“Watch yourself,” Eric murmured. “Andrell’s heading our way.”
We weren’t the first table that the Unseelie Lord had gone to—but he definitely seemed to have us high on his list. He gestured as he approached, pulling an empty chair out for himself with a flick of Power.
“Keeper von Radach, Vassal Kilkenny,” he greeted us. “I’m glad you could make it.”
“We would be amiss in our duties if we didn’t attend,” I told him. “My Queen has charged me to make sure your setup went smoothly. May I assure her that things have gone well?”
“You may,” he agreed. “Much of the groundwork had already been laid, obviously. We’ve been moving in this direction since Laurie’s execution.”
“You know the reasons for that,” I pointed out. She’d betrayed us all, working with vampires and the rogue Enforcers to try and bring down the Covenants guarding the city and murder both Lord Oberis and Magus MacDonald.
Her execution hadn’t been a choice on Oberis’s part. Our law laid out worse penalties for what she’d done than that.
“I do,” he agreed. “And so does the Unseelie Lord, but…” He shrugged. “We did not judge and, no offense to Lord Oberis, we cannot always be as certain of the judgment of a Seelie on one of our own.”
“Her crimes were without question.”
“They were,” he agreed. “But not all cases are as cut-and-dried, are they, Kilkenny?”
“Nothing is ever straightforward,” I agreed.
“Such as is the case with Miss Chernenkov,” he pointed out. “That situation is messy, not straightforward. Given the arrival of my new Court, it could easily grow messier. I beg you, Master Kilkenny, to leave the investigation and pursuit of this Pouka Noble to us.”
I smiled thinly. I was glad Eric had warned me this was coming—the Unseelie Lord was earnest, charismatic and friendly. He was also, frankly, more capable of defeating Chernenkov than I was.
But…
“Maria Chernenkov entered this city by stealth and murdered one of its mortal inhabitants,” I reminded him. “She also had set up a chemical weapon attack that would have murdered dozens, if not thousands more.
“I hesitate to guess at her motivations,” I continued. I could, if I wanted to, but this wasn’t the place. “She has broken not merely fae law and not merely the Covenants of this city, but risked the Covenants of Silence that bind us all. Her fate is set in stone now, Lord Andrell, dictated by the High Court itself and delegated to me by our shared Queen.”
I shook my head.
“Were the crimes any less or the orders any less clear, Lord Andrell, we might be able to come to an agreement,” I told him. “But my orders from my Queen are clear: I am to hunt Maria Chernenkov. I am to find her, and I am to prevent her from murdering any more innocents.”
“If she is Unseelie, then she is mine,” Andrell told me.
“The Fae High Court has decreed her fate,” I repeated. “She is no longer Unseelie, Lord Andrell. By our law, she is simply dead. It is my duty to make that law truth.”
10
Somehow, Mary and I managed to squeeze Saturday off. We got to sleep in, lazily snuggle on the bed, and take advantage of our new vehicle to actually head out of town.
We were planning on a day trip out to a hiking trail we’d heard of near the mountains, but we were barely thirty minutes out of town before my phone started to ring. I glared at the black plastic and electronic block on my dash, and then looked at the number my car was saying was calling.
It wasn’t one I recognized, which was odd. There were only so many people who had my number, and one of the advantages of whatever magical cellular network my phone—a gift from MacDonald—was linked into was that spammers didn’t seem to find the number.
I let it ring again, and Mary sighed at me.
“You know you have to answer it,” she told me.
I echoed her sigh and hit Accept on the touch screen, keeping my attention mostly on the highway.
“This is Kilkenny,” I said as sharply as my Southern drawl allowed.
“Mr. Kilkenny,” a Middle Eastern-accented voice greeted me. “This is Detective Ibrahim. I apologize for interrupting your weekend, but, well…someone interrupted mine and now I get to pass the pleasure onwards.
“I’ve been called to a homicide site in the Northwest. It’s…messy. The officer who called in used to work with the Enforcers, but she didn’t know who to talk to. Given what I heard about the Stampede incident…I believe this one may be yours.”
Fuck.
“Ritualistic cannibalism, horse-related facility, people who should have been there had a sudden sense of dread and didn’t show up?” I reeled off instantly.
“Three out of three, though ‘ritualistic’ may be stretching it,” Ibrahim told me. “If you can get here in the next hour or so, I can keep the scene uncontaminated until then, but that’s as long as I can put off Forensics without making it obvious I’m playing games. And I have no intention of getting in trouble on your behalf. Not for free, anyway.”
I sighed.
No Djinni ever did anything for free.
“What do I owe you for the warning?” I asked.
Ibrahim was silent for several seconds.
“Normally, I’d say this was covered by the spirit of what the CPS pays me for, if not the letter, but given this scene…” He snarled wordlessly. “I’ll take payment in blood, Mr. Kilkenny. When you track this bitch down, you kill her for me, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I agreed. I looked over at my passenger, to find Mary had already pulled up her phone and had the best turn-off and route back to northwest Calgary on it for me already. “We’re out of the city, but I think I can be back in the limits inside twenty minutes. Where do we need to meet you?”
Ibrahim’s anger had warned me that there was more than just the usual grotesqueness going on, but I still wasn’t quite ready for just how bad the situation actually was. The stable he’d directed me to was a small facility on the outskirts of the city. The sign said that they were expecting a Girl Scouts of Canada event the coming week, which was my first warning of how bad it was going to get.
This wasn’t the kind of stable where rich kids put up their horses. This was the kind of stable that was run as a labor of love by horse people, to make sure that children who could never afford a horse of their own would have the opportunity to come riding and take lessons at least a few times in their life.
A single marked police car blocked the entrance to the stable, a smoking policewoman sitting on the hood. She saw me and Mary approach, gave us a single glance-over, then sighed and took a drag on the cigarette.
“You’d be Ibrahim’s friends?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“If I find out you had anything to do with this, I don’t care if you fart fireballs, I will see you rot for it,” the woman told me. “And that’s if I can’t find a reason for you to be ‘shot resisting arrest.’ We clear?”
“I understand,” I told her levelly. If the situation was as bad as I thought, I sympathized. The people who kept supernatural shit under wraps didn’t get a lot of information. The deal was pretty straightforward: we made sure no one in their family died of cancer or similar bullshit we could prevent, and they helped us keep things quiet.
She waved us through, pointing toward a specific outbuilding. It wasn’t like we needed the directions. From the moment we’d got out of the climate-controlled Escalade, Mary and I had been able to smell the blood.
As we got closer, even I could begin to distinguish between human blood and horse blood. This was looking worse by the minute.
Approaching the door, however, we both paused. I looked at Mary and smiled wanly.
“We’re both trying to think of an excuse to make the other stay outside, aren’t we?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she admitted, shaking her head. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”
“No.” I sighed. “Let’s g
o.”
The door swung open easily and the smell got worse. The building had been a prep stable, where the kids would learn how to groom and saddle the horses before they rode them out. If there was a mercy, it was that there’d only been three horses in there when Chernenkov had arrived.
It was hard to tell, though, and I swallowed my gorge as I stepped carefully into the mess, using every aspect of my inhuman nature to control my reflexive reactions.
“You’re here,” Ibrahim told me, his voice flat. “Is this what you were expecting?”
I closed my eyes for a minute, forcing myself to focus, then opened them again and looked around.
Three horses. Each had had a kid grooming them. All three had been girls, early teens from the looks of them. The teacher hadn’t been much older, maybe twenty.
It was hard to say. All four girls had been torn open, their torsos ripped into by a creature seeking the most delicate parts. The horses appeared to have been killed out of sheer perversity, with one ripped completely apart but only a few chunks of flesh appearing to have been taken from the others.
Life force and mass alike had been consumed, fueling Maria Chernenkov’s return to physical form after I’d destroyed her last body.
“It’s worse,” I admitted. “Last time, she’d only killed one.”
“She was hungry, apparently,” Ibrahim snapped. “Is there anything here that can help you, Kilkenny?”
I swallowed hard, restraining my urge to vomit again.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Give me five?”
“I can’t give you much more,” he told me. “Forensics is wrapping up at their last site as we speak. They’ll be here soon.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find what I can.”
Five minutes in the gore-soaked stable was enough for a lifetime. Several lifetimes.
It also didn’t tell me much that I couldn’t have guessed at first glance. Maria Chernenkov had used one of the three horses as an anchor for her spirit, literally ripping herself out of its guts and consuming much of its mass to fuel her initial return.
She’d then killed the children and their teacher with telekinetic force before they’d even reacted, and finished off the horses to stop them raising a ruckus while she set to her meal.
All of this had occurred that morning, about six hours before. Her fear aura had kept the scene uninspected until whoever had called the cops had finally come in.
Stepping out into the sunlight didn’t help much. To my inhuman senses, the whole area still reeked of blood.
“They were just kids,” I said to Ibrahim. “Fuck.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And this is one of yours, Kilkenny. You’ll forgive me if I’m angry.”
“What’s to forgive?” I asked. “If you’d asked me this morning, I would have thought I couldn’t get more determined to bring this lunatic down. I would have been wrong.”
“Good. Because if you don’t, sooner or later, one of these regular cops is going to end up trying. And that will only add more death to the list.”
“I will stop her,” I promised. “We didn’t know she could survive being shot with cold iron and incinerated. Now we do.”
“And your new political landscape will not interfere?”
“Andrell tried, but the High Court has issued their order,” I told the Djinn. “Death. And with me the executioner.”
I shook my head.
“Normally, I dislike it when they try to make that part of my job, but this time…this time, I may even allow myself to enjoy it.”
“Don’t,” Ibrahim suggested. “It’s a bad plan, however much it seems like they deserve it. Trust me.”
“Did you learn anything I didn’t?” I asked after a moment. “Right now, I’m pretty sure who did this, but this area is too much of a mess of scents for us to follow her from here.”
“Officially, we’re still digging,” he told me. “Unofficially, the teacher drives her dad’s car to this on weekends.” He passed me a printout with an address and a license plate. “There’s no way she went to the address, but we can track the car.”
I really didn’t want to involve the mortals.
“If we get the CPS looking for the license plate, can you keep them from jumping her until we get there?” I asked softly.
He sighed.
“That is a violation of my oaths,” he pointed out. “I have a few tricks I can pull, but they’ll require me to go after her myself.”
“No offense, Detective Ibrahim, but better you than your colleagues,” I reminded him. “If you can stop her without me, I’m not going to complain—but if you find her, call me.
“She’s my problem, not yours, and the last thing any of us want is her facing down with a Tac team that doesn’t know what they’re fighting.”
The sound of engines announced the arrival of the Forensics team, and Ibrahim nodded with a sigh.
“You’re not wrong,” he admitted. “I’ll send out the call and I’ll let you know when we find her. Now get out of here.”
11
Our planned day out at the mountains was officially wrecked. I drove away from the stable in a random direction and pulled us into a mall parking lot to try and catch my breath and emotional equilibrium.
Mary didn’t look much better than I did. We were both shaky with shock. The car at least didn’t smell of blood, a small mercy as we gripped each other’s hands tightly and tried to calm ourselves.
“We need to eat,” she finally concluded, always the sensible one. “Or, at least, I need to eat and you probably should.”
I squeezed her hand in agreement and gestured to a chain restaurant across the parking lot.
“That work?”
“That works,” she agreed.
“I’ll need to drop you off at home after,” I told her. “I’m going to need to be on call now. Shouldn’t have expected to be able to get out of town with this bitch on the loose.”
“I know,” Mary agreed, squeezing my hand back and opening the car door. “Drop me at work, though. I need to fill Grandfather in on all of this—and I can get home from there.”
Part of me wanted to argue that Enli didn’t need to know, that this was an internal fae affair…but the Covenants of Silence didn’t give me that option. Once Maria Chernenkov started becoming a threat to the secrecy of the supernatural, she became everyone’s affair.
Even if it was my job, in particular, to deal with her.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Mary asked with a shake of her head. “You did everything in your power to stop her. We don’t expect our enemies to be nearly immortal, Jason. We deal with them with the tools we have.”
“And that wasn’t enough,” I replied. “And now four more innocents are dead.”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “But that’s not your fault. That’s on her. We just have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Agreed.”
“And we need to eat,” she repeated, stepping out of the car. “Before your overcharged metabolism crashes you into a calorie deficit from stress!”
I forced a laugh and joined her outside the SUV. There were some surprisingly mundane disadvantages to being more than human.
Mary gave me a quick kiss and slid out of the Escalade’s passenger seat into the mostly empty parking lot outside the small suburban office in Calgary’s Northwest quadrant. There was nothing to distinguish the modern-looking six-story building from any of a hundred similar small offices across the city. Indeed, the bottom four floors were a normal mix of accountants, realtors and lawyers.
The top two floors, however, were the new home base for Calgary’s Shifter Clans. The Lodge, their equivalent to the Manor, was still a sports bar in the northeast, but Grandfather had decided that he wanted to separate his role as Speaker from his role as Alpha of the Tsuu T’ina Tribe’s shifters.
He’d built an equivalent to the Fae Courts, the Speaker’s Hall. His people co
uld find him here and present their requests and concerns—and the other signatories to the Covenants, like the fae, could find him to present their concerns.
It also meant we weren’t showing up at his house, as we’d done when Tarvers Tenerim had been Alpha. The intrusion had been worth it to the Tenerim Clan, but Grandfather wanted to keep the Speakership separate.
That meant the office was busier than most such buildings on a weekend, and I could spot the pair of loitering werewolves providing security. I met their gazes and they gave me informal salutes.
I returned the gesture and then looked at the SUV’s touchscreen with disfavor as my phone buzzed again. I considered it for a few moments, and then poked at some random buttons until it finally disgorged Ibrahim’s text.
Found the car. Abandoned just off 16th Ave. I’ll be there to check it out in ten. Meet me?
He finished with the address. I could be there before he was if I pushed it—even faster if I stepped Between, but if the car was abandoned, it wasn’t that urgent.
I’ll be there, I sent back, and then pulled the SUV into gear.
Duty called.
I arrived to find Ibrahim’s unmarked police car parked in one of the more rundown alleys I’d yet seen in Calgary. The Djinni was leaning on the hood of the black car, glaring at a powder-blue sedan with utter distaste.
“I don’t smell blood,” I told him as I got out of the SUV. “So, I’m hoping there’s no corpses this time?”
“Not yet, anyway,” he confirmed. “I guess she wasn’t hungry again. Apparently, the car’s usual driver didn’t fill up the tank before driving to work this morning. Our friend Chernenkov ran out of gas and decided to ditch the car rather than try and buy more.”
I nodded and crossed over to the car, looking it over. There was nothing about the vehicle to stand out from a million other sedans like it across North America. Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that its “usual driver” had been viciously murdered this morning.
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