Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “They’ll have found somewhere people won’t go but that has plenty of space—an abandoned office or hotel. Probably close to a homeless shelter or some other source of easy food,” he concluded, “and with easy access to sewers, though that’s not hard to come by in a modern city.”

  “I assume,” he said dryly, “that you have a lot more access to real estate records and on-the-ground knowledge than a morgue tech.”

  “We can probably work it out from that,” I agreed. “Thank you for your help,” I told him. “You saved lives tonight.”

  He grunted. “Not those of the feeders I just set up for you to kill,” he told me. “You’ve got what you want, fae. Get out.”

  I gave him a slight bow of formal thanks and then obeyed the very clear instruction.

  Once I was out of the hospital, I called Shelly.

  “I think we’ve got something,” I told her. “He suggested looking for an abandoned building near downtown, close to a homeless shelter or something similar.”

  “Won’t they have scattered?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t think so—he says they’ll concentrate for protection now they know they’ve been discovered.”

  “That may make things messy,” she said quietly. “I can think of a place or two off the top of my head. If I run up a short list, do you think you can scope them out later in the week?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I agreed. My phone beeped at me. “One second.” I checked it, and it told me I had an incoming call, though I didn’t recognize the number. “Excuse me, Shelly, I have another call.”

  “I’ll be in touch; good night,” she replied, and I switched over to the new call.

  “Kilkenny here,” I answered. “Who is this?”

  “Jason, it’s Clementine Tenerim,” the caller told me. I didn’t even know Mary’s brother had my phone number.

  “Hi, Clementine, what’s up?” I asked.

  “I need a favor,” he answered, his voice slow and drained. He sounded exhausted.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. I’d never heard the shifter doctor sound that tired before.

  “I need you to meet me and Mary at the Lodge; I’ll explain there,” he told me. “You know which pub that is?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. I wasn’t supposed to talk to Clan Tenerim, but I wasn’t going to refuse Clementine, either. I owed him too much—and at this point, I owed Oberis nothing.

  “I was there with Mary on our second date.”

  “All right. Please, come quickly,” he asked, and then hung up on me.

  24

  Wondering what the hell was going on; I directed my cab to the Lodge when it arrived. The yellow cab pulled into the parking lot of Victor’s Sports Bar about ten minutes later. The cabbie had apparently picked up on my mood, because other than telling me the price at the end of the trip, he barely said a word to me.

  I paid him and stepped out into the crowded parking lot. Cars of every size and description filed the lot to capacity, far busier than it should have been on a Tuesday night. As I approached the pub, however, I saw a sign out front proclaiming that the building was closed due to flooding.

  The four large, burly men, one of whom I recognized as Barry Tenerim, out front gave the lie to that claim, however, as did the chaos of people coming and going through the front and back entrances.

  “I’m sorry,” one of the guards I didn’t know rumbled as I approached. “The bar is closed.”

  “Wait, he’s okay,” Barry told the others. “Jason is a Clan-Friend of Tenerim; he’s welcome here tonight.”

  “Clementine called me,” I told Barry. “I wasn’t expecting this kind of chaos; what happened?”

  Barry glanced around, and then leaned closer to me.

  “Ask someone inside,” he half-whispered. “We’re trying to keep things quiet. Talk with Clementine.”

  Confused and rapidly getting even more worried than I already was, I stepped through into the “flooded” bar. The inside was even more crowded than the outside parking lot—mostly because a good third of the bar had been roped off and turned into an impromptu emergency room. Treating shifters mostly involved bandaging them up, feeding them, and letting them heal their own injuries.

  The rows of pub tables put into service as impromptu hospital beds, covered in duvets and cushions probably “acquired” from the department store just down the street, holding barely moving bodies, stood at odds to that normal treatment.

  A number of young men and women, apparently impressed as nurses, moved up and down the tables at Clementine’s direction, checking on patients and applying salves and hypodermics at the doctor’s direction.

  When Clementine saw me, he gave some final instructions and came over to me.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “Tenerim Den is gone,” he said bluntly. “Someone firebombed us just over three hours ago. We got all the people, all the pets, and I think all the important gear out, but the Den is gone. Mary’s okay,” he continued, forestalling my next question. “She was one of the ones who went back in to pull out the explosives, and got hit pretty hard by smoke inhalation. She’s sleeping it off over there.” He pointed toward a corner.

  “Smoke doesn’t bother us too much, and we can heal minor burns pretty quickly, but major burns are bad even for us,” the doctor explained quietly. “We have over twenty sets of third-degree burns, and those will take even our people a few days to heal.”

  “Damn,” I said softly. Tenerim Den gone? Over twenty shifters badly hurt enough to put them out of commission for several days? “Why? Who the hell would do this?”

  “Don’t know who,” Clementine said quietly, taking a seat in one of the bar booths. “But the why is politics—whoever Tenerim chooses as its new Alpha would have a foot in the door to become Speaker, even though they’d be the most inexperienced Alpha—Tenerim is the strongest clan, and the last Speaker was ours. But now we’ve been shown to be weak, unable to defend ourselves. Tenerim will not be the next Speaker.”

  “They did this”—I gestured around the impromptu burn recovery ward—“to make sure Tenerim wouldn’t be in the running for Speaker?”

  “We don’t play politics gently,” Clementine said sadly. “Fire and bullets and knives can’t kill us, after all. This sort of thing is worse than usual, but it’s a difference in scale, not in kind.”

  He sounded very tired. I suspected that this was the first he’d sat down since everything had gone to hell. Even through that, though, something didn’t sound quite right in what he was saying.

  “I’m hearing a but,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, resting his head in his hands. “There are four more days until the vote, at Tarvers’s funeral. If we’re starting off this bad, there’s a real risk things are going to get worse. Most of our elections see a dozen or so duels with steel knives to sort out differences. If we’re starting with firebombing, I don’t think we’re going to calm down.”

  “Any ideas who it could have been?” I asked.

  “There are three Alphas in the running,” he told me. “Darius of Clan Fontaine, Joseph of Clan O’Connell, and Thomas of Clan Smith.”

  “Clan Smith?”

  The shifter doctor shrugged. “They’re all family names originally,” he reminded me. “I wouldn’t think any of the three would stoop to this level of violence, but none of the other four Alphas have a chance unless those three were to die—and I haven’t heard of an assassination in shifter politics anytime in the last few centuries.”

  “What about the...Grandfather, I think he called himself?” I asked, thinking back to the old Native shifter who’d cursed out the Enforcers.

  “Enli Tsuu’Tina,” Clementine said with a nod. “He isn’t in the running—by choice. If he wanted the job, Tarvers would have stepped aside for him to have it—and the other Alphas would do the same now. Enli doesn’t want the job.”

  I nodded, looking around the bar. It looked like Clan Tenerim had
mostly moved into the Lodge for the moment.

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  “Just for tonight,” Clementine told me. “I and Tarvers’s two boys have access to the Clan accounts. Jim and Bryan are busy booking hotel rooms across the city right now, spreading out the Clan as much as we can as we set up to find a new Den.”

  “What was the favor you wanted?” I asked, remembering why he’d called me here as the full reality of the situation sank in. “Any help I can give Clan Tenerim, I will,” I promised.

  “The Clan will survive,” the doctor said simply. “I am the only shifter doctor in the city, so I am mostly untouchable. Mary, however, is just as weak as I am by shifter standards and lacks that protection. I want you to take her out of here and let her stay with you for the week.”

  “I may not be the safest place to be hiding this week,” I warned him. “Fae politics are...causing me issues.”

  “Nowhere in this city is safe,” Clementine said bluntly. “I want her out of the line of fire of Clan politics, and I know you’ll take care of her.”

  “Fair enough,” I agreed. It was hardly like I was going to complain about having my girlfriend staying with me for a week. I just worried that some of the fallout from my duty to the Queen, or my apparent ability to piss off the fae Court, would fall on her.

  “Let’s go wake her up,” I suggested. Clementine nodded and led me back to a darkened corner of the bar, where a dozen or so shifters had been covered with blankets and sleeping bags.

  I saw Mary and knelt down next to her, gently shaking her awake. She blinked her eyes open and smiled broadly when she saw me. I almost missed it in shock at the state of her eyes. Even after several hours of regeneration, her eyes were still red and puffy from smoke.

  “Jason,” she said softly before pulling me down to kiss her. “When did you get here?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago,” I told her. “Clementine called me. He’s filled me in on what happened.”

  “It was awful,” she admitted quietly. “We had to make sure the guns and explosives were out of the house—the fire will be bad enough without the authorities wondering why the house blew up like an ammo dump.”

  “You had that many guns in the basement?” I asked. I’d assumed they had some—all the inhuman groups had long-standing arrangements to have illegal firearms—but enough to cause a noticeable explosion?

  “Two hundred assault rifles and submachine guns, about twice that in various handguns, half a ton of plastique and a million or so rounds of ammo,” Clementine said from behind me. “We have armored trucks in the lot full of the shit.”

  That would have been an explosion to bring down the authorities. Ammo dump was an accurate description.

  “Mary, I’ve asked Jason if you can stay with him for the next few days,” Clementine told his sister. “I want you out of the way until the damn vote is over.”

  “What?” she demanded, glaring at both of us. “Do I get a say in this?”

  “Yes,” I answered instantly. I wasn’t stupid, after all. “I’m hardly locking her in my apartment, Clementine,” I told the doctor.

  “Mary, I have to stay with our people and make sure they’re okay,” he told her. “Otherwise, I’d be finding my own place to hide. You and I don’t have the strength or power of other shifters; if we get caught in the politics we’ll get crushed. Please?”

  After a long moment, Mary nodded. “Can we take your car?” she asked.

  Clementine chuckled. It was a quiet, rather pathetic excuse for a laugh, but it was a laugh, and Mary smiled at him.

  “Yes, you two can take the car.”

  By the time we made it to my apartment, Mary had passed out again from sheer exhaustion. As gently as I could, I carried her downstairs and put her to bed. Not wanting to wake her in the morning, I then went to sleep on the couch.

  I slipped out of the house in the morning after checking on her. She was still sleeping like the dead. I left her a short note on the nightstand, letting her know when I’d be home, but that was all I could do.

  With everything going on, I was horrendously distracted at work. Thankfully, my various coworkers had grown somewhat used to my moods at this point and gave me a bit of slack. We got my truck loaded up, and off I headed.

  Shortly after my third stop, my phone buzzed with a text message.

  It was from Michael, the Enforcer who I’d been meeting every morning to pick up packages, and it simply said, Meet me. It’s not about work. He gave a specific Starbucks, and for once it wasn’t conveniently on the way.

  I left the text message unanswered as I made my next two deliveries. Bill likely wouldn’t be happy with me for the delay, though he’d give me some slack, knowing something had gone down last weekend. I wasn’t supposed to be helping Enforcers at all, though that order came from Oberis.

  Plus, Michael had generally been straight with me, and he’d been honestly confused when I’d told him I wasn’t allowed to help him. With a sigh, I texted him back.

  Can’t till work is over. Meet me by the office?

  His response was just okay. I was left wondering just what was up until my day rolled to an end, and the Enforcer’s blue sedan pulled up outside my dispatch office. Michael popped the side door.

  “Get in,” he told me.

  Hesitant, and wishing I was armed, I obeyed. As soon as I was in the car, he took off.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Nowhere,” he told me, a shadow of a grin crossing his face. “The more we keep moving, the less my brothers can track us. They don’t have a full Magus’s abilities, and movement confuses their scrying.”

  I blinked. That was a weakness of MacDonald’s minions I hadn’t been aware of.

  “Should you have told me that?” I asked carefully.

  “No,” he admitted wryly. “But if I can’t be honest with you right now, I am fucked.”

  I looked carefully over the Enforcer. He was as neatly dressed as every other Enforcer had been each time I’d seen them, but there was a set to his stance and features I’d never seen before. He was stressed. He was...afraid?

  “What’s going on, Michael?” I finally asked.

  “I tried to go to the Magus about what you told me yesterday,” he said quietly, his eyes focused on the road. “I’ve been an Enforcer for ten years. It’s not easy to see MacDonald, but it’s always possible. Just a few months ago, I managed to get into his office just to get him to sign a birthday card for Percy.”

  “And this time?”

  “I was blocked at every turn,” the Enforcer said quietly. “Doors that are normally open are locked. His phone goes straight to voice mail. His receptionist says he’s in a meeting, yet no one has come to the Tower to see him.”

  “He could actually be in meetings,” I said dryly. “He did just have a ticking time bomb dropped on him.”

  “That’s the thing,” Michael continued. “I tried to tell Winters or get Sarah to pass what you said onto him, and they told me that he was aware of it and that I wasn’t to tell anyone else. ‘The situation is under control but very delicate. Please keep this under wraps, or you may be disciplined.’”

  “That’s...not good,” I told him. “The situation is not under control.” The situation was rapidly spiraling even further out of control, with the Clans bombing each other, and the Court preparing for open war.

  He nodded. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.”

  “So, why come to me?” I drawled back at him.

  For a moment, Michael was silent, focusing on the road as he ran us through a random selection of clear-ish side streets.

  “I am afraid that the Tower has been corrupted,” he finally confessed. “I fear that at least some of my fellow Enforcers have not merely failed in the charge given to us by the Magus but actively betrayed it.”

  “From where I sit, I’m not seeing how that changes much for anybody,” I told him.

  “It should change a lot,” he sna
pped. “Don’t you get what I’m telling you? The Enforcers have betrayed the Covenants—and, I’m afraid, the Magus. MacDonald has nothing to do with this and probably doesn’t even know Tarvers is dead.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about Wizard’s Sight in recent weeks,” I said slowly, trying to internalize what he was saying. “How is that possible?”

  “There are ways to block Sight, to fool it, and who knows those ways better than the Enforcers?” Michael asked. “No one I’ve spoken to has seen MacDonald in about a week. I’m afraid he’s been imprisoned—there are ways to contain a Wizard, and who has a better chance to use them than his own bodyguards?”

  I stared at the road in front of us as pieces began to fall into place. I didn’t have all the information yet, but the basics were there.

  Someone—probably the vampires—had co-opted senior members of the Enforcers, probably including Winters, to their plan. The vampires had then played provocateur, sparking conflict, drawing the Clan and Court into action while the co-opted Enforcers kept their master inactive and in the dark.

  Then Winters had acted, murdering Tarvers to create an intolerable provocation and ignite tensions between the local inhumans and the Wizard. Chaos was following. Conflict. And in the anarchy, the Queen’s fear—MacDonald assassinated.

  The scale was massive, the effort huge—and yet, Wizards were untouchable. Undistracted, they were unbeatable. Even if one was killed, three more would descend upon the murderer and annihilate him and everyone connected to him. But in the middle of the kind of chaos forming in our streets, who would they blame? Who would be held responsible?

  With the Wizard’s former employees to stir up the pot and spread confusion, either there would be no target, or there would be a false target, with either the Court or the Clan suffering the wrath of the students of Merlin.

  “We can’t let this happen,” I said aloud, and turned to face Michael. “What do you need from me?”