“Mary, I—” I began, but she laid her finger on my lips.
“Jason,” she said quietly, “if you were about to suggest anything other than going back to your apartment and continuing this in warmth, don’t.”
14
As it turned out, Mary had neither experience with nor enthusiasm for the idea of waking up at five o’clock in the morning. Her response to my alarm going off was to tighten her arms around me. Since we were both completely naked, this was more than a slight distraction from my plan to get up and ready for work.
It was with more than a little regret that I squeezed out of her embrace and began the process of getting ready. Shared blankets were warm, and the basement apartment was cold first thing in a winter morning.
I showered and shaved and dressed for work, and then sat back down on the bed next to Mary and leaned in to kiss her gently awake. She didn’t move for a moment, then slowly opened her eyes and returned the kiss.
“I have to go to work,” I told her quietly. “I take it you don’t get up this early.”
“Not really,” she admittedly sleepily, the blanket falling away from her and exposing a very nice view.
“The door locks from the inside, if you want to sleep a bit longer,” I told her, leaning in to kiss her again. “I do have to go, though.”
She pouted adorably for a moment but then nodded.
“I’ll make sure everything’s locked up,” she promised. “Are you free tonight?”
“No,” I said sadly. “I have some Court business to deal with after work.”
“Okay,” she murmured, sliding back down into the bed. “Call me when you can; let me know when we can hang out, ’kay?”
I carefully tucked the blankets up around her and claimed one last kiss.
“You bet on it,” I promised. She smiled sleepily at me and I quietly left the room, turning the light back off as I did.
The morning chill seemed minor and unnoticeable as I walked to work. Part of that was my frame of mind, and the rest was that the temperature had clearly risen. A check of my phone showed we were going to have highs around freezing, instead of twenty degrees lower than that, for the rest of the week.
I drifted in to work with a cheery smile on my face and immediately fell to helping everyone get set up for the day. With everyone’s loads and pickups established, I left a few minutes early, heading out on my route.
Halfway through my morning run, I got a text from Michael telling me there wouldn’t be a pickup today. Meeting him had become such a regular thing that I had to take the most convenient Starbucks out of the route my GPS was calculating to get me back to the office.
The day passed quietly. The lack of more snow after the snowstorm meant the roads were now almost completely cleared. Many places were still accessed by narrow canyons of cleared path through waist-high banks of snow, but everywhere had managed to dig themselves out by day three after the storm.
I was honestly impressed. I’d never seen a snowstorm like the one that had struck, and I’d expected it to take more than two or three days for everything to return to mostly normal. Everyone had spent the first day digging out of their homes, the second day digging into their workplaces, and the third day acting like nothing had happened.
I finished my routes exactly on time and checked quickly in with Trysta before grabbing a cab. For all that it was warming up in the city; I still wasn’t planning on trying to take transit to get to the hotel that doubled as the fae Court for this city. It was cold out, the roads, while improved, still sucked—and I did not want to be late to meet Oberis.
The cab delivered me to the hotel and I paid in cash, entering the building just over five minutes before Oberis had told me to arrive. I followed a young man in a dark gray suit with long blond hair into the lobby and checked the conference board.
“Talisman Energy” had booked the C wing today, I noted, and then I walked to the doors to that wing of the hotel. The blond youth I’d followed in had beaten me there and was shaking hands with both of the guards.
One of the guards noticed me and gestured me forward. I joined them and the newcomer in front of the security doors.
Now I got a closer look at the newcomer, I saw the resemblance to Oberis immediately. His hair was cut almost identically and was the same shade of gold. His eyes shared the lord’s tawny gold and his chin followed Oberis’s sharp lines. There were differences as well, but this youth was clearly closely related to the Seelie lord.
The guards waved me through and the noble youth followed me into the hallway. We walked forward until the carpet turned to moss in silence, and then he eyed me sideways.
“So, you’re the changeling who’s been stirring up such a ruckus?” he asked. “Jason, right?”
“I guess so,” I admitted in my slow Southern drawl. “And you are?”
“Talus,” he answered. “I’m normally Oberis’s representative up in Fort McMurray, but he called me down here to help deal with the commotion you’ve raised.”
“Which you shouldn’t be discussing in public.” Laurie’s cold voice cut into our conversation as the hag stepped out of a door to join us in the hallway, tucking a cellphone away in a pocket of her conservative business suit as she did. “Lord Oberis is waiting for us; let’s go.”
With a shrug at me, Talus fell into step on one side of the hag while I joined them on the other, allowing her to lead the way for all three of us.
She led us down the same hallway Oberis had led me down after my first visit there, and then into Oberis’s office. Oberis was sitting behind his desk, watching us enter, his fingers steepled on the desk in front of him.
Two men and one woman, all with the neatly perfect features of the gentry, were seated waiting for us alongside three empty chairs. Without being instructed, I took one, as did Talus and Laurie.
“I’m glad you could join us,” Oberis told Talus. “I hope my call didn’t interrupt anything up north?”
“Naw,” Talus replied. “We just finished the semi-annual audit of the heartstone production. Speaking of which—” He pulled a folder of papers out from under his suit jacket and tossed it on Oberis’s desk.
“What’s the summary?” the Seelie lord asked, glancing at the folder without picking it up. “It may be relevant to this whole affair.”
“We checked and double-checked after you warned us about lifesblood in the feeders’ possession,” the young noble told us all. “None of the known production is going astray, and we’ve got enough agents and contacts in the projects to be certain there’s no hidden production.
“In short, if heartstone is going missing, it’s after it reaches Calgary, not at the source,” he concluded.
“So, from the Enforcers or one of the Covenant’s authorized receivers, then,” Oberis said grimly. “We have reviewed our own stockpiles, and the Clans destroy their share. It’s not coming from us or them. But there are receivers outside the city, so it could be any of them.”
The Seelie lord shook his head and eyed us all over his hands.
“For those who don’t know,” which I suspected was only me, “Talus is my nephew and the Court’s senior representative up at the oil sands projects in Fort McMurray, where he watches over heartstone production to be sure none goes astray and that we get our fair share.
“Given what he just told us, it looks like our best bet for finding the heartstone source is to track it through the vampires, which is why you all are here,” he continued.
“Thanks to Jason here”—he nodded toward me—“we now know of a company, a real estate investment trust, founded by the doctor who helped the vampires enter the city. Review of its records show that its investment base has dramatically increased in the last nine months—since the time we believe the vampires entered the city.
“Much of said investment is through shell companies and holding agencies,” he added. “This makes it difficult for us to track down what properties are owned, but we can find the offices of the REI
T itself.
“You six are going to raid said offices,” he told us. “You are operating under my sanction, so tell any Enforcers that give you difficulty to refer their issues to me. You are sanctioned to use whatever force necessary against any vampires you encounter—I would prefer prisoners, but I’ll settle for corpses over free vampires, clear?”
I nodded in grim acceptance, and so did the others in the room.
“Humans involved, I leave to your discretion,” Oberis said quietly. “Minimize injuries or fatalities if possible, but do what is necessary. Remember that most of the employees will have no clue what is really going on; that is why you are going in at night. However, some will be fully aware of their employers and what they’re involved in.”
“Though they may not know the rest of us exist,” Talus interjected. “Vampires recruiting humans tend to try and pretend they are the only part of the supernatural that exists—trying to draw on the Twilight influence and similar ‘vampires are our friends’ tripe.”
Oberis nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “You are all capable of taking on any humans involved; the only real threat is vampires on site.
“I want prisoners if possible, records regardless,” he said. “Paperwork, property deeds, invoices, entire hard drives—clean them out. Don’t let the police get called.
“Talus is in command,” he finished. “Good luck.”
With that, we were dismissed and followed Talus out of the office and back deeper into the hotel. We headed downstairs, into the basement of the hotel, where the moss and wall murals faded away to bare concrete marked with fae-sign.
Talus led us to a solid metal door guarded by a fae in a security uniform and unmarked by fae or human signs. The guard checked Talus’s security card against a reader and then a clipboard list, and then finally stood aside, allowing us into the Calgary fae Court’s armory.
I tended to forget, given how few members the Court in Calgary has, just how pervasive the finances and influence of even a small joint Seelie-Unseelie Court like Calgary are. The armory drove the truth home, though.
In a country where hunting rifles were difficult to acquire and handguns almost impossible, the Court’s armory had hanging coat racks of body armor in every size. Cabinets of long arms, from assault rifles to automatic shotguns, lined one wall, where the other had neatly organized rows of handguns, machine pistols, and submachine guns. The far wall sported a small number of machine guns and rocket and grenade launchers, but the centerpiece of the entire armory was two massive oak wardrobe-like standing closets.
The oak they’d been built of was almost black with age, and they had no handles or locks, only intricate patterns of runes that would open the doors to the right words and uses of power. Inside were the prizes of any court—the orichalcum-enhanced and rune-empowered magical weapons forged by the gnomes, and often passed down through families for generations.
Talus went straight for the machine pistols, pulling out concealed holsters and tossing them to each of us.
“Put these on and grab one of the machine pistols,” he instructed.
I quickly examined the holster, which had been modified slightly to take the different size and bulk of a machine pistol from an ordinary handgun, and then grabbed a gun. It had the T shape familiar from popular media of an Uzi, but was only half again the size of the small pistol I had left at home—an IWI Ltd. Micro Uzi, according to the neat labeling on the case I removed it from.
For all the neat and detailed labeling, and the readily available preloaded twenty-round magazines that I collected five of, the serial number on the weapon had been neatly filed off. How the gun had made its way from its manufacturer in Israel to the armories of a supernatural organization in Western Canada was a mystery to me, and hopefully would remain a mystery no matter what happened to the weapon in question.
Laurie was eyeballing everyone’s size and passing out vests. These were plain Kevlar, no runic enhancements that I could see, but I put the one she gave me on over my shirt and the runic armor I wore under it regardless.
It took us fifteen minutes to pass out weapons and ammo and put on the vests. We then all put our heavy winter coats back on, their bulk easily concealing the body armor and hidden weapons.
Then Talus went around again, sticking a radio/microphone earpiece on everyone and double-checking all of our gear one final time.
“Everyone ready?” he asked, and we nodded. “Let’s go.”
The young fae noble led us out the back of the hotel, to a dark green SUV with tinted windows. Night had reclaimed the city as we’d prepared, along with a chilly fog that diffused the light from the streetlights and left the city a glittering white wonderland against the shadow.
We introduced ourselves in the SUV as we drove through the city. Two of the gentry on the team turned out to be a brother and sister, two redheads in formfitting body armor named Dave and Elena. The third was an overly serious fair-haired youth named Robert.
Robert was carrying a black briefcase containing a laptop and some other tools I hadn’t caught sight of when he was loading them. Listening to him talk to Dave and Elena, I quickly realized that he was even younger than me. Gentry lived a long time; it was easy to misjudge their ages.
With the snow and fog and traffic, we were easily an hour getting to the offices for Sigrid REIT. The last ten minutes or so of the trip passed in silence as everyone checked equipment and weapons.
This was the first time in my life I’d ever headed into a situation where I presumed there would be violence. I spent most of that last ten-minute silence checking there were bullets in the magazines I was carrying for the Micro Uzi.
“First time expecting trouble?” Dave eventually asked me, causing me to realize I was checking the magazine in my gun for the third time.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Most of my encounters have been...surprises.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “to be blunt, you’re slower and weaker than everyone else here. Hang back, shoot at anything that comes right at you, and let us deal with any major threats. Elena and Talus and I have worked together before, and we all know Laurie and Robert as well. We’ll be fine.”
I nodded, and slotted the magazine pack into the machine pistol as Talus slowed the van.
“We’re here,” he said quietly. He turned to look back at us. “Robert and I will go in first and deal with the security system. You four move up and secure the entrance. Corral anyone who tries to leave. Don’t kill anyone you don’t have to.”
I followed Elena and Dave out of the car, and Laurie quickly stepped in to cover the rear as we moved to cover the main doors of the ten-story office building as Talus and Robert went inside.
“Door is locked,” Robert reported over the earpieces, and then the door popped open in front of him. “Not an issue; no alarm here.”
The two figures vanished into the building, heading for the stairs down.
“No security on this floor I can sense,” Talus said quietly into the radio. “There’s enough iron in the building I can’t sense if anyone’s in above us.”
“At the security office, hooking in,” Robert said, almost talking over him. “Looks like all the cameras are being fed offsite. Cycling through them all now.”
There was a pause, and the four of us standing outside shivered, waiting.
“There’s no one in the building,” he told us, and a huge weight slipped off my shoulders. “Which is weird,” he continued. “There should be at least one security guard. Looping the feeds; you’re good to go in—but watch your backs. This doesn’t smell right.”
Dave moved forward first, opening the doors while Elena covered him.
“Remember,” Talus said over the radio, “just because the cameras didn’t see anyone doesn’t absolutely guarantee there’s no one up there. Watch your step. We’ll join you at the stairs.”
We reached the stairwell door, which was sealed by a keypad and magnetic lock. Laurie gestured the rest of us out of the way
and laid her hand on the door. A moment later, she pulled her hand back and the door opened with it.
Talus and Robert were on the other side, and the fae noble gestured us up the stairs before leading the way. Sigrid REIT was on the eighth floor.
Eight floors passed quickly and in silence, Talus stopping us at each floor so he could scan the floor with his sixth sense. Reaching the eighth floor, though, he didn’t even slow down. As soon as he reached the door, it clicked unlocked and swung open for him.
“Show-off,” Laurie muttered over the radio.
“Quiet,” he ordered. “Search the floor, check for hard drives and paper...” He trailed off at the end of the sentence as we walked out on to the floor and saw the state of what had been Sigrid REIT’s offices.
“It didn’t look like this on the cameras,” Robert said quietly, as we surveyed the chaos.
Someone—or a group of someones—had swept through the office like a hurricane. Filing cabinets were overturned. Computer desks rearranged. Several computer towers looked like someone had taken an ax to them repeatedly. Feeble sparks still glowed in the pile of ashes that looked like it had been a foot-deep pile of papers.
Laurie stood still in the doorway, still mostly in the stairwell. “What the hell?”
“The place has been cleaned out,” Elena said briskly. “There may still be something around we can retrieve; let’s take a look.”
The gentry and Talus started moving forward, and my teeth started to itch. The sensation was familiar, and I focused on it for a moment as I followed.
Cold iron! I could feel cold iron somewhere around. The others presumably sensed it too, but Talus and the three gentry seemed unbothered, starting to separate and move apart. It wasn’t a big chunk of cold iron, just little bits. Lot of little bits. Lots and lots...
“EVERYBODY DOWN,” I yelled, and dove forward, tackling Talus and slamming him down to the ground as the first claymore mine detonated.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 12