“So, yes, Jason, we know who she is,” he continued. “I don’t know how much use knowing what we know is to you—we haven’t found her. But if you do…” He paused. “If you can’t get us there, understand that she is far more dangerous than a human should be and utterly without comprehension of us as people. Kill her first. Kill her hard.”
With that, Tarvers finished his beer and stood up, leaving Mary and me alone at the table. She switched around to slide up next to me.
“It wasn’t a story I could tell over the phone,” she said quietly. “Even if I didn’t need Tarvers’s permission.”
I looked at her, meeting her green-eyed gaze and taking her hand in mine.
“I don’t know how,” I admitted, “but I will find her. In the Queen’s name I swear it.”
This human had tortured a kid into insanity and murdered over half a dozen people, simply because they weren’t human as she understood the term. And for her curiosity. I knew that when I met her, I’d have anger enough to fuel an inferno.
But no one had seen her and there was no official address; how could I find her? I stiffened as the answer struck me, accidentally pushing Mary away.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “I just thought of a way to find her. I’ll see you at your game thing tomorrow?” I asked, sliding out of the booth.
She looked up at me, her eyes unreadable. “Okay,” she agreed.
I gave in to temptation and leaned in to press a quick kiss to her forehead.
“I’m sorry, but I think I need to act on this now,” I told her as she smiled sadly at me.
There were no official government records of her address—but I worked for a courier company.
Unfortunately, I didn’t actually have a key to the office, though I did at least know the alarm deactivation code. Fortunately, the semi-industrial area Direct Couriers was headquartered in was utterly deserted at nearly midnight on a Friday night, and the superior senses reflexes of a changeling had made learning to pick locks a breeze during my years of disreputable wandering in the South.
Needing to take my gloves off to do it hurt, but at least I was fast.
I opened the door quickly and stepped in to the sound of the beeping security alarm. I’d been given the code to activate it if I was the last to leave, and the same code calmly disarmed it. Trysta’s computer was turned off, and I booted it up, watching the door nervously in the darkness. I didn’t need a light, and the dark helped conceal me from any passers-by.
I’d picked up Trysta’s password almost by accident, watching her keystrokes one morning, and I quickly typed it in once the computer booted up. The computer rejected it, and I cursed aloud. She’d changed it, but what to?
It was one of those “include a capital, a special character, and a number” passwords, and after a moment, I tried again—switching out the 4 at the end for a 5.
It worked. With the computer booted and logged in, I fell to searching for the archive I knew existed—a list of every name and address we’d ever delivered to.
If I was very, very lucky, we’d delivered something to her. When I found the directory, I searched for Dr Sigridsen, but I got no hits. Tried again with just Sigridsen and started to figure I was out of luck, until I figured to try one last thing.
There were four Elisses in the directory. Two had full last names, one was Elisse R., and the last was Elisse S. A scattering of deliveries across the years Direct had been active, and an address change for the first package less than a year old.
I wrote down the new address and shut off the computer. I slipped out of the office as quietly as I’d come in, reactivating the alarm and locking the door as I left. Bill would be confused when he looked at the alarm records showing the deactivation on Monday, but there were no other signs I’d been there. I could live with a confused boss.
It was too late to take the bus and too cold to stay out much later, but I didn’t want to wait. This woman was actively involved with the cabal, a key to the mission the Queen had given me, and a potential threat to anyone who encountered her.
I checked the address, shrugged, and called a cab.
The cab dropped me off outside a small detached home in a newly built suburb in the central north end of the city—I think the sign had called it Panorama Hills. I paid the cab driver cash and pulled my coat around myself, scoping the house out from the outside.
Nothing suggested this was the home of a university professor turned serial killer. The front lawn showed neatly kept in the light from the streetlamps. No light escaped from the house, though as I walked toward the front door, I realized that was because every visible window was completely covered in heavy drapes. There was no way light could leak out.
It was quite possible there was someone home, and I was starting to wish I’d picked up a weapon somewhere. Sparks of anger in my veins and a warmth in my hands said I wasn’t defenseless, but I figured it would probably be easier to just shoot someone.
I stopped outside the door and sent Mary a quick text. “If I don’t call by dawn, check out this address.”
That sent, I tucked the phone into my back pocket and kicked the door in. Brilliant yellow light spilled out into the night as I walked into the house. A sudden sense of danger hit me, and I dove sideways as a shotgun blasted through the space I’d been standing in. I hit the ground and rolled back up to my feet. A steely gray-haired woman was running toward the front of the house—but the shotgun had been triggered by a laser tripwire and didn’t look to have a second shot.
“Who the hell are you?” the woman demanded, yanking an ugly-looking pistol from a cabinet behind the wall.
Before she’d lifted it to fire, I’d crossed to her and quickly broken her wrist, sending the pistol careening against the wall—thankfully still on safe; I could feel the cold iron in the clip. I barely even noticed the surprise on her face at my speed.
“Dr. Sigridsen, I presume,” I said calmly, breaking her other arm as she tried to hit me, and shoving her back into her living room. She stumbled and landed on a couch.
“You’re one of them,” she spat. “One of those fucking monsters.”
“Monsters, huh?” I said. “One of the people in this room tortured a nineteen-year-old boy. It wasn’t me. Can you say the same?”
“I was studying it, not torturing,” she spat. “Anything that abnormal should be studied, to understand it, use it.”
“Studying involves kidnapping a student and repeatedly attempting to kill them?” I snarled as I advanced on her.
“That monster shouldn’t have been among real people,” she told me. “I saw it—it would have turned on them eventually. It looked at my students and saw food.”
“I’ve never known a shifter who saw people as anything but people, actually,” I said conversationally.
“What did it matter?” she demanded. “It had a solution. What happens to you, monster, if I were to inject you with cancerous cells?”
I froze, just out of reach of her. That explained...a lot. “They’d die,” I said flatly.
“Well, they didn’t do that in me,” she snarled. “I could have found a cure, saved millions, but you monsters had to interfere!”
“It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid,” I told her. “Nothing you could have learned by torturing that boy could save you. And those that could would never help a murderer.”
“Hah! There was one who could,” she answered. “What do you know?”
“I need to know what you did with the container of vampires you brought into this city,” I told her bluntly, and she laughed in my face.
“So, you know how I first served.” She laughed. “What makes you think I’d surrender my saviors?”
“Because, Dr. Sigridsen, your ‘saviors’ eat people to live,” I told her, a sinking feeling in my stomach. Blood magic could cure cancer, easily. It also left the “patient” almost entirely enthralled to their healer.
“Tell me where they are.”
“What can you do to m
e?” she laughed in my face. “There’s nothing they can’t fix. You can’t stop them, and they will heal me again and again and again.”
Sigridsen was insane. And she had the key information I needed.
I took the final step to her and slammed her back into the couch by her shoulders.
“Tell me,” I snarled in her face.
She laughed, and pain seared through me as the echoing crack of a pistol rang through the room. The bullet ripped through my stomach and sent me stumbling backward as she lifted another pistol she’d pulled out of the couch with her freshly healed arms and bared her fangs at me.
The vampires hadn’t cured Sigridsen’s cancer with a blood working. That would have been too easy for me…
“They made you a vampire in payment,” I gasped, feeling for the wound. It wasn’t cold iron; it would heal. It wasn’t a fatal wound to me—for that, she’d either need the gun she’d left in the hallway, or to be a much better shot.
“I will not betray my new brothers and sisters,” she crowed, raising the gun to shoot me again. I dodged, lumbering to my feet and feeling the bullet whiz past my head. Fire flared through my right hand, scorching the gun and misfiring the ammo with heat. Sigridsen dropped the gun as it half-exploded in her hand.
Her eyes glittered with madness as she pulled a short, heavy knife from somewhere. It wasn’t cold iron, but there were lots of wounds I couldn’t regenerate from.
“What can you do to me?” she said in a hiss. “They have made me immortal!”
I stood, willpower and power driving away the pain as I conjured faerie flame in my hands.
“I can burn your body to ashes, bitch,” I snapped, and threw the flame at her. It burned up her arm, forcing her to drop the machete, and I stepped forward, throwing more flame as she went for the gun in the hallway. I caught her in the side, but it didn’t stop her from sliding into the hallway and grabbing with the ugly pistol with its cold iron rounds.
I didn’t conjure flame fast enough, and the heavy cold-hammered iron round tore into my shoulder. Pain tore through my body, driving me to my knees, and she fired again. Another bullet ripped through my chest, and I coughed up blood as she closed.
“Why aren’t you dead?” she snapped. “I thought this shit killed you fucking fairies dead.”
“I’m not true fae, bitch,” I said, coughing up blood with my words. “I’ve more human left in me than you do!”
Anger and pain flared through me and out my extended right hand. A burst of green flame, an inferno like I’d never conjured before, flashed across the room. Sigridsen screamed as the gun literally melted in her hand, the bullets exploding and flying off wildly. One of them might have hit her, but I would never know—the tendril of flame kept going clean through her, incinerating half of her body and burning a huge hole in the wall behind her.
Normal, yellow flame began to lick around the edges of the hole as I stumbled out. I caught a glimpse of a familiar black Hummer screeching around the corner of the street, breaking at least three traffic laws, before the blood loss and cold-iron poisoning caught up with me and I collapsed.
10
I woke up to pain. My entire body ached, and the two cold-iron wounds burned like fire.
“Shit, he’s awake,” Clementine snapped in a voice sharp with panic. “We can’t use anesthetic for this; someone put him out!”
Cold, cold hands touched my temples, and I felt a flare of power, and then the world was gone.
When I woke again, my body ached, but none of my wounds burned. I couldn’t pinpoint the bullet wounds, which told me someone had cleaned the wounds of cold iron. Which would have fucking hurt, hence them keeping me knocked out.
I opened my eyes to the same spartan room I’d been left in when I first was taken to Clan Tenerim’s Den. I wasn’t alone, but this time it wasn’t Mary or one of the shifters who was in with me. A tall dark-haired woman in a black skirt suit sat cross-legged on a chair by the door. Her gaze locked on mine as I looked at her.
“Good, you’re awake,” she said briskly. “I am Laurie. Oberis sent me.”
I could feel her power across the room. She was fae, not quite Noble but strong enough for that. She stood, and to my eyes her visage shimmered, and I cursed mentally. A single glimpse through the glamor she’d woven around herself revealed the true nature of the woman. She was still tall and dark-haired, but her skin was withered with centuries of wind and sun, warped by birth and age. I was sharing a room with a hag.
Hags wielded great magical power, though physically most would barely be a match for me. I knew who’d kept me asleep while Clementine had abraded cold iron from my flesh.
The thought led me to toss aside the blanket over me to examine my wounds. They’d been bound up, but the bandages were clean and not bloody. I touched them gently and could feel the flesh mostly closed over.
“How long was I out?” I asked Laurie.
“It is Sunday morning,” she told me. She passed me a bundle of clothes. “Dress,” she ordered.
“Can you at least leave the room?” I asked. The hag was creeping me out.
“No,” she said flatly. “I am not to leave your presence until I have delivered you to the Lord of the Court. I am your guard.”
“My guard?”
“I have discussed this situation with Alpha Tarvers,” she told me. “You have lied to the Clan and used the goodwill of the court to your advantage. Also, you have threatened the Covenants.”
She tossed a newspaper on the bed in front of me as I began to dress. The headline blazed:
NORTHWEST FIRE LEADS TO DISCOVERY OF SERIAL KILLER
In the aftermath of a fire in the northwest of Calgary Saturday morning, police have found the remains of no less than six people in the basement of the burnt-out home. Identifications have not been confirmed, but police believe them to be the bodies of several missing persons reported in the area.
“Damn,” I whispered.
“Had you passed your knowledge of Dr. Sigridsen’s location on to the proper authorities, we would not have been at risk of the discovery of a vampire by mortal authorities,” Laurie snapped. “We are lucky that her body was sufficiently destroyed that they will not be able to identify her as inhuman.”
“Now,” she continued mercilessly as I pulled on shoes, “are you going to cooperate, or will I have to geas you?”
“I will cooperate,” I said quietly. This wasn’t good. As a Vassal, I technically didn’t answer to Oberis, and it was a tossup whether Laurie would be able to geas me—but from the way the Queen had phrased her orders, I didn’t think she’d appreciate them learning that.
I followed the hag from the room, avoiding the glances of the shifters as I passed through the Den. When we reached the front door, however, Tarvers blocked it. Laurie turned her glare on him.
“We agreed to this, Alpha Tarvers,” she said coldly.
“I will speak with him,” the big shapeshifter rumbled.
“My orders are clear,” Laurie responded. “I am not to leave his presence.”
“In private,” Tarvers told her.
“I have my orders,” the hag said flatly.
“You have my word, as Alpha of Clan Tenerim, as Speaker for the Clans of this city, and a signatory to Calgary’s Covenant, that he will be surrendered to your justice,” the Alpha told her formally. “Now give me a minute.”
They held each other’s glares for a long moment until the tall hag nodded sharply and stepped around him.
Tarvers turned his cold gaze on me.
“Thank you for what you did,” he said flatly, “but I need to know something.”
“What?” I asked, my voice small as I studied his feet. This was not how I’d envisaged seeing Tarvers after taking on Sigridsen.
“Look me in the eye,” he ordered, “and tell me why you lied to us.”
Slowly, I raised his gaze to look into his eyes. It was the first time I’d looked into the Alpha’s eyes, and I realized for the first ti
me that it was not size or strength or blood right that made Tarvers Tenerim master of Calgary’s shifters. He looked into my eyes and through them into my soul, and I knew, in that moment, I could no more deceive him than myself.
“I did not lie to you,” I said quietly, sure that he knew I spoke the truth. “I did not tell you everything, and I cannot tell you now what I did not tell you then, but I did not lie to you.”
“Huh,” he grunted. He held my gaze for a long moment before he finally allowed me to look away. “I will accept that, Jason Kilkenny. Know that my Clan owes you two boons. I will try to convince Mary you didn’t lie to us,” he added, “but I don’t know if even success will help you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You will be barred from seeing the Clan,” Tarvers told me bluntly. “Your Lord is rightly angry in his belief that you have used his name falsely. Even if only by implication.” He winked at me and offered his massive hand.
“You have done us all and the Covenants a service,” he told me as I shook his hand. He pulled me in and whispered in my ear. “We got the bitch’s computers out before the fire took everything. I will let you know what we learn...discreetly.”
He released me and opened the door.
“Good luck, Jason,” he told me.
“Thanks,” I drawled slowly, taking in everything he’d said. “Good luck yourself.”
He nodded and gestured me out of the Den toward my guard.
Laurie was waiting outside, standing by the door of a dark blue SUV. She wordlessly pointed me to the passenger seat, and I obeyed just as quietly. The key turned itself in the ignition as she got in, and the car shifted into gear as she placed her hands on the wheel.
Show-off.
The drive through the city was painfully slow. Laurie, like many hags, was apparently completely anal about rules. Every stop sign was stopped at for exactly three seconds. Every yield sign was slowed for. She even slowed down to a stop when the lights turned yellow!
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