Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  So much for staying out of politics.

  Returning to work on Wednesday morning was a bit of a shock to the system. A day’s rest barely seemed like enough after the weekend I had, but the return to work was adorably mortal and mundane.

  They had a get-well card and Trysta had baked a cake. Everyone took a few minutes out of getting ready for the day’s shipments to make sure I was okay.

  I ended up repeating the lie about the minor car accident and only being a little bruised in the end a lot. It wasn’t like I could explain to them, “I got beaten to the edge of death due to politics and healed by magic over the weekend.” It sounded a little insane even to me.

  Sliding back into the more mundane frame of mind of my job, after a weekend wrapped up entirely in the world of my other life, was hard. It was helped by Bill clapping his hands sharply after a few minutes of everyone clustering around me.

  “Come on, people, we’re all glad Jason is okay, but can we be getting to work, please?” he told us, to general laughter. He harried us all into getting to it and loading up our trucks, and then stopped me as I was about to get into mine.

  Whatever he wanted, I hoped it was quick. The weather was continuing what I was told was an unusual cold streak—everyone kept expecting another one of their “chinooks” to roll in. I was just hoping to avoid freezing to death.

  “Do I want to know what really happened to you?” he said bluntly.

  I swallowed, turning to face him fully. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I lied.

  “‘Minor car accident,’ my ass,” he snapped. “You don’t drive outside of work, Jason, and pedestrians don’t have ‘minor’ car accidents. So, what happened?”

  I sighed and stepped down from the step of the truck, leaning against it and shivering in the cold as I looked him in the eye. “You want the short version, or the one you won’t actually believe?”

  “I know you’re into shit I don’t want to know about,” he told me. “I’m figuring organized crime, but as long as you don’t cause problems for me or mine and do your job, I’m going to let that slide. But I also need to know what’s going to come back on me or mine—and you’re one of mine now, got it?”

  I was touched. There was no other way to put it. Bill had no idea what was really going on, and had made some assumptions that made me look a lot worse than the truth did—organized crime in this city was mostly drugs, so far as I could tell—but I worked for him, so he was willing to take my side.

  “It’s not crime,” I told him quietly. “I’m not going to tell you what it is,” I continued—telling him would do him no favors right now, with a supernatural war about to explode under his nose, “but it’s not crime.

  “The long and the short of it is that someone beat the shit out of me, but not as thoroughly as they thought,” I explained. “I don’t like it, but I’m not in a position to do anything about it yet, either.”

  My boss eyed me over. He stood silent and apparently immune to the chill setting into my bones.

  “Yet, eh?” he answered.

  “Probably never,” I admitted. I didn’t see much coming along that would make it possible for me to get back at Laurie, let alone at Oberis.

  “Well, don’t expect to get the day off if you get beaten up in your off hours again,” he told me gruffly. “I prefer my people not to get into fights.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about that,” I promised. I knew what I could do about avoiding fights: not bloody much. If the Queen commanded, I obeyed. It wasn’t like I had a choice.

  “Now get in that truck while you still have your fingers,” Bill ordered.

  I obeyed.

  23

  Fifteen minutes out of the office, I got a text message, and the politics of the supernatural came crashing back into my life, just as I was hoping to have a quiet, mundane day.

  It was from Michael, telling me to meet him at a Starbucks to pick up packages. I left it unanswered for several minutes, making two deliveries while I mulled over what to do in response. The leader of my race in Calgary had demanded that the Enforcers be dissolved. I doubted that helping them out was on Oberis’s list of things he wanted us to do.

  In the end, I sent a single-word text back. No.

  It took less than a minute for my phone to ring.

  “What do you mean, no?” Michael demanded. “You can’t just refuse the Enforcers.”

  “Yes, I can,” I told him quietly as I maneuvered the heavy truck to the side of the road so I could talk to him.

  “When you entered this city, you agreed to aid the Enforcers in any way we needed,” he reminded me. “Do you want to know what the penalty for breaking that is?”

  “I know that my first oath is to the leader of the Court in this city,” I said quietly. “Oberis has laid sanction against the Magus MacDonald, under the Covenants of this city. All fae are forbidden from offering aid or succor to the Enforcers or the Wizard.”

  “What?!” Michael snapped. “What bullshit is this? I haven’t heard anything like that!”

  A chill rippled down my spine. It had been formally announced—hell, the witness sent back to the Wizard had been Michael’s boss.

  “Notice was given to the Enforcers yesterday,” I told him, trying to stiffen my voice. “MacDonald is being sanctioned for Winters’s murder of Alpha Tarvers, and the Lord of the Joint Court has demanded the dissolution of the Enforcers. I’m sorry, but I am not allowed to help you.”

  There was silence on the phone for a moment, and then a beep as my phone informed me that Michael had hung up.

  I sat there in the truck for a long moment. Notice had been given to the Enforcers Monday of what Oberis had demanded, but an Enforcer of moderate seniority like Michael didn’t know a thing. I had assumed that the news would have spread quickly in such a tight organization, through the rumor mill if nothing else.

  If Michael didn’t know, who else didn’t know? Had Percy told anyone? Or had Magus MacDonald ordered it kept quiet while he did damage control—Powers alone knew what damage control he could manage.

  The most terrifying thought that occurred to me, just as I was putting the truck back in gear, was to wonder if Percy had told the Magus at all.

  Shelly called me shortly after I got home that evening. It took me a moment to recognize the number on my phone, and I didn’t remember giving it to Shelly. I guess Talus had, which made sense—she was the one who could contact Karl, the wendigo we expected to give us whatever clues came next.

  “Hi, Jason,” she greeted me. “How’s life?”

  “A ticking time bomb; how’s yours?” I asked, and she laughed.

  “About the same,” she admitted. “On top of all my normal workload for Talus, plus my other clients, I now get to worry about an impending war in which I would be acceptable collateral damage. My best holiday season ever.”

  “The point is to avoid the war,” I reminded her. “Good to hear you’re in good cheer.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” she told me. “If I can fake believing my client is innocent, I can fake good cheer.”

  “You do criminal law?” I replied. She sighed over the phone.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “And having to defend people I didn’t think were innocent is why I don’t.” She let that sit in the silence for a moment, and then continued, “I spoke to Karl today. He isn’t any happier about this than Talus said he would be. I had to remind him of his debt. And of the fact that if I revealed that he was eating bits of the bodies in his case to his employers, being fired would be the least of his worries.”

  “He knows something?”

  “He was evasive on the phone,” Shelly told me. “I think he was too upset to be called on his debt to not know something. He agreed to meet with you as Talus’s representative.”

  “Where and when?” I asked.

  “Tonight, at the morgue at the Foothills hospital,” she told me. “Six thirty.”

  “Thanks Shelly,” I said. “I guess I’ll go call a
taxi, I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Thankfully, the cab took long enough to arrive that I could change into a fresh shirt and jeans. I hoped, vaguely, that a dark blue shirt and black jeans would somehow make me more intimidating. I wasn’t really sure what a wendigo even looked like, or what it would find scary.

  The cab delivered me to the hospital ten minutes before I was supposed to meet Karl. I intended, for about twenty seconds, to try and sneak in unnoticed. Then I realized I had no idea where the morgue was, and headed for the reception desk.

  “Hi, I’m supposed to meet a Karl Redding here,” I told her, emphasizing my slow Southern drawl, hopefully to make her take pity on the newcomer to the city. “He said to just come down to the morgue, but I don’t know where it is.”

  “Trust Karl not to tell you half of what you need to know,” the petite blonde said with a laugh and a toss of her hair. “It’s not an easy place to find; I’ll call him up for you. What was your name?”

  “Jason Kilkenny,” I told her.

  She nodded, picked up the phone and dialed. “Karl? There’s a Mr. Kilkenny up here to see you. Can you come collect him?” She listened for a moment and then nodded. “Thanks, he’ll be waiting.”

  The receptionist hung up the phone and turned back to me. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  “What did you mean by ‘trust Karl not to tell me’ things?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said with another hair flick. “He’s just an odd one, always a little out of it. Most people find him pretty intimidating.”

  I started to ask why and then spotted the man coming down the hall and let the question die unspoken.

  Karl Redding wasn’t the tallest or largest man I’d ever met, but then, I’d known Tarvers Tenerim. He towered four inches or so over my own six feet and looked easily four feet across the shoulders. He was heavily built, muscles clearly visible even through his hospital scrubs, and his hair was done in pure white dreadlocks. His skin was deathly pale, and only when I met his eyes and saw the Native American cast to his face did it hit me: he was an albino.

  “You’d be Kilkenny, then,” he said to me when he reached reception, his voice soft and warm, not at all what I was expecting from his imposing visage. “Come with me.” He glanced aside at the receptionist. “Thanks, Jenny, I’ll take care of him.”

  With a grunt and a shoulder toss, he indicated that I should follow him. There weren’t many people that we passed in the hospital corridors in the evening hours, but all of the ones we passed quickly stepped aside for me and my human-iceberg guide.

  He led me through various hallways and eventually down a set of stairs out of the normal way, to a clean and sterile concrete basement and a security door. A security badge emerged from the pocket of his white lab coat and he swiped in.

  “Take a seat,” he instructed, gesturing to a glass-walled office in one corner of the chilly room with its rows of metal doors.

  I obeyed, grabbing one of the chairs in the tiny room. A moment later, Karl joined me, carrying a steaming Tupperware. “Threw this in the microwave before I came to get you; timing was perfect,” he told me.”

  The scent of stroganoff sauce wafted though the morgue office, though I realized that he’d closed all the doors, and a ventilation system in the corner whirred away. It was probably enough to keep the morgue outside sterile. Then I caught the scent of the meat in the microwaved dinner. Pork. And I remembered what wendigo ate.

  “That’s human?” I asked, feeling slightly sick.

  Karl grinned and nodded, taking a forkful of the pasta dish. “Want some?”

  “No,” I said flatly, eyeing him as he continued to blithely eat. “Are you doing that to see if it bothers me?” I asked after a moment.

  “No, I’m eating because it’s my dinnertime,” he replied. “Of course, I invited you here at my dinnertime to see if it would bother you,” he added.

  “Of course,” I repeated, and pointedly turned away to look around the small office. A plain gray metal desk that was likely older than I was dominated the room, with filing cabinets taking up most of the rest of the space. A pair of plaques on the wall declared Karl Redding a certified morgue technician, and a Kacy Miller as an MD and certified forensic examiner.

  “I was told,” I continued, looking back at Karl, “that you would be able to help us find the vampires in the city.”

  The big albino Native sighed and took one last bite of his long-pig stroganoff before replacing the lid and sliding it to one side.

  “So, you can wipe them out,” he said flatly. It wasn’t really a question, and I couldn’t argue the point with him, not really. “The fae’s response to feeders always tends towards extermination first. I’m only breathing because my Clan is long known to the Courts, and we have always lived on carrion.

  “Do you think I have a choice?” he demanded suddenly. “Do you think I want to eat people?”

  I thought about it for a long moment, taking a long look at the man and considering him. I couldn’t see someone choosing a diet that left them horrendously exposed in both the human and inhuman worlds.

  “No,” I finally admitted.

  “We don’t have a choice—feeders don’t have a choice,” Karl told me harshly. “Our bodies don’t process other foods properly—without our diet, we die. Do you somehow expect the vampires to just lie down and die?”

  “They kill,” I said simply. “Whether it’s their choice or not isn’t really relevant—you don’t kill.”

  “I have sixty years of cultural acclimation by my family, and a thousand years of tradition,” he told me. “I was born wendigo, and my family raised me to fight the urge—and part of me still thinks that fresh, live human would taste so much better than carrion. And I’ll never be rid of that urge, understand?”

  The image his words conjured in my mind wasn’t pleasant. Wendigo were rare enough that Karl would have grown up with mostly humans, and every day, his body told him humans were food. It would be horrible.

  “What’s your point?” I finally asked. Horrifying as his existence was, it still didn’t help me find the vampires.

  “The vampires don’t have that upbringing or that tradition,” Karl said quietly. “They are turned as adults, and all they know is that they must feed. For too many of them, their state is not their fault.

  “They have no choice in what they do and never had a choice in what they are.”

  “They are monsters,” I reminded him. “Whether murderers by choice or need, they are still murderers, and every day they are in this city, more innocents die.”

  “So simple and black-and-white for you, is it?” he demanded, slamming his fist into the desk as he glared at me. “Even though they never chose this, they are just monsters to be killed—pests to be exterminated?”

  I returned his glare flatly. I couldn’t really disagree with his point—vampires really didn’t choose their fate.

  “As long as they choose to kill to live, yes,” I told him bluntly. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  Karl broke the desk. Both of his fists slammed down with enough force that the metal bent and sheared under his fury. The sound of crumpling metal echoed in the tiny office, and his pink eyes were alight with anger.

  “Remember yourself, feeder,” I barked at him. “One phone call and you’re done at this hospital,” I reminded him. “We gave you sanctuary, a safe place, helped you meet your dietary need. Now the debt is called.”

  Power, both physical and spiritual, rippled along the wendigo’s body, and I realized I was standing, facing him in the tiny room as sparks flashed over his flesh, and his white dreadlocks began to glow and whip around with a life of their own.

  “Remember yourself,” I snapped again, facing him head on and meeting his fiery glare. I was unarmed, but I felt the heat of my faerie flame gathering in my fingertips. We held that moment for what seemed like an eternity, and then the power and rage seemed to drain from him, and he collapsed back i
nto his chair.

  “You’re right,” he admitted, staring at the damage he’d done to his desk. Power still sparked over him, and he laid his hands on the dents. The remaining energy flowed from him, gently reshaping and repairing the metal.

  “I owe a debt,” he said, looking me in the eye, and the fight was gone from him. “But tell Talus this isn’t payment of that. It’s for the innocents. For the ones who will die—and for the ones who were turned and, on at least some level, would rather die than live on as they have.”

  I nodded slowly. That was, of course, the other side of his argument that some of the vampires were innocent. Not that it had occurred to me while I was busy trying to strong-arm him.

  “I don’t know a lot,” he admitted. “But I do follow the sources of our bodies, and unlike every other morgue tech or coroner in the city, I know what to look for. They were scattered all over—I would guess that they’d spread out to avoid detection.”

  That fit with the pattern I’d been told of with the Sigrid REIT properties—small apartments and condos mostly, scattered across the city, mostly in the northwest.

  “Where are they happening now?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen most of the recent ones that show the signs myself,” he said quietly. “They’re coming from downtown—they’ll have made some kind of den.”

  “Any idea where?”

  Karl shook his head. “I can’t say for sure.”

  “Any guesses?” I asked. Just the way the feeder had said he wasn’t sure sounded like he still knew more.

  The wendigo sighed, slowly, and nodded.

  “Not so much where,” he said, his voice now very tired. “But they’re pack predators, in the end, so they’ll follow certain patterns once detected—the same patterns any other feeder would.

  “They’d spread out first, trying to reduce the risk of detection,” he continued. “Now that has failed, they will concentrate for protection—you’ll find the entire cabal in one or two locations. I can tell you they’re downtown somewhere.