Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  “And what of your sister? Victoria is a dragon and more, Trevor. How can you risk her becoming a weapon if you cannot risk me?”

  “Vic has an emergency escape method that none of the rest of us do. She’s probably the least likely to be captured of all of us,” Trev said. His voice sounded firm, but I could tell Rhelia was wearing him down. “Vic, help me out here.”

  I stared at him for a moment, though my gaze had nothing on Rhelia’s glare.

  “Why on Earth, or any realm, would I help you keep a grown-assed woman from going on a mission she wants to be on? Especially when that woman spends half her time as a walking, flying, fire-breathing tank?”

  “Because they could try to use her to destroy everyone?”

  “How is that different from what they could do with any of us?” I asked.

  “It’s damage control,” Trev insisted. “It’s trying to make sure that the fewest people—”

  “It’s you being overprotective because you thought she was dead three days ago,” I said, not willing to listen to the excuses anymore.

  Rhelia actually laughed as all the fight went out of Trev in that moment, and then she was hugging him, and he was crying a bit, and then I thought I heard kissing, and that was lovely, but I didn’t need to watch it, so I headed over to the huddle of all the sensible people who’d left that argument as soon as it started.

  “You finally realized there was no way to win there?” Sol asked, as I wandered over to the group. Azrael and Gwen stood facing me already, but Sol and Seamus had both turned to see me as I approached.

  I sighed.

  “My brother probably hates me now,” I muttered.

  “Ah, so you stood for the side of reason?” Azrael asked.

  “If Rhelia gets so much as a scratch on this mission, Trev’s gonna blame me, personally.”

  “Ha! Only if he wants Rhelia to take his head off,” Sol chuckled. “I can understand the reaction based on recent events, but if your brother is always that protective, Rhelia is going to find someone else to be her partner, ‘mate’ or no.”

  I sighed.

  “I don’t think he’s that much of an idiot, but I haven’t spent that much time with him in the last decade, so…” I shrugged.

  Seamus tentatively wrapped one arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him and wrapped my arms around his waist to let him know the touch was welcome.

  “Don’t ever let me be that much of an ass, ok?” I pleaded.

  “You mean like earlier today when you tried to tell me I should go home?” Seamus asked.

  I was reassured by the fact that he didn’t let go of me, but it was a painful reminder of my own crappy reaction earlier.

  “I’m sorry about that. I get nervous sometimes, about how little training you’ve had in combat. That’s no excuse, though. You’re as much of an adult as I am, and you can put yourself at risk as you see fit. Plus I need to remember that you have a much better idea of what risks lie ahead than most people.” I almost kicked myself for that last part, not knowing how much of his abilities Seamus wanted the rest of our group to know about.

  Seamus ignored the reference to his abilities as a seer, though, and kissed the top of my head in what would have been a patronizing way if I hadn’t so richly deserved it.

  “Lucky for you I was raised by wolves and have been conditioned to see protectiveness in all family and friends as a sign of affection.”

  I laughed then, thinking of all the wolves I’d known in my summers volunteering at the wildlife rescue. Seamus was spot on, they were all inherently protective of their pack.

  A cough sounded behind us, causing half of us to turn around and the other half to look up. Seamus and I both turned at the same time, dropping our hold on one another, because the cough was directly behind us.

  “I am going to sssstay behind and ssssift through ssssecurity feedssss from here, assss well assss run some additional code that might be helpful later,” Rhelia said calmly, her arm wrapped around Trev’s shoulders in almost the same way Seamus’ had been wrapped around my own moments ago.

  A few of us raised our eyebrows at that.

  “And I am going to apologize profusely for being an overprotective git, and then be the one to patch Rhelia into the computers at MOME in order to let her run everything from her apartment on Earth,” Trev said, sounding more than a little sheepish.

  “How is it that you are apologizing and also getting your way?” I asked, when no one else seemed inclined to question this.

  To my satisfaction, it was Rhelia who answered.

  “Becausssse, while I may be a better hacker, Trev issss more familiar with MOME’ssss protocolssss and he will be able to quickly insssstall a proxsssy devicssse that will allow me to monitor the necsssessssary ssssecurity feedssss. And I am better equipped to ssssearch for two weredragonssss than he issss. In addition, Trev has promissssed me that he will not interfere when I abssssolutely demolish MOME oncsssse we have gotten all of our people out.”

  I swallowed, because I didn’t think Rhelia was joking, and I hadn’t known that was on the “to-do” list for today.

  “Do not worry, Living Cat. We have people behind MOME’ssss wallssss other than the prisonerssss you will resssscue now. Today issss not the day that MOME will burn.”

  I glanced at Seamus, saw him shudder, and wondered if he was just reacting to the violent glint in Rhelia’s yellow eyes, or if he had seen something.

  “We should go.”

  It was the first time Gwen had spoken since I’d walked over from Trev and Rhelia’s argument, and I’d almost forgotten she was still here. I had half expected her to simply disappear while we were all distracted. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  When we all looked at her expectantly, she just stared back for a moment.

  “Oh fine. I suppose I can give you a lift,” she muttered, before corralling us into a group hug and blinking us out of existence.

  THE WHOLE THING about gods of serendipity is that they’re really good for short cuts. Apparently, the way the tracking spell that Torrence had cast worked was that it more or less turned him into a walking compass—a compass for which magnetic north was always Siara. So, while our original plan had been to head to Earth via the seam in the dragon realm and then have me shift us in the general direction Torrence’s compass pulled, Gwen showing up cut what might have been a longish game of Marco Polo down to two jumps. We first touched down in a nondescript alley in La Paz (blissfully devoid of human fluids, this time) with the idea that we should start with the last place we were certain MOME had held Siara and Emil. In addition, it was where Rhelia’s Earth apartment was—a fact that had some of us raising eyebrows, since we hadn’t known she’d had a place here until just before we’d left and Gwen asked us where we’d like to head first.

  After Rhelia left us, a quick consult with Torrence and his Siara compass had us aiming NNW, and then in a single blink through space and time we were in front of a large, nondescript concrete building in downtown Phoenix, standing on a brightly lit piece of sidewalk that was still baking with the day’s heat despite a darkened sky, the gathering clouds in the distance, and a wind that carried the scent of impending rain.

  The good news was that I was fairly certain that we were standing in front of the same place where they’d held Seamus and me back when we were awaiting my sham of a trial, and that meant this wasn’t just some random stop on the way to Siara and Emil, but rather was quite likely where they were being held. A quick look at Torrence con-firmed it. He nodded and pointed inside the building.

  “They are inside and down, I believe,” he con-firmed.

  We’d done it. In a handful of hours we’d done what days of searching every bit of external MOME security footage couldn’t do.

  The bad news was, it was a mass of drab concrete with a giant parking lot beside it nestled in downtown Phoenix, a city that held over four million people. Meaning that if things went sideways, the very least that would hap
pen was four million people going up in smoke (assuming we somehow avoided the whole “tearing a hole in time and space and imploding the universe” piece).

  Luckily for me, our plan didn’t leave me time to think about how terrifyingly wrong things could go.

  Gwen added a few finishing touches to every-one’s disguises—which she accomplished with a single wave of the hand that could just as easily have been a gesture of farewell, especially since she disappeared as soon as she finished the gesture—and then I was being dragged along just above the elbow, courtesy of a very stern-faced almost-Sol. Whatever Gwen had done made her look like a stranger, though she was a stranger who shared the same basic skin tone, hair type, and facial structure as Sol. She pulled Az along on her other side. We both did our best to move mechanically, imitating the way that Sol had described the motions of someone under a MOME arrest spell. Torrence, meanwhile, seemed to be doing his best to injure Seamus and Trevor as he dragged them by their collars into the building through the double set of glass doors that was so common for desert office entrances.

  Watching him play the role of a violent enforcer who considered his four captives to be just so much shit under his boot was an education in acting. Either that, or he was totally going to kill us.

  Torrence had slipped into the skin of a pissed off, unthinking muscle cop so well it was hard to believe he was actually the Unterberg council’s lead intelligence officer. Trusting him made me more than a little nervous, but he’d had plenty of chances to kill us or let us die today, so I just had to hope he was actually on our side.

  You’d think that after our last few MOME rescue initiatives, having Torrence and Sol pose as MOME officers wouldn’t really be an option, but Sol had confirmed that more than one tauren already worked for the North American branch (bonus: she confirmed that tauren was the right word for what Torrence was) so he wouldn’t look out of place despite being a large bull-person who looked like he could have just stepped out of a Greek myth. In addition, Trev had confirmed a few days prior that no major security protocols had changed in MOME’s online database. Which meant that, while our Bolivian rescue ops might have caused a few word of mouth warnings for folks to keep an eye out for anyone strange, nothing had changed so much that two officers who looked familiar (thanks to Gwen’s hastily applied illusions) bringing in a handful of nondescript law-breakers was going to attract undue attention, as long as we didn’t stick around too long.

  Not sticking around too long was going to be key.

  And, yeah, ok, maybe Torrence was actually doing too good of a job of playing the asshole cop, or maybe Seamus was playing up the battered prisoner thing too much, because we’d only made it past the second security checkpoint—courtesy of some fake IDs Trev had cooked up for Sol and Torrence, and which Gwen had further modified—when an actual MOME security officer approached us. She was dressed in a grey pantsuit which, combined with her light skin and brown hair, made her completely unremarkable. I assumed she was a mage.

  The expression on her face made it seem like one of us had stepped in dog crap on the way in, and only reinforced my guess that she was a mage. My brief experiences with MOME had taught me that mages in this line of work didn’t think much of their shifter counterparts. Then again, maybe she just took issue with the man-bull who was dragging Seamus by the collar. Sol was holding my elbow instead, along with Az’s. I tried to look at Az, but they had done something to themself to prevent anyone from more than glancing at them (it was the best way to keep them hidden in a place like this, because covering up the fact that they were a succubus was nigh impossible, no matter what kind of illusion one used), so I couldn’t get a good look at their expression. Still, I didn’t think they were too happy with the new scrutiny we were under either.

  “Bullard, I’m going to need to talk to you for a minute,” she said, addressing Torrence. I couldn’t read his fake ID from here, but I doubt the mage could either. Apparently, Gwen had done a good enough job that this woman had mistaken him for some other tauren jerk, though.

  “What, now?” Torrence asked, exuding the kind of disdain that spoke of either a personal history or a deep dislike of women in power. Torrence held firm to Seamus, shaking him angrily even as he spoke. But, at the same time, he pushed Trev towards me in a way that forced him to lightly jostle the grey suited mage. The glower she directed at Torrence intensified, but she didn’t give Trev a second glance as Sol let go of Az’s elbow to take Trev’s instead.

  Given my previous interactions with Torrence, his acrid tone was a bit of a shock, but apparently it was exactly the reaction that the grey-suited officer was expecting.

  She nodded to Sol, dismissing her quickly, before rounding on Torrence.

  Sol didn’t hesitate. She turned on her heel and continued on down the hall with her three prisoners as if everything were perfectly normal.

  “This is the third time this week that I’ve had to talk to you about the way you treat the people you’re bringing in, Bullard. How am I supposed to…”

  The security officer’s voice faded out of hearing as Sol kept us moving down the hall.

  Even so, I was deeply glad when Trev pulled us down a side hall leading to a closed, windowless black door. Trev swiped a keycard down the access panel next to the door and I had to restrain a shocked exclamation as I recognized the grey-suited mage in the photo ID attached to it. Trev had mentioned that the fake IDs wouldn’t get us to the cameras he needed, he’d just never told us exactly how he’d planned to get ahold of a real one, only that he’d “handle it.”

  Probably a good thing. If I’d known that his plan had relied on mugging a real MOME agent, I might have objected.

  For now my objections were put on hold, as, the moment the door swung open, we were faced with a small, dark room, full of security video feed—and vampires.

  FORTUNATELY, WE HAD Azrael with us.

  Before the two closest vampires could even react to our presence, Azrael swooped in and dealt with all seven of them. It was really quite something to see Az work. The succubus moved so fast that it barely registered as motion. From the looks of things, all Az needed to get the better of a vampire was to get one hand on their bare skin. When I’d asked them to explain to the group about their vampire fighting superpowers, they’d said that their succubus nature simply pulled all the vamp’s stolen energy away, and then they collapsed like rag dolls. Apparently, vamps were so easily drained because the energy wasn’t theirs to begin with.

  “Are they dead?” I asked, even as Trev stepped over the limp vampires to get to whatever controls he needed to access. “‘Cause they seem dead.”

  Az looked at me, hand on their chest as if hurt, and they must have dropped whatever spell they’d used to keep my gaze away, because I was able to look back at them.

  “You asked me not to kill them,” they said.

  “Yeah, well. Not everyone does what I ask, you know.”

  “They are vampires, Vic. They technically were dead before we started. However, these ones will regain themselves in a few hours’ time.”

  Trev had gotten to work as soon as the vamps were down, and he was already immersed in pulling apart a few control panels and messing with wires.

  “We have to go,” said Sol, pulling on my arm.

  I hesitated. We were going to need to leave Trev here to run things while we made our way to the dungeon, so he could keep security off of our tails for as long as possible. I hated it.

  Az touched my arm.

  “I’ll stay here with him,” they said. “I am an excellent defense against more than just vampires.”

  I nodded. That hadn’t been the original plan, but it sounded a hell of a lot better than leaving Trev here by himself. Especially now that I’d seen how heavily guarded MOME was leaving their security feeds. It no longer seemed likely that Trev wouldn’t have someone else from MOME drop in on him while he was trying to tell us how to get to Siara and evade more security personnel.

  So, we l
eft Trev to set up whatever relay he needed for Rhelia to do her thing, along with Az to help keep MOME security off of his back.

  Meanwhile, I continued on with Sol.

  I still didn’t like the fact that Trev was here, and that we were leaving him behind, but I’d be doing the same thing to him that he’d tried to do to Rhelia if I attempted to stop him. I still hated having him so close to MOME again after everything they’d done to him, all that they’d tried to do him, had wanted to do to him. It made me pretty ragey just thinking about it, but I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on looking like a frightened prisoner. It wasn’t a big stretch, to be honest.

  Even without the extra help from Torrence, getting into a MOME headquarters never seemed to be a problem for us. Getting out was usually the challenge, and this time I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going to be caught at any moment. If things went badly this time around the results would be catastrophic, not just for me and the people I loved, but for the entire Phoenix metro area, possibly the world, and if we were especially unlucky, maybe even the universe. So… no, acting wasn’t really required to get my palms sweating and my stomach feeling like it was about to jump out of my mouth to parachute someplace safe.

  Except if we failed today there might not be a safe place, like, anywhere, and I was really just going to have to stop thinking about failure, because it was doing me no damned good.

  Sol was clearly dragging out our walk as we waited for Trev to patch Rhelia through so that she could confirm that the dungeons were indeed where Siara was being held, not to mention tell us how the hells to get there.

  Seamus and I had been here exactly once before, and we’d been blindfolded and unconscious on the way in, and too nervous to see straight on the way out. We were about as helpful as a service dog with a sinus infection. Apparently, the only thing Sol could think of to draw things out was to shake me while talking smack periodically. This seemed so unlike her that it was almost humorous.