.

Gunmetal Magic

GUNMETAL
MAGIC

The world has suffered a magic apocalypse. We pushed the technological progress too far, and now magic has returned with a vengeance. It came like an invisible tide, ripping planes out of the sky, dropping monsters onto crowded streets, sucking the power plants dry, and jamming firearms. Some people awoke and found themselves shapeshifters. Others died, cut down by a magic-fueled disease, and rose again as mindless undead, robbed of their ability to reason and driven only by their all-consuming hunger. Gods became real, curses gained power, and telekinesis and telepathy were no longer the products of illusion and special effects.

For three days the magic raged and then it vanished without warning, leaving the world reeling, its population decimated, its cities in tatters.

Since that day, the day of the Shift, the magic comes and goes as it pleases. It floods the planet like a wave crashing on the shoreline, hissing and boiling, leaving its dangerous gifts, and then recedes once again. Sometimes a wave lasts half an hour, sometimes three days. Nobody can predict it and nobody knows what our future holds.

But we are resilient. We will survive.

“40th Anniversary of the Shift”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

CHAPTER 1

Thud!

My head hit the sidewalk. Candy jerked me up by my hair and slammed my face into the asphalt.

Thud!

“Hit her again!” Michelle squeaked, her teenage voice shrill.

I knew it was a dream, because it didn’t hurt. The fear was still there, that sharp, hot terror, mixed with helpless rage, the kind of fear that turns you from a human being into an animal. Things become distilled to simple concepts: I was small, they were big; I was weak, they were strong. They hurt me, and I endured.

Thud.

My skull bounced off the pavement. Blood stained my blond hair. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah take a running start like a kicker before a field goal. The flesh on her body boiled. Bones grew, muscles wound around them like cotton candy over a stick, hair sprouted, sheathing the new body, half human, half animal, in a coat of pale sandy fur dappled with telltale hyena spots. The bouda grinned at me, her malformed mouth full of fangs. I clenched up, curling my ten-year-old self into a ball. The clawed foot crashed into my ribs. The three-inch claws scraped a bone and it crunched inside me like a snapped chopstick. She kept kicking me.

Thud, thud, thud!

This was a dream. A dream grown from my memories, but still just a dream. I knew this, because ten years after my mother took eleven-year-old me and fled halfway across the country, I came back and put two bullets through Sarah’s eyes. I had emptied a clip into Candy’s left ear. I still remembered the way her skull had blossomed with red when the bullets tore out the other side. I had killed the entire werehyena clan. I wiped those bouda bitches off the face of the planet, because the world was a better place with them gone. Michelle was the only one who had escaped.

I sat up and grinned at them. “I’m waking up, ladies. Go fuck yourselves.”

My eyes snapped open. I lay in my closet, wrapped in a blanket and holding a butcher knife. The door of the closet stood slightly ajar, and the gray light of early morning slipped through the narrow gap.

Fantastic. Andrea Nash, decorated veteran of the Order, hiding in her closet with her knife and a blankie. I should’ve held on to the dream long enough to beat them into bloody pulp. At least then I wouldn’t feel so completely pathetic.

I inhaled, sampling the air. The normal scents of my apartment floated to me, the hint of synthetic apple from the soap in the bathroom, the fragrance of vanilla from the candle by my bed, and strongest of all, the stench of dog fur, a leftover from when my friend Kate’s poodle Grendel had kept me company. That freak of nature had slept at the foot of my bed, and his distinctive reek was permanently imprinted on my rug.

No intruders.

The scents were muted, which meant the magic was down.

Thud-thud-thud!

What in the world?

Thud!

Someone was pounding on my door.

I kicked off my blanket, rolled to my feet, and ran out of the closet. My bedroom greeted me: my big bed, intruder-free; the crumpled mess of the blanket on the rug; my jeans and bra, discarded last night by the bed, next to a Lorna Sterling paperback with a pirate in a poofy shirt on the cover; bookcase, stuffed to the brim; pale blue curtains on the barred window, undisturbed.

I dropped the butcher knife onto my side table, pulled on my pajamas pants, grabbed my Sig-Sauer P226 from under the pillow, and ran to the door. Waking up with a gun in my hand would’ve made a lot more sense, but no, I’d woken up clutching a knife. That meant I must’ve gotten up in the middle of the night, run into the kitchen, taken a knife from the butcher block, run back into the bedroom, grabbed a blanket, and hidden in the closet. All without realizing where I was or what I was doing. If that wasn’t crazy, I didn’t know what was.

I hadn’t slept with a knife since I was a teenager. This blast from the past wasn’t welcome and it needed to go away real fast.

Thud-thud!

I reached the door and stood on my toes to look through the peephole. A tall black woman in her fifties stood on the other side. Her gray hair stuck out from her head in a mess, she was wearing a nightgown, and her face was so twisted by worry, I barely recognized her. Mrs. Haffey. She and her husband lived in an apartment right below me.

Normally Mrs. Haffey viewed her appearance as serious business. In terms of battle readiness, she was my hero—I’ve never seen her without her makeup and hair perfectly done. Something was really wrong.

I unlocked the door.

“Andrea!” Mrs. Haffey gasped. Behind her, long white strands covered the landing and the stairwell. I was one hundred percent sure they hadn’t been there when I’d dragged myself into my apartment last night.

“What’s wrong?”

“Darin’s missing!”

I pulled her into my apartment and shut the door. “I need you to tell me from the beginning, slowly and clearly: what happened?”

Mrs. Haffey took a deep breath. She had been a cop’s wife for twenty-five years and her experience from dealing with a lifetime of emergencies kicked in. Her voice was almost steady. “I woke up and made coffee. Darin got up to take Chief outside. I took a shower. When I came out, Darin wasn’t back. I went out on the balcony, but he wasn’t in his usual spot.”

I knew exactly where the usual spot was: two stories under my bedroom window, where the Haffeys’ bulldog, Chief, preferred to mark his territory. I smelled it on my way to work every morning. Of course, Chief smelled my scent and it only made him more determined to pee his way to territorial supremacy.

“I called and called Darin, and nothing. I tried to go downstairs. There’s blood all over the landing and a white substance on the stairs and it’s blocking the way.”

“Did Mr. Haffey take his gun with him?”

Mr. Haffey had retired from the Paranormal Activity Division of the Atlanta Police Department. PAD cops took their guns seriously. As far as I knew, Darin Haffey never left the house without his Smith & Wesson M&P340 snub-nosed revolver.

“He always takes his gun with him,” Mrs. Haffey said.

And he hadn’t fired it, because his revolver ate .357 Magnum cartridges. When he pulled the trigger, the shot sounded like a small cannon going off. I would’ve heard the gunshot and recognized it even through the dream. Whatever happened, happened fast.

The mysterious “white substance” must’ve appeared as a result of the magic wave last night. Kate, my best friend, had warded my apartment months ago. Invisible spells shielded my place in a protective barrier. She’d covered the perimeter walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Anything magic would have a hard time breaking in, which probably explained why I’d slept safe and secure through the night.

“You know Darin’s blind as a bat.” Mrs. Haffey twisted her hands. “He can’t even see what he’s shooting at. The other day he comes running out of the bathroom, screaming and foaming at the mouth. He’d brushed his teeth with Aspercreme instead of toothpaste…”

A note of hysteria slipped into her voice. At five ten, she had eight inches of height on me and she was leaning over. “I called down to the station, but they say it will be twenty minutes or longer. I thought since you were with the Order…”

I used to be with the Order. When I was a Knight of Merciful Aid, it was my job to help people when the cops wouldn’t or couldn’t assist them with the magic hazmat. I had decorations and a stellar service record, but none of it mattered when the Order found out that I was a shapeshifter. They branded me mentally disturbed and unfit for duty and “retired” me.

But they didn’t take away my training or my skills.

I pressed a latch in my wall. A panel slid aside, revealing a small niche that used to be a hallway closet and which I had converted into my own personal armory. A row of gun barrels gleamed in the morning light.

Mrs. Haffey clicked her mouth shut.

Let’s see. I’d be bringing my Sigs, but I needed something with more power. The AA-12, an Automatic Assault 12-gauge shotgun with a 32-round clip was always a good choice. It fired 300 rounds per minute with minimal recoil. I filled mine with steel slugs. Squeeze the trigger once, and get a single shot that would punch through a car door. Hold the trigger, and anything on the other end, no matter how much hard body armor it wore, would become a smoking pile of meat in six and a half seconds. I’d paid a fortune for it and it was worth every dollar.

I grabbed the AA-12 and put on a hip holster, into which I stuck my Sig and its twin. “Mrs. Haffey, I need you to stay here.” I gave her a nice big smile. “Lock the door behind me and don’t open it until I come back. Do you understand?”

Mrs. Haffey nodded.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

I stepped onto the landing and heard the deadbolt slide shut behind me.

The “white substance” stretched in long pale strands over the walls. It resembled a spiderweb, if the spider was the size of a bowling ball and instead of working in a spiral had decided to weave only in a vertical direction. I crossed the landing and inhaled. Usually there was an up-draft here, the air rising from the front entrance to the top of the building. Today no movement troubled the stairway, but I smelled the sharp metallic odor of fresh blood all the same. Tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The predator in me, the other me sleeping deep inside, opened her eyes.

I padded down the stairs, moving silently on the concrete steps, my shotgun ready. Even though magic made my existence possible, it didn’t mean that magic and I played nice. Give me guns over spells any day.

The web grew thicker. At the Haffeys’ landing, it swallowed the walls and the wooden stair rail. I turned, heading down. The stench of blood assaulted my nostrils and I tasted it on my tongue. All of my senses went into overdrive. My heart beat faster. My pupils dilated, improving my vision. My breathing sped up. My hearing sharpened and I caught a distant noise, muffled, but unmistakable: the deep, throaty bark of a bulldog.

I took a few more steps down. Blood stained the stairs. A large amount, at least a couple of pints, possibly more, all in big round drops. Either someone bled and walked, or someone bled and was carried. Please don’t be Darin. I liked Darin and I liked his wife. Mrs. Haffey was always kind to me.

The first floor landing was a narrow tunnel within the web. The door to apartment 1A was intact, but buried in white strands. The same solid wall of white sealed the way downstairs, and none of it was torn. No sign of Darin going that way. The door to 1B lay in a splintered wreck. Bloody marks stretched across the threshold, pointing into the apartment. Someone had been dragged inside.

I stepped into the hallway. A new scent tugged at me, a slightly sour, prickly odor that set off instinctual alarms in my head. Not good.

The apartment had the exact same layout as mine: a narrow hallway, opening into the kitchen on the right, the living room on the left, then the first bedroom, and then a short perpendicular hallway leading to the utility room and guest bathroom, and finally to the master bedroom with a bathroom en suite.

I moved in, nice and easy, slicing the pie around the corner: starting at the wall and moving at a ninety degree angle away from it, leaning slightly away from the wall to see the threat around the corner before it saw me. Jumping around the corners was very dramatic but would get your head blown off.

Kitchen—clear.

I moved into the living room.

On the left, by a coffee table, sat a large wicker basket full of yarn. Two long wooden needles stuck out of it at an angle. Next to the basket lay a severed human arm. The blood had pooled from it, soaking the beige wall-to-wall carpet in a dark red stain.

Pale skin. Not Darin Haffey. No, this was likely Mrs. Truman who lived in this apartment with her two cats. She liked to play bridge with her knitting club and collected yarn for “special” projects, with which she never did anything. Now her torn-off arm lay next to the basket with her knitting stash. No time to absorb and deal with it. I still had Darin to find.

I moved on. The sour prickly scent grew stronger.

Bedroom—clear. Bathroom—clear.

A huge hole gaped in the floor of the utility room. Something had smashed through the floor and tile from below.

I circled the hole, shotgun pointing down.

No movement. The floor below me looked clear.

A muffled noise cut through the quiet.

My ears twitched.

Woof! Woof!

Chief was still alive somewhere in there. I jumped into the hole, landed on the concrete floor of the basement, and moved away from the light streaming through the hole. No need to present a clear target.

Gloom filled the basement, dripping from the web into dark corners. The walls no longer existed. There was only web, white and endless.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Shapeshifter vision guaranteed that as long as there was some light, I wouldn’t bump into things.

Wet dark smears marred the concrete. Blood. I followed it.

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