Cold-iron ball bearings ripped through the room at waist height, and a second claymore detonated. I could feel the iron whizzing across my back, and then suddenly Talus and I were falling. The floor beneath us vanished in a burst of fae Power and we dropped.
Only moments later, another explosion rocked the floor above us as more explosives, these not the cold iron–filled claymores but more traditional charges, shattered structural beams and blew out windows.
We kept falling, wrapped in a glowing nimbus of force as Talus blasted his way through each floor in turn, more explosions echoing above us. We hit the main floor with a shock I felt reverberate through my bones and flesh, even with Talus cushioning us.
The fae noble was on his feet before I even processed that we’d stopped falling. He grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and dragged me across the floor as he pulled me out of the building.
He got us clear and turned back to look at the building. The top three floors of the office were just gone, the last support pillars collapsing inward as I watched the growing inferno consume the last clue I had to fulfilling my Queen’s mission.
Then I spotted motion out of the blaze, and a black figure leapt from the sixth or seventh floor; I couldn’t tell which with the smoke. They plummeted half the distance to the ground, and then Talus had his hand outstretched, slowing and stopping the fall, pulling the figure toward us.
He guided Laurie to a soft landing on the snow pile. All glamors lost to the flames, the hag bore every ounce of her true hideous face, and I doubt Robert had ever seen anything so beautiful. The young gentry lay broken in her arms, one of his legs sheared clean off, and I could feel the burn of the cold iron that had done it as Talus and I rushed to him.
“He’s dying,” Laurie coughed through the smoke. “I don’t know how much iron is in him. I think he missed the claymore blasts, thanks to your warning.”
“Enough,” Talus said shortly, then looked at me. “You can sense cold iron?” he demanded.
“I thought everyone could?”
“No,” he told me flatly. “It’s rare. I can’t.” He paused, looking down at the moaning boy, and then back at me. “And it can save him. Do you trust me?”
For three years, I had learned never to trust the noble fae. I had learned my kind were capricious and callous and often cruel. And even Robert was true fae, almost noble.
And it didn’t matter. A boy was dying on the snow in front of me, red blood staining the stark white beneath him.
I gave Talus my hand and, for the first time in my life, shared minds with a noble of the fae.
15
“I am no more prepared to risk my son than the humans are,” a voice boomed. “The way the Germans keep going, there won’t be much left of London by spring!”
I peeked through a crack in the door, watching my father and mother argue. A bomb had fallen close to the house last night, and many of my schoolmates, fae and human, had been sent into the country. Few who could manage to be elsewhere were still in London.
“But to Canada?” my mother demanded. “It’s so far, and the sea isn’t safe.”
“Calebrant has offered to carry him Between with the Wild Hunt, with the other children of the Courts,” my father—no, Talus’s father; I was seeing his memories, ones the current circumstance brought to the forefront of his mind—said. “They will carry our future to safety. We can walk the paths ourselves to visit if time allows, but bombs pay no more dignity to our kind than to humans. I must know the heir to my clan is safe.” Talus’s father softened his voice, and his pain leaked in. “I must know Talus is safe, now that we’ve lost his brother.”
That was the last time Talus had seen his parents, at the age of twelve. He’d been taken aboard the personal mount of Lord Calebrant—the Wild Hunt’s master, a dark-haired twig of a fae, slightly built and short for a fae lord at less than six feet tall—and carried through the darkness to Canada.
Two weeks later, his father’s words had been proven true. A bomb had destroyed the ancestral home of his fae family. After the Blitz, Talus had never returned, raised in Calgary by his uncle Oberis.
Older and wiser now, Talus looked to the gentry of the city for the closest thing to equals, to their children for his hope for the future. He’d watched Robert grow up. Always from a distance. Never from close up.
Close up, someone might see the resemblance between the gentry boy and the fae noble who could never admit to being related to him for risk of censure to them both. Someone might realize what secret Robert’s gentry mother had taken with her when she’d died in childbirth, and never named the boy’s father.
I opened my eyes and looked into Talus’s, and saw the pain he could never reveal. The truth he could never admit about the young gentry whose life the cold iron stole away second by second.
I saw his pain, felt it through the link between us, and gave him my power. I felt our strengths merge, and for a moment, I could feel the world the way Talus felt it, see it as he saw it—in strings and lines and bars of power and energy, to be touched and changed at a moment’s whim.
We followed my sense for the cold iron and found the strands and pieces working their way into his son’s flesh. We wrapped tiny lines of force around each one and carefully, ever so carefully, for our power does not work well with cold iron, pulled each one out of Robert’s flesh.
An eternity passed in a moment, and then the last of the iron was gone, and Talus released my hand and the link, both of us panting feverishly.
“Sirens,” Laurie told us. “Can he be moved?”
“The iron is out,” Talus said quietly. “We have no choice; we can’t be found here. Dave and Elena?”
The hag simply shook her head.
Talus grunted and picked Robert up easily, leading the way quickly back to the SUV. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles began to arrive as he slipped us away into the night. I held my breath for a moment, afraid that one of them would see us and stop us, but we eluded detection as we fled the scene.
We didn’t drive far before Talus pulled us off the road and put the SUV in park. Leaving the engine on for heat, he rejoined Laurie and me in the back, checking on Robert.
The hag had sat by him the whole way, a tiny trickle of power helping the wounded gentry to heal. “He’s going to be okay,” she told Talus.
“Hold up,” he told us both. “I need to check in.”
The noble stepped out of the SUV, taking his cellphone out into the cold with him. I turned back to trying to bandage up Robert’s still seeping but now slowly healing wounds. I could see Talus outside in the snow, talking on his cellphone and gesturing wildly with his free hand.
Finally, he turned the phone off and got back in the vehicle.
“We’re heading to meet my uncle at the doctor’s,” he told us. “He’s arranged for some of our people to make sure Dave and Elena’s bodies are quietly shuffled out of the mess. Poor bastards.”
I nodded. There wasn’t anything I could say. Unlike Talus, I had only just met the two gentry who’d just died. From my glimpse into his memories, they’d been his friends for longer than I’d been alive. Friends who had been wiped from the world in a single moment of fire.
The cabal had been warned we were coming. Not just that someone was coming but that fae were coming, or they wouldn’t have used cold iron in the claymores. I didn’t want to think of the amount of effort cold-hammering something resembling the thousands of ball bearings in the mine represented. Effort put into trying to kill us—kill me. I liked not being killed.
It was a short drive to the house of the doctor the fae Court kept on retainer. He was waiting for us when we arrived, already dressed in scrubs and standing by a stretcher with a young woman.
The girl was a platinum-haired changeling, but the family resemblance between doctor and assistant was striking. I found myself wondering, as she helped me load Robert onto the stretcher, what kind of fae her mother had been.
The father and daughte
r rushed Robert into the house, and we followed them in. It turned out that they had turned what had probably been a main-floor office or something similar into a—totally concealed from the outside—brightly lit and fully functional operating theater.
I barely had enough to see that before the changeling daughter closed the doors to the operating theater, leaving Talus, Laurie and me standing in the living room. It was a neatly furnished room, with two chairs, a couch and a loveseat, all in a starkly sterile white.
“I guess we may as well sit down,” Talus suggested.
“I’m going to go have a smoke,” Laurie said.
“Don’t leave,” Talus ordered. “My uncle is on his way; he’ll want to debrief all of us.”
She nodded and left, heading for the front door, leaving Talus and me alone in the sitting room, watching the door past which Robert was being operated on. We both sat for a long minute, just staring at the doors.
“Who knows about Robert?” I finally asked. I didn’t need to say what about Robert—he knew I’d been in his head when we linked.
“My uncle,” Talus answered. “His grandfather, Raphael. Dave and Elena knew too, but I guess that’s irrelevant now.”
“That few?” I was surprised.
“Noble fae aren’t supposed to have affairs outside of the nobility,” he said. “Or, at the very least,” he continued drily, “we’re expected to avoid having or acknowledging any children that come of said affairs.”
“Like Robert,” I said quietly.
“Like you,” he pointed out. “A Vassal? Your bloodline is more noble than mine, changeling.”
“Keep that quiet,” I asked. “Eric and Oberis are the only ones who know.”
“A wise choice,” he said with a nod. “I will keep your secret if you keep mine, Jason.”
“Done,” I said without hesitation. I wasn’t planning on blabbing about anyone else’s parentage; that much was for sure. I knew too little about my own, and I knew that was dangerous.
“Thank you,” Talus told me, but any further conversation on secrets was cut off by Laurie’s return, a haze of acrid cigarette smoke offending sensitive fae noses.
The hag took a seat on the loveseat, facing the chairs where Talus and I were staring at the OR door. Silence hung in the room for several minutes, to be interrupted in the end by Oberis stepping out of Between into the middle of the room.
“I was delayed,” were his first words. “I had to arrange for our people’s bodies to be removed so we can give them decent burials in our own way. Stay seated, you three,” he ordered as I started to rise.
The fair fae lord took a seat on the couch, focusing his gaze on each of us in turn. The room was silent, the tension thick enough to be cut with a knife.
“What happened?” Lord Oberis finally asked.
“They were expecting us,” Talus said bluntly. “They’d looped footage so we didn’t see anything before we got up to the floor, and then cleaned the office out.”
“They destroyed any papers or computers they couldn’t take with them,” I added. “It looked like a pretty thorough job.”
“There was some kind of ward over the bombs,” the noble fae continued. “I didn’t sense them. Jason did”—he nodded at me—“because there was cold iron in the claymore mines they used as the main trigger. I didn’t know he was an iron-seeker.”
“I didn’t know that was special,” I said. “Not that it was enough to save Dave and Elena.”
“Iron-seeking is not uncommon among the fae, but not truly common either,” Oberis told me. “I am an iron-seeker, but Talus here, who shares many of my gifts, is not. So, you warned Talus. What happened then?”
“If he’d just warned me, Uncle, I would be dead,” Talus said quietly. “Dave and Elena didn’t have time to duck. Robert only survived because he was blown back into the stairwell, which Laurie hadn’t got out of yet when we triggered the bombs. Jason tackled me and knocked me to floor. Without that, I’d have been in the path of the cold iron.”
“I think you repaid the favor,” I told Talus. “You got us through the floor and to the ground safely despite the bombs.”
“Yes, one of my people in the fire department did mention an interesting hole that the fire thankfully destroyed before more than one or two of them saw it,” Oberis said softly. “It seems I am in your debt, Mr. Kilkenny, for the life of my nephew, and that you two are even.”
“We were lucky,” I said. “Those bombs could have killed us all.”
“We lost two good people,” Oberis told me. “That is never lucky. But I understand your point. This cabal has picked an enemy, it seems.”
As the import of those grim words sunk in, the door to the operating room opened and the doctor, stripped of gloves and face mask, stepped out.
“Dr. Lacombe, how is he?” Oberis asked.
“It was touch-and-go for a minute,” Lacombe said simply. “If you’d been any slower at getting the cold iron out, I think the damage would have spread too far for me to do anything.
“As it is, I’ve stopped the bleeding, both internal and external, and have stabilized him on an IV. He’s still borderline,” the doctor said quietly, and looked at Oberis.
“My lord, I’d like permission to add a small dose of quicksilver to his saline,” he continued. “It would guarantee his survival and speed his healing dramatically.”
“How much?” Oberis asked.
“Less than a milligram,” the doctor said immediately. He’d clearly been expecting the question.
“Do it,” Oberis ordered. “But watch him afterwards. One dose shouldn’t cause addiction—”
“But it’s better to be careful,” Lacombe finished for him. “Your will.” The doctor returned to the operating room, letting the door swing closed behind him.
The Seelie Lord of Calgary looked around at the three of us, still armed and armored under our winter coats, and sighed.
“This was fucked beyond all recognition,” he told us. “You walked into a trap and walked out. You saved Robert’s life, unquestionably. All of you, go home. Return the gear to the Court at a later date.”
A tiny hand gesture suggested that I should stay for a moment as Talus and Laurie drifted out. I crossed to the couch and stood next to Oberis.
“I am sorry, Vassal of my Queen,” he said quietly. “We find ourselves further from completing your mission, when we expected to gain ground.”
“Two people died,” I answered, equally quietly. “I’m more sorry for them.”
He nodded stiffly and gripped my shoulder.
“I can feel in these old bones that the Queen’s warning is true, and that something deeper is going on here,” he told me. “Keep the gun and vest. I have the feeling the day will come when you will need arms and not have time to turn to me.
“Now go rest,” he ordered. “We will find them, Jason, I promise you. For your oath to our Queen, and for the sake of our dead, I promise you that.”
Talus drove me home. Given that the weather had yet to improve in the slightest, I was grateful, but we spent the drive in near silence. I had no idea what to say to a man who had lost two people he’d been friends with for longer than I’d been alive, and he was willing to keep his own peace.
I turned my cell phone back on shortly before we arrived at my apartment. I had a single message, a text from Mary asking me to call her when I could.
I put my phone aside and looked over at my driver.
“You going to be okay?” I finally asked as we pulled in next to my building.
“My son will live,” the fae noble said quietly. “Dave and Elena won’t. That’s going to take some wrapping my head around. I’ll have a better idea tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
“Drive safe, man,” I told him, offering him my hand. He took it and I squeezed. He nodded in acknowledgement, and I left him in the SUV.
I made it down to my apartment and then collapsed on my couch with exhaustion. After a long, long moment, I realized I was w
ay too hot with the coat on, and took it off. With that done, I had to take the concealed holster off to be comfortable.
The Micro Uzi and its holster ended up on top of the black briefcase containing the Jericho, tucked down the side of my computer desk. The heavy Kevlar vest got tossed over the back of the couch, incongruous against its cheerful orange color.
The armor and weapon discarded, I collapsed back onto my couch, pulled my phone out and called Mary. It wasn’t until after the phone had rung three times that I realized it was almost midnight, and then the phone went to voice mail before I could hang up.
“Will someone please think of the cat girls?!” Mary’s voice demanded from the recording. “You’ve reached Mary Tenerim, I’m not available right now, please leave a message.”
“Hi, Mary,” I said awkwardly once it started recording. “Just letting you know I got your text and called; forgot how late it was when I got home. Call me tomorrow if you’re free to hang out?”
The message left, I slowly dragged myself to my feet, stiff and sore from an eight-story fall, however cushioned it may have been by a fae noble’s magic. I had to be at work in a little more than six hours.
16
The next day followed my normal routine. It was so normal, after the day before, as to be almost painful. I did my first rounds of drop-offs and pickups, and met Michael for my Enforcer pickup. He had a package for the airport and clearly didn’t know that I’d been at Sigrid REIT the night before, or I’m sure he’d have said something.
My airport delivery trip, including the extra delivery, went seamlessly, and I made it back to the office just in time for lunch and Mary calling to check up on me.
“Hey, are you okay?” were the first words she said when I answered the phone.
“I’m fine,” I said slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“When you tell me you have ‘Court business,’ and that night a building explodes and rumor in the community says a Court strike team were inside when it blew, I do have to wonder,” the shifter girl told me dryly.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 13