“This is not acceptable,” Oberis snarled, and the temperature in the room dropped. Despite the fire in the center of the Hall, and the candles throughout, I shivered at the sudden chill.
“I, like Tarvers Tenerim, signed the Covenants with Magus MacDonald,” Oberis continued coldly. “And I know what was agreed to.”
“So, Enforcer Percy Harrington,” he said, addressing the senior Enforcer, “I have a message for you to bear to your master. As of now, he is on notice that he has violated the Covenants.”
The room was silent. The balefire burned with an occasional pop, but I don’t think the rest of us were even breathing. I know I was holding my breath as I waited for Oberis to continue.
“He has, per the Covenants, five days to respond to this notice,” he finally said. “If we do not see some action by him against the vampires, and some response to the cold-blooded murder of Alpha Tarvers by Enforcers, I will approach the High Court for sanction upon him.”
I swallowed, remembering Niamh’s warning that Oberis would find the High Court unresponsive to his calls for some time. Did he forget so readily what he’d done? Was ordering a man who had aided and helped him beaten to the edge of death such a minor thing to him that he didn’t realize it would cause a clash between him and the High Court?
“Tell your master, dog,” Oberis continued icily, his gaze still locked on Percy, “that the least I will accept is the beginnings of a good-faith effort to dissolve the Enforcers—and the surrender of Gerard Winters to the Clans’ justice.
“Now get out,” he ordered. “You were here to bear witness, and you have borne witness; now leave this to the friends of the fallen—not those who have marked themselves their enemies!”
With the cremation complete and the Enforcers evicted from the chapel, the silence in the hall was unbroken for what seemed like forever. After what was probably less than a minute, however, Dave and Elena’s father directed everyone up to the top level, where a few gestures from Oberis folded tables down from the walls and spread white tablecloths over them. Several refrigerators that I had missed in the darkness were opened up, and several tables of drinks and appetizers quickly took form under the swift ministrations of a few fluttering pixies, glowing slightly in the still somewhat dim light of the hall.
Leaning as discreetly on Mary as I could, I followed the crowd up to join the wake. With the massive balefire in the center, the hall was not merely warm but hot. It took a conscious effort of will, given my current abused state, to keep myself from stripping off clothing and showing weakness in front of the Court.
It was almost as much of an effort not to glare at Oberis as the fae lord nodded genteelly to me. He walked with the Cunninghams, his attention for the day clearly focused on the parents of those who’d fallen in his service.
Mary gently but pointedly guided me to a table with food on it. I took the hint and slowly began loading up a plate. After I started to eat, Mary grabbed a plate of her own and began to take food. As I ate, I surveyed the hall and the crowd gathered.
The group of shifters mostly kept to themselves, though several of the fae who clearly knew them stopped by and stayed for a few minutes each. Even in this united Court, I could see clear dividing lines among the fae—Seelie clustered with Seelie, Unseelie with Unseelie. There were other groupings, but that was the clearest and most obvious, marked to my eyes at least by the groups Laurie and Talus each moved in—the hag an Unseelie, the noble a Seelie.
Talus spotted me looking over at him and appeared to excuse himself from the conversation and head my way. I sighed inwardly—after Laurie and Oberis, Talus was probably the person I least wanted to deal with of everyone here. While I doubted he’d known of Oberis’s order, he still stood at the right hand of a man who’d ordered me beaten.
Nonetheless, in every other way, he was a man I’d normally regard as a friend, so I didn’t quite have it in me to be rude and turn him away as he came to join me. He smiled at Mary and started grabbing a plate of food.
“I wanted to thank you again,” he said quietly. “There is no doubt your warning and help saved Robert’s life. I owe you.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I’d shared this man’s thoughts, knew what barriers lay against him acknowledging his son. I couldn’t know that and not act to help.
“It was nothing,” I told him.
“Hardly,” the noble said dryly. “But you should also know—Robert healed far faster than Lacombe expected, and Lacombe knows our kind very well. He has begun to manifest the powers of a noble fae, and questions have been asked in Court that I could not avoid. I have officially acknowledged him as my son.”
There was pain in his words. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have that kind of intensely personal moment and admission forced before the body of the Court, both Seelie and Unseelie. Taking into account the fact that fae nobility weren’t supposed to breed outside the nobility, it could not have been an easy day.
“How did he take it?” I asked when Mary squeezed my hand after a moment of silence.
“Not...well,” Talus said simply, and there was more pain in his voice. “He understands, I think, but he is very, very angry with me. I understand that, and he understands why I had to keep it secret, so I think we will work out our relationship over time.”
“It will just be painful for a while,” I said sympathetically.
“My uncle has had to punish me for public consumption,” Talus told me, his voice still quiet. “I am being at least temporarily exiled from Calgary—I am to return to Fort McMurray and my duties there, with no permission to return to the city for some time.”
Well, at least I wasn’t the only one Oberis seemed to feel obliged to punish beyond all reason. I squeezed Mary’s hand in turn and eyed the fae noble.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked him.
He nodded, and there was something...odd about his eyes. He didn’t look nearly upset enough for what he’d just told me. He was being punished because something his uncle had already known had become public—I would have expected him to be far angrier.
“I have to leave first thing in the morning,” he told me and Mary. “Would you two do the honor of joining me for dinner tonight? I would enjoy less...prejudicial company than I’ve had recently.”
“I smell a rat,” I told him bluntly. “What’s on your mind?”
Talus glanced around him quickly.
“I want you to meet someone,” he explained. “I’ll tell you more at dinner—mostly, I do just want company.”
I was pretty sure he still wasn’t telling me the whole truth, but something in his face warned me it was better not to ask there.
“All right, where?”
“The Stadium Park Steakhouse,” he told me, and then gave quick directions. “I’ve reserved a table for four.” He glanced around the wake. “I have to go be social. I will see you tonight at seven.”
With that, he parted, leaving Mary and I to look at each other in concern.
“He’s not telling us everything,” I whispered to her.
“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” she replied, and I nodded in agreement.
“I guess we’ll find out tonight.”
22
“Tonight” wasn’t a whole lot later. The wake for the Cunninghams lasted until just after six, at which point it was a rush for us to get across town to the restaurant in time. While we’d been closed up in the stifling hot ceremony hall, it had started to snow again outside and traffic had crawled to a standstill.
We made it to the restaurant shortly before seven and found ourselves facing a crowded line. Even on a Monday night, the restaurant was packed this close to the holiday season. I managed to squeeze through the crowd.
“We’re meeting a man named Talus,” I told the hostess. “He said he had a reservation; I don’t know if he’s here yet.”
The elegantly dressed, cleavage-exposing, clearly underage brunette at the little podium checked her list, read some
thing, and visibly swallowed.
“If you can come with me, please?” she asked, her voice somewhat shaky. “I’ll take you to your table.”
I was going to ask just what was wrong, but she took off almost before she was finished talking. I traded looks with Mary and shrugged, then followed the girl. She led us expertly through the dimly lit restaurant and around a large gas-fed fire pit in the middle of the restaurant to a door tucked away in a corner.
She opened the door and gestured through.
“Your reservation is in the private room, sir, ma’am,” the girl said, standing aside to let us in.
“Thank you,” I gave her a tentative smile and then entered the private room with Mary one step behind me.
The room on the other side was paneled in aged oak and held a single large conference table that looked older than the building. All of the furniture and decorations were to a far higher standard than the outside, and the chairs looked luxuriously soft under their leather coverings.
Talus, clad in the same subdued black suit he’d worn to the funeral, and a slim auburn-haired woman in a dark blue business skirt suit were seated at the table across from us, and the fae noble gestured for us to sit.
“Welcome to my private room here,” he told us. “I use it for very discreet business, and I would prefer to keep what passes between us tonight very private.”
“Why all the cloak-and-dagger?” Mary demanded as I sat. “And how the hell do you get a private room in a chain restaurant?”
“You own the franchise, the building it rents and their primary food supplier, and are the guarantor of the manager’s immigration visa,” the business woman told us crisply. “Of course, all of those are through various intermediaries, shells and numbered companies, but the management here is under no illusion who actually owns them.”
“Jason and Mary, be known to Shelly Fairchild,” Talus told us, giving the woman a small smile. “My realtor, girlfriend and sometime lawyer.”
“I thought it was lawyer, realtor and sometime girlfriend?” the object of his smile teased him. “When did I upgrade to full-time?”
Talus’s smile expanded marginally, and he took her hand affectionately.
“Please, go over the menu,” he told Mary and me. “We are in no rush, and I want to be sure we aren’t accidentally overheard by the staff. I trust them—they are all mortal and unaware of our politics, if nothing else—but some things should stay as secret as possible.”
As if to prove his word, a waiter with short-buzzed steely gray hair entered the room to ask us for our drink choices. Mary and I reviewed the menu, both of us selecting steaks when the waiter returned again.
“To repeat Mary’s question,” I said to Talus when the waiter left with our order, “why all the cloak-and-dagger?”
“Oberis and I have realized that we are being betrayed at the highest levels of the Court,” he said bluntly. “Shelly and I kept identifying targets, and I kept taking teams out to them to find them stripped.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Mary snipped. “I could have told you that after the damn bomb.”
“We suspected then,” Talus admitted. “But it is now far past any possible doubt. The revelation of my son makes some options available that weren’t before.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Officially, I am being exiled back to my office in the oil sands to continue supervising the heartstone operations and get me out of everyone’s sight,” Talus explained. “No one really thinks I’m being punished, but it helps everyone if I’m out of sight and out of mind, so it isn’t being questioned.”
“And what’s actually happening?” Mary asked.
“I am returning to Fort McMurray,” Talus answered. “There, I am going to quietly reassess the backgrounds and loyalty of my personnel, and put together an operations team from the gentry and higher fae I have there—one I trust completely, and, most importantly, had no one involved in the prior operations. The only overlap will be me.”
“So no one here can possibly betray it,” I said slowly. “Except Oberis or the three of us in this room.”
“And no one in this room other than me knew of every operation, and they were all betrayed,” Talus told me. “So, even if I didn’t already think I could trust you all, you also couldn’t have been the mole.”
“You wouldn’t be telling us this if you didn’t want us—want Jason—to do something,” Mary said. “So, what’s the point?”
“Jason is the only person involved in this that I fully trust,” Talus told us. “My uncle wanted to use Laurie, but I think we needed to use someone who is a newcomer to the community and still mostly an outsider to the Court. He left the decision to me.”
Well, that explained how things went from Laurie kicking the shit out of me to me being dragged into super-secret Court black ops, I reflected. The left hand wasn’t talking to the right. For a minute, I was tempted to ask Talus if he knew about that and really expected me to still be trustworthy, but then sighed aloud.
I’d help Talus if he asked, because he was a good man, and having been in his head, I knew that. Even if I didn’t know that, it served the Queen, so my blood bond and Vassalage left me no choice either.
“What do you expect from me?” I asked.
“I can put together and equip a team from my people and resources up at the oil sands,” he explained, “but I can’t identify targets from up there. I need you to work with Shelly, and—if possible—the Clans”—he nodded at the two ladies in turn—“and find another facility. We ran out of Sigrid REIT properties, but those vampires went somewhere—find it for me!”
“Do we have any leads?” I asked.
“One,” Talus said grimly. “I’ve called in a favor I didn’t want to call. This individual isn’t pleasant to deal with, but if anyone knows what the vampires are up to, he will.”
“What’s so unpleasant about this guy, and how would he know anything about the feeders?” I asked.
“Because he is a feeder,” Talus said bluntly. “He’s a wendigo—a flesh cannibal who lives in the city under sufferance from MacDonald as long as he sticks to eating carrion. He works in a morgue and steals internal...well, bits, prior to the bodies being formaldehyded, for food.
“He owes me, big time, and if anyone knows about the feeders, it’s him,” the noble concluded. “He knows you’re coming, but he isn’t happy about it, and you may need to be convincing...one way or another.”
“How long do we have?” Mary asked. “I can pull help from the Clan, but things will be disorganized until a new Speaker is named at Tarvers’s funeral on Sunday...” She paused. “Shit, that’s when Oberis’s deadline is up, isn’t it?”
“Intentionally so,” Talus confirmed with a nod. “If nothing has been done, Oberis will declare MacDonald in breach at Tarvers’s funeral and ask the support of the new Speaker in sanctioning the Wizard.”
“What can the Clan and Court do against a Wizard?” I asked. Even Oberis, a full fae lord, paled in comparison to the abilities of a full Magus, a Power in his own right.
“Not a lot,” Talus admitted. “We can remove the Enforcers from the equation very quickly, though—their authority has always come from us being unwilling to irritate the Wizard rather than any virtue of their own.”
“Damn,” I said quietly. “So, in other words, we have until the funeral?”
“If at all possible, I want to drag the battered and silver-chained body of whatever feeder leads the cabal into the funeral and toss it in the face of whoever MacDonald sends,” Talus told me. “That is Sunday night. I want to bring my people into town Saturday morning and strike during daylight.”
“So, we have till Friday,” Mary said quietly.
“I hope that through Karl—the wendigo I mentioned—you’ll have info sooner, but yes,” he agreed, “by Friday I must have somewhere to strike.”
“Or we face open war,” I said. Open war against the Wizard, which would make the assassination plot I�
��d been called upon to prevent so much easier. Someone was pulling strings here, and I was starting to feel like a puppet.
“Or we face open war,” Talus confirmed.
And on that grim note, our food arrived.
Later, after we had parted ways and Mary had dropped me off at home, I stared at Shelly’s card where I’d dropped it on my table. The mortal lawyer worked for the fae Court, helping provide a fae noble with the power and wealth he needed to function in modern society.
She was a volunteer who’d chosen to involve herself in fae politics. Talus was a noble, born and raised to play that vicious game. Each found this game of deception and investigation their element in their own way. I didn’t think either would have turned away from it, given a choice.
And me? I’d come here because I found the politics of the South, the constant give-and-take between Seelie, Unseelie and other inhuman groups, the lies and the games, too much to deal with. There, I would only ever be a pawn in someone’s game. Too weak, too young, too unimportant—to the Seelie lords, I was expendable.
I had no idea what had caused Queen Mabona to claim me as Her Vassal now. I’d really thought I’d run far enough that I could find somewhere where there was no quiet cold war between the fae courts. That there, in the hinterlands of inhuman society, in a city with less than two hundred supernaturals—not including Enforcers or however many vampires there were—I could stay out of the games.
But Mabona’s arrival in my life had changed everything. She had commanded, and whether I agreed or not, I had no choice but to obey. Obedience had carried me to the inner circle of fae society and power in this city—of Oberis and his two main lieutenants, one was almost a friend, and the other two appeared to hold me in some disregard, but they knew me. I knew barely a dozen fae in the city, but I knew the rulers—because of the Queen.
I had been forced into that inner circle of power, and now it seemed that, somehow, I had to save the Wizard from an assassination attempt, destroy a vampiric cabal, and prevent open supernatural war in Calgary’s shadows.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 18