Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “I just had to make sure someone outside the Tower knew what was going on. I’m going to investigate, ask more questions. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “And if I don’t hear from you?”

  “If you don’t hear from me for more than a day, go to Lord Oberis,” the Enforcer said grimly. “Tell him what I told you, and that I am likely dead. If you don’t hear from me”—he paused for a moment, taking a deep breath and hesitating before he finally continued—“the Tower has truly betrayed its charge.”

  We pulled up outside my apartment. “Done,” I promised him. I didn’t want to face Oberis yet, but if things were that far gone, I would have no choice.

  “Thank you, Jason,” he said quietly. “I will be in touch.”

  25

  I got home to find Mary in the process of leaving. I almost bounced off her in the stairway leading down to my floor, her hair up under a black toque and her winter jacket on.

  “Plans?” I asked carefully. She and I hadn’t had a chance to discuss how this whole situation was going to work, so the last thing I wanted to do was make her think I was being jealous.

  “Sort of,” she said. “I just got a call from a girlfriend of mine; she’s in trouble.”

  “Related to this whole mess about the Speakerhood?”

  “Yeah,” Mary admitted. “She isn’t Tenerim—she’s Clan Fontaine—and she was being threatened.”

  “So, you’re going to go charging right back into the fray?” I asked dryly. “Why won’t her Clan help her?”

  The whole point of Mary staying with me was to keep her out of this fight. Of course, looking at her now, I wondered if Clementine had realized just how completely futile trying to keep this woman out of any fight she chose was. She was his sister, so he probably did.

  “She didn’t say, but she’s my friend and I’m not going to hide in this basement until everything blows over while people I know are in danger,” Mary snapped. “I’m not asking for your help and I don’t need your permission.”

  “No, you don’t,” I agreed quickly. No twenty-first-century male, half-human or not, was dumb enough to push that point. Mary was as capable of taking care of herself as I was. However, in the world of the supernatural, well, neither of us was very capable.

  “Do you want my help?” I asked.

  “I am not helpless, Jason,” she snapped. “I can handle my own affairs. I don’t need to be nursemaided and coddled.”

  That was...not quite the reaction I was expecting.

  “Wait,” I told her, pausing to think for a moment. “I don’t know who you’re angry at,” I continued slowly, “but I don’t think it’s me. I’m just offering to help.”

  She took a deep breath and then laid her hand on my arm with a heart-melting smile—a huge difference from her snappish tone of a moment before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m so used to being regarded as the weakest member of the Clan, to be coddled and protected. I see it even where it isn’t.”

  “I’m a changeling, Mary,” I reminded her gently. “I understand being assumed to be weak. Hell, you’re probably more dangerous than I am!”

  She smiled again at that.

  “I tend to forget that,” she admitted. “Is that offer of help still open?”

  “Of course,” I told her with a smile. “Just let me grab a gun. I’d rather be over prepared than under.”

  With the tiny but still lethal compact Jericho pistol the Queen had given me tucked away in its concealed holster under my heavy winter jacket, Mary and I piled into her brother’s car and headed off to check in on her friend.

  It was snowing again, rapidly turning the roads into a slushy nightmare. There was just enough slush and muck to make them slippery, and just enough snow coming down to reduce visibility. Mary drove us through the mess with a skill and confidence I envied—necessity had taught me how to drive in the snow, but I wasn’t nearly as confident about it as she was.

  She took us downtown and pulled in to the visitor spot of one of a dozen apartment buildings on the west side of the core. We walked around to the front door and Mary buzzed her friend’s apartment.

  There was no answer.

  “She said she’d wait at home for me,” Mary told me. “She should be here.”

  “Can we get in if she doesn’t buzz us in?” I asked.

  “I don’t have a key or anything,” she said. “It’s a magnetic lock, so I can’t even pick it. Can you do anything?”

  I eyed the door, with its magnetically activated lock. If I had the telekinetic powers common to higher-order fae, this would be a cinch. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure I could get through short of melting part of the door.

  “Make sure no one walks in on me?” I asked her, and then knelt by the door, inspecting the lock close up. It was a pretty simple mechanism, when you get down to it. A trigger upstairs sends a signal to the lock, switching off the electromagnet and allowing the door to open. I could, theoretically, warp the switch with heat and break the connection for the power.

  It might not lock again afterward, but it was more likely to than if I burnt the lock out of the door.

  “When I say go, push the door,” I told Mary, and then laid my hand on the door opposite to the box with the electromagnet. Tiny tendrils of green flame streaked out from my fingers, burning neat little holes in the glass and then in the casing of the electromagnet. Hoping I’d judged the location of the switch correctly, I took a deep breath and focusing on heating it up.

  “Go,” I told Mary, moments before the door clicked as the heat popped the switch. She pushed the door open, and I released the flame. “If we’re lucky, it will lock behind us,” I told her, stepping through the door.

  She let the door swing shut and crossed to the elevator. “She’s on the eighteenth floor; we’ll have to take these,” Mary told me.

  “Can you call her?” I asked, double-checking my gun as we waited for the elevator. I had, thankfully, picked up some normal bullets to go with the tiny automatic pistol, as given what I’d been told about shifter politics, I probably didn’t want to be shooting people with silver tonight.

  “If she’s not answering her intercom, and she’s here, I probably shouldn’t,” Mary pointed out. I nodded agreement and, on that thought, actually drew the pistol and hid it in my coat pocket.

  Paranoid, probably. But better paranoid and armed then unarmed and dead.

  The elevator arrived, empty. The entire building seemed pretty empty so far, but then it was an apartment building lobby in midwinter. Most of the people who lived there had probably gone elsewhere for the holidays.

  The eighteenth floor was dead silent when we arrived. Apartment buildings like this had always creeped me out—I could see ten doors, all closed, and no audible sound came from any of them.

  “This way,” Mary told me, and led the way clockwise around the building. As we stepped around the corner, she stopped in shock, and I pulled the gun out of my pocket. The door to the third apartment down had been torn off its hinges. Somehow, I figured that was our destination.

  As we approached the door, Mary produced an ugly-looking machine pistol I’d never seen before. It looked like a handgun with a magazine and a vented submachine-gun barrel tacked onto the end. Where the hell she’d been hiding it, I had no idea—probably under her coat, but I hadn’t even thought to check to see if she was armed.

  “I’ll go first,” she whispered. “I can survive being shot better than you.”

  She had a point, unless they were using silver. I nodded, and waved her forward while taking the safety off on my pistol. Mary looked at me, smiled, blinked, and her eyes were suddenly those of a cat.

  For the first time, I saw her move with intent, and was stunned at the sheer silence of her motion. She stepped forward into the room, over the broken door, without making a single sound. I followed her, slowly and carefully, but I still crunched a bit on some fragments of wood.

  It
was a small apartment, and once we were inside, I heard whimpering coming from what I assumed was the living room. Mary sneaked forward, peeking around the corner. I don’t know what she saw, because the next thing I knew, she’d stepped around the corner and opened fire.

  By the time I’d made it the four steps to get into the living room and track what was going on, Mary had emptied the thirty-round clip in her machine pistol. Three men in the room had been thrown to the ground by the spray of bullets, and the rapidly healing wounds from the bullets that had hit marked them all as shifters.

  A woman lay on the ground as well. She was tall, with long dark hair, and was probably very pretty when she wasn’t bloodied and beaten in ruined clothes. Her shirt was torn to shreds, exposing her chest. Her pants were still on, but it looked like that had been a near-run thing.

  One of the shifters started to stand again. I had enough time to recognize him as my “welcoming committee” from my first day in the city before I shot him in the head. Twice. The second got most of the way to his feet before I shot him, too.

  The third, however, made it to his feet and shifted. Two hundred pounds of black wolf slammed into my chest, claws ripping into my arms. I felt skin tear, and I dropped the pistol in pain. Mary shouted, and my undamaged left hand burst into flame as I punched the wolf in the chest.

  The fire around my hands burnt green and white and seared clean through him, carrying my fist with it. One moment, an enraged wolf was trying, very successfully, to rip me to pieces. The next, the corpse of a large fair-haired man with a hole burnt through his chest crumpled to the floor beside me.

  I sprang back to my feet, facing the two Mary and I had both shot. One was already healed, though the one I’d shot in the head was still oozing from the bullet holes as he snarled at me.

  My right hand was useless; I could feel that the tendons in my arm had been severed by the shifter’s bite. The nimbus of green-and-white fire sparked around my left hand as I snarled back at the two shifters, and they charged me.

  I blasted the one I’d met before across the room with a bolt of green flame. The other hit me in my right side, having changed in a large cougar along the way. Claws and teeth tore into my side, and I tried to twist to punch him with my useful hand.

  The shifter and I rolled across the floor. His claws tore apart my jacket but bounced off the Queen’s armor underneath, failing to seriously injure me. He still managed to keep me from managing to connect with him with my flaming fist.

  Suddenly, the sound of more gunfire ripped through the apartment. One neat, short, controlled burst. Then a foot collided with the cougar on top of me, and the half-naked young lady whose apartment we were fighting in picked the big cat up by his throat and tore him off me.

  The cougar bounced across the floor and came back up to all fours. He started to snarl, and then Mary put a second neat burst into his head. His flesh seared as the silver rounds from Mary’s new magazine ripped into him and tore through his chest. He crumpled to the floor, his body returning to human as he died.

  I rolled, slowly, back up to check on the third shifter. Mary’s first burst had apparently taken him in the head. There was nothing left of the body above the neck.

  26

  “Go put a shirt on,” Mary told her friend, carefully laying her gun on a couch as she crossed to me, tearing a strip off her shirt to try and bandage my arm.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I do heal.”

  “Not as fast as us, and you’ll lose more blood than you can afford first,” she said critically, ignoring my protest and pulling up my shirt to bind the wounds. “What the hell are you wearing?” she asked in a soft voice, running her fingers down the undamaged cloth of the vest under my shirt, now clearly exposed as most of my shirt and jacket had been ripped to shreds around it.

  “Orichalcum-runed body armor,” I admitted. “It’s...a gift from a friend.”

  “You have impressive friends,” Mary told me dryly, quickly tying the impromptu bandage around my shredded wrist. “And an impressive ability to get yourself mangled.” She inspected my arm, and I winced at her touch. “You’ll live,” she added.

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said, levering myself to my feet with my left hand and retrieving my gun from the floor. “There’s going to be police here any minute—someone will have called the cops.”

  “Bodies in my apartment aren’t going to help me keep it,” the young lady we’d come to rescue said, reentering the living room, now dressed in a black sweater. “But yes, the gunfire will have been heard. We need to leave.”

  “Do you have anything packed?” I asked.

  “No time,” she pointed out, and I had to nod in agreement.

  “Jason, this is my friend Holly Fontaine,” Mary introduced us. “Mary, this is my boyfriend Jason Kilkenny. He’s a changeling.”

  “Fine, nice to meet you, can we get the hell out of here?” Holly snapped.

  “One last thing,” I told them. I stepped over to the closest dead shifter and focused on my hand. I called a carefully shaped burst of flame and turned the body to fine ash. That done, I moved on and ashed the other two bodies as well.

  “Less evidence is better all around, I think,” I told the girls as both of them stared at me. “Let’s go.”

  I wasn’t sure why my grandfather’s gift was growing more and more powerful, but given that the ability to use faerie fire more and more effectively was probably the only reason I was still alive, I wasn’t going to complain.

  Visibly swallowing, Holly led the way out to the stairs. Halfway down the stairs, we heard footsteps coming up, rapidly, and we flattened ourselves against the wall, carefully concealing my blatantly damaged coat and clothes.

  Four men clad head to toe in black body armor came charging up the stairs, the one in the lead gesturing us to the side with a brusque “Police, coming through!”

  The armored officers kept going up, and we kept going down.

  “They’re going to stop us leaving,” Holly whispered. “How are we going to get out?”

  “You two can shift and sneak out, can’t you?” I asked.

  “I turn into a deer,” Holly told me. “Not so useful for sneaking in the downtown.”

  “No,” I drawled slowly as the thought sunk in. “But an awesome distraction to get us out.”

  She nodded. “Point. All right.”

  We reached the main floor, carefully peering out around the lobby. The lobby was mostly unoccupied, but we could see the police cars, the caution tape and the black SWAT van lined up outside. Four people in normal streetwear had been corralled to the side by uniformed officers.

  “We’ll open the door, and then you bolt out,” Mary suggested to Holly, who nodded as her eyes went slightly unfocused.

  “Go,” she told us, her voice thickening as her body began to flow.

  Mary and I walked to the front door. She did her best to shield the shredded side of my coat from view with her body until we popped the door and stepped out. A uniformed police officer intercepted us almost instantly.

  “Sir, ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you to step over here with us for the moment,” he told us. “There’s been an incident in the building and we will have some questions to ask...” He stopped, almost in mid-word, as an absolutely gorgeous white-tailed deer with black highlights through her fur bounded through the door between Mary and me.

  “Shit, she’s going to get hit!” were the next words out of the officer’s mouth, and was clearly torn between trying to save the deer and keep us contained.

  “Over there, right?” I said helpfully, pointing at where the other civilians were gathered, and then Mary and I started toward the group.

  The officer gave me a thankful nod and then joined four of his comrades in trying to corral Holly while a sixth officer pulled out a cellphone and started trying to call Animal Services.

  As soon as they were all thoroughly distracted, we turned in the opposite direction and slipped
quietly around the corner to where we’d parked the car. A minute or so later, Holly joined us, brushing snow off her jacket.

  “Let’s get back to my place,” I told the girls. “Get some hot chocolate and maybe something stronger into Holly.”

  An hour later, whiskey-fortified hot chocolates were being passed around, and the shock had finally caught up with Holly, who was cradling the mug and kind of curled into herself. Mary sat down next to her on my cheap couch and wrapped an arm around the dark-haired woman.

  “What the hell is going on?” I finally asked.

  “Darius Fontaine has gone fucking insane,” Holly said harshly as tears began to leak out. “Those men were Clan, they were supposed to be like brothers to me—and they were going to rape and murder me on his orders.”

  “Why?” Mary asked, gently stroking her friend’s hair.

  “Because we’re the ones behind the fucking bombs and the attacks,” Holly admitted. “Darius’s inner circle is the ones doing it, and they’re trying to keep it secret even in the Clan. I found out we bombed the Tenerim Den, and demanded answers—by right, an Alpha’s supposed to answer questions from the Clan.

  “He told me to keep my mouth shut or he’d shut it for me,” she finished, shivering.

  “I take it you didn’t,” I asked quietly, and she shook her head.

  “I told someone I thought was a friend that I was going to go to Clan Council, that he couldn’t do this without the vote of the Clan,” she admitted, and I glanced questioningly at Mary.

  “Fontaine are one of the largest Clans—Calgary is just one branch,” she told me. “They were founded by refugees from Ireland and have one of the most authoritarian structures of any Clan—but they also have the Clan Council that stands above the Alphas and holds authority over them.”

  “Did you get to this Clan Council?” I asked, and Holly shook her head again.

  “I told Mary I was being threatened,” she continued, nodding to my girlfriend. “I was planning on contacting them once I was safe, but then those...men arrived. They told me that Darius had ordered me killed for talking too much, but they were going to have some ‘fun’ first.” Her entire body shook now, and Mary pulled her closer.