That was about all the encouragement I needed. Celine and I helped Tamara—already healing from the break Laurie had given her—through to one of the beds, and then took others for ourselves.
Tomorrow was going to be a very big day.
32
That day started, as odd as it sounds, with clothes-shopping. With the exception of Talus, who lived at least part-time in Calgary, none of us had full formal wear. Even if I hadn’t been inclined to dress up to show respect to Tarvers, Talus made it clear to us all that we were to dress appropriately.
By morning, George O’Malley was mobile again. His own healing abilities and Talus’s Power had fully dealt with his injuries, and the four of us headed downtown as Talus vanished to deal with his own preparations for the funeral—taking Laurie with him.
The fae noble had handed Celine a credit card before he left, and the Fury had promptly decided to find the most expensive fancy-dress store in the city. This, of course, was buried inside the core and relatively quiet on a Saturday morning.
One of Eric’s “friends I can completely trust” had picked up the van we’d left at Talus’s hidden apartment armory near downtown and delivered it to the motel, so we had transportation.
Celine drove us downtown like she owned the road, and walked into the store with about the same level of ownership vibe. I watched with more than a little fascination as the Fury—probably among the three or four most dangerous females I currently knew, including the Queen—managed to corral four staff members and point one of them at each of us. She kept the manager, I noticed, to herself as she started audibly gleeing over a certain color of coat.
“And what is sir’s style choice for the day?” the somewhat shell-shocked staff member asked me.
I answered with the long-standing conversational placeholder of choice: “Umm.
“I’m headed to a funeral in about two hours,” I continued slowly, thinking carefully. “I want something appropriate, but still...easy to move in—I won’t have to time to change afterward and I have a bunch of errands to do.”
That seemed more acceptable in my ears—and apparently to the young “fashion consultant”—than “I’m going to a funeral, which will be followed by an election and a political negotiation, either or both of which may turn to violence at a moment’s notice.”
“We do have a new line of ‘athletic dress shirts,’” the girl said after a moment. “They’re designed so you can go right from the office to a golf game...”
I paid some attention to the girl’s sales pitch, but mostly just nodded whenever she grabbed an item of clothing. Twenty minutes and a mind-boggling price tag later, I was dressed in a neat black suit with almost-invisible burgundy pinstripes. Both the suit and the shirt underneath it had a surprising degree of flexibility and flow, hopefully enough for me to fight in them if I had to.
O’Malley was finished before me, sitting in a plain charcoal-gray suit by the front entrance while we waited for the girls. Tamara joined us a few minutes after I finished, in a prim suit tied to a long skirt whose multiple layers concealed the fact that it was slit almost all the way up to the hip for ease of movement.
Celine took another hour on top of all of us. By the time she was done, the manager had three of the staff running relays of clothes in and out of the changing room. Finally, however, she emerged to join us—in much the same style of skirt suit as Tamara had picked out in half an hour.
We paid and left the store, heading for the van.
“What took so long?” I finally asked.
The Fury shrugged. “I didn’t see a reason not to make sure I didn’t get the perfect outfit on a noble’s credit,” she answered. “I didn’t go over time—we have plenty of time to get to the funeral. And now I’m ready, and you’re all ready, and you’ve spent the last hour being annoyed at me instead of nervous about what’s coming. Let’s go.”
With that, she strode ahead of the rest of us as I looked after her, knowing I was staring in open-mouthed surprise.
The Fury was good.
We returned to the van in our new formal wear, and Tamara promptly started pulling shoulder holsters and black metal-and-polymer pistols—Glock 18s, apparently—from a box in the back of the van and passed them around. They slipped easily under the suit jackets we all wore and belted into place.
Armed and dressed for the occasion, Celine took the wheel and drove us farther into the city’s southwest quarter. The funeral was at a small Catholic church that was heavily supported by the Clan Tenerim—Tarvers himself had converted to Catholicism several centuries earlier, apparently.
The building was no cathedral, but it was a fair-sized structure of concrete and wrought iron surrounded by easily two acres of landscaped grounds, a tall and neatly trimmed hedge shielding the grounds from view.
A handful of “stray dogs” wandered around the perimeter, outside the hedge, with a precision and pattern that gave their true nature away almost instantly to those of us looking for the guards.
We pulled into the parking lot, slotting the black van in amidst the chaotic mix of vehicles. I recognized many of the cars from David and Elena’s funeral—either shifters who’d known the two fae, or fae who were there to honor the leader of the shifters. Like us.
Mary texted me, asking me if I’d arrived yet, just as we were exiting the van. I excused myself from the group of fae and went to meet her and Holly. I found them standing just around the corner of the church, out of sight from the entrance.
Shelly stood with them, as did Theino, the young and well-spoken goblin who’d been organizing their care. All four were dressed in plain black formal clothes, though Theino also wore a plain white scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face to conceal his tusks.
Ignoring the fact that, even tucked out of view as we were, we were in public, I wrapped Mary in a tight embrace, feeling for a long moment like I would never let her go. She returned the embrace with full force for a moment and then gently extricated herself.
“Hey, what’s going on with you?” she asked. “I’m not the one who tried to get killed last night—I should be the one freaking out over you.”
“Yes, but you’re not going to,” I told her, trying to keep my voice reasonable and somewhat flippant. “So, I have to do it for both of us.”
My shifter shook her head, pressed a kiss to my forehead, and cast a look around. “Shelly told us about Laurie,” she said very quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“For now?” I shrugged, nodding toward Shelly. “Follow Talus’s lead. I trust his sense of melodrama to provide the right timing to introduce Laurie.”
“He’s noble fae,” Shelly said, nodding. “Melodrama runs in his blood.”
“Shelly, melodrama runs in all fae blood,” I told her, finding it easier to joke and smile now Mary was there. “What about you?” I asked, turning to Holly.
“I’m going to hide between you and Theino until the actual election starts,” she said quietly, responding slightly to my smile and attempted good cheer. “Then I’m hoping you’ll be between me and any of Darius’s men who try to shut me up.”
I nodded, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder and glancing over at the goblin. In answer to my unspoken question, so that Holly wasn’t aware of it, he opened his jacket just enough for to see the black metal of some sort of firearm in a shoulder rig.
Both of us were armed, so with me on one side of the girl and Theino on the other, no one was getting to her without paying a heavier price than they expected. Mary saw the exchange as well and leaned in to kiss me. She grabbed my hand as she did and put it inside her jacket.
It looked like a cuddling, possibly somewhat indecent gesture to everyone else. I realized she’d put my hand on the grip of the same ugly-looking little submachine gun she’d produced in Holly’s apartment.
There was a very real chance no one in this church was unarmed, and unlike most of them, I knew how ugly this could get.
“The Fontaines are in
,” Shelly told us quietly, having glanced around the corner. “We should head in. We don’t want to miss the service.”
I nodded at her comment, taking a deep breath as the real reason for today sank in. With everything else going on, I’d almost forgotten we were there to mourn a man who’d proven himself worthy of my respect in the short time I’d known him.
A man who hadn’t deserved to die.
The church was very quiet inside, despite the several hundred people already in the building. A piano stood, untouched, by an empty choir stage. The seats were mostly full, and the empty ones rapidly filed around us as we slid into chairs in the back row.
It was a plain building, inside as well as out, but well maintained and sturdy. My quick eyeball suggested that extra chairs had been added, wrapping around the normal pews, allowing space for probably around six hundred people.
By five minutes after we’d sat down, every seat was full. A handful of people leaned against the back wall, but they were the final stragglers. There weren’t six hundred supernaturals in the city, period, but there were apparently at least a few dozen humans who’d known who Tarvers Tenerim actually was.
Most of the attendees were shifters—there were probably less than a dozen shifters in the city who weren’t there—but a fair number of fae and other inhumans filed out the rest of the chairs.
The shuffling slowed and eventually stopped as people either found seats or comfortable leaning places for the fifty or so people who there just weren’t seats for. Almost before the movement stopped, the priest, clad in his black-and-white vestments, strode confidently toward the podium at the front of the church.
A closed casket rested just in front of the podium, a picture of Tarvers in his prime set upon it. The priest looked around at everyone and said a short benediction in Latin that went right over my head.
“Welcome,” he said finally in a language I understood. “We have all come here today to honor and celebrate the life of an amazing man, who lived a life of service for over three hundred years.”
He then launched into a sermon on public service. For a speech given by a Catholic priest, it was light on the religious symbolism and lacked even one parable from the Bible—probably in consideration to the fact that many of the shifters and almost all of the fae and other inhumans were the literal definition of pagans—unsaved and uninclined to be saved by the stories of a mortal man when we had the very real Powers to look to for salvation.
For all that he started with a sermon, the service was short. It was also very clear that the priest had known Tarvers. He spoke to the man’s virtues—many—and vices—anger, pride—and then passed the podium to the old Alpha’s sons.
The two men, both carrying the bulk and menace of werebears, stood side by side at the podium and spoke, in voices that broke with every sentence, of growing up the children of a man who’d seen a city rise from nothing. They spoke of being raised to be shifters by the greatest shifter of all.
In there, subtly, although I doubt anyone missed it, was the announcement that the older brother—Michael—would succeed Tarvers as Alpha Tenerim. From the quiet sigh that Mary swallowed beside me, I took it that even that hadn’t been certain. I squeezed her hand, knowing without even looking that she was quietly weeping as the sons continued to speak about their father.
I don’t think there were many people in the hall that weren’t crying to one extent or another. There was tension in the church—everyone knew what would follow the service—but at this moment, we mourned one of the greatest of our own.
The speeches done, the two brothers each took one end of the casket and slowly carried it from the church. We all followed them out into the chill and snowy air, row by row, in quiet grief.
It was possibly the quietest group of people of that size I’ve ever seen, and I was silent with them as we made it out into the small graveyard behind the church. There, I stood at the back of the crowd, barely able to see as Tarvers Tenerim was slowly lowered into the earth of the city he’d seen grow from nothing to a major center.
His sons took up shovels, and the other Alphas joined them. The crowd of over six hundred watched in silence as nine men slowly and carefully, for all the massive strength and speed available to them, filled in the grave.
Finally, the priest sprinkled water over the grave and spoke some more Latin I thought I recognized as the last rites.
His task done, the priest bowed to the Alphas and withdrew into the Church. The entire mood of the crowd shifted as he did so, and the tension ratcheted up a notch. Wordlessly, the eight Alphas walked in a group, leaving Tarvers’s younger son kneeling by his father’s grave until he joined the rest of the crowd.
We followed the Alphas to find a pair of large marquee tents had been set up to create a huge assembly hall. Propane heaters occupied each corner, but they didn’t look nearly large enough to provide the comfortable warmth that filled the tents. I suspected the small beaver-fur fetishes hung above each heater had more to do with it. There was Power at work.
A long table was set up at the front of the table, and the eight Alphas each took a seat. I recognized Enli, the old Native American cougar shifter, Michael Tenerim—and Darius Fontaine. The others were familiar by face but not by name.
I was about to try and grab another back row set of seats, but Holly took charge as we entered the tent. “Follow me,” she ordered in a whisper, and confidently strode right up the center of the hall to take a front row seat, directly across from Darius Fontaine. The young Fontaine deer shifter met her Alpha’s gaze calmly, daring him to challenge her, to admit that he’d tried to have her killed.
He didn’t take the bait, turning away to glance around the room as Enli stood, gesturing for people to hurry up and sit.
We’d shed a hundred or so people—most of the fae and other non-shifters who really didn’t have a say or interest in the shifter election. Sitting at the front now, I saw Lord Oberis also in the front row, in one of the corners. He looked concerned, but that was likely due to the lack of both Talus and Laurie, though when he caught sight of me, the old fae looked somewhat relieved—probably presuming, correctly, that if I was there, Talus must be okay.
“Everyone here knows who I am,” Enli said as the rustling continued. The old Alpha spoke quietly, but the entire tent heard him and quieted down. “We are gathered here to remember Tarvers Tenerim,” he continued, “which does not stop because he is buried.
“But,” Enli said with a deep sigh, “we must also now choose his successor. Today, here, of the Alphas of Calgary, we must choose a new Speaker, to lead us and to speak for us to the Covenants of this city.”
A rumbling of noise and argument almost immediately erupted from the crowd, people shouting the names of Clans and Alphas they supported or would refuse to see elected. Several of the Alphas at the head table got in on the shouting as well, with one Alpha I didn’t recognize banging on the table in a vain attempt to be recognized and heard.
“Silence,” Enli bellowed, and I think the sheer shock of the kindly old native Grandfather shouting quelled the shifter Clans to silence.
“The custom is and has always been that the Alphas select one from among their number,” he reminded everyone, his voice instantly calm and soft again. “If you have an opinion here, you should have raised it with your Alpha before now.”
The chair beside me scraped across the grass, and I quietly shifted so I could readily reach the gun under my jacket as Holly stood. Few among the shifters had the gumption to interrupt Grandfather while he was speaking, and her presumption kept the inevitable shouting down.
“There is something I have to say before you vote,” she said quietly, but the silence in the tent allowed her to be heard. “An Alpha has acted against his Clan and broken his oaths.”
“Holly Fontaine, be seated,” Darius barked. “This is not a place for grievances amongst Clan members.”
“My grievance is not merely that of Clanswoman against Alpha,” she resp
onded. “We all know that someone has waging a campaign of violence amongst our numbers—trying to weaken Clans, distract others. This campaign has been waged to influence this election, and I know who waged it.”
She paused as the crowd around her exploded. Shifters were on their feet, people were moving—and two were very clearly headed toward Holly. I stood, taking a place at one side of her as Theino rose on her other side and Mary slipped neatly in behind us.
Without even looking, I knew that Tamara, Celine and O’Malley were moving closer, making sure they were in a place to cover us if things got worse. The tension ratcheted in the air as the shouting continued, accusations and counter-accusations flying all around us.
“BE SEATED,” Grandfather bellowed a second time, and this time, every ounce of energy and command and Power the old Alpha had cracked through his voice. A pointed, wrinkled finger silenced Darius before he could speak, and he turned back to Holly.
“I would hear the girl speak,” he continued. “Will you approach the table and face the gaze of the Alphas?”
I could almost feel the fear in the girl. Darius had tried to kill her in the past, indirectly, and the Alphas were the strongest of her kind, any one of them able to kill her with a single swipe. Nonetheless, she squared her shoulders and walked forward, holding Enli’s gaze every step of the way. The old shifter gave her an approving nod as she stopped directly in front of the table, facing Grandfather as a way to avoid looking at Darius.
“Speak, child,” Enli said quietly.
“I overheard two of the men I knew were close to Darius talking,” she began without pre-amble. “They spoke of the bombing of the Tenerim Den—with perfect knowledge of what had happened. They thought they were alone and so did not conceal that they had been the ones to attack the Den—on his orders.
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