“Then it seems I have a story to tell you,” Inga said with a sigh. “It is not my place…but if the Wizard believes the Masked Lords have reached here, then you must know.”
Inga led me into her office and fussed with the coffee machine for several moments. I suspected she was as much trying to marshal her thoughts for this conversation as to make coffee, but I took a seat by her desk and waited quietly.
“I’m surprised you never heard the name before,” she finally told me as the pot starting hissing. “The Masked Lords were a problem back when Mellie Kilkenny left Ireland. Not my place to say if they were part of why she did, but there was a lot of blood shed that year. She wouldn’t have been the only one to leave. Especially not the only pregnant girl to decide her babe was better born on a different continent from the High Court.”
“The High Court?” I asked.
“Yeah. The Powers were the target of the whole mess, the closest thing the fae have seen to a serious civil war in a few centuries.” She shrugged. “The Seelie and the Unseelie posture and cause havoc every few years, but it’s been a long time since anyone fought anything resembling a real war.
“The Troubles in Ireland were cover for a lot of bullshit in the supernatural communities, but Ireland was always one of the strongholds of the fae and the home of the High Court. So, when a bunch of Nobles and Lords decided they were going to take over, they came to Ireland.”
“Take over?” I asked. “The High Court are Powers. Who goes gunning for a set of nine demigods?”
“Someone who’s found a way to kill a god,” Inga said quietly. She was silent for a few moments as she poured the coffee. She studied the cups for a long moment, then produced a bottle of whisky from Between and added a generous dollop to both cups before handing me one.
“We believe they were all Fae Lords,” she noted. “But we have no way to be sure. We don’t think they were all Seelie or Unseelie; the Masks seemed distributed across the usual lines. It’s possible some were merely Nobles or Greater Fae, but the very thing that names them made it impossible to tell.”
I took a sip of the coffee and managed not to grimace. The alcohol was harsh and raw—and the coffee was terrible, too.
“They wore masks?” I asked. “Why would that stop the Court identifying them?”
“They wore masks, yes,” she confirmed. “Leather-lined, orichalcum-enchanted, cold iron masks. No magic of the fae could penetrate those masks to identify the men and women under them.
“They had designed a ritual that called for twenty-one participants and mustered all of their power into a single strike. It was an assassin’s tool, mostly…and it worked.”
“They killed Powers,” I said quietly.
“The Lady of Autumn. The High Keeper. The Lady of Summer,” she reeled off sharply. “They ambushed and murdered three Powers of the High Court. They also assassinated lesser lords and Nobles who defied them. The Irish Courts ran with the blood of the fae, loyalist and traitor alike.”
“Why wasn’t the Hunt called?” I asked. It was the job of the Wild Hunt, after all, to protect the High Court.
“Because Calebrant and Mabona were fighting,” Inga said sharply. “He was her Vassal once, and she imposed on the relationship more than she should have, so Calebrant had not attended the High Court in over a decade.
“We knew of the conflict, we’d been involved, but the High Court are bound to their secrets. We did not know any of the Powers had fallen—until the Masked Lords came for Mabona herself.”
“And Calebrant had been her Vassal,” I concluded. If Mabona was attacked, I would know. If she summoned me, I could walk Between to her side from anywhere in the world. She had other Vassals in the Hunt, I knew that, but if Calebrant himself had once been sworn to her…
“We rode,” Inga said simply. “Mabona had been wounded, but she was cleverer than the Masked Lords allowed for. She escaped the brunt of their blow, and her home had become a pitched battlefield.
“And then we arrived. The Masked Lords couldn’t fight two Powers, and Mabona was already wounded and hiding.”
She shrugged.
“Calebrant killed…half of them. Maybe more. But they killed him. We destroyed their followers…but at least ten of the Masked Lords escaped.
“They killed four of the Nine Powers of the Fae High Court, Jason Kilkenny,” she told me quietly. “And we have never found them. From the power they brought to bear, they walk among our highest echelons, but the Masks concealed them.
“Twice since them, Masked Lords have appeared to challenge Courts and cause trouble. Unidentified, unidentifiable. We don’t know their goals now; we don’t know their intent.
“But if the Masked Lords have stretched their reach into Calgary, then the Wizard’s warning must be heeded,” she said flatly. “You must tell Mabona, Jason, and we must redouble your training.”
“My training?” I couldn’t fight these Lords!
“You stand in the Queen’s stead here. If the Masked Lords are plotting anything here, you will fall into their crosshairs,” she warned. “We must prepare you to at least survive when they come for you.”
Because I’d needed more headaches this summer.
16
After Inga had smashed me into paste and forced me back together again, teaching me how to fight with telekinesis, I set out for my meeting. I could only barely use a sword in my hands, and she was making me duel her with the sword held in my mind.
Today, I was actually meeting people in an office. It was a suburban building across the parking lot from one of the city’s midsized malls, full of accountants and doctors and dentists.
One of said accounting firms was only tangentially what it claimed to be, an entire floor of administrative affairs dedicated to the various bits and pieces of business required to keep the fae community in the city running.
We couldn’t, after all, use regular tax accountants or lawyers or anything like that. Even the new changeling at the Manor, Zach, had bank accounts and registration with a firm like this one. My understanding was that there were three in the city, all reporting to Oberis’s Court.
Which, of course, created the problem that resulted in my being here, and I studied the four people sitting across from each other in the room.
I knew George O’Malley, one of the Gentry who’d come down from Fort McMurray to help deal with the vampires MacDonald’s Enforcers had infiltrated into our city. He’d fought by my side and was, generally, a sensible soul.
The Unseelie seated across from him was barely an acquaintance to me. Dubhán McNeal was a gnome, one of the Unseelie breeds of that kindred, with dark eyes and an oddly metallic black tint to his skin.
The two humans in the room were senior administrators of the accounting firm, both looking entirely uncomfortable with the current state of affairs. Meine Masters was an older woman with graying hair and a sallow tint to her skin, heavier than was healthy for a mortal but with sharp green eyes.
Her companion, Jiang Kuang, was a younger Chinese man. His eyes seemed vaguely unfocused, almost as if he wasn’t paying attention…but he was Masters’s senior-most manager, which meant he was definitely no idiot.
“I do not understand,” he began when we were all seated, in a notable Chinese accent, “why you are requesting these changes. We have served your Court successfully for over a decade without issue, and now you demand that we change everything.
“I do not understand,” he repeated.
“The problem, Mr. Kuang, is that you have served a Seelie Court for over a decade,” McNeal said harshly. “And while that was not through any choice of yours, it means that we would prefer to remove the various Unseelie accounts from your company and place them with a new entity.”
“Any firm such as ours that functions in this city has only worked with Oberis’s Court,” Masters noted. “Have you brought your own accountants and lawyers, Mr. McNeal? What plan do you have once you’ve taken your accounts away from us?”
> The gnome looked uncomfortable.
“That isn’t for me to say,” he admitted.
“By which you mean you have no idea,” Kuang snapped. “If your new masters have brought such an organization with them, fine. We will transfer the accounts as requested. The contracts we’ve signed, however, do not allow us to simply abandon any of your kindred.”
“And we are far too familiar with both the myth and the truth of the fae to lightly break our contracts with your people,” Masters added. “I do have a compromise to suggest.”
“Listen to her, McNeal,” I told the gnome, my tone light. It might not have sounded like a command, but everyone in the room knew what I meant. “Ms. Masters is more familiar with how the interface firms work than any of the fae in this room, isn’t she?”
“I suppose,” McNeal allowed. “What would you suggest, Ms. Masters?”
“There are several interface firms in Calgary, but we have all worked with the joint Court to date,” she told us. “What we can do, however, is divide the accounts and set up internal soft and hard firewalls. My firm has two floors here. We can split our databases, files and staff between the two floors and set up different security cards etc. for each floor.
“With those internal firewalls in place, the people working for Andrell’s Court will have no information on Oberis’s Court and vice versa. That will allow us to meet the needs of the Unseelie Court without leaving anyone high and dry, until we can set up a separate firm.”
Of course, being the first firm in Calgary with that setup would benefit Masters dramatically. Nonetheless, it was a good idea.
Before I could say anything, however, my phone buzzed with a sharp sequence of vibrations I’d only felt it go through once before.
“Excuse me,” I said swiftly, pulling the device out and staring at it. The code flashing on my screen was one I’d only seen when we installed the app—an emergency alert from Mary.
“Ms. Masters has an excellent suggestion, but I’m afraid my time has been overridden,” I told them all. “My apologies, but this meeting is suspended until a later time—can you have your people arrange something, Ms. Masters?”
“I—”
I never heard the end of her response. The alert told me where Mary was and I was already stepping Between.
Mary might have hated the way Clan Tenerim regarded her and her brother as weaklings in need of protection, but she accepted enough of its truth to have an emergency alert on her phone. What she missed, I suspected, was that as one of Tenerim’s administrators and armorers, she was also important to the Clan.
Barry had added the receptor app for her emergency alert to my phone a while back. While he hadn’t mentioned that to her, I had. There were secrets I had to keep from my girlfriend—that I had access to the emergency alert she could trigger didn’t strike me as one of those.
The alert gave me the GPS location of her phone, nearly on the opposite side of the city from me. My phone couldn’t pick it up from Between, but I could cross the entire city in under five minutes by traveling Between.
I emerged from the chill of that other place into the blazing July sun and the smell of smoke. I stood in the middle of a deathly silent suburb, looking at the wreckage of a taxi that had been T-boned by a black pickup truck.
The taxi driver had clearly tried to crawl clear of the wrecked vehicle…and then someone had slammed an axe into his head. Bullet holes marked both vehicles, and a second body was sprawled backward over the tailgate of the pickup.
The chill silence told me I was no longer in the right place. I could see Mary’s red-cased phone lying on the ground, but there was no sign of her. Whatever battle had started here was continuing elsewhere—and I strained my hearing to the limit to try and pick up anything.
Mary’s little machine pistol had a distinctive sound, one I could identify even at this distance as it echoed in the quiet neighbourhood. I did what any good boyfriend would do: I ran for the sound of her gun.
Skipping Between every few steps, I covered the nearly two kilometers she’d fled in moments, emerging behind the pair of men advancing down the back alley of the strip mall they’d pinned Mary against. She wore a navy-blue business suit, the blazer flung open to expose the empty concealed holster against her shoulder where the Czech-built machine pistol normally lived.
A third man was sprawled on the ground where I emerged, and this time, I was close enough to feel the cold iron in the bullets that had killed him. Mary was not playing around—and her hunters were fae.
They hadn’t heard me arrive, and a whip of flame tore the ax from the leader’s hand as he charged at my lover. He had enough time to curse and start to turn before Mary shot him in the head. The last attacker lunged at her with a bloodcurdling yell.
I caught him with Force, his ax only inches from Mary, yanking him back toward me and away from her. He spun in the air, a red baseball cap flying from his head and revealing a different red cap underneath it.
One that was part of his skull and dripping with fresh blood.
I slammed the redcap to the ground in front of me and glared at him.
“You have entered this city without announcement and attacked a supernatural ally in public,” I hissed at him. “Explain yourself!”
“I serve—”
His head exploded, a cold iron bullet smashing through from above as a sniper opened fire.
“Jason!” Mary shouted, but I was already moving.
A second and third bullet slammed through where I’d been standing—but then I reached Mary, scooping her up into my arms and stepping Between as more gunfire sounded.
The last thing I heard before the chill silence of a strange reality took us was the distant sound of sirens.
Someone had called the cops when the shooting started—and while barely minutes had passed since I’d received the alert, Calgary’s police were fast on the draw.
“Are you okay?” Mary asked me the moment we were clear, and I chuckled softly.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m more worried about you.”
“I’m not the one wearing brains and blood!” she snapped, and I looked down.
Between didn’t have a visible sun. It was always lit with a strange diffuse glow that showed everything clearly. Right now, it was clearly showing the splatter pattern from the redcap’s skull. The bullet had clipped my clothes—I hadn’t even noticed that—but none of the blood was mine.
“That’s all the redcap’s,” I told her. “What happened?”
She sighed, looking around Between and shivering closer to me. “Can we get out of limbo first? I need to call Barry.”
I nodded and stepped, delivering us back to the car accident. Mary gasped again and grabbed her phone.
“We should move still,” she said. “I hear ambulances, thank the Powers.”
I nodded, and we slipped down an alley, away from the approaching mortal help. None of the redcaps were savable, and we’d make sure the coroners didn’t mention the oddities of their anatomy.
Sadly, the taxi driver was beyond helping as well. He hadn’t asked to get dragged into this.
“We’d finished the meeting,” Mary finally said, tapping out a text on her phone as she leaned against a fence. “I’d arrived with Grandfather, but he was going to meet the Fontaine Alpha for lunch. I grabbed a taxi back to the Tenerim Den and…well, you saw what happened to the poor taxi.”
She shivered again, hit Send on her text and put her phone away to meet my gaze.
“They hit us in the middle of the road. I’m guessing the woman driving was Chernenkov, but the four assholes in the back were new. Given the current politics, I was carrying cold iron rounds…and I switched after the first bastard axed the driver and got back up after I shot him.”
Redcaps could soak their hats in animal blood to sustain their life. That was, as I understood, how all accepted members of the Unseelie subspecies survived. This quartet, though…
“Chernenkov produced
a big ugly gun after I killed the first one, and I decided that being somewhere else as a cat was a damn good idea,” she told me. “Turned out that the…redcaps, you called them? They are damned fast.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “And murderous, even when they’re behaving.”
She shivered again.
“I noticed. They tracked me despite Shifting and pinned me against the back of that strip mall. No one saw enough to call the cops until I started shooting—and then you arrived. Thank you for that.”
“You’d have been fine,” I told her. It was even mostly true—she was fast enough to swap out the ten-round magazines in her machine pistol while the bastards were closing. She’d probably have been hurt, potentially badly, but she’d have taken both the redcaps on her own. She would have been fine.
Until Chernenkov shot her in the head with the sniper rifle, anyway.
Her phone buzzed and she checked it.
“Barry is almost here,” she told me. “GPS is guiding him to my phone. What do we do now, Jason?”
“I don’t think our Pouka friend realized you were a shifter,” I replied. “They weren’t ready for you to turn into a lynx and run.”
And if Mary hadn’t Shifted…she’d be dead. Maria Chernenkov had gone for what she thought was a weak point. She’d been wrong, thank the Powers.
“But we know where she was, which means Barry can track her again,” I told her. “And this time, I know where her damn car is. She isn’t going anywhere in that truck.”
“What about the redcaps?”
“I’ll talk to Eric,” I promised. “He’ll make sure they get dealt with safely…and see if we can work out when they snuck into the city.” I shook my head. “There aren’t any of those fuckers in Calgary, new Unseelie Court or not.
“We’ll find out where they came from, and that, my love, will give us another angle of attack. She may have thought she was coming at us sideways, but all she’s done is show more of her hand.”
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