Cloak of Wolves

by Moeller, Jonathan

  That, at least, was something Owen didn’t need to fear. He had used the mindtouch spell to peer into Osmond’s thoughts, and he knew the man was guilty. Osmond didn’t think it was his fault, of course. If the clerk had cooperated faster and gotten the money out, then Osmond wouldn’t have gotten annoyed enough to shoot him. And if those two old women hadn’t come into the store when they did, well, Osmond had to protect himself, didn’t he? It was their fault for interrupting him. Nothing was his fault. His friends had gotten him started on drugs in high school. His local Elven noble had refused to take him as a man-at-arms, so he hadn’t been able to find a decent job. It was their fault, all their fault, and everyone was conspiring to screw him over.

  The human mind was a sewer, but Osmond’s had been worse than most.

  Tradition demanded that Osmond be given a chance for last words, and Caulomyth gestured for him to speak. Osmond had been gaunt when Owen had arrested him, but several months without illegal stimulants had filled him out a bit. His eyes still had their manic, sullen gleam, and Owen wasn’t surprised when Osmond launched into a torrent of abuse, shouting curses at the families. Not only was he glad that he had killed all three of his victims, he wished he had killed their children and molested the old women first.

  One of the sons of the dead women started to step forward, hands balled into fists. Owen had been expecting that, and he caught the man’s shoulder, looked into his anguished face.

  “Don’t worry,” said Owen. “It’s going to be over soon.”

  “All right,” said Caulomyth. “You’re done.”

  He gestured to the officers assisting him, and they ripped off Osmond’s paper jumpsuit, leaving him naked. They wrestled him to the wooden post, punching him in the gut a few times to ensure cooperation, and shackled his arms over his head and his ankles to the bottom of the post, so his face was pressed into the wood.

  “Dean Osmond,” said Caulomyth, uncoiling the whip from his belt. “You have been sentenced to flogging and execution by a jury of your peers and handed to the officers of Duke Tamirlas for the carrying out of your sentence. The sentence will be delivered now. May God have mercy on your soul.”

  With that, Caulomyth began flogging Osmond. For the first five strokes or so, Osmond kept screaming curses and threats. By the tenth stroke, he was just screaming. By the twentieth, it was a mixture of howls and sobs. After that, it was just a constant keening sob. When Owen’s daughter Sabrina had been four, she had fallen down the stairs and broken her left arm so badly that the bone had torn through the skin. Her cry had sounded like that.

  Owen forced the memory aside. He didn’t want to think about his family during this.

  After the fifty strokes had been delivered, Osmond’s back was a bloody ruin of torn skin and muscle. If he didn’t die of blood loss in the next hour, infection would probably finish him off, but Osmond didn’t have much time left to worry about it. Caulomyth’s assistants unshackled Osmond from the post and bound his hands behind his back, ignoring his cries of pain. Another man tied the noose to the wooden arm, and Osmond saw it and started weeping and trying to get away, but the flogging had left him with no strength, and the officers made him stand on a wooden box. With precise, efficient movements, Caulomyth tied the noose around the sobbing Osmond’s neck and shoved a black hood over his head.

  Then he kicked the box aside, and Osmond was hanged by the neck until dead.

  Owen watched the man die. These were always horrible to watch. But what else could have been done? Would it have been better to lock Osmond in a concrete cell for the rest of his life? Owen had done research into judicial punishments for his master’s in criminology, and he knew that the pre-Conquest United States had maintained a vast prison system, one that had been rife with abuses and corruption. Would that have been better? Or would it have been more humane to simply shoot Osmond in the head? But Dean Osmond had murdered three innocent people in cold blood without remorse. How much mercy did he deserve?

  Owen didn’t know, but he was glad when the execution was over.

  One of the assistants cut down Osmond’s body, and another produced a hose and began washing the blood and urine down the drain.

  Later, once the families had been escorted out, Owen retreated to his office to finish up his paperwork before he went home.

  But Lieutenant Kyle Warren was waiting for him.

  Warren was the Homicide division’s rising star, the most competent detective under Giles’s command. He looked like a movie star, with the sort of commanding jaw and strong build that would have gotten him a movie role as a maverick Homeland Security investigator on the trail of Rebel terrorists. Despite that, Warren was well-liked within the Milwaukee branch. Homeland Security, Owen had sourly noted more than once, had “tall poppy” syndrome in spades. Exceptional performers tended to get frozen out lest they make the mediocre lifers look bad. Warren, though, had the rare knack of sharing credit with his partners and subordinates, making sure that everyone involved looked good when he closed a case.

  Warren was probably going to go far in politics one day, Owen thought. Maybe he would become governor once old Arnold Brauner finally went to the big dairy farm in the sky. Or maybe sooner – having both of Wisconsin’s senators be Brauner’s sons would just look bad.

  “How’d the execution go, Colonel?” said Warren, straightening up.

  “About like you’d expect,” said Owen, unlocking his office door. He gestured for Warren to take one of the visitors’ chairs and then sat behind his desk. “You here about the Doyle case?”

  “Yeah,” said Warren. He sighed. “I’ve got no choice but to pass this one onto the Inquisition.”

  Owen frowned. “It’s that bad?”

  Warren nodded. “Ronald Doyle, his wife, and his three children all murdered inside their locked apartment? And not just murdered, but ripped to pieces? Had to be a Shadowlands creature. That means magic, which means I have to pass the case to the Inquisition.”

  Owen shrugged. “That’s what the Inquisition is here to do.” Well, that, and keep an eye on the Elven nobles, so they didn’t betray the High Queen. He sighed and tapped a pen against his desk. “I hope they get someone to look into it quick. This kind of thing always starts bad and gets worse.”

  “The problem is that there are too many people with too many reasons to kill Ronald Doyle,” said Warren. He glanced at the office door to the bullpen. “Doyle was one of Governor Arnold’s guys, yeah? Brauner doesn’t usually kill people who piss him off, but maybe he’s branching out. There are a dozen different lawsuits ongoing against Doyle Construction because of defective concrete, and the company is losing money. I’m pretty sure that Doyle himself was having an affair, and not for the first time.” He spread his hands. “And that doesn’t include the possibility that Doyle was randomly targeted by a leftover Rebel, or this is the start of some sort of incursion from the Shadowlands.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not an incursion,” said Owen, remembering the Archon attack several years ago. Not that the Archons were a problem any longer, but the High Queen and Elves still had numerous enemies beyond the Shadowlands, which meant that humanity shared those enemies by default. “Until you hear from the Inquisition one way or another, keep working the case. Check out the people who had the strongest motive to see Brauner dead, see if they had any links to someone who could summon Shadowlands creatures.”

  “That’s what I was going to do anyway,” said Warren, and he grinned. “But it helps to have permission from someone higher in rank.”

  “That’s what the department is,” said Owen. “A mechanism for spreading the blame.”

  They talked for a few moments longer about the details, and then Warren left to work on his case. Once he passed it to the Inquisition, that would be that. The case was out of their hands, and unless the Inquisition wanted local help, there wasn’t anything they could do about it. But perhaps it was just as well. Homeland Security was equipped for a lot of things but fighting thin
gs from the Shadowlands wasn’t one of them.

  Owen spent the rest of the day finishing his recent paperwork, which meant a lot of time typing into the UNICORN database. The Unified National Intelligence Crime Online Reporting Network (the acronym, Owen thought, was proof that government agencies should never name their own projects) was the Homeland Security database, containing case notes and records. It also held records of every United States citizen, holding a wealth of information about their finances, criminal histories, employment histories, and so on. As a colonel, Owen could access most of it, but UNICORN was hosted in the Inquisition’s data centers in Utah, which meant certain sections of the database were blocked out to everyone but the Inquisition.

  As a shadow agent of the High Queen, Quell had more access than he would have otherwise.

  Definitely more than he might have wished.

  He finished up his shift and headed home. There had been times in his career when he had put in a lot of eighteen-hour days, but today wasn’t one of them. That was just as well. Marriage to a Homeland Security officer was sometimes a challenge, and it had put a lot of strain on Anna, who had done more than her share of the work with the kids and the house. Well, Christmas was coming. Perhaps he would take some time off, and they would go to her sister’s house in Cincinnati. He didn’t particularly enjoy sleeping in the guest bed, but Anna and the kids always seemed to enjoy the trips. And another year and a half, the twins would be old enough for college, and Owen would see a lot less of them.

  He shook off thoughts of work as he fought the rush hour traffic to get home. The downside of finishing his shift at the normal hour – the traffic in downtown Milwaukee was heavy. But it only took him about thirty minutes to get out of downtown and to his house in northern Wauwatosa.

  It had started as a four-bedroom house, but Owen and Anna had learned from their experience with the twins that teenage girls got along a lot better when they had their own rooms, so they had added another bedroom. Owen pulled up the driveway and into the two-car garage behind the house. Anna’s car was in its place. The old Duluth Motors sedan they had gotten for the twins to use was in the gravel parking spot next to the driveway. More than once, both Sabrina and Katrina had complained about having to clear snow off their car in the morning last winter, but Owen had responded that it built character (which was true), and he also didn’t want to chisel ice off his windshield in the morning (which was also true).

  He closed the garage behind him and started to walk up the driveway to the kitchen door.

  “Colonel Quell? Colonel Quell?”

  Owen bit back a sigh. He’d been expecting this.

  He turned towards the fence next to the driveway. It wasn’t much of a fence – wooden, about five feet tall, designed more for privacy than actual security. Mrs. Cornelia Fischer was just tall enough to look over the fence. Behind Cornelia rose her immaculate house with its white siding and well-trimmed yard. Her husband had been rich, and he had died before Cornelia could get pregnant. That had been thirty years ago, and now Cornelia Fischer had nothing better to do than interfere in other people’s business. When a Homeland Security captain had moved in next door, she had been delighted to have an authority figure to whom she could bring all her grievances about the neighbors. Ten years and Owen’s promotion to colonel had not changed her.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Fischer,” said Owen.

  She peered at him from behind the fence, a tiny old woman in a housedress and a sweater. “There were four suspicious cars on the street today, Colonel. Four!” She passed him a slip of paper. “I wrote down the license plates.”

  “I’ll look into that,” said Owen, tucking the paper into his jacket pocket.

  “Also, the Whartons three houses down – you know the Whartons – still haven’t raked their leaves. Their house is becoming an eyesore, Colonel, an eyesore. People will think bad things about our neighborhood, think we’re elfophobic and support Rebel terrorists.”

  “Because the leaves haven’t been raked,” said Owen.

  Sarcasm, as ever, bounced off the invincible fortress of Cornelia Fischer’s grievances.

  “Exactly,” said Cornelia, bobbing her head. “You understand.”

  “Both the Whartons work full-time,” said Owen. “Hard jobs, too, utility repair and a nurse. They’ll get to it. They always have, haven’t they?”

  Cornelia gave him a suspicious look, but she nodded. “That’s true. I suppose I can be patient.” Owen was relieved. Cornelia was an endless source of nuisance calls to Homeland Security. She saw a burglar in every parked car and a potential Rebel terrorist in every stranger who happened to walk his dog past her house. “But you’ll check on those license plates, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Owen. “But I have to go. I promised Anna I’d be home by 6:30, and I’ve got only two minutes left.”

  “Well, then you had better go,” said Cornelia, her lips pursed.

  Owen bade her a good evening and walked to the back door of his house.

  And as he did, he cast a spell.

  He felt a little bad about using his aurasight before coming home every night, but not that bad. After the twins hit adolescence, they had started having furious mood swings that sometimes led to bitter fights with each other or their mother. Trying to understand the moods of adolescent girls was difficult enough, and Owen figured he could use every advantage to help maintain familial harmony.

  A shiver of pain went through his head as the spell activated, and he swept the aurasight over the house. At once, he saw the emotional auras of his wife and four daughters. Anna was in the kitchen. The twins were in their bedrooms. Antonia and June were in the living room, with Antonia likely helping June with her homework. He didn’t see any upheavals in their emotional auras. Anna was concentrating on something. To judge from the intent concentration in their emotional auras, Sabrina and Katrina were texting their friends, or possibly each other. For some reason they liked to communicate through text messages even though their bedrooms were right next to each other. Owen had relented and let the twins get their own cell phones when they turned fourteen, but he had also installed a hidden monitor app that let him read all their messages and monitor their call activity. He felt no guilt about that whatsoever. The girls were impulsive, and a lot of psychos viewed teenage girls as prey.

  He had seen that firsthand again and again, often on steel tables at the medical examiner’s office.

  And somehow, despite that knowledge, he had wound up with four daughters. How had that happened?

  Owen unlocked the back door, stepped into the kitchen, and saw the reason he had ended up with four daughters.

  Anna was standing at the kitchen counter, humming to herself as she chopped vegetables. Owen’s mind flashed to eighteen years ago when they had first met. It had been a murder case, naturally. Anna liked to say that they met on his first case, but that was artistic license. It had actually been his fifth one. The case itself had been open-and-shut. One of the partners at Anna’s accounting firm had been having an affair with his secretary, and the secretary had murdered the partner’s wife and then the partner. The physical evidence had been overwhelming, and the woman had cracked under interrogation in about five minutes.

  But while interviewing witnesses, Owen had met Anna, and his first immediate impression was that she had a nice ass. Once the case was closed, he had set out to seduce her, and somehow, he had been the one who had gotten caught. Not that he minded.

  Though it had set his life on what was a dangerous path at times.

  Unconsciously, his thumb rubbed the blood ring on his right hand.

  “Oh, good, you’re home,” said Anna. Owen stepped over and gave her a quick kiss. “Listen, do you mind cleaning up after dinner? I’ve got to finish the paperwork for one client, and I’m chaperoning Antonia’s class’s trip to the museum tomorrow, so I won’t have time in the morning.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” said Owen. “Kids getting along today?”
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br />   “Everyone’s cheerful,” said Anna. “Helps when school tires them all out.” She glanced towards the dining room, made sure the girls were out of earshot. “How did the execution go?”

  “Messy,” admitted Owen. She stopped chopping vegetables to squeeze his hand. She knew he hated going to the execution. “Nothing went wrong. Osmond, well…he didn’t beg. Just screamed a lot.”

  “He got what he deserved,” said Anna. “If someone shot you or shot my mother while she was shopping, I’d watch him die.”

  His aurasight was still active, and he saw the dark surge that went through her emotions.

  “I know,” said Owen. “But it’s done. Until the next time, anyway.”

  “Dad?”

  He turned his head as his youngest daughter June came into the kitchen. She had changed out of her school uniform and wore a blue T-shirt and jeans. She carried an art project that he was reasonably sure was supposed to represent the house and her family.

  “Hi, kiddo,” he said, and picked her up and kissed the top of the head.

  “Look what I made!” said June, holding out the art project.

  “Is that our house?” said Owen.

  “It is,” said June. She pointed out the various members of the family and repeated the praise her first-grade teacher had given her. He listened to her, nodding gravely, though he couldn’t see the resemblance to the stick figures on the page and reality. But she was six, so that didn’t matter.

  A flicker of old fear went through him. Osmond’s victims had simply been going about their day, and they had been killed. It could happen to anyone. Even his family.

  It was a reminder that no matter how solidly Owen built the locks on the doors and windows, no matter how secure the panic room in the basement, no matter how carefully he trained his daughters in self-defense and the use of firearms, the world was a dangerous place. Owen had been careful to keep the darkness of his career from touching his family, but he couldn’t always protect them.