“Yeah,” I agreed, eyeing the chart. If I was reading it correctly, missing-persons reports had doubled over a three-month period, stabilizing at twice their earlier level.
“These reports are a useful tool for looking for vampires,” Aheed told me. “They are hemovores; they have no choice but to feed. Only the very strongest of them can feed and not kill.
“Unusually,” he continued in his precise fashion, “several of our missing persons have resurfaced. While a portion, certainly, were ordinary cases, it is likely at least one or two are something...else.”
“But they’d be obviously vampires,” I objected. “Even to humans, they’d stick out.”
“I would agree,” he replied with a nod, “except that one of our reappearing persons went missing again a couple of weeks ago. His court-ordered therapist hasn’t heard anything from him since a Saturday several weeks ago when, as I understand it, you and Clan Tenerim dealt with a group of vampires.”
A click of Aheed’s mouse threw a picture of a dark-haired young man up on another screen. “Recognize him?”
I looked at the picture long and hard, mentally hollowing out cheeks and adding the shadow of a moonlit night, and then nodded.
“He was one of the vampires who attacked me,” I confirmed. He’d been the one who’d come after me with a cold-iron knife.
“And so, he was a vampire,” Aheed said with satisfaction, and then brought up another picture of the young man. “This is Mike Russells two days before you and he fought,” he continued. “Note that this photo was taken in daylight—this is a still frame taken from the police station security cameras.”
Russells looked perfectly alive in the picture, shading his eyes from the sun as he calmly entered the police station.
“How?” I asked.
“Lifesblood,” Eric said quietly. “Human blood mixed with heartstone would allow a vampire to do that. It would allow them to sustain a legal identity, one the cabal could use to buy property and vehicles.”
“Did this Russells buy anything?” I asked.
“No,” Ibrahim said, shaking his head. “He was too poor and broke for large purchases to be immediately justifiable. If he had survived, he would likely have ‘come into some family money’ and used it to open a front business of some variety. One of our other returned missing persons may still do that.”
“So, none of them have?” I checked.
“No,” he admitted.
“But they have to already have some base of operations,” I told the two other men. “Have you discovered anything on that?”
Aheed brought up a map of the city with tiny red dots on it on another monitor—he hadn’t turned any of them off yet. “If you analyze the distribution of missing-persons reports in the last nine months,” he said, gesturing at the new image, “you’ll note that they are disproportionately in the northwestern quarter of the city. The northwest is generally regarded as being a higher quality and is often disproportionately lower in missing-persons reports.
“That still, however, leaves you a full quadrant of the city for possible locations,” he added, “including the entire university campus.”
“That’s not hugely helpful,” Eric observed. “I expected better for one of my favors.”
Wordlessly, Aheed passed me a USB stick.
“This drive contains all of the information I retrieved on our six remaining reappeared missing persons,” he told me.
Aheed’s comment on the university reminded me, and I looked at him.
“Which of these are the cases that turned out to be Sigridsen’s murders?” I asked.
The djinni looked at me, surprised, and then fiddled for a moment, turning a grouping of the dots blue. “Those.”
I stood and walked over to the monitor to look at it more closely. The blue grouping was off-center from the main grouping, more central-north, where most of the missing persons were scattered evenly over the northwest.
“She sticks out,” I observed. “But she’s how they got into the city. She had to have prepared something. Do you know if she purchased any property—for that matter, what name was the house she was living in owned under?”
“I don’t know,” Aheed admitted, sounding surprised. “I can find out, though.”
I turned toward him and pointed a finger at him as his fingers flew to the keyboard.
“Yes, but what will it cost me?”
The djinni stopped, his fingers suspended over the keyboard. For a moment, he tried to fake a shocked expression, and then he broke out into deep laughter.
“You warned him well, Eric,” he told the gnome. The djinni turned his gaze on me as his wife came down the stairs behind me, the smell of tea suddenly filing the warm computer room.
“There is always a price with a djinni,” Aheed told me. “You are quite right to ask what it will be. In this case...” He eyed me. “In exchange for everything I can discover about Sigridsen, properties she owned or was involved with that may lead you to the cabal, I want a blood sample.”
“No,” Eric snapped instantly. “I can call in another favor.”
The djinni held up a hand. “You are not the one bargaining, my friend. My hobby is analyzing inhuman DNA,” he explained to me. “Much of our nature is bound up in things that science cannot explain, but blood still reveals many secrets. In trade for one small vial of your blood, I will track down what connections Sigridsen had.”
I looked at Eric, who shrugged helplessly. “It’s a fair trade—if she had connections that can lead us to the cabal,” he directed at Aheed.
The djinni shrugged in turn. “You are bargaining for my services, not for guarantees,” he told me.
I considered it for a moment. My blood wouldn’t, unless the djinn could do something I wasn’t aware of, give Aheed any huge power over me. It was a minor thing, really.
“Done,” I agreed.
“Good; now, if that’s settled, can you three drink your tea?” Nageena instructed us as she set her tea tray down on a small table clearly kept down there for the purpose. “While you’re doing that, I will grab my needles.”
I sipped at the tea as Aheed turned back to his computer and went to work. A few minutes later, Nageena returned with a tray of sterile-looking medical equipment and a folding table. She quickly and efficiently laid my arm on the table and drew the one tiny vial of blood. A tiny ouch, a minor gross-out, and I had finished my side of the bargain.
“Sigridsen hasn’t owned anything in her own name since the shifters burned her out last year,” Aheed told me. “At least, not real estate property in Calgary. One house in Africa. Some shares, none of them enough to give her a noticeable say in any company.”
“That’s not very useful,” I observed.
“No, but it does tell us that the house she was living wasn’t held in her name,” the detective said absently, scrolling through multiple databases as he switched between screens and monitors. “Ah, here. Sneaky woman.”
“Oh?”
“Her full name was Dr Elisse Laura Sigridsen,” Aheed told me. “However, according to this, she was married for five years when she was younger. For that time frame, she was Dr Elisse Laura Marshall. Being a sneaky woman, she managed to keep Marshall as a legally existing name when she went back to her maiden name.
“The house was owned by E. Laura Marshall,” he concluded. “It has been for two years. There are, however, no other properties under that name.”
“Damn,” I cursed.
“Do not be so hasty,” the djinni told me. “I agreed to trace all connections, and I have found one. Laura Marshall is one of the founding shareholders of a small investment trust operating in Calgary—a real estate investment trust. I have a list of apartments, a few warehouses—it’s approximately eighty million dollars in property, with over seventy percent purchased in the last nine months even though the trust has been operating for three years.”
“So, the company was originally hers, but the vampires took it over?”<
br />
“Almost certainly,” he nodded. “May I have that again for a moment?” Aheed took the USB stick away from and plugged it back into the computer.
“Very well. I have added all the information I could find on both of her identities and on the Sigrid REIT. Their head offices are in the northwest, as are a significant portion of their properties.”
“Somewhere to start,” I agreed. “Thank you.”
“The deal is kept,” Aheed said in formal tones.
12
“What are you going to do?” Eric asked me once we were outside again.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted as I strapped myself into the snowshoes. “Check out the offices tomorrow night, late enough that any mortal staff should have gone home?”
“Want a suggestion?”
“I’ll take one, sure,” I admitted to him. “I’m still trying to get past flailing around lost, but I’m not sure how successful I’m being.”
“Call Oberis,” Eric said simply. “Jason, you’re dealing with powers and factions and politics you know nothing about—and no one knows this city’s inhuman politics better than our lord.”
“Still don’t want to trust the Enforcers?” I asked.
“If we need to bring them in, that should be Oberis’s call,” the gnome told me. “And if he makes it, he’ll go straight to the Wizard. We can’t do that.”
“Will he help?” I asked. I had, after all, just caused Oberis a lot of trouble.
“You are fae; he is your lord,” Eric said as we snowshoed our way across the still-buried streets. “Even if you weren’t a Vassal of the Queen, he would help. Now he knows what you are, he is bound to help by his fealty to the Nine.”
Eric borrowed my phone and dialed the number for me before passing it back. The phone rang once, and then Oberis answered.
“What is it, Jason?” he asked abruptly.
“I have word on my task,” I told him. “The Keeper advised that I bring it to you. We have a lea—”
“This is not something to discuss on the phone,” Oberis cut me off. “Stay where you are.”
He hung up, and I looked at Eric in confusion. “He said to stay here; I’m not sure why.”
“So I can find you,” a familiar voice said behind me, and I turned swiftly—only to tangle my feet in the snowshoes and crumple to the ground.
The Seelie lord laughed and helped me back to my feet. He hadn’t bothered with snowshoes, simply standing lightly atop the thick drifts of snow in a pristinely white suit. Even compared to the chill of the winter day, his gloves were cold.
“Do you trust me, Vassal of my Queen?” he asked me, and offered me and Eric each one of his hands. The gnome took it unquestioningly, but I looked at him for a moment and then breathed deeply.
“I did call you,” I admitted, and took his hand.
There was a flash of cold, cold nothingness, and then warmth wrapped itself around me. We stood in a featureless black expanse I recognized as Between, where the Queen had taken me to tell me of exactly what I’d been born to.
“Between,” Oberis confirmed as he saw me glance around. “We are in a bubble of warmth and air sustained by my power. Here, unless a member of the Wild Hunt has followed us, we have perfect privacy.”
I nodded. “I don’t suppose Eric could conjure us some chairs?” I asked, with a glance at the gnome.
“Not here,” he answered. “My ‘conjuring’, as you call it, is actually retrieving objects from a storage space I keep Between. I can’t access it from here.”
“You said you had word on your task from the Queen,” Oberis said quietly, his white suit and fair skin seeming to glow in the dark of the Between. After a moment, I realized it wasn’t an illusion. The light we were seeing each other by was emanating from the noble’s skin. “I assume this means you have learned something about the vampires.”
“We have learned that they have turned at least one person taken in the city, and returned them to the population to act as their agent,” I explained. “He used lifesblood to appear alive and interact with mortal authorities.”
“Damn,” he murmured. “Lifesblood—you’re sure?”
“I saw the footage of the man walk and breathe as if alive, and yet it was barely a day later when we know he fought Jason here as a vampire,” Eric confirmed. “Heartstone is the only way.”
The fae lord turned away from us. “This is bad,” he told the darkness beyond his circle of life and light. “It also explains how the vampires snuck into the city.”
“Some of the Enforcers have betrayed the Low Covenant,” I said quietly. The Low Covenant was the one that bound together every faction in a given city and laid out the laws they would function by.
Oberis nodded. “Our Covenant laid out exactly who got how much heartstone. So, either the heartstone is being funneled back into the city by one of the known recipient groups, which is unlikely, or it is being siphoned off at the source. By the Enforcers.”
“Wouldn’t the Wizard know he was betrayed?” I asked.
“He should,” my lord answered grimly. “And yet clearly he has been betrayed and knows nothing of it. What else have you learned?”
“Under the name she owned the house I found her in, Sigridsen owned significant holdings in a real estate investment trust,” I explained. “It owns apartments and condos all through the northwest, where the disappearances of people have been concentrated. The trust also owns several warehouses, and has an office near the University.
“Most of the property was bought since the vampires came here,” I finished.
“Good enough reason to believe they are funneling money through this trust,” Oberis agreed. “We need to act on this evidence ourselves,” he told me and Eric. “If we could trust the Enforcers, I’d bring them in, but with evidence of corruption among their ranks, I must have enough evidence to go directly to Kenneth.”
“What do you need of me?” Eric and I asked, almost simultaneously.
“Of you, Eric, nothing,” Oberis said gently. “If you can do your best to keep the Unseelie quiet until this is resolved, I would appreciate the effort, though.
“Of you, Jason, patience,” he continued. “You are the representative of our Queen in this, so I would have you present, but it will take me time to quietly assemble the arms and people for such a task. If I acted today, all I could send would be you and Laurie.
“Give me three days, and I can assemble a strike team of gentry and major non-noble fae,” he told me. “You will primarily go in with them as an observer, but you will accompany them. Acceptable?”
I thought about it for a minute. “You can’t act yourself?” I asked. Oberis on his own would be far more comforting support than a dozen gentry or “major non-noble fae”—like Laurie.
“I am bound by the Low Covenant myself,” Oberis reminded me. “I cannot become personally involved in things without talking to Kenneth first. So, we will need a chance to assemble a team. Keep your head down until then, all right?”
“Okay,” I agreed. “It makes sense. Thank you,” I added.
Suddenly, the three of us were standing in my sparsely furnished living room.
“I will do what I can,” the Seelie lord told us. “It is in everyone’s interest to see the feeders driven from the city. Enjoy your snow day,” he instructed, and stepped back Between, vanishing from my apartment.
In the morning, Bill called and asked if I wanted a ride to work. I gratefully accepted the offer and was delivered to the dispatch office before anyone else had arrived. I followed Bill into the back, thinking I’d help him set up the pickup loads. Instead, to my surprise, he pointed me to a chair.
“We have about ten minutes before Trysta gets here, and I wanted to talk to you,” he told me gruffly. “There’s a camera in this office,” he said bluntly. “I’m not sure what you were looking up on our computers that late at night, and I know you didn’t steal anything, but I’m still not overly impressed with you breaking in here.”
For a moment, I was too shocked to say anything. My boss waited patiently until I got my composure back, then I met his gaze and shrugged helplessly.
“Dead to rights,” I admitted in my soft Southern drawl. “I didn’t know there was a camera, and I know I didn’t damage the lock. I just needed to look up a customer for...personal business.”
Bill nodded. “Look, I know Sarah is involved in something,” he said quietly. “I assumed you were too when she sent you to me. I don’t give a shit if it’s drugs, the mob, or gunrunning—but it stays out of this office. No harm done this time, but if my business gets dragged into whatever you’re messed up in, I will break you.”
All of this was said in the same quiet, perfectly level voice. I could feel his disappointment as a physical thing in the room with us.
“It won’t happen,” I promised. Like I’d told Michael, I didn’t want Direct to get stuck in any of the messes I was involved in. It wouldn’t happen, no matter what it took.
“Good,” he grunted. “Let’s set up the loads.”
The rest of the morning passed in companionable silence until Trysta showed up. She cheered up the office with a bright “Good morning, boys!” and then set to work with us.
By the time the rest of the drivers showed up, we had the first morning loads and pickup routes set up and ready to go. I checked my own schedule and headed out to my truck to program in the GPS.
When I got the text from Michael telling him to meet him, I’d already finished programming the appropriate Starbucks into my GPS. I got there to find him, once again, waiting for me with a steaming cup of coffee.
“You’re going to have to be damn careful about that promise of yours,” I told him sharply as I took the coffee. “My boss is aware that I have ‘connections’ to something, and he does not want that spilling over onto them.”
The Enforcer shrugged his shoulders. “We will do the best we can,” he said. “That is all I can offer; you know that.”
He pulled a small box and a plain white mailing envelope out of his car and passed them to me.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 10