It helped us cover up the inevitable incidents and maintain the Covenants of Silence.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Not least, a certain foursome of redcap freelancers stayed there for two nights before they went and turned themselves into a political hot potato.”
I exhaled sharply.
“They were there too?”
“Yeah. I met them, though no one told me the Pouka was there,” he concluded. “You’re sure about that?”
“We followed her from the street fight,” I told him. “Mary and Barry helped me track her after the murders at the stable. They know her scent and they followed her to that safehouse—and Mary smelled her inside.
“And all over Gráinne.”
“Fuck me,” Milligan whispered. “I know enough Poukas to know I don’t want to be anywhere near that crazy bitch. She’ll knife me while I take a piss.”
“Quite possibly,” I agreed. “You’re in danger in that safehouse…and that safehouse is a Covenant violation all on its own. Plus, if Andrell is protecting a Pouka marked for termination by the High Court…”
“That’s a clusterfuck that’s over my paygrade,” the Gentry told me. “Look, I’m not going to pick a fight with an Unseelie Lord. Having a separate Court isn’t doing me any huge favors, but I don’t write the rules and the Covenants, eh?”
“I know,” I said. “But I need to find Chernenkov and bring her down. If she’s there and it’s Andrell’s safehouse, this becomes a Wild Hunt problem—but I need to know.
“Can you get me in?”
Milligan was quiet as our food arrived, using his meal as an excuse to avoid answering my question. Finally, halfway through his burger, he put it down and met my gaze.
“I can get you in,” he told me. “But I can’t protect you once you’re inside. I can’t fight a Pouka—or Gráinne, for that matter. And I won’t even try.”
“Worst-case scenario, I can escape Between,” I reminded him. “Let’s make it happen.”
“I’m there tonight. Come by after dark; text me when you arrive,” he told me. He shook his head. “I don’t think Andrell is all the way into this, but…”
“Even if it’s just Gráinne, we still can’t go to him without proof,” I agreed. “I’ll cover for you, I promise. I just need you to let me in the doors.”
21
I wasn’t planning on starting a war tonight, but if I had a shot at taking down Maria Chernenkov, I wasn’t going to pass it up. The heavy oak wardrobe in our bedroom had been a gift from Eric and had a false back that was far larger on the inside than the outside, and I opened it up as I prepared for the evening’s festivities.
First came the dark gray undershirt the Queen had given me shortly after claiming my Fealty. The fabric concealed layers of impact-resistant gel capsules and Kevlar, all of it inlaid with orichalcum defensive runes on the inside.
Fortunately, those runes also regulated my body temperature. As I checked the weight of my equally armored and enchanted long raincoat, I knew that was going to be important. Multiple layers in tonight’s promised stifling heat would be a problem otherwise.
The leather pouch with its cold iron spikes went into the raincoat’s inside pocket. A shoulder holster with my revolver—loaded with triple-kill rounds of garlic, silver and cold iron tonight—went over my torso, and the harness for my MP5 went over that in turn.
The submachine gun was loaded with cold iron rounds. No fae, not even a changeling, liked carrying true hand-forged cold iron in any form, but cold iron bullets were the most nerve-wracking. A triple-kill round would impede fae, shifters or vampires alike.
A cold iron bullet had only one intended target: other fae.
The raincoat covered both weapons and I dropped magazines for the MP5 and speed loaders for the .38 Detective Special into the other inside pockets. Studying the closet, I decided that grenades would probably be overkill and there was no way I could hide the South African–built AK-47 clone or the Russian automatic shotgun.
Having access to both the fae and shifter channels for illegal weapons definitely opened up options for Mary and me. For a sneak-and-peek, however, bringing heavy firepower was probably unnecessary.
It was damned tempting, though. If things went sideways, I could easily find myself facing a furious Pouka, an Unseelie Noble and an entire safehouse worth of fae mercenaries.
Of course, in that case, I was better off running away Between. Somewhat regretfully, I closed the secret compartment on the long arms and adjusted the harness to make sure I could move quietly with the MP5.
It was time to get to work.
On the other side of the hill that loomed over the warehouse was one of Canada’s ever-present Tim Horton’s coffee shops. I grabbed two coffees and an iced cappuccino in the drive-through, and then parked the Escalade in the back corner of the parking lot as I walked over to the chunk of green space looking down over the industrial district.
I sat on the grass and drank the iced cap as the sun set, watching the compound and waiting for the shifters to find me. When I spotted the coyote drifting, mostly stealthily, around the top of the hill, I met the animal’s gaze and gestured toward the coffee cups.
For a moment, I thought I’d just offered coffee to an actual wild animal, but then the animal loped up to me and shifted into a broad-shouldered squat man with messy blond hair.
“O’Malley,” he introduced himself. “Pat O’Malley, Clan Fontaine.”
O’Malley was familiar, though I intentionally didn’t try and place him. A lot of my encounters with Clan Fontaine when I’d first arrived had involved either fists or bullets. If I had met O’Malley, it probably hadn’t been polite.
“And you are a saint, Mr. Kilkenny,” he continued gratefully as he took a swallow of the coffee. “We’ve been cycling on and off, but it’s been a long day.”
“Anything interesting going on?”
He snorted.
“They’re trying to be quiet, but there’s a few folks coming and going. Muckety-muck types, at least one of your Nobles,” he told me. “I got a description and a scent image of your prey, though, and if she was in there, she hasn’t left.”
“Good,” I said grimly. “Any idea how many are in there?”
He shrugged.
“No one is leaving, just a handful of specific people going in and coming back out. I don’t think they want anyone else to know they’ve got people in there. Especially not us, and I think they know they’re being watched.”
That would be a logical conclusion after they’d caught Mary the previous night, but…
“What gives you that impression?” I asked.
“There are three guys, all Unseelie I’ve met around town, keeping a damn close eye on the place,” O’Malley told me. “They cycled off teams once, about an hour ago, but they’ve kept three of your heavy hitters outside the whole time.
“They’re watching for trouble and they’re ready for hell to come crashing down on ’em.”
He bared his teeth.
“From what I hear, if that bitch is in there, Grandfather is definitely considering introducing them to something of that kind.”
Which was a headache I didn’t need.
“This isn’t shifter business yet,” I told him. “I appreciate your help—a lot—but this is still fae business and we will deal with the bitch ourselves.”
Grandfather would be…unhappy if we brought the Wild Hunt in. But then, no one would be happy if we brought in the Hunt. That was why we needed to be certain before I summoned the High Court’s pet army.
Plus, well, anything a Hunter could do, I could do.
“I’m guessing you’re not alone?” I asked.
“One of Clan Mackin’s gals is watching the east side,” he confirmed. “I can bring her the coffee while I’m keeping my eyes open.”
“Good. Everything should stay quiet,” I told him. “If it doesn’t…” I shook my head.
“If it doesn’t stay quiet, I will be teleporting t
he hell out of there, so do not come in after me,” I instructed. “You’d be taking a risk for no purpose at all…and you need to report back to Grandfather.”
“That doesn’t feel right,” O’Malley complained, but he nodded. “It’s your op and your call. We’ll be out here if you need us.”
I texted Milligan as I reached the fenced compound, carefully staying in shadows that should conceal me even against fae senses. From the way the Gentry came out through the gate in the fence and looked around, I hadn’t done too badly.
I joined him by the gate, moving as quietly as I could, and he nodded calmly as I approached.
“Three of us from Calgary on exterior patrol,” he murmured. “Myself, Jane Connelly and Chris Armstrong. They don’t know what’s going on, but we’ve split the outside into thirds tonight, so they shouldn’t pass through between here and the door.”
He passed me a key card.
“I said I’d left my card at home when I got here, so Lyle lent me his,” he continued. “He’s one of Andrell’s Nobles and he’s an ass, so if it falls back on him, I don’t care much. Plus, it probably has better access than mine, too.”
I chuckled.
“That was clever. Well done.”
“If I’m guarding the Pouka I helped you ash, I’m pretty sure my life expectancy is missing a few centuries it’s supposed to have,” he said bluntly. “Plus, if my Court is shielding a Pouka Noble who is eating people…then fuck my Court.”
He walked me back through the gate in the fence, watching for his compatriots.
“There’s no security cameras,” he told me quietly. “I guess they didn’t want any record of who’s here. You’re clear to the door. After that…it’s all on you.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “And believe me, Bryan, I’m not planning on leaving by the door I came in by.”
He chuckled softly.
“Good luck, Kilkenny,” he told me.
The key card Milligan gave me opened the exterior door without even blinking at me, and I found myself inside a building that had been a large open box originally. There was a two-floor segment that looked like it had been offices, but the rest of it had just been a wide-open space. Presumably, it had originally had shelving and storage racks to fill it.
Some sections still had that, sealed off with key card–locked fences, but most of the space was now taken up by structures that looked like a cross between small apartment buildings and motels. There were two of the sections inside the warehouse, each looking like it had around twenty small suites in it. A third building looked like it had started as secure storage and been turned into a cafeteria.
The shelving and storage racks only made up about a quarter of the space now, and I’d entered next to one of the security gates blocking access into the storage section. My stolen key card easily slipped me inside, out of view of the handful of people—all fae—wandering the interior of the warehouse.
As I slipped past the shelving, the feeling of cold iron stopped me in my tracks, and I paused to examine the contents of the shelf next to me.
Most of the crates were somewhat familiar from my time up in the States, neat stacks of US Army–issue crates stamped with their contents on the exterior.
Guns. Mines. Ammunition. Rocket launchers. The one small storage area I was standing in held enough firepower to fight a small war—and the crates where I’d stopped radiated cold iron. The stencils proclaimed that each contained sixteen hundred 7.62mm cartridges.
From what I was picking up off them, the stencil was probably accurate—and some well-paid armorer had replaced the original bullets with cold iron rounds. They’d have basically reloaded the rounds from scratch, but they’d done it on a massive scale.
Not every crate of bullets appeared to be cold iron…but enough. Thousands of bullets designed to killed fae. Tens of thousands.
Possibly more.
The boxes from the custom-blade fabricators were almost scarier. The top box was open, allowing me to see that the blades were silver—heartstone-infused silver. Shifter’s Bane. That meant someone had used part of the supply to make weapons that were supposed to be insanely restricted.
Thankfully, it didn’t look like there were that many of those, but someone had set up an armory for murdering fae and shifters in mass quantities.
To be fair, it wasn’t like Oberis didn’t have an armory with stacks of weapons and munitions just like these. He had, so far as I was aware, at least three. But none of them were to this scale—even Andrell had armories that he’d reported to Eric.
This was someone preparing to fight a war…and worse, this whole structure wasn’t new. They were using Andrell’s Court to provide security for it, but those interior motels hadn’t been built in the last six months.
Mary hadn’t had time to see just what was hidden back there. She’d been looking for Chernenkov—who was probably in one of those motels, and it looked like you need a key card just to get to the stairs and doors. I’d bet money that getting onto the second-floor balcony took another key card.
Tiered security by people who didn’t trust anyone. My key card was probably good enough to get to where I needed to go, I hoped. There was more going on there than just one rogue Pouka Noble. If I was lucky, there was data in the office.
It was time to be sneaky.
22
In my favor were the facts that I had senses far superior to those of a regular human, had the dexterity to be extremely quiet, and was sneaking around the portion of the warehouse well away from the apartments where most of the Unseelie were hanging out.
Against me were the facts that those Unseelie had roughly the same level of perception and were expecting any potential intruder to be equally supernatural. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to expect that anyone would make it in past their exterior guards.
As I circled around the apartments, I saw that my guess that the upper balconies were behind another layer of security was correct. Not only was there another set of security doors barring the stairs, there was actually a guard at each of the four stairs going up.
More redcaps, in fact. At least half of the Unseelie I could see were redcaps, which was more of that particular breed of fae than I’d seen in my entire life. They did not have a particularly good reputation, though I suspect that, like most stereotypes, it didn’t apply to all or even most of them.
In here, away from public eyes, the redcaps weren’t covering their natural caps. The odd structure of hair and flesh and cloth that topped their heads gleamed with fresh blood, and the men—all of them were men, though I understood that there were redcap women—all wore black Kevlar armor vests and carried slung M4s.
The uniformity of their gear and clothing suggested what I’d judged the first set to be: mercenaries. A group of freelancers, working as a team and apparently completely without morals or loyalty to the Courts.
Not that I could blame them much. The official Courts were not gentle on feeders. Allowances were made, as we didn’t want to commit genocide, but we weren’t going to let the redcaps kill someone every week or so to soak their cap in blood.
Even these ones were almost certainly using animal blood, or we’d have noticed a new pattern of disappearances. After the vampires had managed to sneak into the city, Calgary’s supernatural community had kept a very close eye on missing-person reports.
Dangerous and hideous as the redcaps were, however, they clearly regarded the safehouse as, well, safe. Their job was to stop the rest of the Unseelie wandering around from going upstairs and bothering the people living on the second floor—probably whatever Greater Fae or Nobles they’d sneaked into the city.
As I sneaked up to the office structure, I realized that someone had also set up a catwalk from the second floor of the office to the upper balcony of the apartments. A fifth redcap was standing guard at the balcony end of that catwalk, a layer of paranoia that made the back of my neck itch.
Assuming that I was seeing one shift of tw
o, there were at least ten redcap mercenaries in the warehouse. Probably at least that again in other regular fae, and at least a dozen fae important enough to be behind the redcap guards, almost certainly including Chernenkov.
Forty or more Unseelie. The entirety of Oberis’s Court had totalled about two hundred fae of both stripes. What the hell was this?
I hoped there were answers in the office as I used the key card to open a side door and slip in. I just hoped that the answer wasn’t going to take the form of a Fae Lord in a cold iron mask.
That would be a very short answer, after all.
The bottom floor of the office had been gutted at some point in the past. There were no desks, no cubicles, no internal walls, even. The entire area had been turned into a single open space, and one wall was lined with practice swords and dummies.
This was apparently the training area for the Unseelie staying there, and from the burnt and wrecked status of some of the dummies, they were training with more than blades. Or, potentially, had had quite a bit of frustration to work out.
Certainly, there was nothing of immediate value for me in there, and I made my way over to the stairs quietly and carefully.
The second floor was still clearly in use as an office. There was a row of separate offices along one side, probably with windows to the outside, and a set of cubicles with computers. All of the machines were on, humming away with the monitors in standby mode.
I checked a couple of the cubicles, but I was unsurprised to find them all locked. It was too much to hope that what appeared to be a secret cohort of Unseelie rebels had worse data security than a general warehousing corporation.
What they also had, however, was paper. Clearly, most of it was going through a scanner and into a shredder—a desire for absolute confidentiality serving to help create the mythical “paperless office”—but the invoices and documents in the middle of being processed were still on people’s desks.
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