What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  I faked a cough. “It was, uh, nice seeing you again, partner. Take care of yourself.”

  Saoirse gathered all the strength she had to look me in the eye, throw on the cheeky grin I’d once loved, and say, “I always take care of myself. You’re the one who needs a caretaker, rookie.”

  Fond memories threatened to break free from the shadows where I’d locked them away, and it was all I could do to say, “See you around, Saoirse.” Then I marched across the evidence room, gave a little parting wave to Larry, and slipped into the side hall that led to the service stairs mere seconds before Kennedy stormed out from the main stairwell, huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the entire precinct down.

  What was I thinking, coming here after seven goddamn years?

  I really was a glutton for punishment, wasn’t I?

  Chapter Seven

  The warehouse I’d observed during the trace appeared to be empty when I arrived. As I searched the perimeter for any hidden wards or hiding hostiles, I finished the last few bites of a sub I’d bought on the walk over, crinkled up the paper wrapper, and tossed it onto the overflow pile of a trashcan that hadn’t been emptied in about two years. At the sound of the balled-up paper smacking the pile and rolling away, nothing potentially dangerous jumped out at me, in the literal or metaphorical sense. So I stepped off the sidewalk and sidled up to a rusted hole in the chain-link fence just big enough for a man my size to slip through.

  I climbed through carefully, making sure the jagged metal didn’t graze my skin. On the other side, I paused and again searched the gravel lot for any booby traps, of the mundane or magic sort, but I still didn’t find anything that might try to blow me to smithereens. A pinch of suspicion tickling my nose, I continued toward a small side door whose chain and padlock combo appeared to have been broken recently. The metal bits were still lying on the short set of steps leading up to the door. Someone had commandeered the place in the past few weeks. Presumably for “business.”

  The door opened with no more than a gentle tug, and the hinges, which should have been rusty after years of disuse, were well oiled and soundless. I peeked in to view the shadowy interior of the warehouse. The floor was mostly empty, the inventory having been cleared years back. But there were a few wooden crates atop pallets in one corner that looked pretty new, and fresh scuff marks on the floor indicated they’d been dragged there from the loading dock not too long ago. So the warehouse was in use. But who was using it?

  And why are they so testy about the harp?

  Nothing moved inside the building, so I slipped in and closed the door quietly. I inched along the walls, staying in the darkest shadows, avoiding the dim light cast through the dirty window cut into the roof, until I got close to the office where the courier had received the package. No lights of any kind were on, and the door was closed, which told me the room was unoccupied. But I figured if the place was frequently used as a drop-off point for illicit shipments, there might be records stored in the office. Records containing incriminating information about who ran this operation.

  Depending on who that show runner was, I would either continue to search for the harp, or bail out immediately. Some mob bosses in this town were what you’d call “cutthroat bitches,” and I wouldn’t cross them without a good reason. (Money, for the record, was not a good reason.) The fact that one of them had been willing to sacrifice Mo—and that they had known to sacrifice Mo, which meant they knew some key info about me—just to throw me off the harp’s trail was a foreboding sign. So if I got confirmation here that the person who sponsored the harp’s sale was exceedingly dangerous, I would quit this job in a heartbeat.

  I crept over to the office door and reached for the knob, only for my fingers to instinctively pause an inch from touching the metal. My skin prickled with a faint, resonating hum of magic. I took a step back and thoroughly examined the knob, the door, and the frame. It took about two minutes of staring intently, to the point my eyes started to sting, before I picked up hints of wards shallowly etched into the doorframe that had been hidden with extra layers of white paint. Even after I found the spells though, I had trouble keeping track of the energy threads circulating through the ward lines. This was a sophisticated magic security system.

  Yet another bad sign.

  Because I was fairly certain a brute-force approach would either blow me up, raise a magical alarm, or both, I spent forty-seven minutes dismantling the wards, and suppressing the components I couldn’t dispel without alerting the caster. The entire time, I kept looking over my shoulder, at the door I’d used to enter, at the loading bay, whose metal roller doors were down and locked in place, and at every speck of dust stirred by the weak air currents in the building. I hadn’t been this paranoid since I went into hiding, after my catastrophic last day on the force, to weather the rest of the purge.

  But then, I hadn’t broken into a mobster’s warehouse before either.

  Finally, I rendered the door safe enough to open, and entered the little office. It consisted of a flimsy desk, a chair with a taped-over cushion, and a standard gray filing cabinet. There was a computer on the desk, and it was plugged into the wall, but a quick push of the start button confirmed there was no electricity running to the warehouse. Whoever used this office now hadn’t bothered to remove the stuff left behind by the people who’d worked here before the collapse. Or maybe they were just optimistic and thought the lights might come back on sooner rather than later.

  Regardless, I ignored the computer and scooted over to the filing cabinet. A quick but thorough check told me it wasn’t warded like the door. Which was nice, because I didn’t want to waste another hour cracking wards. Only issue was there were no labels on the drawers, and the cabinet had eight drawers. So depending on the filing system, it could still take me a while to sort through the records. Suppressing a sigh, I opened the top left drawer and peered inside.

  A tightly packed sea of manila folders. Why was I not surprised?

  I tugged out the first folder and held it close to my face so I could read the label inside the green-colored tab on the end of the folder. But the writing turned out to be an abbreviation I didn’t know, and a cursory scan of the rest of the folders in the lineup, some of which had green tabs, some yellow, and one red, informed me they all used the same system. So I’d have to actually read the contents of each folder to…Hold up. They must have a quick way to identify the most important shipping records, right? I dragged my gaze over the folders again. The colored tabs were the only things besides the actual labels that set them apart. Could it be that simple?

  Opening the green-tabbed folder in my hand, I skimmed the handwritten cover page of what turned out to be a manifest for winter coats. Next, I plucked a yellow-tabbed folder from the middle of the drawer; it contained a manifest for hunting rifles. Finally, I grabbed the sole red-tabbed folder near the back of the drawer, flipped it open, and skimmed the summary on the first page. It explicitly used the words “high priority” and “take utmost care” to describe the shipping strategy for a million-dollar painting that had been scavenged from a museum forty miles outside Kinsale.

  Bingo.

  The red-tabbed folders were for expensive, unique, and hard-to-acquire items being smuggled into the city. Like the harp.

  Over the next five minutes, I searched every drawer and pulled all the red-tabbed folders. There were only seventeen, so I quickly flipped through them, read the cover pages, and tossed aside any folder that wasn’t relevant. When I didn’t find the harp among the three “H” designations on the labels, an itch of irritation started to build in my brain at the idea the harp may not have even come through here, that this whole trip was a waste of time. But then, as I opened the last folder with so much force I tore the spine, I was greeted by a message in red ink that read: TOP PRIORITY / #TDD4754 / HARP.

  Underneath that header was a description of the harp, where it had been found—Adelaide, as Tom had said—how it had been smuggled into the city, and wh
ere it was going after it arrived in this warehouse. Oddly, it had been scheduled to go to auction next week at the time this summary was written. Something must have changed after the harp departed this warehouse and got shipped to wherever the auction organizers stored items slated to go on sale in the near future. But what? A happenstance reshuffle of the auction schedule? Or something less coincidental?

  The summary for this manifest was longer than the others, and it continued onto the back of the cover page. I turned the page over to read the last few sentences, which concerned the condition of the harp and how it had been stored to preserve…

  My attention drifted to the bottom of the page. Where a prominent signature had been scrawled in that same red ink.

  Agatha Bismarck.

  I dropped the file folder like it was molten rock and recoiled so fast I nearly rammed into the desk. Dread fell over me like a lead-lined blanket, weighing down my every muscle, and the words “oh, shit” repeatedly shrieked inside my head. I bit down on my thumb through the fabric of my glove, harder and harder until it started to hurt, until the pain cleared away the panic and I could think clearly enough to devise a plan of escape.

  Because I had to get the fuck out of here.

  I was standing in Agatha Bismarck’s warehouse, searching her private shipping records. And I’d just read definitive proof that the Duchess of Crime herself had personally overseen the recovery and shipment of the harp. That almost certainly meant she’d been the person who approved the rescheduling of the harp’s auction slot. And that almost certainly meant she’d arranged the harp to be sold to a particular individual under the guise of a normal auction that wouldn’t draw the attention of the regular patrons. And Bismarck wouldn’t make such arrangements for any old buyer.

  Someone very powerful and very wealthy had purchased that harp.

  In fact, putting all the clues together, it seemed to me that someone had known exactly where the harp was and asked Bismarck to recover the instrument for them.

  No wonder Tom’s bribe attempt had been rebuffed. The harp had been a priority item brought into Kinsale to appease someone in the upper crust who had significant dealings in organized crime. Tom’s obsession to retrieve it had put Bismarck in an awkward position, because while she might not have minded a lesser buyer’s personal information getting bribed out of the ledger, this particular buyer probably valued their privacy a great deal more—and could seriously harm Bismarck’s business if they didn’t get it.

  So Bismarck had sent a tail after Tom, who’d seen Tom recruiting Kinsale’s best-known stretch scavenger to locate the harp. Bismarck’s lackeys had done a little digging overnight, realized I knew Mo, who occasionally worked at their auctions, and then set Mo up to get arrested so he couldn’t give me any information. Unfortunately—for everyone involved, including me—that tactic didn’t work thanks to the cops arriving at Mo’s about ten minutes too late to prevent our conversation. And because Detective Hothead ticked me off, I was driven to investigate the evidence package Bismarck’s people sent out to incriminate Mo. Which led me here.

  Crap. I’ve made a mistake.

  One of Bismarck’s people would’ve been watching Mo, and thus already knew the plan had gone awry. That lackey probably switched tactics and started following me after I left Mo’s shop. Which meant they saw me go to the precinct—where the evidence package was—and then leave the precinct and walk directly to this secret shipping facility. And in the hour I’d been here, that lackey could’ve run home and grabbed their friends with the automatic weapons.

  Unlike most people, Bismarck didn’t fear retaliation from the common paranormals. Hell, she had numerous half-fae working for her, among other nonhumans and human magic practitioners. And since she didn’t know what type of fae I was—she likely assumed I had lesser fae blood, because that’s what the majority of half-fae had—she wouldn’t think twice about ordering her goons to snuff me out. (That would come back to haunt her later, of course, when the powers that be heard she’d made an attempt on my life. But later wouldn’t help me now.)

  Run, Whelan. Fast. Or you’re going to end up in a bitch fight.

  I couldn’t go out the side door because someone would be waiting for me there, so I had to either get past the roller doors and exit through the loading bay or go through the skylight and take the roof option. There was another warehouse about forty feet from the north side of this building, separated by a patch of gravel and the same fence I’d snuck in through. If I took a running leap, and gave myself a magic boost, I could make the jump between rooftops.

  The roof option would also lower my chances of getting shot, compared to running at ground level. On the ground, the goons could just spray their guns at me and land a few hits. Shooting up into the air was considerably more dangerous for them, because what went up had to come down. And bullets could come down on your head and brain you.

  The roof it was.

  I deactivated my first and second glamours with a quick rush of whispered words, sharpening my senses and strengthening my body like I had at Walter Johnson’s house. Kicking the stack of file folders out of my path, I swung around to the doorway, eying the skylight above the center of the floor, the invocation for a levitation spell on the tip of my tongue. I stepped out of the office, parted my lips to begin the spell, and—

  A huge wooden shipping crate hurtled toward me.

  I dropped to my knees, and the crate skimmed my hair, shaving off a few strands, before it crashed into the wall and exploded into a rain of splinters and silverware. A few of the splinters nicked my skin—and a fork bounced off my head—but I ignored the pain, heaved myself back to my feet, and spun to the right to find the source of the attack. From a trapdoor cut into the concrete floor, which had been obscured by one of the pallets when I walked by it earlier, men and women in black suits were climbing into the warehouse. Three men were already on the floor, and two of those three were almost eight feet tall and had the bulk to back up their height.

  Half-trolls. They had misshapen faces with large, skewed noses, crooked jaws, and bulging eyes, and the seams of their clothing strained to remain intact as they flexed their massive muscles. The one on the right reached for another crate, but the one on the left tapped his shoulder and gave him a hand gesture I interpreted as, “Don’t destroy any more of the boss’s goods.” The half-troll looked miffed he didn’t get a second chance to take my head off with a four-hundred pound box.

  I glanced up. I wasn’t in line with the skylight yet, and the half-trolls could jump high enough to grab me if I didn’t quickly shoot up to the roof. So I turned on my toes and dashed toward the faint beam of light cast onto the center of the floor. The half-trolls bellowed in rage and took off after me, their heavy steps vibrating through the floor. The humans around the trapdoor were now pulling out their weapons, an assortment of large-caliber rifles and pistols, preparing to rivet me with a hail of gunfire. Seconds were left on the clock before this devolved into a full-scale battle.

  I tried to beat that clock. So hard.

  But I didn’t make it.

  Just as my right foot landed in the square of light, one of the half-trolls lunged for me. He flew twenty feet across the floor so fast he was a blur of writhing muscles and frothing, incoherent shouts. Yelping, I leaped to the side an instant before his meaty fists swung into the space where I had been. He crashed to the floor, cracking the concrete, tearing his suit jacket and shirt clean in half. Then he stood up and casually wiped the debris off, like he hadn’t suffered an impact that would’ve killed a human. He didn’t even appear to notice he was bleeding from six places.

  The second half-troll had switched directions when I flung myself clear, and as I landed in a smooth slide near the back wall, he barreled toward me, snarling, fist raised to pulverize my head in a single blow. My magic roiled inside my veins, anticipation rising, but I didn’t immediately attack. I waited as he drew closer and closer, waited until the huge fist rocketed downward, waited
until a self-assured grin of malevolence crawled across the half-troll’s face like a wriggling worm. Before I crouched, evading the fist by less than an inch, swung around behind the man, and rammed my magic-infused hand into his back. Then I released the spell I’d been holding on my tongue.

  A three-foot-long ice spike formed outward from my fingertips, pierced the half-troll’s back, shot out through his abdomen, and rammed into the wall, pinning the man in place. He wailed so loud it hurt my attuned ears and began to viciously thrash, trying to pry himself from the spike. But I’d made it wider at the base so he couldn’t easily yank himself free. I had maybe thirty seconds before he managed to break it. Which gave me just enough time to deal with the humans about to shoot me.

  I turned on my toes and shot forward, sprinting faster than any human could. The gun-wielding mobsters near the trapdoor were startled by my sudden approach, but they worked with nonhumans all the time, so they didn’t let it deter them from taking aim. What deterred them from pulling their triggers, however, was the realization that their half-troll comrade was now directly behind me, pinned to the wall, and he was significantly bigger than me, so if they missed hitting me, they’d hit him instead. One of the women wielding an automatic rifle swore as she flicked her gaze between me and the half-troll.

  Then the other half-troll came back into play, diving toward me so he could knock me out of alignment. But I’d anticipated that. Because half-trolls were not the smartest lot.

  I dropped into a slide that took me underneath the half-troll’s hulking form as he soared through the air. His grabbing fingers missed the collar of my coat by a fraction of an inch. My open palm did not miss smacking his stomach, at which point I unleashed yet another spell—that covered him head to toe in four inches of solid ice. Frozen in place, unable to control his trajectory or prep for a landing, the half-troll careened into the office and slammed into the filing cabinet, crumpling the weak metal with a loud, echoing screech.