Wild Hunger

by Chloe Neill

  “You have a fairy’s confession?” he asked. “You have direct, forensic evidence tying a fairy to the crime?”

  I glanced at Yuen, who shook his head slightly. I guessed he didn’t want to elaborate in front of Dearborn, and reminded myself to follow up later.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ms. Sullivan,” Dearborn said, rubbing the spot between his eyebrows. “Even assuming your analysis is correct, there is a reason that I am the Ombudsman and you are not. I have the training. I have the resources. I have authority of the city of Chicago. My methods do not damage property. My methods do not send fairies from their homes. My methods do not end up with fairies in the middle of Grant Park.”

  “Neither do mine,” I muttered.

  “We have someone in custody. He has motive, opportunity, and means. And there’s physical evidence that links him to the crime.”

  “He didn’t do it. And the Pack’s demands that he be released are only going to get louder.”

  “The Pack isn’t in charge,” Dearborn shot back.

  “No, it isn’t,” I agreed. “But it’s their city, too, and they’re entitled to the same rights as humans. Including being considered innocent until proven guilty.”

  “That’s surprisingly naive for a vampire.”

  “It’s not naive,” I said. “It’s the ideal. If we don’t live up to it, we’ve failed.”

  Dearborn held up a hand. “I don’t have time for this. I’ll need to shower, change, communicate with the mayor, and figure out how to spin this debacle.”

  “It’s not a debacle,” I said. “But if we aren’t careful, it’s the beginning of a war.”

  His eyes were hard and sharp, his pointing figure accusatory. “That is precisely the kind of hysteria we do not need.” He took a step forward. “If you so much as suggest to the media that a war is at hand, your father and I will have a long talk about Cadogan House’s continued existence in this city.”

  My blood began to speed, the monster to stir.

  But before I could speak, Yuen said Dearborn’s name. “We have enough threats from the outside. We are allies, and should act like it.”

  “Yes,” Dearborn said, eyes glinting as he stared at me. “We should.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and strode down the hall again.

  “You know,” I said, when the echoes of his footsteps faded away, “for a thin man and a runner, he’s quite a stomper.”

  “Ego,” Theo said. “Makes the soul heavy.” He looked at Yuen. “Methinks he’s losing it.”

  “His cool,” Yuen said. “Not his authority. That remains, regardless of how much we respect him.”

  “Or how little,” Petra said, her tone utterly bland. “I will say again that you should have his job.”

  “He might have it in the near future,” Theo said. “Dearborn bet his job on Riley, on this being a minor issue that he fixed by arresting a shifter. If it turns out all these pretty fairies are involved, he’s going to lose a lot of face.”

  “That is for the mayor to deal with,” Yuen said. “We deal with the details. Tell me what happened, from the beginning.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We walked him through the events at Grant Park, giving him every detail we could remember, while Petra made notes on a smaller screen paired to the larger one, so her words appeared in tidy rows behind us.

  “I don’t understand how they could simply appear and reappear,” Yuen said.

  “They must have learned a new skill,” Theo said. “That wouldn’t surprise me, given Ruadan seems to be pushing them in a new direction.”

  “But what direction?” I asked. “Shifters are blamed for Tomas’s death. The peace talks fall apart, and fairies are trying to make big magic in Grant Park. How do those things connect?”

  “Fairies,” Petra said. “They’re the common thread.”

  “And Ruadan specifically,” I said. “He was at the sessions, the party, the castle, Grant Park.”

  “And without Claudia for the latter events,” Yuen said. “You said her room was disheveled, and she’s apparently missing. Why?”

  “Ruadan likes violence,” I said, thinking of his expressions at the castle and Grant Park. “He wants trouble. Maybe he wanted a real fight at the peace talks, and was angry when Claudia agreed to a seat at the table.”

  “What about the pin?” Theo asked.

  “Forensic tests haven’t been completed yet,” Yuen said. “Surveillance video of the party is still being reviewed at Cadogan.”

  “How’s Riley doing?” I asked, feeling a stab of guilt since I hadn’t visited him again.

  Yuen’s eyes went dark, concern etched in his face. “For now, he’s handling it. For now.”

  “Has his memory improved?”

  Yuen shook his head. “We’ve tried meds, meditation, and magic. Nothing has helped. He still has pain when he tries to remember.”

  “What about the knife?” I asked. “I know his fingerprints were on it, but do we know where it came from?”

  “We don’t,” Theo said. “At least, not specifically. It was a mass-produced hunting-style knife.”

  “Hard to trace,” I said.

  “Exactly. The blood on Riley’s shirt was Tomas’s. But the quantity wasn’t nearly as much as should have been there given the nature of the wound.”

  I had to kick away the memory of Tomas’s disconnected head.

  “So the actual perp was probably covered in blood,” Theo said. “There’d have been soiled clothes.”

  “The CPD’s going through the castle?” I asked.

  “They are,” Yuen said. “They haven’t reported anything yet, but if there’s anything to find, they’ll let us know.”

  “We have to figure out where the fairies are,” I said. “Aren’t there security cameras all over the place these days?”

  “There are more cameras than there used to be,” was all Yuen would confirm. “Petra?”

  “I’m on it,” she said, pulling off her gloves and working the main screen again, logging into some kind of a city portal. She pulled up a map, then zoomed in on the river’s south fork, where the castle was located. The area was covered in dots.

  “Those aren’t all cameras,” I said.

  “Oh, they are,” she said. “Welcome to the Internet of Things. Traffic-light cameras, speeding cameras, security cameras, laptop cams, body cams. Always wear your good underwear, because someone is probably filming you.”

  “Sound advice,” Yuen said with a smile.

  There were four traffic cameras near the castle. It took only a few moments to find video of the castle’s gatehouse and front drive, and only a few minutes longer to speed through the window of time between our first and second visits to the castle.

  Unfortunately, not a single fairy showed up. The only visible change in the time period was darkness; the torches hadn’t been lit the second evening, so the castle stayed dark as the sun fell.

  “Either they’ve got a secret way out of the castle,” Theo said, “or they left by magic. And there’s no way to tell that from the video.”

  “There might have been magical vibrations,” I said. “But the castle grounds are enormous, so the ripples might not have spread any farther than that.”

  “So we assume they left by magic, as a group,” Yuen said, studying the video. “And they took Claudia with them?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But Claudia wasn’t with Ruadan the night Lulu and I visited. It’s possible she was already gone by then.” And given the condition of her room, that they’d dragged her out in a much more conspicuous style.

  “Go farther back,” I said. “Find the period between the Cadogan party and our visit.” If we couldn’t find the fairies leaving, maybe we could find Claudia.

  * * *

  •
• •

  We searched video of the castle for nearly an hour. And still didn’t have what we were looking for.

  “Maybe we don’t have the right angle on the castle,” Theo said.

  “There are more cameras in the sector,” Petra said. “But unless we can narrow down a place or a window, it would take days to go through all the video.”

  “Zoom out on the map,” Theo said. “Let’s check our options.”

  On the screen, the square of green that held the castle became one block in the larger quilt of the city.

  And there was an unusual bundle of cameras just up the street from the castle.

  “What’s on that corner?” I asked, pointing.

  “Gas station,” Petra said after a pause. “Lots of security cameras, including on the pumps themselves.”

  “Fairies have vehicles,” Yuen said. “Good thought, Elisa. Pull it up.”

  The gas station was busy. Autos and driven vehicles pulling in for gas, people pulling in for snacks or necessities. They all looked human, or humanlike, at least until a large black SUV pulled up to a pump. The passenger’s side opened and a fairy stepped out, looked around cagily, and moved to the pump.

  While he waited for the tank to fill, he pulled open the back door. There in the backseat, hands tied in front of her and a vacant expression on her face, was Claudia. She was visible for only a second before the door was closed again.

  “Well, well, well,” Yuen said quietly.

  The SUV drove off again, giving us a clear view of the license plate.

  “I’m pulling the license,” Petra said, logging into another information portal. “And . . . it’s licensed to Claudia, no last name given, and the address is the castle, so no help there. Permission to track?”

  “Track it,” Yuen said.

  Petra pressed a hand to her screen for some kind of security clearance, then did more swiping and typing. The overhead monitor flashed, and a map of the city replaced the camera footage.

  “There’s now a tag on the vehicle,” Yuen explained. “If it’s spotted by a person or camera, we’ll get an alert, and we can track its movements.”

  “That’s handy and terrifying,” I said.

  “It is,” Yuen agreed. “In equal measure.”

  Petra looked back at us. “Now that we’ve got that underway, do you want to talk about the ley lines?”

  “The what?” I asked.

  Petra glanced at me. “Rivers of magical power that run through the earth’s outer crust. Possibly remnants from changes in the earth’s magnetic field.”

  “Theoretically,” Theo said. “There’s no evidence they actually exist.”

  “Spoken like a tool of the Deep State. Bet you don’t believe in aliens, either. Hot tip,” she said in a whisper, “they’re real.”

  “Let’s just stick to planetary subjects for the time being,” Yuen said with a smile.

  “Fine by me,” she said, but slid me a glance. “Ley lines are completely legitimate, but the government doesn’t want you to know they exist.”

  “And why not?” I asked.

  “Big Petroleum. Oil companies go out of business if humans figure out how to utilize the ley lines to run our vehicles, heat our homes, energize our tech. So they keep the knowledge very carefully guarded. But some of us know better.”

  “What does Grant Park have to do with ley lines?” Theo asked.

  She gave him a flat stare. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes?” he asked, his voice now uncertain.

  Petra rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll need to lay it out for you.”

  “Please do,” Yuen said, amusement in his dark eyes. “And nice pun.”

  “Yes, it was.” She used her smaller screen to direct the large one, flipping through faded drawings to find a scratchy sketch of what I thought was Lake Michigan.

  “The North American Journals of Prince Maximillian,” she said. “He traveled the US in the 1830s, did these amazing natural-history journals where he recorded plants, animals, food, people, landscapes. Not much of Chicago at that point. But he didn’t need the buildings to see this.”

  She zoomed in to reveal three lines that ran across the edge of the lake near where I guessed Chicago sat today. One crossed the city from east to west. The others were angled, one running southwest to northeast, nearly vertically, through the middle of the city, the other running northwest to southeast at a shallower angle.

  “Two of the lines cross near downtown Chicago,” Petra said, pointing at the map. “But the actual ley lines are only a couple of feet wide, so the scale is totally wrong on this map.”

  She swiped a screen and pulled up more data, and the overhead monitor showed a satellite image of Chicago marked by three glowing, intersecting lines.

  “These are Chicago’s ley lines,” Petra said, beaming like a student who’d just nailed a recital. “I used satellite images, surface temps, wind data, and jet-stream movement, along with a sprinkle of human activity, and these are the lines predicted by that formula.”

  “They’re real,” Theo said, looking back at her with awe. “And you actually found them.”

  “It’s more accurate to say I found the echo of them, the place they’re algorithmically predicted to be. We don’t have the knowledge to detect them per se, so this is the next best option.”

  She zoomed in, and the lines grew clearer, crisper, thinner, until they crossed just off Michigan Avenue, just south of the river.

  And right over Grant Park.

  “There’s a ley line conjunction beneath Grant Park,” Theo said, gaze intent on the screen.

  “There is,” Petra said, then looked at us. “Have you figured it out yet?”

  We looked at her, then the map, trying to figure out where she was leading us.

  “No?” Theo said.

  With a heavy sigh, Petra pulled up another photo. This one was an overhead shot of the fairies at Grant Park, the careful lines in a V configuration, with Theo and me tiny dots in front of them.

  The fairies’ formation matched the ley lines perfectly.

  “That’s why they were in that V configuration,” she said. “They were standing over one of the angles created by the conjunction.”

  “Damn good work,” Yuen said, and his smile was as wide as Petra’s had been. He seemed genuinely proud of her work, which I suspected wouldn’t have been Dearborn’s reaction.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “So the fairies wanted to use the ley lines for something,” I asked. “And they figured the conjunction—two ley lines crossing—would give them the biggest bang for the buck.”

  “Maybe,” Petra said. “We don’t know much about the mechanism of ley lines because of—”

  “Big Petroleum,” we finished for her.

  “Hilarious,” she said without a hint of humor. “And correct. But presumably they want the power.”

  “Ruadan wants the power,” I murmured, stepping closer to the map and wondering what he had planned.

  “If they wanted the conjunction,” Theo said, “they might try Grant Park again. Or the next best thing, which I guess would be anywhere else along the ley lines?”

  I nodded. “So if we search the ley lines, we might find the fairies.” And then the obvious thing hit me. “Can you put the Potter Park tower and the castle on that map?”

  Petra looked at me, grinned. “Of course,” she said with a nod. “Of course they did that.”

  She knew what I was looking for. And when she plotted the two structures on the map, she showed my instinct had been right.

  “They’re positioned over ley lines,” Theo said.

  “Claudia probably selected the Potter Park tower because of the location over the north-south line,” I said, “and bought the castle property for the same reason.”

 
“We’ll get CPD officers to travel the lines, look for any sign of them. Can you get me a scalable version of the map and the course of the ley lines to pass along? Perhaps one that, just in case of Big Petroleum, doesn’t actually say ‘ley lines’?”

  “Sure,” she said. “No one has to know what the lines represent. We can call them . . . fairy migratory routes or something.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  She smiled, which crinkled her nose. “Yeah, I like it, too.”

  Yuen’s screen buzzed, and he pulled it out. “I think our luck is changing,” he said, and swept a finger across the screen to send an image to the larger monitor.

  The image was dark, but it showed side-by-side images of a fairy. In the first, the neck of his tunic was pinned with a gold pin. In the second, the pin was gone.

  “Cadogan House surveillance video,” Yuen said. “These images are from the evening of the party. And, interestingly, they are the only images of him at the event. There are none of him entering through the front gate or speaking to the other guests.”

  “Like he was there for a very short time,” Theo said, “and a very specific purpose.”

  “Precisely,” Yuen said.

  I closed my eyes and walked through the scene, trying to put myself in the fairy’s place. “He wants to stay undetected, so he avoids the front gate. Instead, he comes in over the wall. He kills Tomas, magicks Riley and gives him the knife, then sneaks out over the wall again, leaving his pin behind, then disposes of his bloody clothes.”

  “And the only evidence we have of any of that is circumstantial,” Yuen said.

  I nodded, opened my eyes again. We were getting closer. But we weren’t there yet.

  “We’ll put out an APB,” Yuen said. “But I suspect we won’t find him until we find the rest of them.”

  “You’ll let me know if you find him?” I asked. “And the SUV?” At worst, Claudia was in danger. At best, getting her back might help stop whatever the fairies were trying to do.”

  “We will,” Yuen said. “While I’m still not entirely convinced by your Rogue-vampire argument, it would be wrong of me to discount your contributions. So thank you.”