I was glad Riordan didn’t write novels about werewolves and vampires. I mean, I’d have still married him, but I was glad he didn’t. Those novels annoyed me. The message always seemed to be that if the woman just loved the vampire or the werewolf hard enough, they’d stop being monsters.
Given that my first lover had been the man who had almost detonated a nuclear bomb in New York, I knew that wasn’t true.
“Whatever the thing was, it was a wraithwolf, but it was walking on two legs,” I said. “It had hands, and opposable thumbs, too. Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“No,” said Riordan. “Never seen or heard of anything like that. I’ll ask the others.” He paused. “You’ve seen and fought this thing?”
“I saw it on some security camera footage at a pizza restaurant in downtown Milwaukee,” I said. “You ever heard of a guy named Ronald Doyle?”
“No. No…wait. Isn’t he getting sued about a collapsing building?”
“Not anymore, because he’s dead,” I said. “Check out the news reports from Milwaukee when you have time. It’ll say that he and his family died in suspicious circumstances. I think the two-legged wraithwolf did it.”
“I see,” said Riordan. “If you get a chance, send me a picture. I’ll show it to Nora and Alex and some of the others.” He paused. “You might wind up getting help from my employer on this one.”
I thought about that. Did I really want to pull the Shadow Hunters in on this? Heck yes. I didn’t want to take off and fight an unknown threat by myself. And if Owen Quell tried to bully me, it would be useful to have backup.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll send it right away.”
“Thanks,” said Riordan. “I’ll text you before my flight leaves.” He paused. “Be careful.”
“I will,” I said. “I’m sorry I made you worry.”
He snorted. “I’m sure you’ve been worried while I was gone.”
“Well,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Riordan. “I love you, Nadia.”
“I love you, too,” I said. “Have a good flight.”
With that, the call ended.
I leaned against the wall outside of a restaurant for a moment, taking a screen capture of the best image of the two-legged wraithwolf and sending it to Riordan. I suppose I was technically sharing evidence of an ongoing Homeland Security investigation, but I didn’t care. There was no one more qualified to deal with Shadowlands creatures than the Family of the Shadow Hunters, and if Owen was smart, he would see their help was a good idea.
Especially if there was more than one of those creatures.
Now there was a cheery thought.
A shiver went through me. I hadn’t realized how cold I had gotten. With a muttered curse, I pushed off the wall and kept going, pulling my coat tighter around me. I knew Riordan would worry about me, but to be fair, we both worried about each other a lot. Only natural, I suppose, given that he was part of the Shadow Hunters and I was the High Queen’s errand girl. Neither job was exactly safe.
I got back to the parking garage and started my car, intending to head home. I thought about stopping by the Marneys, but I wanted a quiet night to myself.
And if someone was summoning up two-legged wraithwolves to attack people, best not to draw attention to anyone near me. Especially since I had to work with Owen Quell. He seemed like the sort of asshole who would arrest someone because they annoyed him.
###
Owen pulled his car into the garage and shut off the engine, thinking.
He had a lot to think about. The case, certainly. He already had investigators digging through Doyle’s life and financial records piece by piece. Someone had sent that two-legged wraithwolf to kill Doyle deliberately, and Owen needed to find out why.
But he also found himself thinking about Nadia MacCormac.
He didn’t like her, and he couldn’t tell if that was affecting his judgment or not.
She was obviously dangerous, and the aurasight had told him that she was not emotionally stable. That in itself was not worrisome. She had herself under control, as far as he could tell, and Owen had worked with a lot of damaged and dangerous people in his life.
But her contempt for Homeland Security caught his attention. He was used to seeing hatred and fear in the course of his duties. But that bone-deep contempt…he had only encountered a few times before. It was usually from people who had gotten away with their crimes and were convinced they would continue to do so.
The first time Owen had encountered that attitude had been as a teenager, with Peter Walsh, in the awful weeks after Christopher’s death.
He hesitated, then pulled out his laptop, booted it up, and did a UNICORN search on Nadia MacCormac.
Preoccupied with reading Warren’s case notes, he had only glanced at Nadia’s information, but now he gave her records a more thorough look. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in her UNICORN file. Nadia Moran had been born on June 17th, Conquest Year 294, in Seattle. There were no records of schooling or employment. In July, she had received a royal pardon from the High Queen, retroactively granting her immunity from prosecution for everything she had done before that date. Probably that had been one of the things Tarlia had used to recruit her as a shadow agent. A few weeks after the pardon, Nadia had married a man named Riordan MacCormac, and they owned a house in Brookfield. Nadia and her brother Russell had also started a company called Moran Imports, of which they both owned half.
There wasn’t much else in the record. Owen wondered Nadia had done that the royal pardon had covered up.
He did a search on Riordan MacCormac and came up with little else. Most of Riordan’s records were protected. As a colonel, Owen had enough rank and access to see that Riordan’s records existed, just not to read most of them. That probably meant Nadia’s husband was a human Inquisition agent, a high-ranking employee for an Elven lord, a Shadow Hunter, or a senior officer of the Wizard’s Legion.
Owen sighed, logged out of his UNICORN session, and shut down his computer. His earlier suspicions were likely true. On the balance of probability, Nadia MacCormac had been a high-ranking Rebel that Tarlia had coerced or convinced into becoming her shadow agent, probably because of some unique skill or ability she possessed. The fact that she had walked unnoticed and unannounced into a Homeland Security facility was proof of that.
He wondered how many crimes Nadia had committed, how many people she had hurt.
Well, Owen couldn’t do anything about the past. Nadia had a royal pardon. That was that. But that only applied to everything that had happened before July. With her obvious contempt for Homeland Security and her emotional instability, Owen feared that Nadia MacCormac was a bomb ticking down to an explosion.
He would keep a very close eye on her, and make sure she didn’t hurt someone and try to skate away from the consequences as Peter Walsh had thirty years ago.
With a sigh, Owen stowed his laptop in his bag, got out of his car, and locked the garage behind him.
To his complete lack of surprise, Cornelia Fischer was lurking by the fence. It was five or six degrees below freezing, but she was still outside, ready to hear gossip. He glimpsed a trash bag in her hand. No doubt she had waited to take the trash out until she had seen him pull into the driveway.
“Working late, Colonel?” said Cornelia.
“Crime never sleeps, Mrs. Fischer,” said Owen. “And I told Anna I’d be home an hour ago,” that was true enough, “so I’d better get inside, hadn’t I?”
“Yes, you had better,” said Cornelia. Owen got to the back door and let himself inside before Cornelia recovered her wits. The kitchen smelled of stir fry, and Anna was at the sink, washing a pan.
“Hi, Owen,” she said, glancing up from the sink. “We had dinner an hour ago, figured you wouldn’t want us to wait. There’s a plate for you in the fridge. Do you mind keeping an eye on things? I need to get a couple of hours of work done before…”
Her voice trail
ed off, and she turned off the water.
“Bad day?” she said.
“Kids upstairs?” said Owen.
“Twins are downstairs, using the weights,” said Anna. “Antonia and June are upstairs.”
Owen let out a breath. “Yeah, it was a bad day. I met the other shadow agent today.”
“What’s she like?” said Anna.
Owen found himself lapsing into the clinical speech of a trained observer. “Caucasian female. Twenty-two years old. About five foot three inches in height, about a hundred and ten pounds. Brown hair, gray eyes.”
“Twenty-two years old?” said Anna. “Is she pretty?”
She was teasing him, he knew, try to lighten his mood. “Quite.”
Anna smiled. “Do I need to be worried?” Her tone was light, but not entirely. Owen knew he was at the proper age for a midlife crisis. He’d seen a few men his age launch themselves into doomed affairs with younger women, and while at times Owen could see the appeal, he thought that sounded exhausting. And then he would have to live with himself after.
“No,” said Owen. “Not about that. She’s bad news.” He took off his coat and hung it up on the hook by the door. “I think she’s a former Rebel. She probably turned on the Rebels, and the High Queen coerced her into becoming a shadow agent.”
Anna’s brow furrowed. “Isn’t…that a good thing?”
“It would be. But Nadia MacCormac is emotionally unstable, and her UNICORN records are sealed or nonexistent,” said Owen. “She probably got away with a lot.”
“Like Peter Walsh,” said Anna.
“I didn’t say that,” said Owen. He paused and sighed. “But yes.”
“Walsh didn’t get away with it in the end,” said Anna. “You made sure of that.” She hesitated. “How bad is it?”
“The case?” said Owen. “The murders were bad, and it’s too early to tell. But Warren did a lot of good work in the beginning, and he left an excellent foundation. We’ve got a video of the killer entering the premises, and whoever did this would have gotten sloppy somewhere. We’ll get them. It’s just a matter of following the tracks back far enough.”
He didn’t have enough proof for that assertion, not yet, but he had a hunch, and after years doing this, his hunches were usually right. Someone had summoned up a two-legged wraithwolf and sent it after the Doyles. The sort of people who did that, usually Dark Ones cultists, tended to make mistakes. It was simply a matter of finding that mistake and following the thread.
“You’ll only have to deal with the MacCormac woman until then,” said Anna.
“Yeah,” said Owen. “I can see why the High Queen sent her. She’s smart.”
“I thought you said you didn’t like her,” said Anna.
“I don’t,” said Owen. “If I had met her in any other context, I think I would be investigating her for something she had done. The sooner I can get this case wrapped up, the better.”
But there would be complications, he knew. There always were.
“Well,” said Anna, and she kissed him. “You’ll handle it. You’ll always do.”
“I’ll finish up in here,” said Owen, “so you can get started on your work.”
“No,” said Anna. “Eat dinner first and go say hi to the girls. Then you can finish cleaning up in here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Owen, giving her a mock salute with two fingers. She grinned and walked out of the kitchen to get her laptop.
He opened the fridge, took out the leftover stir fry, and heated it up. His mind turned over what he had learned today. Someone had sent that two-legged wraithwolf to kill Doyle and his family, and Owen suspected the answer was somewhere in Doyle’s financial records.
He sat down to eat and read over the case file one last time for the day.
***
Chapter 7: Cronies
The next morning, the morning of November 14th, I woke up in a foul mood.
I hadn’t slept well, and I had a headache. A succession of bad dreams had plagued my sleep. Not quite the level of the nightmares that caused me to wake up in full-blown panic attacks, ready to start flinging blasts of lightning into the shadows, but still unpleasant. In the dreams, I had been stealing something for Lord Morvilind, and I had been fleeing for my life from Homeland Security officers, knowing that if they caught me, Russell would die of frostfever. I flung open a fire door, hoping to escape into the night, but instead, I found myself standing on the main street of the twisted simulacrum of a small town inside the Eternity Crucible.
I whirled to flee back through the door, but it had vanished. I was trapped, and I could hear the rasp of wraithwolf claws against the concrete as they stalked me.
That was how I knew it was only a bad dream. Real wraithwolves, when they creep up on you, are utterly silent. You don’t know the wraithwolves are there until their fangs sink into your flesh.
Just one of the many things I had learned the hard way.
So I didn’t wake up in the sort of panic attack where it took me ten minutes to stop shaking, but I had an absolutely foul mood. I wanted to exercise to utter exhaustion, but I had done a hard strength workout yesterday, and doing those two days in a row is a great way to hurt yourself. Instead, I settled on doing cardio. I swallowed some ibuprofen tablets with a mug of cold coffee, went to the basement, and pounded out a run on the treadmill.
I was at about seven and a half miles when my phone started ringing.
I blinked in surprise and paused the treadmill, my breath wheezing, sweat dripping from every inch of my body. The basement of our house was unfinished, with a poured concrete floor and cinder block walls. That suited us perfectly. Riordan and I had set up a gym down here soon after we had moved in, and in the corner was the gun safe and an area that was evolving into a workshop for the various kinds of specialized equipment we used. I’d left my phone on the treadmill console, in case someone tried to call, along with a bottle of water since I’d promised Riordan that I would make sure I stayed hydrated while I exercised.
Thomas Hawley was calling me.
Arnold Brauner’s lawyer. Now why was Brauner’s lawyer calling me at seven in the morning?
I accepted the call. “Hello?”
“Mrs. MacCormac?” said Hawley in his precise voice. “I hope that I’m not calling too early.”
“No, I was up,” I said. I moved the phone away from my mouth and took a long drink of water. That felt really good. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Governor Brauner wants to know if you were available for a conversation,” said Hawley.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Was Brauner going to try and squeeze me for more money? “I’m going to be busy all day, but if he can call me before nine, that should…”
“Governor Brauner wanted to know if you were available for a conversation right now,” said Hawley.
“Now?” I said. What the hell was so urgent that he wanted to talk about it right now? “Sure.”
“One moment,” said Hawley. “Governor?”
I heard him pass the cell phone to someone else, followed by a short, muffled conversation in the background.
“Mrs. MacCormac?” Brauner’s bluff voice filled my ear.
“Governor Arnold,” I said. “Everything all right with the contract?”
“What? Oh, yes, it’s quite good. Very generous of Moran Imports to donate to the Brauner Foundation,” said Brauner. “But I’m afraid I’m calling about something else. My friends in Homeland Security tell me that you’re assisting Colonel Owen Quell with his investigation into the murder of Ronald Doyle and his family.”
I paused. Brauner wanted to talk about that? A couple of different possibilities occurred to me. Maybe Brauner had arranged to have Doyle killed, and was worried we would catch him. It was possible, but it didn’t seem likely. Murder really wasn’t Brauner’s style, and while he was a hard man, I didn’t see him ordering the deaths of the wife and children of a man who had crossed him.
Or maybe he was worr
ied. Maybe he was frightened that whoever had killed Doyle was going to come after him next. He and Doyle had been close.
“Yeah,” I said at last.
“Might I ask why?” said Brauner.
I shrugged, and then remembered he couldn’t see me over the phone. “Quell asked and I said yes.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but I wasn’t going to walk around telling people that I was the High Queen’s shadow agent.
“That seems…unlikely,” said Brauner. “With all respect, Mrs. MacCormac, while you are a capable young woman, why would Homeland Security ask you to help with a murder investigation?”
“I did other stuff before my brother started a fruit company,” I said. “Some of the skills are transferable.”
“Yes, that video of you in New York,” said Brauner.
I repressed the urge to sigh. That damn video. I wish that Tarlia hadn’t allowed it to go out to the public. I wasn’t exactly famous or a celebrity or anything like that, but anyone who did more than five minutes of research on me knew that I was the woman who had stopped New York from getting nuked. Which I suppose was why Tarlia had let it be released – it was occasionally useful when dealing with guys like Arnold Brauner.
“And if you saw me kill those guys on that video,” I said, “then you know I might be useful when apprehending a murderer.”
There was a silence on the line. I suppose Brauner could have interpreted that last statement as a threat.
“I don’t doubt your capabilities, Mrs. MacCormac,” said Brauner. A flicker of humor entered the voice. “As you proved with my toothbrush. But you have to concede the timing is curious. You and your brother agree to contribute to the Brauner Foundation…and then less than two weeks later you are brought on as a consultant for a murder case. An odd coincidence.”
“But just a coincidence,” I said.
Unless…
Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe Doyle had been killed because of his connection to Brauner.
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