Cloak of Wolves

by Moeller, Jonathan

  Then I remembered where I had heard of Quell. When I had been a teenager, spending half my time learning from Morvilind’s retainers and the other half stealing things, Quell had written a book called The Basic Principles Of Investigation. It had become the standard manual for Homeland Security detectives and was used in some other countries. Morvilind’s retainers had insisted I read it to learn about Homeland Security procedures so I could evade the law, and I had. I had learned so much about Homeland Security procedure and technique that I probably knew more than most low-level officers.

  I’ll say this for Morvilind. When he made me his shadow agent, he trained me thoroughly. He wanted a return on his investment.

  I pushed aside the memory as another thought occurred to me. Ronald Doyle? That was the concrete guy, wasn’t he? The one Arnold Brauner wanted us to use for the warehouse expansion? I searched the news sites and found a story from two days ago. Ronald Doyle, local construction magnate, his wife, and his three children had all been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Homeland Security was investigating…

  The door slid open, and Russell stepped onto the patio with me.

  “Hey,” he said, closing the door. “You okay? You had a really weird look on your face.”

  “What, like this?” I said, and I closed one eye and stuck out my tongue at him.

  Russell laughed. “Not like that.” He sobered. “Like something was wrong.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “The High Queen has a job for me.” After the battle of New York, I had decided that I would be completely honest with two people in my life. Russell, because I hadn’t told him the entire truth and he had nearly gotten killed searching for me. And Riordan, because we had gotten married and he had gone to insane lengths to save my life.

  “Uh oh,” said Russell. “What is it?”

  “Tomorrow I’m supposed to go to Homeland Security and work with another shadow agent to solve the murder of a guy named Ronald Doyle.”

  Russell frowned. “Doyle? Isn’t that the construction guy? The one Brauner wanted us to use?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I turned my phone towards Russell so he could see the news story. “Says he died in ‘suspicious circumstances’ two days ago, Homeland Security is investigating, no details released to the public at this time, blah blah blah. That could mean anything from a murder-suicide to a gas leak in their house.”

  “The High Queen wouldn’t send you to investigate a gas leak,” said Russell.

  “She would if someone deliberately caused the gas leak,” I said. Russell nodded to concede the point. “Still. I wonder why she cares.”

  “Yeah,” said Russell. “I mean, she’s got two worlds to rule, right? Earth and now Kalvarion. People get murdered every day, which is sad, but that’s just the way it is. Why does she care about one murder in Milwaukee?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking it over. “Milwaukee’s the city right next to the Great Gate to Kalvarion.” I waved my hand to the west.

  “West is actually that way,” said Russell, pointing.

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Maybe it’s significant. Maybe Doyle was a Dark Ones cultist. Maybe he was a leftover Rebel, I’ve run into a few of those.” I shrugged. “Suppose I’ll have to find out tomorrow.”

  Russell hesitated. “You’ll be okay?”

  “Don’t see why not,” I said.

  “You don’t really like Homeland Security,” said Russell.

  “No one likes Homeland Security,” I said. “They’re a collection of thugs, incompetents, and timeservers. But I can pretend to be civil…don’t give me that look. I can totally pretend to be civil.”

  Russell thought about that.

  “Well…yes,” he said at last.

  He was a terrible liar.

  I made a face. “See, you’re not very good at pretending to be civil.”

  “Do you need any help?” said Russell.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t sound that complicated. I’m supposed to go meet Quell and help him figure out who killed Doyle and why.”

  Except there were always, always, always hidden depths to the High Queen’s missions. Two months ago, in New York, she had told me to find the murderer of an art dealer, which had seemed a pretty trivial problem for her to worry about. Except the art dealer had actually been a disguised dragon. And he had been murdered by a cyborg created by the mad science of the Catalyst Corporation, which was apparently being used by a terrorist organization or individual called the Singularity.

  Yeah. There would be more here than met the eye.

  “Well, Robert and I can look after the company,” said Russell. “I’m almost done with all my exams anyway. Just have to study for a few more, and I’ll officially be a high school graduate.”

  “Great,” I said. “Besides, it’s your company. I just own some shares, and I’m helping manage it until you’re done with school. And Riordan should be back from the UK soon.” Just thinking about that cheered me up. “If I run into trouble, I’ll ask him for help.”

  “He’s probably better at providing help for this sort of thing than I am,” said Russell.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You did pretty well against the Rebels.” But I was being nice. Russell kept his head in a crisis, but Riordan had been a Shadow Hunter for decades.

  “Hey, are you cold?” said Russell.

  “Freezing. Want to go back inside?”

  “Very much so,” said Russell.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for worrying.”

  Russell grinned. “You’re a worrying sort of person.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, thanks so much.”

  He wasn’t wrong, though.

  We went back inside and sat on the couches. James, Robert, and Russell turned their attention to the football game. Alexandra was also a major football fan. To my complete lack of surprise, she had been a football cheerleader in high school and college and retained enjoyment of the game into adulthood. Lucy read the news or maybe a novel on her tablet, and I produced my phone and started researching.

  I looked at Ronald Doyle first, picking up what I could from the news reports. Usually, the news was about as reliable as a stuck clock, but there was a lot about Doyle. His company specialized in construction and concrete, and he was in the middle of a bunch of lawsuits because one of his crappy buildings fell down and killed some people. There was even speculation he would be liable for criminal prosecution, though I bet Brauner shielded him from that.

  Had Brauner ordered Doyle killed? I really doubted it. That wasn’t Brauner’s style. If he’d wanted to get rid of Doyle, he’d withdraw his protection and let Doyle’s various problems eat him alive.

  I switched gears and started looking up Owen Quell. He appeared in a lot of stories – usually as the investigating officer in various criminal cases. Quell seemed to get a lot of high profile investigations. Which made sense. If he was a shadow agent of the High Queen, then Tarlia wouldn’t give him the easy jobs.

  Pity she hadn’t sent him to investigate Max Sarkany’s murder. I might have avoided a lot of trouble. Then again, I had gotten a new house out of it.

  I logged into UNICORN and did a search for cases related to Quell. I had gotten high-level UNICORN access when Tarlia had sent me to find Malthraxivorn’s killer. That had proven useful. In the old days, working for Morvilind, I had to gather information surreptitiously and carefully. Now I had official access to enormous amounts of government data. There were advantages to working for the High Queen.

  After I entered the query, I thought my phone had frozen up, but there were so many results the phone had locked for a few moments while Quell’s list of cases loaded. The man had worked a lot of different investigations, and he had an amazingly high closure and a conviction rate. I wondered how he had managed that. Maybe he was the sort of Homeland Security officer who manufactured evidence and railroaded innocent suspects. Tarlia didn’t care much how the sausage got made. />
  I didn’t like Quell already.

  Regardless, I was going to have to work with him.

  I sighed. Tomorrow promised to be an interesting day.

  ***

  Chapter 4: The Department

  I slept in a bit late the next morning since I didn’t need to be at the Central Office until ten and I had been putting in a lot of early mornings and late nights at Moran Imports while Riordan was gone.

  After I had solved her uncle’s murder, Della Sarkany had given me a house to express her gratitude. Which was a bit much, I thought, but Riordan and I had needed a place to live in Milwaukee, and anyway it’s churlish to refuse a gift. It was a big place, four bedrooms with a two-car garage and a long driveway since the lot was an acre and a half. It had come with a decent security system, which I had been steadily upgrading since. All the windows had wire frames running through them, making them much harder to break. The doors had steel cores with reinforced frames and multiple deadbolts. Motion-trigged security cameras covered the driveway and all the approaches to the house, along with floodlights. I could access the camera feeds from anywhere in the house so long as I had a device on the local network. In case someone tried to cut the power, there was a backup generator in a locked shed behind the garage.

  Naturally, we also had a lot of guns secured in a pair of safes in the basement, and I kept handguns hidden in our bedroom and in the living room.

  All this might seem excessive, but I had pissed off a lot of powerful people during my career as a shadow agent for Morvilind and Tarlia. Granted, a lot of those powerful people had gotten killed during the Sky Hammer battle and the Mage Fall, but still. And the security would be useful against non-magical threats, like Arnold Brauner and his goons if he decided to blame me for Doyle’s death.

  Or from someone like Colonel Owen Quell, if he turned out to be an asshole.

  Because I was pretty sure he was going to be an asshole. You didn’t get high rank in Homeland Security without that particular quality.

  After I woke up, I exercised. We’d set up our gym in the basement, so I powered through some weight sets and then did a run. I showered off and got dressed – black jeans, gray sweater, black work boots with steel toes, and my black navy pea coat that had enough room to conceal a shoulder holster. I didn’t don a holster, though. The Central Office had weapons detectors at the door. That didn’t mean I couldn’t get a weapon into the building, but if I had to work with this Quell guy, best to start things off without antagonism.

  The weather forecast showed a chance of snow, and I didn’t want to attempt that in my motorcycle. I suppose it was time to concede defeat and stow the bike for the winter, and I decided to do that after I finished dealing with this Doyle thing. Instead, I took my old, reliable Duluth Motors sedan, after I loaded some guns and other supplies into the trunk. Just in case.

  I had taken this car to the meeting with Brauner.

  Was Doyle’s murder involved with Arnold Brauner somehow? It was possible. The Brauner family had a lot of enemies, and Doyle had been one of Governor Arnold’s most loyal supporters. Then again, Doyle had been his own man, and a couple of people had been killed in the building collapse that had been traced back to his crappy concrete. Maybe one of the families had taken vengeance.

  But the High Queen wouldn’t send me to investigate a normal murder. She definitely wouldn’t send two shadow agents. No, I was sure that something weird was going on. But I couldn’t make any assumptions until I had seen things with my own eyes.

  My mouth twisted.

  That was an entire chapter in Quell’s book, I remembered – the danger of an investigator making assumptions before reviewing the evidence and the facts. Good advice for a Homeland Security investigator, I supposed. And, as it turns out, excellent advice for a thief.

  I left Brookfield and drove downtown. It was past rush hour, so I missed the worst of the traffic, but there were still a lot of cars on the road, and progress was slow. To my annoyance, I felt a growing sense of unease. All my life, I had avoided Homeland Security, fearful of what would happen to me if I got caught – and terrified that Morvilind would stop the cure spells and let Russell die of frostfever. Now Russell was cured, and I probably had more authority to act as I saw fit than any Homeland Security officer or investigator. There was no rational reason for me to be uneasy and tense.

  But, that’s the thing about emotions. Sometimes they just don’t make sense.

  I was already in a bad mood by the time I reached the Central Office.

  I arrived a half-hour early and drove around the block. The Central Office of the Milwaukee branch of Homeland Security was a massive ugly cube of a concrete building perched on the eastern side of I-43. It had been built of the site of the pre-Conquest Milwaukee County Courthouse (a historical nugget the website cheerfully informed you of, as if it mattered), and the building had all the charm of a cinder block. Probably by design, I supposed. I didn’t see anything amiss, though this was the least likely place in Milwaukee for someone to make trouble.

  There was a parking ramp a block away, so I pulled into it, paid too damn much for parking, and stashed my car on the second-highest level. That way, if it did wind up snowing, I wouldn’t have to brush off the windshield. I got out of the car and hesitated, staring at the trunk. The need to bring a gun with me was so intense that it almost felt like an itch. But I didn’t want to start trouble, not unless Quell started it first, and carrying a firearm into a Homeland Security office was asking for a mountain of trouble.

  Besides, if there was trouble, my magic would make a better weapon than a pistol.

  I took a deep breath, telling myself to suck it up, and left the parking ramp. A cold wind lashed at me as I headed down the sidewalk, and I tugged my coat tighter around myself and thrust my hands into my pockets, even though I was wearing gloves. I had problems with cold. My subconscious defaulted to holding my magical power ready, which had the annoying side effect of draining off my body heat. When I was calm and relaxed, I could make my subconscious release my power, but right now, both my conscious and subconscious mind expected big trouble.

  I walked up the front steps to the Central Office. Out of habit, I double-checked that I was wearing gloves. I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints in the building, even if I was here legitimately. Old habit – and I could thank Homeland Security for that.

  The lobby was a rectangular space with a polished floor and harsh fluorescent lights overhead. On the wall were portraits of the High Queen and Duke Tamirlas of Milwaukee, looking solemn. On another wall were long rows of polished brass plaques holding names – Milwaukee branch Homeland Security officers who had fallen in the line of duty. On the far wall, over the elevators and the doors to the stairs, was a giant painting of the Homeland Security shield with the words PROTECT AND SERVE beneath it.

  Protect and serve. Yeah. Sure.

  Four metal detectors and weapons scanners blocked the front of the lobby, manned by a pair of officers in blue uniforms. Visitors would have to sign in and get a special badge before they went further. I walked towards the scanners, and one of the two officers did a double-take and stepped towards me. A big guy, young and fit, with close-cropped hair and hard eyes, and the nameplate on his uniform below his badge read KIRBY…

  Ah, shit. He was one of the two officers who had been hassling Jake Boyer.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to stop right there,” said Kirby.

  I stopped and waited. Kirby remembered me. I could see the malice in his eyes.

  “What is the purpose of your visit to the Central Office today?” said Kirby.

  “I have an appointment with Colonel Owen Quell at 10 AM,” I said. A flicker of distaste went over Kirby’s face. Guess he knew Quell.

  “And what is the purpose of your visit, Mrs. MacCormac?” said Kirby.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Quell didn’t tell me. You want to call up and ask him?”

  His expression went stone cold.
“You’ve been flagged as a suspicious person. Come with me now to submit to an enhanced search.”

  A tide of rage rose up in my throat. I remembered all the times I had lied to Homeland Security officers, knowing that if I screwed up, I would end up on a Punishment Day video and Russell would die of frostfever. These stupid time-serving thugs with badges had given me trouble for all my life, and now this idiot was hassling me just out of spite.

  Except I didn’t have to put up with it.

  I badly, badly wanted to use my blood ring to summon Tarlia’s seal, but the High Queen would not like that. Instead, I grinned my humorless rictus of a grin.

  “Changed my mind,” I said. “Bye.”

  I turned and walked back out the doors.

  If he came after me, I decided, I would hurt him. Wait until he grabbed me on the stairs, then I would use a gauntlet of telekinetic force to break his arm or leg. To the camera mounted over the doors, it would look like he had slipped and fallen on the stone steps. After all, a woman my size couldn’t physically threaten a guy as big as Kirby.

  But he didn’t follow me, and the second I was out of sight of the cameras, I cast the Cloak spell.

  Invisible, I turned and ran back up the stairs and caught the heavy door before it closed. I slipped inside and saw Kirby arguing with the other officer manning the checkpoint. Evidently, the second officer wondered why Kirby had been giving me a hard time. I ignored them both and walked through the weapons scanner. It should have picked up the steel toes in my boots, but the Cloak spell protected me. I crossed the lobby, came to the elevators, and scrutinized the directory mounted on the wall. Quell was head of Special Investigations, and his office was off the Homicide department on the second-highest floor of the building.