Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

“Give me a moment; I’ll grab a couple of guys to help you,” he told me.

  “Wait up a sec,” I said. “Bryan Filks, right?”

  He checked his nametag. “Yup,” he grinned at me.

  “This is for you.” I passed him the box, and the grin faded as fast as it had appeared. “I was told you’d know what it was.”

  “I do,” he said flatly, and something about the way he said it suggested asking more would be unwise. He took the box quickly. “I’ll grab you that help,” he told me, and vanished into the building.

  For several minutes, I shivered in the cold, and then Filks and two more guys in warm-looking coveralls arrived to help me start unloading boxes. We worked quickly, but even the work wasn’t enough to keep us warm. When the last box was loaded, we closed the van up, and the airport guys looked me over.

  “Come in for a minute and grab a cuppa hot chocolate,” Filks told me. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

  I nodded agreement—there’d be no argument on that point from me in this city! A minute or so later, they dropped a steaming cup of hot chocolate into my half-frozen hands. I wanted to cuddle up to the thing and never let go, but a tiny voice in the back of my mind suggested that these guys might know something about how the vampires got here, even if they weren’t inhuman.

  Filks vanished as I took my first sip of hot chocolate, and I eyed the other two—Tom and Harry.

  “You guys only ever work on the shipping side?” I asked.

  “Nah,” Harry replied. “Other than Filks, most of us working here are those on workers’-comp ‘limited lift weights’—Tom and I are normally heavy cargo receiving, but we both managed to gum up our backs within two weeks of each other. I’ll be done here in two weeks, though.”

  “Lucky shit,” Tom grunted. “Docs say mine won’t ever be what it was—I’m on light or semi-light for life, it sounds.”

  “You must see everything come through here,” I said. “What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?”

  “Dinosaurs,” Tom laughed. “A few years back, the zoo updated their animatronics display, so we had these crates with full-size fake dinos in them come through. One of them got ‘accidentally’ turned on—no fucking clue how; they don’t have batteries, after all—but you should have seen the reaction around here when a T. rex roar, right out of Jurassic Park, came blaring through the main cargo hangar.”

  “Almost as spooked as when that load of cadavers came through,” Harry agreed, with a shiver as he mentioned them.

  “Load of cadavers?” I drawled questioningly. That sounded promising.

  “About nine months back,” Harry said, thinking slowly. “There was a special refrigerated cargo container came in on an express cargo flight from Philadelphia. Some of the paperwork got fucked up, so security checked it out—it was full of corpses. Thirty of them. It was two days before everything got sorted out and some muckety-muck from the med school at the U came over to grab them.”

  “People were really spooked,” Tom agreed. “Kelly thought he saw one of the corpses walking around the airport the night before the doc came for them. Like I said, spooked.”

  “Who was the doc?” I asked, trying to fake passing curiosity and drinking more hot chocolate.

  “Sigurdsen? Sanderson?” Harry shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Oh, for really fun loads, though, you should have seen the day they were shipping in a load of tank parts to send up to the base in Edmonton,” Tom said with a grin. “Soldiers everywhere.”

  I quietly drank my hot chocolate, listening to their stories, but no clues beyond a box of cadavers—one of which had walked!—coming into town nine months before.

  Maybe I should look into this Dr. Sigurdsen, or whatever, after work.

  When I made it back to the dispatch office, Bill was there with Trysta, wiping sweat off his forehead with a dirty rag.

  “Hey, Jason,” he greeted me. “How was the airport delivery?”

  “Cold,” I replied. “Otherwise, no problem.”

  “Good,” he grunted. “It looks like you’ll be doing it for a bit. Jake’ll be down for about four weeks, the docs say.”

  “But he’s okay?”

  “Yeah, the surgery went off without a hitch.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Four weeks on airport duty, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Bill confirmed. “I can do it, but I prefer to be the backup, not the one and only.”

  “Understood, boss.”

  Bill grunted, and wordlessly gestured Trysta and me out of the office—it was closing time. The redheaded receptionist bundled herself up tightly in her winter coat and followed me out.

  “What are your plans tonight?” she asked me as we walked to the bus stop.

  “I have research to do,” I answered with a smile, “and a girl I should be calling back.”

  “Oh,” she said, and went suddenly quiet.

  “Yourself?” I asked.

  “Nothing much,” she said shortly, and the rest of the short trip to the bus stop passed in silence and me wondering just what I’d said wrong.

  I worked it out just after her bus pulled away. With a sigh of “oh, Powers, I’m dumb” I boarded my own never-quite-warm-enough public transit.

  9

  It didn’t take much time on the Internet to find the phone number for the University of Calgary’s med school, and one of the advantages to starting at six in the morning was that most places were still in business hours when you got home.

  I decided to bite the bullet and called them.

  “Good afternoon, Cumming School of Medicine,” a cheery young male voice answered.

  “Hi, I’m looking to make an appointment to see a Dr. Sigurdsen,” I told him calmly. “It’s to do with a shipment he signed for some months back.”

  “Hold a moment,” the young man told me. It wasn’t much longer than a literal moment before he was back.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have a Dr. Sigurdsen here,” he said. “We did have a Dr. Elisse Sigridsen here, but my files show she left the faculty about a year ago. Are you sure this shipment was to do with the medical faculty?”

  “There was some mix-up with the paperwork, and the airport asked me to look into it,” I lied, hopefully smoothly. “They said it was headed for your faculty—I was advised it was a cargo of donated cadavers.”

  “Um…” The man on the other swallowed. “I believe”—he paused again—“that we meet all of our needs for that...resource from donations in the local region. Let me check, but I don’t think we’ve received a shipment in a while.” There was silence on the line for a moment, broken by the sound of a keyboard.

  “Yeah, that’s correct,” he finally continued. “We last imported cadavers two years ago.”

  “There must be some confusion, then,” I allowed. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Yes, of course. What was your name?” the man asked, but I hung up as he finished the question.

  An Internet search quickly confirmed what the receptionist had told me. Dr. Elisse Sigridsen was a pathologist, with a specialty in rare human parasite strains. She’d worked for the U of C’s Health Sciences Centre for ten years, including many research trips around the world for research.

  Some of her paper titles were very interesting: A Pathological Study of Human Mutation. Human Genetic Strains and Supernatural Myth. Rare Variations in Human Physiology. This was the kind of woman who’d love to meet an inhuman—so she could dissect them.

  But she hadn’t been working for the U of C when she’d signed for that container, and it had never gone to the university, either. So, who had she been working for, and where had it gone?

  Boxes of cadavers were suspicious when investigating vampires in the first place, but now this was starting to stink to high heaven.

  Curiosity itched, though, so I threw her name into Fae-Net as I grabbed my phone to call Mary. The results came back instantly, and I dropped the phone with Mary’s number undialed as the red text flashe
d up on my screen:

  WARNING: Supernatural Hunter. This individual possesses an unknown degree of awareness of the supernatural, and has reacted hostilely to all known encounters.

  More details scrolled across the screen as I viewed a Fae-Net warning notice. Sigridsen was confirmed responsible for the death and—my earlier thought proved correct—dissection of five true fae and one changeling. Three more changeling and several fae murders were suspected. The warning notice concluded that she was definitely aware of the fae vulnerability to cold-forged iron and of most if not all of its limitations.

  This woman had spent ten years bouncing around the world, hunting inhumans. Driven, from what the mortal Internet articles had suggested, by nothing more than an insatiable curiosity, she had killed and dissected half a dozen people—and I only had definite information on the confirmed fae murders. Anything outside of the Courts wouldn’t be solid enough for this sort of file.

  If Sigridsen had been offered some of the answers to the riddles she was clearly willing to kill to resolve, she would almost certainly have been willing to abuse her name and credentials to sneak a container of vampires into the city.

  Which, I realized with a sigh, did me no good whatsoever, because I still had no idea where she’d taken the container, nor any way to do so much as contact her.

  At a dead end on my own, I called Mary.

  “Hi, Jason,” she chirped cheerfully into the phone when she picked it up. Call display ranked somewhere slightly above wizards on things that made me uncomfortable most days.

  “Hi, Mary,” I said lamely. “How’s my favorite wildcat?”

  “The only other wildcat shifter you know is my brother,” she told me laughingly. “He may be offended after stitching you up.”

  I laughed with her. She had a point.

  “I’m good,” she answered. “Work is boring, and a friend left me asking all sorts of uncomfortable questions around.”

  “Where do you work?” I asked. “I was lucky and found a courier job right after I hit town.”

  “You’ll laugh,” Mary told me. “I work at the local geek central—it’s a giant board-game, book and anime store right downtown. You’d be surprised how many inhumans are gamers.”

  “I’m not sure I even know what you mean by the term,” I admitted.

  “Role-playing gamers,” she explained. “Dungeons and Dragons, that sort of thing. It’s fun; you should come out for our weekend gaming group at the store—we’re playing tomorrow.”

  “I may do that,” I said. Given the near kiss the other night, I figured time spent with Mary was a good thing. “I’m sorry if my questions caused issues.”

  “Tarvers told me to tell you to be careful,” Mary said bluntly. “Then he asked for your email and said he’d be in touch with whatever he learned. Something along the lines of ‘I don’t tell fae where to dig their own graves.’”

  “I appreciate his vote of confidence,” I said dryly.

  “Clementine examined what was left of the bodies, but nothing came of that,” she continued. “The most intact was the one Barry chased down, but we shifters don’t leave a lot behind.”

  I still had vivid memories of the one Tarvers had taken apart, and I couldn’t see how one of the large shifters could leave much behind.

  “Does the name Dr. Sigridsen mean anything to you?” I asked. The line was silent for a long time. “Mary?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “I’m not allowed to explain that, though. Look, are you okay entering Clan territory?”

  “I woke up in it on the weekend,” I reminded her.

  “I’m going to call Tarvers,” she told me. “The equivalent to your guy’s Manors is the Lodge. The one in Calgary is a sports bar named Victor’s in the northeast. Meet us there in an hour.”

  “Okay,” I agreed slowly. She gave me the address.

  “Sorry for the mysteriousness,” Mary said quietly. “You’ll understand once Tarvers explains, I promise. See you soon.”

  She hung up, presumably to call Tarvers, and I put my phone down, feeling more than a little confused. Apparently, the shifters there had dealt with Dr. Sigridsen. And the only way I was going to find out more want to head to the Lodge and meet with Tarvers.

  I sighed and grabbed my coat. It was a Friday night, and I suspected it was cold outside.

  I missed not just one but two bus connections on my way to the northeast and ended up taking over an hour and a half to get to Victor’s. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting—I was figuring it would be a biker bar or something similar, with brawly tattooed men smoking outside by the rows of motorbikes. Instead, Victor’s was a quiet sports bar buried in a residential strip mall.

  There was a row of motorbikes but also a moderately full parking lot of cars. Two young men, one the fair-haired shifter from the other night who Mary had called Barry, loitered outside the entrance. From the way the one I didn’t know moved before Barry waved him to relaxation, both were carrying.

  “Tarvers is waiting for you,” Barry told me. “Booth at the end on the left.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded to the shifters and entered the bar.

  The inside was plain but solid. The booth tables were heavily mounted wood, and even the freestanding ones looked bolted to the floor. The bar looked like it had started life as one giant tree—presumably from somewhere not Calgary—and been hacked into shape. The lights were just dim enough to hide what I was sure were permanent stains on the bar.

  Two giant flatscreen TVs hung above the bar, showing the progress of a hockey game and holding the attention of most of the bar’s patrons. I don’t think I saw a single human in the bar, though.

  I followed Barry’s directions and found the two shifters waiting for me. Mary looked up at me with a bright smile, and Tarvers simply grunted and gestured me to a seat, sliding a whiskey on ice across the table to me.

  “You’ll want the booze,” he said grimly as I sipped at the whiskey and coughed as it burned its way down.

  “How did you come across Sigridsen?” the leader of Calgary’s shapeshifter population asked.

  “You know what I was asked to investigate,” I told him. That I hadn’t been asked by Oberis was a detail they didn’t need to know, and I was more comfortable not telling them. “I asked some questions up at the airport and was told a story about a cargo container of cadavers coming into the city about nine months ago—and Dr. Sigridsen signed for them for the university. Except no one at the university knows anything about this, and she hasn’t worked for them for a year.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” Tarvers said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. “We’re pretty sure she knows that if we find her, she’s dead.”

  I looked at him, surprised. Most inhumans generally ignored the human populace half the time and looked down on it the rest. We weren’t much noted for specifically trying to hunt down mortals.

  “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” I suggested.

  Tarvers nodded and took a gulp of his beer.

  “Clementine was the first of us in a while to go through higher education,” he told me. “While we have more control when we change than myth tends to suggest, it’s still risky to spend that much time in purely human company.”

  “Barry’s younger brother Abraham followed Clementine in,” he continued. “He’s a wolf shifter, so it was a bit riskier, but Clem had shown us it could be done. The year Clem graduated as a doctor, Abraham entered pre-med. One of his first teachers was Dr. Sigridsen. We didn’t know, then, that the fae Courts had issued a hunter warning on the bitch.

  “Abraham made it into his second year without an issue, and then something—we’re not sure what—went wrong,” the big bear shifter said quietly. “Sigridsen got suspicious and started stalking him. She was good—the bitch hunted fae, after all. It was around this time I mentioned what was going on to Oberis, who warned us that there was a hunter at the school.

  “It was too late.” Tarvers drained the remnants of his beer a
nd gestured for the waitress to bring him another. “Abraham had mentioned to us that he was starting to feel nervous, so when Oberis told me about the hunter, I took five good men and rushed to the campus. We found his dorm room destroyed—every sign of a struggle.

  “We found later that Sigridsen had taken him by surprise and injected him with a silver nitrate–laced tranquilizer. He almost killed her regardless, and she almost killed him with the tranquilizer, but in the end, she took him alive.”

  Mary hadn’t said a word the whole time Tarvers had been talking; now she laid a hand on her clan leader’s shoulder and squeezed, sharing a sad smile with me.

  “It took us two weeks to find who had taken him and where,” the big Alpha finally continued, his voice quiet and pained. “She nailed him to a table with silver and dissected him. And then, when he regenerated, she did it again. And again. And again. She was studying him, like he was an animal, only worse. No animal could have survived what was done to him. A human, an animal, even a fae would have died by the end of the first day. She repeatedly dissected him and studied his regeneration for two weeks.”

  “Powers,” I cursed softly.

  Tarvers lapsed into silence, and Mary squeezed his shoulder again and then continued the story for him.

  “I was on the strike team that went in after him,” she told me. “One of my first tasks for the Clan, actually, was scouting out the site. We hit her house in the middle of the night, trying to capture her, but it turned out she’d trapped the place. Barry was badly injured, as were several others, and she escaped—but we got Abraham out. But...she broke him, Jason,” Mary said, her voice tired. “Broke his mind like a twig—he’d been repeatedly tortured for weeks.

  “That was a year ago,” she continued. “Sigridsen vanished, though we don’t think she left the city. Abraham is only now starting to show some improvement under continuous care and therapy.”

  “If we find that bitch, she is dead a thousand times over,” Tarvers growled. “From what you said, she’s now dealing with feeders. But in a year of searching, all we’ve been able to be sure of is that she’s in the city. We have police and government contacts, but she hasn’t registered a change of address since we destroyed her house.