Gunmetal Magic (Kate Daniels #5.5)(96)
Author: Ilona Andrews

I raised my arms. “What do you think of my body?”

The human attacked. I saw it, saw the glove on his hand with long pale metal claws, and I willed my magic to shield me, but too little was left.

He thrust his metal claws into my chest and scoured my heart.

It burned! It burned like fire. Pain writhed through me, tearing me apart. I’d never felt an agony like this, an all-consuming, terrible pain. I shoved him back, but the pain didn’t stop.

The claws had broken off. They ripped my heart apart. My magic streamed past it, unable to remove them. I couldn’t heal the damage.

I was dying.

I screamed, and the trees shook from my howl.

I flailed, trying to rip the metal out of me.

No. No, I would not die today. I tore myself from my new form and fled, into the mud, into the sludge, where my old form slumped, discarded.

The world slammed into me in an explosion of pain. Silver burned in my heart.

“I got you,” Raphael was holding me. “I’ve got you.”

I was dying.

Suddenly Doolittle was there with the scalpel.

Where had he even come from? Was I hallucinating before death?

“It’s okay,” Raphael crooned in my ear.

Doolittle sliced my chest open. “Expel this silver if you want to live!”

“Do it, Andrea!” Raphael snarled.

I pushed against the burning points of pain. Doolittle dug in my open chest with forceps. I screamed.

“Expel!”

I couldn’t breathe. My chest was on fire, and the unbearable, terrible pain burned inside me like an inferno.

The first shard slid out of me. Doolittle plucked it out with forceps.

The world dimmed, as if someone was blowing out its candles one by one. Doolittle raised his hand. I caught a glimpse of a syringe. Doolittle plunged it down. The needle bit me in the heart.

The darkness tore in a blinding flash of light and adrenaline.

“Silver!” Raphael screamed at me. “Get it out!”

I strained. Another shard slid free.

“Do it, Andrea!” Raphael growled.

“Expel,” Doolittle commanded.

It hurt and I was so tired.

Another shard left me.

“Last one,” Doolittle barked.

The world went black.

It was so cold and quiet. Can I please stay here…

I opened my eyes to agony and Doolittle massaging my heart with his fingers.

I screamed, but my voice was just a hoarse croak.

The last point of agony slid out of me. Raphael laid me flat. Doolittle knelt over me. His hands were bloody. He was holding some sort of surgical instrument. A woman handed him gauze. A cooling sensation spread through my insides. I was going numb.

Behind him I saw Anapa stagger to his feet.

Eyes lit up in the swamp. I saw them with shocking clarity, hundreds of eyes.

A flood of furry bodies poured from the underbrush. Jackals. Dozens upon dozens of them, and in the lead were the huge, muscled shapes of shapeshifters in their warrior form. Clan Jackal had arrived.

They circled Anapa.

“We will take the child now,” a gray shapeshifter in a warrior shape said.

“Give us the child.”

Anapa smiled a lopsided grin that bared his teeth and thrust his arms up. Magic flowed from him in a slow wave.

The Jackals pushed against it.

The enormous alpha in front howled. Hundreds of voices answered in a chorus of howls, barks, and yips.

Anapa pushed.

Clan Jackal gained a foot. Another foot.

Anapa clenched his teeth. There were too many of them and he was too weakened.

“Give us the child,” snarling voices demanded.

“Return the child.”

“Return!”

“Stop!” Magic pulsed, knocking the first few Jackals back. Others took their place. He didn’t have enough juice to disappear. I had been inside him, and I knew. He’d spent everything on that fight.

“Here!” He spat. “Have her.”

A little girl materialized in the middle of the Jackal pack. One of the warriors snatched her and ran toward us. The Jackals kept moving, step by step, tightening the ring.

“I gave you what you wanted!”

The Jackals closed in, one step at a time, eyes on fire, fangs gleaming.

“Stop!”

They swarmed him. He screamed, but not for very long.

I sat on a muddy log. My heart was beating inside me. Doolittle had mended it through a gaping hole in my chest, while I screamed, and then he’d repaired my rib cage, and then he had sealed my wounds. He sat next to me now, wiping my blood off his hands with a wet rag. His eyes were red. He had a terrible look on his face.

Raphael knelt by him. “Thank you.”

Doolittle shook his head. “I didn’t hear that. What did you say?”

Raphael leaned closer. “I said, thank—”

Doolittle grabbed his throat and smashed his head into Raphael’s face. It was the most vicious head butt I had ever seen. Raphael fell back. Doolittle snarled something under his breath and walked away.

Raphael shook his head. Blood gushed from his broken nose.

“I think he’s mad at you,” I told him.

“He’ll get over it.” Raphael grinned at me.

“How did you know I wouldn’t die?”

“I didn’t.”

“Took a chance, huh?”

He nodded. “We had nothing to lose.”

Behind him the Jackals had dismantled one of the huts and dragged Anapa’s dismembered corpse onto a pile of wood. Two shapeshifters in warrior form dumped fuel onto the boards and set it on fire.

“How did you know Anapa would panic?” I asked.

“When you told me he had started as a shapeshifter, I went to the Jackals looking for their research on Anubis’s weaknesses. They took it very seriously. Half of the Clan was digging up information. They said that in ancient Egypt, when Anubis was still human, silver was virtually unknown. The Egyptians started getting it later, through imports, and even then it was highly prized. There was no reason he would know how silver affected shapeshifters from personal experience. Roman said that he would likely retreat to the old Anapa body if he was threatened. Clan Jackal trailed us. His ego was so colossal, he didn’t view them as a threat.”

“He didn’t even notice them,” I told him.

“The hardest part was talking Doolittle into that emergency open-heart surgery. He really didn’t want to do it. We argued for hours. He thought you wouldn’t survive.” Raphael swallowed. He looked sick.

“What’s the matter with you? Is it the poison?”