No Sanctuary

by Z. J. Cannon

  “I know what you did to Eddie,” said Ashante. “The news is calling it suicide, but I know better. And I’d rather you didn’t do the same to me. I have what you want, and I’m willing to give it to you.”

  “Engstrom’s location?” I asked.

  A long pause followed. “How do you know that name?”

  I tried my best to keep my face neutral. I didn’t want her to see my surprise. But if she didn’t know I was here for Engstrom, what did she think I wanted? I couldn’t ask without letting on that I knew less than she thought I did.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I want his location. Along with…” Whatever she thought I was here for. “Everything else. And I don’t think you’re in any position to negotiate terms.” I played with the clasp of the watch.

  “No, don’t!” Her panicked voice burst out of the speakers as soon as I touched the clasp. “I’ll open the door. Ellison told you we kept the key here for safekeeping, didn’t he? He was right. I’ll show it to you. I’ll give it to you, if you let me go. Just please, don’t use your magic on me.”

  I dropped my hand from my watch. The door swung open.

  But I hung back. Her fear might be making things easier for me, but I still didn’t like it. If she was as deeply involved with Arkanica as I suspected she was, I didn’t see any scenario in which I could let her live. And if I had to take her life, I wanted it to be while she was fighting back. Or at least giving me a smirk like Ellison’s and trying to recruit me. I didn’t want her scared and begging.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. No doubt some of those fae prisoners had begged; that hadn’t stopped Arkanica. And whatever this key was, it sounded like Ashante thought it was as important as Engstrom—if not more. Which meant I needed to get my hands on it.

  I took a step forward—and stopped.

  This was all a little too easy. If this woman was one of the founders of Arkanica, she’d been working with the fae for years—but one glimpse of me and she was ready to surrender? And the memory of being trapped in Ellison’s apartment was still fresh in my mind.

  “Come outside,” I called to her. “Bring me the key.”

  She hung back from the door. “I really shouldn’t. It requires special handling. You don’t want me to damage—”

  “Come out to me.” I gave my voice more of a bite this time. “Or we can find a different way to do this. Ask Ellison how that’s likely to go.” I reached for the borrowed watch again.

  “No, wait! All right. I’ll bring it to you.” A slim figure stepped out the door. But why was she coming out yet? She hadn’t had a chance to get that key yet.

  This wasn’t right.

  I unclasped the watch. At the same time, she held up something she was holding. The key, whatever that was? No, it was a—

  A remote control.

  The ground dropped out from under me, along with Ashante’s entire front yard.

  She peered down into the hole as I fell, and fell, and fell. “This could have been a lot more comfortable for you if you hadn’t been so—”

  I hit the ground before I could hear the last word.

  I lost consciousness for a few seconds. Or maybe longer than that, because by the time I woke up, any bones I might have broken were healed. I doubted I had come out of that fall without any injuries, but I didn’t see or feel any evidence of physical damage, aside from a slight headache and a splash of blood across my shirt.

  I didn’t know how far below the main cabin we were. A long way, judging by how long it had taken to hit the ground. But this place had quite the ambience for an underground prison. Like the outside, it was all high-tech luxury masquerading as rustic charm. I caught a glimpse of a crackling fireplace that was actually just a screen, giving off no heat. The lights on the raw wood table looked like candles, but were near-flawless electronic imitations. They even had the flicker down. Somewhere in the walls, some sophisticated air-freshener system—courtesy of Nexegence, I assumed—pumped the smell of cedar into the room.

  That was all I could see through the iron grate that surrounded me in all directions. I had been right about the metal underneath the cabin, but wrong about the type—this wasn’t steel, but pure iron.

  A woman stepped around the corner. Looking through her office window, all I had been able to see was her back. I could see her better now, even in the candlelight. She was thin and wiry, with deep brown skin and closed-cropped hair. She wore a loose tank top and long skirt that pretended at casual comfort the same way the cabin did. I was willing to bet those simple-looking clothes cost as much as anything I had worn in my Hawaii days.

  She gave me an easy smile. There was no triumph in her expression, even though she had earned it. She looked for all the world like she was welcoming a dinner guest into her home.

  “I apologize for all this,” she said. “But I’m sure you understand why I had to do it. Like I said, I watched the news. I know what you did to Eddie. I doubt you came over for a friendly chat. Although now that you won’t be going anywhere for a while, I’m hoping you might indulge me in one. After all, what else do you have to do in there?”

  Chapter 24

  Ashante stared at me like I was an exotic butterfly she had pinned as she waited for my answer. I didn’t give her one until I was sure I could keep my voice steady. Showing anger would do nothing but emphasize the fact that I was helpless to act on it. Showing fear would be worse. “I take it there is no key.”

  “You got me,” she said, with an apologetic shrug. “I have to say, I’m glad the security system worked.” She reached out as if to pat the bars, but quickly pulled her hand back, staying out of my reach. “I’ve never gotten the chance to test it before. I knew someone would be coming around sooner or later—if not you, then someone from the Summer Court, once they decided we had outlived our usefulness. We all took precautions—well, Eddie and I. Charles didn’t need to. But some of us did it better than others.” She scoffed, eyes flicking toward the ceiling. “Eddie thought he was untouchable. He figured his reputation and a little extra iron in the walls of his apartment would be enough. That and his obnoxious security system. Would it be callous of me to say he got what he deserved?”

  “Maybe. It would also be true.” I caught myself. I wasn’t going to let her succeed where Ellison had failed, and distract me from why I had come here. “Why didn’t Engstrom need to take precautions?”

  Ashante shook her head. “We’ll get to that. But let’s not rush things, all right? I meant what I said—I’d love the chance to talk to you, even for just a few minutes. I was hoping it would be you who came. I’ve had more than enough of Summer.” Another brief roll of her eyes.

  “How do you know who I am?” I crossed my arms. “I read your book. And Ellison told me some things. Enough to convince me you know a lot of things you shouldn’t know.”

  “You read the book? Really? What did you think?” She ducked her head. In the fake candlelight, it was hard to tell, but I thought she might have been blushing. “Never mind. I’m sure you didn’t come here to give me a book review. But as for how I know about you… are you really interested?” She looked at me with hopeful eyes.

  I ground my teeth, and decided I wanted answers more than I wanted to shut down her attempts at conversation. Besides, I told myself, getting her talking would let her guard down, and buy myself time to look for a way out. “I’m already here. You might as well tell me.”

  She grinned. “It’s a long story. But I’ll stick to the highlights.” She sat down cross-legged and faced me, still from a safe distance. “I don’t know how much you looked into me before you came here, but I started off as a lawyer. My mother the hotshot defense attorney wanted me to follow in her footsteps. She probably should have taken into account the fact that I was the kid who had to be escorted off the stage at my high school graduation before I could give my valedictorian speech because I threw up at the sight of the audience.”

  Listening to her now, I would never have guessed it. I
t seemed she had grown to enjoy the sound of her own voice in the intervening years. I faked an interested expression as I surreptitiously scanned my surroundings for a weapon. No such luck, of course. Even if I jammed my arm through the thin bars, there was nothing within reach, not even one of those candles. She had thought ahead.

  Not all of my interest was faked, of course. I might not have been interested in bonding with the Arkanica pawn who had trapped me, but I did want to know how she—how any human—had come to know about me. Because that kind of notoriety, no matter how limited, was a threat I couldn’t afford.

  Then I caught myself, and stopped that train of thought with a bitter internal laugh, Once, before I’d had my face plastered across every newspaper and television station in the world, I might have seen this woman’s book as a serious threat. Once, I had thought I had known what a real threat looked like.

  But I still wanted to know how she had found out about me.

  “I figured out early on that I wasn’t going to be the kind of lawyer my mother wanted,” Ashante continued. “So I resigned myself to an eternity of awkward Thanksgivings, went into contract law, and became a professor. I was worried about the teaching aspect, but it turns out public speaking isn’t scary when everyone listening is already primed to accept you as an authority. As with so many things, it’s all about power.”

  “Like this conversation, for instance?” I let my voice take on a slight edge. “I ask you a question and you drag out the answer as long as possible, just to prove you can? Must be nice to have a literal captive audience.”

  Another slight darkening of her cheeks. “Oh! I’m sorry. That was completely unintentional, I promise. I have a bad habit of rambling when I’m nervous, and I confess, I’m feeling a bit starstruck right now.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Anyway. One day, a student showed up in one of my classes with some… let’s say, unique questions. Specifically, he wanted to know how certain types of contracts would apply to the fae—beings with an innate inability to lie or break their word. I laughed, of course. Until he gave me a demonstration.”

  “Then this student wasn’t just a mythology buff, I take it.”

  “He showed me the ears first. I only took that as evidence that he had taken his fantasies too far, and referred him to the school counselor. That was when he showed me how wrong I was.” In what looked like an unconscious gesture, she thrust her palm out, in the same motion most of the fae used for their magic. The hand gestures weren’t technically necessary, from what I understood, but the fae were taught to use them, and most of them had never bothered to get out of the habit.

  I frowned. She had to have been born long after Faerie had closed itself off from the human world. Yes, a handful of fae had stayed behind—most of whom had ended up as Arkanica test subjects. And more had snuck through the portals in secret, mainly Mab’s agents. But whether this student she had met was a fugitive or a spy for the Winter Queen, I didn’t see why he would have risked revealing himself to a human. Especially not for the sake of asking a few obscure questions about contract law.

  Something was off about this story. More accurately, something was off about that student of hers. Because unless she was faking those blushes, I believed Ashante was telling the truth.

  “When was this?” I asked, just to be sure.

  “Oh, about twenty years ago now. We met for lunch every week for a while. I was fascinated, as I’m sure you can imagine, and he… well, I’m not sure what he got out of it. Maybe he just liked feeling special. He seemed to enjoy teasing me—he would never give a straight answer to any of my questions. Just drop little hints here and there, always with that smile of his.” She shook her head. “There was some attraction there, I’ll admit. At least on my end. Before I realized what a bad idea that would be—and not only because he was my student. His appearance was… arresting, in a way no human’s could have been. That golden hair, those bright green eyes, those features too thin and delicate to be real. But the more I talked to him, the more I saw that everything about him was ever so slightly off-kilter. He wasn’t human—and somewhere along the line, that started feeling like a threat. And then there was his pet.”

  “Pet?” I asked, drawn in against my will, even though she hadn’t yet gotten to how she knew about me. I was sensing it too, more with every word—the same impression she had gotten from this student. Something about this story was wrong.

  It was true that, centuries ago, the fae had enjoyed toying with humans. But that was when they had lived among humans openly—when everyone had known that the the dangers of stumbling into a fairy ring one night and being snatched away by the Fair Folk were more than stories. Which of the fae had risked breaking his secrecy, in a world full of cold iron and colder humans, just to flirt with a college professor? And more importantly, why?

  “A human girl,” Ashante said. “She went with him everywhere. She didn’t look too happy about it, either. He never let her speak, or touch anything, or move without permission. In all the time I knew him—at least a year—I never once heard her voice.” She shivered. “I didn’t want that to be me.”

  Smart of her. I had seen the results of that kind of treatment, back in my youth when the fae had still been a presence in the world. Usually after their fae masters had discarded them, leaving them bewildered and broken. “Can I assume this student is the one who told you about me?”

  “Only bits and pieces. But he gave me enough that later on, after I went into this field myself, I could track down the old stories and recognize them for what they were.”

  Pretending to be fascinated by her story, I shifted closer to the bars of the cage, in the hope of getting her to do the same. “These stories of his were compelling enough to make you change your entire career path?”

  Her eyes followed my movement, but she stayed where she was. “Well… yes. I had just found out that magic was real. What would you have done?” She brought her hands up to her cheeks as they darkened again, and shook her head at herself. “Well. If you were human, I mean.”

  Now I had my answer as to how Ashante had learned my name. It was as simple as a few stories told over a meal by one of the fae who, for reasons of his own, had wanted to impress a college professor. It would almost have been a letdown, if I had still cared about the answer. But now I was more interested in the motivations of this mysterious fae student. I knew it probably hadn’t meant anything—just one of the fae feeling nostalgic for the old days, and forgetting that they could no longer afford to play the same games with humans that they used to. But my mind didn’t want to let go of it.

  Blond hair, green eyes… that said Summer Court to me. A thought tickled at the back of my mind. Maybe it was a stretch, but on the other hand, when had the fae ever demonstrated any limits in their capacity for manipulation?

  “So this student took an interest in you,” I said. “And that put you on the path to becoming an expert in the fae. Which is, I’m guessing, how you ultimately became involved with Arkanica.”

  She didn’t bother trying to pretend she didn’t recognize the company name. She nodded. “A couple of years ago, I was approached by… a certain individual who had also had contact with the fae, and needed an expert’s advice. I was the expert he found.”

  I had a pretty good guess as to what that man’s name was. And soon enough, I would bring the conversation back around to him. But for now, I wanted to follow this idea through to its conclusion. “And the Summer Court wanted humans to solve climate change for them by using the blood of their enemies as fuel,” I said slowly. I leaned in toward her, careful not to touch the bars. “Has it ever occurred to you that the Summer Court might have set you up from the beginning?”

  She shook her head. “They never came to me directly. They didn’t even know he was planning to reach out to me. If they had, they would have stopped him.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  From the frown growing on her face, she wasn’t sure at all. “The direction I
took the company… it’s not what they wanted. Not only that, I make them nervous. I could sense it, the few times they actually met with me in person. At first I thought it was about how much I’ve learned about them, but it’s more than that. It’s my legal experience, I think. They don’t like the thought of a human who knows how to bind them with words in ways they can’t wiggle out of. They tolerate me, but only because the other two won’t get rid of me.”

  But she didn’t sound nearly as certain as she had a moment ago.

  Lucien had warned me that I hadn’t put an end to the Summer Court’s involvement with Arkanica when I had killed the Lady of the Balance. According to him, the Arkanica plan hadn’t even started with her. Others from the Summer Court had set Lady Iliana on the path that led her to formulate the Arkanica plan, and had done so without her so much as realizing she had been manipulated. It wasn’t a stretch to think those same unknown fae had been willing to manipulate a human in the same way.

  I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if this student of Ashante’s had been one of those people. And if I was right, there was a good chance he was still out there, doing whatever he could to help Arkanica recover from the blow I had dealt them.

  Which meant I was probably going to find myself going up against him sooner or later. If only because he wasn’t going to be happy when I finally succeeded in wiping Arkanica off the face of the earth.

  “What name was he using?” I asked, even though there was almost no chance he was still operating under the same alias—assuming he was even still on this side of the veil. “Can you give me any more specifics about what he looked like?” If I was going to get a knife in the back one of these days, it would be good to have a clue as to what direction it would be coming from.

  “Of course,” said Ashante with a confused frown, “although I’m not sure why you’re interested. He had…” Her frown deepened. “He had blond hair. And green eyes.”