What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  “Now you listen to me, you stupid half-breed bastard,” McCullough practically spit, leaning close to my face. His expression screwed into a dark sneer, twisting the jagged iron scar that bisected his right cheek into an even uglier shape. A shape, I thought distantly, that reflected the true face of the man beneath the pretty sídhe veneer. “You are nothing compared to me. Nothing at all. I’ve looked into you, Whelan. Your history. Your childhood.”

  He did spit this time. A glob of saliva landed right beside my ear. “Your mother is an unknown palace employee, so ashamed of you she never publicly admitted her parenthood, probably because she thought, correctly, that acknowledging a weak whelp like you would shame her entire family line. And when she finally accepted just how much of a stain you were on her life, she had the palace guard drag you out of Tír na nÓg, sans memory, and toss you on your worthless father’s doorstep. And then—”

  Like lightning, my hand shot up and grabbed his face, nails digging into his scar. McCullough was so shocked by the sudden pain, his grip on my throat loosened enough for me to speak.

  I tilted my head up as far as I could in our awkward position and hissed, “You can insult me all you want, you arrogant, hapless son of a bitch. But don’t you ever insult my father. He made a better man of himself in sixty years than you could in a thousand, and he didn’t have to bully or belittle or brutalize a single person along the way. You are nothing compared to my father. So if you insult his memory again, you will pay the price.”

  McCullough was momentarily alarmed by my gall, but his ego reasserted itself all too soon. “What kind of price could you possibly exact on me? Huh? You are half a sídhe. I can crush you easily.”

  “But you cannot crush me without consequences.” I glanced to the right.

  McCullough followed my line of sight—to the orange tabby sitting on the narrow brick ledge outside the picture window. Tom Tildrum’s favored proxy.

  What little color existed on McCullough’s skin drained to white. He abruptly let go of my neck and sat up, wrenching his face free of my grasp. He positioned his head out of the cat’s view, so it couldn’t read his lips, and said quietly, “I don’t know what it is you’ve done to earn the double-edged favor of the King of the Cats, but I do know that favor won’t last forever. Cats are fickle things, their figurehead even more so, and when Tildrum finally tires of batting you around like a mouse, I will be there to destroy whatever shreds of you remain. Mark my words, Whelan. You don’t get to deride me in front of my subordinates and walk away unscathed.”

  I met McCullough’s gaze dead-on. “Watch me.”

  He came very close to punching me in the face. “Get out,” he muttered. “Get out, and don’t you dare come back here. You aren’t welcome at these meetings. You aren’t welcome in this building. You aren’t welcome in my sight anywhere in this pathetic excuse for a city. From now on, I’ll have someone send over summaries of whatever tactical decisions I make about the defensive forces I control, and you and your dogs will not make a single move against the vampires beyond intelligence gathering unless I say so. Understand?”

  “Oh, I understand perfectly.” How far and how fast you are going to fall.

  He gripped the lapels of my coat and hauled me to my feet, then practically threw me out the open door. I stumbled into the hall and nearly fell on my ass. But Aileen, who’d been waiting outside the conference room the entire time, caught my arm and steadied me.

  McCullough, grumbling curses under his breath, stomped back around the table. As he retook his seat, he shot me a final punishing glare that promised pain and suffering in abundance. Before he flicked his finger, ejecting a stream of energy, and magically slammed the door shut.

  Aileen looked stricken. She whispered in my ear, “What the hell were you thinking, provoking him like that?”

  “I was thinking,” I whispered back as I quickly led her down the hall, until we were out of earshot of the two conference room guards, “that the best way to break the pedestal of someone’s authority is to prove that they are too unstable to hold that authority in the first place.”

  “Are you serious?” She eyed my bruising neck, incredulous. “That was reckless. He could’ve killed you.”

  “I disagree. It wasn’t reckless.” I paused at the top step of the grand staircase leading to the ground floor. Even six months later, I could pick out the faded stains on the marble floor from the blood of the zombie attack victims who had flooded the building after it became a makeshift hospital. “It involved the exact amount of risk necessary to get my point across.”

  She stopped beside me, lips pursed. “Do you think it worked?”

  “Did you see their faces?”

  “Whose?”

  “Everyone’s.”

  Aileen looked to the side as she recalled the scene in the conference room. “They all appeared…unsettled. Even the sídhe soldiers.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  She tapped her high-heeled shoe against the floor in a staccato cadence. “A colonel losing all sense of self-control and attacking a weaker fae scion for no demonstrable benefit to his current mission or to the Unseelie Court as a whole…is a memorable faux pas. The others won’t forget such a transgression anytime soon.”

  “They won’t forget that transgression,” I countered, “as long as McCullough is alive.”

  Aileen searched my face for an answer to a question she didn’t want to ask, but failed to find it. “And how much longer will he be alive?”

  “That”—I started down the stairs and gave her a casual parting wave—“is entirely up to him.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “You know, I still don’t understand why Mab would choose to send such a massive asshole to oversee the defense of a protected city. I know you said she had a good reason, but I just can’t figure it out. He thinks humans are trash and doesn’t care how many of them die on his watch. He views half-fae as grossly inferior to sídhe in all respects, and the mere suggestion of taking their counsel offends him. He treats the lesser fae as his personal servants and prefers they be seen and not heard. And I’m pretty sure he’d burn the remaining half of this city to the ground if that was what it took to get his next promotion.”

  I looked down at the cat walking alongside me. “Seriously, what’s the deal with his assignment? He’s a major liability and has no business being in Kinsale.”

  The orange tabby slowly blinked at me but didn’t otherwise respond. Not that I’d expected it to speak to me. It was just a regular cat after all. Tildrum, as far as I could tell, had the ability to see through the eyes of all cats, and hear through their ears, and he could compel them to do whatever bidding was within their feline power. But that magic didn’t affect the cats in any profound or permanent fashion. They simply acted as walking spy gear, gathering intel in a way not dissimilar to that of the two-legged Watchdog informants. The only major difference between the two groups was that the cats were a whole lot sneakier.

  This particular cat had been assigned to tail me on a semipermanent basis, on account of the fact I was a high-risk vampire target. Tildrum had never outright stated that he would protect me should Vianu finally come calling to collect the shred of respect I’d inadvertently stolen from him when I escaped his clutches in Pettigrew. But I got the sense that the wily cat sídhe had no intention of letting me die unless he thought I’d well and truly failed in my Mab-ordained role as Abarta’s fae foil and burgeoning archenemy.

  As long as I put forth a good faith effort to fulfill that role, I believed Tildrum would tilt any truly unfair fights back into balance. Much like he had the night Saoirse and I stumbled upon Abarta on the verge of casting the harp spell.

  Of course, it would be up to me to take advantage of the finger he placed on my enemy’s side of the scale. Up to me to give each and every battle my best effort in all respects. Up to me to demonstrate the true cleverness of my faerie nature, and the true resourcefulness of my human side, which had existe
d in relative harmony with my fae side these past months only because I’d gone to great pains to invent a whole new type of glamour.

  Tildrum would help me where I honestly needed help, but he wouldn’t give me a free pass. I had to prove I was worthy of the role that Mab had chosen for me. My failure and resulting untimely death would be considered an admission that I didn’t deserve to be called Unseelie, and spun as an intentional decision Mab made to “take out the trash.” My victory, on the other hand, would be seen as an assertion that Mab knew best, as she always did. Either way, I was a pawn in the convoluted game that Mab was playing with Abarta and an as-yet-unidentified third party who was apparently a much bigger threat.

  I resented being a pawn, but only insomuch as it was not my choice to be one. After everything Abarta had done to my city, and everything he was planning to do to the world at large, I had no issue fighting tooth and nail to drag him down to hell where he belonged.

  In order to reach Abarta, however, I first had to defeat his pawns.

  “I can’t allow McCullough to derail what might be our only opportunity to prevent another attack on the city.” I paused for a moment and examined the deserted neighborhood laid out around me, wary of eavesdroppers hiding in the fire-gutted buildings or the shadowy alleyways. The ambience of a walk through downtown Kinsale had taken on a distinctly ominous quality since the zombie invasion. “If I defy the direct orders of an Unseelie colonel,” I added quietly, “and the outcome is favorable for the sídhe, do you think there will still be blowback from the court?”

  The tabby let out a tiny trill I took to be a noncommittal response from Tildrum: There is always a price to pay when you choose to defy a rigid hierarchy, no matter the reason or results.

  If Tildrum had been here in person, I doubted he would have said anything less cryptic or more reassuring. So I just let out a deep sigh and picked up my pace down the sidewalk. All the people who’d still been on the streets at the ebb of twilight, when Odette, Tori, and I left HQ, had long scuttled off to their homes and barricaded themselves behind heavy doors and strong wards. So the streets were empty save for me and my furry friend, and quiet save for the low moans of the wind as it crawled through the gaps between buildings.

  Once upon a time, I would have laughed at the thought of feeling uncomfortable traversing the streets of my hometown. That time had died a slow and horrible death.

  The cat and I hurried along in companionable silence, me contemplating passable raid strategies that didn’t require the presence of the dullahan to ensure success, the cat contemplating the can of tuna in my pocket that had become my regular fee for its “guard duty.” Side by side, we skirted the edge of the burn-scarred park that had once been Kinsale’s central market square.

  Though the melted tents and charred bodies had long been cleared from the expanse of dead grass, a new market had never been erected in its place. The zombie attack had scared civilians away from extended outdoor excursions, so the replacement market was housed in an old warehouse twenty blocks south of its predecessor.

  We turned onto the street where I lived, and I picked up speed with each step at the promise of safety from the encroaching darkness and the things that lurked within. But that reassurance was dampened by the awful sight of what had once been a cozy neighborhood of pretty townhouses and thriving small businesses. Only about half the buildings had been reconstructed since the zombie invasion.

  Every other house was still a blackened wood skeleton shot through with warped support beams and littered with broken bricks. The skeletons represented those who had died in the attack, or those who didn’t have the resources to rebuild the homes the vampires had so cruelly taken from them.

  The damage made me that much angrier every time I saw it.

  If it’s the last thing I do, so help me god, I’m going to get Vianu back for this.

  My house was the only one on the street left unscathed, thanks to the powerful wards I’d erected in the weeks leading up to the invasion. It had been a happy coincidence on my part, driven by the fact Abarta, via Rian, had blown up my previous house using a particularly nasty inferno trap ward.

  I’d strengthened those wards even further since the vampires had taken up residence in the city, pouring all my knowledge into their design, along with the expertise of every ward specialist I could track down through Odette and Tori’s practitioner network. I was fairly certain even Abarta would have trouble breaking down my door without blowing himself up in the process.

  When I reached the front step, I began the complex ten-step process to temporarily take the entry wards offline. I spoke the invocations mentally, despite the fact it was considerably easier to cast spells aloud, so the vampires I knew were watching my house didn’t glean any important information about the ward array. This procedure, which had been grueling for me during the first few weeks, had slowly become second nature as my command of intricate mental magic improved through daily practice. So much so that I was able to multitask now.

  Halfway through the invocations, I reached into my pocket, retrieved the tuna can, and opened it with a flick of my wrist and a tiny pinch of magic. I set the can down in front of the cat, who sniffed at the fish a couple times, licked its chops, then carefully picked up the can with its mouth and trotted off to the nearest alley.

  I hadn’t spotted any more cats on the walk home, but Tildrum’s sneaky spies often traveled in groups of three, so the tabby was likely planning to share the tuna with its kitty friends. The idea made me smile—before I realized I could very well end up with an army of hungry cats wailing outside my front door every morning.

  That thought was so awful I almost flubbed my last invocation.

  Thankfully, I said it right in my head.

  After checking one last time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that was liable to get me blown up, I opened the door, poked my head inside to see if anyone was lying in wait to assassinate me, and hopped across the threshold. Then I closed the door, locked it tight, and began the equally difficult process of restoring functionality to all the wards I’d just defused.

  Ah, the shit I put myself through in the name of safety.

  Once all the wards were fully active again, I crossed the bare expanse of the show floor that had once been my stuff store. When it had become obvious I couldn’t return to my low-key existence as a shop owner and stretch scavenger, I’d donated most of my inventory to the relief efforts so a few more of Kinsale’s newly homeless would at least have winter clothing, clean bedding, and other necessary supplies.

  That had left the main room empty save for some disassembled shelving units and metal racks piled in one corner. And since my new role helping Saoirse spearhead Project Watchdog kept me on my toes an average of twelve hours a day, seven days a week, I hadn’t yet found the time to make use of all the cleared space.

  Jumping the disused checkout counter, I left the former store behind, passed through the skinny wooden door into the back hall, and jogged up the rickety steps to my living area. My usual routine after work was to grab a prepared meal from my magic-powered freezer and toss it into my gas oven, change into a set of comfy sweats and a cotton T-shirt, and curl up on my couch with a hot dinner and a cold beer to watch an old movie on a scuffed but functional battery-powered DVD player I’d found when cleaning out my inventory. I wanted nothing more than to do exactly those things in exactly that order tonight, but my scuffle with McCullough necessitated one final task before I could call my day well and truly done.

  On the desk in my “war room,” where I stored all my personal weapons and defense gear, sat a glass screen that resembled the ones used for the Network. Unlike those screens, mine wasn’t connected to the Network at large, but rather paired to a single screen that sat on another desk in the warded basement of a particular person’s house. Given the time of night, this person should’ve just arrived home after wrapping up the disheveled mound of paperwork that somehow piled up in her inbox every single day.
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br />   I sat in the fraying leather chair in front of the desk, picked up the magic stylus that had once been a decorative chopstick, and wrote a coded message on the screen that amounted to, Saoirse, you there?

  The message disappeared into the ether after thirty seconds. Not long after, Saoirse responded, Was wondering when you’d be along. Guess it went poorly with McCullough, huh?

  You get a message from him after the City Hall meeting let out? I scrawled.

  Sure did. Demanded we scrap all our raid plans on account of our “lack of actionable evidence.” Took all my willpower not to tell him to shove it.

  I snorted. Glad you didn’t. He’s already got his head up his ass, so I’m not sure he can fit anything else in there.

  Saoirse didn’t immediately reply to that. I imagined her sitting at her desk, shoulders shaking as she stifled laughter. When she got the amusement out of her system, she wrote, Well, as big a dick as he may be, he still has a great deal of authority in this city. We have to be extremely careful if we attempt to circumvent his objections to our plans.

  If only we had time for caution. I relayed everything I knew about the magic circle in the park, including my theories on its origin. That plus the blood slave stockpile gives me the impression that the gears of this new scheme are already in motion, and have been for some time. They’re ahead of us. We need to close the gap before we’re caught totally unaware, like we were with the neamh-mairbh.

  She considered my words for several minutes, likely tugging on a springy red curl as she always did when trying to untangle the threads of a complex case. Seems we have no choice but to risk McCullough’s ire then. Protecting Kinsale from whatever Vianu is plotting is far more important than safeguarding our personal well-being, or the status of Project Watchdog as a fae-supported organization. If McCullough wants to throw a tantrum because the mean little mortals didn’t bow at his feet and defer to his every whim, I say let him throw one—after we save the city, defeat the vampires, and upend Abarta’s efforts. Those things will benefit the fae just as much, if not more, than they benefit us. So if McCullough tries to call us out after the fact…