Saoirse drew her lips into a thin line. “That’s the second time you’ve referred to humans as the ‘blood supply.’”
“Oh.” I cringed. “Sorry.”
She eyed my collar, beneath which sat my new and improved glamour necklace. “Might want to tweak that mind glamour a bit more.”
I let out a dry laugh. “It’s a work in progress.”
“Aren’t we all?” She rolled her chair away from her desk. “So, I guess I should start shelling out new orders to the primary raid teams?”
“Primaries and secondaries would be my recommendation. The vampires are going to put up a hell of a fight if we try to thin their blood sup…er, rescue a substantial number of prisoners from their clutches. There’s nothing that sets off a fledgling vampire more than the prospect of losing easy access to a food source.” I ran a hand through my hair, analyzing the map that highlighted in bold colors just how dangerous Kinsale had become in recent months. “We can expect ample resistance from the vampires at the holding locations, as well as retaliatory attacks on civilians from other members of the coven, if Vianu fails to corral them all in the immediate wake of the raids.”
“You don’t think he’d condone such attacks?”
“No, because it invites the interference of the sídhe contingent. He already made a misstep in that regard once, and lost four fledglings as a consequence. He won’t do that again. He’ll keep his army lurking in the shadows until they’re primed for whatever major offensive he’s plotting as part of his long-term domination strategy.”
Saoirse sighed and leaned back against the cracked leather cushion. “Every day, I feel more and more like an army general.”
“Every day, this city draws closer to all-out war in the streets, so that’s hardly surprising.”
“Do you see this ending any other way?”
“The war won’t be an end.” I backed away from the desk and half turned toward the door. “It’ll either be the beginning of a new era of mortal triumph, or the dawn of an age of vampire tyranny.”
Saoirse closed her eyes. “And how do you think that coin’s going to land?”
“Doesn’t matter how it lands. I’ll flip it in our favor, no matter what it takes.”
A tiny smile curved the corner of her mouth. “That sounds like the sort of proclamation you used to make back when you were a rookie detective, right before you did something stupid.” She cracked one eye open. “Careful you don’t get in over your head again, Vince.”
“Ha! Now there’s a good joke.” I reached for the doorknob. “I’ve been in over my head since the day Tom Tildrum walked into my store.”
Chapter Nine
Odette Chao’s training class was the highest level of punishment offered at Project Watchdog’s school for paranormal combat novices. Human practitioners, half-fae, and even mundane humans who had never thrown a punch or held a weapon, but who were intent on doing their part to protect Kinsale from the vampires, entered the gym on day one of the course with no concept of just how badly Odette was going to own their asses.
Generally, these poor fools emerged from day one’s session with a new appreciation for ice packs and skin-colored makeup. Some of them flaked out after this experience, unable to accept the brutal reality of magical combat that Odette was not afraid to put on full display.
But to my surprise, the majority of each class stayed put and allowed Odette to beat them black and blue day in and day out. Until they finally grew proficient enough at fighting to exit the gym at the close of a session with a modicum of their dignity intact. That exit would still be accompanied by an obvious limp most of the time, but people felt a great deal of pride when it became apparent they weren’t getting destroyed quite as badly as they’d been at the start of the course.
Tonight, most of Odette’s trainees hobbled out of the gym in a good mood, even the guy who looked like he’d gotten whacked in the eye by a high-speed baseball. This batch of recruits were nearing the end of their training, and next week, they’d “graduate” to placements as rookies in the various specialty units Saoirse and I had designed to maximize the organization’s effectiveness against the vampire threat.
Roughly half the human practitioners and fae scions would be assigned to raid teams, precision strike teams, or emergency defense teams; they’d become the swords we wielded against our enemies and the shields who defended Kinsale in times of great need.
The remaining halves of those groups would get slotted into research and development positions, crafting new magic tools to help us more efficiently outwit the vampires and fine-tuning the practical applications of the indispensable magic theory models our top researchers had developed by studying the cache of powerful items Odette lifted from Manannán during the assault on Emhain Abhlach.
The bulk of the mundanes, by contrast, would either be assigned administrative positions or R&D support jobs. Which, despite sounding boring, were critical roles we needed filled in order to keep Project Watchdog up and running, especially as we expanded the scope of our many operations throughout the city.
The remaining mundanes would be assigned to covert operations. Half of our intelligence network consisted of civilian informants recruited by O’Shea or Christie through their business connections. But the other half were trained Watchdogs carefully seeded into nondescript positions across the city, all of which were connected to the vampires in some fashion. We had spies inside the now vampire-run businesses, spies living across the street from suspected vampire meeting places, spies practically everywhere you could imagine.
At Project Watchdog, we assigned everyone an important job. Simply because there were so many.
After the last trainee shambled out of the gym, Odette herself emerged. She was wearing the same sports bra she’d had on that fateful day six months ago, when we’d jumpstarted all of this by fleecing a sea god. Though today she’d complemented the garment with a matching pair of compression shorts. Sweat clung to her skin, plastered strands of her loosely bound hair to her head and neck, and even ran in rivulets down the intricate carvings on her prosthetic arm. She was dabbing at her face with a small towel as she stepped into the hall, but she paused with the towel against her cheek when she spotted me across the way.
“Oh great. Just what I need tonight,” she said. “You.”
“Me?” I pushed off the rough plywood wall. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whenever you corner me after a class, it’s either because you have bad news to pass on, or because you want me to join in on some dangerous excursion liable to get me killed.”
“That’s not true.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Name one exception.”
I thought about it for a second, and came up empty. “Huh. You may actually be right.”
“Of course I’m right.” She resumed wiping herself down with the towel. “Go on. Spit it out. What’s the rub tonight?”
I recounted my conversation with Saoirse, and added, “Based on the reports, the office on Normandy appears to be the largest of the makeshift prisons. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to do a joint entry with your team so we have a better chance of rescuing the majority of the victims before the vamps recover from our stun tactics and start tearing into any flesh they can find.”
Odette pursed her lips. “Do we have enough primary raid teams to cover all the other targets?”
“Yes, and we’ll have all secondary teams on standby.”
“All right. I guess we can work together again.” She threw on a grin. “It did work out pretty well last time…except for that part at the end where the ocean almost crushed us.”
“Are you still on about that? It was six months ago. And Manannán hasn’t bothered us since.”
“My life flashed before my eyes,” she drawled. “I’ll be on about it forever.”
“You make me want to roll my eyes forever.” I turned in the direction of the labs. “But fine. Hold a grudge if you want. It’s your problem to dwe
ll on in the middle of the night, not mine. So I’ll be sleeping like a baby while you toss and turn.”
She punched me in the shoulder with her metal fist. Hard.
“Ow!” I clutched my arm. “Fuck you.”
She raised her fist like she was going to hit me a second time. “Fuck you harder, Whelan.”
We stared each other down for a tense moment. Then we burst out laughing.
After I gathered myself, I asked, “You going to shower here or head home first?”
“Home. Just going to pull on a tracksuit I’ve got in my locker.”
“I’m guessing the water pressure issue still hasn’t been fixed?”
She stomped her bare foot against the tile floor in annoyance. “Somehow, they made it worse. At first, it was so low you could hardly wash the shampoo out of your hair. Now, it’s so high it feels like you’re being stabbed by a million tiny needles. I swear I was bleeding when I came out of the shower yesterday.” She snorted. “Who the hell did you hire to fix the pipes?”
“Didn’t hire anyone. Can’t hire anyone.” I gestured to the ceiling. “Secret base, remember?”
“So who’d you ask to fix the pipes?”
“Some guy who was training to be a plumber before the collapse.”
“Oh.” She draped the towel over her shoulder. “That explains a lot.”
We trekked across the basement, made a pit stop at the locker room where Odette finished cleaning up and dressed, and finally reached the largest lab space in the complex, which was warded even more heavily than Saoirse’s office.
Lab 9 was where our top-secret weapons projects were developed and tested by our most skilled research practitioners. It took two coded knocking sequences, five verbal passwords, and a ward-based biometric scan before someone opened the door and allowed Odette and me inside. The door was immediately shut behind us, the defense wards reactivated.
The woman who’d let us in warned us in a hushed voice not to venture too close to the back left corner of the expansive room, where several practitioners were testing a prototype of what appeared to be a magic laser gun.
As I watched in muted awe, blue beams shot out of the weapon’s barrel and sliced cleanly through a brick set on a pedestal twenty feet away. Then the brick exploded into high-speed shrapnel, and the onlookers dove for cover behind a wall of bulletproof plastic.
Well, that concept needs some tweaking, I thought as a tiny piece of brick bounced to a stop at my feet.
“Oh, is it end of shift already?” said a familiar voice.
Odette and I spun away from the failed test scene to find Tori on the opposite side of the lab, tucked behind her usual table. She was wiping up a puddle of green liquid that had bubbled over the rim of a beaker set atop a Bunsen burner. She sent Odette an air kiss as she rounded the table to toss the soiled rag into a trashcan with a TOXIC label taped to the side, which was full of identical wet rags, at least one of which was smoking as if slowly being dissolved by acid.
Project Watchdog’s lab setups were not exactly OSHA approved.
Tori called to another witch, her assistant, and passed on instructions for finishing whatever potion experiments they’d been working on today. Then she stopped at a sink and thoroughly washed her hands, before jogging across the room to join Odette and me.
Tori was rather shy and reserved when it came to strangers, but once she warmed up to you, she displayed what I could only describe as a “bubbly personality.” She was a fan of big smiles, frequent winks, and lame jokes, and she struck me as the sort of person who would’ve been popular on social media before the collapse. Maybe some kind of video blogger, or one of those people who took a lot of selfies with their cats.
What astonished me most about Tori wasn’t that she’d maintained that happy-go-lucky personality during the collapse, but rather how that personality so perfectly concealed her true identity as an ingenious magic scholar and potion-making prodigy. At twenty-seven, Tori was by far the youngest practitioner in this lab, yet she had a successful experiment output four times higher than anyone else.
She’d almost singlehandedly developed our entire arsenal of potion-based anti-vampire stun weapons, many of which we’d utilized to great effect in recent raid operations. She put my own magic knowledge to shame, and whenever she tried to explain to me the science behind her experiments, I felt like a second-grader trying to understand theoretical astrophysics.
Tori bypassed me with a quick smile and laid a real kiss on Odette’s cheek. Only to recoil a moment later, grimacing. “Ugh, you smell like a neglected clothes hamper.”
Odette shrugged. “Sorry, but I’m not getting stabbed by those showers again.”
Tori gave me a side-eye. “Can’t you get that fixed? You’re a big boss around here.”
“I tried.” I shrugged. “If you want real change, you’ll have to bug Saoirse.”
Tori looked appalled by that suggestion. “But she’s scary.”
“And I’m not?” I pointed at the sídhe marks on my cheeks.
“Nah. I thought you were at first, but then I realized you just wear a resting bitch face to scare off the nasties.” She poked my chest. “You’re kind of warm and fuzzy on the inside, the ice faerie thing notwithstanding.”
My eyebrows rose. “Wow, that’s…an interesting description of me. Haven’t heard that one before.”
Odette scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. Tori just gives people the benefit of the doubt too often.”
“She give it to you?” I asked.
“Nope. Odette’s a raging bitch.” Tori patted Odette’s shoulders. “But I love her anyway.”
Odette produced an eyebrow wiggle with an impressive range of motion that suggested something like, I’m just that good in bed.
Tori caught the innuendo and flicked Odette’s temple. “You shouldn’t flatter yourself either. You’re nothing but a pile of emotional problems.”
“That hurts,” Odette said flatly.
“I’m sure.” Tori grabbed her arm, then mine. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. It’ll be getting dark already, and I hate walking these streets without lights.”
The three of us joined a stream of people clocking out for the evening and passed through the set of repurposed swinging doors at the north end of the basement that let out into the tunnel network we were still in the process of digging.
Since vampires could easily tail people, given their propensity for stealth and speed, we’d needed to ensure none of our members could be tracked to the factory. A concrete tunnel that connected the factory basement to an outbuilding fifty yards away had given us the idea for a tunnel system.
During our setup phase, we’d dug two more tunnels, one that spit you into the basement of a deli that belonged to a Watchdog’s cousin and one that connected to a dusty storage room in the nearest public library. Four more tunnels, whose outlets were farther from the factory, were works in progress.
The library exit was closer to Flannigan’s, so we chose the left-hand fork and proceeded to take a leisurely stroll whose scenic views included: dirt walls decorated with battery-powered lanterns that hung from rusty nails, plastic sheeting on the ceiling that reflected the light from those lanterns in creepy ways, and creaky boards beneath your feet that sank too far when you put your weight on them, a consequence of recent rains softening the earth.
Traversing one of the tunnels was a claustrophobic experience at best—they were only about five feet wide—and with each step you took, you were acutely aware that the entire structure could collapse on you at any time.
But hey, it was better than being snuffed out by vampires.
Once we reached the ladder that led to the storage room, I shimmied up, lifted the trapdoor disguised as a set of floor tiles, and peeked about the darkened room to make sure no prying eyes were in the vicinity. Coast clear, I motioned for Tori and Odette to come up. As they climbed, I quietly flipped the door all the way over on its hinges and rested it on the floor.
Entering the room, I did another sweep of the unkempt space, hunting for suspicious shadows lurking behind the old filing cabinets or unnerving humanoid shapes obscured by the tall metal racks. I found neither. There were no vampires—or oblivious bystanders—here tonight. And our luck holds for another day.
Odette closed the trapdoor behind her, and we all shuffled over to the exit. I cracked the door and searched the hall for library patrons, but found no one. The basement level of the library wasn’t currently in use, due to the limited availability of public funds, so no one was supposed to come down here. But sometimes people hopped the rope barriers in front of the stairwell anyway so they could have a warm place to squat for the night. Or so they could pillage from the multitude of materials the library staff had stored down here during the collapse and hadn’t yet had a chance to dig out.
I opened the door all the way and let Odette and Tori out ahead of me. From the basement, we made a quick trip up the stairs, slipped out the stairwell door on the ground floor unseen, split up and took separate routes through the towering stacks, and each emerged a few seconds apart near the circulation desk.
The matronly librarian on duty, who was one of our informants, gave me a quick glance, followed by a subtle nod to indicate she didn’t believe any suspicious persons were in the building at this time. So we converged into a group again and casually strolled toward the main exit. We passed dozens of people milling around wooden tables or sitting in beanbag chairs, reading books or studying or quietly discussing various subjects. A few patrons stopped what they were doing to ogle my sídhe marks, but most of them paid us little attention.
The news that Vincent Whelan was a half-sídhe had long finished its run in the gossip circles.
Arctic air hit us on the front steps, carrying the scent of oncoming snow, and the women shivered as a brisk wind blew through the street. The winter weather had been worsening over the past week or so. It gave me the impression Mab was once again fixing a watchful eye on the city in anticipation of the next skirmish between the fae-aligned forces in Kinsale and Abarta’s expanding web of associates on Earth.
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