Courts and Cabals 2

by G. S. D'Moore

  I gave them a tired smile. “Honey, I’m home.”

  Both women enveloped me in a hug, but we didn’t say anything. There was no need to. We all knew we were fucked.

  Chapter 16

  The lights and sirens around the resort and casino attracted Vernon and Becky like moths to the flame. Their rental car had to park at the rear of the cluster of emergency vehicles that had swarmed the area. Today, with only a handful of rag-tag agents, they marched into the crime scene.

  “We look like the Dirty Dozen,” Vernon fought down a grin, and the urge to look slightly behind him and to the right.

  Becky had opted to be on another surveillance team, but being the boss, that allowed him to set her schedule to match his. When it was time to work, they worked. When it was time to play, they played . . . hard.

  “She’s getting the best performance report ever,” he told himself as they worked their way through the looky-loos surrounding the perimeter. “Able to handle a big workload . . . always tackles the mission with open legs . . . I mean mind,” he put the kibosh on the dirty evaluation as he ran into a local cop.

  “Sorry, you can’t . . .”

  “UN,” he flashed his badge and brushed past the human. Becky followed him, while one of the UN’s human agents broke off to settle the cop and get details from the rank and file.

  They worked their way around a casualty collection point, where ambulances were staged and waiting to transport the most critical cases to the local hospitals. A scent hit his nostrils, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He expected Becky to walk into him, but she’d already halted.

  “I smell him,” she said, and took a deep breath through her nose. “It’s subdued, but that’s definitely Cameron Dupree.”

  Vernon agreed, which was why he grabbed the nearest EMT. “I need a list of every ambulance that has been here, every patient taken away, and what hospitals they went to.”

  The guy looked wide-eyed and confused, so another agent broke off to liaise while Vernon kept moving forward. He kept his senses open. He smelled fire, dryad, dwarf, troll, shit and piss from where people had lost control of their bladders; but beneath all of that, was the smell of what he was hunting. The wolf inside him howled in victory. The hunt was on.

  “Who the hell let you in here?” a lanky man in a black suit objected as Vernon pushed into a command tent set up by the Bureau’s local office.

  “UN,” he flashed his badge again, and kept it out for the suit to review his credentials and call them in. Just flashing your badge might work with local cops, but the feds had a stick up their asses about clearances and other shit like that.

  Once Vernon was confirmed as legit, the FBI agent growled something about this being his jurisdiction, yada yada yada. Vernon didn’t listen.

  “I need all the security footage from the incident,” he walked past the man who was trying to bully him. The agent wasn’t succeeding; least of all because he barely came up to Vernon’s chin. “Every single scrap of data from the cameras inside the building, and anything pointed at the ambulances,” he turned to Becky. “We’ll comb through it and cross reference everyone that came and went during and after the fight. Dupree was here, now we just need to track him down.”

  “Wait a second,” the agent protested.

  Vernon snapped around toward the agent, and the agent’s rebuke became a nonsensical stutter. Vernon’s eyes glowed like the harvest moon. The wolf inside him wanted to come out and play, hunt, and find the kid that had sent him on a wild goose chase across Upstate New York. Then the entire country. He was done fucking around. He had his scent, the trail was laid out in front of him, and Agent Fuck-For-Brains wasn’t going to get in his way.

  “Easy, killer,” Becky put her hand on his shoulder, and that calmed him. She took over liaising with the FBI, while he walked the scene.

  Someone had nearly burned down the casino. That made it hard to work through the individual scents, but he had lots of training and practice at this. It didn’t take him long to find a muted scent of Dupree in the bathroom. He followed it to the center of the fighting.

  “Still pissing people off left and right, kid,” he had to admire Dupree’s growing reputation. Whatever Dupree was, he’d taken on a second troll and lived, so he wasn’t some pushover anymore. If he ever was.

  “I should have listened to my gut and taken the kid in when I first saw him,” he was never going to let himself live that decision down. People were dead because he didn’t listen to his instincts. The wolf rumbled agreement within him.

  He also caught another scent, which put Underwood at the scene. That meant wherever Dupree was, he was likely to find them all. Scents identified by shifters with the training and certification he had were admissible in a court of law, which meant he could get a warrant. Putting two of the four suspects in the same place was enough to bust this case wide open.

  He tracked the scents back into the convention center. For the most part, it was intact, but a section by an emergency exit looked like someone had taken a bulldozer to it. The scent of blood and violence was thick, but Dupree hadn’t been a part of that. He tracked it toward the front entrance, where more police were huddled with event organizers. One of them reeked like Dupree and Underwood.

  “You, vamp,” Vernon called. He wasn’t as respectful as he could have been, but he’d nearly been killed by a machine gun-toting vamp packing silverbane not too long ago. Let’s just say no vamps got a Christmas card from him this year.

  The tall, leggy woman snarled and turned to face him. Her fangs vanished behind her lips when she saw the UN badge hanging from around his neck.

  “How can I help you?” it was replaced with a reluctant smile.

  “Do you recognize these two people?” he pulled out his tablet and showed her pictures of Dupree and Underwood.

  “No,” she answered.

  He scrutinized the single syllable; smelled for an increase of perspiration, listened to her heartbeat, zeroed in on her pupil dilation; all the tricks shifters used to sort the truth from lies. She was telling the truth.

  “Who were you with today?” he wasn’t giving up because of her response.

  “A lot of people,” she glared at him, “but most of my time was spent with two VIPs.”

  “Do you have pictures of them?” he felt a grin split his face when she nodded and took him to a laptop.

  The two people didn’t look anything like Dupree and Underwood, but it was a place to start. “Get those to me,” he provided an email, and two minutes later he had the photos. Even though she was maybe two hundred feet away, Vernon used his tablet to call Becky.

  “Yes?” she picked up with a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m forwarding you two pictures. Dupree and Underwood were here. They must have had a Fae glamour them, but I found someone who smells like she took a bath in them,” there was a huff from the vamp behind him, but he ignored her. “Use these pictures as a starting point. Find them.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” she hung up.

  He turned to the vamp. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll have more questions soon.”

  The vamp gulped but nodded. Victory was close enough he could taste it. He was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as he continued investigating the scene.

  “Soon,” he whispered in the depths of his mind where the hunter lay. “Soon, you’ll answer for that shit in New York.”

  He was looking forward to being alone in a room with Dupree.

  ***

  “You stupid, mongoloid motherfucker,” there was a crack as Aveena’s hand broke the sound barrier.

  Out in the middle of the desert, it just made a few lizards scramble for cover, and a nearby coyote run for the hills. It also meant she was free to beat the shit out of the people who failed her.

  A second crack echoed as her backhand hit Rock squarely in the jaw. The big troll was picked up off his feet and launched into an impressive specimen of his namesake. His landing crushed the big boulder i
nto pebbles, and the troll groaned as he extracted himself from the debris. He grimaced as he rubbed his broken jaw, but remained silent.

  “You were supposed to call me,” Aveena rounded on Saffron, who was doing her best impression of a dog rolling over and showing its belly in submission.

  “We didn’t know,” she mewled, as she prostrated herself before the noble Fae. “I would have called you in once I was sure, but . . .”

  “You were defeated by a mudslinger,” the selkie, Anna Seatwig, lounged on a cactus boulder and basked in the glory of her enemy’s failure.

  Saffron took a moment to glare at the selkie, before going completely submissive at Aveena’s approach. “You’re right, we should have warned you. We were wrong,” she bowed her head like she expected Aveena to take it from her.

  Aveena was tempted. The rage she felt at the clusterfuck was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. Even Chloe’s death didn’t rise to this level. Her people had failed her, and even worse, done so very publicly. Fae attack porn convention was going to circulate in every newsroom in the western United States by sundown.

  Worst of all, she was nearly out of time. When word of the brawl hit police scanners, she was forced to evacuate the Flamingo. The cops had nabbed the two mercenaries, so she left it to the South African to sanitize the room and rendezvous at their fallback position. She’d stepped and arrived here to wait for her underlings.

  “We . . .” the troll’s monotone only set her off again as he tried to explained himself. Before he knew it, she had him face down in the rubble, her foot pressing him into the earth, and both arms torqued behind his back.

  This time he screamed. His back was a blackened mess of blisters and dead skin. As she applied pressure, skin began to slosh off in sickening globs. The sight nearly made her puke all over Rock, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing his injuries were making her stomach do somersaults.

  “Just a little pull, pop, and . . .” she let the violent imagery of ripping off the troll’s arms quench the thirst for blood inside her. Instead of destroying the idiot, so he would have to return to the Faerie Realm to fully heal, she merely dislocated both his shoulders with a loud pop.

  His roar of agony echoed across the desert, but it made her feel better. She wiped the sand from her hands, the pus-soaked, infected dead flesh from her boot, and patted down her outfit to make sure she was presentable.

  Saffron had moved from complete prostration to her knees. “What can we do to make this up to you, my Lady?” she asked.

  “Kill the mercenaries,” she answered immediately. It told her a lot about Saffron that the dryad didn’t even flinch. “They know too much, and since you fucked up, you get to clean up that loose end.”

  “Yes, my lady,” the dryad bowed. “Where shall we meet you when the task is complete?”

  “Nowhere,” Aveena snapped. “You two are done. You’ve been compromised. You are less than useless to me now. Be gone,” both stepped at her command, and wouldn’t be back if they knew what was good for them.

  “Now what?” Anna asked from the cactus she was using as a therapeutic bed of needles. She was trying to play it cool, but Aveena could feel her unease as she picked at her teeth with a thorn.

  “Now, we wait,” Aveena huffed out the last of her frustration, and tried not to take it out on her last underling. “The cops were all over that place like white on rice. We let them do the legwork for us. We look for an opportunity, and then we strike,” she said it with conviction she was hardly feeling.

  “So, I guess I’m not going back to California anytime soon,” the selkie sighed dramatically.

  “No. Be ready to move at a moment’s notice,” Aveena snapped and stepped.

  “Three more days,” she took ten deep breaths in the Land Between to calm her nerves before heading back to Vegas. “Three more days to see if I live or die.”

  ***

  “It’s not good,” Venus sat at the head of the conference table. Her stylish boots were kicked up on the polished hardwood, and for all the seriousness of the situation, looked completely at ease; even content. Lilith, Dani, Xamira, and Lark were also present to go over the coming shitstorm, and it was going to be a doozy.

  “How?” I didn’t understand. “I got out of there clean.”

  “Your glamour shattered,” Lark shook his head. “Your face is all over their security footage; even if it was only a few seconds,” he forestalled my complaint, “that’s enough.”

  “They’ll comb through every second of that convention,” Venus continued. “They’ll see the glamour you wore, interrogate the people you talked with, backtrack your every move. In fact, the worst thing you could have done was escape so quickly,” she let out a long breath, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “Our people in LVPD are on the lookout, but the feds were able to download the data to their servers before we could drop a virus on the casino’s systems. We’ve totally fucked their network, but any footage before we hit them is fair game,” Xamira shrugged, she looked defeated.

  “And I’m sure a cyberattack out of left field already has people looking in all the wrong places,” I appreciated the assist, but I would be more thankful if it actually accomplished something.

  I hated that she had to be here. I’d fucked up and now everyone was getting the shit end of the stick. I hated being the weak link, and just when I thought I was getting some badass mojo of my own, the universe kicked me in the balls.

  “If a warrant comes down through the LVPD’s usual pipeline, we’ll have about an hour to react. If they get it directly from the court and head straight here . . . maybe fifteen minutes,” Lark gave me a pained smile, like he knew what I was thinking. The guy might be the basis for the devil, but so far, he’d been nothing but a great teacher.

  “So, we need an exit strategy,” Lilith spoke up, she’d been very quiet since she embraced me down in the covert parking garage.

  “No,” Dani and Venus said at the same time. Venus nodded for Dani to continue. “We can’t run from this?”

  “Why the hell not?” I asked. Running had worked out fine so far, and the last thing I wanted to do was let some UN asshole get his hands on me.

  I had visions of sterile labs, needles, and when they found out what my spunk did to succubae; I shivered as I envisioned some sort of contraption on my dick like the thing they put on a cow’s utters to milk them. If I didn’t run, they’d turn me into some sort of lab rat.

  “The cabal just can’t let us up and leave,” Dani explained. “If they have a search warrant, then they’ll be able to legally come into all of the cabal’s security zones. Everything they keep hidden here: magical defenses, priceless research, the art, money, weapons, and all the people that value their privacy above all else. All of that will be put at risk.”

  “I don’t care about the gold bullion they keep in the basement,” I screamed. “This is my fucking freedom!”

  “Calm down, Cameron,” Venus’s voice hit me like a much-needed bottle of whiskey, and I relaxed like I was on a beach with an umbrella drink in my hand. “Our lawyers are already briefed on the situation. If it comes to it,” by her tone, the if really should be a when, “you four will surrender yourselves to the authorities before they can execute a search warrant. Our lawyers will stay with you every step of the process, and ensure your rights are not violated in any way. They have your defense laid out, bail money is ready to be transferred, and for the most part, we can have you out and safe in a few days.”

  “This way, the cabal isn’t kneecapped, and we don’t get fucked in the ass by the long dick of the law,” Dani summed it up like it was a win-win.

  I still felt like I was getting the shittier end of this deal, but Lilith’s hand on mine shut me up.

  “You took a risk taking us in,” she turned to her mother. “Thank you for that. Thank you for training Cam. Whatever happens, I know we’ll be okay,” she gripped my hand harder.

  I felt some steel
find its way back into my spine as the little meeting broke up. Venus told us to keep our phones on us in case we needed to move in a hurry.

  Instead of heading to her room for the evening, Lilith followed me back to mine. That sent a little thrill through me, but I wished it was under better circumstances.

  “Wow,” her jaw dropped at the spotless suite.

  “Yeah, wow,” I echoed her thought. Fern had really outdone herself.

  The pixie was nowhere to be seen, but I doubted there was a stray mote of dust in the entire place. Everything had the lemony, pine-fresh scent that made my nose tingle. I smiled as we headed to the bedroom. Lilith curled up on the mattress, and I snuggled in next to her, big-spoon style. We both tried to ignore my raging hard-on poking her in the ass as we digested what our immediate future had in store for us.

  “Well, this sucks,” I stated after a long silence. That got a chuckle out of her. “I joined your harem to protect myself from the Fae, and now I’m gonna have the LVPD, FBI, UN, and gods only know who else busting down the door to get at me,” I sighed, but felt her stiffened beside me.

  “That’s not the only reason I joined,” I quickly added. “And it’s not the reason I decided to stay when you gave me an out,” I grabbed her shoulder and turned her toward me.

  Our eyes met, and I pulled her in for a kiss; no tongue tango, or trying to tie a knot with a cherry stem, just our tender lips pressed against one another. As it lingered, she wrapped a hand around my head, placed it on my neck, and drew me in closer.

  “Aah,” I felt every muscle in my body simultaneously relax as she worked her succubus magic. In a heartbeat, she made me feel warm, accepted, wanted, and loved. This wasn’t the Lilith who I announced, to half the school, that I wanted her to bob on my knob. This was the Lilith I’d fought for; who’d fought for me, and who I could trust to have my back no matter what happened. I felt the same way about Dani, and that caused another pang of regret to resound through my soul.