Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “She is,” Talus confirmed. “O’Malley and MacDougall?”

  “Not sure,” Celine said, rising to her feet from where she’d finished laying Frankie’s jacket over his head. “I tried to call them once the zombies went down—figured that was the end of it. Neither is answering their radio or cellphone.”

  For a moment, the idea of the two men we’d left outside as snipers answering their cellphones seemed ridiculous, and then I remembered the headset radio gear some of the team had was of a much cheaper grade than a mortal military team might have. Our cellphones were probably more reliable.

  “No one went out by either entrance we saw,” Tamara told Talus, still glaring at Laurie.

  “There was an exit in the basement,” I told the two women. “And a ritual chamber of some kind. Probably for these things,” I realized aloud, gesturing at the bodies of the thralls.

  “I’ll check on the boys,” Talus said quietly. “Can you walk?” he asked Tamara, who nodded. “You three move Frankie and Laurie out to the street; I don’t want any of us here when someone decides to investigate the gunfire.”

  I nodded and took the traitor from him. I’d barely grabbed Laurie’s cuffs before the fae noble slipped out the door. I looked at the two women from our team.

  “Can you two carry Frankie?” I asked.

  In answer, Celine threw the dead fae’s body over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The ease with which the Fury moved the body suggested that my question was more than a little laughable.

  Tamara was clearly unneeded, and she slipped over to stand on the other side of Laurie as I began to guide our prisoner out to the street. The nightmare leaned in to whisper in the hag’s ear, and I only barely caught what she said.

  “Talus and Jason may have settled for cuffing your arms,” she said softly, her voice sounding gentle, “but I know you. If you try and run, I will burn your legs off. Get me, bitch?”

  Laurie nodded, roughly, still silent as we manhandled her out the door and across the street into a dark alley. Thankfully, it didn’t look like anyone had been close enough to hear the gunshots, and no one saw us moving a prisoner and a body away from the hotel.

  The alley was completely empty, though garbage littered the ground, mixed inextricably with snow and mud and ice. Celine took one look at the ground and kept Frankie’s body over her shoulder. I was a little less polite to Laurie, shoving her against the wall and leaving whether she stayed on her feet or not entirely up to her.

  At the very least, the death of the two Cunninghams was entirely at her feet. On top of that, her assistance in allowing the vampires to evade the efforts to bring them to justice had allowed dozens of murders to take place—and led quite directly to Tarvers’s murder.

  The traitor remained completely silent, though I could feel the cold iron still circulating through her body from my bullet. The sensation of cold iron near me was one I associated with a reason to get the hell out of wherever I was, which probably contributed to my now-violent antipathy to the hag.

  We’d been in the alley for a few minutes and the cold was starting to seep past the adrenaline when a shadow came between us and the nearby streetlight. My attempt to go for a gun at that point was the first I realized that I’d left both weapons I’d started the evening with in the hotel.

  Before I could start to summon Faerie flame, however, Talus landed next to us. He was supporting O’Malley, who was covered in blood from an ugly bullet wound clean through his left lung. It looked like the delay had been Talus healing him enough to keep him alive.

  MacDougall was less lucky, and his corpse, slowly leaking from multiple bullet wounds, floated behind Talus until Tamara gently took him into her arms.

  “I have him stabilized,” Talus said quietly, “but I need somewhere warm and sterile to make sure he makes it.”

  “The colony?” I asked. I knew there was a doctor among the goblins who paid allegiance to Talus there, but he shook his head.

  “With your girlfriend and our witness on the Clan mess there, I don’t want to draw attention to them,” he told us. “With her a traitor”—he pointed at Laurie—“I don’t know who I can trust in the Court.”

  The answer was obvious to me after a moment’s thought, and I shook my head at Talus.

  “Eric,” I suggested.

  “I’m not even sure of him,” Talus replied, and I shook my head at him again.

  “Eric is like me,” I reminded him. “His loyalty is neither to the Court nor breakable.” Many Keepers bore fealty, just like a Vassal, though not hereditary like a Vassal, to the Queen or another member of the High Court.

  In Eric’s case, his fealty was to Queen Mabona, the same as me. His loyalty could not be broken without killing him.

  While my comment earned me confused looks from Celine and Tamara, it bought an instant relieved smile of acknowledgement from Talus, who nodded. “Call him,” he ordered me, and turned his attention back to O’Malley.

  Obedient to a fault, I pulled out my own cellphone and started to dial.

  31

  The background noise when Eric answered his phone was loud, the burbling chaos of Friday night at a bar. The sound of a band playing was almost lost under the dull roar of conversation.

  “What’s going on, Jason?” he asked abruptly. “I’m busy—I have a full house here.”

  “We need help,” I told him. “Talus and I went after the vampire den—we have dead and wounded and a prisoner.”

  For a moment or so, all I could hear on the line was the background noise. “A prisoner?” he asked finally.

  “One of ours was with them,” I said simply. “She’d betrayed us and was helping them evade our ops. We have no transport and Talus can’t heal our wounded in an alley covered in snow.”

  “Where are you?” the Keeper asked, and I told him the name of the hotel. “I’ll be there,” he promised, and hung up.

  We spent what seemed like forever but probably was less than fifteen minutes waiting in the cold as Talus, the only one of us with any healing abilities, struggled to keep O’Malley alive in the horrendously adverse conditions.

  Then an old Volkswagen minibus—the stereotypical hippie van, though this one was woodlands camouflage–colored, not tie-dyed—whipped around the corner and skidded to a halt at the end of the alley.

  The back door of the bus popped open, and Tarva, the blond nymph waitress from the Manor, jumped out. She wore a long black coat that covered her from neck to toe, probably because she was still wearing the nothing that passed for a uniform at her job underneath. The boxy bullpup assault rifle she carried with consummate professionalism held my attention more than memories of her in tightly scandalous clothing.

  “Come on, let’s get you all in out of the cold,” she said quietly.

  I started to move to help the others with the wounded, but Talus simply gestured. The two bodies floated into the van under his Power. He supported O’Malley and Celine helped Tamara into the van while Tarva and I took up the rear. I pushed Laurie in front of me, and Tarva eyed the hag, clearly wondering why she was bound.

  “Everyone in?” Eric asked as I closed the door.

  “Yes,” I replied shortly, and looked forward to see the gnome look into his mirror. At the sight of Laurie, his jaw dropped.

  “She’s the traitor?” he demanded incredulously.

  “Yes,” Talus answered flatly. “Now, I have to focus if I’m going to save George’s life, so if everyone can be quiet, I think we’d all appreciate it.”

  The drive back to the Manor passed in silence with Talus bent over O’Malley, fully focused on saving the older gentry’s life. The rest of his team sprawled in their seats in various levels of exhaustion. I kept an eye on Laurie, who was being way too calmly docile and creepily silent for my peace of mind.

  When we got back to the Manor, Eric maneuvered the minivan in behind the motel and turned it off, looking back at the rest of us.

  “Rooms 114 through 118 never get rented
,” he told us. “They aren’t actually rooms; it’s a small office and storage space.” He tossed me a key and paused. “There’s also access to a morgue-style freezer under the space,” he said quietly. That shocked me—though it made sense, seeing as how fae bodies would be problematic if a human coroner got his or her hands on one.

  “Tarva and I have to get back to the bar,” Eric continued. “Can you lot take care of yourselves for a few hours?”

  “Yes, we can,” Talus said quickly. “Thank you, Eric. I owe you a boon.”

  The gnome nodded sharply in acknowledgement of the formal debt Talus was offering, and exited the van. With a smile and nod all around, Tarva opened the back door and followed him.

  “Let’s get George inside,” Talus instructed.

  “I’ve got Frankie and MacDougall,” Celine said softly, the Fury scooping up the two bodies as she said so. “Is the way clear?”

  “I’ll go grab the door,” I volunteered. Leaving Laurie with Tamara, I got out of the truck, checking the badly lit alley and making sure no one was standing at the transit station across the street, watching us.

  The motel parking lot was dark and quiet except for Eric’s bar on the other side of it, and no one seemed to coming in or out of the bar right now.

  I opened the door to room 118, the closest of the four Eric had pointed out, and shouted back toward the van. “The door is open; bring them over.”

  Celine was first, the dead bodies of our friends sadly being the most noticeable and attention-grabbing portion of our group. Talus followed, supporting O’Malley, who was now at least semiconscious and paying attention to things around him.

  Tamara and Laurie stepped out of the van, but as the nightmare was stepping down from the van, Laurie finally acted.

  Her hands still cuffed together, she joined them into a double fist and slammed it into Tamara’s leg before the other fae could react. Standing by the door to the motel, almost twenty feet away, I heard Tamara’s thighbone snapping.

  The dark-skinned fae crumpled, falling from the minivan to the concrete of the parking lot as Laurie bolted. She timed it perfectly, as a c-train started to come rumbling up to the platform as I dropped the key to take off after her.

  With cold iron running through her veins, she had no powers, but she was still fast. I was faster, just barely, and starting from much farther behind. None of the others could react at all, tied down with wounded and dead, so it was all up to me.

  If she escaped, we would probably never catch her again. Certainly not in time to help stop the coming catastrophe looming over the city. I put on an extra burst of speed, trying desperately to catch her.

  I knew it wasn’t going to be enough, and then a sudden flash of cold came over me. Between one breath and the next, my world was even colder than the frozen street I was running across. When it passed, and I breathed again, Laurie was inches from me—within arm’s reach.

  I hooked her legs out from underneath her before she processed that I was that close, and she went flying face first into the pavement. Before she could try to get up, I was on top of her. I grabbed her cuffed hands to immobilize them and drove a knee into her shoulder, pinning her to the ground.

  “Stay down,” I ordered, and she looked up at me in surprise.

  “Damn you, Hunter,” she gasped. “Who are you, truly?”

  “Jason Kilkenny,” I snapped. “Vassal of Queen Mabona,” I finished, and a horrified understanding filed her eyes. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

  I roughly manhandled her to her feet, pushing her before me with a hand on the chain of her handcuffs as I delivered her back to the motel rooms Eric had turned into a sanctuary. Celine, her burdens delivered to the basement, was waiting for me, her eyes glowing with black fire.

  “We need her alive,” I told the Fury roughly.

  “I’m not going to kill her,” Celine promised.

  “Just lock her in a closet or something,” I ordered. To my surprise, the Fury—who could easily have taken me apart—obeyed instantly. She dialed down the black fire in her eyes and took the hag in care with a rough but not damaging grip.

  Tamara had made it into the sanctuary and Talus had helped her into a chair from which she watched as the fae noble laid George O’Malley flat on top of a desk.

  The room had very obviously started as the motel room it once had been. Where the beds had once been had been replaced with four desks, and the bathroom had been torn out and replaced with a storage closet that Celine was now removing boxes of weapons from so she could lock Laurie in it. A door on the right side led into the other converted rooms, and a door by the closet, still slightly ajar, presumably led to the basement and its refrigerated morgue.

  “You never told us he was a Vassal,” Celine told Talus, somewhat accusingly.

  “I take it everyone heard that,” I realized aloud, remembering just how good the hearing of gentry and greater fae could be. I should never have said anything. Laurie didn’t need to know, and neither did anyone else here.

  “Yes, we did,” Talus confirmed, drawing a blanket over O’Malley and stepping back from the now stable and mostly healed gentry. “And I didn’t tell you,” he said to Celine and Tamara, “because one huge advantage that Jason has as a changeling and a Vassal is that no one expects one of the High Court to hold a changeling’s fealty.”

  “I’d prefer it if it stayed that way,” I admitted, pulling up a chair and trying to calm my breathing and loosen my muscles. “The idea of painting a giant ‘shoot here’ sign on my head for the Queen’s enemies doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “We live in Fort McMurray,” Celine told me dryly as she finished barring the closet door shut behind Laurie. “Who are we going to tell?”

  “Heartstone flows from the oil sands,” Talus said quietly. “Power flows from the heartstone. For all that it’s the backwater of the world in almost every sense; Fort McMurray is the center of a lot of things both mortal and inhuman. Hell, the Fort is probably at least half the reason for the chaos here.”

  “So, what happens now?” Tamara asked, carefully shifting her leg to make sure it didn’t heal crooked overnight.

  “Tarvers’s funeral,” I told them. “The shifter clans will elect a new Speaker afterwards, and then Lord Oberis will request that Speaker’s aid in waging war against Magus MacDonald.”

  “So far, so good,” Tamara pointed out. “The Enforcers caused this whole mess; kicking their ass sounds good to me.”

  “The whole thing is a trap,” I explained slowly, trying to lay out the pieces I’d uncovered so that the others would understand. “Oberis isn’t going to kill MacDonald—force him to leave, yes, but not kill—firstly because he probably can’t, but secondly because if you kill one Wizard, three more descend to destroy you and anyone associated with you. It’s how they protect their own when they’re so scattered.

  “But while the war is going on, Winters is going to kill the Magus.”

  Talus had worked it out, I knew, but clearly, he hadn’t explained the whole situation to his people, as both Celine and Tamara stared at me in shock.

  “The Alpha of Clan Fontaine is creating chaos and violence to undermine the other candidates for Speaker,” I continued. “Right now, Darius Fontaine is the most likely Speaker for the Clans—and as either Speaker or a high-level Alpha, he can and will accuse Oberis of ordering the murder. The Wizards would destroy the Court and place Winters, as MacDonald’s former right-hand man, in charge of the city in their name—and in charge of the heartstone.”

  “The vampires’ role in this is done,” Talus realized aloud, picking a point out of the whole mess that I’d actually missed. “All we’ve done is made it so that Winters doesn’t have to include them in his new Covenant in payment.”

  “So, we have to stop the war,” I told them all quietly. “We have witnesses who know what Fontaine was up to, so we should be able to stop him being elected. I’m hoping that Laurie can tell us enough of the truth to get Oberis to call it of
f.”

  “Why don’t we interrogate her now?” Celine asked, with a toss of her head toward the closet we’d locked the traitor in.

  The door to the outside opened before Talus could answer, and then slammed shut behind Eric as the gnome slipped into the room.

  “Because she’s protected against truth magic,” the Keeper told us as he took a seat on one of the desks, looking around at us all. “Sorry,” he continued, “I’ve been eavesdropping on you all—I figured I’d need to be up to date on what’s going on and with whatever we’re planning.”

  “Laurie, like Talus here and other fae who serve at that high a level in the Court, is shielded from truth magic by Oberis,” Eric explained. “Only Oberis himself can force her to tell him everything and not lie.”

  “Damn,” the Fury said quietly. “So, what do we do?”

  “We air all the dirty laundry,” I told them all. “We drag Laurie into the center of everything and throw her at Oberis’s feet. We have our witnesses condemn Darius Fontaine before his clan and the other Alphas. We stop the war before it even starts.”

  Tamara inhaled sharply, looking at me with a tilt to her head. “Sounds simpler than it is,” she observed. “What do you have planned for an encore?”

  I took a deep breath and turned to look Talus in the eyes. Of anyone there, he was the one who had to understand just what my orders were in all of this.

  “I fulfill my mission from the Queen—and rescue the Wizard from his own Tower.”

  Talus nodded, once, silently communicating his understanding to me. Not a promise of help, nothing like that, but it was an acceptance that he knew what I had to do.

  “We’re going to have a busy morning,” he told everyone. “I am going to call Shelly and let her know to bring Mary and Holly. We will bring Laurie. Eric, can you keep an eye on our prisoner?”

  Eric nodded. “I’ll call a couple of friends I can completely trust,” he promised. “I’ll make sure she’s still here. There are beds still in here for you to rest on,” he continued. “It’s probably best if you all stay here till the funeral.”