What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

She blanched. “What exactly is it you think he’s planning?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but I know it involves magic. And vampires plus magic is always destructive.” I marched back to the door. “If McCullough keeps beating around the bush for the sake of preening his reputation, he’s going to find out exactly how destructive that combo can be.”

  Aileen hustled across the room and placed her hand on the door before I could open it. “He’s not going to listen to you, Whelan.”

  “Then let my warnings fall on deaf ears. I’ll do what I want, he can do what he wants, and when Vianu finally rolls the dice, we’ll see who comes out ahead.”

  “If you embarrass him, he’ll destroy you,” she said, almost in a whisper. “McCullough is not one to be crossed lightly. He’s among the most ruthless of the high army officers, his military history soaked in blood.” She leaned closer to me, as if she was afraid her next words would somehow penetrate the soundproofing ward and scuttle all the way down the hall until they reached McCullough’s ears. “There is speculation that he orchestrated the deaths of two of his own peers, his own friends, in order to remove his only competition for the coveted promotion to colonel.”

  My chest tightened at the thought of being stabbed in the back by someone who was supposed to be on my side. But I’d already been stabbed in the gut by one such person this year, so the effect on my resolve was minimal. “Did the illustrious Queen of Wind and Ice take issue with that behavior?”

  Aileen worried her lip. “I don’t believe our queen has expressed an opinion on the matter, but surely, such a rumor would have quickly reached her ears.”

  “In which case, her silence is the opinion. An indication she’s willing to look the other way when her subjects commit such transgressions, as long as their actions don’t impair the capabilities of the court.”

  She took a step back, brows furrowed. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that M-A-B won’t give a single fuck if McCullough dies during the inevitable escalation of hostilities between the faeries and the vampires. As long as our side emerges victorious in the end and restores the public’s trust in the ability of the fae to keep the peace inside the protected cities.”

  Aileen’s lips parted in shock. “Are you saying you’re going to set up Colonel McCullough to die in the upcoming conflict?”

  “No.” I grabbed the doorknob and slowly turned it. “He’s going to set himself up to die, and I’m going to look the other way when the fallout lands on his head.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Wrenching the office door open, I made a beeline for the conference room. Aileen trailed me in silence, but I could sense the tension wafting off her body. Her steps heavy and uneven. Her breathing stilted. Her nervous gaze boring into the back of my neck.

  As a lesser fae, she’d been instilled early in life with a powerful aversion to upsetting the sídhe. It was a key element of self-preservation when you lived in Tír na nÓg, where the sídhe ruled with impunity and did not hesitate to trample anyone who stood in their way.

  That I was willing to push McCullough’s buttons appalled Aileen. That I was willing to go even further, to brand myself his adversary, stoked within her a sense of existential dread.

  Admittedly, I felt the same sort of dread as I bypassed the guards in the conference room doorway and strode up to the long table that seated the ten-person sídhe contingent, along with Mayor Connolly. Because McCullough was no greenhorn sídhe, young and inexperienced like the Seelie soldiers I’d run into during the rescue operation in the Divide. He was hundreds of years old, and he’d spent those years clawing his way up from obscurity among the lower echelons of sídhe society to achieve recognition and fearful respect in the court. You didn’t climb—couldn’t climb—that far up the ladder without possessing a great deal of magic strength.

  If I screwed up handling McCullough, he would kill me in a heartbeat.

  “Ah, if it isn’t our resident half-blood police lieutenant,” said McCullough as I came to a stop directly across from him.

  He was sitting in the chair at the center of the table, which had once belonged to Connolly, who had now been relegated to a seat at the very end. The full military uniform McCullough always wore had been downgraded to its casual variant this evening. His black coat replete with medals hung over the back of the chair. His shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. His leather gloves set aside on the tabletop. His sword propped against the table’s edge.

  “We were just discussing you actually,” he added snidely, “you and your…interesting idea for launching a convoluted raid operation against the elder vampire’s forces.”

  “Not so much interesting as the only practical solution to our problems,” I replied.

  McCullough chuckled. “You call that practical? Risking the integrity of the barrier? Again?” He glanced at Connolly in a way that was somehow more denigrating than the tone he used when speaking to me.

  I hadn’t been at City Hall when McCullough arrived in Kinsale, but Aileen had filled me in on the verbal shitstorm the colonel unleashed on the poor mayor for “allowing” the barrier to be compromised during the zombie invasion. Never mind that Connolly had no idea the vampires were involved in the zombie attack until after the fact, or that if Connolly hadn’t sent all the dullahan into the city to defend the citizenry, hundreds more would’ve died.

  All McCullough cared about was that one of Mab’s spells had been breached under an Unseelie faerie’s watch. In his mind, an affront to the institution of the Unseelie Court was worth more than any number of human lives.

  “I believe depriving the vampires of as many blood slaves as possible is more important than maintaining an overwhelming defense of the barrier at this time.” I tried to keep my tone as calm and even as possible. If I showed a shade of real emotion, McCullough would start dismissing everything I said as melodramatic human drivel. Despite the fact he himself was red in the face and raving half the time. “I have reason to believe the vampires are currently planning another major offensive against some critical aspect of the city’s infrastructure.”

  “Yes, your human captain mentioned you’d been batting around new theories about the man claiming to be a Tuatha.” McCullough laughed, and the rest of the sídhe laughed with him. That was something they did whenever I mentioned Abarta in a context that suggested he was the real deal, a rogue member of the Tuatha Dé Danann plotting the downfall of the sídhe regime. The official stance of the faerie courts was that Abarta was nothing but a pretender seeking to sow discord in Tír na nÓg, and any responses to his illicit activities should involve minimal resources.

  I didn’t think McCullough was dumb enough to fall for such propaganda, but I did think he was arrogant enough to discount Abarta as a legitimate threat. He wasn’t old enough to remember the wars between the sídhe and the Tuatha. They were nothing but stories to him, stories that ended in victory for the sídhe.

  I, on the other hand, had met Abarta personally, and knew his drive for vengeance against the sídhe was something to be feared by everyone on Earth, and everyone in Tír na nÓg. That man may have once been a trickster god, but with havoc he was now wreaking, he was rapidly mutating into a god of destruction.

  “My theories have a logical basis,” I said to counter McCullough’s dismissive jibe. Walking over to the large chalkboard attached to the wall, I picked up an eraser and swiped away what appeared to be a guard rotation schedule—which caused McCullough to curse at me in a faerie dialect I pretended not to know—then swapped the eraser for a piece of chalk. In a flurry of deft strokes, I drew from memory the parts of the summoning circle the vampires had failed to destroy in Coley Park. When I was halfway through, McCullough’s string of insults trailed off, and a hush fell across the room.

  I scrawled in the last few symbols of the most complex section of the circle I’d observed and stepped aside so everyone in the room could view my drawing. “Some vampires were seen constructing that circle in Coley Park by on
e of the Watchdog informants earlier today. They erased most of it afterward, but they left enough behind for us to glean some meaning from the various elements.”

  McCullough analyzed the drawing intently, dark-blue eyes narrowed in distaste. “Looks like some sort of summoning circle.”

  “But what’s it meant to summon?” asked the woman sitting to McCullough’s left. His second in command, Orlagh. “That section is missing from this partial rendition.”

  “Could be anything,” said a man farther down the table. Boyle was his name. “I think the more pertinent question is: why are vampires using a faerie spell?” He pointed to a group of symbols in the lower right corner of the chalkboard. “Aren’t those from an old fae language?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think they’re from a fae language at all. I believe some of those symbols were adopted into an old fae language, and that they originally came from a much earlier language. Perhaps a Tuatha language.”

  McCullough scoffed. “You’re an expert in Tuatha and fae linguistics, are you? A half-fae who only lived in Tír na nÓg for the first six years of his life?”

  “I don’t have to be an expert on anything to put two and two together.” I rapped on the chalkboard with my knuckle, a little harder than I intended, slightly denting the surface. “Vampires are not welcome in Tír na nÓg, so there’s no possible way Vianu or another elder could’ve spent enough time there to dig up information on this kind of magic, especially since almost all written instructions for powerful spells are locked away in heavily guarded locations in major cities.

  “So unless you’re suggesting that some full-blooded fae, likely a sídhe with access to such sources, took a bribe to provide Vianu’s coven with this spell”—McCullough growled at the impertinence of that accusation—“then the only other option that makes sense is that Vianu obtained this spell from someone else likely to have knowledge of ancient magic.”

  “That of the so-called Tuatha rogue, who is known that have obtained a number of ancient power objects, and logically may also have obtained access to various ancient spells,” said Orlagh. She tugged on her long, light-gray braid, a tic she always fell into when contemplating. “I admit the theory has some merit. Perhaps it’s worth considering before we make the final determination on how to proceed with the forthcoming raids.”

  McCullough’s ears briefly turned red, the blush highlighted by his stark combination of slate-gray hair and pale skin, but he didn’t harp on Orlagh for agreeing with me. I’d learned from Aileen that Orlagh was the daughter of one of Mab’s top generals, and as such, McCullough treaded very lightly around her even as he intentionally stomped on everyone else’s toes.

  So while Orlagh didn’t exactly like me, her tendency to value options that offered real solutions to our problems—as opposed to McCullough, who valued options that ran the smallest chance of backfiring on him personally while maximizing his chance of glory—was the only reason Project Watchdog had come as far as it had in the past few months.

  “Fine,” McCullough begrudgingly conceded. “Let’s entertain the idea that the vampires are working in tandem with the man who claims to be a Tuatha, and that they are planning to summon something inside the city in the near future, presumably a nefarious creature from the Otherworld. The question then becomes, do the dangers of this developing plot outweigh the dangers of leaving the city border so poorly defended that the vampires outside might be emboldened to attempt another breach of the barrier?”

  “If the city falls to an attack from the inside,” I said, “the possibility of an attack from the outside becomes a moot point.”

  He scowled. “Isn’t that what got your city into trouble to begin with? That you left the barrier undefended so you could focus on an interior threat?”

  “That ‘interior threat’ was a heavily destructive, large-scale attack no one was prepared for. If we nip whatever Vianu is planning in the bud this time around, we can avoid another situation like that altogether.” I took a deep but quiet breath through my nose, trying not to raise my voice or otherwise display my burgeoning frustration with McCullough’s stubbornness. “On the other hand, if we don’t put a damper on Vianu’s aims before he sets this new scheme in motion, we could face a second, equally devastating incursion, or even something far worse, depending on the degree of Abarta’s involvement.”

  “What is their end goal, do you think?” asked Orlagh.

  “The vampires’ goal?” I clapped the chalk dust off my hands. “Total domination of humanity. Same as their goal has been since the dawn of civilization.”

  “And the goal of the alleged Tuatha?” McCullough sneered. “What does he gain from giving the vampires access to the ‘powerful ancient magic’ you presuppose they intend to use against the city?”

  “What does he gain exactly? I can’t guess quite yet.” I shrugged. “But Abarta wants one thing and one thing only: to awaken the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann so they can usher in a new age of war against the fae in Tír na nÓg and take revenge for their humiliating defeat fifteen hundred years ago. I believe he originally allowed Bismarck to entangle his interests with those of the vampires because he thought he could use the vampires in the long term to further that goal. And I also believe that whatever Abarta is plotting in conjunction with the vampires right now is the culmination of half a year of careful planning between all the parties currently working in Abarta’s circle.”

  Connolly, who hadn’t said a word since I walked in, finally piped up. “You think Kinsale is just a staging area for a much greater scheme?”

  “I do.” Subtle movement near the picture window caught my eye, but I didn’t acknowledge it. “I think it’s a critical staging area, and that if we manage to knock this part of the overall scheme out of commission, we might just be able to derail Abarta’s efforts entirely. At least for the time being.”

  “Oh please, Whelan.” McCullough rolled his chair back and languidly stood up. “All you have to support your zany theory is a tangled pile of rumors and suppositions. Eyewitness statements from fallible humans and dirt drawings in public parks do not actionable intelligence make. If you want me to pull over half the dullahan from their border guard positions and use them to supplement your dogs so you can launch a high-risk preemptive strike against ten vampire-held locations, you’ll have to first definitively prove that an impending citywide threat actually exists.”

  I almost snapped at him. Almost. Because McCullough knew damn well that there was no way to definitively prove the threat existed. You couldn’t send actual spies into the heart of a vampire coven because they used compulsion to control their servants and blood slaves in order to ensure they couldn’t be betrayed. You couldn’t spy on vampires using magic because vampires, paranoid by nature, were always well versed in anti-spying wards. And you couldn’t use mundane means, like cameras or listening devices, to spy on vampires because their senses were so keen they could pick up on all such means in a single sweep of a room.

  The only way to untangle the puzzle of a vampire’s overall strategy was to gather as many vague clues as possible and construct the likeliest picture—or just wait until the trap was sprung to find out what horrors they had in store.

  “And if the delay in taking action results in mass civilian casualties?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  McCullough gave me a condescending smile. “Then you’ll have yourself to blame. You’re the one who spearheaded the Watchdog initiative, so it’s your responsibility to ensure the organization’s methods produce acceptable outcomes. I am under no obligation to risk the well-being of my soldiers in the name of your half-baked notions about a far-reaching Tuatha conspiracy predicated on questionable interpretations of peculiar vampire behavior in a single human city.”

  He smacked his palms on the tabletop, startling all the lesser fae in the room. His own sídhe soldiers were apparently used to such conduct. They didn’t flinch.

  “Either do a more thorough job,” he said, “and indis
putably demonstrate the vampires are up to something as serious as you claim, at which point I will consider expanding the scope of the joint dullahan-Watchdog operations I’m willing to approve. Or, and this is my preference, Whelan, step aside and let someone more competent take over the job you are clearly too inept to perform properly.”

  An awkward silence blanketed the room.

  Until I barked out a laugh and said, “My god, you really are a coward.”

  All eyes turned to me in horror.

  McCullough’s blush reappeared, darker than before. “Excuse me?”

  “What, did I stutter?” I cocked an eyebrow and threw an extra dash of disgust into my tone. “Let me try again: You. Are. A. Coward. You’re so afraid of losing face the same way you did the first time you tried to take out Vianu that you’re willing to stand idle while an elder vampire, on the orders of a Tuatha, one of the faerie courts’ worst enemies, commits an egregious act of violence against a large, vulnerable human population. Your goal here isn’t to protect Kinsale from anything. It’s to protect your own damn reputation.”

  A low, mocking laugh rattled up my throat. “You were so gung ho to pursue Vianu in the beginning so you could get all the accolades for killing a disrupter to faerie governance. But when it became apparent that you have no clue how to combat vampire guerilla tactics in urban environments, you decided the better option would be to sit on your hands, proclaim your inaction a ‘conservative, cautious strategy,’ and let the mortals take the blame when the house of cards came tumbling down. Because who cares if a bunch of humans die, right? They’re just humans. The only thing you care about is whether or not Mab gives you a little head pat and tells you what a good boy you are. And that’s just fucking pathetic—”

  McCullough lunged across the table. His hands wrapped around my throat before I could let out a yelp of surprise, and then his bulk slammed into my chest, knocking me off my feet. I landed hard on the thinly carpeted floor, and McCullough followed me down, straddling me. The air evacuated from my lungs, but it couldn’t escape from my windpipe as the powerful hands tightened like a vise.