Hunter's Oath

by Glynn Stewart

  “We have a lot of information channels,” Talus said slowly, his fingers flying over a keyboard I can barely see. “I think…yeah, that one originally came through one of our mortal information channels; someone flagged some odd combinations of names and supplies.

  “Secondary validation was…from the Unseelie themselves, a Noble in the Lord of the Unseelie’s staff named…fuck.”

  “Talus?” I demanded.

  “It was Gráinne,” he told me. “Gráinne Coghlan. Now, of course, the right-hand woman of Lord Andrell.”

  “And the one person in this city I know to be a damned Masked Lord,” I replied. “That doesn’t really help us. Who was the mortal source?”

  “Kuang runs our mortal intelligence network,” he said slowly. “Jiang Kuang, at Masters and Co. One of the interface firms.”

  “I know them,” I said grimly. “I even know him. I think I need to pay a visit.”

  “Jason, you’re supposed to be dead,” he pointed out. “That has advantages still.”

  “Yes, and if I show up in supernatural spaces, that’s a problem. But Kuang works in an office where we quite specifically have no other supernatural presence. And even if he knows enough to know I’m supposed to be dead, I think I can convince him to stay quiet.”

  Talus sighed.

  “I can’t take care of it myself,” he admitted. “Be careful.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “No, you aren’t. Don’t get yourself killed for real, Kilkenny.”

  27

  I’d memorized the layout of the building Masters’ firm was in when I’d needed to go back to pick up the Escalade after the attack on Mary. There were several quiet corners and utility sections where people rarely went, and I stepped out of Between into one of those.

  If I’d been ten seconds later, I’d have caused some unfortunate problems. Instead, when the building maintenance worker came around the corner, she found me shaking off the fuzz of teleporting into a building and looking dazed.

  “Hey,” she barked. “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

  I was over the daze by now, but I let it infuse my voice anyway as I turned to her.

  “Sorry, miss. I was looking for the bathroom?” Between the daze and the drawl, I probably sounded like a complete moron, but that served my purposes at this exact moment.

  She shook her head exasperatedly.

  “Getting back here looking for the bathroom takes some doing,” she noted. “I’m going to have to talk to my guys; there shouldn’t even have been an unlocked door!”

  I blinked at her in faked confusion.

  “I thought the door was for a bathroom and kept going,” I told her. “Am I close?”

  “Are you close?” she echoed with a laugh, her exasperation still present but muted at the apparently harmless idiot in front of her. “No. Wrong side of the building entirely. Look.” She stepped over to me and pointed down the utility corridor. “You go down that hallway, grab the door on the left. That’ll let you into the public section of the building. Go left, follow that hall to the end, turn right, and the bathrooms are on the left.

  “You got that?”

  “I got it,” I told her. “Thanks, miss.”

  I gave her my best “Southern idiot” grin and followed her directions out into the hallway. From there, I grabbed the elevator instead of the bathroom and went up to the top floor.

  I entered Masters and Co’s offices with a firm stride, barely slowing as I came through the door, and then came to a rest at the front desk.

  “I need to speak to Mr. Kuang about my employer’s accounts,” I told the receptionist crisply. The young man looked almost as confused as I had pretended earlier—and then I reeled off the name of one of Talus’s larger holding companies.

  “Of course, sir!” he said instantly. “Let me see if he’s free.”

  For an account of the size I was claiming to represent, I’d be stunned if Kuang didn’t manage to find himself suddenly available.

  It took less than five minutes before the receptionist escorted me back to Kuang’s office. Only the two managers at the firm were familiar with me, which helped cover my tracks, but I needed to be careful regardless.

  As soon as I entered Jiang Kuang’s office, however, he recognized me. He also, clearly, recognized that something unusual was going on.

  “That will be all, Wesley,” he told the receptionist. “Thank you. Close the door on the way out please.”

  The young man stepped outside, closing the door behind him, and Kuang regarded me levelly.

  “Lying to get into my office is rarely to anyone’s benefit,” he told me. “On the other hand, that you even had that name to conjure with tells me Talus sent you, even if you don’t represent that company in question. What do you want, Kilkenny? The follow-up meeting Masters scheduled is in a few days.”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” I asked as I took the chair he specifically hadn’t offered me. “I’m dead. Your meeting will have to get rearranged with Eric.”

  “Dead,” he echoed. “I’m…unfamiliar with fae corpses, but you look rather alive to me. Politics, I presume?”

  “Politics,” I confirmed. “I will need you to keep that you ever saw me very, very quiet.”

  “Mr. Kilkenny, this company’s purpose is to allow your people to interface with the mortal world without anyone even learning you exist. Discretion is quite literally our stock in trade.”

  “I need you to keep my current status from all of your contacts,” I told him flatly. “Seelie. Unseelie. Humans with…interesting contacts. I believe you even do work for the shifters in the city.”

  “Not much, not yet,” he told me. “That section is pretty heavily firewalled for privacy, but it’s growing. What do you need, Mr. Kilkenny? My discretion can be assumed.”

  “Can it?” I murmured. “I’m not sure I believe that, but then, I have evidence you’re working for at least one employer we don’t know about.”

  The hesitant pause as he reached for his coffee cup would probably have been invisible to a human. Kuang was very well controlled.

  “I… We have many contracts and deals,” he finally said. “We keep their nature secret. If you knew all of our clients, Mr. Kilkenny, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.”

  “And if you betrayed us for money, you definitely weren’t,” I told him. “Who paid you to tell us the Pouka was coming?”

  He took a sip of his coffee and laid it down on the desk.

  “Talus pays me to maintain a network of contacts that is far from legal under mortal law,” he pointed out calmly. “The information came through that network and I passed it on to him. I understand that he validated it separately.”

  “He did. But that validation was from someone I now suspect is an enemy,” I said calmly. “Which leaves me with every reason to suspect the initial source of the information. And you, Mr. Kuang, are lying to me.”

  It was more than a guess but less than a certainty. He was too controlled in his motions, too sure in his words. He’d gone into full legal-defense mode, a state that would have fooled any human. But habits and skills learned to deceive humans didn’t work on fae.

  He went for a panic button. My hand was out without thinking, telekinetic force wrapping around his wrist to freeze him in place. He tried to go for it with his other arm, and I sent him spinning across the room in the swivel chair as I vaulted the desk.

  Kuang landed flat on his back on the floor and I knelt next to him.

  “I have no desire for this to get ugly,” I told him, “though I find myself wondering just who that panic button calls that you thought it was worth pressing on me.”

  He coughed.

  “The Unseelie,” he admitted. “It’s supposed to go to one of their Nobles’ cellphones. Not sure how fast they’d get here.”

  “Not fast enough,” I told him. “Listen to me, Jiang. You’ve stepped into the middle of a war you know nothing about and have
betrayed not merely Oberis but the Fae High Court. You’re a mortal, in the know, and in the service of a Fae Court…and you betrayed the High Court.

  “Your life is mine.”

  I suspected he was quite sure that I wouldn’t kill him in cold blood. He was even right. That didn’t mean this was a conversation he wanted to have.

  “Chernenkov and Andrell’s Court weren’t here yet,” I concluded. “You had a contact. Someone who gave you information and paid you to make sure Talus knew about it. Didn’t you?”

  He looked up at me from the floor and I watched the fight go out of him.

  “Until Andrell showed up, I didn’t know there even was another faction at play,” he told me. “I thought someone was paying me to help you guys.

  “And then, once the Unseelie showed up, this scary-tall Irish lady showed up, told me I’d betrayed Oberis in taking the money and was utterly fucked. If I helped them out, they’d protect me and see me paid.”

  “And if you didn’t, they’d make sure Oberis learned you were on the take,” I said. “How many other sweetheart deals did you have?”

  From his terrified expression, more than we would have preferred. Most of them had almost certainly involved breaking the very confidentiality his business relied on, but only to other supernaturals.

  “Who was your contact?” I demanded.

  “Anonymous email originally,” he said desperately. “Had the right tags to hit my inbox without going to spam, but no sender. Just a promise of money and information.

  “Met someone at a bar at the new airport hotel. They gave me a flash drive with the information and a draft on a numbered company for fifty grand. Like I said…I thought I was being paid to help out.”

  I sighed.

  That was useful background, but it didn’t really tell me anything useful. Except…

  “They asked you for more data,” I said sharply. “What did you give them?”

  He cringed away from me, but my sympathy suddenly evaporated.

  “What did you give them, Jiang?”

  “I told them where Talus’s office is,” he said quietly. “She asked this morning. I don’t know…”

  “Do you have any idea how badly you’ve betrayed the Courts?” I asked him, then shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you came clean. We may still be able to salvage something from this. But I need you to tell me exactly what you told her.”

  I didn’t know where Talus operated from, but if I was going to save his life…I needed to know.

  Now.

  Of course, Talus’s office was in one of the most expensive, most prestigious buildings in downtown…which made it one of the busiest, most crowded and most public buildings. I didn’t know the layout well enough to step Between directly to a quiet spot in his offices, either.

  Fortunately, the Court maintained several facilities downtown that I was more familiar with. Knowing those spaces would, if nothing else, be clear of mortals allowed me to cut an hour or so off my rush to get to Talus’s office.

  The handful of people inside the print shop I materialized in stared at me in shock. Just because they were all fae didn’t mean they were used to watching people appear out of thin air, after all.

  None of them were people I knew well, which meant that, today at least, I didn’t know I could trust them. I gave them a calm nod and strode out into the front half of the print shop—a facility we maintained because, well, even supernaturals needed business cards and pamphlets, and some of those shouldn’t be printed by mortal hands.

  The young woman managing the front desk was a changeling I had met before, but she missed me emerging behind her because she was utterly focused on the customer in front of her.

  Which was fair. Robert was a Fae Noble, after all, and there was a lot about him that could be distracting if you were attracted to men. For myself, my main priority was that he was here and powerful enough to make a difference if I was about to go toe-to-toe with Chernenkov and her friends.

  “Robert, we have a problem,” I told him, cutting into his flirtation with the changeling. He blinked in confusion for a moment, then caught up.

  “What kind of problem?” he asked, snapping into readiness mode before he even processed that I was supposed to be dead. “Kelly, to me!”

  His Gentry escort seemed to materialize out of nowhere, the young-looking woman nodding to me politely as she joined her ward-slash-boss.

  “Unless I’m severely mistaken, Maria Chernenkov is about to storm your father’s office with a posse of redcap mercenaries,” I told him. “We need to get there now.”

  “I…” Robert swallowed. “That’s a hell of a status report, Jason. Plus…aren’t you dead?”

  “Rumors exaggerate, et cetera, et cetera,” I told him. “Chernenkov is coming for the Court and I don’t care what tricks are up her sleeve; she isn’t going after Oberis while Talus or you are alive.”

  Fighting a Fae Lord was suicide. Fighting a Fae Lord with his Nobles at his side? I wasn’t sure what the term for that was. Already dead probably covered it.

  So, Chernenkov would go for the Nobles—Talus and Robert. One at a time.

  Robert coughed delicately.

  “I’m with you, Jason,” he told me. “But…truth is, even I don’t know where Talus has his office.”

  Robert might be Talus’s son, but he’d been unacknowledged until very recently. The two were still working out their relationship, and Talus was apparently truly paranoid about his home base.

  “Fortunately, the same idiot who told Chernenkov where it is told me,” I replied. “It’s only a couple of blocks from here, but…”

  “We’ll need to clear the building,” Kelly suggested instantly, the blonde Gentry in the process of tying her hair back. “I suggest calling in a bomb threat to 911?”

  “If you’ve got to move, you’ve got to move,” the changeling at the cash desk told us. “I barely followed your conversation, but I can bloody well call in that I overhead a bomb threat if you give me the address, eh?”

  28

  Timing was everything.

  In this case, timing was…not quite fast enough

  We could only move so quickly through the crowded streets of downtown. All three of us were armed, and this was not a city where we wanted to draw attention to that. Shoulder holsters were only so stealthy in weather where a suit jacket made you look overdressed and on your way to melting.

  It didn’t bother me as much as it clearly bothered the locals—what the southern US states regarded as “hot” would have turned this entire city into a pool of sweat—but Kelly and Robert looked clearly uncomfortable in the blazers they wore to cover their guns.

  We were halfway there when a helicopter buzzed overhead. The green-painted Canadian Forces vehicle had no business in downtown Calgary—a suspicion only aggravated when it flew into a landing on the roof of the tower we were headed to.

  Robert and I shared a look.

  “They had a pile of military gear,” I noted.

  “Fuck us all,” he replied. “Let’s move!”

  Police sirens began to echo as we moved, the city’s mortal guardians moving to protect the innocent from the threat we’d arranged to call in. We needed them to make sure the innocents were removed from the building—but we needed to get into the building before the cops arrived.

  We picked up the pace, moving toward the building even as the first crowds began to exit it. Whatever alarms were ringing weren’t audible from the outside, and we made it all the way to the entrance before we saw anyone directing people outside.

  “Keep moving, people,” a uniformed security guard was telling everyone. “There’s a developing situation; we need you to evacuate. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back in.”

  I led my companions in, ducking through a door that didn’t have any guards next to it and over to the elevator.

  “They’re locked down,” Kelly said after poking at the buttons. “Probably waiting on police or
fire keys; they’re evacuating everyone through the stairs.”

  “That rules out us going up the stairs,” I replied quietly. I studied the elevator doors for a moment. “Robert, you up to picking locks?”

  The young Noble stepped up to the elevator call panel and waved a hand over it. There was a crunching sound, hopefully inaudible at a distance, and the Down button flashed live.

  “Picking, no,” he said cheerfully. “Forcing? Yeah, sure.”

  The elevator doors slid open and we were inside before anyone could question us. I slammed the button to close the doors and repeated Robert’s trick with the outside lock to unlock the panel.

  “Top floor,” I said aloud as I hit the button. “Of course he’s on the top floor.”

  “I’m guessing the helicopter wasn’t friendlies,” Kelly replied. “I suppose they knew about the top floor too?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I got the address from the same people they did.”

  The elevator started moving and I shook my head.

  “I just hope that this elevator gets us up there while Talus is still holding out.”

  The elevator opened to the sound of gunfire.

  It wasn’t directed at us, which was a momentary relief. It was, however, directed at the dozen or so staff running for the door to the stairwell. A mix of changelings, fae, and regular humans, none of whom really had any business in a fight without at least being armed.

  Four redcaps with automatic weapons turned the lobby of the building’s top floor into a slaughterhouse. Cold iron bullets were overkill, but they were what the bastards had—and they made sure that even the Lesser Fae and changelings in that crowd weren’t getting back up.

  Robert was moving before I could even think to react. I was faster than a human, but the Fae Noble with me was faster still. Glamor-forged armor flashed into existence around him, glittering silver plate that clung to every line of his body like a second skin.